I was at the top of my game, the pinnacle of my profession. I had mastered newspaper delivery. No hedge was too high, no letterbox too slim, no holiday supplement too fat and no poodle too ferocious. I had delivered through hail, hoods, bullets and barricades. My paperbag was blacker than anyone else’s, the blackest of all paperboys’ bags. I had alone survived, when all around me had been robbed or sacked, or both. Oul’ Mac even gave me eye contact.
I had achieved high levels of customer satisfaction too. One day, when I was at the doctor’s with my mother and a boil on my thigh, we met Mrs Grant, from No. 2, who always gave me a toffee-apple tip at Halloween.
‘Your Tony’s a great wee paperboy, so he is,’ she said, as she darted across the doctor’s waiting room, on her way to pick up a prescription for her Richard’s chest. The waiting room in the surgery had a shiny old wooden floor that you stared at while you waited, dreading a diagnosis of doom. It smelt of varnish and wart ointment.
‘He’s the best wee paperboy our street’s ever had!’ the generous Mrs Grant added. ‘He’s never late, there’s no oul’ cheek and he closes the gate.’ The whole waiting room stopped coughing, and looked at me admiringly.
‘Och, God love the wee crater,’ two chirpy old ladies in hats chorused in unison.
This adulation momentarily anaesthetised the pain of my throbbing boil, which had brazenly blossomed on the precise part of my thigh where my paperbag would rub. The word was out: it was official. I was a prince among paperboys. It should have been on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph itself.
But then it happened. As unforeseen as a soldier’s sudden appearance in your front garden, along came Trevor Johnston. A rival had arrived.
Known to his friends as ‘Big Jaunty’, Trevor Johnston was older than me, taller than me and cooler than me. He wore the latest brown parallel trousers with tartan turn-ups and a matching brown tank top, from the window in John Frazer’s. John Frazer’s was the bespoke tailor to the men of the Shankill, whether it was flares, parallels, platform shoes, gargantuan shirt collars or tartan scarves you were after. This emporium of 1970s style was just across the road from the wee pet shop where I got goldfish and tortoises that died, and a mere black-taxi ride down the Shankill Road. From the moment you walked through the front door of the shop and got searched for incendiary devices, you could smell the alluring richness of polyester. It was where I always spent all my Christmas tips.
It seemed that every single time I went to buy some new clothes in Frazer’s, there was Trevor Johnston, perusing the parallels. In fact, it was possible that he only left the place during bomb scares. A veritable fashion icon of the Upper Shankill, Trevor also wore a Harrington jacket with the collar turned up. I knew these were very expensive. My big brother had got a Harrington for his birthday, and it was twenty weeks at 99p from my mother’s Great Universal Club Book. When I said that I wanted one for my birthday too, my brother tore the page in question out of the Club Book and fed it to Snowball, our already overweight albino rabbit. I had to settle for a pair of faux-satin Kung Fu pyjamas instead. They were twenty weeks at 49p, but I was determined that my Harrington-jacket day would come.
When Trevor Johnston put all his chic Shankill garments together, he looked like Eric Faulkner from the Bay City Rollers, and everybody loved Eric. When I stood beside Trevor in my duffle coat and grammar-school scarf, I looked more like Brian Faulkner, the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. And nobody loved him.
One day, without even a five-minute telephone warning, there was Trevor Johnston, standing with the other paperboys, waiting for Oul’ Mac’s van to arrive with the bad news. Evidently, he had been headhunted at short notice. The day before, Oul’ Mac had sacked Titch McCracken, who was ginger but good at football like Geordie Best, and brilliant at twirling his band stick on the Twelfth. Poor wee Titch had been having a sly smoke in the red telephone box on our street and had inadvertently dropped a lit match into his paperbag. Minutes later, the ash of thirty-two Belly Tellys and a half-cremated paperbag on the floor of the telephone box was all that remained of Titch’s career. It had undoubtedly been the finest fire in our street since the last Eleventh boney, but Mrs Matchett across the road phoned the RUC to inform them that the IRA had carried out an incendiary attack on our telephone box. When Oul’ Mac arrived on the scene, he was so incensed that he couldn’t even speak. This was gross misconduct. Titch was so scared that he couldn’t speak either. He knew he was finished. Oul’ Mac’s disciplinary procedure involved kicking the culprit on the backside halfway up the street, until Titch ran up an entry crying, and from a distance we could hear him telling Oul’ Mac where he could stick his paper round.
