Paperboy (3 page)

‘You stay here!' he commanded, as he grabbed the pickaxe handle from the back seat and sprang out of the car. He ran up behind the wee hood in the dark. It was raining now, and everything looked blurred through the windscreen. I watched my father unleash the weapon with force across the wee lad's back. I feared he was going to kill him.

The hood stumbled on the impact, yelped like a beaten dog and ran for his life. Now I felt sorry for him. All this for a packet of Wrigley's and a
Thunderbird 2
badge. Dad had hit him so hard that he had lost his own balance and landed in a puddle on the pavement in his good trousers and cut his hand on the kerb. He looked like Captain James T. Kirk, after fighting a monster alone on a dangerous alien planet, all sweaty and bloody, determined to save the crew of the USS
Enterprise
. By this stage, however, I just wanted him beamed up as quickly as possible.

‘That's the end of him!' my father announced when he returned to the car, soaked, breathless, bleeding and sweating.

‘It nearly was!' I thought. ‘No son of mine is gettin' robbed by no wee hood!' Dad proclaimed.

I had expected the robber to be brought to the police: now I was afraid the police would arrest my father. Fortunately, the RUC had other priorities at the time.

My father drove us home very quickly, and his heavy breath steamed up the inside of the windscreen. This was the same car we went on picnics in. Within a few minutes we were back home and he was just Dad again, falling off the sofa, laughing at posh Englishmen talking to a dead parrot on
Monty Python's Flying Circus
.

My mother was appalled by the state of his soaked and shredded slacks. She had fifteen more weeks at 99p to pay for them, and now they were ruined. She ended up using them to clean the windows. But I knew she was secretly pleased by the protective pickaxe blows for her son. She tended to Dad's injured hand like Florence Nightingale nursing the soldiers in my school history book. She called him ‘Eric, love' and he called her ‘Betty, love.'

Everything was all right again. I felt safe and protected by the strength and toughness of this new action-hero dad. He was like Clint Eastwood, only bald with glasses, and this Wild West was in Belfast.

I understood that this was the Northern Ireland way. If someone hits you, you hit him back harder. It felt satisfying and powerful, but I knew this way solved absolutely nothing. I saw it every day in Belfast. Tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Catholic for a Protestant. Men excusing heinous acts of inhumanity to protect or liberate ‘their' people, belligerently sowing pain and bitterness for generations to come. I suppose it made them feel potent and powerful too. I got a little taste of it that night with my father and the wee hood, but I spat it out. It sickened me. There had to be another way. I resolved that I would be Belfast's first pacifist paperboy.

Chapter 3
The Belfast Crack

‘P
atience is a virtue,' said Mrs Rowing, in a gently reproach-ful manner.

The Rowings lived just around the corner from us, in the newest red-brick semis in our estate. These newer houses were basically the same as ours, but being more modern, they had no larders, smaller gardens, and the toilet and bath were in the same room. All the modernity of 1970s Shankill living was reflected in these most up-to-date of dwellings, which had central heating in some rooms and an outside water tap at the back door. The outside tap seemed to impress everyone, which I couldn't really understand, because my granny had a toilet outside her back door and it impressed no one. Running water in your back yard was not a universally applauded amenity.

Our family home however, while it was one of the older semis, was years ahead even of the newer residences. My father had used his fitter's skills and had already installed central heating in our house all by himself with pipes he had borrowed from the foundry. I had held the torch for him in the dark under the floorboards, as he hammered stubborn pipes into shape to keep his family warm. I was in awe of my Da's skill and heroism. I noticed that even when he sweated big drops, he kept on working. As I held the increasingly heavy industrial torch – which my Da had also borrowed from the foundry – I distracted myself from the ache in my arm with thoughts of how people in Belfast had hidden from German bombers under floorboards just like this during the Blitz, when my father was a wee boy – not that long ago, really. At night sometimes, I had bad dreams of screaming air-raid sirens and German bombers, like in black-and-white movies, droning in the distance and then appearing in the skies above the Black Mountain to drop hundreds of bombs in our direction – one of which could be heading for your house, for all you knew. When people on the Shankill talked about the Blitz, they always mentioned Percy Street, where a bomb had landed on the air-raid shelter and killed whole families. It sounded even worse than the Troubles to me.

Looking at Mrs Rowing as she held the door open for me, I was thinking that I had never heard anyone say ‘patience is a virtue' before, except for
Robinson Crusoe
on BBC 1 on a Saturday morning, as he walked around and around his island surrounded by black-and-white waves.

The other neighbours up our way didn't talk like that. I would have been more used to something like: ‘Houl your horses, ya cheeky wee skitter!' This was the Upper Shankill, after all. Certainly more upmarket than Lower Shankill, I was always told, but hardly Malone or Cultra, where the posh accents lived. But the Rowings were gentle and well-spoken Church of Ireland people. Mrs Rowing said her ‘ings', collected for cancer and got a knitting magazine. In spite of their unusual name, I certainly couldn't imagine these lovely people ever actually having a row with anyone!

