‘I hope they don’t think my Spanish guitar is a machine gun from up there!’ I suddenly thought. For a moment, I imagined a new boy having to take over my paper round the next day, delivering Belfast Telegraphs with the headline: ‘12-year-old Terrorist with Suspicious Instrument Shot Dead’. We weren’t allowed toy guns or fireworks in case they got us shot, but I had never before considered that carrying a Spanish guitar could transform me into a legitimate target. Blinded by the light and distracted by all of this catastrophising, I was unprepared for the impact.
The malicious wind blew the steel gate into my defenceless wee guitar. I heard the crack; I knew it was serious. The guitar was covered by a soft, blue pretend leather case that my aunt had bought me for my birthday. (The hard guitar cases used by professionals were too dear to be sold in the Club Book, even over sixty weeks.)This soft blue case kept the rain off my Spanish guitar, but it lacked the rigidity required to protect the vulnerable instrument from damage. I couldn’t see inside just yet, but I knew already that my precious guitar had been seriously wounded.
When I finally got indoors and saw a big crack in my guitar which ran from head to bridge, I cried. Of course, my father did his ‘fix-it’ best with glue he had borrowed from the foundry, but I had to come to terms with the fact that my guitar was permanently fractured. There was nothing I could do: it would always be split. Sadly, just like Belfast would be all my life. I yearned for things to be different, but I couldn’t envisage it any other way.
From that night on, there was a new melancholy in my rendition of ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley’. Yet somewhere in my mind I still held on to thoughts of Jeux Sans Frontières and Europe and hope. And I remembered that patience is a virtue.
Chapter 4
Secrets in School
Being a paperboy had to be a secret once I started Belfast Royal Academy, as I soon learned. Living up the Shankill, having a Ford Escort respray and a father who worked in a foundry near the Falls Road were just a few of the other facts best kept hidden. No one ever said it out loud, but I picked up the cues from the dominant rugger boys that this information was best kept discreetly folded away – like the Woman’s Own you kept at the bottom of your paperbag for the middle-aged man with dyed hair who still lived with his mammy in No. 91.
I thought I had more secrets to keep than James Bond, until I got to know Thomas O’Hara, another wee boy in my class with something to hide. I had never met any ‘O’’ anythings before. It was whispered in the playground that wee Thomas with the curly hair and freckles was, in fact, a real Catholic. This was confirmed when someone overheard him saying ‘Haitch Blocks’ instead of ‘H Blocks’. And David Pritchard, who didn’t believe in God and rebelliously refused to close his eyes during prayers in Assembly, had spotted Thomas crossing himself at the ‘Amens’. David, evidently a Protestant atheist, was appalled and told everybody.
Wee Thomas was the first Catholic I had ever spoken to, although I had once sung along with Val Doonican’s rendition of ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ from his rocking chair on BBC 1 on a Saturday night after Doctor Who. At eleven years old, I was very young to be meeting one of ‘the other sort’ for the first time. Most people in Belfast left it until they were at least eighteen, or preferably never did it at all. Titch McCracken said you could tell someone was a Catholic if their eyes were too close together, but I wasn’t convinced, because one of the other paperboys, Billy Cooper, was practically cross-eyed, but he played a flute in The Loyal Sons of Ulster Band. And you couldn’t get more Protestant than that.
I would get the biggest shock I had had since John Noakes announced he was leaving Blue Peter when remarkably – against all the odds and contrary to all that I had heard from both heaven and earth – I realised that wee Thomas O’Hara was in fact dead-on. Before this, my primary experience of Catholics had been limited to cross men on Scene Around Six who made my father shout. Of course, Dad also yelled when the Reverend Ian Paisley came on the news, which was baffling because Big Ian was the opposite of a Catholic. And while my granny said Paisley was ‘our saviour’, my father called him ‘Bucket Mouth’. All the other paperboys said, like Granny, that without Big Ian we would be ‘sold down the river’, but I could never work out where the river was. Maybe it was in Ballymena.
I made friends with wee Thomas on my first day at grammar school. Out of all the boys and girls in my class, he was the only one who wasn’t wearing a brand-new school uniform in the first week. He told me he was getting his blazer at the weekend, but when I told my mother, she said,‘God love that poor wee Catholic boy; they can’t even afford to buy the crater a uniform!’ This seemed to clash with the proud assertion I had often heard, that ‘we’re just as poor as them, you know.’
In fact, Thomas proved what I had always suspected, but would never have dared to articulate to either my paperboy peers or my Sunday school teacher: that Catholics were just the same as us! I couldn’t understand why such an astounding discovery had never made the front page of any of the Belfast Telegraphs I delivered.
Wee Thomas was one of the few people in my class who would have made a good paperboy, and he was certainly much more like me than any of the rugger boys. They made clever jokes in the rugby changing rooms about sheep and masturbation, but they never dropped a single ‘ing’. The rugger boys at school were the first people I ever heard putting a complete ‘ing’ onto the end of ‘f**k’, and it just didn’t work. They thought they were dead hard, eff-ing and blind-ing, but I thought they sounded ridiculous because I knew what real effin’ and blindin’ was. They were in their element kicking each other in a scrum, but I wondered how they would deal with hoods and robbers on a Friday night up the Shankill.
The only difference between Thomas and me was that he didn’t make a secret of who he was or where he lived. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to feel the need to keep secrets at school. Maybe my shame at not being prosperous was pure Presbyterian. Once wee Thomas and I became friends, I even learned that he was from Ardoyne, where the IRA lived. Of course, I never asked him if he wanted a United Ireland, worshipped Mary and supported the IRA. I just assumed he must be one of the ‘good ones’ who didn’t do all that.
However, one thing that I knew for sure was that wee Thomas and I shared an aspiration for something far more important than fighting between Catholics and Protestants. We were both willing to set aside all ancient rivalries for the sake of a common purpose – to dominate the pop-music charts. Along with two other school friends, me and wee Thomas decided to start a rock band. The other members of the band were Ian, who got the New Musical Express and sang in an English accent, and Stephen, who played a tambourine like David Cassidy. We wanted to be Status Quo, but we had limited talent and resources. All we had was my split Spanish guitar and an old bodhrán from Thomas’s granda’s shed. I never told my granny that I was in a band with an Irish drum, as I assumed this might be dangerous territory.
Although we tried very hard, we could never make ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley’ sound like Status Quo. We decided to copy ABBA by using the first letter of each of our names to spell out the name of the band. We would be just like Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid. However, this idea proved problematic when we realised we had Thomas on drums, a lead vocalist called Ian, Tony on lead guitar and a tambourine player called Stephen . . .
The TITS were doomed. We split up during rehearsal one day, before playing even one gig at the scout hut, when I mistakenly expressed an interest in the forthcoming Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. Ever since Pammy Wynette had told me the Rollers were coming to Belfast, I had been scouring the Belfast Telegraph announcements pages every night for news of dates and prices. My customers were even beginning to notice that I was ten minutes late every night. When, at band practice at Ian’s house one day, I casually mentioned that I was engaging in this research, the revelation exposed deep and unexpected artistic differences within the TITS. Ian was very angry. He said he was too serious about