Paperboy (8 page)

There was one short gap in the guffaws, when my mother asked breathlessly, ‘Is anyone kicking sand in your face at the caravan, love? Cos your Daddy'll deal with them, so he will!' Then, before I could even attempt to answer, the laughter recommenced with added vigour. Charles Atlas went straight into the Parkray fire. The bin wasn't good enough to assuage my anger and humiliation.

My most successful purchase from an advert at the back of
Look-in
was a pen pal. It said I could choose which country I preferred my pen pal to come from and whether I preferred a boy or a girl. My preferences were for a girl from Sweden or America who liked music – but I got a pen pal called Winston from New Zealand who played rugby. For a while, however, we enjoyed writing to each other.

I was sure Winston must have been disappointed about getting a male pen pal from Northern Ireland because he had probably wanted a girl from Sweden too, but he turned out to be very interested in the Troubles. He was always kind enough to ask at the end of every letter if the British had killed anyone in my family since his last letter. He also assured me of his full support for my people in fighting for freedom from the British invaders. I never responded – in the same way that he never replied to my question as to whether he had a pet kangaroo. I wrote long letters about what I did at school on airmail paper which was even thinner than a page of the
Belfast Telegraph
, and when Winston replied, I was able to add his New Zealand stamps to my growing collection. We corresponded for over a year. Once he realised that we had televisions in Ireland too, we discovered that we both watched
Doctor Who
. However, the letters ceased shortly after I asked him if there was a Bay City Rollers fan club in New Zealand.

But I wasn't going to let a minor discouragement like this dampen my own enthusiasm for the Rollers. Since hearing about their forthcoming trip to Belfast from Pammy Wynette, I had been saving every spare tip in anticipation of the moment the tickets for the concert in the Ulster Hall finally went on sale in Spin-a-Disc. When that feted day arrived, the queue went right around the block: it was longer than the daily queues for water during the Ulster Workers' strike when the men at the Water Board had cut off our water to keep us British. Along with half the teenagers of the Shankill, I waited for hours and finally emerged triumphant from Spin-a-Disc, clutching my very own ticket to go and see Woody, Eric, Alan, Leslie and Derek performing live in the Ulster Hall. There was a massive Bay City Rollers fan base in Belfast. We did tartan exceptionally well.

Our whole gang got tickets for that concert. There was me and my big brother, Heather Mateer, who was the oldest and looked after the money for the tickets, her friend Lynn McQuiston with the buck teeth, former paperboy Titch McCracken, Irene Maxwell, who was still in love with Big Jaunty, Sharon Burgess, who was now, as I have said, my official girlfriend, and Philip Ferris, another paperboy, who said the Rollers were ‘ballicks' but wanted to go and see them anyway.

Philip, whose da had coached the Boys' Brigade football team to victory in 1975, was always very hard to impress. He said a lot of things were ‘ballicks' – even being a paperboy for Oul' Mac. This seemed very ungrateful to me. At the Westy Disco, every time any song came on that Philip didn't like, he just said ‘ballicks' and walked off to the tuck shop. This happened quite a lot. You would be up on the dance floor doing the Slush to Elton John and Kiki Dee and then the Osmonds would come on. Then, from behind, you would hear Philip Ferris shouting ‘ballicks', before heading off for a packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion. He seemed unworthy of a Bay City Rollers ticket, really. And ours were no ordinary tickets either: we had got the last balcony tickets. I had never sat in a balcony before.

The next day, I brought my treasured ticket into BRA to show it off, but I was surprised and disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm in the playground. Tartan was clearly less popular at grammar school. Not everyone was impressed, and they weren't just pretending to be not impressed because they were jealous, like when you came top of the class in English. My former fellow band member, Ian from the TITS, just shook his head, told me to ‘wise a bap' and slapped me across the head with his
NME
. I didn't tell the teacher on him, in case I got my ticket confiscated along with Ian's
NME
. I just couldn't understand this hostility. I accepted the Rollers weren't a serious rock band like Status Quo, but they were always No.1 on
Top of the Pops
, and they were brilliant to sing along to in the Westy Disco and on Downtown Radio.

When I told Mr Rowing at my next guitar lesson that I was going to see the Bay City Rollers, he just said ‘Lovely!', and redirected me back to Tom Dooley. He clearly had no idea who they were!

