The Street and other stories

by Gerry Adams

  He disappeared into the back of the store. I had hardly started to load the van when he arrived back. Between the two of us we weren’t long packing in the cartons and crates of wines and spirits and then we were off, Geordie cheerfully saluting the men on barricade duty at the end of the street as they waved us out of the Falls area and into the rest of the world.

  Geordie and I spent most of our first day together delivering our load to off-licences and public houses in the city centre. I was nervous of being recognised because I had worked in a bar there, but luckily it got its deliveries from a different firm. It was the first day I had been in the city centre since August; except for the one trip to Dublin and one up to Derry, I had spent all my time behind the barricades. It was disconcerting to find that, apart from the unusual sight of British soldiers with their cheerful, arrogant voices, life in the centre of Belfast, or at least its licenced premises, appeared unaffected by the upheavals of the past few months. It was also strange as we made our deliveries to catch glimpses on television of news coverage about the very areas and issues I was so involved in and familiar with. Looked at from outside through the television screen, the familiar scenes might as well have been in another country.

  Geordie and I said nothing of any of this to one another. That was a strange experience for me, too. My life had been so full of the cut-and-thrust of analysis, argument and counter-argument about everything that affected the political situation that I found it difficult to restrain myself from commenting on events to this stranger. Indeed, emerging from the close camaraderie of my closed world, as I had done only that morning, I found it unusual even to be with a stranger. Over a lunch of soup and bread rolls in the Harp Bar in High Street, I listened to the midday news on the BBC’s Radio Ulster while all the time pretending indifference. The lead item was a story about an IRA convention and media speculation about a republican split. It would be nightfall before I would be able to check this out for myself, though a few times during the day I almost left Geordie in his world of cheerful pubs and publicans for the security of the ghettos.

  The next few days followed a similar pattern. Each morning started with Geordie absenting himself for a few minutes to the back of the store while I started loading up the van. Then we were off from within the no-go areas and into the city centre. By the end of the first week the two of us were like old friends. Our avoidance of political topics, even of the most pressing nature, that unspoken and much-used form of political protection and survival developed through expediency, had in its own way been a political indicator, a signal, that we came from “different sides”.

  In the middle of the second week Geordie broke our mutual and instinctive silence on this issue when with a laugh he handed me that morning’s dockets. “Well, our kid, this is your lucky day. You’re going to see how the other half lives. We’re for the Shankill.”

  My obvious alarm fueled his amusement.

  “Oh, aye,” he guffawed. “It’s all right for me to traipse up and down the Falls every day, but my wee Fenian friend doesn’t want to return the favour.”

  I was going to tell him that nobody from the Falls went up the Shankill burning down houses but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I didn’t want to go up the Shankill either. I was in a quandary and set about loading up our deliveries with a heavy heart. After I had only two of the cartons loaded I went to the back of the store to tell Geordie that I was jacking it in. He was in the wee office with oul’ Harry the storeman. Each of them had a glass of spirits in his hand. Geordie saw me coming and offered his to me.

  “Here, our kid, it’s best Jamaicay rum. A bit of Dutch courage never did anyone any harm.”

  “Nawh, thanks, Geordie, I don’t drink spirits. I need to talk to you for a minute…”

  “If it’s about today’s deliveries, you’ve nothing to worry about. We’ve only one delivery up the Shankill, and don’t be thinking of not going ’cos you’ll end up out on your arse. It’s company policy that mixed crews deliver all over the town. Isn’t that right, Harry?”

  Harry nodded in agreement.

  “C’mon, our kid. I’ll do the delivery for you. Okay? You can sit in the van. How’s that grab you? Can’t be fairer than that, can I, Harry?”

  “Nope,” Harry grunted. They drained their glasses.

  “I’ll take a few beers for the child, Harry,” Geordie said over his shoulder as he and I walked back to the van.

  “You know where they are,” said Harry.

  “Let’s go,” said Geordie to me. “It’s not every day a wee Fenian like you gets on to the best road in Belfast…” he grabbed me around the neck “… and off it again in one piece. Hahaha.”

