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  ‘Thanks for keepin’ an eye on pussy over the Twelfth, love,’ also signalled that a good tip was on the cards. This fell into the category of the ‘additional duties’ related tip, and was most commonly bestowed by pet owners during the month of July. This was easy money because the cats didn’t seem to care much if their owners never returned from the caravan.

  ‘Was them robbers at you again the night, love?’ or, ‘Och, look at the state of you the night in the rain, ya wee crater,’ were also promising remarks, indicating an imminent sympathy tip. I accepted such tips with sad and grateful eyes and closed the gate carefully behind me. Then they would go straight to my boots.

  Like the baddies in Thunderbirds that I could always recognise from the stubble on their plastic faces, I instinctively understood who would never tip. Mr Black always had a ‘don’t-you-bloody-well-think-you’re-getting-an-extra-penny-out-of-me,-ya-cheeky-wee-hallion’ look on his face on a Friday night, and never tipped.

  So, the identity of a possible tip-giver was predictable. The amount and occasion of a tip, however, was as difficult to foresee as the number of milk-bottle tops donated to the Blue Peter appeal for Africa in any given week. This element of uncertainty turned the whole tipping experience into something of an adventure. It was like snow on the streets: you never knew how much you were going to get and when exactly you would get it, but once you knew it was on the way, a whole new world of opportunities for having fun was opened up to you.

  The sum of my pocket money, wages and tips was sometimes as much as £4 by the time it was Saturday night. I was rich! Patrick Walsh at the School of Music said all Protestants were rich and that we kept all the Catholics poor. I wasn’t so sure, because I had seen a picture of the Pope’s church in Rome on John Craven’s Newsround, and it was even bigger than Ian Paisley’s church on the Ravenhill Road. However, I couldn’t really argue with Patrick, not just because he was a first violin and I was only a second, but because I was probably the only Protestant he had ever met, and I had to admit that I was very rich for my age.

  However, I tried not to flaunt my wealth, and I learned to use it wisely. I invested a few pounds every month into my Abbey National savings account, where you got ten pence for free at the end of every year just for keeping your money there. The Abbey National was on Royal Avenue in the city centre, beside the Grand Central hotel where the army lived, so it got burnt and bombed quite a few times. In spite of this precarious location, the place was always open with a ‘Business as Usual’ sign and a spirited smell of wet smoke. It felt good, queuing up there to make my deposits alongside adults with wallets and purses. The lady behind the counter wore make-up and pearl earrings, talked through her nose and pronounced every ‘ing’ as she cheerily accepted all of my investments and firmly stamped my book. The Abbey National savings book had a blue cover like a Presbyterian hymn book, except with a powerful plastic smell. It was the aroma of wealth.

  My very first account was for saving up for big expensive things, like a new pair of parallels out of John Frazer’s or my ticket for the Bay City Rollers Concert. However, because I was so well-heeled (in platforms of course), I was able to avail of other opportunities for spending my additional disposable income. I quickly learned the hard way though not to play the slot machines in Millisle and not to play poker with my big brother in the shed. I was not prepared to risk losing my hard-earned cash so easily, and also my granny said gambling was a curse and a sin. (This moral outrage about gambling must have put a strain on her marriage, because Granda worked in the bookies on the Donegall Road.) I gave some of my money away to babies in Africa of course, but I still had enough left to invest in all sorts of exciting products.

  So I turned to Look-in, my favourite magazine full of interviews, crosswords and pin-ups of the Bionic Woman and the Bay City Rollers. The back pages of this wondrous publication had adverts for an array of investment opportunities for a boy of my means that were not readily available from the shops on the Shankill Road. The lack of local consumer choices on the Shankill Road was regularly confirmed by adults all around me, in fact. ‘The Road’s nat what it used til be for shappin’ no more,’ they would say.

