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PROLOGUE

I couldn’t sleep.

I was down from Belfast for the Ireland v. Wales rugby game at Lansdowne Road, the first clash of the Celts in the then Five Nations Championship on 18 January, 1992. I’d only arrived in the Dublin hotel after three in the morning. Now, as I switched on the bedside radio in the dark, the luminous clock with its red digits was telling me it was 5.59 a.m. One minute to RTÉ’s first news bulletin of the day.

I wanted to know if anything terrible – or even more terrible – had happened in the killing fields of Northern Ireland the previous night.

At six on the dot, there was the ringing of bells on the radio; before the news, the Angelus. The daily morning prayer call for Catholics. It is a thing of beauty, meant to convey goodwill to all, and it offers a warm and welcoming embrace of belonging – not just to members of the Catholic faith, but to all. I fall into that ‘all’ category. A Protestant from ‘the Black North’.

Normally, I would bend an ear and listen – the chimes of the bells can be gently calming in themselves. But in this pre-dawn, they sounded like the very bells from Hell. After what I’d witnessed, and reported on, from the Teebane crossroads in County Tyrone the previous night, with no disrespect to anyone, this to me was more like Hell’s Angelus. The sound of those bells awoke in me again memories I’d tried to ward off in sleep, but couldn’t: images of the terror, the trauma, the savagery and the searing sadness of the night before in the quiet country townland of Teebane.

A massive IRA landmine, planted at the side of the road, had been detonated at the end of a wire by a cowardly bastard sitting a smug half-mile away. The bomb blew to pieces a company van, which had been ferrying fourteen decent men home from their week’s work. Eight of those men were killed instantly, the rest horrifically injured. Their crime? Carrying out construction work on a UDR base in Omagh, County Tyrone. But because this was what the Provos deemed working for the crown forces, it was, in their depraved eyes, ‘collaboration with the forces of occupation’ and as such deserved the death penalty.

I was working with the Ulster Press Agency (UPA) that Friday night. We were covering shifts for three different newspapers, two in Ireland, one in the UK. But I’d already made plans to travel to Dublin later in the evening. I’d booked a hotel, hoping nothing big news-wise would happen, and that I’d get to the rugby international the next day. But then the first calls started to reach me in Belfast about the atrocity in Teebane, and those plans were instantly put on hold.

I got in the car and headed for Teebane crossroads, which was on the road from Dungannon to Omagh, a good 45 miles from Belfast. By the time I got there, the area was already crowded with police, soldiers, doctors, nurses, firefighters and rescue personnel – the whole spectrum of the emergency services. And, not least, the first stunned and grieving relatives of the victims. Hugging, weeping in huddles, they had been alerted by the first breaking news bulletins, and knowing that their menfolk would have been on that road and being all too aware of the danger they were in by doing the work they were doing, they had intuitively realised that the very worst had happened.

One side of the van had been blown out and it had careered for a distance along the road before shuddering to a halt in a hulk of tangled metal and mangled bodies. The roadway was strewn with debris from the van and with human bodies. A short time before, these had been living, breathing, joking workmates, looking forward to a Friday night out, with their brown envelope pay packets still in their pockets.

Of course, reporting the Troubles, the pitiful sight of the bloodied remains of human beings was not new to me. But the horror always engulfed me. And it has remained with me. It wasn’t only the clichéd ‘stuff of nightmares’. It haunted my waking hours as well. I know I was not alone in this. That horror stalked all those who ever witnessed it – and especially the security and emergency services, who were almost always first on the shocking scenes of such atrocities.

Those heroes had to do their job. And hacks like me, we had to do ours: to open the window to the wider world about this kind of senseless slaughter. To open people’s eyes to the sheer savagery and horror of terrorism – a terrorism that back then was mostly confined to our small corner of Europe but sadly today is rampant throughout the continent and indeed the world.

So that night I set to work gathering as much information as I could. Then I headed to a nearby farmhouse. This was in the days before mobile phones. Back then, we had to rely on the generosity of local people to allow us to use their home telephones so we could file copy. I got a landline, made reverse charge calls, filed copy off the top of my head to the newspapers for which the UPA was on duty that night. (I didn’t take notes. I didn’t have to. I simply reported what I saw with my own eyes, and whatever information I could pick up from people on the ground.)

Having done as much as I could, I headed back for Belfast, monitoring the breaking news radio bulletins on the way. My wife, Lindy, also a journalist, was waiting for me to go to Dublin that night. We eventually left around midnight. We were in two minds about going at all, since it was now so very late, but we headed south anyway. Once over the border, we switched the car radio to RTÉ. And on a news bulletin I heard something that both stunned and sickened me, even though I would have thought it impossible I could be any more stunned or sickened on that infamous night.