So, Trevor was here to replace wee Titch. I hated the way all the girls called him ‘Big Jaunty’, with gormless smiles on their faces. Irene Maxwell – whose da raced pigeons and limped – got a Jackie and Look-in every week, and so she was something of an authority on matters of art and culture. She once made the momentous prediction that ‘them uns from Sweden that won the Eurovision Song Contest are going to be more popular than yer man Gary Glitter.’
Every time I arrived at Irene’s front gate with her weekly delivery of pop culture, she would gush, ‘Big Jaunty’s lovely, so he is. He looks like David Cassidy.’ One night, I even spotted Irene and her best friend, wee Sandra Hull (who was only six, got a Twinkle and permanently had parallel snatter tracks under her nose), following Trevor street by street on his paper round.
Sharon Burgess had never once followed me on my paper round. Living as she did half a mile away, on the other side of the Ballygomartin Road, in one of the clean council houses on the West Circular Road, Sharon never got the chance to revere me at work. Her father was Big Ronnie who riveted in the shipyard, and her mother was Wee Jean who permed pensioners in His n’ Hers beside the graveyard.
One Saturday night shortly after the arrival of Trevor Johnston on the paper-delivery scene, I bumped into Sharon at the chippy, with the usual bagful of Ulsters on my shoulder. Sharon looked lovely, with her hair flicked like the blonde one in Pan’s People on Top of the Pops.
‘Do you wanna come with me, doin’ my Ulsters?’ I asked romantically, expecting an immediately affirmative response.
‘Wise up, wee lad, I’m gettin’ a gravy chip and a pastie supper for my da, and The Two Ronnies is on our new colour TV the night!’ she retorted, devastatingly. Sharon had rejected me for a gravy chip and three old Ronnies! And so no girl had ever followed me and my Belly Tellys, just wee hoods and robbers.
Of course, Trevor Johnston looked nothing like David Cassidy. Just because he was the first wee lad in our street to get his hair feathered in His n’ Hers didn’t mean he looked like a pop star. Who would want to look like David Cassidy anyway? He was crap.
I preferred to call ‘Big Jaunty’ by his proper name: plain old-fashioned Trevor. I enjoyed that. But I also knew I had to keep well in with him, in spite of everything. Rumour had it that Trevor’s da was in the Ulster Volunteer Force, and so it was best not upset him. I noticed that Trevor was the only paperboy who never had so much as an attempted robbery. I didn’t know much about the UVF, except that they killed Catholics and beat up burglars. I still couldn’t distinguish the difference between the UVF and the UDA, but I reckoned they were a bit like Shoot and Scorcher, the two main football comics I delivered: they each had different fans, but the same goals. I concluded that they were both just IRAs for Protestants. Trevor’s da had big muscles and UVF tattoos, and wore more gold rings and necklaces than even Mrs Mac. He worked in the foundry with my father, but he seemed to have a lot more money than us. He ran the UVF drinking club down the Road, and I suspected he didn’t serve Ulster entirely as a volunteer.
Trevor’s da had led the boycott of goods from the South of Ireland in our estate. He put up posters saying: ‘Don’t Buy Free State Goods’ on the same lamp posts the children would swing on. He also promoted his campaign by marching around to everyone’s doors and telling my mother and others like her to stop buying Galtee bacon and cheese, because by doing so they were just paying for a United Ireland. Ulster was saying ‘No’ to Catholic bacon. I hadn’t realised the pigs down south were Republicans and even at the age of twelve and a half, I was slightly sceptical as to the purported impact of processed cheese on the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. More importantly, I loved Galtee cheese, especially on a toasted Veda loaf from the Ormo Mini Shop, and I knew my mother snacked on it too while she was watching Coronation Street. Once a fortnight Mammy did a surreptitious shop on the Falls Road and would bring home a forbidden block of delicious Galtee from wee Theresa’s corner shop. (My mother had sewed trousers with wee Theresa in the suit factory before the Troubles. Apparently she was one of the ‘good ones’.) When my granny visited, we would hide the treacherous cheese in the fruit tray at the bottom of the fridge, underneath the oranges, of course.
