One of the best things about growing up in the Upper Shankill was that you could go ‘up the fields’. This was the end of Belfast, where urban sprawl met threatened countryside. However, for us, up the fields represented much more than just a glimpse of pastoral beauty. It was up the fields that my father had fled as a boy when Hitler bombed Belfast. Thousands camped out in those fields during the Blitz. Then I was told that up the fields would be our escape route too, should the IRA burn us out to get rid of the last Protestants from West Belfast. I imagined choosing which of my James Bond Corgi cars and Doctor Who annuals to carry with me the night the IRA would burn our house down. I pictured a wee Catholic boy called Seamus using my paperbag and delivering The Irish News and the RTÉ Guide the next day.
So ‘up the fields’ was a safe haven. But there was adventure and a sense of danger there too. One remaining farm perched above our estate. It was a declining rural remnant of another era. The farmer there resented the runny-nosed children with Belfast accents. No doubt we personified for him the cheek of the encroaching city. It was this farmer’s fields that presented so much excitement to us, for there were risks attached to going up the fields. You could be chased by the angry farmer himself, or his incensed bull – which was rumoured to have killed a wee boy once. If you went too far into the fields above the north or the west of the city, then you could be chased by vengeful Celtic supporters coming across the mountain from Ligoniel or New Barnsley. There were no peace walls up the mountain yet, so you never knew how safe you were. Every trip up the fields was an adventure.
In the lower fields, we collected bucketloads of blackberries every year. Our fingers would be stained with a fusion of blackberry juice and blood from thorn pricks. I became an expert blackberry picker. It was like delivering papers, only in reverse: instead of emptying a large canvas bag, you filled up a small plastic bag. After years of practice, I could spot the perfect blackberry, ripe for the picking. If the berry was bulging black, it would burst in your fingers and be lost in a juicy mess – my fingers would be stained black. If a berry was too green, it would be immovable, and its thorns would prick your fingers until they bled. My fingers would be stained red. The perfect ripe blackberry was halfway between the two. After a day of successful blackberry-picking and paper delivery, my fingers would be a healthy hue of dark purple. The mothers of the estate would fill jam jars with their homemade blackberry jam. Up the fields was also the place where we plundered frogspawn and newts from the few remaining mountain streams and introduced them to life in the same jam jars, once we had emptied them for a piece and jam.
Every July, we built the bonfire on the lower field. I would spend hours going round the doors for wood. My customers were most generous. If I had delivered the papers proficiently through the winter months, I would be rewarded with ample flammable material come July. The main donations were small broken crates and sticks and cut-down hydrangea bushes, but the most generous donors gave us whole back doors, broken guiders and old wardrobes. My main bonfire duties, apart from wood collection, were building the ‘boney’ and guarding it at night with the older boys.
Building a boney was an intricate task. We spent hours getting the base right, so that it would not collapse as the wood piled up. I have no doubt that we learned more about physics and engineering at the boney than in school. A passing dad would do the occasional safety inspection, and now and again a mum would bring us juice and Jammie Dodgers as we rested from our labours in the sunshine. Rival bonfire gangs in neighbouring streets were a constant threat: if they got through your defences and lit your boney before the Eleventh Night, you would have to endure a whole year of taunts and humiliation. And so guarding duties were very important, and we would build a wee guardhouse in the centre of the bonfire in which to sleep at night. I would get very upset every July because my parents never allowed me to sleep inside the bonfire. How unreasonable of them!
Some summer days I was so distracted by my duties at the boney that I almost forgot about my primary occupation – the papers – unless I heard the distant roar of Oul’ Mac’s van, or Mrs McDonnell, who got a Beano and a Dandy for her grandchildren, popped her head through the bushes and asked, ‘Are there no papers the night, love?’ Then I would dash to the van, heart beating fast, fearing an imminent disciplinary procedure from Oul’ Mac.
I loved the Eleventh Night. You would sometimes get a tip from the Orangemen customers, the ones who always put their flags out. On that night, their faces would seem to light up like a bonfire too. The preparation and the atmosphere up the fields was in fact far more enjoyable than watching marching bands the next day, playing boring old-fashioned music that you never heard on Top of the Pops. I used to climb up the fields every Eleventh Night and watch the warm glow of bonfires all over Belfast, when weeks of hard work would go up in glorious smoke in the space of a few hours. I remember the smell of damp wood smoking and foil-covered potatoes baking. There was no underage drinking, and no burning of tyres or Irish tricolours at our ‘boney’. Apparently, it was the ‘dirt down the Road’ who did that.