  That’s how I ended up on the Shankill. It wasn’t so bad, but before I tell you about that, in case I forget, from then on, each morning when Geordie returned from the back of the store after getting his “wee drop of starting fuel”, he always had a few bottles of beer for me.

  Anyway, back to the job in hand. As Geordie said, we only had the one order on the Shankill. It was to the Long Bar. We drove up by Unity Flats and on to Peter’s Hill. There were no signs of barricades like the ones on the Falls, and apart from a patrolling RUC Land-Rover and two British army jeeps, the road was the same as it had always seemed to me. Busy and prosperous and coming awake in the early winter morning sunshine.

  A few months earlier, in October, the place had erupted in protest at the news that the B-Specials were to be disbanded. The protesters had killed one RUC man and wounded three others; thirteen British soldiers had been injured. In a night of heavy gun-fighting along the Shankill Road, the British had killed two civilians and wounded twenty others. Since then there had been frequent protests here against the existence of no-go areas in Catholic parts of Belfast and Derry.

  Mindful of all this, I perched uneasily in the front of the van, ready at a second’s notice to spring into Geordie’s seat and drive like the blazes back whence I came. I needn’t have worried. Geordie was back in moments. As he climbed into the driver’s seat he threw me a packet of cigarettes.

  “There’s your Christmas box, our kid. I told them I had a wee Fenian out here and that you were dying for a smoke.”

  Then he took me completely by surprise.

  “Do y’ fancy a fish supper? It’s all right! We eat fish on Friday as well. Hold on!”

  And before I could say anything he had left me again as he sprinted from the van into the Eagle Supper Saloon.

  “I never got any breakfast,” he explained on his return. “We’ll go ’round to my house. There’s nobody in.”

  I said nothing as we turned into Westmoreland Street and in through a myriad of backstreets till we arrived in Urney Street. Here the tension was palpable, for me at least. Geordie’s house was no different from ours. A two-bedroomed house with a toilet in the backyard and a modernised scullery. Only for the picture of the British queen, I could have been in my own street. I buttered rounds of plain white bread and we wolfed down our fish suppers with lashings of Geordie’s tea.

  Afterwards, my confidence restored slightly, while Geordie was turning the van in the narrow street I walked down to the corner and gazed along the desolation of Cupar Street up towards what remained of Bombay Street. A British soldier in a sandbagged emplacement greeted me in a John Lennon accent.

  “’Lo, moite. How’s about you?”

  I ignored him and stood momentarily immersed in the bleak pitifulness of it all, from the charred remains of the small houses to where the world-weary slopes of Divis Mountain gazed benignly in their winter greenness down on us where we slunk, blighted, below the wise steeples of Clonard. It was Geordie’s impatient honking of the horn that shook me out of my reverie. I nodded to the British soldier as I departed. This time he ignored me.

  “Not a pretty sight,” Geordie said as I climbed into the van beside him.

  I said nothing. We made our way back through the side streets on to the Shankill again in silence. As we
turned into Royal Avenue at the corner of North Street he turned to me.

  “By the way,” he said, “I wasn’t there that night.”

  There was just a hint of an edge in his voice.

  “I’m sorry! I’m not blaming you,” I replied. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know,” he told me firmly.

  That weekend, subsidised by my week’s wages, I was immersed once more in subversion. That at least was how the Unionist government viewed the flurry of political activity in the ghettos; and indeed a similar view was taken by those representatives of the Catholic middle class who had belatedly attached themselves to the various committees in which some of us had long been active. On Monday I was back delivering drink.

  We spent the week before Christmas in County Down, seemingly a million miles from the troubles and the tension of Belfast town. For the first time in years I did no political work. It was late by the time we got back each night and I was too tired, so that by Wednesday I realised that I hadn’t even seen, read or heard any news all that week. I smiled to myself at the thought that both I and the struggle appeared to be surviving without each other; in those days that was a big admission for me to make, even to myself.

