One day, during a break from the musical massacre of one of Beethoven’s finer pieces, Patrick asked me, ‘Do you go to Belfast Royal Academy?’ His lip seemed to curl up slightly as he said the word ‘Royal’. I had never heard anyone say ‘Royal’ before without obvious deference, so I thought this was odd.
‘Aye, I go to BRA, so I do,’ I replied.
‘Are you a ... Prod?’ he pressed. Patrick seemed to have difficulty saying the word ‘Prod’, and there was that lip curl again. He seemed to be upset at me being what I was.
‘Aye,’ I replied.
‘You’re rich!’ he then squeaked, accusingly.
This was front-page news to me. I was once again con-fused. At BRA I was poor, but now at the School of Music, just like in the Upper Shankill, I was rich again. And now there was a need for yet another secret. We only met once a week at the School of Music, so I had thought that I wouldn’t need to keep any secrets – but now I realised that I would have to keep quiet about being a Shankill paperboy here too.
Patrick however knew the truth, and so he would regularly educate me on a Saturday morning. He said that his father worked at Queen’s University, and knew all about being oppressed by the Brits for hundreds of years. He said that I was an Orangeman and that as such I would be handed all the best jobs on a plate. I knew I wasn’t an Orangeman because my father kept the Sash his father wore up in the roof space, but Patrick did seem to have a point about all the best jobs, as delivering the papers for Oul’ Mac was one of the best jobs around.
One seriously savage afternoon, when all the buses were off and I was definitely going to be late for my papers, our headmaster asked an English teacher from Templepatrick (where the doctors lived) to transport a handful of us safely from the bosom of BRA to the Ballygomartin Road.
‘Where’s the Ballygomartin Road?’ asked the English teacher, to my astonishment. Okay, so it wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was only two miles up the road.
‘It’s an extension of the Shankill Road,’ replied the headmaster. It stung to hear my humble origins exposed with such authority. The English teacher’s face turned the same colour as his chalky fingers. This surprised me. I couldn’t think of a single episode of the Troubles which involved English teachers from Templepatrick being regarded as legitimate targets on the Shankill Road. In Belfast, legitimate targets were more likely to be taxi drivers and milkmen.
The English teacher looked edgy as we crammed into his spotless hatchback, which had Jane Austen on the back seat and a Radio 4 play on the radio. I definitely smelled sweat as he drove us up the Road. He was never this twitchy when teaching us about the war poets, but he put me in mind of those lines from Wilfred Owen when I noticed his ‘hanging face, like a devil’s, sick of sin’. He was only driving us up the Shankill Road: he wasn’t being gassed in the trenches! As the teacher in question transported us silently, I imagined the paperboy from his area, sitting snugly on a brand-new Chopper bike, and presenting him with a pristine copy of The Times. I was sure that his kids in Templepatrick would be getting Eleven Plus practice papers instead of the Whizzer and Chips.
The entrance to our estate was up a dark muddy lane. The mothers had been campaigning for a proper road on UTV, but it was still just a mucky path. On one side of the lane was the Girls’ Secondary School and on the other side was the Boys’ Secondary School. Most of the Shankill went there at eleven years old when they failed the Eleven Plus. Neither school was renowned for academic achievement. My mother always said it was a good thing I hadn’t failed my Eleven Plus, because I would have been ‘eaten alive in there’. My English teacher must have had similar concerns of being cannibalised as he drove up that dirty dark lane, sandwiched between two staunch secondary schools, for he proceeded with extreme caution. It was like the Doctor leaving the TARDIS for the first time, having just materialised on a strange alien planet.
As he drove along the lane slowly, the teacher at last cut the silence to say, ‘This looks like the sort of place they take you in the dark to put a bullet in your head!’
His passengers laughed instantly, but only very briefly, because he didn’t join in. We thought he was joking, but of course he wasn’t. I, for one, felt offended, and the following year, I resented the same man through every page of Pygmalion. Of course, I knew from the front page of the papers every day that people like me and Thomas were getting bullets in their heads just for being Catholics or Protestants from the wrong sort of place. But this was the sort of place I came from, this sort of place was my home, and this was the sort of place where I determinedly delivered forty-eight Belfast Telegraphs each night in the darkness.
Chapter 5
A Rival Arrives
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