The upper fields of the Black Mountain were more remote and mysterious than those nearest to us. I remember my father returning once from a walk up there with a prehistoric flint arrowhead, like in my school history book. He said there was a ‘something-o-lithic’ quarry up there. I imagined a colony of surviving cavemen, hiding out in undiscovered caves above us. Some people also said that’s where the UDA had their meetings.
The first day I climbed to the top of the Black Mountain, it was almost as exciting as Thunderbird 3 taking off from Tracy Island. I was both exhilarated and exhausted. As I hiked up to the higher fields with my cousin Mark, I imagined I was climbing Mount Everest, like Sir Edmund Thingummy. After hours of tramping through ‘cows’ clap’ and mud, over hawthorn bush and painful bramble and through unfamiliar heather and moss, we arrived at the top.
I was the whole way up the fields for the first time ever! I was thrilled: the views were breathtaking and spectacular. I could see all of Belfast: the dome of the City Hall where old men argued; the Co-op Superstore still smouldering in York Street; the big Samson and Goliath cranes in the shipyard where the good jobs were; the unknown enemy territory of Ardoyne. I could see across Belfast Lough, to where the rich people lived, before you got to the caravan in Millisle, and in the distance I could even see where the Mountains of Mourne swept down to the slot machines, candy floss and ‘kiss-me-quick’ hats. From this vantage point, you could see across the peace lines to strange alien places you had never been – like in Star Trek, except that, unlike Captain James T. Kirk, you would never boldly go where no one from your side had gone before.
However, the greatest sight of all from the top of the mountain was the massive Divis television transmitter that gave us the BBC and was on the news regularly for being repaired or bombed. It was famous – a single celebrity tower on the top of Belfast. Soldiers guarded the transmitter, like it was their boney, so you couldn’t get too near, but it was still impressive to me to be close to something so powerful. (The BBC was very posh and authoritative, though none of the politicians seemed to like it. Even the newsreaders from Northern Ireland spoke with strange English accents: they pronounced every ‘ing’, but didn’t pronounce their ‘r’s. They would say we were listening to ‘Radio Ulstah’, or watching ‘BBC Nawthan Ahland’).
There was one day in particular up the fields that I would never forget. It was a spring day, and I was up there with my big brother, collecting dandelion leaves for Snowball, the obese albino rabbit. On the way back down the lower fields, we met Roberta and Mandy, two wee girls from our estate, who were happily taking turns on the rope swing.
Roberta Ross and Mandy Brown were two older girls who lived in the next street and who both still got Bunty, even though they were of Jackie age. Their street was the one that led you up the fields: it was on a steep hill, so it was hard work to carry bonfire wood up there in the summer, but great fun to slide down on the lid of a biscuit tin in the winter. The rope swing the girls were playing on was slung from the tallest tree in the lowest field. It was far more exciting than the ageing, vandalised playground swings in Woodvale Park. (The park used to have a wonderfully sickening roundabout and a cold steel slide as well, but it all got wrecked in the Troubles.) Meanwhile, up the fields, this magnificent swing was like something from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Made of thick strong rope borrowed by a dad from the shipyard, it had a huge knot at the bottom to sit on. When you fell off the tree swing, you usually ended up in the Royal for stitches.
Roberta’s father was a milkman who got up very early in the morning, and Mandy’s mother took Keep Fit with plump pensioners in the church hall. Mandy fancied my big brother, so the two wee girls giggled as we approached them at the swing. My big brother provoked a lot of reactions in me, but giggling wasn’t one of them. I just couldn’t understand girls.
‘Hiya!’ said Mandy, swinging happily. Roberta giggled.
‘’Bout ye?’ said my big brother. He spat out his Wrigley’s in a very manly way.
‘Mandy fancies you!’ announced Roberta indiscreetly.
My big brother did not reply directly. Instead, he picked up a small stone and fired it at the bough of the tree, knocking off a small piece of bark. Mandy jumped a little, but looked impressed. Throwing stones was a sign of virility in West Belfast.
Roberta and Mandy weren’t cheeky or millies, so I thought they would be easy to impress. I picked up a slightly larger stone and also threw it at the poor, embattled tree. My aim wasn’t as good as my big brother’s, so I missed the tree, and Mandy had to duck as my stone flew past her head into the field, missing its target by several miles. The two girls giggled again. This giggle had a different tone to the one they had given in response to my big brother, though. He was a genius at aiming footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls and stones. I was only good at aiming newspapers through letterboxes.