When I delivered Muscle Men Monthly to Trevor’s da, there were always men with moustaches and dark glasses smoking in their living room, and I could hear Elvis records playing on the stereogram. Sometimes I wondered why so many Loyalists were Elvis fans: they always seemed more Paisley than Presley to me. There was no obvious connection between the King and the members of the UVF, apart from maybe ‘Jailhouse Rock’, and even that didn’t really make sense, because that was the young, thin Elvis, and these Protestant paramilitaries seemed to like old, fat, white cat-suit Elvis. But maybe Elvis was a Loyalist. Maybe he was doing all those gigs in Las Vegas for the Loyalist prisoners. He could have filled thousands of the collection buckets that came round our door.
One Saturday night, at our local disco, ‘the Westy’, in a lull between Suzi Quatro and Mudd, I asked Sharon Burgess secretly if she thought Trevor’s da was in the UVF. The Westy Disco was a good place to pose such a discreet question, because it was dark and noisy, and no one could hear, or see your eyes.
‘Big Jaunty’s da?’ she replied. ‘I don’t know, but Big Jaunty’s lovely, so he is, he looks like David Cassidy.’ I dropped my carton of hot peas and vinegar over the new platform shoes I had just got from John Frazer’s.
For six months, Trevor turned up on time and never thieved. He consistently delivered, and was even starting to get some eye contact from Oul’ Mac. My position was under threat. The more time I spent with Trevor, the more he irked me.
He was of course the only paperboy with no spots. He never had to use any of his tips to buy a tube of Clearasil which he would have to hide at the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind his father’s old Brylcreem jar (that had not been used since he went baldy), in case his big brother found it and accused him of wearing girl’s make-up.
I noticed, when we lined up to get the newspapers from Oul’ Mac’s van, that Trevor always smelled of Brut aftershave – and he hadn’t even started shaving! And so it came to pass that Trevor Johnston would be responsible for the most embarrassing incident of my life to date.
Spurred on by jealousy of my rival, I used some of my birthday money to proudly buy my first bottle of Brut from Boots, near the City Hall. I knew that Henry Cooper wore this aftershave, and he had knocked out Muhammed Ali. I only wanted to knock out Trevor Johnston, so I was sure it would do the trick. As I opened my first bottle of Brut, I recalled Henry Cooper in the TV adverts saying that he splashed it all over. The instructions on the bottle itself said the same thing: ‘Splash all over.’ So that night, as I was getting ready to meet Sharon Burgess, to watch her wee brother play the flute at the band parade, I did just that. By this time, Sharon and I had become an item, much to my great joy.
But no one had warned me that ‘all over’ should not include your jimmy joe. As the burning sensation increased, I rapidly ran a cold bath, submerged the painful region and sat, shivering and suffering in silence, in the vain hope that no one would notice. My mother’s intuition, however, intervened to inform her that something was amiss. Her persistent knocking at the locked bathroom door eventually forced me to admit my error with the aftershave.
‘Come on, love, tell me what’s wrong,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m your mammy, love, it’s all right.’
‘Okay!’ I finally confessed. ‘I put Brut on my jimmy joe!’ I blurted out, ‘and it’s killin’ me!’
Within seconds, Mammy was down the stairs and into the greenhouse in the back garden, where my father was watering his tomatoes.
‘Oh my God, Eric, we’re gonna have to take our Tony to the Royal! He’s put aftershave on his wee jimmy joe!’ she shrieked, much, much too loudly.
Could it get any worse? The prospect of being wheeled into Casualty in the Royal with a Brut burn on my jimmy joe was an absolute nightmare. My mother’s unnecessary use of the word ‘wee’ in this context completed my humiliation.
I heard the sound of the watering can clattering on the crazy paving and my father shouting: ‘The stupid wee glipe!’ But, then to my relief, he added, ‘No son of mine will be going to the Royal with an aftershave burn on his …’
This welcome pronouncement was interrupted by the outbreak of hysterical laugher from the nearby garden shed. My big brother had been in there with my wee brother, teaching him how to play poker with matches, and they had heard everything. The reverberation of their laughter on the shaky wooden walls of the garden shed continued long after the pain had subsided. My wee brother was only six years old at the time, but for weeks afterwards, he replaced ‘Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall’ with a new nursery rhyme, which he chanted again and again, with a delighted chuckle as he bounced up and down the street on his space hopper: ‘Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe/Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe’.
I was learning that a TV commercial was like the Bible in Belfast: if you took it entirely literally, it could cause a lot of pain. Of course it had all been Trevor Johnston’s fault – he had made me do it!
