None Shall Divide Us

by Michael Stone

  I met Cyril Stone just the once, when I was already a father myself. It was a very strange experience but also a moving one. The meeting answered an unasked question: ‘What am I missing out on?’ When I met Cyril I realised, with a great sense of relief, that I was missing out on absolutely nothing. I was twenty-eight and it was 1983, the year my grandmother died. Margaret Stone had kept a diary given to me by my mother on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. She told me to read it because there are ‘things in it you will want to read’. Inside was an address and telephone number for Cyril. He was still living in the Midlands. I rang the number and when he answered I was surprised at the strength of his Belfast accent. I can still hear the conversation we had. I said his name and he answered with, ‘Is that you, Michael?’

  I told him I was coming to England to see him. He didn’t resist, put me off, hang up or refuse to see me. I booked a hotel and my ferry ticket and made my journey to Birmingham. I found his home and with a shaky hand rang the doorbell. He answered the door and there we were – two Stones looking at each other on his doorstep. It was a warm, friendly meeting and I am glad I met him, but I knew he would never take the place of John Gregg, who raised me. Cyril had remarried and had two other children, twins Tracey and Terence. Terence is now a Buddhist monk living in south-east Asia. The whole family welcomed me with open arms. I noticed my school photos sitting alongside pictures of his new family. I was happy to leave Cyril’s home and go back to Belfast to the only mother and father I have ever known and loved. The only missing piece in the jigsaw of my early life was Mary Bridget O’Sullivan and I accepted, with great sadness, that I would probably never find her.

  2

  A BOY FROM THE BRANIEL

  MY EARLY YEARS WERE SPENT IN BALLYHALBERT, ON THE SHORES OF BELFAST LOUGH. In the late 1950s the village was an old-fashioned place with just a handful of houses, the local shops and church, but it had a strong sense of community and family. Everyone knew everyone else and it was a friendly and safe environment in which to bring up children. I remember clearly the walks with my mother along the shore and the gulls which swooped close to our heads in their search for scraps of food. I would grab her hand but was fascinated by their fearless dives.

  I was just four when the family moved to the Braniel estate, a new housing complex on the eastern edge of Belfast. More than a thousand new homes were built, making it the biggest development of its kind in Northern Ireland. My mother and father were pleased to get a house at 47 Ravenswood Park. It had a small garden at the back and front, it had a bathroom and my father was near the shipyard where he worked. We were an ordinary, working-class Protestant family, no different from the families that surrounded us. It was 1959, and fathers went out to work while mothers stayed at home with the children. Dad’s job as a steelworker took him out of the house from early morning to dinnertime. Mum never left the house. She had her hands full with two sons and four daughters. Home life was simple. Money was tight because there was just the one wage coming in, but we were happy.

  In our home special pictures adorned the walls. Those images celebrated our culture and our loyalty to the young Queen Elizabeth II, our Protestant faith and my family’s heritage; a heritage handed down from my grandfather and great-grandfather.

  My grandfather was called Cyril Stone and he served in the Royal Corps of Signals. I find it ironic that the two corporals who were murdered at the funeral of Kevin Brady, and one of the men I killed at Milltown, were attached to the Royal Corps of Signals. My great-grandfather was Thomas Stone, an engineer and explorer. He was a fascinating character and spent many years in South Africa laying the railway along the Gold Coast. A photograph of Thomas Stone taken while he was in South Africa as an employee of the British government shows him holding Jacko, his pet baboon. This picture took pride of place in the living room and I was fascinated by the stories my mother would tell about Jacko.

  After Thomas Stone finished working abroad he returned to England with his German wife Augusta, Jacko and two live alligators. He disembarked from the boat with the two alligators on leads and Jacko by the hand. The newspaper cuttings from 1936 show him, his massive collection of tribal war spears and his prized juju. Jacko is sitting on his knee. The baboon lived as an additional member of the family. When I was growing up my mother told me stories about life with her grandparents. Jacko was house-trained and lived indoors. He slept indoors and ate with the family. My mother, who paid regular visits to her grandparents as a little girl, said she was terrified of Jacko because he was so big. Eventually my great-grandfather had to kill him, after coming home from work to find his wife cowering in the corner of the kitchen, being attacked by Jacko, who was now fully grown. My great-grandfather and the baboon fought hand to hand: Jacko was strangled and my great-grandfather was covered in bites. The alligators are now in the Museum of Birmingham.

  Also on the wall of our home was a framed parchment dated 28 September 1912 which was signed by James ‘Soldier’ Moore, my other great-grandfather. He served with the Royal Irish Fusiliers. ‘Soldier’ Moore had put his signature, in his own blood, to a solemn covenant to resist British Home Rule for Ireland. My mother was very proud of that parchment. My family were good, working-class Loyalists who were loyal to the Crown, loyal to their Queen, loyal to their identity and loyal to their British nationality.

