Thunder and Lightning

By Colin Bateman

Colin Bateman grew up in the pleasant seaside town of Bangor in Northern Ireland. Ten miles away, the IRA, the UDA and the UVF were blowing Belfast apart, but he was more concerned with making his first million through the GBA – the Gerbil Breeding Association (sadly short-lived when his gerbils turned out to be cannibals). Inspired by All the President’s Men and The Odessa File to become a crusading journalist, Bateman joined the local paper when he was a seventeen-year-old punk rocker, where instead of bringing down Presidents and finding Nazis, he found himself being hunted down by the notorious Kilcooley Strollers, a dance troupe with an axe to grind. So close to the Troubles, yet so far away – Thunder and Lightning is the story of one boy’s journey through the rather soft side of life in a town which lacked tough streets but boasted many cul-de-sacs. A town where an occasional terrorist bomb was seen as an opportunity to profiteer and where his father became a paramilitary by accident.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785374364

Colin Bateman

Colin Bateman is an author, screenwriter and playwright. He is the creator of the BBC series Murphy's Law and was listed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the Top 50 crime writers of all time. Find out more at colinbateman.com

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Preface

I KNOW SOMEONE WHOSE PET parrot whistles our loyalist anthem ‘The Sash’ every time somebody comes to their front door.

In Belfast, this would be considered vaguely sinister, a reinforcement of historic bigotries channelled through a captive bird with green feathers, the captivity being symbolic and the green being sarcastic.

In Bangor, my home town, it’s just funny.

That is essentially the difference between the city and the town, between their Troubles and our troubles. We were always just on the fringes of what went on. Even though there was carnage twelve miles up the road, most of what we experienced, we experienced through the television news. We had a chip on neither shoulder. It was a bit like our football supporting. The clubs we were fervent about were Liverpool and Manchester United – close, but still removed; a sea between us, never to be seen in the living flesh.

Ours was largely a Protestant town. I was eleven years old before I met a Catholic. We were not aware of injustices, of discrimination, of tensions between communities, because there only was one community. If there were Catholics they were scattered around, there wasn’t some Papish enclave we had to fear. Nice, safe, mostly middle-class, solidly unionist but still vaguely liberal, sardonic Bangor, with its lovely parks and tennis clubs, where a child pretending to be a paramilitary was something to be encouraged and applauded, as offensive as a Morris Dance.

I love and hate Bangor with equal measure, but what I can never change about it is that it is home. I once yearned to leave, but now know I never will. It is as remarkable and unremarkable as any other town. It used to be a destination, and then planes were invented. Our Victorian seafront is now literally gone, replaced by a fucking marina. A parade that used to feature hotels, bars, chip shops, seagulls and amusement arcades is now a boarded-up eyesore. And yet, once, it was, almost literally, the centre of the world, famous for sending its missionaries abroad. Legend has it that Altus, the Roman Centurion at Golgotha, at Calvary – the soldier who said, ‘Truly this man is the son of God’ – was an Irish mercenary who fled Bangor because he heard about the plans for the fucking marina.

This is a book about my growing up, about school and small-town journalism. It has the vagaries, and mistakes, that come with memory – but they’re still my memories. If there is an occasional embellishment or reordering of events, they are only feeble attempts to make me look fractionally more heroic. Names have occasionally been changed to protect the guilty. If any offence is taken by those still living, well, you were probably asking for it. Never cross me.

1

The Wellington Olympics

I WANT TO TELL YOU about the Olympic Games. You do remember when the Olympic Games were held in Bangor in 1972? More precisely, they were held in Wellington Park. More specifically around the circular block which connected Wellington Park, Wellington Drive and Wellington Gardens. We called it The Block. It had about the same circumference as a 400-metre running track, give or take a hundred metres. The Block is still there, you can go and visit it. The houses it surrounds are much smaller than they used to be. But there is nothing there to commemorate the historic Wellington Olympics of 1972.