  In its place Geordie and I spent the week up and down country roads, driving through beautiful landscapes, over and around hilltops and along rugged seashores and loughsides as we ferried our liquid wares from village to town, from town to port and back to village again; from market town to fishing village, from remote hamlet to busy crossroads. Even yet the names have a magical sound for me, and at each one Geordie and I took the time for a stroll or a quick look at some local antiquity.

  One memorable day we journeyed out to Comber and from there to Killyleagh and Downpatrick, to Crossgar and back again and along the Ballyhornan road and on out to Strangford where we ate our cooked ham baps and drank bottles of stout, hunkering down from the wind below the square tower of Strangford Castle, half-frozen with the cold as we looked over towards Portaferry on the opposite side, at the edge of the Ards Peninsula. We spent a day there as well, and by this time I had a guide book with me written by Richard Hayward, and I kept up a commentary as we toured the peninsula, from Millisle the whole way around the coastline and back to Newtownards. By the end of the week we had both seen where the Norsemen had settled and the spot where Thomas Russell, “the man from God knows where”, was hanged, where St Patrick had lived and Cromwell and Betsy Grey and Shane O’Neill. We visited monastic settlements and stone circles, round towers, dolmens and holy wells. Up and down the basket-of-eggs county we walked old battle sites like those of the faction fights at Dolly’s Brae or Scarva, “wee buns” we learned compared to Saintfield where Munroe and 7,000 United Irishmen routed the English forces, or the unsuccessful three-year siege by the Great O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, of Jordan’s Castle at Ardglass. And in between all this we delivered our cargoes of spirits and fine wines.

  This was a new world to me, and to Geordie, too. It was a marked contrast to the smoke and smell and claustrophobic closeness of our Belfast ghettos and the conflicting moods which gripped them in that winter of 1969. Here was the excitement of greenery and wildlife, of rushing water, of a lightness and heady clearness in the atmosphere and of strange magic around ancient pagan holy places. We planned our last few days’ runs as tours and loaded the van accordingly so that whereas in the city we took the shortest route, now we steered according to Richard Hayward’s guide book.

  On Christmas Eve we went first to Newry where we unloaded over half our supplies in a series of drops at that town’s licenced premises. By lunchtime we were ready for the run along the coast road to Newcastle, skirting the Mournes, and from there back home. At our last call on the way out to the Warrenpoint Road, the publican set us up two pints as a Christmas box. The pub was empty, and as we sat there enjoying the sup, a white-haired man in his late sixties came in. He was out of breath, weighed down with a box full of groceries.

  “A bully, John,” he greeted the publican. “Have I missed the bus?”

  “Indeed and you have, Paddy, and he waited for you for as long as he could.”

  Paddy put his box down on the floor. His face was flushed.

  “Well, God’s curse on it anyway. I met Peadar Hartley and big MacCaughley up the town and the pair of them on the tear and nothing would do them boys but we’d have a Christmas drink and then another till they put me off my whole way of going with their ceili-ing and oul’ palavering. And now I’ve missed the bloody bus. God’s curse on them two rogues. It’ll be dark before there’s another one.”

  He sighed resignedly and pulled a stool over to the bar, saluting the two of us as he did so.

  “John, I might as well have a drink when I’m this far and give these two men one as well.”

  He overruled our protests.

  “For the season that’s in it. One more’ll do youse no harm. It’s Christmas. Isn’t that right, John? And one for yourself and I’ll have a wee Black Bush meself.”

  “Will you have anything in the Bush, Paddy?”

  “Indeed and I’ll not. Now, John, if it was Scotch now I’d have to have water or ginger ale or something, but that’s only with Scotch. I take nothing in my whiskey!”

  We all joined him in his delighted laughter.

  “What way are youse going, boys? Did you say youse were going out towards Newcastle?” the publican asked us.

  Geordie nodded.

  “Could you ever drop oul’ Paddy out that road? He has to go as far as Kilkeel, and by the looks of him if he doesn’t go soon he’ll be here till the New Year.”

  “No problem,” Geordie grinned. I could see he was enjoying the old man who was now lilting merrily away to himself.