Nevertheless, I once again refused to be put off by this lack of appreciation of my musical tastes. I had never been to see a real pop concert before. I had once won a ticket in a raffle to go and see
The Wombles
at the ABC in Belfast, but that was cancelled after the first night because everyone complained it was just men dressed up in suits: it was even on the news headlines before the bombs that day. Most of the big pop stars didn't do concerts in Belfast, of course, because they thought we would kill them. Cliff Richard came over every year to do a gospel concert – but that was always on his own with an acoustic guitar, because his band was too scared to come with him. Cliff must have believed God would keep him safe from us. But hardly anyone else ever came, so the Bay City Rollers playing in Belfast was a really big deal to the legions of parallel-trousered and tartan-scarved youths. After all, we had had tartan gangs on the Shankill long before the Bay City Rollers ever existed.

I kept my ticket safely hidden beneath my remote-controlled Dalek in my room, waiting patiently for the months to pass until I could exchange it for an audience with the Scottish gods of rock in the historic surroundings of the Ulster Hall in Belfast city centre. This ticket would be my wisest financial investment of that time. It was worth every routed robber, every hailstone soaking and every slither on Petra's poop. I had earned it, so I had.

Chapter 8
Good Livin'

I
got saved on a bin at the caravan, so I did. Uncle John, the Good News Club leader, said I had put my sin in the bin. I felt very clean on the inside, even though I was never very clean on the outside at the caravan. The only time I came into contact with water there was whenever we took a paddle in the Irish Sea on the days the sun came out. There was an electric shower at the caravan site that took 50p coins for ten minutes of hot water, but there was always a queue, and I preferred to keep my 50ps for the dodgems at the amusement arcade.

The caravan site we went to every summer was in Ballywhiskin, on the outskirts of the County Down seaside resort of Millisle. It was also known as ‘Shankill-on-Sea', because the whole Road went there for the Twelfth Fortnight – and our family was no exception. If the Shankill was the heartland of Loyalist Ulster, then Millisle was the Loyalist Riviera. The atmosphere was different beside the sea, though. Even though it was July and the middle of marching season, the Tartan gangs never looked as tough in Millisle, somehow. When they took off their Rangers tops and licked 99s in the sunshine, they looked too soft, white and skinny for kicking your head in. As you strolled along the seafront, even the skinheads shouting, ‘Who the f**k are you lookin' at?' in the sunlight seemed less intimidating when they were simultaneously tackling a pink candy floss.

My parents had bought a second-hand caravan on hire purchase at the start of the Troubles. It was a major financial commitment. Only a lot of overtime at the foundry and a lot of sewing for posh ladies made it happen. The said caravan was a static on four legs – not a touring model like rich people with tweed car coats in England had. It was a Pemberton: that means it was rather plush. Adding the word ‘Pemberton' before caravan was a bit like adding the word ‘respray' after Ford Escort. It meant you were a cut above the rest of your street. My mother always said the word ‘Pemberton' quite loudly when talking to anyone about our caravan while in the Post Office queue. This was something to shout about.

The Pemberton had mustard upholstery, a gas grill where I singed my eyebrows toasting Veda, and an amazing pull-down bed, which your grandparents could sleep on if they came down for the weekend and got too drunk, and embarrassed your parents in a pub in Millisle and then slept for a long time, while your father vowed ‘never again!'

The best place in the caravan, however, was the bedroom I shared with my big brother. It had bunk beds – the most exciting of all beds – with our own little window to look out at the dump next door to the caravan site. My big brother let me have the top bunk, on the unspoken understanding that this did not imply in any way that he was not top dog in any other circumstance. I loved the reassuring sound of summer rain dancing on the caravan roof when I was tucked up in my bunk bed after a long day of one-armed bandits, fish suppers and beachcombing. For me, it was the most comforting drumming sound of summer.

We had many happy times in our wee tin box in the rain in a field, so we did. From the main windows, you had a lovely view of the beach and the sea beyond the dump. Some of the parents were constantly complaining, saying that the dump should be filled in, but the kids enjoyed catapulting the rats and playing in the old car that rested there, year in, year out. We shared our field beside the dump with twenty other families in caravans of all shapes and sizes. They weren't all from the Shankill. Some of our caravan neighbours – including Big Ruby who taught me how to kiss properly, in the sand dunes – were from exotic places I had never been to, like the Newtownards Road.