Peter Brooke, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – dubbed ‘Babbling Brooke’ by the Belfast press for his seismic failure to grasp the essence and nuances of his job – had gone ahead that Friday night with a live guest appearance on The Late Late Show on RTÉ television, hosted by Gay Byrne. In the very shadow of the valley of death that had been Teebane crossroads just a few hours earlier, the senior British Cabinet Minister with responsibility for Northern Ireland hadn’t only gone ahead with the chat show appearance, he’d even given them a song. The rendition? ‘My Darling Clementine.’

How bloody cruel. How bloody crass. How utterly, utterly insensitive.

Later Brooke, who was in Dublin because he was due to be a VIP guest at the rugby international at Lansdowne Road, did apologise. He said he’d been taken unawares at the request for a song and felt he couldn’t get out of it.

We all make mistakes, yes. But listening to news reports that morning about the Northern Ireland Secretary of State singing on a television entertainment show against the backdrop of the horror I’d just witnessed was stomach-churning. What message did that send to the ordinary people of Northern Ireland about how seriously their plight was being taken at government level? More than that, what did it say to the bereaved families of the victims of terror, all those many, many bereaved families?

‘You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine …’

The mantra of journalism is that reporters are always meant to be ‘objective and impartial’, but anyone with a heart, a soul, a conscience, and who actually came from – was born, bred, brought up in – the cauldron of conflict that was Ulster would know there is only one word to describe that supposed code of conduct.

Impossible.

It is impossible to witness such horror and then dispassionately distance yourself from it. I felt rage and despair at the savagery I’d seen that night. But also disgust at the government minister who’d blithely sing as reports of that atrocity unfolded.

Meantime, Lindy and I had dragged ourselves into the Dublin hotel lobby about 3.30 a.m. on the Saturday morning. Ireland were playing Wales that day. The bar was still open. The men from the Valleys – and everywhere else in the principality – were in full song. But even their rendering of ‘Bread of Heaven’ tasted stale, and it stuck in my throat. We went straight to our room.

The next morning, we trudged around Dublin. The evolving story from the Teebane massacre was still headlining on the bulletins, and was all over the front pages of the newspapers. The pubs in Dublin were throbbing with excellent banter and rising expectation – from both the home and visiting fans. I knew all our lads, a tens of thousands-strong scrum of Irish rugby supporters, would be in the usual watering holes: Scruffy Murphy’s, The Palace, the old hacks’ bars of The Oval and Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street would all be bunged. Instead of joining them, Lindy and I trudged – not walked, trudged – round to Trinity College. Far from the madding crowd. I’m not particularly religious, Lindy is atheist. But we time-warped, poring over the ancient Christian Book of Kells buried deep in the bowels of that revered citadel of learning.

On the way back we bumped into two Welsh fans, who were asking did we know anybody with spare tickets for the game. Their lucky day. Rugby is a bit of a religion to me. But that day my heart just wasn’t in it. We gave the lads our tickets. Refused to take their money. They must have wondered, but we didn’t explain.

I walked away, my head bowed, thinking of those men murdered the previous evening, their by now deep-in-grief families and friends, and the bombers who blew them up probably now sitting in a bar, gloating. I didn’t know those murdered men personally. But I knew men like them. I grew up among them. Decent, hard-working men doing their best for their families, their parents, their wives, their children. Men who’d never done anyone a bad turn in their lives, singled out because of their religion and their job. And I thought of Peter ‘Babbling’ Brooke and his performance on The Late Late Show as the bodies of those good men lay on a dark and cold country road in County Tyrone.

Teebane is just one of the very, very many horror stories I covered in the course of the Troubles. My journalistic career – I prefer the word hack to journalist – began just as the first rumblings of what was to become a full-blown sectarian war were being felt. I covered many stories of massacre and mayhem down all those long, dark years, and also during the murky years that followed the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. Visiting newsmen and women used to seek out local hacks like myself for help with background information on a story, or on how to contact so and so. Or for a brief rundown on who was who amid Northern Ireland’s complicated array of paramilitary groupings. We’d sit in the bar and chat, and inevitably these visiting reporters, whether from elsewhere in the UK, America, France, Germany, whatever, would get round to the questions that most intrigued them.

What was it like living amid a terror war where, unlike visiting newsmen and women such as themselves, you couldn’t just get up and leave after a few days – where you (and your family) could face the wrath of those terror chiefs who didn’t like what you wrote about them?

And second … why?

Always that word … why?

They just couldn’t get their heads around the Northern Ireland Troubles. ‘Fighting over religion!’ they’d laugh. That was medieval, wasn’t it? Reliving old battles. 1690. 1798. 1916. The rest of the world had moved on. Nobody fought over religion anymore except us. What the hell was wrong with us?

Why?

Needless to say, the Troubles were a bit more complex than just a battle over religion. But sadly, as we all now know, Northern Ireland’s conflict is no longer unique on even that score. Many of the countries those reporters came from have in the years since also been touched by terror waged by those who claim to be fighting their own holy war. And throughout the wider world the media is having to adapt to reporting on the horror of homegrown terror – of having to speak and write openly and fearlessly about the warlords and the gangsters in their own midst, knowing of the risks that entails not just to their own lives but sometimes to their families as well.