The Wellington Olympics were thought up by our gang: The Wellington Boot Boys. Mainly Rodney, Dougie, Terry, Michael and me, though others came and went. Paul was one of those who drifted through. He was Michael’s big brother. He had spina bifida. This was before the Paralympics were thought of. He was as enthusiastic as any of us. He could turn, but only awkwardly. He could run, but only slowly. His nickname was Billy Whizz, after the Beano character. It was funny then, and it’s quite funny now, though possibly cause for a tribunal and my never working in Hollywood again.

My nickname was Bacon. I think it comes from someone not being able to pronounce Bateman. But you never really know. One day it was there, and it stayed. Is Bacon coming out to play? Where’s Bacon? It lasted until I was a teenager. Then nobody asked those questions.

I remember the summer of ’72 as blazing hot. It may not have been. There’s probably a way to check. Summers, then, lasted forever, and there was bugger-all on the TV, apart from the actual Olympics, which were taking place in black and white. Mary Peters was going to win Gold for us in Munich. She was a big woman who looked like a farmer’s wife, and she might well have been. There’s probably a way to check. She was going to win the Pentathlon. Nobody quite knew what a Pentathlon was, but it sounded like a good thing to win. As part of it, she threw the shot put. You wouldn’t mess with Mary Peters. She’d break your back if you messed with her. She sounded Northern Irish, but she was English. We didn’t know that then or she wouldn’t have had so much support. Besides Mary Peters, the Munich Olympics also had terrorists and many deaths, but we weren’t much preoccupied by that as we had our own terrorists and deaths. Our Olympics were taking place in colour, though obviously we didn’t actually have any people of colour – the first black man didn’t arrive in Northern Ireland until 1973 and he thought it was too violent and moved on.

The colours we were concerned with then were Gold, Silver and Bronze, though admittedly we were equally fascinated by Red, White and Blue. Luckily for our Olympics, the Twelfth of July was well over – we had already marched up and down Wellington Park as the Cardboard Memorial Flute Band. We didn’t have any instruments – we would play imaginary flutes, and when we got bored with that, we would become Me-Me men – you know, playing the pretend bagpipes. Me-me, me me me me me me me me. Rodney always marched at the front of the band because he was the best at throwing the stick. Every band leader had a stick. For us, it was usually a broom handle with a tennis ball taped to one end. Rodney could twirl it behind his back and throw it high in the air and catch it and twirl it again and throw it, all in time to the beat of the drums we didn’t have. Rodney came from Lurgan, which for us was quite exotic. He might as well have come from Timbuktu. We had no idea where Timbuktu was either. He lived around the corner in Chippendale. I used to copy his maths answers in P4. His dad might have been a Me-Me man. I think he was. My Uncle Roy was a Me-Me man, though for some reason we didn’t talk to that side of the family. You never really know why families divide. You’re too shy to ask when you’re young, and when you get older, there’s no one left to ask.

For three months up to the Twelfth it was the most important thing in our lives. We started collecting for the Eleventh Night bonfire to celebrate it immediately after Easter. This meant knocking on doors and asking for wood. A surprising amount of people had wood. Or made a point of finding wood. It’s amazing how many people can find wood when required to by a gang of twenty boys demanding it. There were perfectly good sideboards and wardrobes donated to the cause out of a combination of loyalism and fear. People went out and bought furniture just so they would have something to give us when we called. It wasn’t without its dangers. A skelf in the finger was an occupational hazard. You would get rid of the skelf – a small sliver of wood that would embed itself when you were shifting planks – by applying a bread poultice. Yes, I was born in the eighteenth century.

One house we called at consistently was Grumpy McVeigh’s. He lived on the corner of the Park and Drive, about four doors away. We called at his house every year, even though he never gave us any wood. We also called at his house at all times of the day and night, ringing his bell and running away.¹ Generations of us rang his doorbell and ran away. He was called Grumpy because he made the mistake of being grumpy about it. He had a long white beard and was very old. He looked like Santa Claus without the red suit, but he didn’t act like him. You wouldn’t have wanted to sit on Grumpy’s knee; he would have throttled you. Do you know what happened to Grumpy? He died. That’s what happens to grumpy people. He lived with his sister. She didn’t seem bothered by us at all and outlived him because of it. She was easy come, he was easy go.