  So every week, when the magazines arrived in Oul’ Mac’s shop, I grabbed a Look-in and scoured these appealing back-page adverts. I found stamps and books and card collections and strange creatures to buy – all for the cost of a 50p postal order. First of all, I became a member of the Imperial Stamp Club, and got a new set of stamps every month to add to my collection. I got a red stamp collector’s book for Christmas and began to stick stamps in the appropriate page for each country. I had never heard of some of the countries and had to look them up in my father’s 1959 Pears Cyclopaedia. Sometimes my father brought home a bag of old stamps from the war he had borrowed from the foundry, and I added these into my growing collection too. After several messy mistakes, I concluded that I should not attempt to stick stamps in my album immediately after doing the papers, as my inky fingers would soil the crisp white pages. From time to time, I borrowed the Stamp Valuation Book out of the Shankill Library (along with a Billy Bunter or a Famous Five). I would search through the catalogue to discover the invariably disappointing value of each stamp.

  Next, I invested in a card collection of animals of the world. For a 50p postal order, I got ten animals a month to put in a wee red card container. My favourite card was the one with the skunk. I dreamed of having a pet skunk to come with me on my paper round on a Friday night and spray foul smells on the foul wee hoods. I cancelled my subscription after about sixty animals however, because I was being sent far too many farm animals. ‘Next, they’ll be sending me a card of Petra,’ I thought. I was very fond of Petra, who was the most popular golden labrador in the Upper Shankill (even if she did poop on all the pavements), but I wanted to collect rare, dangerous, poisonous animals from, say, Borneo – not pets or farm animals from Ballymena. I knew I was the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, but I had no ethical difficulty with killer animals, because they didn’t seem to know any better.

  Inevitably, therefore, I moved on from animal cards and joined the Puffin Book Club, to collect books instead. I hadn’t fully realised that you could actually buy your own books – I thought you just borrowed them from school or from the Shankill Library. As a member of the Puffin Book Club, I got a set of book labels saying, ‘This book belongs to …’ to stick into the inside cover of every book I bought. I would get very excited when my latest book would arrive. I cherished the smell when you opened the first page for the first time. I started with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and eventually blew all my tips on Narnia. C.S. Lewis took me away to another land, one where they listened to the children and the baddies didn’t rule forever.

  I was very proud of my stamp, animal and Narnia collections, but not all of my purchases proved so satisfying. One day, at the back of a Look-in summer special, I spotted an advert for ‘sea monkeys’. A 50p postal order would buy me a packet of dried sea-monkey eggs, it seemed. If I simply added water, these tiny alien-like creatures would hatch in a jam jar in my bedroom just like magic, and I could raise whole families of them!

  I was attracted to the mystery of this new species, and amazed that I could afford them with my tips. Once the sea monkeys arrived, in a very small packet, I followed all of the instructions carefully. After an initial panic on my part that the creatures had perished in the post, sure enough, they hatched within a few days. Unfortunately however, the ‘sea monkeys’ – despite their exotic name – weren’t anything like the families of winged aliens pictured in the Look-in advert. They were more like the wee flies you got in rock pools at the seaside when you were looking for crabs and dropped your net, slipping on the seaweed and scraping your knees.

  In spite of my disappointment, I acknowledged that the sea monkeys were still God’s wee creatures, so I cared for my charges like any responsible parent. Then one sad day while I was watching Rolf Harris painting a kangaroo on BBC 1, my we
e brother (inspired by Rolf) used my sea monkeys’ jam jar for dipping his paintbrush, so that he could fill in Noddy in his colouring book. My erstwhile pets were permanently preserved as flecks in the red paint on the bonnet of Noddy’s car. However, given the poor return on this investment, my grief was fairly short-lived. And my wee brother reminded me that although he had indeed made a tragic error, it wasn’t half as bad as putting Brut on your jimmy joe.

  Shortly after I had recovered from the calamity with the sea monkeys, I noticed another advert in the pages of Look-in on how to become a muscle man like a certain Charles Atlas in America. Everything in America was bigger. Mr Atlas had more impressive muscles than the Incredible Hulk, and it said in the advert that if I bought his book and got big muscles like him, then no bullies would ever kick sand in my face again. I couldn’t remember anyone ever kicking sand in my face in Millisle – not even a skinhead – because the sand was always too wet and heavy with the rain, but I did like the idea of becoming a big strong muscle man, like this Charles Atlas in America. It would make me safer from robbers on a Friday night and would certainly help if the Provos really did decide to make paperboys ‘legitimate targets’. I would be able to lift a dozen paperbags in one hand and Titch McCracken in the other. I would be strong enough to lift Oul’ Mac’s van over the barricades in slow motion, like the Six Million Dollar Man himself.

