Early years in Belfast 2

In the evenings we also fished for sticklebacks in a river which ran through the school. I remember once being caught by the headmaster and told to clear off home. We also used to throw ‘throwing arrows’ in the school grounds. These were arrows made form birch or beech trees. We made the flights out of cardboard. We had competitions to see who could throw them the furthest. It was never me. I remembered.

The ‘Pump house’ was a shack which housed some sort of broken down electrical generator. It was in an isolated location in the school grounds. This was a den of illicit activities for teenagers-mostly smoking and reading pornographic magazines. My little group of friends was divided as to whether they regarded visits to the pump house as acceptable or not. Some did, (M and D) some didn’t (R and his brother A.) I was on the fence: I think my ‘public’ position was not to go-but I may just have gone their on my own a few times to check out that other people weren’t being led astray by those awful magazines. I was showing early signs enjoying a role as public defender of ethics and morality: a shrewd observer might have been heard saying: "That one's going to be a teacher when he grows up".

R’s brother, A, was an interesting character. He was older than the rest of us but we gave him hell because he wouldn’t do what we all did–climb trees and play ‘tig’ etc.-in fact anything involving physical exercise. As a result he was regarded as a killjoy and a grumpy bugger. We knew vaguely that A had some illness –but with that lack of generosity of spirit which characterises children of that age,(10? this excuse didn’t cut much ice with the rest of us: we were not convinced. We really thought A was a bit ‘stuck up’ and didn’t want to play with us because he was older than us, and thought we were childish..

One day, when A was fourteen R (his brother) announced that A was going into hospital to have an operation for a “hole in the heart’ . We were led to understand that the operation was dangerous. Indeed it was, and A died on the operating table.

His death explained his inability to participate in all the physical activities with us–and his sudden conversion to Christianity about a year before the operation. A had not been faking it all those years at all when he used to refuse to climb trees or play football with us and we called him a ‘sissy’ - a derogatory Ulster colloquialism for ‘girl’. How cruel we had all been to him.

'Nicking' (stealing) apples from the orchards was major in the summer. All the neighbour’s gardens were regarded as legitimate targets. We were never caught-perhaps because the neighbours parents would have been too embarrassed to confront each other. They all knew each other anyway and probably colluded to turn a blind eye to the stealing in order to keep the peace.


Some kids on the road were ‘persona non grata’ at our house for many years. R M lived up the road and opposite us. He was rumoured to have a gang of aggressive young eleven year old thugs who would beat us up if given the opportunity. We therefore had to construct defensive positions by digging holes at the bottom of our garden in case R and his gang attacked us. These holes were covered with grass and twigs and had bags of water inside them in order to deter R and his gang from attacking us. In vain we waited in our bunker at the bottom of the garden for R to attack us. If he had come we were convinced that he and his mates would have stopped in the tracks and been so frightened they would have run away. The idea that stepping in the traps might have made them more angry and want to beat the crap out of us did not occur to us at the time.

R and his gang never came that summer-but we enjoyed the fear of waiting for the attack-and had many roasted spuds with salt in the fires we lit in front of our 'bunker'-a very large hole in the ground. A few years later I met R –and he was actually a very nice fellow-the perfect gentleman.

Our road had a legitimate territory which we were careful not to stray too far from. Aside from R's fearsome gang, we also didn’t want to meet up with the feared ‘B' Gang’ from Ardcarn or with Davie B from the Comber Road-a fate surely worse than death itself.

Fearsome neighbours

Some of our adult neighbours were fearsome too. One night when M and I had nothing better to do we were surprised through the sitting room window to see D A ‘snogging’ his wife on the couch in the sitting room in full view of the public from the road (us). This was a very exciting event for M and I and we yelled our appreciation and encouragement from the road through the sitting room window which was only about thirty metres away. DA was clearly occupied at the time and didn’t appreciate the audience. He sprang up from the couch , burst through the door, picking up an iron bar and hurled it at us with all his might. We were at a distance of thirty metres or so and it landed quite close to us. But we had decided that we were safe enough and far enough away from him to hurl some verbal abuse at him without real fear of retribution.

We were mistaken.

DA tore up the driveway after us like a bat out of hell. We escaped down the road to the school (yet again!) Schools have always played a major part of my life –even in my spare time. As usual, M was in the lead and I followed. That was always the way it was in those days. I was never the leader but egged on my more adventurous friends to do the risky things.

But DA gained on us fast. M was cooler under pressure than me and much more streetwise. Quite suddenly he shrewdly took a sharp left and disappeared into to the dark night up a grassy knoll. I kept going on straight as an arrow with DA in hot pursuit. After a long chase he eventually caught up with me. He verbally abused me whimpering and cowering in the doorway of a house. He threatened to do all sorts of things and scared the hell out of me. It was only verbal abuse though, and fortunately for me his bark turned out to be worse than is bite. He must have chased me for about a kilometere!

Another neighbour was knicknamed “Cudgwedge”. MC was the headmaster of a government secondary school. He distinguished himself one ‘Halloween’ night by striking my eldest brother R over the head with a milk bottle.

The motive for this unneighbourly act? Apparently, ‘Cudge wedge” decided that he had had enough of youths throwing fireworks into his garden.

According to a reliable and completely impartial source (Mum), Cudgewedge lay in wait and ambushed my unsuspecting and innocent brother R as he returned home from his ‘constitutional ’ walk which just happened to pass Cudgewedge’s gate at midnight on Halloween night.

I think R had thrown fireworks into the pigeon loft of cudgewedge!

Needless to say “Cudgewedge” was never spoken to again by anyone in our family. I’m not sure whether I entirely believe Mums version of events but R was, to be fair, an unlikely person to bait a character like cudgwedge. I might have done such a thing myself –but not R. It wasn’t in my big brother’s nature.