The Derwents were directly across the road from us. They were English. Their youngest child, Jane, was my best friend for a while, but we also played with her two big brothers, Alan and Roger; there was an older brother we didn’t have much to do with. Roger was my brother’s age. His nickname was Dibble, after Officer Dibble in TV’s Top Cat cartoon. Dibble’s dad hated him being called Dibble. His dad was an old-school martinet and sometime Scout master. At Hallowe’en my dad invited all the neighbours round to our back garden; it was probably the last year before fireworks were banned because of the Troubles. The government didn’t want Catherine wheels in the hands of terrorists. For many years afterwards we had to make do with sparklers. The terrorists weren’t as interested in sparklers. But that last year my dad had all the neighbours round, all the Derwent kids, and their parents too, and many more besides. He placed the fireworks in milk bottles for debatable safety and set them off. Everyone had a good time, i.e. nobody died.

A week later the Derwents had their own firework show in their back garden, because they were still English and were celebrating Guy Fawkes. My brother and I went to watch the fun over their garden fence. Mr Derwent spotted us. We expected him to wave us in. But, instead, he chased us away. Then he went to our front door and complained to Dad that we’d been sneaking a peek. That’s the sort of man he was. My dad called him The Duke, and I always thought it was because he was a bit pompous. It was forty years before I finally twigged: The Duke of Wellington.

I can’t emphasise enough how everything seemed to revolve around us being Protestants. We had no idea what a Protestant actually was. We went to Sunday School, but, as in most families, that was just so our parents could get us out of the house. My brother was once almost sucked into the Plymouth Brethren. A friend called Uel Kennedy invited him along.² My brother went, but soon decided there were limits to friendship. Nevertheless, despite our lack of commitment, the Twelfth was a celebration of being Protestant and it was right up there with Christmas as the high point of the year – although technically it was the Eleventh we loved more than anything, because we could stay up after midnight for the bonfire and were given extra pocket money for sweets. This was before the twin spectres of girls and alcohol altered those nights forever, when Kicking the Pope was still more important than copping a feel. Because there was No Pope Here. Or anywhere, as far as we were concerned, apart from Rome. The Pope was in Rome and he could stay there, while we relaxed in the warm glow of a bonfire on the ‘Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne’, though actually the Boyne was across the border where none of us had ever been, because why would you?

My dad had been across the border exactly once in his life, and that was on his honeymoon. He grew up in Belfast, first on Lindsay Street and then Ulsterville Avenue. He went to Fane Street Primary School, which was in the shadow of Windsor Park, home of Linfield and the Northern Ireland team. My mum’s family was Bangor through and through. She grew up at 100 High Street. There’s a beautician’s there now, called Breathe, which unfortunately she is no longer able to do. She worked in a shop. My dad’s parents, John and Ada, eventually moved to Bangor and lived in the now disappeared Williamson Lane and then on Broadway,³ right beside Ward Park.

Mum and Dad met at a dance. She was seven years older than him. Today you’d call him a toy boy. Back then he was a toy boy who’d blown up Nazis from his tank. I never saw them dance anywhere else. I was never at a wedding or a funeral my whole childhood. My mum didn’t marry until she was well into her thirties. They got married at Bangor Parish Church. The bridal party was conveyed to the wedding in a Daimler limousine, which cost £2.10 to rent from James Russell & Co., ‘weddings a speciality’. They also buried people, but that must not have been a speciality. Maybe their burials were rubbish and they left bony hands sticking out of graves. For their honeymoon, Dad put Mum on the back of his motorbike and they headed south. They had seven nights at the Central Hotel in Dublin, and then on to the Metropole Hotel in Cork. In Dublin they went to the Abbey Theatre to see a Terence Rattigan play. I only know about it because long after they were gone I found the theatre programme in the Hat Box of Important Stuff they kept under the stairs. I know that it starred Ray McAnally, who was later in A Very British Coup and The Mission and then died of a heart attack shortly thereafter.