Mr Rowing was my long-suffering guitar teacher, and on the night in question, I was early for my Friday evening lesson. Guitar lessons had followed a similar pattern to the advent of my paperboy career. My big brother had started first, and I simply had to follow. Then, as soon as I began, he retired. The fact that I had become old enough to engage in any activity seemed to immediately deem it inappropriate for him. This precedent would, however, later be broken when it came to drinking Harp and going to the bookies.

It was windy and cold that night as the red-brick semis of the Upper Shankill clung to the side of the Black Mountain. I had to push the Rowings' doorbell three times instead of giving it the usual solitary ring. My fingers were still numb from folding forty-eight
Belfast Telegraphs
in the freezing rain, followed by a furious scrubbing to cleanse them from black ink so as to have dirt-free fingers for my guitar lesson. With my fresh and freezing fingers now plunged into my temperate duffle-coat pockets, I stamped from foot to foot in anticipation of the warmth of the Rowings' well-kept semi. I had just finished my Friday-night paper round and safely collected the paper money for the week from all of my customers. There had been no attempted robberies by wee hoods this week: the inclement weather seemed to be more of a hindrance to their profession than it was to mine. On a cold wet Friday night with bombs in the pubs, most people stayed in. Very few of my clientele had pretended not to be in to evade my monetary demands, and so I had a warm and welcome bootful of profits.

To tell the truth, I was a little offended at the ‘patience is a virtue' remark. It was clearly a gentle rebuke. Mrs Rowing was normally encouragingly cheerful, and my mother always said she was a lady. I was sure that patience was indeed a virtue, but I was in a hurry: it was freezing cold. Music was the fruit of my paperboy labours: from my £1.50 wages, I paid for strings, plectrums and music books, as well as 20p for this regular guitar lesson. I was keen to get out of the cold and get started. I wanted to play like Paul McCartney, so I had a lot of catching up to do.

Every week, Mrs Rowing would welcome me with a pleasant smile and usher me in to wait my turn in her well-ordered living room, complete with a cornered television. The decor was old-fashioned compared to our living room, as the Rowings weren't as young and ‘with it' as my parents. For a start, they wore slacks instead of flares. An ancient wind-up wooden clock ticked relentlessly on the mantelpiece and chimed every fifteen minutes: it must have been a hundred years old. The Rowings had old dark wooden furniture that reminded me of the tables and chairs that came out of my other granny's house after my other granda died, when the Protestants were moving out of the Springfield Road. We on the other hand had the latest lava lamp on hire purchase from Gillespie & Wilson. The Rowings had delph ornaments of cocker spaniels and a copper coal bucket on the hearth; we had woodchip wallpaper and venetian blinds. They had a traditional patterned rug; we had verdant shag pile. The only old thing in our house was a bookcase my mother had bought when her numbers came up on the Premium Bonds, before I was born. It was called a ‘libranza', and it already looked much too dated for my modern eyes.

Mr Rowing gave the guitar lessons in their sitting room. It was obviously the ‘good' room, with a china cabinet and white lace doilies on the arms of the chairs and sofa. Opposite the sitting room was the kitchen, where Mrs Rowing lived. Although there was always a smell of freshly baked scones coming from the kitchen, I never once saw a single scone on a Friday night. Mrs Rowing was always baking, and yet there was only the two of them in the house, so I wondered who ate all the scones. I never actually got to see into Mrs Rowing's working kitchen either, but I imagined that it contained a high fruit-scone tower piled up in the middle of her lino.

Inside the antique china cabinet in the sitting room where the lessons took place, a pair of tiny white lace baby boots rested on a well-polished glass shelf. Old and faded like Miss Havisham's wedding dress in
Great Expectations
in English class, these tiny curiosities would catch my eye every week, and I wondered who the baby might have been. Maybe they had belonged to Mr Rowing when he was a wee baby, with tiny hands of less than the span of a fret. Perhaps they were Mrs Rowing's, from a time long before her first fruit scone. Or maybe they belonged to the couple's mysterious long-lost son, who had fled Belfast to escape from the Church of Ireland and the Troubles, to play gypsy guitar in a travelling circus in Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain, where the nuclear bombs were pointing right at us.

Mr Rowing was an accomplished guitarist. On the walls of the sitting room hung faded, framed black-and-white photographs of him playing old-fashioned guitars in showbands in the fifties. Everyone's parents had met at the dance halls in Belfast in the fifties where the showbands played. My mother and father had met at The Ritz, and I was sure Mr Rowing must have performed there. I wanted to believe that Mr Rowing had played guitar during their first dance, when a young fitter called Eric from the Springfield Road had asked an innocent seamstress called Betty from the Donegall Road for a jive. My parents had loved the showbands. When the Miami Showband were shot, my mother cried at every news bulletin and my father's silence scared me. It was like the Troubles had taken over for them, and all the old happy times were gone for ever.

