Belfast Aurora

A Memoir of a Falls Childhood, 1971–1974

Seamus Kelters

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785374159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

Duck

A class trip was something spoken of as though Christmas was coming in May. From before Easter, money was collected by our teacher. I do not remember how much it cost per head, perhaps three or four pounds. It was after decimalisation, but a pound still counted for something. This was big money, so the collection was going on for weeks, anxiety building over whether we would all be able to go.

‘Have you paid yet?’

‘No, have you?’

The questions and answers littered every conversation.

The threat of being kicked off the trip hung over our every misdemeanour, so we were subdued at least in class and when teachers were around. A student teacher spent some of the time teaching us about Cú Chulainn. Here was a hero we could identify with, bold, brave and reckless. The student might have been his image, in a mirror, in reverse. Uncharacteristically for us, for we scented fear, we took no advantage of his obvious naivety even when our teacher, Micky Barr, was not watching. A class trip was not to be risked.

We had been on our first day out the previous year. About half of us had already been brought to Belfast’s zoo, Bellevue we called it back then, even before the class trip. It was a wet day. The hillside collection of semi-domesticated elephants, giraffes and kangaroos was miserable, shrouded in mizzle. We packed close together in front of the lion enclosure.

‘There’s no lion in there so there’s not,’ shouted one of the class.

In fact, the cage’s sole occupant, wisely, remained under the coverage of foliage at the back where, barely visible, it refused to respond to our roars.

We ventured into the monkey house, its pungency making our eyes water. There came the highlight of the day. Some classmates were taunting a huge silverback gorilla. Infuriated, it flung some of its faeces at us. We charged away, tripping over each other, laughing at those we claimed had been successfully targeted.

‘You’ve got monkey shite on you.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘You are monkey shite.’

Other visitors, from more well-heeled areas, viewed us with disdain. ‘They should be on the other side of the bars,’ I heard a woman say as she dragged her child away.

We had not gone far that day and there was little to marvel at through the rain.

Expectation for the new class trip was fuelled by one of the class who had been there on holiday. Dessie Burns painted a picture of a land somewhere between Glocca Morra and Shangri-La.

‘There’s big aeroplanes so there is,’ he told us, ‘and they fly way up in the sky so they do.’

Each week the stories of what we would find inflated; dodgems, a swimming pool, boats, rides, ice cream, snooker tables, toy stores and arcades. And, once you got through the gates, Dessie said, it was all free.

We were going to Butlin’s Mosney.

The day arrived. The buses arrived. We spat on board like fizzy drink shaken from a bottle, scrambling to get to the back seats beyond the view of the teachers at the front. Well before safety regulations, in some cases three or four of us piled into two seats. In the same way three classes were crammed onto two buses, more than a hundred of us accompanied by a trio of teachers and as many students. My berth was midway.

The talk was, not everyone had paid their full amount, although Micky Barr saw to it that every boy in his class got on the bus. Tickets might have been subsidised from school funds. More likely, the money came from his pocket.

Mosney was about five miles beyond Drogheda, a journey for us of about 80 miles. The first problem emerged about 20 minutes after we left the school. We had been told to bring packed lunches. For some these consisted of chocolate of every variety, cans of fizzy orange and unlimited quantities of crisps. As we twisted along country roads, there was an unmistakable ‘whooooahhh’ from up the front as one of our class, Paddy McIlwaine, retched into a carrier bag that had contained his lunch.

‘Wow.’

‘Ah shite.’

‘Move, move.’

Those around him scattered as if he had unpinned a live grenade. They fled into neighbouring rows ignoring the occupants’ protests. Paddy was left to himself. The student teacher reached back to open a latched sliding pane above one of the big windows. Air rushed down the bus, along with the smell.

Seeing the student open the window, some of those at the back of the bus did the same with a window there. Marty Breen went a step further, clambering on a seat to yell out the window. It was not so much that he actually said anything, just the fact that he made some sort of roar to startle pedestrians. Each time he saw someone walking, he would let out a high-pitched ‘yeeeeee-oow’.

The more this amused the rest of us, the more audacious he became. He shouted ‘fatso’ at a man, and ‘millies’ at two girls. The Belfast jibe might have been lost on them, but we laughed anyway at the shock on their faces.

What happened next, as somehow unlikely as it was predictable, I watched as though in slow motion. Looking out the front window of the bus, I saw a crowd waiting at a stop. A couple moved forward thinking we were the scheduled service. A lot of us saw them. Marty Breen saw them and turned his head sideways to get as much out of the open window as possible. Up front, Paddy McIlwaine was not a troublemaker, not usually the centre of devilment, but others around him were hissing, ‘Go on, go on.’ To be fair, he must have wanted to get rid of the bag of boke. As we sped almost level with the bus stop, he neatly threw it out the window. His only misjudgement was the effect speed would have on trajectory. Instead of showering the bystanders, the bag slewed along the side of the bus, catching Marty Breen as he stretched for a high note. Too late someone shouted, ‘Duck!’ The bag hit him full in the face in mid gulder – ‘Yeeee-argh, argh, aww, shite, shite.’ He was drenched in vomit, his face, his neck, his hair, his pullover, the collar of the shirt he was wearing. He was simultaneously attempting to splutter and not breathe. Yells came from everywhere around him.