  As well as my elder brother and two elder sisters, I have two sisters who are younger than me, Sharon and Shirley. One of the first rules of our family, taught to each of us in turn by my mother, was ‘Family Comes First’. Years later, when I joined the UDA, I broke that golden family rule. I didn’t put my family first and my illegal paramilitary activities became the focus of my entire life. My brother was shy and scholarly as a boy. John loved studying and is now a master draughtsman. He is a quiet family man living in the UK and, although he has never passed judgement on my past life, he often says he doesn’t understand how and why I got involved.

  As a teenager John was a member of a rock group called Richmond Hill. He was the lead singer of the five-piece group and they played support to the Irish rock acts Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher and Horslips. Although he was a quiet lad he had an amazing Joe Cocker-type voice and the band regularly gigged at Dublin’s Baggot Inn. I used to scam my way on to their van whenever I got the chance.

  Nowadays my sister Rosemary is a florist, while Colleen is a full-time wife and mother, Sharon an auxiliary nurse and Shirley a care attendant. Although the tables are turned and they now look after me, when we were young I took it upon myself to look after them and protect them from young lads on our estate.

  My father worked long hours to keep the family together. As a steelworker at the Harland & Wolff shipyard, he had followed in his own father’s footsteps. He was proud to be working class. He was a union man all his life and in his younger days represented boilermen, first as a convenor and then as a shop steward. My mother never left the family home for thirteen years and I mean just that: she never stepped beyond the front door. She didn’t even go to the shops herself. Each of us, me included, did the shopping for her on our designated days. Her day, for all those thirteen years, was getting my father to work, getting us ready for school, cleaning, washing, cooking, getting us ready for bed, getting dinner ready for Dad and falling into bed herself. Her day was multiple trips from kitchen to backyard and backyard to kitchen. I don’t think she really sat down during all that time. My parents had a long and loving marriage until death separated them in 2001. My lasting memory of the two of them together is Dad buying Mum a new winter coat and taking her into the city for a meal.

  My school years – I went to a primary school which was right opposite my home – were not the happiest of my life. I preferred schoolyard games to sitting behind a desk and doing my lessons. It was at primary school that I got the nickname Flint, and it stayed with me until I became a Loyalist volunteer in my teens.

  One teacher ensured I would leave school with little education and a dislike borde
ring on hatred for teachers and educators. Bordering the Braniel estate was a middle-class estate called Glenview and children from there also attended Braniel Primary. This teacher was a snob: he held a senior position of responsibility but believed working-class kids had no right to education. He ran his school with an iron fist.

  I had one encounter with this teacher that shaped the rest of my school life. When I was eight he slapped me in the face, causing my nose to bleed profusely. He beat me because I took a fit of the giggles in the playground when we were lining up to go back into class. I have never forgotten or forgiven the incident. After lunch the bell would ring to tell us it was time for lessons to begin. He had a ritual: you lined up in pairs, took the hand of the boy or girl standing beside you and filed into your classroom. I had a friend called Thomas ‘Daz’ Dizell. The bell rang and we lined up. I see this teacher striding up and down the lines of children and I take Daz’s hand. He laughs, pulls his hand away and sticks his tongue out at me. I start to laugh and the teacher spots us. He walks over to where we are standing and tells us to wait outside his classroom. I am scared because he has a reputation and has been known to beat boys.

  In the classroom, Daz is slapped on the palms of his hands with a ruler and ordered back to class. I know I’m next. The teacher walks towards me and I feel a heavy thud on my face that knocks me off my feet. He had hit me with the back of his hand and his knuckles had rammed so hard into my nose it burst a blood vessel. I have always had a weak nose and if I blew it too hard the blood would gush out and take ages to stop. I could see the blood dripping on to the floor and could feel it sliding down the back of my throat. I bolted under his desk, with blood pouring out of my nose, terrified I would get another slap. He screamed and shouted at me. Another teacher – a lady – heard the noise and rushed in. He left, slamming the door behind him, and she put me in a chair, saying just the one thing: ‘You made him do that by being bold.’ She never cleaned my face or tried to stop the bleeding. I was told to take off all my clothes and I began to cry, asking for my mother. The teacher left me sitting there in my socks and underpants, told me not to move until she came back and locked the door. I could hear her footsteps as she walked up the corridor.

  The bleeding had stopped and had dried in my nose and on my face. The teacher eventually came back carrying a plastic bag containing my clothes. She emptied the bag on the floor and placed my trousers, shirt and jumper on a radiator to dry, but it was spring and the heating wasn’t switched on. ‘You stay here until the end of school, you tell your mother you fell and banged your face,’ she said. ‘You have sisters here and we can expel all of you.’ Once the final bell went, she came back and told me to get dressed. I put on my damp clothes and went home.

  My mother was furious with me and wanted to know what happened. I lied and told her I fell in the playground and hurt my nose. I convinced her I’d had an accident. I put on a brave face when I should have told her what that teacher had done. After that, he never let me out of his sight. He asked other teachers to make me sit at the seat nearest the door and he would watch my movements. I was constantly waiting for the next blow or the next punch. I learnt a lesson that day: never tell a secret. I could have told Mum that a teacher had hit me but I didn’t. I chose to stay quiet and keep it to myself. Ironically, it is a lesson that was to stay with me in the years to come, when I was operating as a paramilitary. As an eight-year-old I learnt to never spill the beans and never betray anyone.