As if to consolidate my humiliation, my big brother then picked up a large, impressive piece of cement from the remains of last year’s boney. There was still white ash on it, which covered his hands and his Wrangler jacket. Although he now looked like Auntie Mabel after she had been mixing flour to make buns for the soldiers, the girls still looked at him respectfully. No mocking giggles for my big brother. He hurled the lump of cement with both hands, and the projectile ploughed into the bough of the tree and knocked off several small and hopeless green shoots. The rope swing shuddered, and Mandy seemed to shudder too at this display of masculinity. I knew instinctively that it was my turn. Not to be outdone, I looked around the debris of last year’s bonfire. There were some rusty springs that were all that remained of the old mattress that Mrs Porter had given us when her husband died, but I realised that these would be too small to make an impact.
‘What’s that you’ve got in your pocket?’ asked Mandy, who had suddenly noticed the dandelion leaves falling out of the pockets of my parallels.
‘It’s dandelion leaves for our Snowball, so it is,’ I replied innocently. The giggling erupted once more.
‘Dandelion leaves make you wet the bed, ya know, wee boy,’ taunted Mandy. There then ensued a musical chorus of ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed’, and eventually my traitorous big brother joined in: ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed, wet the bed … ’
It didn’t make sense. How could a weed from up the fields impact on my bladder function while I was in my bed? Maybe I had missed that page in my biology book. Maybe that’s what made Snowball pee on his straw so much. I hadn’t wet the bed for years, although I had recently spilled some Lucozade on the sheets when I was in bed with the chickenpox. Anyway, now I understood why my big brother wasn’t carrying any dandelion leaves in his pockets. He had plucked dozens of leaves, but they had all been stuffed into my pockets. I was clearly intended to be the beast of burden for all potentially embarrassing materials. I was the ass for kicking.
By this stage, I was becoming desperate to save face. I needed a big stone, and I needed one now. I suddenly spied a red brick from last year’s bonfire debris. It had been used to hold down the sides of our tent the night before the Eleventh Night, when I had been allowed to sleep beside the boney (rather than inside it). I lifted the heavy half-brick and flung it at the tree. Once again, however, it missed its intended destination, and once again Mandy had to duck. As she fell off the swing into the ashy dust below, the red brick continued on its tragic trajectory and hit poor Roberta Ross on the head. ‘Oh f**k!’ said my big brother and disappeared into the distance in an instant, like a summarily sacked paperboy.
Mandy was now lying on the ground, holding her scratched leg and crying. Roberta looked up at me with a trickle of blood on her forehead, and, as she stared at me, the water came to her eyes too. I had red brick on my hands.
I froze on the spot. I had made two wee girls cry. I had made two wee girls bleed! I was in trouble. This was the worst thing I had ever done in my life – worse even than stealing sweetie mice from the youth-club tuck shop when the minister’s wife’s back was turned to open a new box of Tayto Cheese & Onion. I felt guilt and fear in equal measure. And I was ashamed.
‘You’re dead!’ shouted Mandy.
I couldn’t disagree.
‘Her Da is gonna kill you!’ she continued.
Not if my Da kills me first, I thought.
What had happened to me? I had turned from rabbit nurturer to terrorist in seconds!
Roberta just looked at me pitifully and cried, until the blood and tears blended on her cheeks. She didn’t shout or scream or call me a ‘cheeky wee bastard’ or anything – and that just made it worse.
What am I going to do? I thought. I had to consider the right course of action. Roberta’s da was a milkman, so he was probably a hard man because milkmen were legitimate targets. But it was the afternoon, so he was probably in bed right now … Having evaluated all of my options, I took a moral decision. I ran away.
I didn’t set foot in that wee girl’s street for two years after this, in case her da got me. I had to find an alternative route to the July bonfire through Mr Beattie’s hedge, and I missed a whole winter season of street-sliding on my biscuit-tin lid. I had a recurring nightmare of Roberta’s da coming to our front door with an angry face, shaking a milk bottle in my face and threatening to split my head like his wee girl’s. But it never came to pass. Any hope, however, of a career progression from paperboy to milk boy was shattered.
