I don’t think Mr Black was aware that he was quoting from a Robert Frost poem I was studying in my English class. I was certain he had no idea that the line he was quoting was supposed to be what my English teacher called ‘an ironic poetic device’. I began to notice that the people who made comments like ‘good fences make good neighbours’ always seemed to be the sort of characters you really wouldn’t want to live beside anyway.
Another two such customers of mine, the Morrisons and the Smiths, had a real fence war going on. It started out as just one small wire fence between the two houses. Then the Morrisons put up a new wire fence without consulting the Smiths. So the Smiths put up another, higher wire fence on their property. These fences were starting to look like the ones on Colditz that I used to watch on BBC 1. In response, the Morrisons added a wooden fence that was even taller than their neighbours’ higher wire fence. Then the Smiths vengefully erected a six-foot wall with a six-foot wooden fence on top of it. In the end, neither side were getting any sun on their nasturtium borders any more.
All this reminded me again of that poem from English class, which said, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.’ Maybe Robert Frost had been a paperboy too. I always enjoyed studying poems about war and walls much more than doing Shakespeare, because at least these poems were about ordinary everyday life that I could relate to.
Of course, there were even bigger walls in the city than those between my customers. In fact, we were brilliant at walls in Belfast – they were going up everywhere, higher and higher, all around me. For every inch that I grew, the walls surrounding me got six foot higher. Ever since the start of the Troubles, they had been putting walls up between Protestant and Catholic streets to stop us killing each other. Of course, it didn’t work because ever since they built them we had been slaughtering each other even more. Most people on both sides, however, thought that the walls between us were a good idea, and it wasn’t very often Catholics and Protestants agreed on anything. I suppose the walls made me feel safer because they helped me believe that it would be harder for the other side to get at me. When the walls were put up, you couldn’t see the other side any more and they couldn’t see you, and that was better for everybody. And if you wanted to show the other side how much you hated them, at least you had an obvious place to go to, to throw stones and bricks over at them. You didn’t have to look at exactly what damage you had done to the other side, but at least you could be pretty sure you had hurt them.
Everyone called them ‘peace walls’, which I thought was funny, but not funny ha-ha. It was very strange, I thought, to call these walls peace walls, because there hadn’t been any of them before the Troubles, when we had peace. The parts of Belfast that had the most peace didn’t have peace walls. And the places in the city with the biggest peace walls were the streets where Catholics and Protestants had lived together previously, before they started burning each other out – like the Springfield Road, where my father grew up and where my other granny had got out just in time.
Everywhere else in the world that had peace didn’t have peace walls. However, in history class I learned about another big wall in another city: the Berlin Wall, which separated the goodies in West Germany from the baddies in East Germany. (Although my granny continued to insist that all Germans were still baddies.) The Berlin Wall was, as far as I could tell, a huge curtain made of iron and apparently it was going to be there for ever. Not like our peace walls in Belfast, which were only going to be here until the Troubles were over.
I wanted the Troubles to be over tomorrow because they were all I could ever remember. I hated all the fighting and killing more than I hated any Catholics or even the IRA. I thought that it probably didn’t matter when you got killed whether the ground around your coffin was Irish or British muck. Everyone said you could never trust the other side. Apparently there were actually some good ones, but, generally speaking, you couldn’t trust them. Catholics were all supposed to support the IRA and wanted to kill us for a United Ireland. So we had to defend ourselves to stay British, because that was the most important thing in the whole world. I was never quite so sure about all of this. I knew that all the Catholics on the other side of the peace wall had too many children and did Irish dancing, but I couldn’t accept that they all wanted me dead. I was curious as to what they were really like over there. I had so many questions. Did they learn at their church too that we were all going to Hell? Did they want to put us all on the Larne–Stranraer ferry back to Scotland? Did they really believe we were all rich? Were their paramilitaries full of wee hard men that liked to boss everyone around, like ours were?
