Chapter 6
Three Steps to Heaven

Weekends were hard work for a paperboy, so they were. There wasn’t just the gauntlet of Friday nights to be run, with the possibility of attacks by wee hoods hopeful of stealing your takings for the week: on Saturdays, there were heavy additional professional demands too. Saturday night meant two newspapers to be delivered, and so double the weekday workload. There was Ireland’s Saturday Night as well as that day’s edition of the Belfast Telegraph. The former was very popular in the Upper Shankill, even though it had ‘Ireland’ in the title. Of course, you weren’t supposed to like anything with Ireland in the title (although the Church of Ireland seemed to be all right for some people). I remember us all having to cheer very quietly the night Dana – who said she was from ‘Derry’ instead of ‘Londonderry’ – won the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland. If Mrs Piper had heard us cheering because of ‘All Kinds of Everything’ getting ‘douze points’ from Norway, she might very well have suspected that we were secret IRA supporters and we could have ended up by getting a ‘friendly’ call from Trevor’s da.

Anyway, for some strange reason, Ireland’s Saturday Night was known to everyone as the Ulster. In my younger days, I had thought that the Shankill was Ulster. Later I realised the Shankill was in Ulster. Then, in geography class one day, I noticed on the map that Ulster was in Ireland. Finally, I learned that, although Ulster was not actually in Britain, it was, in fact, more British than Britain itself. It all made perfect sense. The Ulster newspaper was simple too. It was a straightforward weekly sports paper with all the day’s sporting results. Published on a Saturday evening, to catch all the latest sports results from matches and races that had taken place earlier in the day, it was a true ‘hot-off-the-presses’ newspaper.

You felt special delivering the Ulster, because people were standing in the street waiting for it. You were a very important person, because you were the courier of extremely valuable information: you had something fresh and precious, something everyone wanted now. With the Ulsters slung over my shoulder, I felt like a scout from a John Wayne movie, returning to the circled wagons to tell his compatriots where the Apaches were. Men who liked football and horses got the Ulster, and they often met me at their front door to take delivery of it. They were like kids getting a birthday card or their Eleven Plus results, or like Irene Maxwell getting her Jackie when it had David Cassidy on the front. These customers would start reading the paper straight away, standing up, fully absorbed in its contents, even before the front door was shut again.

All of this was, however, a mystery to me. I couldn’t imagine a more boring newspaper, apart from that pink English newspaper with all the numbers in it, which nobody up our way ever got. I myself preferred to read about Space 1999 and The Tomorrow People in Look-in magazine. Science fiction was so much more exciting than football, and it seemed to cause less trouble, even though there was usually a higher body count. Unlike with football, Protestants and Catholics seemed to like the same science-fiction programmes. No one ever rioted after an episode of Lost in Space, even when Dr Zachary Smith had endangered the life of Will Robinson and his family yet again!

I had sixteen Ulsters to dispatch on a Saturday evening. This wasn’t very many, relatively speaking, but though it didn’t take long to deliver them, it did tend to mess up my social life if I was planning to meet Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco on a Saturday night.

The Westy Disco was so called because it was a disco that was held in a hut on the corner of the West Circular Road. It was an old Nissen hut from the war which was used by Ballygomartin Presbyterian as a church hall, falling down and freezing though it was. I went to our well-ordered Scouts meetings there when the lights were on, but on a Saturday night the hut was transformed, and the lights were switched off and replaced by flashing coloured spotlights and ultraviolet tubes that made your white socks and dandruff glow in the dark. I always made sure to wash my hair with Head & Shoulders before a night out at the Westy Disco, because there was nothing as humiliating as wee girls laughing at your fluorescent dandruff as you tried to do a manly dance to Status Quo.

Every Saturday night, all of us teenagers crammed into that ageing Nissen hut, as the corrugated iron walls vibrated to the sounds of the latest hits from Sweet and The Glitter Band. The floor was sticky with chewing gum and slippy with condensation, but we managed to make our moves anyway – the Slush, the Twist, the Bump and the Hucklebuck. We had to, because this was our only dance floor. The Westy Disco certainly attracted far more kids than Sunday school or the Scouts. Some nights, there were more than four hundred of us in platforms and parallels, dancing innocently to Showaddywaddy and the Bay City Rollers, while outside our city convulsed.