But the journalist’s job is to tell the story, whatever the cost.

Of the stories I have covered, some made me laugh, but very, very many have made me cry. I covered heart-wrenching stories that highlighted the very best of human nature. And I covered stories that plumbed the depravity to which others stooped.

My colleagues and I were always aware of the dangers of some of the stories we worked on. In the most horrific instance of all, my colleague at the Sunday World, Martin O’Hagan, was brutally murdered one September evening. My own life was threatened many times. When the security forces used to arrive with a report about another threat to my life, they’d bring with them a form – called a PM1 – which I then had to sign to confirm I’d been made aware of the relevant intelligence. I have enough of those forms to paper a room. Twenty-one, I think, at the last count. The threats came from paramilitary groups on all sides, from drug dealers and other gangsters.

I have been beaten up in the street, abused and spat at. I’ve received bullets in the post. At one point terrorists attempted to murder my son to get at me. Our home, with its bullet-resistant windows, security cameras, monitors, hand-held ‘Hawkeye’ panic button with its direct link to the nearest police station, sometimes resembled a bullet- and bomb-proof bunker.

But those stories – even the ones that put my life in danger – had to be told. That was my job. That was what I did. It is what I do.

And this, now, is my story.

THEY TRIED TO KICK ME TO DEATH …

‘Cover up! Cover up and curl up!’ my brain was screaming at me.

I wanted to get up and fight. I’d been decked, down on the ground, once. Tried to get up. I thought I’d connected with one punch. But the brutal barrage of the bare-knuckle blows to my head beat me back down again.

‘Cover up! Cover up!’ was the tattoo drumming inside my head.

So I did. I covered up and curled up on the ground. Then the boots started drumming. And my baldy head was the drum. It was like the red-hot rivets from the shipyard caulker’s glove being sledged into the hull of the Titanic: time and time again.

The impact was stunning. And just like the Titanic, I went down. But I wasn’t out. I didn’t black out. The big, bulky, brown overcoat I’d bought in a pawnshop many years before – my friends said that when I wore it, from the back I looked like a garden shed – acted a bit like a flak jacket. It cushioned my torso, and saved my ribs from being kicked in.

Finally, finally, the assault stopped.

I tried to struggle up. I couldn’t. There were people all around me. They had stood and watched what one man, a renowned writer, later described as the ‘most savage thing’ he had ever seen. It certainly must have been a surreal scene. Fairy lights twinkling in the half light in the background. Festive music blasting out. Shoppers, revellers and excited children bustling through Belfast’s Christmas continental market. The smells from the various hot food stalls wafting through the crisp late November air. The cinnamon scent of mulled wine … And suddenly, the sight of me being jumped on from behind and savagely hammered by the boots of a team of gangsters.

The crowd – and the market that day was absolutely jam-packed – had parted into a circle. People stared down at me in open-mouthed shock as I struggled to get up. A few came to help me. I was bleeding, from my mouth, from my head, and from an ear. Those good people helped me up.

I staggered over to the wall of Belfast City Hall, just a few feet from me, leaning against it, trying to get my bearings. Someone called for an ambulance.

What the hell had just happened to me?

I hazily recalled what I thought were the words one of my four attackers had said before the battering began: ‘You’re trying to get my brother killed.’ Later, from my own sources, I was to find out that what the ringleader actually said was: ‘You’re trying to get my boss killed.’

His boss was Stephen Matthews, the so-called commander of the East Belfast battalion of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a lethal loyalist paramilitary gang. The main man fronting the attack on me, and who had stuck the boot, again and again, into my head was one of Matthews’s henchmen, a gangster, drug dealer and convicted armed robber called Jamsey Reid. Both myself and my colleagues in the Sunday World had written about Matthews and about Reid many times before. We were to do so again afterwards.

But that weekend, on the front page of the paper, we published a picture of my battered and bloodied head and face. The headline summed up what I had felt was a real possibility as I lay there on the ground with those boots blattering in on my head. It read:

THEY TRIED TO KICK ME TO DEATH

They’d come up on me from behind. I’d had a few pints on me. I’d been at a very special celebration that day with my friends in the Irish News, the Belfast morning paper, for the great James Kelly (now sadly deceased), who’d first started as a cub reporter in the Irish News way back, some eighty years before. That morning there’d been a reception for Jimmy and a formal presentation in the offices of the Irish News. Afterwards, a busload of us headed for a much less formal lunch in the Billiard Room of the Ulster Reform Club in the city’s Royal Avenue.

At the formal presentation, various folk from the many strands of life who’d known Jimmy – he was in his late nineties at the time – had been asked to say a few words. The Fitzpatrick family, who own the Irish News, had asked me to pay homage to him on behalf of the press. I was last on my feet after a phalanx of tributes.