I was curious about everyday life on the other side of our Peace Wall too. I wondered if they had paperboys over there as well, and, if so, did the Provos allow them to deliver the Ulsters on a Saturday night? Maybe there were wee lads over there too with bad hearts and braces who were worried that Sinead O’Burgess was falling in love with their big brother (who was brilliant at Gaelic football). Maybe the same mothers that we could hear banging their bin lids every August on the anniversary of Internment also sewed dresses for posh ladies and ordered toys for Christmas from the Great Universal Club Book (even though it was posted from England).
My father questioned divisions between working-class people just as much as he questioned the existence of God. He hated the peace walls as much as I hated the fences between my customers. They had knocked down Lanark Street, where his family came from, and put up a peace wall instead. My Da was definitely in the minority on the Shankill.
One summer evening in July, as I was returning home from finishing a particularly sweaty paper round, I came across my father arguing over the gate with Mrs Piper. She was wearing her usual black cardigan that never quite covered both breasts, even though she was constantly trying to pull either side across them.
‘We need them walls til go up a quare bit higher yet,’ Mrs Piper was explaining. ‘Them Fenians is still gettin’ petrol bombs over. And we need more gates on the roads too, so we can close them at night so as to keep them out.’
My father looked exasperated. He was never very good at hiding his exasperation, and so I always knew right away when I was in trouble.
‘All I ever hear yousens sayin’ is we need more walls put up to keep the other side out. Did you never think that it might be our side that’s bein’ walled in?’ he asked.
Mrs Piper had clearly never thought of it this way before. She vainly attempted to pull her cardigan across her generous bosom once more, only now with great indignation.
‘Well, if you don’t agree the walls should go up higher, then you’re just supportin’ the IRA!’ was her predictable reply.
This was always the response when you disagreed with Mrs Piper. My father’s questioning the raising of the peace walls would now be added to a long list of errors that would support the suspicion that you sympathised with the IRA, and this was the ultimate sin, of course. An even worse sin than a mum running off with a soldier or a man being a homo. In the past, Mrs Piper had been known to assert that you supported the IRA if you didn’t like Paisley or Orange bands, or if you did like Dana or Mother Teresa.
I know my father had stood up to this sort of thing before. He had a mind of his own. In his job as a foreman in the foundry he had once got a death threat wrapped around a bullet that had been placed in his locker, supposedly for giving a Catholic a job, instead of a Protestant. One day, Daddy had a blazing row in the middle of the street with a famous television reporter who he had observed giving money to children to throw stones at the soldiers, for the camera. He never forgave this. Every time the same journalist came on the news, reporting from some other war zone in another part of world, our family knew it was my father’s cue to jump out of his chair and shout at the TV, ‘There’s that English bastard that paid the kids to throw stones at the soldiers!’
Of course, sometimes Daddy had to cooperate with the powers that be for the greater good. So, on one occasion, he was
prepared to enter into negotiations with the UDA to get the Westy Disco gear back when it had been stolen during a heist on the Presbyterian church storeroom. It was the lesser of two evils.
‘Your father’s a very clever man,’ affirmed my mother when these negotiations proved successful. He managed to get everything back, apart from a few Elvis singles.
One summer’s day in 1977, I went up the fields again and looked down on Belfast as usual. I could see the peace walls snaking along the roads between neighbours all over my part of the city. There seemed to be more and more of them, and they seemed to be getting higher and higher by the day.
I thought again about my Robert Frost poem in English: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall …’ I wondered about who was being walled out and who was being walled in. I speculated as to whether the peace walls would end up being here for ever, like the Berlin Wall. I imagined travelling through time to the future in the TARDIS with the Doctor, and landing up the fields above Belfast in the year 2000. Oul’ Mac was being kept alive by a computer and his van was now all silver and space age, and it flew up and down the Shankill. The papers were being delivered by a robot paperboy. The Troubles were over long ago, and Protestants and Catholics went to the same schools together and played football together and lived in the same streets again, and the peace walls had all been torn down for ever. I was a dreamer, so I was.