Although ‘the Free State’ was right next door, we never officially went south as a family, although we once strayed accidentally into Letterkenny before retreating, horrified. We went to Ballycastle or Portrush on the north coast if we needed a holiday. We never went properly abroad, unless you count the Isle of Man. I wasn’t on a plane until I was nineteen. That time we went to Blackpool. I was way too old to be on holiday with my parents. I had just met my first proper girlfriend and spent the week pining for her and thinking she’d be off with someone else by the time I got back. But no, she waited for me, at least for a while. Eventually she was Bad News. I killed time in Blackpool by going to a punk festival in a park, and to the cinema to see a Gary Glitter film, Remember Me This Way, which we were destined not to.

My parents lived first in a tiny house in Alfred Street, less than a stone’s throw from where my mum grew up. They brought my brother David home there from Bangor Hospital in 1959, but soon moved to the High Donaghadee Road, a twenty-minute walk away from the town centre. That’s where they brought me home to. We lived there until shortly after I started primary school in September 1966.

My Auntie Lily lived with us for as long as I knew her. I don’t really know what her story was, besides that she was a spinster and my mum’s older sister and that she worked in Shorts, the aircraft factory, in Belfast and occasionally brought us home brochures about the plane they were building there, the Shorts Skyvan. She didn’t actually build the planes. She was a test pilot. No, a clerk. She smoked like a train and knitted a lot. Eventually she had a stroke. After it she could still smoke, but she couldn’t knit, which was a godsend for us all. She could walk, but she was less dextrous than Billy Whizz. We made terrible fun of her.

Michael Caldwell lived next door. He was my age and deaf and dumb. We made fun of him too. We were terrible. When my brother wanted to make fun of me, which was often, he would call me Colin Michael Caldwell – because my middle name is Michael – and I would cry. He still does it sometimes, and he’s sixty-two. For the things we said and did, we should have been in the Bad Boys Home. We were occasionally threatened with it. Most children were. But occasionally my dad would drive us past it – it was in Millisle, which is a poor man’s Donaghadee – without saying anything, at the same time saying a lot.

We had an Ormo Bread man who had no thumb on his right hand. He told us he’d sucked it off to make us stop sucking our own thumbs. You couldn’t say that to kids today, they’d need counselling.

My best friend in P1, Colin Cairns, lived around the corner. He brought me back to his house one day in a state of great excitement because his parents had purchased a fridge. I’d never met anyone who had a fridge. His mum made orange ice lollies in the freezer compartment. I’d never dreamt such a thing was possible. And she gave me one for nothing. With that sort of power, she could have brought down capitalism. Once you control the means of production … But she probably didn’t think of that. She was too busy making orange ice lollies.

Throughout my childhood I only went to a restaurant once with my parents. That was for my dad’s fiftieth birthday. We had minute steaks and Black Forest gateaux in the Skandia on Main Street. We weren’t deprived or noticeably poor. I didn’t know anyone who went to restaurants. I don’t know how restaurants survived. Nor were we ever in a pub. Pubs then didn’t serve food. None of them. If we ever did eat out it meant sitting at a table in a chip shop. Usually along Queen’s Parade, our seafront before the fucking marina, with its bingo halls and sleazy cinema and seagulls. My dad never went out for a pint with his mates. I’m not sure if he had mates. As an ex-soldier he could go to the Royal British Legion club on Hamilton Road. He went once, perhaps in an effort to meet old friends or foster new ones.⁴ He came home and said everyone was drunk, and never went back. He wasn’t against drinking and enjoyed the odd whiskey, but he drank infrequently. Mum hardly drank either. When they had friends round, Mum drank advocaat,⁵ which hardly counts.