Now, Jimmy was still writing a Saturday column for the Irish News. And he was no friend of the Orange Order, who, in his eyes, were distinctly out of order on many occasions, especially with regard to their insistence on marching through nationalist areas. So, for a joke with a wee bit of a jag, I had an Orange sash, a collarette, especially made for him. It was embroidered with the words ‘Kelly’s Heroes Loyal Orange Lodge’, with the number of the supposed lodge being the date he started in the Irish News.

When I got to my feet, I paid due and colourful tribute to the legendary scribe. And at the end, I began taking the sash out of the plastic bag it was in behind my back, so Jimmy wouldn’t see it as I walked towards him. A ripple of laughter ignited behind me as folk sitting at the lunch tables realised what it was.

James was sitting in his wheelchair, so it made it easier to whip it out and stick it over his shock of white hair and onto his shoulders before he could react. And react he did: in typical, sharp – and this time, sweet – Kelly style. Taking the microphone, he said: ‘McDowell, I’ll wear this in bed at nights from now on – just in case, when I get to the Pearly Gates, St Peter turns out to be a Prod!’

After the lunch a posse of us went out into the late afternoon for a final pint, or two, at a beer tent in the grounds of Belfast City Hall. The annual pre-Christmas continental market was in full swing. There were hundreds of people thronging the stalls packed with goods, and food, from throughout Europe. We were having a great time. Until, that is, I left the beer tent to head to the toilets.

OK, I’d played rugby for some 37 years. Represented Ulster Schools, captained the Ulster Junior XV to a couple of Inter-Provincial titles, and was proud to turn out, even just once, for an Ulster President’s XV at Ravenhill captained by the great Willie John McBride. I was still turning out for the club known euphemistically in Belfast as the ‘Cregagh Red Sox’, otherwise the legendary Malone Rugby Football Club, when I was 48 years of age (it was their ‘golden oldies’ Tankards team). Plus, I’d got round eleven marathons in my time. Ran under three hours in the Belfast Marathon. And I’d done a bit of boxing: both inside and outside the ring.

But I was no Jack Reacher. I was 62 years of age. Still fit, yes. Still jogging – or, to use a good oul’ Ulster Scots word, still hirplin’. But I was no match for that UVF ‘team’ who simply walked up to me in the dark and, without warning, got stuck in.

With my Irish News friends, I’d been sinking a few pints in one of the big marquee bars at the City Hall market to finish off the day. The only WCs were portaloos away at the other side of the grounds. That’s where I’d headed.

Reid and his gangster mob had been drinking in the big beer tent, too. I hadn’t spotted them, although I should have. But they’d seen me. They followed me. And as I dandered back from the toilets, they attacked me, the only warning being that single sentence: ‘You’re trying to get my boss killed.’

That night, and the next morning, the daily newspapers and the broadcast bulletins carried reports of the assault. Within hours, our own reporters, through their sources, had sifted out who was responsible. We even discovered that Reid had phoned his boss, ‘Ugly Doris’ Matthews, when he’d spotted me in the beer tent. He’d asked Matthews for permission to attack me. ‘Ugly Doris’ gave the go-ahead.

When you are raised in the brilliant city of Belfast, there is an old saying that you were ‘born, bred and buttered’ in that great town. Or as I referred to myself in subsequent interviews, ‘born, bred, buttered and recently battered in Belfast’.

I love this city so well – and its magnificent, ordinary, decent, spirited people. Some of my friends later expressed shock that none of the many onlookers had waded in to help me during the attack. I don’t blame them. The attack upon me was sudden and savage. So sudden, I couldn’t identify my attackers. They came from behind so I didn’t get a full view, or any view, of their faces. And, of course, at that time on a dank November night, it was dark.

No one in that milling crowd at the Christmas market came forward to say they could ID the culprits either, or even to offer a description. I didn’t blame those people then. And I still don’t. Most had absolutely no idea what was going on. Many of them didn’t know, or realise, who I was in the panic of the moment. Some of them did, they told me afterwards, especially the people who helped me up and phoned an ambulance.

But this is Northern Ireland. Often to act, to speak out, to help the police can have consequences – especially if the bogeymen, the paramilitaries, are involved. And anyway, many of those people had young kids with them. How were they to know that in acting the Good Samaritan to help me, they, or more particularly their children, wouldn’t be dragged into the violence and hurt? Reid and his hoods may have been ‘carrying’: perhaps knives, possibly a gun. I’m convinced, though, that if the gang had been armed, I’d have been more seriously injured. Or even dead. But I still believe those folk who were witnessing what was happening before their very eyes were right not to interfere. What could they have done anyway? It had happened so suddenly. Nobody could have envisaged it.

The element of surprise is always one of the terrorists’ best weapons. And they know that well. The attack on me at that Christmas market in Belfast was a bloody reminder of that.

Initially I had no idea of the identity of the men who’d attacked me. When our Sunday World sources got the names, I tried to get evidence to put these UVF gangsters behind bars. In the paper we had already dubbed the East Belfast mob, who were dealing both death and drugs and were up to their necks in protection rackets, the ParaMafia. I scoured whatever CCTV footage I thought could turn up clues. There had been a huge sightseeing wheel in the City Hall grounds – a smaller version of the London Eye – during the continental market. I got CCTV footage from that, but it didn’t cover the location of the attack. CCTV footage from anti-vandalism cameras on buses parked nearby were also examined. Nothing there.