Chapter 19
Winners
The day of the Lord Mayor’s Show had finally arrived. Our eagerness in anticipating this event was second only to the excitement that had led up to the day of the now legendary Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. In spite of my ongoing concerns about Sharon Burgess and the allegations of the wee millie that Sharon fancied my big brother, today I was consumed with hope for a great victory for the members of the Westy Disco.
The Lord Mayor’s Show was an annual event, with a big parade through the centre of Belfast past all the bombed-out shops and the City Hall. Hundreds of people came out onto the streets to watch all the colourful floats, and there was music and dancing, as well as prizes for the best entries, and no rioting. It was a bit like the parade on the Twelfth of July, except there were fewer flags and less drink, but more girls and Catholics.
This was not the first time that the members of the Westy Disco had entered a float for the Lord Mayor’s Show. The previous year, we had dressed up as The Wombles for our float, and we had been awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ rosette for our efforts. My mother and Auntie Emma had spent weeks making Womble suits from old sacks and cotton wool. We had all dressed up and got onto the back of a lorry to sing ‘Remember You’re a Womble’ around the streets of Belfast. I had been given the part of Tobermory, which I thoroughly enjoyed – until, after hours of singing and dancing, my Womble suit got very hot and itchy. I endured this unpleasantness by imagining that I was an actor inside a Dalek on Doctor Who – as opposed to a boy inside a sack on the back of a lorry in Belfast. In spite of all the discomfort, it had been the best time ever. Children had waved and cheered at us all day long, and there had been a photograph of us in the Belfast Telegraphs I delivered. The whole carnival experience had left us hungry for more.
When Uncle Henry had got the letter inviting youth clubs to enter this current year’s Lord Mayor’s Show, he immediately brought it to the attention of the whole of the Westy Disco, during a short lull between Boney M and the Brotherhood of Man, and all those consulted were unanimous. We definitely wanted to enter the competition once again – but this year we were far too grown-up and cool to be Wombles. This year, we wanted to enter a float as the Bay City Rollers! We had to come up with a colourful banner that reflected the theme of the show, which was ‘Rebuilding Belfast’. So my father came up with the slogan: ‘BCR: Build, Construct, Renew’. My da was a very clever man, you know.
We soon got to work with all the preparations. It was a lot easier this year, because most of us dressed like the Rollers anyway, so there was no need to make special costumes for us. Our major task was building and painting a stage and banners to put on the back of the lorry. We used paint that my father had borrowed from the foundry and some wooden panels someone said had fallen off the back of another lorry. Belfast’s emporium of fashion, John Frazer’s, kindly donated sacks of tartan fabric fragments, and we painted and hammered and sewed until our creation was complete.
On the day of the show, our float was resplendent in tartan and packed full of tartan-clad teenagers in parallels on an unstable stage, singing Rollers songs at the tops of our voices. Five very lucky members of the Westy Disco had been chosen to be the Rollers themselves. Unfortunately I was passed over, just in case, following my starring role as a Womble the previous year, anybody thought my parents were guilty of favouritism. This was outrageous, I felt, because I would have made a far better Alan than Philip Ferris, who just kept saying as per usual that everything was ‘ballicks’. Heather Mateer, with breasts, was chosen to be Les McKeown and Irene Maxwell was Derek. I thought this was even more perverted than Patricia Thompson’s recent triumph on the stage at BRA as Huckleberry Finn, and I was amazed that Reverend Lowe did not even attempt to intervene. Worse still, Titch McCracken was picked to be Woody and I was so jealous I had an urge to kick him. (It had never occurred to me that I might ever want to kick Woody again.) But I relented when I saw wee Titch on the day, still wearing his too-tight pinkish parallels, as I assumed he would be in enough pain already without an assault on his shins by the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast.