The Westy was a good place to ask a wee girl you fancied for a slow dance during a Donny Osmond song, so that you could have a go at snogging. It was here in the dark that I discovered that tongues could have more fun than just blowing bubble gum. Of course, some of the people in the church who never smiled did not approve of such worldly discos. They said that dancing was a sin, because it was like sex. It surprised me that sex was a sin. I was certain that even good livin’ people did it, because they had lots of kids and not all of them could have been adopted. However, Reverend Lowe, our independently minded minister, allowed us to dance because, as he said, it kept us off the dangerous streets and out of the pubs and the paramilitary organisations. On several occasions, Reverend Lowe had been spotted ordering paramilitaries off the dangerous streets into the pubs. He used to preach about the lesser of two evils.

I, however, was no ordinary member of the Westy Disco. I was in a very privileged position. My parents were voluntary youth leaders, in charge of the most popular youth gathering in the whole Shankill. This made me special: it was like being one of Paul and Linda McCartney’s children. My parents had started the disco, along with Uncle Henry and Auntie Emma from our street. (They weren’t my real aunt and uncle, but they were warm people, and just like family to us.) Uncle Henry did the door where we paid our 10p and blew into the breathalyser to get in. My mother and Auntie Emma, who were best friends and like mammys to the whole hut, did the tuck shop where you could get crisps and chewing gum, and peas and vinegar. Auntie Emma never missed a Saturday night, even though she didn’t like the disco lights because the ultraviolet rays made her prematurely false teeth look black. Uncle Henry was the warm heart of the Westy, but it was my father who was the star. Daddy was the DJ, like Jimmy Savile on Top of the Pops, only younger. He played the 45s on a double-deck turntable plugged into enormous speakers and would turn up the music so loud that the neighbours would complain. This was very cool, of course: not many dads up our way got accused of blaring out the Rollers too loud.

As resident DJ at the Westy, my father picked the hits and read out the requests, so he did. With the profits from the tuck shop, he would buy two new singles every week from the record store. They were the latest new releases, and they would be his Top 40 predictions: he always managed to choose the songs that went to No.1. My father was an unlikely candidate for youth-club leader in the church, because he wasn’t ‘good livin’ ’ at all. He smoked and drank and said God didn’t exist because Christians didn’t practise what they preached. I wasn’t so sure that this followed, because paperboys often didn’t do what they were commanded to do either, but Oul’ Mac certainly still existed.

For a middle-aged man, Da’s musical choices were very good, although he did get a little too excited by some of the more irritating Boney M singles. One of them was called ‘Belfast’: it was a bouncy little singalong pop song all about our hatred for one another in our city. We danced and sang along to it as if it was about something happy and funny, like ‘Waterloo’. I put my position as son of the DJ to good use, slipping in extra requests for my latest favourite singles and asking my da to play slow songs by Donny Osmond at just the right moment, when Sharon Burgess might be most receptive.

One of the best slow songs that often elicited a snog from your girl was ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ by Showaddywaddy. The lyrics were brilliant. They gave you an easy-to-remember, step-by-step guide to getting yourself a girl. Showaddywaddy were geniuses. Unfortunately Mrs Piper disagreed, and when she heard this song blaring out while passing the hut on the way to her prayer meeting one night, she complained to my father for leading us all astray with ‘the Devil’s music’. She said that there was only one true step to heaven and that was for us all to get saved. My DJ da told her to catch herself on.

Whatever Mrs Piper thought, I followed Showaddy-waddy’s instructions to the letter. ‘And as I travel on and things do go wrong ….’ they sang. It was as if they knew of my personal travel problems due to all the buses getting hijacked in Belfast! ‘Just call it steps one, two and three,’ they crooned, and I would listen with an earnest desire to follow these ‘three steps to heaven’, so I would. ‘Step One – to find a girl to love …’ Sharon Burgess, of course. ‘Step Two – she falls in love with you …’ Hopefully – if I have splashed enough Brut all over. ‘Step Three - you kiss and hold her tightly …’ Yes! A proper snog like Big Ruby at the caravan had shown me. ‘That sure feels like heaven to me.’

The night at the Westy Disco always ended with ‘The Last Waltz’ by Engelbert Humperdinck. When the first bars of the piano commenced, we knew it was time for a fish supper and perhaps the opportunity to walk a girl home. Engelbert certainly cleared the floor, because ‘The Last Waltz’ was old-fashioned compared to the latest number from The Rubettes, but I knew this tune also had a deeper meaning. It was my parents’ favourite song from the stereogram in the sitting room, and the one to which they had danced when they won the Ballroom Dancing Competition at Butlin’s in Mosney the year before. So Da played it every week, not just to let us all know that the disco was over but also to let my mother know that he loved her.

