Paperboy

by Tony Macaulay

  As for me, I was wearing my best green parallels from John Frazer’s, with Macaulay tartan stripes fresh from Princes Street in Edinburgh, professionally sewn down the sides on my mother’s sewing machine. I was also wearing my best brown-and-cream striped tank top and my Harrington jacket. I splashed some extra Brut all over it to mask any residual whiff of boke from my traumatic trip to get my teeth out and tomato sauce from the Geordie Best sausages at the jumble sale.

  At last the black taxi arrived at the bus stop, and we all crammed inside. The smell of Brut aftershave and Charlie perfume was overwhelming. (Charlie was like Brut for girls, except they didn’t need to splash it all over.) The black-taxi driver was an Elvis fan with UVF tattoos and a beer belly. His glasses had a brown tint that went ever darker as the evening sun came out.

  ‘And where are yousens goin’?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re goin’ to see the Bay City Rollers at the Ulster Hall, and I just love Les, so I do,’ answered Lynn McQuiston, oblivious to the intended irony of the question.

  Ten minutes and dozens of choruses of ‘We love you, Rollers’ later we were down the Shankill Road and in the town. Once we had emerged from the black taxi, my big brother expressed his disgust that we boys had been joining in the chants of ‘We love you, Rollers’. He gave us a brief lecture, explaining that boys should refrain from singing along with anything that referred to loving the Rollers, because boys shouldn’t sing about loving other boys, or everyone would think we were ‘f**kin’ fruits’. And so henceforth, we clapped or stamped our feet aggressively along to any mantras that used the word ‘love’ in appreciation of our heroes, and we contented ourselves with shouting ‘Yo!’ manfully every so often instead of joining in with the singing.

  As we arrived in Bedford Street, we were greeted by the queue outside the Ulster Hall – a seething mass of tartan and parallels, singing:

  Woody, Eric, Alan, Leslie and Derek –

  We love you, Rollers

  Rollers, we love you!

  I had never seen such a large crowd on a Belfast street without the presence of petrol bombs. I was so enthralled that I joined in with the singing immediately – until my big brother kicked me in the shins and I remembered the Love Rule. The atmosphere was amazing.

  We were about to join the end of the longest queue I had ever seen, when Lynn McQuiston reminded us of her plans to begin a relationship with Les McKeown at the stage door.

  ‘Like, I don’t even know where the stage door is,’ said Heather.

  ‘Wise a bap!’ said my big brother.

  ‘Ballicks!’ said Philip Ferris, of course.

  It was at this moment that my experience of the School of Music came in handy in a most unexpected way. I had played my violin in the back row of the second violins in the School of Music Orchestra concert in the Ulster Hall the previous year. It was such a big occasion that even Patrick Walsh had played in the orchestra that day, despite the fact that he generally said the Ulster Hall was just for Protestants. On the day itself, I had in fact nearly fallen off the stage, when I dropped my chin rest and one leg of my chair teetered perilously over the edge of the podium towards an audience that was heavy with gold jewelry and whispered ‘ings’. Anyway, as a performing artiste, I had entered the Ulster Hall that day by the aforementioned stage door. So I knew exactly where the stage door was. It was in the next street at the back of the hall itself.

  ‘Follow me!’ I said triumphantly, much to my big brother’s disgust. For once, I was the leader, and he would have to follow.

  I led the gang down a side street of shops that were boarded up from the latest car bomb. In less than a minute there we were, standing at the stage door at the rear of the Ulster Hall. Amazingly, there was hardly anyone else there apart from a few other tartan-clad girls sobbing and screaming, and a couple of RUC men who were clearly more used to policing angry rioters than hysterical teenagers.

  ‘They’re already inside, so yousens may as well go back round and get into the queue, kids,’ said one of the RUC men with a moustache when he saw us.

  I turned around immediately to obediently return to our place in the queue.

  ‘Houl’ yer horses!’ said my big brother. ‘They’re not here yet!’ I was shocked at this remark. It had never occurred to me that the RUC would tell lies.

  ‘Like, the peelers wouldn’t still be here if the Rollers was already inside!’ said Heather, excitedly.

