Joe Graham is very good company, which was just as well because I arrived thinking that we would chat for an hour and eventually staggered out of his front door ten hours later. He began by sharing his memories of growing up in Ballymurphy, a housing estate in west Belfast, built after the war. Ballymurphy is now an urbanized republican area, but back then it was a mixed area on the edge of open country. Graham remembers: ‘We were the last houses before the countryside. The mountains came right down on us. The big mill dam. The water was crystal. Two rounds of bread, a milk bottle of cold tea, and away you went up into the mountains. All the local kids. Ten of you, you didn’t know who was who, running about, swimming. There was an old mill, and the part that housed the big wheel was the dungeon. It was a beautiful thing of childhood – but every now and again you’d get a reminder, and you were acute enough to take it.’
He describes a reminder: ‘One beautiful sunny morning when I was 11 I went up the street. All my mates were Protestant, because all our street was Protestant except us. So I went to wee Billy Smith’s house, and Mrs Smith said to me, “He’s away out, Joe, son.” I said, “Dead on.” The same thing happened at the next house. Then, at Jimmy Reilly’s house, I knocked on the back door: no answer. His Aunt Tilly was at work, but Jimmy and his wee sister should have been there. Where were they all? So I ran down the dividing fence to the garden next door. Just as I vaulted over the fence into that garden, I saw the curtains flicker in Jimmy’s bedroom. So I came back over the fence, climbed on top of the coal shed, leaned over and banged Jimmy’s bedroom window. He opened it – and it was all the boys sitting there, red, white, and blue everywhere. “What the fuck’s going on?” “Joe! Joe! Get off!” they said to me. So I jumped down and stood in the garden, until Jimmy came down. He said, “We’re going to let you in, but for God’s sake, don’t let my dad know.” “Why? What’s going on?” “We’re making flags!” There was a big football match at Windsor Park, the Six Counties versus England – so they were on a winner either way. I went up into the bedroom and there were thousands of these mini Union Jacks, and the boys were on a couple of pennies each to staple them together. But that wee Fenian bastard Graham wasn’t to be seen about the place. Hurtful. Because these were my best mates. Hurtful. But I helped them to staple these things. And then, in turn, I said, “Don’t tell my mummy and daddy I helped with these…” But it meant fuck all. Even now, it would mean fuck all. A man trying to make a few quid for his family selling Union Jacks? So what? But the sad thing was that in doing so, he hurt a child. He marked a child – and he did no good to the Protestant kids, because they – in adulthood – must feel guilty.’
For Graham the divide was often emphasized casually but firmly nonetheless. ‘I went to St John’s School. At the foot of the street there was a huge industrial complex belonging to James Mackie, who employed 99.9 per cent Protestants. You were playing on that street during lunch break and the workers were coming out to go to their dinner, you would get a cold, icy look, as if you weren’t there. Yet local people would rub your head fondly. “Hello, wee man. How you doing? Are you being good today?” There was that difference. That coldness from the other people. You were aware that this place was totally split.’
Graham, and others like him, could sometimes take advantage of the split. ‘We’d get up in the morning to buy pigs’ feet. We would hoof them and singe them, we would scrub them and cook them, and me and Paddy would sell them around the bars. But not on the Falls Road! These people had no work and the Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday. So we went down the Shankill, the Old Lodge Road, Sandy Row, where all the Protestants who had shillings lived, and we sold the pigs’ feet in the bars down there. That was an education. To get a shilling for pigs’ feet, we had to go to these people.’
In 1953, the year of her coronation, the Queen visited Belfast. Graham can remember buses of unionists coming down to the Springfield Road, where a big banner was placed across the road and Union flags flew everywhere. ‘It was so British,’ says Graham, ‘you’d have thought you were in the Midlands.’ But for Graham’s family 1953 had a different significance: ‘It was the anniversary of the 1803 rebellion, and I watched my father going up the stairs with a long pole. He went into the girls’ bedroom and set it across the bed, and he opened a wee cubby-hole and he took out the national flag. It was the first time I’d been so close to the national flag, and he set about pinning it onto the pole. Then he got a cable and a lightbulb, and pinned it onto the top of the pole, and put it all out through the bedroom window. I thought it was a carnival thing – but within two hours, the cops were belting up the street in their sedans, demanding that he take it down. My father was a very sedate, serious countryman, and he said that the flag would be flying tonight, and it would be taken down tomorrow morning. By then the Protestants had all gathered, and some were standing in the garden. I’ll always remember the cop, a big, ginger-haired bastard, saying, “That’s a foreign flag! It’ll have to come down!” “Why does it have to come down?” “We’ve got reports that people are offended.” My father asked our neighbour Mrs Rossbottom, “Are you offended?” “Not at all, Jim!” But some of the Protestants started getting angry and shouting at the cop, and my father said, “Why are youse all offended? Have you come all the way from the Springfield Road to be offended?” In the end they left, and the flag flew. That was the first flag that flew in Ballymurphy – and it flew with the grace of the Protestant neighbours. There was no ill intent towards the house.’
Graham speaks of having an acute awareness of inequality as he was growing up: ‘We Catholics did get a raw deal by design. They planned it so, but in planning it, they made it “us and them”.’ It annoys him that today there are those who rewrite history to make out that things were fine before the Troubles started. ‘There was nothing bright and beautiful about being a Catholic living in these six counties. There were things that took away your heritage. Things like the Special Powers Act. We weren’t allowed to have a rebel song LP. It was confiscated, you were charged. You weren’t allowed to read certain newspapers; if you were caught in possession of the United Irishman – an eight-page newspaper – you could have got two years in prison. If you had a bit of money found in the house, money to buy a horse and cart to create a livelihood, had the peelers come in at any time and found that, that would have been confiscated. It could have been seen as having a political purpose. You couldn’t display the national flag – yet theirs could be thrust in our faces 24 hours a day.’
It is interesting to compare Joe Graham’s recollections with those of Gusty Spence, a one-time member of the UVF, who served a life sentence for the 1966 killing of Peter Ward, a Catholic barman. Spence subsequently repudiated violence to become a loyalist politician and advocate of the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he gave to Bobbie Hanvey, he describes his youthful attitude to Catholics: ‘Catholics had horns and were in some way inferior to Protestants. We were always led to believe this. At the back of your mind, you knew that it was wrong – but at the same time you lived in that grime and squalor that we lived in, and it was good to feel superior, even at the expense of another human being.’
When he left school Spence started work in a linen mill, where he came into contact with Catholics for the first time. He met a Catholic boy named Jimmy, who talked to him about Irish history. Jimmy told him that the United Irishmen were Protestant. ‘I had no knowledge, and of course, I thought he was telling lies.’ The two young men used to go swimming together in a Catholic area: ‘Jimmy and I had something in common. We both had tattoos. He had a tricolour on his arm, and I had a Union Jack on my arm. Falls Road baths had good facilities for swimming and whenever I went there to swim with Jimmy I had to get a sticking plaster to cover over my Union Jack. So despite what people say about the good old days, about there being no problems, it’s a load of nonsense. We lived in an abnormal society. Jimmy had to teach me to say something about a Hail Mary, so as I could bluff