  “De euw did eh euw, did eh euw did del de.”

  “Paddy, these two men’ll give you a wee lift home.”

  Paddy was delighted.

  “Surely to God, boys, but youse is great men so youse are. Here, we’ll have another wee one before we go. A wee deoch don dorais.* All right, John?”

  “Indeed and it isn’t,” John told him. “Kate’ll be worrying about you and these two lads can’t wait. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  “Well, let it never be said that I kept men from their work,” Paddy compromised.

  “A happy New Year to you, John.” The three of us saluted our host and retreated into the crisp afternoon air.

  “It’ll snow the night,” our newfound friend and passenger announced, sniffing the air. I was carrying his box.

  He did a jig, to Geordie’s great amusement, when he saw that we were travelling in a drinks van.

  “It’ll be the talk of the place!” he laughed as we settled him into the passenger seat while I wedged myself against the door. Geordie gave him a bottle of stout as we pulled away.

  “Do you want a glass?” I asked. “There’s some here.”

  “A glass? Sure youse are well organised. Youse must be from Belfast! No, son, I don’t need a glass, thanks all the same. This is grand by the neck. By the way, my name’s Paddy O’Brien.”

  We introduced ourselves.

  “You’ll never get a job in the shipyard with a name like that,” Geordie slagged him.

  “And I wouldn’t want it. ’Tis an Orange hole, begging your pardon, lads, and no offence, but them that’s there neither works nor wants.”

  To my relief Geordie guffawed loudly, winking at me as he did. For the rest of the journey Paddy regaled us with stories of his mishaps in black holes and other places.

  “I wouldn’t like to live in Belfast. I’ll tell youse that for sure. I worked there often enough, in both quarters, mind you, and I always found the people as decent as people anywhere else. I was at the building and I went often enough to Casement Park, surely to God I did, for the football and some grand games I saw, but I wouldn’t live there. Thon’s a tough town!”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said loyally, while all the time looking beyond Paddy and past Geordie t
o where Narrow Water flashed past us and the hills of County Louth dipped their toes in Carlingford Bay.

  “No, give me the Mournes,” Paddy persisted. “Were youse ever in the Mournes?” He emphasised “in”.

  “Nawh,” we told him. Geordie began to enthuse about our week journeying around the county.

  “Sure youse have a great time of it,” Paddy agreed. “I’ll come with youse the next time. Work? Youse wouldn’t know what work was. But boys, I’m telling youse this. Don’t be leaving this day without going into the Mournes. There’s a road youse could take, wouldn’t be out of your way, so it wouldn’t. After youse drop me off, go on towards Annalong on this road, and a wee bit outside the village on the Newcastle side there’s a side road at Glassdrummond that’ll take you up to Silent Valley. It’s a straight road from here right through to Glassdrummond, boys. Youse can’t miss it.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Geordie agreed.

  “Well, that’s the best I can do for youse, boys. Come back some day and I’ll take youse on better roads right into the heart of the mountains, but it’ll be dark soon and snowing as well and my Kate’ll kill me, so the Silent Valley’ll have t’ do youse. You’ll be able to see where youse Belfast ones gets your good County Down water from to water your whiskey with and to wash your necks.”

  “Is Slieve Donard the highest of the Mournes?” I asked, trying to find my faithful guide book below Paddy’s seat.

  “Donard? The highest? It’ll only take you a couple of hours to climb up there; but, boys, you could see the whole world from Slieve Donard. That’s where St Donard had his cell, up on the summit. You’ll see the Isle of Man out to the east and up along our own coast all of Strangford Lough and up to the hills of Belfast and the smoke rising above them, and beyond that on a clear day Lough Neagh and as far as Slieve Gallion on the Derry and Tyrone border. And southwards beyond Newry you’ll see Slieve Gullion, where Cúchulainn rambled, and Slieve Foy east of there, behind Carlingford town, and farther south again you’ll see the Hill of Howth and beyond that again, if the day is good, the Sugar Loaf and the Wicklow Mountains’ll just be on the horizon.”