Mr Rowing also promised me new songs at Christmas. I yearned to learn ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ by Slade, but he taught me ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Away in a Manager’. Although my guitar-playing skills progressed and my ambition was limitless, sadly my repertoire never really escaped from the 1960s.
Pamela Burnside was always in just before me on a Friday night. Pamela’s parents were big fans of country and western. They had a signed photo of ‘Big T’ from Downtown Radio on their mantelpiece. Mr Burnside had a Kenny Rogers beard and a snake belt, and he sold second-hand cars down the Road. My mother said he was a real cowboy. Pamela’s mum had the longest hair on the Shankill – like Crystal Gayle – and she sang ‘Amazing Grace’ in an American accent and wore cowboy boots at the Annual Beetle Drive for Biafran babies in the church hall. The Burnsides and their small white poodle wore Union Jack stetsons on the Twelfth of July, and they wanted their daughter Pamela to be Tammy Wynette. They made her wear a suede country-and-western jacket with a fringe on the arms that got caught in the spokes of her bike. I’m fairly certain she would have preferred a Bay City Rollers T-shirt like everybody else. Anyway, she just didn’t have the kind of talent needed to be the next Tammy Wynette.
Every Friday night, as I waited my turn in Mrs Rowing’s living room, I could just about make out from the next room the muffled sound of Pamela’s desperate attempts at ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley’. She rarely got the one chord change right, and I would hear Mr Rowing saying kindly, ‘Yes, that’s getting better now’ – although it clearly wasn’t.
Tom Dooley must have died a million times in Mr Rowing’s sitting room on those Friday nights. Poor Pamela always emerged from her lesson red-faced and fearful. I could tell that she felt ashamed of her poor performance and knew rightly that she was dreading the inevitable inquiry into her progress with the plectrum which awaited her at home. Pamela still couldn’t manage ‘Tom Dooley’, yet she knew only too well that her doggedly optimistic parents were already expecting her to deliver the musical complexities of ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’.
As I waited in the living room for my lesson, thinking up excuses for not having practised enough during the week just past, I would watch It’s a Knockout on the 1960s black-and-white push-button television. I usually longed for Pammy Wynette’s lesson to overrun so that I would get to watch an extra five minutes of Jeux Sans Frontières, as the French called it. But Mr Rowing was always merciful enough to Pamela to ensure that the lesson was not drawn out any longer than necessary.
Jeux Sans Frontières was like the Eurovision Song Contest without the songs. It was live by satellite from a football pitch in Belgium. I was astounded at how they beamed the pictures from Europe to Belfast via outer space. It was like when a Klingon from an enemy ship on the other side of a space anomaly was able to speak to Captain Kirk on the big screen on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. I was fascinated by the sound of Continental cheers, the whistles and horns and the spectacle of Germans, French and Italians and others in comical costumes, falling over each other as they fought for victory in Europe. I thought it odd that thirty years earlier these nations had been slaughtering one another. My granny still wasn’t too keen on Germans. Any mention of Germany evoked a tirade of abuse about ‘that oul’ brute, Hitler!’ According to her, he was worse than Gerry Adams. Now these former enemies were having ridiculous races in giant clown costumes to the tinny satellite echoes of hysterical laughter from Stuart Hall, the jovial presenter – and all in the name of light-entertainment television. ‘Patience is a virtue’, I thought.
I had a small Spanish guitar. It had been my first really grown-up Christmas present – that is, not from Santa. It had cost twenty weeks at 99p from the Club Book. Okay, it wasn’t a red star-shaped electric guitar like on Top of the Pops, and I couldn’t imagine Marc Bolan playing it – but I loved my guitar. It was in many ways like my first girlfriend, Sharon Burgess: it never felt cold when I embraced it or rested my chin on its shoulder.
My guitar was a honeyed yellow colour, with a simple dotted line design around the edges. It retained a lovely smell of wood and fresh varnish. At first, the strings made painful impressions on the fingers of my right hand. I was left-handed – like Paul McCartney – but we couldn’t afford an expensive left-handed guitar, so I got a right-handed one, restrung the other way round. Hence I always appeared to be playing my guitar upside down, with my plectrum guard above, rather than below, the blows of my energetic strumming. My big regrets were that I was neither Paul McCartney, nor right-handed, nor rich.
Eventually, just as the Germans were playing their Joker Card to win extra points in a raft race in gorilla suits, my absorption was interrupted by the sound of Pammy Wynette being gently escorted from the premises by an exhausted-looking Mr Rowing. Pammy generally ignored me, ever since we had fallen out at the bonfire one year, when I had said that country and western was for oul’ lads and oul’ dolls. But on this evening, as she said her apologies and goodbyes to Mr Rowing, she turned back towards me with vital information.
‘It said on Radio Luxembourg last night that the Bay City Rollers is comin’ to Belfast,’ she pronounced, with the look of superiority that could only come from being the bearer of such exclusive, fresh and earth-shattering information.
‘Brilliant!’ I exclaimed. ‘Are yousens goin’?’
‘Aye,’ Pamela responded. ‘Are yousens?”
‘Aye,’ I replied excitedly.
The word ‘yousens’ in this context referred to oneself and all of one’s friends. It was clear that most of the teenage population of the Upper Shankill would be going to this great event. Tickets would be like gold dust, and tartan material would be at a premium.
As I entered Mrs Rowing’s good room for my lesson, I dreamed of playing guitar on stage with the Rollers. It seemed promising when Mr Rowing said that he would begin to teach me a new, ‘more up-to-date’ number. Yet I was once again disappointed: it was ‘Love Me Tender’ by the pre-fat Elvis! Yet again, an old-fashioned song from the sixties that only old people liked and that most people would soon forget, instead of a modern classic, like ‘Shang-a-Lang’. However, I got my Cs and Fs and Ds in the right order, and Mr Rowing appreciated my talent so much that I got an extra fifteen minutes. I was his last student of the night, because I had to finish collecting the paper money and avoid hoods and robbers on a Friday night – and so no one was ever waiting through the final minutes of It’s a Knockout for me to finish. As a result of this fact, and Mr Rowing’s good nature and genuine enthusiasm, I often got an extra fifteen minutes for my 20 pence.
After my extended guitar lesson at the Rowings’ that windy winter night, I ran the short distance home through the spitting rain, with the tune of ‘Love Me Tender’ repeating itself irritatingly in my head. I sped past Titch McCracken, who was desperately trying to light a sly cigarette in the wind behind Mrs Patterson’s hydrangea. Overhead droned a noisy British Army helicopter, keeping an eye on West Belfast.
Before the Troubles, I had never seen a real helicopter, apart from the one that Skippy the Bush Kangaroo on UTV would alert to save a boy who had fallen down an abandoned mine shaft in Australia. But now helicopters were an ever-present whirr, looking down on us, their searchlights shining on targeted streets to illuminate any wrongdoing. This heavenly Super Trouper was in fact one of the more enjoyable experiences of 1970s Belfast – at least for me, and other boys like me. The boom of bombs pummelled the marrow in my growing bones. The deadly staccato sound of gunfire ripped at my tender heart. But the night-time sight of a helicopter searchlight rushing up your street until you were standing in quasi-daylight was as exhilarating as the rollercoaster at Barry’s on the Sunday school excursion to Bangor! It was the most exciting thing to go up our