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.
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.’