Paperboy (9 page)

I think that meant they help poor people. Now I was getting angry. Reverend Lowe never made me angry like this. The Methodists at the Grosvenor Hall had taken my mother on holidays to Bangor when she was a poor wee girl with nothing.

‘They neglect the sinner's need to make Jesus their own and personal Saviour,' he elaborated.

My pompous preacher friend next went on to explain that we should not waste money by sending food to Africans because we needed to send missionaries to get them saved first, as that was more important. I couldn't work out how you could give them salvation if they had already died of starvation.

Then he turned his eye on the smaller denominations.

‘The Baptists and Pentecostals and all the rest are nothing but little tin-hut Christians,' he said.

He didn't even cite a verse from the Bible to back this one up. This final condemnation was the most confusing of all, because I knew from listening to Mrs Piper in our street and from some of my friends in school that Baptists thought Presbyterians weren't Christians, and Brethren and Pentecostals said we weren't saved either.

Leaving the church that Sunday morning, I tried to avoid eye contact with this man as he shook hands at the door, but his errant eye seemed to follow me nonetheless.

On the Shankill, a ‘good livin' ' person was someone who had put their hand up to get saved at a gospel meeting (otherwise known as a ‘wee meetin'). This usually happened at the end of the wee meetin'. For about half an hour the preacher asked you to raise your hand if you wanted to be saved, while the organist played fifteen verses of the hymn, ‘Just as I Am'. That usually gave you enough time.

Some people I knew got saved every week. They got born again, again and again. Once you were saved, you didn't curse or drink or smoke or go to the cinema or discos. If you had done any of these sins a lot before you were saved, you got asked to give your testimony at wee meetin's, and you stood up and told everyone all the worst sins you had ever committed in great detail. The biggest sinners were the best.

I found all of this spiritually perplexing. The list of what you weren't allowed to do got longer every day. You weren't allowed to watch TV on a Sunday or buy a raffle ticket, even for an African baby! Of course it was worse for girls: they had lots of extras they weren't allowed to do, like wear trousers, or speak. I was baffled. I thought it was all supposed to have something to do with Jesus.

But soon after my road to Damascus moment on the bin in Millisle, neighbours and relatives, when trying to distinguish me from my two brothers, started referring to me as the ‘wee good livin' one'. My older brother had put his hand up at a meeting once and got saved, but he said ‘f**k' twice the next day and so gave it up. And my wee brother was still too young to put his hand up at all. The only thing worse than being called ‘good livin' ' was that you were always described as ‘wee'. You couldn't just be a ‘good livin' fella' – you had to be a ‘wee good livin' boy'. At a certain point, I was taller than both my brothers, but I was the one that was being called ‘wee'!

I faithfully attended and remained true to the principles of the Good News Club until well into my time as a paperboy. And so Mrs Mac always called me a ‘wee good livin' boy' too. I put up with it, because I just knew I was her favourite paperboy. Good livin' meant no thievin' in her books, and she kept Oul' Mac's accounts right to the last halfpenny. Mrs Mac was a tough old Belfast woman, like my granny: a bit scary, but with a warm heart. She didn't curse quite as much as Oul' Mac but she could give him a good run for his money, if Mrs Beattie from No. 21 complained about you leaving her gate open or letting her Jack Russell out or giving her cheek after she'd called you ‘a lazy wee skitter'.

Mrs Mac was quite glamorous for her age. She used a jewelled cigarette holder like an American woman in the black-and-white movies, so she didn't have yellow fingers like Oul' Mac. Her hands were elegant even when they were black with newspapers, and she had fancy handwriting when she wrote the addresses on the magazines. She looked like one of those old film-star actresses interviewed on
Parkinson
on a Saturday night, who looked better in black and white, and too pink on colour TV. Mrs Mac had red painted nails and big gold rings on nearly all of her fingers. This was evidence of what some of the other paperboys used to say about the Macs. ‘Them uns is loaded', they would say. But I couldn't see how selling newspapers could make you all that rich. Perhaps they had won ‘Spot the Ball' in one of their millions of
Belfast Telegraphs
. Mrs Mac had a beehive too, which, my mother told me, was all the rage in the sixties. I knew this was true because Cilla Black and Petula Clark had beehives on the old LP covers in our stereogram in the sitting room.

One Eleventh Night I had to leave the paper money round to the Macs' house as the shop was already closed for the Twelfth. When she came to the door, Mrs Mac was in a wonderful mood. She was winking at Oul' Mac and laughing a lot, and she seemed a little more unsteady on her feet than usual.