  From that day I have always had a problem with authority figures. When I left my primary school, I enrolled in Lisnasharragh Secondary. My sister Rosemary was already a pupil there and was in the same class as George Best, the football legend. He was head boy and Rosemary had a massive crush on him; in fact all the girls in Lisnasharragh had a soft spot for Best. He had moved from Grosvenor Grammar School and Rosemary told me that years later, at a school reunion party organised by the Democratic Unionist Party councillor Kim Morton, the former headmaster reminisced about George Best and my name also came up in the conversation. Then he said to her, ‘Lisnasharragh had one famous pupil and one infamous pupil and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is which.’

  My mother, spotting a wild streak in her young son, packed me off to the Army Cadets while I was at the school. I was fourteen and loved the weekend excursions to Orangefield Barracks. My mother thought it would tame me. It didn’t. It gave me a taste for weapons and warfare. Every weekend for a year I got to put on a khaki uniform as a junior in the Irish Guards. I trained on real but deactivated weapons. The first I held in my hand was a Webley .45 revolver. The irony of this is not lost on me. Just two short years later I would hold a Webley in my hand once again and swear an oath of allegiance to the Ulster Defence Association, the UDA. I had great fun playing the boy soldier and would pretend my enemies were lurking behind doors and I would take an imaginary pop at them. The year culminated in a weekend exercise on the Isle of Man and the training in the use of live ammunition that I got there taught me to respect firearms.

  But I still had to finish my schooling. I got into trouble at Lisnasharragh Secondary because I wouldn’t do as I was told. I hated the teachers and thought they were all the same. I had no intention of doing exams, so I didn’t see the point in being there. I hold the teacher at my primary school responsible for this tough-kid attitude. I wanted to leave school but the authorities wouldn’t let me because I was only fifteen. So I engineered fights to get expelled. The brawls were easy. Too many big-mouthed boys would ask questions about my family, why I had a different surname from my sisters, why I was Stone and the girls were Gregg. I told them it was none of their business and used my fists and my feet to ram the message home.

  My ploy worked and at fifteen and a half, a good six months before I could legally leave school, I was released by Lisnasharragh. They were glad to be rid of the tough troublemaker who continually disrupted the school. I was glad to be free of them. I hadn’t a qualification to my name. My education was basic, to say the least. The past ten years sitting behind desks and looking at blackboards had been a complete waste of time, apart from school girlfriends.

  In the early days the Braniel estate was mixed. Catholic families lived side by side with their Protestant neighbours. There was no reason for it to be any other way. Catholic families were exactly like mine, with fathers who worked and mothers who stayed at home. Their homes were exactly like mine except they had different pictures on their walls. There was a long-haired Jesus Christ exposing his heart and a picture of a woman in a blue veil standing on a burning bush in her bare feet and I couldn’t understand why she was smiling and not screaming in pain. In one home there was a well that a Catholic pal would dip his finger into and touch his forehead, chest and shoulders before leaving the house. Boys like him were my friends. I kicked footballs and played games with them. Politics, religion and nationality had nothing to do with our fun, even though Northern Ireland was just a few short years away from full-scale sectarian warfare.

  When I wasn’t playing street games with my good pal, Tim and other friends, I was involved in activities at St Bridget’s church hall. I was taken to Sunday service regularly and joined the Junior Boys’ Brigade. I sang in the local choir and, to my mother’s delight, was poached by St John’s in Orangefield to sing in their much bigger and better-known choir. The rector, who had great hopes for me, taught me to read music. I even appeared on the BBC’s Songs of Praise in a red surplice and snow-white ruffle. The singing stopped when I became leader of a junior street gang and was more interested in using my fists and feet than my angelic voice.

  3

  STREET FIGHTER

  IT WAS 1970. THE FABRIC OF NORTHERN IRISH LIFE WAS UNRAVELLING FAST. Catholic agitation was escalating and three years after the formation of the Civil Rights movement in the province they were still shouting in a collective voice. They said they wanted changes, they demanded reform and were fed up with being treated as second-class citizens. They said it was their
basic human right to have a job, education and decent housing. I was fifteen and not interested in a group of strangers moaning about their lot. I was more interested in street life and carving a niche for myself as the local bad boy.

  The same year the Civil Rights activists were making waves for the establishment, I was making waves of my own – as the leader of a ruthless street gang. We called ourselves the Hole in the Wall Gang and we formed to defend our turf, and our girls, from neighbouring gangs. The Hole in the Wall wasn’t sectarian. I can put my hand on my heart and say that, because half of the gang was Catholic. The Hole in the Wall had nothing to do with vigilantism and keeping Catholics out, but it had everything to do with keeping rival street gangs in line. If they strayed into our territory they had to obey the rules and the golden rule was no flirting with our girls. They also had to behave – no anti-social antics, no trashing of local property – and show respect for the local gang. And if they didn’t keep our rules there would be hell to pay.