In terms of paper delivery, the mountain had to go to Mohammed on a Saturday evening. Oul’ Mac didn’t deliver the Ulsters to the streets in the legendary yellow van, as was his wont on week nights. He had clearly carried out a cost– benefit analysis on using the van for such a relatively small delivery. The executive summary of this time-and-motion study was communicated to us in no uncertain terms: ‘Youse can come and get the Ulsters yerselves, ya lazy wee buggers,’ he advised. So on Saturdays I had to walk to Oul’ Mac’s shop, down at the bottom of the Ballygomartin Road. This was more of a nuisance than a heavy burden until one Saturday night, when something happened which would henceforth give my favourite Showaddywaddy song a whole new meaning.

On the dark Saturday night in question, I am on my way home from the newsagents with my Ulsters. It is late October. I have already emptied my boots of the takings from late-paying customers and handed over the warm and fragrant coins to Mrs Mac. I have bought myself a packet of sweetie mice with a tip from Mrs Hill with the baldy poodle. Walking back up the hill towards my street, I hear the customary noise of a bomb thudding somewhere in the city. It is not too loud this time, not like the night the IRA blew up the Gasworks and the whole sky lit up like in a crash landing from Lost in Space.

It is the first frost of October. Icy footpaths are brilliant for sliding on, except when your bag is so heavy that you lose balance, and your fall shreds the sports pages of the papers you are carrying, and No. 93, who never tips, complains, and Oul’ Mac shouts that you are a ‘clumsy wee hallion’. I can see my breath in the cold stillness. I recognise a frosty, smoky Halloween smell in the air: fog and sparklers. I am happy, as usual. As I walk past the chippy, my mouth waters at the wafting aroma of fish suppers on the vinegar-soaked pages of the papers I had delivered yesterday. I am alone, my ever darker paperbag over my shoulder, my fingers yet again black with ink from troubled pages.

All at once, I become aware of two men, walking close behind me. I glance around. One of them looks like the lead singer in Showaddywaddy, yer man with the dark glasses. The other, smaller, one has an aggressive mouth like a dog that bites paperboys, and he looks like he’s had too many fish suppers. They are both staring at me in an unmistakable, ‘hard man’ way. I am outnumbered, so I don’t even dare to venture a ‘who d’ye think yer lookin’ at?’

‘Robbers!’ I conclude in a tense instant, although these are guys in their twenties – older than the usual robbers. Their pace has now quickened, as if they are trying to catch up with me. I quickly turn off the main Ballygomartin Road to escape into an empty street and up the hill towards home. Safety always seems to be hillwards in these parts. The two men follow.

In my mind, all I can hear is the robot in Lost in Space repeating, ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

Catching up, my pursuers bundle me into the small untidy front garden at No. 4, whose owners are never in, but who always get the Radio Times (I always read it in the street when Doctor Who is on the cover). The Showaddywaddy guy presses something hard and cold into my back through my duffle coat. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

I hear metal clicks against my toggles as I struggle and turn to get loose. I bite on my grammar-school scarf.

‘I don’t have any money,’ I cry, my newly broken voice returning to prepubescent shrillness. I am telling the truth. My boots are empty. Instinctively, I then turn out my pockets. There is no money, just the remains of a melting white sweetie mouse encrusting a bull’s-eye marble. My assailants don’t seem interested.

They don’t speak. I freeze. I don’t understand. ‘They are IRA men after an easy target,’ I fret inwardly. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

It starts to rain very heavily. Icy drops dilute the warm tears on my shivering cheeks. Suddenly, Mr Watson with the dyed black comb-over from No. 24 – whose wife gets Woman and who always gives a big tip at Easter – comes running down the street towards us. My oppressors see him coming, and mistakenly sense an attempted rescue. The tough guys just run off. But Mr Watson is just running to escape the downpour of hail. I stand alone in the trampled weeds of the garden of No. 4 beside a small gnome with a fishing rod and his nose broken off. Mr Watson runs straight past me. He has tonight’s Belfast Telegraph over his head to protect his much-too-black Brylcreemed hair.

I must run home. But, I then remember, no one is at home. I must run to the Westy Disco, where Dad will be playing ‘Mamma Mia’ and Mum will be clipping Geordie Cooper around the ear for stealing penny chews, as per usual. I must tell them what has just happened. I can’t catch a breath. I can’t speak. They had put a gun in my back. I start to hyperventilate. (I thought only Americans hyperventilated.) I burst into the Westy Disco before Uncle Henry can even breathalyse me. A group of adults and wee girls gather around me at the tuck shop. I am crying. Then I am embarrassed: what if Sharon Burgess sees me like this?

The mood of the tuck-shop crowd surrounding me changes from concern, to shock and then to outrage. Meanwhile, Geordie Cooper empties the penny-chew jar behind them all.

The general consensus is that the IRA has just tried to kill me.

