Kindling Ashes

Part One

Torched

‘The Combustible Years’

12 July 1969

My mother was a local of Sandy Row, Belfast, but my father was an ‘outsider’, an English soldier who lost his way once on the Donegall Road as he walked back towards his barracks. It was the mid-1930s, when he stopped a young Irish girl walking in the opposite direction, to ask his way. They exchanged smiles and, as he was leaving her, he turned and said, If, by chance, I was to come back this way next Sunday at the same time—would you be here? She, of course, was there the following week. That is how my parents met and settled my Ulster heritage. A telling anecdote about chance, chancers and slick chat-up lines to pass on to grandchildren.

In the fifties and sixties, ‘The Row’, as it was known, was as good a place as any to grow up, perhaps better. The inhabitants looked out for each other in a heartfelt sense of belonging. People’s doors were always open—literally—with neighbours dropping in and out for tea and gossip. Natural events like births, and more especially deaths, were moments of neighbourly sharing. Of course, people were poor and possessed little, but some were much poorer than others and for them, life was more difficult. But even the poorest were not forsaken. It was not unusual for a neighbour to send over a pot of soup. It is a sobering fact that alcohol was the main contributor to both dire poverty and domestic violence and those families who remained outside the clutches of ‘the demon drink’—because of personal taste or religious conviction—earned greater respect and admiration (tinged with a little covert resentment) from their impoverished neighbours. My parents fell into that category, fortunately, neither of them had a taste for regular alcohol consumption.

The inhabitants of the Row liked to think of the place more as a village than just a criss-cross of mean working-class streets and it is true that I remember the neighbourhood in the sixties as a closely-knit community and vibrant commercial centre, full of shops, pubs, ‘bookies’ and linen factories—places to work, play, spend, blather and even dream. It was a community which held together throughout the century until the Troubles arrived—the time when people began dying from unnatural causes. Almost all the inhabitants of the Row lived in the same two-up two-down factory-built houses which none of us owned, with an outside toilet, coalhole, and notable absence of hot running water.

Rent collectors and penny insurance men were not liked, but on the whole, they were welcomed with a hospitable cup of tea. Adults seldom complained and appeared to me to be generally more enthusiastic about the area than myself. Perhaps there was a generational effect which meant that enthusiasm was gradually and inevitably on the wane. It was brought to an abrupt halt in the early seventies when the community fell apart. Men I knew as a youngster were addicted to drinking, fighting, betting, whoring, telling funny stories about themselves, and fucking the Pope, but most were what we would call relatively ‘decent people’ who had the striking characteristic of all voting the same way. True blue, no questions asked. The number of these decent people declined as the years went by and we moved brutally into the seventies’ thug-rule, when even alcohol was replaced by toxically debilitating chemicals. I would like to think that the older generation would appreciate the story I am going to tell, but given the events which have taken place over thirty bloody years, I doubt that very much. Even relative decency has now become a rare commodity amongst people of all ages. The good do not die young, but when they can, they move out. This may sound like a lamentable cliché: ‘Things were better in the old days.’ But for Sandy Row, they were.

I was fortunate to have a cousin on my mother’s side, to share life’s important adolescent moments with. My cousin Eddie lived on the Shankill, one of the other main ‘Protestant enclaves’ the media talk about today. He was a year older than me, a very smart, street-wise kid, whom I tried to see as often as possible, which was usually about once a month. Our families liked to oppose us—always putting their son forward as the smartest, since we both passed the Eleven Plus and went to different Protestant grammar schools. To Eddie and me, that was just a minor and usually funny consideration because we both loved and learned from each other’s company.

Probably the main subject that came to separate us was religion—Eddie was christened Church of Ireland but had recently become Free Presbyterian and I, at the tender age of almost sixteen, no longer had one. He thought I had temporarily gone astray, but I attributed my reticence more to sceptical observation and my general lack of enthusiasm. It occurred to me, perhaps wrongly, that you need a generous allotment of fervour for the next world to be unreservedly religious and I did not have that. Neither could I see anything good in the ‘good living’ people I came into contact with. They confused cleanliness with godliness and were too quick to put the fear of God into others. But it was dangerous to broadcast your atheism in a community where Protestant meant Unionist meant true blue single-mindedness. Anything else was a betrayal and the price could be very high. At best, most non-believers would hide their lack of belief behind a shield of agnosticism. It was easier and safer to confess, I don’t know. Eddie once said that it was my proud cynicism that would not let me buy into religion. It was my fault; I was lacking some humble quality or empathy. He was probably right, but wrong to think I would ever return to the fold. The irony is that my early unswerving attendance of Sunday Church, Monday Night Mission, and Salvation Army gatherings, turned me into an unholy misanthropist, which made my parents worried for me and my neighbours wary of me. Whilst the next life seemed like a cheap sell, I undoubtedly overvalued my worth in the present. Eddie was the only really smart person I knew who invested heavily in the next world. And believe me that is even more ironic.

