A Belfast Child

by John Chambers

  Part of our duty as young UDA members was collecting money for the organisation and keeping the local hoods in check, which was kind of ironic as I and other young members were among those hoods. During my time, my main task was actually welfare stuff, including the Loyalist Prisoner Aid, supporting the families of those inside. When I was going out with Kathy, the Catholic girl, I was supposed to take her out one night but I’d lost all my money on cards. So I went to the top UDA money lender and got a fifty-pound loan to take her out for a meal. A bit cheeky, getting the UDA to pay for a meal with a Catholic, and I’m sure if they had known I would have been in some serious trouble, but I didn’t give a shit at the time. As I knew and got on with some of the top players in Glencairn I took liberties like this from time to time.

  There was another occasion that a notorious party took place on the estate that seemed to be gate-crashed by just about everyone living there. A gang of hoods somehow brought a horse into the house and filled it full of drink. In a pissed-up state of fear, it managed to shit everywhere before passing out on the kitchen floor. The owner of the house went to the UDA the day after and asked for two hundred pounds for new carpets, wallpaper, etc, blaming the hoods for bringing the animal in and allowing it to ‘rub its arse all over my wall’. She got it too.

  By this time I’d long blown my compensation money and was on and off the dole in between a succession of catering jobs around Belfast. Cooking was something I enjoyed and was good at, in spite of my shite education. I was just about together enough to hold down a few decent-ish jobs in between the rest of my mad existence and I was lucky to pick up just enough knowledge to help me in the future. I worked for a while in Musgrave Park Hospital, which was kind of weird as I had spent so much of my childhood in there as a patient. I also worked in a few Italian restaurants and an Indian.

  After years of acting the maggot, as they say in Northern Ireland, and generally being a pain in the arse, particularly to my long-suffering family, I realised that if I carried on this way I would either end up in prison, on the dole for the rest of my life, or dead. I was rapidly heading out of my teens and was running out of excuses to misbehave.

  At the time the old guard of the UDA, like my Uncle Rab and others, were being pushed aside by the more militant and violent young turks. This created lots of tensions and feuds, not only between the various UDA units in and around Glencairn and the Shankill, but often with the local UVF. When the bullets started flying it didn’t matter who or what you were, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time it could end up getting you killed. I was once in the Tyndale club (a legendary Loyalist club that was like the Old West and very violent) up in Ballysillan with a large group of UDA men from Glencairn when a fight broke out. We were chased from the club and all over Ballysillan with bullets flying all over the place. It was events like these that made me decide that the life of a UDA member wasn’t for me.

  Very shortly after this incident, I came to the understanding that if I wanted any kind of a life out of trouble, or the Troubles, I would have to leave my home and my family. I wasn’t alone. Across Northern Ireland many kids with backgrounds like mine were thinking the same thing. They’d shove any spare money they had into an old biscuit tin, saving up for the day they could get the boat over to Stranraer or Liverpool, and then on to the big cities. Or maybe they’d even have enough for a plane ticket that would take them to America, where friends and relatives who’d already escaped were waiting.

  One of these escapees was my friend Jacqueline McFall, the photographer. From our first meeting via the Mod scene, Jacqueline and I had become close, and when she moved up to Glencairn we started hanging around together a lot. She was very clear about wanting out of Belfast. The photos she took of us Mods around the city were amazing, but behind all the cool clothing and polished scooters was a bunch of kids whose futures were uncertain, to say the very least. At any time, any one of us could’ve ended up dead, or given a terrible hiding for something we’d done or not done. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and those of us who wanted little or no part of the ongoing war soon realised this, and made plans to get out.

  Jacqueline moved to London to start a new life and I envied her. I missed her too. She had (and still has) a down-to-earth sense of humour and looked at life through the eyes of a true artist. She was bright and had her head screwed on. In short, she was good for me and when she’d gone I felt cut adrift.