I can only remember going once to the pictures with my parents. Bangor had two cinemas, the Tonic on Hamilton Road and the Queen’s Cinema on the seafront. The Queen would not have been impressed by the one named after her. It was known locally as the Fleapit. It showed mostly re-runs and X-rated movies,⁶ and specialised in soft-core porn films, which mostly seemed to feature Italian nuns and which we tried to get into but were usually turned away from because we hadn’t yet entered puberty. Eventually it burned down under Mysterious Circumstances. My one cinema visit with my parents was to the altogether more salubrious Tonic, which was a 2,000-seater with a massive screen, one of the largest in the UK. It was a birthday treat when I was about five to see The Sound of Music. I fell asleep shortly after ‘High on a hill lives a lonely goat-herd’. The film seemed to go on forever. I think it was more their birthday treat than mine.

My Auntie Lily took my brother and me to see a double bill of The Magnificent Seven and Ambush Bay. The Magnificent Seven is a classic. But I was even more enthusiastic about Ambush Bay, surely the best war movie ever made. When I was all grown up, I set about tracking it down to find out why it had been neglected by film history and discovered it starred Mickey Rooney and was rubbish. I saw various James Bonds at the Tonic, always during someone else’s birthday treat. There was always a love for the movies. Around the time of the Wellington Olympics, I would take myself off to the Tonic to watch the Saturday afternoon matinees. I only recently discovered that my brother did the same. Nobody kidnapped us and kept us chained to a radiator in their basement. Very few people had basements. Being chained to a radiator in a living room would have led to early detection. We sat by ourselves and nobody interfered with us. Eventually the Tonic burned down under Mysterious Circumstances. It was owned by the same people who owned the Fleapit. They had bad luck with Mysterious Circumstances.

I mention the plays and the movies only because we were not a family much steeped in culture, although there were occasional flurries. There weren’t many books in the house that we actually owned. My dad went to the library every two weeks and took out books about the First World War for himself and about ghosts for my mum, who for some reason was obsessed – or possessed. Later I found out that we had relatives who dabbled in spiritualism and rose quite high up in the Spiritualist Association. Eventually they were Promoted to Glory. Spiritualism grew quite big in the inter-war years because so many lives had been lost in the First, and people were desperate to contact their loved ones. I don’t know how seriously my mum was into it. There were no hand-holding sessions around the dining table, and the only voice that ever came from above was my dad trying to fix the TV aerial on the roof.⁷

I was an early reader and prone to obsessions the way kids are. The Story of Dr Dolittle was a favourite. Dr Dolittle led to The Hobbit. The Hobbit led to The Lord of the Rings, and The Lord of the Rings changed my world. Most of my parents’ reading, however, consisted of them perusing lists of houses for sale. Every Saturday morning my dad would go round the various estate agents picking up the new lists and they would spend hours in our kitchen going through them, choosing which houses they wanted to view. They didn’t seem to have any real intention of moving. They just liked looking at other people’s houses. It was their thing. Maybe they were just nosy. Maybe they were aspirational. They lived in hope of winning the Football Pools, which was a big thing and might finance their big move. Or Spot the Ball in the Saturday Night, which was the sports paper published by the Belfast Telegraph on – you guessed it – a Saturday night and was often the only way we had of catching up on the football results. It was also, for some reason, known as ‘The Ulster’. You had to put an X on a photo from a football match, indicating where you thought the missing ball should be. You put about thirty Xs and then you had to post it in. God knows how it was ever decided. I suspect it was a swiz. They sent theirs in for years and won fuck all.

We occasionally went to the Little Theatre in Bangor, which was a little theatre in Bangor. We went to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I chiefly remember for the words ‘sexual intercourse’ being shouted out from the stage – which was mortifying even though I had no idea what they meant. But I suspected. Mostly I remember it being really hot in there and the play going on forever.

We went to see James Young there too. He was a Belfast comedian who sometimes dressed up as a woman as part of his act. He was the biggest star we had in the early ’70s, besides footballer Georgie Best. The