  It took a long time to receive a response after I sent off my 50p postal order, but I knew Charles lived in America and realised that it would take a while for him to get back to me. However, on the morning the reply eventually arrived, I was once again disappointed. I spotted the envelope in the hall, shortly after the postman called: it was sticking out from underneath a flier about a sale in the Great Universal Club Book. I retrieved this long-awaited passport to power immediately.

  Aware of the slagging potential this delivery could provide for my big brother, I headed straight for my bedroom to open the package in private. When I ripped open the envelope with my feeble arms, instead of a book telling me how to get muscles, I was greeted by a pile of leaflets explaining that I needed to send off another, much larger, postal order to buy the book telling me how to get bigger muscles. Then, as luck would have it, before I could stuff the information pack into the bin, my big brother walked into my room. Catching sight of the incriminating documents, he grabbed them, quickly scanned them and began to laugh. He seemed unable to stop laughing, in fact, and this attracted my mother into my bedroom, too. When she arrived, Mammy lifted up the pack and then began to laugh too. Finally, hearing all the hilarity from downstairs, my father and wee brother joined us and before very long, there they all were in my bedroom: my whole family, laughing hysterically like the Martian robots on the Smash advert on the TV. Not even the thick woodchip on my bedroom walls could absorb the sound of their hysterical laughter.

  There was one short gap in the guffaws, when my mother asked breathlessly, ‘Is anyone kicking sand in your face at the caravan, love? Cos your Daddy’ll deal with them, so he will!’ Then, before I could even attempt to answer, the laughter recommenced with added vigour. Charles Atlas went straight into the Parkray fire. The bin wasn’t good enough to assuage my anger and humiliation.

  My most successful purchase from an advert at the back of Look-in was a pen pal. It said I could choose which country I preferred my pen pal to come from and whether I preferred a boy or a girl. My preferences were for a girl from Sweden or America who liked music – but I got a pen pal called Winston from New Zealand who played rugby. For a while, however, we enjoyed writing to each other.

  I was sure Winston must have been disappointed about getting a male pen pal from Northern Ireland because he had probably wanted a girl from Sweden too, but he turned out to be very interested in the Troubles. He was always kind enough to ask at the end of every letter if the British had killed anyone in my family since his last letter. He also assured me of his full support for my people in fighting for freedom from the British invaders. I never responded – in the same way that he never replied to my question as to whether he had a pet kangaroo. I wrote long letters about what I did at school on airmail paper which was even thinner than a page of the Belfast Telegraph, and when Winston replied, I was able to add his New Zealand stamps to my growing collection. We corresponded for over a year. Once he realised that we had televisions in Ireland too, we discovered that we both watched Doctor Who. However, the letters ceased shortly after I asked him if there was a Bay City Rollers fan club in New Zealand.

  But I wasn’t going to let a minor discouragement like this dampen my own enthusiasm for the Rollers. Since hearing about their forthcoming trip to Belfast from Pammy Wynette, I had been saving every spare tip in anticipation of the moment the tickets for the concert in the Ulster Hall finally went on sale in Spin-a-Disc. When that feted day arrived, the queue went right around the block: it was longer than the daily queues for water during the Ulster Workers’ strike when the men at the Water Board had cut off our water to keep us British. Along with half the teenagers of the Shankill, I waited for hours and finally emerged triumphant from Spin-a-Disc, clutching my very own ticket to go and see Woody, Eric, Alan, Leslie and Derek performing live in the Ulster Hall. There was a massive Bay City Rollers fan base in Belfast. We did tartan exceptionally well.

  Our whole gang got tickets for that concert. There was me and my big brother, Heather Mateer, who was the oldest and looked after the money for the tickets, her friend Lynn McQuiston with the buck teeth, former paperboy Titch McCracken, Irene Maxwell, who was still in love with Big Jaunty, Sharon Burgess, who was now, as I have said, my official girlfriend, and Philip Ferris, another paperboy, who said the Rollers were ‘ballicks’ but wanted to go and see them anyway.