‘Thanks love,' she said, taking the bag full of warm and fragrant coins, fresh from my Doc Martens. As I was leaving her house with my burdens lightened, carefully closing her gate tight after me, she called out to me, ‘Enjoy yourself at the boney the night, son! That's a good boy.'

As I turned to thank her, I am sure I heard a muted fart, and a lock of long hair fell forlornly out of the beehive across her tortoise-shell glasses. I'd never heard a lady fart before.

The day after the Showaddywaddy guy had put a gun in my back, my father brought me round to the Macs' house to explain the whole drama. Their house was full of gold-framed mirrors, copper bubble wallpaper and china dogs on every available window sill. There was not a newspaper in sight.

When he heard about the Showaddywaddy guy, Oul' Mac was so furious I thought he was going to spit out one of his looser teeth, but poor Mrs Mac was just very shocked and concerned. She gave me a big hug, looked at my father with tears welling up in her eyes and then, cocking her head to one side, she said, ‘And him a wee good livin' boy, too.'

Chapter 9
Wider Horizons

I
was not well travelled, so I wasn't. I had left Ireland only once in my life, on a primary-school trip to Ayr in Scotland. But the experience was marred when the teacher slapped me around the head because I had been ungrateful enough to fall asleep in the cinema during the
On the Buses
movie. So I got homesick and hated that teacher ever after.

However, as I thumbed through my
Belfast Telegraphs
night after night, I discovered unexpected information within those pages that fuelled a new desire to see the wider world. It was the holiday section that always caught my eye. There were ads for a week in a caravan in Donegal, where my father had climbed up on the roof of the toilets to rescue my kite, but we stopped going there when the Troubles started in case it helped bring a United Ireland. Donegal always confused me because everyone said it was down south but on the map in my geography class it was further north than most of the North. Nobody seemed to notice. Maybe compasses were different in Donegal.

Then I discovered that at the back of the
TV Times
there were adverts for trips to more faraway places, like the Isle of Man and Blackpool and the Costa Brava, where Judith Chalmers got a tan every week on UTV. The more I devoured the holiday ads in the newspapers and magazines my profession brought me into contact with, the more I longed to travel to these long-haul destinations.

I had always enjoyed the caravan and the candy floss in Millisle, but I began to dream of wider horizons, so I did. I wanted to go to Sweden, where ABBA lived on an island with a piano and snow and fur coats. I wanted to visit London, where they made
Top of the Pops
and Wimpy burgers and the Royal Family lived. I longed to go to Italy to see where a volcano in my history book had buried everyone, even the dogs. I wanted to visit China, where they had a huge wall you could see from outer space. Apparently it was bigger than the peace wall between the Falls and the Shankill – and they didn't even have Protestants and Catholics in China! As I dutifully delivered my daily papers on automatic pilot, I daydreamed of flying on a jet plane to America, where they made big cars and movies and Osmonds. I would also imagine myself on a trek across Australia, where Skippy the Bush Kangaroo would be there to save me if I ever fell down a disused mine shaft. Of course, I also had dreams of travelling to the planet Vulcan, but there were never any package deals to that particular destination advertised in the
Belfast Telegraph
.

Unfortunately, I knew rightly that not even the pooled resources of my father's overtime earnings at the foundry, my mother's income from extra sewing for swanky ladies up the Lisburn Road, my big brother's poker winnings in the garden shed and several bootfuls of my Christmas tips would ever be enough to finance any trips to these exotic destinations. I envied boys in my class like Timothy Longsley, whose parents said all their ‘ings' and were always go-ing holiday-ing to their cottage in eff-ing France.

But then fate intervened in my favour, in the way that it sometimes did – like those times I would unexpectedly bump into Sharon Burgess in Woodvale Park in her hot pants. For, all of a sudden, it seemed that everybody wanted to send us poor kids from the Shankill on trips away from the Troubles. It was amazing! The nice people with all the money for trips must have heard that the Westy Disco was full of poor wee potential petrol-bombers, who needed taken away from war-torn Belfast. And so, suddenly and unexpectedly, exciting new opportunities for travel began to open up for us. And as we were wee deprived children from West Belfast, the trips were absolutely free: we didn't have to pay a single penny, which meant more spending money for buying sweetie mice to eat on the journey. Yes, these trips were as free as a Captain Scarlet badge in a box of Sugar Puffs. The only problem for me was recruiting a sufficiently trustworthy substitute paperboy to stand in for me while I was away. But I could be quite resourceful when I needed to be.