  I wanted to follow her but at that point I didn’t quite have the guts to pack my bag, get on the boat and do a Dick Whittington to London. It seemed a big journey, physically and metaphorically, and I was still torn between wanting to get away and the love I had for my siblings, friends and extended family across Glencairn and the Shankill.

  So instead, in a kind of compromise, I went to the Isle of Man. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because it didn’t feel so far from Belfast as London did. Perhaps I just wanted to try out the feeling of leaving home before I really did leave home for good. In any case, I wasn’t long over there. I got low-paid kitchen work in one of the hotels in Douglas and for a couple of weeks I slogged it out as the realisation dawned on me that this definitely wasn’t London, or anything like it. The only memorable event about the whole fortnight was that two gay guys from Dublin kept trying to hit on me. Being from Loyalist Belfast, the gay scene wasn’t exactly familiar to me – despite all my street smarts and living by the seat of my pants I could be incredibly naive sometimes – and at first I just thought these two were being friendly. As I hadn’t met many people from ‘down South’ up to this point, they intrigued me. It was only when they insisted on me coming back to their room for more drinks that the penny dropped.

  So, with my tail between my legs, I re-boarded the Belfast boat and went home. When I arrived back to the flat, the place was a ghost town. All those who dossed down there, crashing on my sofa or wherever they could lay their heads, were away camping. I was in almost complete isolation, and as I sat there, bored and fed up, I decided not to hang around for more than a couple of days. London was calling, and it was time for me to answer it.

  CHAPTER 15

  J

  acqueline didn’t sound so surprised when I phoned her and told her I was coming to London.

  ‘At last, Chambers,’ she said. ‘What took ye so fuckin’ long?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I said, ‘faffin’ about as usual. What’s your place like? Can I crash on you for a wee bit?’

  ‘Yeah, course you can. But I’ll warn ye now . . . this place is a madhouse, so it is.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then. We’ve come from a madhouse, Jacq.’

  ‘Wait and see, Chambers,’ she said, ‘wait and see . . .’

  I put the phone down, still laughing. No place on earth could be as crazy as Belfast. London might be full of nutters and psychos, but generally they weren’t carrying automatic weapons. Whatever I might meet in London, it would be nothing compared to Northern Ireland. We were all being dragged into it, Catholics and Protestants, and some of us would be dragged much deeper than others. I’d had it with all that stuff. I just wanted to get away, make a new life and have some fun without constantly looking over my shoulder.

  Also – and perhaps it wasn’t so obvious to me at the time, but looking back I see some significance – there was the fact that my parents had spent time in England. My feelings about my mother were still strong and maybe subconsciously I felt that if I hadn’t found her in Belfast, there could be a chance that she could walk past me on the streets of London. Admittedly, in a capital city of (then) 6 million people the chances of that happening were remote, to say the least, but there was no harm in wondering what might be.

  Still, I wasn’t entirely confident about hitting London on my own, so I arranged to go with Finn, a friend from Glencairn. Like me, he was a bit of a hood and forever in trouble with either the RUC or the UDA – or both, which wasn’t a great place to be. Plus, I fancied the hell out of Finn’s sister and would use the excuse of g
oing round to his for planning meetings to eye up his lovely sibling. Predictably, she wasn’t interested in me at all, so all I got was a crazy guy for a travelling companion who would no doubt get into as much trouble in London as he had done in Belfast.

  We settled on a date in October 1987 as our farewell to Belfast. There was no need to book the flight; in those days you just turned up at the British Midland desk at Aldergrove Airport (now fancily re-named ‘Belfast International’), bought a ticket and got on the plane. Not that I’d ever been on one before, so I was sitting in my flat that morning in a state of nervous anticipation when there was a knock at the door. I opened it, expecting Finn, to find my cousins Pickle and Karen on the step. They told me Finn had been arrested for theft, the details being that he’d broken into my auntie’s house and stolen a video recorder and TV, among other items, and had been arrested while trying to sell them.

  ‘Cheeky bastard!’ I said. ‘Looks like I’ll be going to London on my own, then . . .’