  ‘Oh my God, my Les is gonna be right here any minute nigh!’ shrieked Lynn.

  ‘Ballicks,’ said Philip.

  No sooner had he yet again demonstrated just how limited his vocabulary was than a long black limousine with the windows blacked out like a police car pulled up in front of us. What happened next was like a dream. It seemed to happen in slow motion, like the Six Million Dollar Man running. Right before our very eyes, five young men dressed in parallels and tartan emerged from the limousine in quick succession. Alan and Derek, the two brothers, got out first and escaped through the stage door before we had fully grasped the reality of what was happening in front of us. Eric Faulkner was next.

  ‘Eric!!’ screamed Irene Maxwell, as she ran forward and grabbed his jacket. It was like a sick woman touching Jesus in a story in Sunday school. Eric turned briefly and smiled at her. His face was mirrored in the T-shirt Irene was wearing. She fainted. As Titch McCracken and Sharon Burgess knelt down to see if she was all right, and before we had a chance to take all of this in, the real, live Les McKeown from off Top of the Pops was suddenly running straight past us.

  ‘I loooove you Les!’ screamed Lynn McQuiston repeatedly, the tears streaming down her face onto her buck teeth, as she reached out and grabbed at a tuft of hair on the back of his head. Les just looked scared and kept running.

  While the girls in our gang had known instinctively how to approach this situation – by screaming and attempting to touch their idols, the boys didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to scream or touch our heroes, but we did want to make some more masculine kind of connection with them. So we did what came most naturally to us – we kicked them.

  My big brother led the way, and just managed to land a boot on Les McKeown’s backside, leaving a dirty boot print on the lead singer’s white parallels. It was then that fate intervened once again in my favour. The last Roller to get out of the car was Woody, and I found myself standing right beside him. So what did I do? Did I ask him for his autograph? No – he was moving much too fast for such niceties. Did I shout, ‘We love you Woody!’? Of course not – my big brother had forbidden such expressions. So I did what I knew best: I kicked him. In the heat of the moment, I abandoned my pacifist principles for the second time that day and expressed my adoration of a pop idol in the only way I knew how. I kicked him in the shins. Yes, I kicked Woody!

  Once the Rollers were safely inside the Ulster Hall, we looked at each other in excited silence. We had seen all the Rollers in real life! We had screamed at them, touched them and kicked them. As we rejoined the queue, we relived those precious moments – something we would continue to do for the next six months afterwards.

  ‘I touched Eric and he smiled at me and I fainted!’ said Irene. ‘I’ll never wash my hand again!’

  ‘I touched Les and he knows I love him and I think he loves me back,’ said Lynn sadly, looking down in awe at a clump of Les’s hair in her hand. ‘I’ll never wash my hand again!’

  ‘I kicked yer man Les!’ boasted my big brother. ‘That’ll harden him!’

  ‘I kicked Woody!’ I rejoined guiltily. ‘I’ll never, er … wash my foot again!’

  Titch McCracken looked up at me, stubbed out his cigarette on the pavement and then followed it up by spitting contemptuously and rolling his eyes.

  My heart was now beating very quickly with the excitement of it all. For a second I wondered if God was going to let my bad heart kill me before the beginning of the show – as a punishment for using violence on a pop star. But mercifully, He spared me and I got to see the
whole concert in its full glory.

  Once inside the historic building, the chants of ‘We Love You, Rollers’ were deafening. I had never heard so many girls screaming, even after a bomb, and neither had the Ulster Hall, I’m sure. We made our way to our prime seats, up in the balcony. Looking down on the stalls below, teeming with tartan teenagers, I felt slightly dizzy.

  It seemed like we had to wait for ever for the concert to begin. The longer we waited, the more the tension grew and the more the screams intensified. I began to get fed up with all this stupid screaming and passed the time by counting the number of pipes on the big organ at the back of the stage.

