You may think that with the orange Lodges showing me their
rituals and customs that I would be safe.
One of my protestant friends used to take me along to his Sunday school
and no one minded. Then one day things
changed. That year, for my birthday, I
had asked for a racing bicycle as a present.
Normally I would be taken to a gentleman’s outfitters in Warrenpoint where
I would try on a selection of clothes.
After a while I realised that half of the clothes I was trying on would
be my Christmas presents and the other half would be my birthday presents. Having already had the tour of the tailor
earlier in the year I knew I was not very likely to get a bike.
I do remember that then a decent racing bicycle with dropped handlebars
and five or ten gears was thirty six pounds brand new. So on my birthday I was given the obligatory
clothes but I was also given a five pound note. This I was told, if used correctly, could buy
the parts to build a racing bicycle.
Okay as a young boy the lessons learned for future life don’t really
sink in, especially when you feel let down on your birthday but now, as a
Master Candle Maker I do see the lessons that I must have learned. I always made sure my children got what they
wanted for their birthday, within reason of course.
I, with the help of my good friend Dessie managed to build a
bike. Dessie even stole the gears from a
bicycle shop for which he charged me ten bob.
It was a Friday, my bike was completed and the following day, the
Saturday, I was going to cycle to Dundrod with Dessie. It would only be a nine or ten mile journey,
but I was so excited, not just the fact that I was taking my bike, the bike
that I constructed, but that I was going to see and get the autograph of Giacomo
Agostini, one of the most famous motorcycle racers of all time.
That evening my father gathered us all together and told us
to go upstairs and stand on the landing.
We did and he went into the front bedroom. Outside we could hear shouts and screaming
and eventually we all crept into the front bedroom, staying well away from the
windows, to see a crowd of two or three hundred people surrounding Mr O Hare’s
house opposite us. The O Hare family
were putting items into their car as quickly as they could. Within minutes the car drove away and minutes
later the crowd stormed the house and set it on fire.
We were all shocked and probably scared. My father ordered that we all get on the
floor and remain there. The crowd had
turned and were now outside our house demanding that we should leave. It was Cecil Ross, the senior man of the Shankill
orange Lodge who came out, placated the crowd and managed to hold them off
until the police arrived. Despite the
police guard on our house my father sat up all night watching, and I went to
bed that night believing that I now knew how Frankenstein’s monster must have
felt when the locals stormed the castle.
All that was missing was the pitchforks.
The next morning I woke up early, excited to think that I was
off to see Agostini. But I saw a priest
sitting at the end of my bed. It would
seem that the secret society that had enabled me to enter training to become
perhaps the greatest Master Candle Maker in the world, ever, had deemed Belfast
to be too dangerous for me. I was off to
live in a parochial house with three priests and a severely deranged house
keeper.
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