I went down into the control room, buried deep in City Hall, which monitors the security in and around the city’s beautiful centrepiece building. There was footage from one security camera that had captured the assault, but it was so grainy as to be useless in ID’ing my assailants. Thankfully, there was enough in one clip we lifted from the security disk the City Council kindly gave me to show a certain member of the gang sticking the boot into me.

Again, we quickly learned from our sources that the boot boy was Reid. But that was the only evidence the police had to work on. They did their best. They passed what they had on to the Public Prosecution Service (PPS), as is the norm. But eventually, inevitably, I got a letter from the PPS saying there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Reid, or any of his UVF cohorts.

That letter arrived at my home on a Saturday morning. The next day, we splashed Reid’s picture on the front page of the paper, naming him as my main attacker. He never sued. And we hammered him, in print, many times afterwards – not least over a botched armed robbery he and his team carried out … after being spotted scouting out their target by a good ex-cop who later filled me in on the whole cartoon-style cock-up.

Reid was banged up behind bars. And not before time.

While he and his mob may have gotten away with hammering me, our extensive and saturation coverage of him, his boss Stephen Matthews and the sordid East Belfast UVF battalion proved that the pen is not only mightier than the sword. It is also mightier than the boot.

We dubbed UVF godfather Matthews ‘Ugly Doris’ because of his bleach-blond hairstyle and off-the-wall wardrobe. An earlier gangster from East Belfast, Jim Gray, who had been ‘brigadier’ of another loyalist paramilitary outfit, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), had a similar hairstyle and swanky mode of dress: what people in Belfast used to call the ‘Miami Sammy’ look, day-glo tans and all. Gray was the first in a series of what we dubbed the loyalist ‘Brigadiers of Bling’, gangsters with a taste for expensive jewellery, designer labels and garish wardrobes. That definitely applied to Jim Gray, who was later shot dead by his own, a UDA assassin, after he was ‘court-martialled’ and expelled from the organisation for treason. We had nicknamed Gray ‘Doris Day’ – with his bouffant blond hairdo, his flowery shirts, his fake tan and his lavish gold chains, the UDA boss was known as a bit of a preening diva.

While Stephen Matthews was cut from the same garish cloth as Gray, he was, in contrast, just brute ugly. Hence the nickname we gave him – ‘Ugly Doris’. I don’t think he appreciated it. Maybe that was another reason he gave the go-ahead for me to get the kicking at City Hall.

For years I’d been on my guard against just such an attack. And not just from the UVF. I had many enemies I’d exposed in print. I’d got used to looking over my shoulder. Keeping an eye on who was coming in the door. Being careful about where I was drinking. That day I’d let my guard down a little. But then, I was in company, in a crowded public place, with literally hundreds of people milling around. The atmosphere was happy and festive. And there was no warning.

But I shouldn’t have needed a warning. For years I’d been in no doubt that I was a target for paramilitaries and drug pushers and other lowlife whom I’d offended by having the temerity to highlight their violence and gangsterism. I held these people in utter contempt. Not just the savagery and misery they inflicted, but because they were parasites – all of them – living off, wrecking and bringing fear to their own working-class communities. The same working-class community I come from – am proud to come from.

When I first started off in journalism, it was a different world. Such a different world that I was even told back then that coming as I did from a poor background, I was thinking above my station in life to even consider journalism as a career. I didn’t listen. I always knew what I wanted to be. From my earliest days I’d wanted to be a reporter. I never wanted to be anything else. And no bullyboy thugs with their heavy boots, their threats and their hatred were going to change that. Ever.

INK IN THE BLOOD

I never dreamed I’d captain an Ulster grammar school rugby team First XV.

I never thought I’d play for an Ulster Schools XV that would win an Inter-Provincial title, unbeaten against the other three provinces – Leinster, Munster and Connacht.

I never had an inkling that I would skipper the Ulster Junior XV side when we made a clean sweep of the other provinces.

And I never imagined I would lineout at the Holy Grail of Ulster rugby, Ravenhill, with the likes of Ulster, Ireland and Lions legend Willie John McBride, wearing the Red Hand of a full Ulster XV above my heart.

I did that. Only once. It was a President’s XV.

But I was so proud.

And why not? If the dour-as-dough Presbyterian clergyman who ran his Old Testament writ over where I was born and brought up in the inner-city community of Donegall Pass, close to the gasworks wall in Belfast, had had his way, I’d never have gone to a grammar school at all – and a brilliant one at that – or played the oval ball game as a consequence. Because that bumptious Bible-thumper told my mother, Cherry – who was holding down two jobs to help my Da, ‘Big Jimmy’ McDowell, feed us and keep a roof over our heads – that as a boy from a working-class community, I had ‘no right’ to go to a grammar school.