  I got the bus into the city centre then took the airport bus up to Aldergrove. All the while I stared out of the window, watching my home city disappear into the distance and wondering whether I’d be back in a few weeks or if I’d ever return at all. Soldiers and heavily armed police mixed with shoppers and families on a day out. Young and old submitted to security checks and searches taking place outside department stores. There were large concrete anti-terrorist barriers in place everywhere. Helicopters buzzed above us, police stations had been turned into fortified military bases and unseen eyes watched everything via CCTV cameras. This was our normal – about as far from normal as you could possibly get, and yet we’d lived like this for years. I hadn’t known any other way of existence. Adjusting to a country without such restrictions would take some doing.

  I purchased my ticket and headed for the departure lounge via the Harp bar, where I downed a few pints before boarding. I was almost shitting myself with fear as I boarded the plane and was glad to see that you could smoke if you didn’t mind sitting at the back of the plane. I made a beeline for the rear seats and broke out the fags before I’d even fastened my seatbelt. Although the flight was short, I hated every second, and even today I’m not comfortable travelling this way. Still, it was either that or a trip that took the best part of two days by boat, bus or rail, so I just gritted my teeth and smoked the time away.

  I landed at Heathrow and made my way by Tube up to Walthamstow, where Jacqueline was living. I’d been to London before, of course, but now I was looking at it through the eyes of someone who would be living there. And even on the Tube, the differences between London and Belfast were amazing. Sure, people travelling in the carriages weren’t exactly warm and friendly. Most sat with newspapers up to their faces, or plugged into their Walkmans. There was a bit of tension in the air, not helped when a couple of drunken posh blokes got on at Kensington and started shouting about this and that.

  They didn’t bother me, because what tension there was had nothing on an average early evening in Belfast. People here were from all corners of the globe and they could come and go as they pleased with little fear of attack, death by car bomb or random sectarian murder. True, London was far from perfect but even so, you didn’t feel you were constantly being scrutinised for who you were and what you were. I felt liberated. There were no soldiers, no cops with guns, no barbed wire, no barricades, no paramilitaries. Generally, people looked happy and stress-free. In Belfast, fear seemed to be etched into the face of every one of its occupants.

  I changed trains and took the Victoria Line to Walthamstow. Back then it was a traditional east London community that had seen better days, and a magnet for those who were looking to live as cheaply as possible. Immigrant families of all faiths and persuasions were moving in – and then there was the interesting mix of personalities living at Jacqueline’s . . .

  The large flat was above some shops on Blackhorse Road, close to the Lord Palmerston pub. And just as Jacq had described it, it was a complete madhouse. The three or four rooms that constituted the living space were shared by at least fifteen people and it was a case of sling your sleeping bag down wherever you could find a gap. And in comparison to the working-class Loyalist community I’d grown up in (with the addition of a few Catholic Mod friends), my housemates were a very eccentric, eclectic set of people indeed.

  There were Irish Mods, skinheads, punks, ska girls and rockabillies. In one room, a terrible heavy metal band gathered to rehearse a couple of times a week. There was a strange guy called Max, who had the unique feature of having four nipples on his chest. There was an even stranger girl, Cheryl, who was obsessed with Cliff Richard and would stalk him whenever he played in London. There was a revolving door of gay guys and prostitutes who worked the streets of Soho. I’d never been in the company of such a weird and wonderful bunch and I loved every minute of their company.

  God only knows how this wild bunch got on, but we did. There were arguments and fights, of course, but by and large we were a functionally dysfunctional community, if that makes sense. On a Friday night we’d all head to Blackhorse Road Station and take the train to Camden, where we’d hit the Camden Palace, the Electric Ballroom and Dingwalls. We must’ve looked like something out of The Warriors, the cult 1979 film, or, at a pinch, an extended version of The Young Ones, which wouldn’t have been far wrong, given the state of our house.