When my rival first arrived to do paper delivery, the pecking order of paperboys was already established. The rule was that when everyone assembled at Oul’ Mac’s van for the distribution of the papers, the more senior paperboys received theirs first. By this stage, it was I who was in pole position. New boys and younger boys got their newspapers last, even if sometimes these included a couple of torn back pages for which they would have to suffer the consequences from an angry customer who played the Football Pools. The shade of the paperbags slung on the shoulders of the line-up of paperboys painted a spectrum of power and status. At the front, almost head to head with Oul’ Mac, were the dirtiest bags, while the clean bags loitered nervously at the back. To my horror, after a few months of Trevor being in his employ, and twice in one week, Oul’ Mac gave him his papers first. This was getting serious! Maybe Mrs Mac hadn’t cleaned Oul’ Mac’s glasses that month, or maybe he was confused by the smell of all that Brut, I hoped desperately, clinging to the possibility of some sensory impairment on Mac’s part as an explanation.
Suddenly, Trevor Johnston was everywhere, like little Jimmy Osmond. He was even in my scout troop! And when he was made the leader of my patrol group just because he was tall and good at knots, I was livid. As we lined up, raised three fingers to God and the Queen and said, ‘Dib, dib, dib’, Trevor was at the top. Big Jaunty was the leader of the pack.
Then, one Friday night, I was delivering the Jackie to Irene Maxwell. I had struggled to remove the white knitting wool tied round the gate and gatepost to stop Irene’s wee brother from getting out onto the road, so I was already distracted. When I removed the glossy magazine from the grimy interior of my paperbag, there was David Cassidy on the cover.
‘He looks a bit like Big Jaunty, so he does,’ I found myself thinking, before catching myself on. It was the last straw. I snapped like one of my guitar strings being tuned too tightly. I hated Trevor Johnston! I wanted him to try to jump Mr Hamilton’s fence and catch his Doc Marten laces on the wire, and fall on his pretty face and tear his parallels at the knees and to have to get stitches in the Royal. I knew the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast should not be thinking this way, but then again, most people in Belfast were justifying much worse.
However, fate was to intervene, as generously as a drunk customer deciding to tip on a Christmas Eve. It was just a couple of weeks before the banging of the bin lids for the anniversary of Internment, and my mother was standing at our front gate, shouting up the street at me that my dinner was ready. I had just finished the papers, and, as I arrived at the merciless and still unforgiven, guitar-abusing gate, who should be striding up the street towards our house but Trevor’s da! He always looked like he was marching, even when it wasn’t the Twelfth.
‘Doesn’t his son do the papers with you, love?’ my mother asked and added, innocently, ‘You know, Big Jaunty – he looks like the lovely wee fella that sings on the Partridge Family, so he does.’ I gripped my paperbag strap and breathed deeply.
‘Hello, Mr Johnston, what about ye? It would melt ye the day,’ Mammy said, alluding to the fine summer weather.
‘Och, Betty love, what about ye?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t it terrible what them Fenians are tryin’ til do til us?’
‘Och aye, terrible, love,’ she complied.
This was like talking about the weather to Trevor’s da.
‘I hope you’re not buying any more of that Papish cheese?’ he continued.
‘Wouldn’t touch it, love,’ lied my mother impressively.
Just then, I noticed an unfamiliar feeling of warmth in my Doc Martens – and I knew it couldn’t have been coins, as it wasn’t a Friday night. I looked down to see that Trevor’s da’s dog had just peed on my boots. It was a yappy wee chihuahua, which was quite surprising because most of the Loyalist leadership had rottweilers. My big brother said men who walked chihuahuas were homos, just like wee lads who played violins. (He added this second fact just to peeve me, of course.) According to my big brother, there was only one thing in the world worse than being a Provo, and that was being a homo. I sometimes wondered what he would do if he ever met a homo Provo. I thought homos were boys who wanted to kiss boys, and that had nothing to do with either small dogs or musical instruments. I myself only wanted to kiss Sharon Burgess, and I couldn’t imagine Trevor’s da kissing one of his mates with a moustache in the UVF.
‘Have you heard our news?’ asked Trevor’s da.
‘No, love,’ said my mother, ‘Is your Martha bad with her nerves again?’
‘No, Betty, love, we’re movin’ to Bangor.’
‘Yes!’ I almost leapt out of my squelching boots.