I’ll not tell you what my Ma told him.

And he seldom crossed our door at 17 Howard Street South again: except when my grandparents, who lived with us – as was the custom in such communities those days – were ill and needed pastoral care. That pest of a pastor had tried to intervene just after I had passed the then Qualifying Examination, later to become the controversial 11-Plus exam, which dictated whether kids, at eleven years of age, went to grammar or secondary school.

The year before, I had lain for four months in an isolated hospital-cum-convalescence home eight miles from Belfast as I recovered from a bout of rheumatic fever. The clergyman – our so-called family clergyman, who had baptised me in Donegall Pass Presbyterian church – never came to visit me once. That spell in the Lissue House convalescence facility had also cost me vital months away from my desk at Porter’s Public Elementary Primary School on the run-in to the vital Qualifying Exam tests.As was the norm in such schools in areas like ours, not many pupils were expected to pass that test. Unfortunately, that is still the case in similar ‘areas of social deprivation’ across Belfast and elsewhere. However, two of us from Porter’s did pass: myself and Davy Fitzsimmons, who also went on to become a half-decent rugby player, a clever scrum-half at both Grosvenor High School and Cooke RFC. And we succeeded in spite of the then principal, a sadistic child-beater called Mr Todd. His nickname, both among teachers and on the street, was ‘Bazzler’. I never did find out why. I didn’t want to. School for us kids was, simply, a reign of terror under him.

They talk about the sins of the Christian Brothers in their maltreatment of pupils in their schools in the old days. ‘Bazzler’ Todd would have fitted neatly into the habits they wore – and their cruel child punishment habits as well. Todd even used to split the end of his cane with a Stanley knife and Sellotape up the strands, so that when he caned you on your open hands, the palms and fingers would blister, and then go down after a short time and not bleed. Imagine that kind of vile corporal punishment being meted out to six-, seven- and eight-year-olds now.

Today, ‘Bazzler’ would be behind bars. And rightly so.

Indeed, after he died, I encountered someone close to him in Barney O’Neill’s pub, beside the City Hall. He informed me that Todd was deceased. I asked him where the grave was. He told me. He asked was that because I wanted to visit it and pay my respects? I told him straight.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to go and piss on it.’

He didn’t offer to buy me a pint.

However, in spite of that clergyman, and in spite of the sadist called Bazzler, I did go to a grammar school, and an excellent educational establishment at that. Annadale Grammar School sat on the banks of the River Lagan. It was named after the one-time family home of the Duke of Wellington when they lived in Ulster. The school blazer’s badge bore the cockatrice from the duke’s family crest.

Annadale was spearheaded by a pioneering headmaster, Douglas Paulin. The idea was to give boys from a background that might not endear itself to the established ‘big’ Belfast grammar schools – the Royal Belfast Academic Institution, Methodist College, Belfast Royal Academy – a chance to shine in a new school, with a markedly more relaxed or liberal regime and outlook. It worked. Spectacularly well. Even though I was almost expelled three times. But I still insist that it was a school where the masters, as they were termed then – and there were a galaxy of stars in the staffroom, among them ‘Jap’ Humphreys, ‘Chuck’ Evans, David Coffey, Ronnie McNamee and, of course, ‘The Doug’ himself – never taught us. Instead, we learned from them, and as much about life as the subjects on the syllabus.

And as for those near-misses on expulsion: well, let’s just say there were a couple of fighting matches with boys from other schools at school dances who fancied themselves as ballroom boxers, rather than dancers. (Incidentally, the signal for the scraps to start was when someone nodded to the DJ and he played the Long John Baldry hit ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’ and they certainly did for some of our foes.)

There were a couple of carpetings in front of ‘The Doug’ as a corollary. But there was one incident where I and a trio of other sixth formers narrowly escaped being shown the school doors – and having the collars of our blazers felt by the cops. That happened on a hot Friday afternoon in June, after we’d sat our final end-of-term exams. We’d gone up to the big playground at the back of the gym, laid down our blazers as goalposts, stripped off our sweaty bri-nylon shirts – remember those? – and started a game of soccer with about twenty a side.

When it finished, Stuarty Dougal – who was to succeed me as first XV skipper the following year – Michael ‘Mickey’ Murdoch, Garth Morrow and I were strolling out the main gate on to the Annadale Embankment, to dander past the Annadale Flats complex flanking the banks of the River Lagan. Now, there was a bit of history between us four and some of the boys who lived in the Flats. Particularly the sons of a well-known gentleman in the area at that time. He was a member of the Travelling community whose family had settled, for a spell anyway, in the brown-brick, Weetabix box-like edifices. The old boy hadn’t maybe settled quite so well. He still preferred the open air.

This gentleman’s sons had been picking off first-formers getting off buses to come into school on Monday mornings, and literally mugging them for their school dinner money. A couple of the kids we knew from our own districts came to us. The next Monday morning, we got off the bus with the ‘Firsties’. Well, let’s just say the boys who’d been bullying them came off second best. The first-formers were left alone after that.

