LITMIR.BIZ

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      My mother, spotting a wild streak in her young son, packed me off to the Army Cadets while I was at the school. I was fourteen and loved the weekend excursions to Orangefield Barracks. My mother thought it would tame me. It didn’t. It gave me a taste for weapons and warfare. Every weekend for a year I got to put on a khaki uniform as a junior in the Irish Guards. I trained on real but deactivated weapons. The first I held in my hand was a Webley .45 revolver. The irony of this is not lost on me. Just two short years later I would hold a Webley in my hand once again and swear an oath of allegiance to the Ulster Defence Association, the UDA. I had great fun playing the boy soldier and would pretend my enemies were lurking behind doors and I would take an imaginary pop at them. The year culminated in a weekend exercise on the Isle of Man and the training in the use of live ammunition that I got there taught me to respect firearms.

      But I still had to finish my schooling. I got into trouble at Lisnasharragh Secondary because I wouldn’t do as I was told. I hated the teachers and thought they were all the same. I had no intention of doing exams, so I didn’t see the point in being there. I hold the teacher at my primary school responsible for this tough-kid attitude. I wanted to leave school but the authorities wouldn’t let me because I was only fifteen. So I engineered fights to get expelled. The brawls were easy. Too many big-mouthed boys would ask questions about my family, why I had a different surname from my sisters, why I was Stone and the girls were Gregg. I told them it was none of their business and used my fists and my feet to ram the message home.

      My ploy worked and at fifteen and a half, a good six months before I could legally leave school, I was released by Lisnasharragh. They were glad to be rid of the tough troublemaker who continually disrupted the school. I was glad to be free of them. I hadn’t a qualification to my name. My education was basic, to say the least. The past ten years sitting behind desks and looking at blackboards had been a complete waste of time, apart from school girlfriends.

      In the early days the Braniel estate was mixed. Catholic families lived side by side with their Protestant neighbours. There was no reason for it to be any other way. Catholic families were exactly like mine, with fathers who worked and mothers who stayed at home. Their homes were exactly like mine except they had different pictures on their walls. There was a long-haired Jesus Christ exposing his heart and a picture of a woman in a blue veil standing on a burning bush in her bare feet and I couldn’t understand why she was smiling and not screaming in pain. In one home there was a well that a Catholic pal would dip his finger into and touch his forehead, chest and shoulders before leaving the house. Boys like him were my friends. I kicked footballs and played games with them. Politics, religion and nationality had nothing to do with our fun, even though Northern Ireland was just a few short years away from full-scale sectarian warfare.

      When I wasn’t playing street games with my good pal, Tim and other friends, I was involved in activities at St Bridget’s church hall. I was taken to Sunday service regularly and joined the Junior Boys’ Brigade. I sang in the local choir and, to my mother’s delight, was poached by St John’s in Orangefield to sing in their much bigger and better-known choir. The rector, who had great hopes for me, taught me to read music. I even appeared on the BBC’s Songs of Praise in a red surplice and snow-white ruffle. The singing stopped when I became leader of a junior street gang and was more interested in using my fists and feet than my angelic voice.

       3

       STREET FIGHTER

      IT WAS 1970. THE FABRIC OF NORTHERN IRISH LIFE WAS UNRAVELLING FAST. Catholic agitation was escalating and three years after the formation of the Civil Rights movement in the province they were still shouting in a collective voice. They said they wanted changes, they demanded reform and were fed up with being treated as second-class citizens. They said it was their basic human right to have a job, education and decent housing. I was fifteen and not interested in a group of strangers moaning about their lot. I was more interested in street life and carving a niche for myself as the local bad boy.

      The same year the Civil Rights activists were making waves for the establishment, I was making waves of my own – as the leader of a ruthless street gang. We called ourselves the Hole in the Wall Gang and we formed to defend our turf, and our girls, from neighbouring gangs. The Hole in the Wall wasn’t sectarian. I can put my hand on my heart and say that, because half of the gang was Catholic. The Hole in the Wall had nothing to do with vigilantism and keeping Catholics out, but it had everything to do with keeping rival street gangs in line. If they strayed into our territory they had to obey the rules and the golden rule was no flirting with our girls. They also had to behave – no anti-social antics, no trashing of local property – and show respect for the local gang. And if they didn’t keep our rules there would be hell to pay.

      As a teenage boy I ruled the ‘middle Braniel’ with an iron will and at fifteen I was already showing signs of the man I would become. There were fights every weekend and sometimes on weekday evenings with the Braniel’s two other gangs – Terminus and Lower – who felt our tough justice. I also enjoyed leading the gang into rival turf in Castlereagh, Corduff and Tullycarnet in a bid to lure gangs from these areas back to my patch for a real fight. I had tough street rules and was proud of my ‘nine to ninety’ rule: any male from a ganged-up area who was between those ages was fair game.

      The gang had weapons. There were no guns but we did carry small flick knives, and during a scrap we would use anything that came to hand, including lumps of wood and bricks. We even strapped coins to the inside of our hands. Our uniform was distinctive and made up of jeans and ox-blood-red Doctor Marten’s boots. It was our badge. The gang lasted a year. It disbanded when the Troubles erupted and the Braniel became a tinderbox. Catholic families were forced to flee, grab what belongings they could and run for their lives. They had windows broken and threats shouted at them, but the houses were never burnt. That was a deliberate ploy to keep it ready for the new Protestant family who were waiting to move in, after being kicked out of another part of the city. All over Belfast thousands of displaced families were on the move, intimidated out of the areas they called home. Areas once mixed now became ghettos. Northern Ireland had drawn her sectarian battle lines.

      Overnight the Braniel became almost exclusively Protestant. Only a handful of Catholic families chose to stay. A good friend of mine was one of the final victims, and when his family left I broke up the gang. To this day he probably thinks his family was forced to flee because Protestants didn’t want them on their estate. The truth is, they were forced to flee because an angry young Catholic set fire to a wheelie bin and pushed it up against the family’s back door in a fit of rage. Two nights before they were forced to leave, a gang from an estate in Woodstock in East Belfast had come into the Braniel to target Catholic families. They had escaped, but another friend Tim was targeted. He was furious that his house was trashed and my other friend’s was untouched, so he set the wheelie bin on fire and calmly walked away. I witnessed the incident. When I tackled him about what he was doing he just said, ‘I’m not leaving on my own. He can come with me.’

      They were gone that evening. They didn’t even take their furniture. They were terrified they would be ambushed if they hung around packing up. The family moved to Twinbrook and so did Tim.

      Like many young boys, I followed my father into Harland & Wolff, but it would not be long before I would be in trouble again and fired for assaulting a workmate. In working-class Protestant families it was more than tradition for a boy to follow his father into the world-famous yard. It was obligatory. I had left school just weeks before and was just four months off sixteen. I started as a ‘hammer boy’ in the blacksmith shop at the Deep Water dock. I loved my new job and looked forward to going into work in the mornings. I felt grown up.

      One of my duties in the blacksmith shop was to direct a massive steam-driven sledgehammer on to sheets of white-hot metal. Hammered into smaller, workable sizes, these were then fashioned by the craftsmen into fittings for the ships. I loved the Deep Water. I worked hard and kept myself out of bother. The highlight of my working day was mealtimes,

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