The Street and other stories by Gerry Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

the Shankill. For all that closeness there might as well be a thousand miles between them.
    When we were kids we used to take short cuts up Cupar Street from the Falls to the Springfield Road. Catholics lived in the bottom end of Cupar Street nearest the Falls; there were one or two in the middle of Cupar Street, too, but the rest were mainly Protestantstill you got up past Lawnbrook Avenue; and from there to the Springfield Road was all Catholic again. The streets going up the Springfield Road on the righthand side were Protestant and the ones on the lefthand side up as far as the Flush were Catholic. After that both sides were nearly all Protestant until you got to Ballymurphy.
    When we were kids we paid no heed to these territorial niceties, though once or twice during the Orange marching season we’d get chased. Around about the Twelfth of July and at other appropriate dates, the Orangemen marched through many of those streets, Catholic and Protestant alike. The Catholic ones got special attention, as did individual Catholic houses, with the marching bands and their followers, sometimes the worse for drink, exciting themselves with enthusiastic renderings of Orange tunes as they passed by. The Mackie’s workers also passed that way twice daily, an especially large contingent making its way from the Shankill along Cupar Street to Mackie’s Foundry. The largest engineering works in the city was surrounded by Catholic streets, but it employed very few Catholics.
    Often bemused by expressions such as Catholic street and Protestant area, I find myself nonetheless using the very same expressions. How could a house be Catholic or Protestant? Yet when it comes to writing about the reality it’s hard to find other words. Though loath to do so, I use the terms Catholic and Protestant here to encompass the various elements who make up the Unionist and non-Unionist citizens of this state.
    It wasn’t my intention to tell you all this. I could write a book about the
craic
I had as a child making my way in and out of all those wee streets on the way back and forth to school or the Boys’ Confraternity in Clonard or even down at the Springfield Road dam fishing for spricks, but that’s not what I set out to tell you about. I set out to tell you about Geordie Mayne of Urney Street. Geordie was an Orangeman, nominally at least. He never talked about it to me except on the occasion when he told me that he was one. His lodge was The Pride of the Shankill Loyal Orange Lodge, I think, though it’s hard to be sure after all this time.
    I only knew Geordie for a couple of weeks, but even though that may seem too short a time to make a judgement I could never imagine him as a zealot or a bigot. You get so that you can tell, and by my reckoning Geordie wasn’t the worst. He was a driver for a big drinks firm: that’s how I met him. I was on the run at the time. It was almost Christmas 1969, and I had been running about like a blue-arsed fly since early summer. I hadn’t worked since July, we weren’t getting any money except a few bob every so often for smokes, so things were pretty rough. But it was an exciting time: I was only twenty-one and I was one of a dozen young men and women who were up to their necks in trying to sort things out.
    To say that I was on the run is to exaggerate a little. I wasn’t wanted for anything, but I wasn’t taking any chances either. I hadn’t slept at home since the end of May when the RUC had invaded Hooker Street in Ardoyne and there had been a night or two of sporadic rioting. Most of us who were politically active started to take precautions at that time. We were expecting internment or worse as the civil rights agitation and the reaction against it continued to escalate. Everything came to a head in August, including internment, and in Belfast the conflict had been particularly sharp around Cupar Street. This abated a little, but we thought it was only a temporary respite: with the British army