‘Them f**kin’ Provos have just tried to a pick off another wee Prod the night!’ shouts Philip Ferris insensitively. The rumour spreads across the dance floor that paperboys are now ‘legitimate targets’. Then I notice the muffled sounds of Showaddywaddy from the loudspeakers in the background – it’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. The lyrics mock me. I feel as if I have just taken several steps closer to heaven than I had ever wanted to.

Within twenty-four hours, I am in Tennent Street police station with my father and a serious-looking young policeman with a moustache, called Darren. (All the RUC men have moustaches, and many of them are called Darren.) I feel more unsafe inside the RUC station than when I was cornered in a garden by the Showaddywaddy guy, because the Provos keep attacking the Tennent Street station with mortar bombs, and even though the building is surrounded by concrete and fencing nearly as tall as a peace wall, the mortars always get through. I pray the Provos haven’t planned an attack while I am giving my statement.

Constable Darren shows me black-and-white pictures of hard men, the way they do in Starsky and Hutch, except these guys are all white. None of them looks like the Showaddywaddy guy, and they all look the same to me: scowling faces, long hair and sideburns like Elvis. I conclude that all criminals have sideburns in the same way that all policemen have moustaches, and that this distinctive use of facial hair is why they find it so easy to avoid one another. I point to the one who looks most like my attacker.

‘No, he’s in the Maze, son,’ says Darren the policeman. Then he asks me if they touched me anywhere. I don’t understand the question. They stuck a gun in my back: what could be worse than that? As we leave the RUC station, my father tells me that if I should ever set eyes on those two again, I must tell him right away, and that he would ‘take care of the bastards’. I can foresee another outing for the pickaxe handle, but I’m not so sure it would do the job this time.

A few months after this, I was waiting on the Ballygomartin Road for the No. 73 bus across town. It was a slippy Saturday morning. The No. 73 said ‘Malone’ on the front, when on its way into town, and ‘Springmartin via Shankill’ on the way back. I liked the idea of being on the bus to posh Malone, where my orthodontist lived – but I wondered what the people from over there thought about having to get a rough Springmartin bus into town. But perhaps they didn’t get the bus.

I was carrying my violin case this time, instead of my dirty paperbag. My fingertips were sore from last-minute practice. I had string-imprinted fingers and coin-embossed toes! I was on my way to the School of Music for orchestra practice, the only boy from this neck of the woods to go there. I had decided never to reveal to the other second violins that I was a Shankill paperboy. Most of them were Catholic grammar-school girls, and I fancied one of them, a dark-haired girl with a cello and an Irish name I couldn’t spell. But I knew the rules: I was the wrong sort from the wrong kind of place. So I settled for a distant admiration of her vibrato. Of course, I didn’t tell the other paperboys about the School of Music, either. I knew the combination of mixing with ‘Fenians’ and playing ‘poofy’ classical music would attract double derision from them.

The bus was late. I wondered if it had been hijacked – but it was a bit early in the day for hijackers. Then, from across the deserted misty road, an old Ford Cortina pulled up abruptly in front of me. It was the Showaddywaddy guy with the gun. He just sat and stared at me. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

Old Mrs McCready from No. 25, who always got The Sunday Post, arrived beside me at the bus stop, rummaging through her old-lady-shopping trolley bag. She didn’t even notice yer man, who continued to just sit and stare at me. I wondered what he was going to do this time. I was a teenager now, with a broken voice and getting taller. I still wasn’t a fighter, but I had by now learned a fairly effective ‘hard-man’ stare myself that worked with some of the rugby-playing bullies in school. I wasn’t sure if it would work with big lads with guns, but I attempted to stare back convincingly. It is possible that carrying a violin undermined the hard- man stare, but then again, gangsters in old black-and-white movies always looked quite threatening while carrying violin cases, though of course they didn’t wear duffle coats and grammar-school scarves.

After what seemed like an endless five minutes, the Showaddywaddy guy simply sneered and drove off, giving me an ‘I-know-where-you-live’ kind of stare. However, even though I thought about him often after that, I never saw him again. The No. 73 eventually arrived, and I ‘dinged’ my ticket and sat down with my violin case on my knee, shaking a little. I could hear my bow rattling inside. I wasn’t going to tell my father. I didn’t want him to take care of yer man, because that would mean someone would then take care of my dad. That’s how it worked in Belfast. We were going nowhere – the tit-for-tat mindset reigned supreme.

As we travelled down the Shankill Road, the bus driver turned up his wireless. It was Big T on Downtown Radio – he was always on Downtown on Saturday mornings, when you were having an Ulster fry. He was playing Showaddywaddy: they were singing ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. I shivered, so I did.