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.
I strummed ‘This Little Light of Mine’ with all my heart and determination, and the choir kept up admirably. A man at the back of the church started to clap his hands in time with the rhythm. If this had happened at home, a fat lady with a tweed beret would have turned around and shushed him, and he would have had to stop. But clapping wasn’t a sin in the Church of Scotland, it seemed.
It was all going very well until we came to the final verse, when we cleverly adapted the lyrics: ‘Shine all over Scotland, I’m gonna let it shine.’ In the excitement, I overdid it, breaking my ‘E’ string and dropping my plectrum. I had to finish using my thumb, because I had bitten all my nails for a recent Chemistry exam. However, when we finished the song, the whole congregation broke out into a spontaneous applause. I had never heard applause in a church before: I had always thought that God didn’t do clapping.
Finally, it was time for our most accomplished work, ‘Any Dream Will Do’. It was a song from a musical about Joseph with an amazing Technicolor dreamcoat. There was even a story in the Bible based on it. ‘Any Dream Will Do’ always got us the biggest applause. The youth-club choir didn’t generally do four-part harmony like the school choir, but we could do quite complicated pieces like ‘Any Dream Will Do’, where the boys sang the lines ‘I closed my eyes’, and the girls echoed with an ‘Ah-a-ah’. The girls sang their ‘Ah-a-ahs’ in a Belfast accent. No one could go up at the end of a sentence better than a Belfast girl. Our audiences usually adored this musical intricacy, so we often sang this song as our final piece and as an encore.
We could feel our Scottish audience’s sense of expectation grow as our finale drew close. So, when Uncle Henry raised his hands and smiled, getting us ready for the opening bars of the song, there was a hushed atmosphere in the pews of St Philip’s. We smiled back in silent harmony: our smiles reflected a quiet assurance that this was going to be good. Uncle Henry counted us in, and then we were off to a harmonious start. Carried away by the music and the atmosphere, I imagined I was Joseph with a Technicolor Harrington jacket and my own pyramid in the desert because, like him, I was a dreamer too. However, disaster was just around the corner, like Oul’ Mac’s van had been the day he ran over Mrs Grant’s pussy.
Nobody else knew that some of the girls, who normally led the ‘Ah-a-ahs’ so beautifully, had smuggled a bottle of Scottish whisky into the girls’ dormitory the night before. Nobody knew they had only managed two hours’ sleep. Nobody else knew that they were teetering in the twilight zone between still drunk and hungover. Our fate was sealed.
‘I closed my eyes … ’
‘… I closed my eyes’ – It was lovely.
‘Pulled back the curtain ...’
‘… Aaaaaaah huh’
Uncle Henry’s smile disappeared as fast as a cat in a hedge being chased by Petra.
‘To see for certain …’
‘Ugh aaa … Aaaaaaah huh’ – It was horrible. The girls began to giggle.
‘That was ballicks!’ whispered Philip Ferris, much too loudly. The boys began to laugh.
Uncle Henry wasn’t laughing. The congregation wasn’t laughing. Scotland was not amused. I felt my face go redder and redder. We were rude and disrespectful wee hooligans from Belfast! They had paid for us to come here and sing to them, and we had messed it up with drink as usual! It was humiliating.
I vainly attempted to rescue the next ‘Ah-a-ah’, but it was too high for me because my voice was breaking. My big brother gave me a dig in the ribs and whispered ‘Fruit!’ much too loudly.
It was too late. We had fallen apart. ‘Any Dream Will Do’ had become a nightmare. We had travelled hundreds of miles over land and sea for this performance, and we had fallen on our faces at the last hurdle. The Scottish minister rushed the benediction, bringing the awful embarrassment to a blessed end.
In spite of our collapse, the Scottish Presbyterians were most forgiving: they still cried and gave us big hugs when we were leaving. It was as if we were going back to somewhere terrible, to our certain deaths.
When we finally returned to Belfast after another long journey – which included yet another evacuation of the contents of my stomach into the Irish Sea – I was relieved and glad to be home, so I was. My new Harrington jacket was crumpled and smelly, but I was happy to be back to familiar things, like homework and marbles, army Saracens and my paper round. The eventful trip to Edinburgh had whet my appetite for wider horizons, but it also confirmed to me that no matter what the rest of the world thought about us, there was something I loved about home.