Unfortunately, and completely accidentally – I still swear! – the oul’ boy himself wasn’t so lucky. What happened was that as Mickey and Stuart and Garth and I dandered down towards the River Lagan, we noticed an old Ford Prefect car parked up partly on the pavement, beside the grass embankment that sloped down to the shallow edge of the river itself. There were no iron railings running along the embankment, as there are now. The battered oul’ banger looked like it had been abandoned for scrap, so we decided to do the Belfast City Council Cleansing Department a favour.

We were four strapping lads. So we put down our schoolbags, hunched down along one side of the rust-bucket jalopy, and rolled it over the embankment and into the Lagan. As it turned out, thank God, it landed on its wheels in the shallows, rather than on its roof.

On the Monday morning, I was late getting in to morning Assembly. As is the norm, the seating in school Assemblies was that first and second forms sat in the front, running through the rest of the school to the sixth forms at the back. As I went to take my seat at the back, the whole Assembly hushed. ‘The Doug’ spoke first.

‘Mr McDowell, Mr Murdoch, will you come to the front of the hall, and join me on stage.’

Of course, that’s where the headmaster and the teachers sat for Assemblies.

So I dumped my old army surplus shop haversack, which handily doubled as a school and rugby kit bag, at my feet, and started to walk towards the stage with Mickey, wondering what was going on. As we walked up the middle aisle towards Mr Paulin, who was sitting centre-stage at a desk, a rumble of cheering started to roll out, row upon row from the serried ranks of the pupils. A sharp order from ‘The Doug’ silenced that tsunami of noise.

And then, as I got closer to the steps at the side of the stage, I noticed an oul’ codger sitting just behind the headmaster, beside the deputy head. He’d a face like a boxer’s used leather punch bag. His flat cap was sitting askew on his silvery, white-haired bonce. There was a bandana tied around his neck, over a collarless, striped turfcutter’s-style shirt. And he wore a black button-up waistcoat under a jacket with so much shine on the shoulders and elbows, it looked like it had been buffed with Brasso.

‘Jay-sus,’ I thought. The recognition was instant.

It was the ‘Da’ himself, whose sons we’d scrapped with over the mugging of the first formers.

‘What the hell is he doing here?’ I wondered. ‘And what the hell are we doing here, too?’

I soon found out. In front of the whole school.

For you see, that rusty and, as we thought, ‘scrap’ Ford Prefect we’d rolled into the Lagan on the Friday afternoon wasn’t scrap after all. In fact, it belonged to the oul’ boy, who’d now got to his feet and was standing beside the headmaster. And worse still, the rust-bucket on wheels hadn’t been empty when we’d tipped it into the river. Your man had been in it, full drunk from drinking a bottle, or maybe two, of that infamous monks’ brew, Buckfast wine – otherwise known as ‘Lurgan champagne’, a County Armagh soubriquet for rocket fuel. And when he woke up he was, literally, in the drink … although only up to his knees. If the car had landed on its roof, well, that might have been a different matter. He might have drowned: happy, and drunk, the best way to go. But myself and the rest of the boys could have been facing a manslaughter charge.

As it was, the oul’ fella didn’t just look like Albert Steptoe, he had his fellow rag and bone man’s love of hard dosh. He settled for reparation of a couple of hundred quid. Luckily, all four of us had been working full-time in pubs and clubs to save up for a summer holiday together in the then sixth-form haven of Jersey. We cobbled together the cash. And that, along with the compassion of ‘The Doug’ – who nevertheless gave us the tongue-lashing of our lives – kept us in class, just about, instead of being handed over to the long arm of the law.

Oh, and I must mention one other notable brush with the law – although my dear mother was the unsuspecting culprit this time.

Myself, my brother Tom and our mates were playing ‘shootie-in’ in the street, our goal marked in white out on the battery company gable wall. We were playing with a plastic Frido football – cost, back then, one shilling and three old pence. We were only kids. But in those days, the cops from nearby Donegall Pass police station took a dim view of kicking a ball in the street. And if they caught you, you’d get a kick up the arse from the cop, or a clip round the ear.

But there was one peeler in particular who liked to catch us at it. He was a motorbike cop, the only one, incidentally, in the local barracks. In Belfast at that time, motorbike officers were known by the moniker ‘the Durango Kid’, after a TV cowboy. On this day, the Durango Kid comes roaring round the corner of Charlotte Street straight into our street, Howard Street South, and catches us cold. We scarper in every direction – up alleyways, round corners, over backyard walls.

Now, in our 14 shillings a week rented house, with its outside toilet – like every other down ‘the Pass’ – there was no carpet on the floors. There was only oilcloth, the forerunner of modern-day vinyl. But those houses – with sculleries and big white Belfast jaw-box sinks and hot water having to be boiled in kettles or basins on the gas stoves – were kept like the proverbial ‘Wee Palaces’.