Interestingly, my big brother displayed great loyalty, by not revealing any of the details of the assault to my parents, so I got off with it. I felt guilty though. I still feel guilty. But somehow I learned something that day up the fields. The bloodied face of Roberta Ross was unforgettable. I worked out that I didn’t want to do anything like that ever again. Sure, there were enough people drawing blood in Belfast, and too many of them seemed to enjoy it. So I chose a different path – the path of the pacifist paperboy. It all happened up the fields. The same fields where I watched peace from a distance, in 1976.
It was 28 August, and there had been no big stories or elections for a while, just the usual marches and murders. While the papers were usually a bit lighter in the summer, on this day there were shoulder-breaking extra pages. Oul’ Mac had arrived late with the delivery because the crowds were still causing a traffic jam on the Shankill Road. Although he was shouting and saying ‘f**k’ even more than usual, there was no danger of Oul’ Mac’s van being hijacked today. For this was the day that the Catholic women of the Falls Road would walk across the Peace Line and when the Protestant women of the Shankill Road would join them to walk together for peace. This was unheard of.
I first stumbled upon the suggestion that this miracle might actually happen on a recent front page of one of my Belly Tellys. I was so shocked when I read this news that I stopped still on the pavement mid-delivery and my paperbag dropped off my shoulder, landing perilously close to a recent dirty deposit made by Petra, our street’s now legendary labrador.
I wasn’t used to miracles. Protestants and Catholics didn’t mix deliberately, unless they were rioting at the Peace Line, or arguing on Scene Around Six; unless there were petrol bombs or politicians present. We weren’t allowed to live in the same street; we weren’t allowed to go to school together; we weren’t allowed to get married; and we even got blown up in different pubs. And, after that, we would be buried in different graveyards. My granda’s family were buried in an old cemetery that was divided between the two sides: when I went to visit my dead relatives, I noticed there were no Virgin Marys on our side of the cemetery. I wondered if the corpses were building peace walls underground, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t matter quite so much down there.
Of course, sometimes Catholics and Protestants couldn’t avoid ending up in the same place together – like when all the kids from the Falls and the Shankill had to go to the Cupar Street Clinic to get a polio vaccination. In the waiting room, the mothers would talk away to each other like everything was all right, agree that it was terrible what was going on, so it was, and that it was a small minority on both sides that was causing all the trouble, so it was. They would not dare to get any more specific, for fear there would be an unhealthy exchange in a clinic with such large needles present. But although we queued together for polio injections on the Peace Line, that wasn’t the same as marching together for peace in public. You were supposed to march against them, not with them!
On that sunny August day, the front page of the Belfast Telegraph had a picture showing our mountain, the Black Mountain, rising behind a 25,000 strong throng of widely flared women in Woodvale Park. In the same picture, I could make out the trees in the park where my name was carved alongside that of Sharon Burgess. Elton John and Kiki Dee were at No.1, but it seemed possible now that Sharon might go breaking my heart anyway. In the grainy image on the front page of my papers, I could also see the fields on the slopes of the Black Mountain in the background, where, only a few hours ago, I had sat and watched the huge rally for peace. I had been a tiny dot up there behind it all.
Most of the women in our street, including my mother, had decided to go to the rally. My mother said she would know some of the Catholic women from the Falls Road, because she used to sew with them before the Troubles. The few women in our street who stayed behind that day were the ones who believed that God or the man they voted for – or both – would disapprove of marching for peace with Catholics, or ‘Roman Catholics’, as Mrs Piper called them. She always corrected you for saying ‘Catholic’, which was almost as wicked as saying ‘Derry’ instead of ‘Londonderry’. But for a brief interval that summer, the Mrs Pipers were the minority.
Of course, most of the men stayed at home. It seemed that peace was women’s work. Manning vigilante barricades, hijacking buses and joining the UDA was for my gender. Titch McCracken said you were only a real Ulsterman if you were prepared to fight and die to keep Ulster British. I was prepared to defend the earth from an alien invasion, but that was as far as I was willing to go.
As I climbed up the fields that day, I wondered why a boy could only watch peace. Reaching the higher fields, I was amazed at the sight of the crowds in Woodvale Park that afternoon, and moved by the sound of singing and cheering. A strange mix of laughter and the refrain of ‘Abide with Me’ was bouncing off the Black Mountain that day. This was unbelievable.
Unexpectedly, I found myself weeping. I was used to the echo of bomb blasts and gunfire. Were we really capable of this? It seemed a lot harder than fighting. This was the answer. The Troubles would be over soon. One day the killing would stop. There would be no more bombs at the shops and no more soldiers on the streets. And everyone would agree that all the fighting had been a waste of life. I was living in hope, so I was.