Although it starts earlier, everyone knows that summer is ‘the marching season’ in Northern Ireland. As a child, I wanted to play the flute in the parade but never managed to join a flute band in Sandy Row. It would arguably have made me a different person, a participant rather than an observer. Colourful and noisy, the parades pulled in thousands from the surrounding province and on each 12 July; I would stand with my mother in Shaftesbury Square and watch people she knew march by in their black bowler hats and orange sashes. It was an ostentatious ritual which reinforced a sense of belonging to the right side of history. These men would guarantee that belonging would endure. Their restraint and discipline contrasted sharply with the boys in the bands who would saunter, bashing their big drums and sending their poles like Scud missiles into the air before catching them and twisting them around their bodies in defiantly acrobatic contortions.

When I was nine years old, my uncle John managed to have me accepted as a string carrier—I held one of the strings dropping down from the enormous orange and blue banners decorated with intriguing symbols of ladders, stars and compasses, and of course, bold writing affirming that we would never surrender. The strings kept the banner from folding in the wind, but I was never asked to do it twice as my uncle John chastised me for not looking as if I was enjoying myself: Would it crack your face to smile at people, Jimmy? He always called boys Jimmy even though that was not their name.

My name is Daniel, but he rarely used it. I tried to smile up at him. Useless. My marching days were over. Uncle John impressed me a lot. He once gave me an orange sash with a blood stain on it, telling me that his uncle Joe had been shot dead by a sniper whilst innocently marching through some wild Catholic area in Belfast. I think that is where my fear and mistrust of the other side began. There could not be anything wrong with decent people just marching peacefully and enjoying themselves, could there be? I kept the bloody sash religiously in my bedroom as if I had been put in charge of the family jewels.

I never marched again in any capacity nor had anything to do with Orangemen or flute bands. But I did go to the Field once more. Along with my cousin Eddie, in July 1969 when I was still 15 (I was born in August). I used to go out with a girl called Sandra from ‘Tin Town’—that is what the estate of prefabricated metallic bungalows in Finaghy was known as, real name Taughmonagh Estate—and I ran into her on the Donegall Road the day school broke up for the summer. She went to Kelvin Secondary School because she failed the Eleven Plus. That did not make her stupid but did make her and her parents, think she was. Even after we split up we still flirted when we met and I know she invited me to a party at her place on the eleventh night in order to get things going again between us. I jumped at the offer as I thought it was a great idea and sold it to my cousin Eddie who was usually reluctant to leave the Shankill bonfires on the eleventh. I threw in a trip to the Field the next day as an added incentive. He bought it.

We got to Sandra’s place at about eight, along with a couple of bottles of scrumpy Eddie had bought from one of his many friends. More than a dozen people had already arrived, a majority of them girls of my age, no adults in sight, all dancing to ‘Everlasting Love’, smoking, and drinking vodka and coke. It was very exciting and Sandra latched on to me straightaway, pulled me into her dance as she slithered alluringly to the song which was just coming to an end. Next up was ‘Behind a Painted Smile’. Sandra motioned to her best friend Grace to grab a hold of Eddie who quickly began to jump about more or less in time to the rhythm. Eddie was not much of a dancer but what he lacked in technique, he made up for in infectious enthusiasm. We got through two or three fast ones and then ‘Tracks of My Tears’ came up. That was the call we were all waiting for. Sandra snuggled into me and I knew then that the night was going to be so much better than prancing around a bonfire of rotten planks, broken pallets and tea chests, the evening only highlighted by roasting spuds wrapped in silver paper in the embers of the fire. I could happily leave that to the grown-ups. We smooched for most of the record and this turned into a more frenzied kiss as the song ended. Everyone was looking at us so we decided to move to the kitchen and start the food circulating. There was a lot of finger food which Eddie and I consumed between gulps of strong scrumpy. The latter soon took effect. Two or three girls, who had remained in the sitting room with their vodka and coke, began singing along to ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ and this sucked us all back into the semi-obscurity where we began dancing again, singing, and gesticulating wildly:

But if you leave me a hundred times

A hundred times I’ll take you back

I’m yours whenever you want me

I’m not too proud to shout it, tell the world about it ’cause I love you

Sandra was looking at me as if the words had some special meaning for her but I just grinned—the scrumpy was starting to anaesthetise my brain and carry me along with the vibrant flow.