Bangor was on the train by the sea, and where you moved if you got a good job in the bank. We used to go to there on the Sunday-school excursion, but we had to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and not ‘The Sash’ on the double-decker. Bangor had a Barry’s Amusements that still used old money like my granny: halfpennies, pennies and sixpences. The dodgems didn’t do decimal. Barry’s also had an old ghost train that was scary but not frightening. It was a safe sort of scary, not like getting a bus in Belfast in the riots.
Bangor also had a very famous outdoor swimming pool called Pickie Pool, where, as my parents told me, they would go for a paddle when they were courting. I never got a go in it because I always forgot my rubber ring. Of course, Big Jaunty wouldn’t need any inflatable assistance once he got there. He was probably a brilliant swimmer, like yer man Mark Spitz with the moustache, from the Olympics!
My mother was genuinely shocked by Trevor’s da’s revelation.
‘Och, I’m sorry to hear your news, love. When are yousens leavin’?’ she enquired.
This was breaking news, and I could tell she was determined to get all the details before Big Aggie up the street, who was jealous of her sewing and usually uncovered the best gossip first.
‘September, love. Martha says it’s not the same round here since all the dirt from down the Road are movin’ up, and she says our Trevor would be far better off in Bangor with his asthma, and it’s got one of them new shopping centres.’
As he marched off down the street, I’m sure I heard my mother say something under her breath, like, ‘I’m sure they’ll be delighted in Bangor.’
Afterwards, Mum rushed the fish fingers and Smash ‘potatoes’, and disappeared for most of the evening. Later, as I ran around the corner to the erstwhile telephone box towering inferno, with two 2p pieces in my hand to listen to the new Showaddywaddy single on Dial-a-Disc, I spotted my mother still sprinting from house to house like a good paperboy, conveying the news to the most trusted neighbours. She was clearly enjoying delivering these tidings. Sadly, I had to hang up on Dial-a-Disc after the first chorus of ‘Under the Moon of Love’, because my big brother walked past and overheard me singing along, and shouted through one of the many broken windows: ‘Are you singing down the phone to Sharon Burgess, ya big fruit?!’
As I stomped home in humiliation, I noticed as I looked down that the white ash from Titch’s papers was now covering my Doc Martens, due to the adhesive properties of Trevor’s da’s dog’s pee. It was, I imagined, just like the layer of ash from Pompeii in my school history book. As I looked for a convenient pavement puddle to clean it off my boots, I noticed Irene Maxwell standing at her gate, crying her eyes out.
‘What’s the matter with you, Irene?’ I asked. She could hardly splutter the words out through the sobs, but I knew what was coming next anyway.
‘Big Jaunty’s leavin’ to live in Bangor, and he was lovely, so he was, and he looked like David Cassidy and … and I think I love him,’ she wailed.
‘Now she sounds like a David Cassidy song herself,’ I thought, unsympathetically.
Then I did two sins I had been told not to do. Uncle John at the Good News Club had told me not to tell lies, and my father had told me not to be such a selfish wee bastard. To my shame, I did both simultaneously, with a heartbroken Irene Maxwell.
‘Och, isn’t that awful?’ I feigned. ‘I hadn’t heard he was leavin’ and Big Jaunty was one of my best paperboy mates too. Oul’ Mac’ll be ragin’, so he will, and – oh no, I might have to be the new patrol leader in the Scouts!’
My thoughtless words only compounded Irene’s grief, and so I made a stab at consoling her: ‘Sure, you and wee Sandra might see him at Pickie Pool on the Sunday-school excursion next year. Although I heard Trevor’s mammy doesn’t let him go out much, because he’s bad with his asthma.’
Poor Irene. I handed her my other two pence and told her not to worry, because Showaddywaddy’s new single was brilliant and that she should go and listen to it on Dial-a-Disc round in the telephone box, but that she should watch her sandals, because the ash from Titch’s paperbag was still on the floor.
I was as heartless as an apprentice petrol-bomber but happier than a paperboy sent home on full pay because Oul’ Mac’s van was hijacked. Trevor would be transferred to a North Down newsagent, and he would take his brown parallels with the tartan turn-ups and his feathered hair and his inflammatory Brut with him to Bangor. And all the girls at Pickie Pool would say Big Jaunty was lovely, so he was, and that he looked like David Cassidy, but I wouldn’t have to care anymore!
After six months of serious challenge, I was to be peerless and without equal once more – undisputedly, the top paperboy in the Upper Shankill.