The 1969 Pemberton was mainly our holiday home, but my father made it clear that it was always there if we ever needed to get out of Belfast in a hurry. It was reassuring to know that if we got burnt out at least we had somewhere good to go. I had dreams of being a refugee in Millisle, driven from my home by the IRA in balaclavas and exiled to a life of dodgems and dulse on the County Down coast. But things never got bad enough, and by the time my brother and I were paperboys, the caravan was beginning to lose its attraction. We had work to do: paper money to collect on Fridays and
Ulsters
to deliver on Saturdays. Millisle wasn't within the commuter belt for paperboys.

I was eight when I asked Jesus into my heart on the bin at the caravan. The Good News Club was a ‘wee meetin'' for children every day for a week in July. There the aunts and uncles, volunteers from the Baptist Church in Newry, would encourage us to get saved. Every day all the kids emptied out of the caravans to go to the Good News Club. It was brilliant fun, especially if you had already lost all your pocket money in the slot machines in Millisle, read your
Whizzer and Chips
Summer Special five times and were bored with trying to find live crabs in the rock pools at the beach. We played games and bible quizzes and won pencils and rubbers and rulers with John 3:16 on them. We sang wee choruses about Jesus with guitars. An aunt or an uncle would hold up a big book with the words of the song on it, and this usually had illustrations of boys and girls and crosses.

One of my favourite choruses was a song called ‘Good News'. For this one, the songbook had pictures of a paperboy with cap and an armful of newspapers and, when it came to the last line, we had to shout out the word ‘Extra!' like a paperboy shouting in the street. I confess I sometimes got distracted from the Good News itself, because I was too busy imagining that one day I would be a paperboy shouting ‘Extra!' around the streets of Belfast. Little did I know then my dream would come true in just a few short years.

The aunts and uncles were very young and happy, for religious people, and thankfully my father noticed this, and I was allowed to go to the wee meetin's. Dad was an atheist, though my mother was Presbyterian. He said religion was ‘all superstitious twaddle', but he had agreed that his children could be christened in the Presbyterian Church because my mother was a believer, and just in case it would be bad luck not to get us done. At grammar school, I would meet a few more atheists – David Pritchard, for example, who told me he had stopped believing in God because his father had died. He said religion was a crutch for weak people. My father's father was also dead, so I wondered if God only existed when He kept your father alive.

Atheists at Belfast Royal Academy were not uncommon, but it was quite unusual to be a non-believer on the Shankill. All the murals on the gable walls said we were ‘For God and Ulster' – although I noticed most people were really much more for Ulster than for God. So, while I was allowed to go to Sunday school, I was generally forbidden from going to any ‘wee meetin's' where my father thought I might be ‘brainwashed by the born-agains'. However, he had noticed that the aunts and uncles at the Good News Club were young and very friendly compared to the gospel-tract distributors at home, and he was surprised to see the women were actually allowed to wear jeans, so he relaxed the rules at the caravan.

Even though I was allowed to go to the wee meetin's, I was aware of Dad's concerns that I could be brainwashed, which I knew was what they sometimes did to people in James Bond movies, but no one at the Good News Club was from Russia or ever locked me in a room strapped to a chair in the dark to force me to get born again. Instead, the aunts and uncles, in their jeans, told us stories from the Bible and the amazing adventures of heroic missionaries saving the natives in Africa and China. We sang choruses about Jesus taking all our sin away, and for a while I forgot about Belfast and barricades and the Eleven Plus and everything. We sat on a huge blanket on the grass on sunny days, but when it was rainy, we met inside a small caravan or in the bungalow at the entrance to the caravan site where the owner stored the new bins. These shiny aluminium bins became sacred. They were our pews.

It was in the summer of 1972 that I got saved, the same year as Bloody Friday in Belfast, when the bloody Munich Olympics were on TV, and bloody Donny Osmond was at No.1 with ‘Puppy Love'. I was jealous of Donny because all the girls fancied him. However, I had always liked Jesus at Sunday school. He seemed kinder than God and more human than Donny. God was definitely a good, sound Ulster Protestant, but He was always wagging his finger at me like a grumpy old Orangeman.