My first free trip was up to Corrymeela. This was in Ballycastle, County Antrim, beside the sea, where you got ‘yellowman' honeycomb that stuck in your teeth, and dulse that made you sick on your parallels in the minibus on the way home. A man with a beard had phoned Auntie Emma from the Westy Disco to ask us to come to Corrymeela to get away from the riots for a day, so Uncle Henry organised three free handicapped minibuses for the trip.

We weren't allowed to sing ‘The Sash' or smoke as they transported us up the coast to Ballycastle. En route, I noticed that the County Antrim coast had more cliffs and fewer skinheads than the County Down coast I knew so well. Corrymeela itself was a big white wooden house on a cliff where they liked peace and wore Aran jumpers. I liked peace too, because I was the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, but I wasn't so keen on the knitwear. They mustn't have had a John Frazer's in Ballycastle.

As soon as we arrived at Corrymeela, the whole thirty of us spilled out of the three handicapped minibuses and jumped onto a seesaw and broke it. Auntie Emma was scundered, and the man in an Aran jumper who was about to welcome us in an English accent looked quite scared. We were wilder than the waves in the sea below the cliffs. Then we played brilliant games – organised by men with beards – on a big field, and afterwards we got free juice and biscuits served by smiling ladies with rainbow scarves. It was the best fun ever. I loved it. Nearly everybody loved it. Peace was free. Peace was fun! Even my big brother said it was ‘class'. Lynn McQuiston with the buck teeth said it was ‘weeker', but Titch McCracken said half the men with beards were Catholics called Brendan, and, somewhat predictably, Philip Ferris said it was ‘ballicks'.

After we had our free juice and biscuits, we were handed out song sheets, and then one of the bearded Brendans started to play the guitar and got us to join in a singalong on a blanket on the ground at the top of the cliff. We sang ‘Puff the Magic Dragon', ‘Lord of the Dance' and ‘Kumbaya'. We may have been wee deprived kids from up the Shankill, but when we stopped messin' and started singing the same song at the same time (and when Titch McCracken stopped shouting ‘Kick the Pope!' between verses), we actually began to sound quite good. It was as ‘Someone's singing Lord, Kumbaya' drifted out over the cliff edge towards Rathlin Island that Uncle Henry had his most inspired idea since introducing the breathalyser at the door into the Westy Disco.

‘Let's start a youth-club choir!' he suddenly proposed.

‘Aye! Dead on!' shouted wee Sandra Hull, through her snatter tracks. Sharon Burgess smiled and nodded shyly. Heather Mateer cheered, jumping up so quickly that she split her parallels and we saw her knickers, and giggled inappropriately the whole way through ‘Someone's crying Lord, Kumbaya'. Most of the girls thought the choir was a wonderful idea and squealed with excitement. The seagulls above us joined in a screeching chorus of noisy agreement. The boys were a little more restrained in their enthusiasm, because boys didn't sing and choirs were for homos.

‘Wise-ick!' said my big brother.

‘Ballicks,' said Philip Ferris.

‘Sure, give it a go, lads,' requested Uncle Henry.

We trusted him, so we did. We would give it a go! We spent the rest of the day talking excitedly about the new musical vistas now opening up before us. Uncle Henry was in a brilliant mood and didn't even get too angry when we left Corrymeela to visit the scenic harbour nearby, and Titch McCracken broke into a digger and tried to drive it into the sea. We were escorted from Ballycastle by the RUC.

The scene was set. We were to form the first Upper Shankill youth-club choir. We would practise every Tuesday night after I had done the papers and tortuous trigonometry homework. The next time we would be taken on a free trip, it wouldn't be just as poor wee troublemakers from West Belfast. We would be travelling by special invitation, as a performing choir on tour. All of this meant yet more opportunities to broaden my horizons, of course.

When the booking for our first international gig came in, the venue was perfect. We received an invitation to sing in the very birthplace of Rollermania, the land of the Mull of Kintyre itself. Yes, our first overseas performance was to be in Scotland, across the water on the Larne–Stranraer ferry. For years, we had revelled in the music that Scotland had brought to us through Woody, Eric, Alan, Leslie and Derek: now it was our turn to return the favour. We were going to bring the music back to Scotland! Patrick Walsh at the School of Music said all Protestants should go back to Scotland anyway.

Our debut destination was Edinburgh; we were invited to sing at St Philip's Church in the city. It was a Church of Scotland church, which I thought was just Church of Ireland with a Scottish accent, but it turned out that the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian like us, except with fewer flags. Presbyterians were official in Scotland, it seemed. We would be spending a week seeing the sights of Edinburgh and then sing at the church service on the Sunday morning before getting the boat back home. I was determined to go, so I arranged for the wee ginger boy with National Health glasses that I bullied to do my paper round for the week. In a momentary lapse from my pacifist principles, I threatened to kick his teeth in if he stole any of the paper money. In the words of our Reverend Lowe, it was, as far as I was concerned, the lesser of two evils.