  It felt as if the whole crowd was about to explode, when suddenly the lights went out. At first I thought the Provos had blown up an electricity transformer again, but then I realised that this was what Miss Baron would have called ‘dramatic effect’. One minute there was complete darkness and the next there were five spotlights on five figures. I recognised them of course from Top of the Pops and also from up close at the stage door. The Bay City Rollers were here, now. They were live! The screaming reached an even higher pitch. It was so piercing that I had to put my hands over my ears. The concert began. I couldn’t actually hear the Rollers, what with all the screaming and with my ears covered. Heather, Irene, Lynn and even Sharon Burgess screamed and cried through the classic ballad ‘Give a Little Love’. I put my arm round Sharon Burgess and she didn’t tell me to wise up, but she wouldn’t turn her lips towards me either, because that would have meant taking her eyes off Eric Faulkner.

  Every so often, if the screams began to calm down, Les would turn his back to the audience and shake his bum. For some reason, this made the girls go wild, but every time he did it, I was sure I could see the boot mark from my big brother’s Doc Martens on the backside of Les’s white parallels. Philip Ferris watched carefully through every guitar solo, and kept accusing the Rollers of miming. We all sang along to ‘Summer Love Sensation’, and I noted that my big brother knew every word – even though he was supposed to be an Alice Cooper fan who hated teenyboppers. Meanwhile, Heather Mateer started to dance up too close to him, but he was playing it cool because he preferred girls who did gymnastics. I noted with some relief that Heather’s flirtations with my big brother did not appear to be upsetting Sharon Burgess.

  Woody didn’t attempt to dance much, so I wasn’t able to ascertain whether he had developed a limp due to my recent attack. So I reassured myself that I had done no lasting damage to his shins or his musical career.

  As the concert continued, the volume of the screaming and the pitch of the temperature in the Ulster Hall went ever upwards. The hall was full of the smell of the sweat and cigarettes and the spearmint chewing gum of a thousand teenagers. There was a powerful crescendo of hormones, heat and noise. We were happy, we were alive, and, for a few hours, we didn’t think or care about homework or gunmen or bomb scares or there being no jobs.

  ‘The Belfast crowd are the best audience in the world!’ proclaimed Les between hits, and we loved him even more.

  Of course it couldn’t last for ever, and when at last it came to the final encore of ‘Shang-a-Lang’, the whole of the Ulster Hall erupted into a new level of frenzy. Unfortunately the crowds on the balcony surged forward so fast that the front panel of the balcony began to give way, as if it might fall on the fans below. There was a serious danger that Rollers fans from above might rain down upon the unsuspecting crowd below in the stalls.

  Luckily, the security men noticed the impending disaster immediately and sprang into action. With the assistance of several RUC men with moustaches, they dutifully spent the last verse of ‘Shang-a-Lang’ clinging onto the front panel of the balcony with all their might. When the concert finally ended and we began to leave the Ulster Hall in our droves, the security men stayed where they were, holding onto the front of the balcony to stop it collapsing onto the rows below. They were sweating more than us.

  Our gang had to walk home in the rain that night because there weren’t enough black taxis for everyone – we clearly had overwhelmed the paramilitary public-transport system. We didn’t care, though. We sang ‘Shang-a-Lang’ as we ran with the gang the whole way home up the Shankill. When I finally got into my bed that night, I kept waking up, trying to figure out what had been real and what had been a dream.

  The next day at school, I swapped my usual grammar-school scarf with a tartan scarf, even though this was against the rules and it clearly didn’t go with my duffle coat. When I arrived in the playground that morning, I noticed Ian, formerly of the TITS, standing against the wall sullenly reading his NME. I couldn’t resist deliberately walking past him, whistling ‘Shang-a-Lang’ loudly and flaunting my tartan scarf. Ian pretended not to hear or see me, but I knew I had provoked a response when he aggressively turned the pages of the Status Quo feature he was reading and spat on the ground disgustedly. At that moment, Miss Baron was walking past and told him off for spitting in the playground. ‘We are not hooligans at this school!’ she scolded. ‘We are civilised here.’

  Ian got detention, and stuck a ‘Kick Me’ sign on the back of my blazer with chewing gum at lunchtime for revenge. I drifted through every class that day in a daze, retaining even less knowledge than usual, apart from in French when the teacher nipped me under the arm until I got my verbs right.