God was like a big cosmic Paisley, only not as popular in our street. On the other hand, Jesus, according to the wee choruses we sang in Sunday school, loved me, ‘this I know, for the Bible tells me so'. He even loved me in the King James version. God locked up the swings in Woodvale Park on a Sunday, but Jesus loved ‘all the little children of the world'. It occurred to me that if He did indeed love ‘red and yellow, black and white', and that if all were really ‘precious in His sight', then He might even love the Green the same as the Orange! Maybe Catholics and Protestants were no more different than the
Radio Times
and the
TV Times
: alternative formats – one a bit heavier than the other – but basically the same content. I kept this heresy to myself, though. I knew it was unlikely to win me a prize in Ballygomartin Presbyterian Church on Children's Day.

Sitting on the bin at the caravan site that summer day in 1972, it had all seemed so simple. I did bad stuff, Jesus wanted to wash it all away, so I asked him to. But even when I got back to our caravan that day and talked about my spiritual encounter, I discovered there was so much more to it. Granda paused from a sip of stout to say I had been ‘led up the garden path'. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it made me feel stupid. Next, Dad expressed concerns I couldn't quite grasp: something about ‘no son of mine being brainwashed by no born-again bigots'. It seemed a born-again son was an atheist father's worst nightmare. Worst of all, Granny then started to cry, and said it was tears of joy, like when Paisley got elected. She said she thought it was lovely that I had become a ‘wee good livin' boy', that maybe one day I would become a minister – and then she added cryptically, ‘especially with him and his bad heart and all!'

Although upset, I knew I must humbly absorb all of these remarks, as a martyr to my new-found faith. If the missionaries in the stories at the Good News Club got beaten and eaten, then I should be able to cope with these persecutions. I prayed sincerely that all of them too would be saved and also that this bad heart of mine – now with Jesus in it – would keep on beating.

When I returned home from Millisle, I soon learned the full truth about the whole religious package I had so spontaneously embraced. The burden of it all soon became heavier than a paperbag when you had thirty extra
Tellys
to carry because one of the other paperboys was off to the clinic with nits.

For a start, the Shankill was coming down with churches. There were even more churches than pubs. If you fell out with the minister in one church – as lots of people did – you could always join, or even start, another church in the next street. Lots of old men in church always talked about how in the 1859 Revival, everyone had got saved in tents. They said we should all pray for it to happen again, but it never did. Maybe God was fed up with us being more for Ulster than for Him, because the more they prayed for revival, the more people I knew stopped going to church.

I remember how one Sunday – it was during the first year of my paper-delivery days – when Reverend Lowe, our regular minister, was on holiday, we had a visiting minister with a turn in his eye. This man took it upon himself to explain to us the difference between all the churches.

‘The Presbyterian Church is as near as humanly possible to the Church on earth that God intended,' he announced.

I was shocked by this, because in our church, the roof was leaking and the organ kept breaking down. I searched the visiting minister's face for an impish smile, but such an expression was clearly a stranger to his visage. He was serious! I knew Protestants were God's chosen people, but I didn't think Presbyterians were perfect, and our church certainly wasn't. The church bells blasted out from a cassette tape recorder plugged into big speakers in the bell tower every Sunday morning, because we couldn't afford real bells, which no one would have known how to ring anyway. One Sunday morning, someone put on the wrong tape, and instead of church bells chiming out, we had had Philomena Begley singing ‘One Day at a Time' – and she was a Catholic!

Titch McCracken's cousin from Ballymoney had told me when he was down visiting that Ulster Protestants were the last descendants of the ‘Lost Tribe of Israel'. He was very convincing, but when I looked up Israel in my geography atlas, I concluded that either Titch's cousin was wrong or we were a very lost tribe indeed.

Having established that we were the champions as far as religion went, the visiting minister then turned his attention to the other churches. The most obvious target was first.

‘The Roman Catholic Church is corrupt and evil, and its misguided adherents are doomed to hellfire and damnation!' he declared.

That always went down well on the Shankill. This man knew how to get his audience on side.

‘Its Pope is the Antichrist!'

Now, I had heard this one before, but I always thought the Pope looked like quite a nice man, and when I stared very closely at him on
John Craven's
Newsround
, I could never make out a 666 on his forehead. Anyway, the Antichrist was Damien in
The Omen
.

‘The Church of Ireland is so close to the Church of Rome as to be indistinguishable. It is not a Christian church, and its people are in error,' the minister continued.

I was shocked again. My guitar teacher, Mr Rowing, and his wife were Church of Ireland, and they seemed so much kinder than this man, and, as far as I was concerned, Mr Rowing's only error was not to teach me ‘Mull of Kintyre'.

‘The Methodists have departed from the truth to serve a social gospel,' he pontificated.