  Philip, whose da had coached the Boys’ Brigade football team to victory in 1975, was always very hard to impress. He said a lot of things were ‘ballicks’ – even being a paperboy for Oul’ Mac. This seemed very ungrateful to me. At the Westy Disco, every time any song came on that Philip didn’t like, he just said ‘ballicks’ and walked off to the tuck shop. This happened quite a lot. You would be up on the dance floor doing the Slush to Elton John and Kiki Dee and then the Osmonds would come on. Then, from behind, you would hear Philip Ferris shouting ‘ballicks’, before heading off for a packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion. He seemed unworthy of a Bay City Rollers ticket, really. And ours were no ordinary tickets either: we had got the last balcony tickets. I had never sat in a balcony before.

  The next day, I brought my treasured ticket into BRA to show it off, but I was surprised and disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm in the playground. Tartan was clearly less popular at grammar school. Not everyone was impressed, and they weren’t just pretending to be not impressed because they were jealous, like when you came top of the class in English. My former fellow band member, Ian from the TITS, just shook his head, told me to ‘wise a bap’ and slapped me across the head with his NME. I didn’t tell the teacher on him, in case I got my ticket confiscated along with Ian’s NME. I just couldn’t understand this hostility. I accepted the Rollers weren’t a serious rock band like Status Quo, but they were always No.1 on Top of the Pops, and they were brilliant to sing along to in the Westy Disco and on Downtown Radio.

  When I told Mr Rowing at my next guitar lesson that I was going to see the Bay City Rollers, he just said ‘Lovely!’, and redirected me back to Tom Dooley. He clearly had no idea who they were!

  Nevertheless, I once again refused to be put off by this lack of appreciation of my musical tastes. I had never been to see a real pop concert before. I had once won a ticket in a raffle to go and see The Wombles at the ABC in Belfast, but that was cancelled after the first night because everyone complained it was just men dressed up in suits: it was even on the news headlines before the bombs that day. Most of the big pop stars didn’t do concerts in Belfast, of course, because they thought we would kill them. Cliff Richard came over every year to do a gospel concert – but that was always on his
own with an acoustic guitar, because his band was too scared to come with him. Cliff must have believed God would keep him safe from us. But hardly anyone else ever came, so the Bay City Rollers playing in Belfast was a really big deal to the legions of parallel-trousered and tartan-scarved youths. After all, we had had tartan gangs on the Shankill long before the Bay City Rollers ever existed.

  I kept my ticket safely hidden beneath my remote-controlled Dalek in my room, waiting patiently for the months to pass until I could exchange it for an audience with the Scottish gods of rock in the historic surroundings of the Ulster Hall in Belfast city centre. This ticket would be my wisest financial investment of that time. It was worth every routed robber, every hailstone soaking and every slither on Petra’s poop. I had earned it, so I had.

  Chapter 8

  Good Livin’

  I got saved on a bin at the caravan, so I did. Uncle John, the Good News Club leader, said I had put my sin in the bin. I felt very clean on the inside, even though I was never very clean on the outside at the caravan. The only time I came into contact with water there was whenever we took a paddle in the Irish Sea on the days the sun came out. There was an electric shower at the caravan site that took 50p coins for ten minutes of hot water, but there was always a queue, and I preferred to keep my 50ps for the dodgems at the amusement arcade.

  The caravan site we went to every summer was in Ballywhiskin, on the outskirts of the County Down seaside resort of Millisle. It was also known as ‘Shankill-on-Sea’, because the whole Road went there for the Twelfth Fortnight – and our family was no exception. If the Shankill was the heartland of Loyalist Ulster, then Millisle was the Loyalist Riviera. The atmosphere was different beside the sea, though. Even though it was July and the middle of marching season, the Tartan gangs never looked as tough in Millisle, somehow. When they took off their Rangers tops and licked 99s in the sunshine, they looked too soft, white and skinny for kicking your head in. As you strolled along the seafront, even the skinheads shouting, ‘Who the f**k are you lookin’ at?’ in the sunlight seemed less intimidating when they were simultaneously tackling a pink candy floss.