However, apart from my righteous anger regarding these two major injustices, I had been looking forward to this year’s Lord Mayor’s Show to the extent that I had almost forgotten the poisoned words of the wee millie about Sharon Burgess and my big brother. Sharon Burgess was a dancer in the Rollerettes, and my big brother was Eric Faulkner on guitar – I had been keeping a close eye on them, like 007 trying to catch out a double agent, but as far as I could tell there was still no spark between them.
On the day itself, we were brilliant! My father had rigged up the turntable and speakers from the Westy Disco on the back of the lorry and had somehow plugged them into the engine battery, and so the Rollers were blasting out up and down Royal Avenue and all around the City Hall. I had taken out my brace and left it at home because I knew I would otherwise have great trouble pronouncing the lyrics of ‘Summer Love Sensation’. The crowds were smaller than the previous year, in case there were car bombs, but those who were there cheered and waved at us, especially all the teenagers in parallels.
It was amazing! We sang ‘Shang-a-Lang’ and ‘Bye Bye, Baby’ a million times until our throats were hoarse, and we waved our tartan scarves until our arms were aching. It was a Saturday, and I had the Belly Telly and the Ulsters to deliver that night, so I alone had to be careful to pace myself to ensure I would have sufficient energy left to carry out my professional duties later on.
After we had encircled the City Hall, we went with all the other floats up to the Lagan Embankment, where everyone parked in long rows to wait to be judged by the Lord Mayor and ladies in hats who were full of eager ‘ings’. This stop was timed to coincide with lunchtime, so that everyone could get off their lorries, go to the toilets and have a pastie supper and juice from a wee chip van, before doing their very best performance for the judges. Last year we had been highly commended Wombles, but this year we were determined to be winning Rollers.
Once our lorry was parked on the banks of the Lagan, we also had the opportunity to dismount and check out the competition. You couldn’t see the other floats during the parade, because they were either in front of you or behind you, but once the lorries were all parked together beside the river, you could walk up and down and assess your biggest rivals. We strolled up and down, admiring all the big fancy floats made of polystyrene advertising banks and businesses, but it was the other youth clubs in our category that we were most interested in. There weren’t very many youth-club entries in the Lord Mayor’s Sho
w because young people weren’t allowed out much in the Troubles – so we were in a very strong position.
Heather Mateer, obviously still on a high from being Les McKeown, finished her pastie supper first and grabbed my big brother by the tartan scarf, saying, ‘C’mon and see who we have til beat this year!’ My big brother went along with Heather without question, and I duly noted that this did not appear to cause any upset to Sharon Burgess. Irene Maxwell followed close behind the others, tartan scarves trailing from every limb.
‘Heather Mateer fancies him, ya know,’ I said slyly to Sharon, ‘but he’s only interested in Man United and girls that do gymnastics, so he is.’
There was no discernible response to the trap I had set. Sharon Burgess just continued dipping her last few chips into the residue of salt and vinegar on last night’s Belfast Telegraph.
Me and Sharon would follow shortly, but we had to wait around for Titch because he had spilled brown sauce from his pastie supper on his pinkish parallels. A crowd of wee lads dressed as pirates on a float from the Shore Road had immediately pointed at his trousers and started shouting, ‘Bay Shitty Rollers!’ I had never seen Titch looking so scundered as he ran away to look for a toilet where he could try and clean up his trousers before the judging commenced. A few minutes later, Titch emerged from the crowd, all traces of the brown sauce removed from his parallels. However, he had used so much water to clean off the stains that now his trousers had a huge wet patch in all the wrong places! The pirates from the Shore Road reappeared from the crowd straight away of course; this time they pointed at Titch, shouting, ‘Bay Pissy Rollers!’ Poor Titch was so humiliated that he ran over and grabbed one of the pirates and told him that if he didn’t shut up, he would kick him so hard he would be ‘floating up the f**kin’ Lagan in a bubble’. Then, just as this drama was unfolding in front of us, Heather Mateer arrived back on the scene, out of breath and bearing tidings of great import.
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