After months of saving, I had at last been able to buy my very own Harrington jacket – complete with tartan lining – and I wore it proudly on the day of the journey to Scotland. ‘That's a quare nice new Harrington you've got, wee lad,' observed Irene Maxwell, as we boarded the boat. Irene knew everything about fashion, from
Jackie
magazine.

The Larne–Stranraer ferry smelt of salt and fish and vomit, and it made me feel very queasy. While most of my fellow choristers were enjoying a pastie supper in the canteen below decks, and some were secretly sampling vodka and coke in the bar, I ended up spending most of the voyage up on deck in the fresh air, in a desperate attempt to keep down the tomato sandwiches my mother had made me for the journey. I tried to distract myself from the feelings of nausea by pretending I was James Bond, working undercover on a cruiser in the Caribbean, wearing a white suit and trying to catch a diamond thief, but eventually the tomato sandwiches defied gravity and returned. As the contents from my stomach spewed over the side of the Larne–Stranraer ferry, an insulting wind from the surface of the Irish Sea blew my boke back on me. My prized Harrington jacket smelled rotten for weeks.

‘Are you calling for Hughey and you're not even in Scotland yet?' enquired my big brother sympathetically, as he passed me on the deck while I was in mid-vomit.

When at last we arrived on dry land and travelled up to Edinburgh, I was completely awestruck. I had never seen a city like this before, apart from on
Blue Peter
. There was a big castle on a hill and a toy museum and huge shops, where they didn't search you to get in. I kept raising my arms automatically to any adult standing at the entrance doors of these shops, until people looked at me strangely and I realised that you weren't searched for bombs on the way into shops over here.

In Princes Street, there was a clock made of flowers, and shops selling nothing but tartan. Here I found the real Macaulay tartan that you couldn't get in John Frazer's in Belfast and bought a strip for my mother to sew down the side of my parallels for the much-anticipated Bay City Rollers concert. Most exciting of all were the real old-fashioned blue police telephone boxes, which, when no one was looking, I pretended were my TARDIS. Every day at one o'clock, the big cannons fired from the top of the castle. The whole youth-club choir jumped in unison every time this happened, because we thought it was a car bomb.

We had been practising for months for this premiere performance. The Scottish Presbyterians had heard we were very good in spite of all our sufferings, and I could sense that they were looking forward to our Sunday show with great anticipation. However, as the week went by, I began to feel a little nervous: I wondered if their expectations might be a little too high. I feared they might be disappointed. I knew we could sing okay, and our performances always went down very well on Children's Day in Ballygomartin Presbyterian Church, but the youth-club choir wasn't like the choir at BRA. At school, we read the musical score, and the teacher used a baton, making funny faces like a real conductor. In the youth-club choir, we had no music to follow – only the words copied out on carbon paper – and Uncle Henry just waved his hands encouragingly and counted us in at the right time. At home, everyone thought we were the best choir ever, because we were singing instead of fighting, but in Scotland maybe they would have higher expectations.

We had three pieces to perform that Sunday morning: our three best ones. They were ‘When a Child is Born', ‘This Little Light of Mine' and ‘Any Dream Will Do.' We sang ‘When a Child is Born' all year round, and not just at Christmas like Johnny Mathis. This was the only song we sang that had been on
Top of the Pops
, so we knew it was cool. The recital in Edinburgh began with this anthem. We started off a little nervously, but soon got into our stride: Johnny Mathis would have been proud of us. We were standing on a raised stage at the front of the church. When it came to the spoken part, and Heather Mateer said, in her best American accent, the bit about turning tears into laughter, hate into love, war into peace and everyone into each other's neighbour, I could see two old Scottish women in hats in the front row getting their hankies out. They loved us! We were a symbol of hope in a violent and cruel world.

In the next song, I was to play a starring role. It was ‘This Little Light of Mine', a fast country-and-western gospel song that didn't work with an organ accompaniment, so I was asked to play along on guitar. Thankfully, my Spanish guitar had sustained no further damage on the boat journey and so I was all set. I was nervous about the important role I had to play, but I was fairly confident too, because the song had the same two chords as ‘Tom Dooley', and I had practised it to death. Mr Rowing would have been proud of me, playing guitar up on stage on tour in another country. I was sure that Paul McCartney's guitar teacher must have felt similar pride the first time he heard Paul performing in public.