‘Get away, get away.’

‘Spew face, look at spew face.’

The student teacher came down the bus. He saw the state of Marty and thought he had been sick. You could see the student almost gag himself at the overpowering smell.

‘Wooooargh.’

There was the sound of liquid splattering onto plastic. Someone else had puked into another bag. We were cheering, jeering, shouting. Anarchy threatened.

‘Quiet. Quiet all of you.’

Micky Barr had come halfway back, his voice raised, close to where I was sitting. ‘If youse keep this up, the bus will turn around and you’ll all go home.’

Silence. For the first time that day, silence. A wet towel appeared from somewhere. Marty was told to clean himself up.

Micky Barr warned us. ‘If there’s one more can opened or I hear one more crunch on a crisp between here and Mosney, I’ll get the driver to turn back. One more. Do you hear me?’

No one spoke. Lunches, or what was left of them, were stored in overhead racks. Micky Barr, we knew, was not a man of empty threat.

There was little else by way of event, except when we reached the border. Soldiers stationed in a sandbagged emplacement somewhere beyond Newry made a token effort of stopping traffic so that the buses, cars and lorries formed a long queue. We belted out a song. None of the teachers attempted to stop us. We saw the student join in on the refrain: ‘Armoured cars and tanks and guns, came to take away our sons’. I had the impression the driver wished someone would take us away. I glimpsed his face in his mirror; it was a look of antipathy. I found this difficult to understand, for everyone where I came from loved ‘The Men Behind the Wire’. Exhausting it, we launched into ‘The Merry Ploughboy’, chanting out the phrase ‘to the echo of a Thompson gun’. We had all heard that echo, we could relate to the words.

Micky Barr stood up.

‘We have just crossed the border,’ he announced and there was a big cheer.

The student teacher was not to be outdone. ‘That’s the Gap of the North boys – remember, from the stories about Cú Chulainn, the Celtic myths?’ He did not get a cheer. Instead, we grunted feigned interest, for he had joined us in the singing and we wanted to reciprocate.

The most obvious indication we were in the Free State were the bilingual signs, Dún Dealgan, Droichead Átha and of course Baile Átha Cliath. The Irish for Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin respectively was more mysterious and strange on our tongues, mostly because of our twangy Belfast mispronunciations. I learned my Irish at beginners’ classes in the Chluain Árd hall in Hawthorn Street, a cold, Spartan building where I demonstrated no facility whatsoever for grasping the language. Despite my ignorance, I loved the sounds, relishing even more the discovery of their meanings.

We passed a sign for the Cooley Peninsula. My father had spent holidays there and, long before the student teacher, he had told me how only the teenage Cú Chulainn had defended Ulster’s honour after Queen Medb sent her Connacht men to steal Donn Cúailnge, the great brown bull of Cooley.

The one place on the way to Dublin that always struck me was Castlebellingham, in the townland of Gernonstown, the only village where the Anglicised version, named after some lieutenant of Cromwell, sounded more melodious than the Irish, Baile an Ghearlánaigh.

The road blurred past. We reached Drogheda, rolled down the hill and booed crossing the Boyne, the site of the 1690 battle, a permanent reminder for the defeated. Soon we arrived at the entrance to Butlin’s, all standing up with excitement, eager to indulge in its delights.

‘Quiet. All of you, quiet.’ Micky Barr was standing again. ‘Sit down. Sit down while I see if they’ll let us in.’ We peered intently as he got off and presented the paperwork. Back on the bus, he shouted a few ground rules as we pulled through the gates. We had to be back at the bus by four o’clock and were not to get into any trouble. There might have been more. That was all I heard.

For weeks, my friends and I had planned meticulously where we would go first. When the doors of the bus opened, it uncorked us in a headlong rush. We ran every which way, yelling and squealing to announce our arrival. Whatever I was looking for, I could not find. There were a couple of shops, a sign towards a boating lake, a big open recreation room where some of our lads had already grabbed the few available snooker cues and table-tennis bats. The snooker tables were full-sized, far too big for us, and my classmates were already seeing how hard they could bounce the ball from the far rail.

‘Stop that,’ shouted Micky Barr. ‘If I see that again you are back on the bus.’

The lads had to leave the tables to our teachers. I wondered if King James had felt the same when King Billy chased him from the field.

We darted from place to place, seeing everything inside perhaps 20 minutes. There were accommodation blocks. They were curtained, as were a row of chalets. There was, I think, a roller-skating rink. None of us had skates. There was a swimming pool. None of us h...