  I treated my first few weeks of idleness during the day and partying at night as ‘settling in’, but as my meagre savings were fast dwindling away I realised it was time to find a job. I went down to the Denmark Street Job Centre, just around the corner from Tottenham Court Road, and I picked this particular place for a reason. I’d always had a bit of an obsession with serial killers – coming from where I did, I’d probably mingled with a few – and I knew from reading his life story that Dennis Nilsen, the serial murderer of young gay men, had worked in that very office. After browsing the jobs boards for a while I began chatting up the staff, shamelessly asking them what Dennis was like and where he’d sat. They must’ve wondered who this strange Paddy was, coming in and asking all sorts of odd questions about their most notorious employee.

  ‘Paddy’ . . . of course, now I was in London that’s how I was viewed. Most English people made little or no distinction between Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants. To them we were all Paddies, working in pubs, mending roads or hanging off scaffolding on building sites, wolf-whistling passing secretaries. At first, this shocked me and pissed me right off. Didn’t they know or appreciate the fact we were prouder to be British than them? People from Northern Ireland had (and still have) a very keen sense of who might be from the other side of the fence. Evolution seems to have taught us that this is nothing less than a survival technique. In England, though, it didn’t seem to matter a damn. Few understood the difference, and fewer even cared. I was astonished, given the constant drip-drip-drip of bad news still coming out of my country. But there it was. I was deemed to have ‘Irish charm’ and if that got me a few dates with the girls, which it did, I wasn’t going to argue the details.

  Thanks to the catering experience I’d gained in Belfast I managed to get a succession of temping jobs working as a chef/waiter/barman where necessary. At that time, towards the end of the 1980s, London was booming. The recession of the early part of the decade was over, the Big Bang (the day of stock market deregulation in 1986) had happened, and it seemed that everyone was either stuffing their faces, drinking themselves silly or drugging till they dropped. I was never short of work, and certainly never short of people to talk to. Diners and drinkers would catch on to my accent and ask me where I was from. When I said ‘Belfast’ they’d look at me with a mixture of intrigue and suspicion – who knows, they might have been talking to a real live terrorist! If they wanted the ‘blarney’ I was happy to give it to them – it often meant a fair bit extra in tips – but I was always careful to make sure I didn’t give too much away.

  I was working in a bar one time whe
n I spotted an older guy, probably in his thirties or forties, sitting at the end of the bar. He clocked my accent when I asked him what he wanted to drink.

  ‘Ah, Belfast,’ he said, ‘a fine city. My other leg’s still over there, you know.’ And he beckoned me to peer over the bar at the space where the limb used to be. I asked him what happened, already guessing the answer. He’d been in the army and he’d been caught by an IRA booby-trap bomb. I told him which part of Belfast I was from and he realised then that I was a Protestant. Knowing, as a former soldier, that he was safe with me he dropped his guard, I dropped mine, and we had a good old chat that evening.

  I also did some temping work in a private members’ club near Trafalgar Square. It was all military personnel and there I met a lovely older fella we knew as ‘Sir Stephen’. He’d been in the Second World War, was captured by the Japanese and forced to help build the bridge over the River Kwai. His stories fascinated me, as did those of other members who took the time to speak to me. One afternoon I was interested to see a whole crowd of security personnel arrive in the building, complete with sniffer dogs. There was a big event on in honour of some general or other. One of the security guys talked to me for a few minutes before carrying on with his work. Within five minutes the manager of the club came over and generously awarded me the day off. By his tone of voice I could tell that this wasn’t a request, but an order. ‘Paddies’, even red, white and blue ones, weren’t welcome in the club that day.

  Still, I went with the flow and would frequent the Irish pubs and clubs up in the Archway and Kilburn areas of the city. I did some work in one such bar in Swiss Cottage – the owner didn’t care if you were Orange, Green or any other colour as long as you had an Irish accent of some description. On a Friday night the place would be crammed full of Irish builders and labourers, pissing their hard-earned cash against the toilet wall. One night, a smallish fella came in and sidled up to me as I was clearing away a tableful of empty Guinness glasses.