After an exhausting LP of The Stones, someone had the great idea to play Spin the Bottle. I think most adolescents and even adults enjoy this game although that enjoyment is harder to justify as you get older. I don’t quite know when it stops being ‘harmless fun’ and becomes a challenge to ethical concerns. Now the teenage version of adult Swingers dropping their car keys into a bowl and then going off with someone else’s husband or wife—I saw that in a film much later. Spin the Bottle seems innocuous enough as you only get a couple of minutes in an adjacent dark room or hallway with the partner the bottle has randomly chosen for you. And of course, there is no obligation to do anything, but judging from the expressions on the faces of those returning to the sitting room, things can sometimes take a bad turn when some unwanted exploration has taken place. But Sandra and I felt fairly sure of each other as the infidelity usually never went further than kissing—which no one understood as being unfaithful in the circumstances.

More dancing, drinking, smooching, and eating followed the game and continued until the party started to go a bit flat around 1 o’clock in the morning when the few disappointed singles started to leave. Eddie was doing well with Grace and they were obviously going to stay together until dawn. When Sandra and I flopped onto the couch, they disappeared into one of the other rooms. We were completely alone in the sitting room and the exploration of Sandra soon began. No adults were expected to return before late morning as they had abandoned the house to go to a bonfire party down in Boyne Square where they had lived before moving up to Finaghy.

Sandra and I had gone out together for roughly three months, about a year before tonight, but I had never gotten further than a tactile exploration of her small, round, and very firm breasts. The latter had developed significantly in the past year, as it was quickly my pleasure to discover. It did take a while and a certain tacit encouragement on her part to go further but I eventually worked up the courage to ‘drop the hand’, as we refer to it. More than that, after a delicate bit of sweaty wriggling down through her tight jeans, I managed to reach the objective of the evening and for the first time, I investigated her sex. It was also the first time she had been touched there and we both knew that events would not go any further on this occasion. Stages had to be respected and this was an important one. About another half hour was spent in sometimes clumsy probing until we both decided to call it a day and get some very welcome and shared rest.

I woke up around nine the next morning and the first thing I did was to pull up Sandra’s zip and button her jeans just in case her parents walked in unexpectedly. But no adults turned up and we managed another hour on the couch just kissing and fondling before Eddie appeared with a big Eddie-smile on his face. Things had obviously gone very well in the next room. I bet he forgot to tell Grace about the girl from the Shankill he was going out with at present. One of them would soon be disappointed.

After making a half-hearted attempt to tidy up, we had cornflakes, and when the girls were in the kitchen making tea and toast, Eddie and I decided that it would be a good policy to vacate the premises before the parents did finally come home. We tried to down the toast quickly and discreetly but it was noticeably faster than expected as Sandra astutely asked us if we had plans to go anywhere.

We’re going to the Field, said Eddie, which was true, but the tone also signalled that we were going without them. Grace was already omitted from the equation.

It’s a bit early…we were thinking of going too. Sandra looked at me in a half-pleading way. Eddie continued to do the talking—he knew instinctively which line he had to follow:

Well, we’ll see you over there. We have to meet up with a few of the boys beforehand…planned a bit of a day out, ya know? Sure, we can’t disappoint them!

Okay, we’ll see you there then, said Sandra, unconvinced and obviously saddened by my neutrality.

She was right to have her doubts about spending time with us at the Field. The night had been wonderful but the light of day brought new desires and, like most immature kids, we just wanted to run away with our plundered treasure. Sandra pulled me tightly to her and kissed me in a long, drawn-out, and wistful embrace. Then Eddie and I started out at about eleven on our adventure to the Field. I don’t know what happened to Grace.

D’ya know exactly how to get to the Field from here? he asked as we started to tentatively make our way through Tin Town where every house and neglected garden looked the same and the roads meandered confusingly. From a past visit, I knew that Sandra’s house was on the Malone side of the estate and that we just had to head in the opposite way. At a crossroads, I looked in all directions but could not recognise the way we had come the evening