Everyone loved Friday nights, as a rule. There was a lightness in the air, like on Christmas Eve and the Eleventh Night. Friday was the night you had no hateful homework. It was the night when Dad came home from the foundry, paid and happy, and he gave us boys 50p and Mum a Walnut Whip. (When he got overtime, we got a pound note each and she got a box of Milk Tray.) Friday was the night of Crackerjack at five minutes to five on BBC 1. Everyone in my street loved it, but I had to miss it. While all the other kids of my age were glued to the screen, trying to win a Crackerjack pencil – which was nearly as good as winning a Blue Peter badge – I was out in the dark, running the gauntlet of doing papers and collecting money. I was learning to make sacrifices for my career.
Growing up in the Upper Shankill, you soon learned that you were better than the people in the Lower Shankill. It was good to be better than someone somewhere. Any trouble or crime was usually blamed on ‘that dirt down the Road’. The houses were older and smaller down the Shankill – two up and two down, if you were lucky. Everyone down there was on the dole and smoked and nobody did the Eleven Plus.
We, on the other hand, lived in the Shankill’s only privately owned housing estate. So we were special. One lady on my paper round, who got a People’s Friend, always corrected you if you called it an ‘estate’. She preferred you to say a ‘private development’. We had front and back gardens in our estate, and not everyone put a flag out for the Twelfth. Our house had a phone, some of the neighbours owned shops on the Road, two of my customers had new Ford Cortinas, and a man in the next street was even a teacher.
Mrs Grant from No. 2 actually had a son at university. He had passed his Eleven Plus and gone to ‘Methody’ on the Malone Road. Mrs Grant said it was better than Belfast Royal Academy because there were no Catholics living anywhere nearby. Her son was a genius, and so he had gone to university in England. It was very important to her that everyone should know about Samuel’s academic achievements. If you ever found yourself in the queue behind Mrs Grant in the Post Office when your mother was collecting the family allowance or sending a postal order to the Great Universal Club Book, you would hear Mrs Grant ending every conversation with a noticeable increase in volume, and always with the same words: ‘Our Samuel’s still at university in England, you know.’ The whole queue would roll its eyes.
I never, ever saw Samuel. He was always at university in England, it seemed. Maybe he is still there. He was like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels. You heard a lot about him and all of his heroic achievements, but you never actually saw his face. Samuel didn’t seem to come home much, even though Mrs Grant talked such a lot about him, and her husband, Richard, was awful bad with his chest and throat and everything.
The kids in the council estate on the other side of the road called our warren of red-brick semis ‘Snob Hill’. They were jealous because we were so rich. Some of their rows of red-brick terrace houses were boarded up and we called them ‘smelly’. Of course, we were jealous of them too. They had shops and a green for their bonfire, a flute band and a community centre for paramilitaries, and the black taxis stopped right at the entrance to their estate. All we had was a telephone box, a post box and neat gardens.
Every year, one or two children from our estate, like me, passed the Eleven Plus and went to grammar school. We weren’t really supposed to. But regardless of this fact, my parents made education a priority, to the astonishing extent that passing the Eleven Plus was more important than not having a United Ireland. ‘No son of mine is going to end up in a filthy foundry like me,’ was my father’s refrain.
If doing the Eleven Plus meant that I was a snob, passing the Eleven Plus meant that I was a super snob. And going to a grammar school meant that I was Prince Charles. Yet, on my first day at Belfast Royal Academy, I would learn that I was much less of a snob than I could ever have imagined. There were not too many paperboys from the Shankill around. Not too many Shankill boys around at all, in fact. I had been an impressive angelfish in a small goldfish bowl at Springhill Primary School, but at Belfast Royal Academy I was a guppy with raggedy fins in the huge expanse of Lough Neagh. Wee hard men from the Lower Shankill delighted in reducing the Belfast Royal Academy to a breast-related acronym: ‘Have you been inside a BRA all day, ya big fruit?!’ they would shout.
It was at grammar school that I first discovered that most people made no distinction between Lower Shankill and Upper Shankill. We were all dirt.
The robbers from the Lower Shankill weren’t big-time hoods or paramilitaries. They weren’t like those Great Train Robbers or Jesse James on TV. Neither were they wee fat men in masks with black-and-white striped shirts and swag bags, like in The Beano. They were just wee hard men a few years older than me. I got stopped by them all the time. I guess I must have looked soft in my blue duffle coat and grammar-school scarf.
But, in spite of appearances, I was hard to rob. I didn’t fight. I couldn’t fight. Sure there were enough people in Belfast fighting anyway. So I just used my head instead. I kept an eye out for suspicious-looking teenage males in my streets on my patch on Friday nights. They were easy to identify. They walked like wee hard men, half march and half swagger. They wore tartan scarves and white parallel trousers and smoked.
Once I spied a suspected hood, I could disappear into the darkness through holes in familiar fences, under camouflage of garden hedges. Then, just in case my attempts at invisibility should fail, I hid the paper notes down my socks and dropped the coins down my boots. Robbers hadn’t the brains to suspect that my Doc Martens held a cash stash. They thought boots were just for kicking your head in. So, when they ordered me to empty my pockets, or else they would ‘smash my f**kin’ face in’, and when they searched my pockets for cash, they got nothing. You should have heard the victory jangle of coins in my boots as I leapt over prim Protestant hedges between semis after an attempted robbery. There was, however, a cost to my zealous protection of Oul’ Mac’s profits – painful blisters on my feet, from running on grinding ten- and fifty-pence pieces.
The worst part of being a Shankill paperboy was the constant fear that the robbers out there in the darkness would employ more violent techniques. It worried my parents too. I was under strict instructions from my father that I should inform him of any encounters with suspected robbers. I rarely did. I had worked out how to handle them myself. I used my head, like the Doctor preventing an invasion of Daleks. Instead of hand-to-hand combat, I too attempted to come up with a clever and cunning plan.
But one Friday night, it was different. The wee hood was only about sixteen, but he scared me. He wouldn’t give up. I had already done my disappearing act a couple of times. He had already stopped me once, used the obligatory ‘kick your f**kin’ head in’ threat, and made me empty my pockets. Of course the money was safely snuggled between my toes, but he took my chewing gum and my Thunderbird 2 badge. Even that didn’t seem to satisfy him, however. He kept hanging around and following me and I had to stop collecting money altogether.
The wee hood in question wasn’t much taller than me, but he was plumper, and his parallels and Doc Martens were worn. He wore his trouser legs higher up the shin than me. This was an important indicator of the level of potential threat. For girls, the higher the parallels, the bigger the millie. A ‘millie’ was a girl that smoked, said ‘f**k’ a lot and wound her chewing gum around her fingers between chews. A millie was the opposite of Sharon Burgess. They could be good craic, but you wouldn’t want to kiss one. With boys, the higher your parallels, the harder you were. My big brother’s parallels were always higher than mine. Of course, you had to be very careful. If your trouser legs went above your knees, then they just became shorts and that meant you were a fruit.
The wee hood’s