  However, when I picked up my forty-eight Belfast Telegraphs from Oul’ Mac’s van that night, I was shocked by the reports about the Bay City Rollers concert on their pages. Old men were saying that the Rollers fans were uncivilised hooligans, even worse than spitting schoolboys. Instead of rave reviews of the happiest night in Belfast for years, there were angry people claiming that teenagers at the pop-music concert in the Ulster Hall the previous night had vandalised the balcony. There were allegations that the concert had turned into a riot that could have ended in tragedy. There were cross baldy men demanding that there should be no more pop concerts in the Ulster Hall ever again, because we couldn’t be trusted not to wreck it. This was unfair! We were being misrepresented. This was what John Hume called injustice.

  I delivered my papers reluctantly and angrily that night. It felt like I was personally delivering untruths about myself to my own customers. It was the first time ever that I had hated doing my papers. I began to wonder if there were other career opportunities that I could pursue in the future. As I wandered home that night humming ‘Give a Little Love’, I considered my potential for delivering milk or bread, neither of which could tell lies. Or perhaps becoming an international spy like James Bond, or an astronaut who got lost in an anomaly in time and space. I was growing up, so I was.

  Chapter 18

  Across the Walls

  I hated fences, so I did. They made life very difficult for a paperboy. The more my customers erected fences between each other, the more walking, running and jumping I had to do. This was particularly problematic and painful on a Friday night, when my Doc Martens were concealing coins from hoods and robbers.

  There were four main types of fence: wire fences, hedges, wooden fences and walls. Wire fences were the easiest to negotiate, because there was usually a convenient hole in which to stick your foot for support as you clambered over to next door. However, if you weren’t careful, this foothold could bend permanently into the shape of your boot. A customer could become suspicious and peek out through their net curtains to try to catch you red-footed and tell you to stop being such a ‘lazy wee hallion’ or else they would tell Oul’ Mac.

  Hedges were the next easiest to get over, because most would usually have sufficiently sturdy inner foliage to support the slight weight of a paperboy as you scaled their heights en route to the house next door. However, if you started to make a noticeable gap in the hedge, there were similar dangers of getting caught as with wire fences. The only difference was that at least with hedges there was the possibility that fresh leaves might eventually grow over your misdemeanours. I found I also had to face certain moral dilemmas with h
edges. At some times of the year, stamping on the leaves would risk squashing many caterpillars underfoot – and as the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, I did not want to be responsible for the extermination of any of God’s wee creatures.

  Wooden fences were more of a hazard for two reasons. First of all, they were generally covered in rough sharp shards of wood that would stab your hands as you gripped on to jump over. You would end up with wee scalps in your fingers that got all infected and swollen so you couldn’t practise your violin, and your daddy would have to poke the wee scalps out with a sharp needle, and you would have to try hard not to cry, because you were too big for crying by this time. The second problem was that most wooden fences up the Shankill were very cheap and fragile and couldn’t support the weight of even a small paperboy, especially if it had been years since they had been painted to stop them from rotting. After several incidents where I caused damage that I managed to blame on Petra chasing Mrs Grant’s pussy, I avoided any further attempts to put boot to wood.

  The biggest challenge of all for a paperboy like myself was the brick or concrete wall. If such walls weren’t too high, they were quite easy to jump over or sit on and swing over, but if they were very high, you had no other option but to walk around them. However, if they were walls of medium height which you thought might be easily scalable, you might make a serious misjudgement and end up colliding with hard and rough red brick, tearing your parallels, scraping your knees and elbows and maybe even ending up in the Royal for stitches.

  Of course some of my customers had no fence at all, or just a little low row of flowers dividing them from their next-door neighbours. They always seemed to be the friendliest or poorest of my customers. They either didn’t want to be separated from their neighbours or they couldn’t afford to be. On the other hand, I noticed that for some of my customers, fences were very important indeed. They tended to be the rudest or the richest of my clientele or the ones with big snarling dogs. Mr Black from No. 13 had high fences on either side of his house. Of course he had greyhounds, but they couldn’t jump that high, so I knew he just didn’t want anybody next or near to him. ‘Good fences make good neighbours!’ he would proclaim.