Mr Rowing looked like a young Bill Haley. He still had dark, teddy-boy hair, and he was the only customer in the whole estate who got
Guitar Player
magazine. Unlike me, he had big thick fingers, like sausage rolls from the Ormo Mini Shop. I assumed that playing guitar for all these years had made his fingers grow, and these sizeable and dexterous digits were perfect for switching and sustaining complicated chords. I hoped that one day my hands would become as strong and tough, so that no malevolent metal string would ever slice into them again.

A big gentle man, Mr Rowing was always encouraging and always friendly. Most men his age shouted a lot, but he never once got annoyed at my limited musical progress, tolerating my lack of practice between lessons and praising me for infinitesimal improvements. Mr Rowing seemed to understand the virtue of patience. Maybe Mrs Rowing had taught him.

The first tune I learned with Mr Rowing was, ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley'. It was ancient, and country and western, and more than a bit depressing to my young ears, but it only required the ability to play two chords. The doleful lyric went as follows:

I played that song until my fingers stopped stinging, my family's ears stopped smarting and my performance had become flawless. Tom Dooley died a thousand times in my bedroom, but I knew that once I had mastered this piece, Mr Rowing would, as he had promised, teach me something from the Hit Parade. I couldn't wait. Would it be something from
Top of the Pops
, like ‘Maggie May' by Rod Stewart?

But no. My next piece would be ‘Apache' by The Shadows: an old hit from the sixties by a group with glasses that my Granny liked because ‘that lovely wee good livin' boy, Cliff Richard, used to sing with them, so he did'. Just like Tom Dooley, I hung down my head and cried.

With every new chord I mastered, I anticipated learning a brand-new song, something groovy from the seventies. I knew I could never handle the intricacy of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen in three chords, but could Mr Rowing not at least accommodate my rock-star longings by teaching me ‘Mull of Kintyre'? In the end, I took matters into my own hands, spending all my paperboy tips one Saturday morning on the sheet music by Paul McCartney. It was half-price in the smoke-damage sale in Crymble's music shop beside the City Hall. The Provos had tried to burn Crymble's down, and so I feared there would be no music shops allowed in a United Ireland.

Once I had the sheet music in front of me, I taught myself ‘Mull of Kintyre'. Mr Rowing had been teaching me the basics, but now I was emerging as an artist in my own right, like Michael Jackson leaving the Jackson Five. As I played Paul McCartney's inspiring anthem in my bedroom, I imagined I was performing it in my duffle-coat, out on a windswept Scottish hillside on the Mull of Kintyre itself, which was across the sea from Barry's Amusements in Portrush. Earnestly poring over every chord and with every word I sang, I could see Sharon Burgess standing beside me, her hair blowing in the Celtic winds while she gazed up at me, admiring my strums, just like Linda McCartney with Paul.

Mr Rowing also promised me new songs at Christmas. I yearned to learn ‘Merry Christmas Everybody' by Slade, but he taught me ‘Silent Night' and ‘Away in a Manager'. Although my guitar-playing skills progressed and my ambition was limitless, sadly my repertoire never really escaped from the 1960s.

Pamela Burnside was always in just before me on a Friday night. Pamela's parents were big fans of country and western. They had a signed photo of ‘Big T' from Downtown Radio on their mantelpiece. Mr Burnside had a Kenny Rogers beard and a snake belt, and he sold second-hand cars down the Road. My mother said he was a real cowboy. Pamela's mum had the longest hair on the Shankill – like Crystal Gayle – and she sang ‘Amazing Grace' in an American accent and wore cowboy boots at the Annual Beetle Drive for Biafran babies in the church hall. The Burnsides and their small white poodle wore Union Jack stetsons on the Twelfth of July, and they wanted their daughter Pamela to be Tammy Wynette. They made her wear a suede country-and-western jacket with a fringe on the arms that got caught in the spokes of her bike. I'm fairly certain she would have preferred a Bay City Rollers T-shirt like everybody else. Anyway, she just didn't have the kind of talent needed to be the next Tammy Wynette.

Every Friday night, as I waited my turn in Mrs Rowing's living room, I could just about make out from the next room the muffled sound of Pamela's desperate attempts at ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley'. She rarely got the one chord change right, and I would hear Mr Rowing saying kindly, ‘Yes, that's getting better now' – although it clearly wasn't.

Tom Dooley must have died a million times in Mr Rowing's sitting room on those Friday nights. Poor Pamela always emerged from her lesson red-faced and fearful. I could tell that she felt ashamed of her poor performance and knew rightly that she was dreading the inevitable inquiry into her progress with the plectrum which awaited her at home. Pamela still couldn't manage ‘Tom Dooley', yet she knew only too well that her doggedly optimistic parents were already expecting her to deliver the musical complexities of ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E'.

As I waited in the living room for my lesson, thinking up excuses for not having practised enough during the week just past, I would watch
It's a Knockout
on the 1960s black-and-white push-button television. I usually longed for Pammy Wynette's lesson to overrun so that I would get to watch an extra five minutes of
Jeux Sans Frontières
, as the French called it. But Mr Rowing was always merciful enough to Pamela to ensure that the lesson was not drawn out any longer than necessary.