That Saturday morning, my Ma was mopping the oilcloth in the front room. The front door was open. The Durango Kid had removed his black leather-covered helmet with the plastic peak, and was making a beeline for – who else? – me! I saw that our front door was open. My escape route, I thought, was through the house, through the scullery, into the back yard, up on to the metal bin (no wheelie bins in those days) and then all I’d have to do was shin over the yard wall and into the back entry.

Problem was, my mother, Cherry, was still mopping the living-room oilcloth just inside the front door. I startled her as I sprinted in and past her.

Normally, I’d have got a clip with the mop for tramping over the still wet floor. But bursting through the door after me was this cop. My Ma didn’t know who he was, especially with his police helmet off. All she saw was this strange punter chasing her own son into her own house, her family citadel, her Wee Palace. So she whacked him with the wet mop, full frontal, right up the face.

All hell broke loose ...

Fortunately, my Da was able to get it all smoothed over and keep my Ma (and me) out of court and out of the clink. He was running a bookie’s shop at the time, in Ventry Street, just off the Dublin Road. Situated up a flight of skinny wooden stairs the pitch was, ironically, called ‘the Elbow’ – because you had to stand elbow-toelbow with other punters to pick your horses off the big chalk boards on the walls and then queue shoulder-toshoulder to get to the counter to place a bet. The pitch was just a few hundred yards from Donegall Pass police station.

In those days, before the Troubles got a grip, a lot of police officers in the Pass barracks enjoyed a pint and a punt. And the Durango Kid was no exception. He owed my Da a few quid on beaten dockets that were still lying in the losers’ drawer in the bookies. What resulted was, as they say in soccer circles, a scoreless draw. The peeler’s bad bets, and debts, were wiped out.

And so was the notion of any charges being brought against my beloved Ma – who, after all, was just wiping the floors with a mop when she used it to whop the Durango Kid.

That wasn’t the only time my Da steered me onto the right path and away from trouble. It was because of my Da, ‘Big Jimmy’ McDowell, that I fell in love with newspapers and, indeed, with the very scent and feel of newsprint and the fresh ink on its pages. In passing that on to me, he changed my life forever.

My father – raised in a wee street in the heart of the wistfully named Sandy Row – had actually served his time as a butcher, but he ran a bookie’s and was fond of a punt himself, either on the horses or on the dogs. So he always kept two greyhounds in a big kennel in the back yard, squeezed in between the bin and the outside toilet. Those dogs were treated as if they were heading for Crufts, rather than running at the then Dunmore or Celtic Park race tracks in Belfast (both now sadly bulldozed). Often, those dogs got the best of minced beef – the same as we got with our Ulster fry on a Saturday.

Often, too, when one of the dogs won – my Da had a knack of picking good greyhound pups and bringing them on, as they say in the game – a posse of my Da’s mates would arrive back at the house in one of Tommy Dunne’s black taxis, with parcels of chips and pigs’ feet in brown paper bags. And with brown paper bags full of bottles of Morton’s Red Hand stout and a couple of bottles of Bushmills whiskey, too.

They were a colourful crew, straight out of a Damon Runyon story: ‘Pan Rice’, ‘Isaac the Jew’ (who wasn’t, actually), ‘Wee Joe the Blow’, and Joe ‘Rob’ Roy among them. And when a singsong started among that win-celebrating impromptu choir, it wasn’t exactly a London West End musical: it was better.

On his way home with the dogs, my Da always picked up a virtual rack of morning newspapers: the now defunct Northern Whig, the Belfast News Letter, the Irish News, the Ulster edition of the Daily Mirror. All of them, of course, carried the greyhound cards listing runners for that night’s racing at the two city greyhound stadiums, as well as the winners from the previous night. They also carried the predictions of the dog race tipsters for that night’s racing.

Those professional journalists who were paid full-time wages to exclusively cover greyhound racing in those days – men like ‘Wee Matt’ Rossbotham, Harry Duff, Jim Davey, Brendan Smyth – stoked my Da’s ire when they nominated one of his dogs as ‘favourite’ or ‘danger’ (meaning that pick could pose a threat to the favourite). Because such a nomination would bring down the betting odds against one of his dogs: and he almost invariably bet on his own.

However, I loved that reel of newspapers coming into the house every morning. The fresh news blasting out in the headlines on the front page, the fresh ink that smudged the tips of your fingers as you flicked through them, the fascinating pictures – the window on the pages – that opened your eyes to a world oceans away from the back streets of Belfast, the wars, the love stories, the triumphs and tragedies of all the peoples of the earth – as well as those back on your own doorstep.

When we came home from school, even at a young age, I still went first for those newspapers, which by late afternoon were stuffed under the cushions of the settee. That was real romance: a romance that was sparked almost sixty years ago, and which still burns bright in my breast, and still beats strong in my fingertips as, after almost half a century as a pencil-pusher, hack, reporter, sometime broadcaster, and twice newspaper editor, I tap this out, alas not on a trusty old typewriter, but on a computer keyboard.

When my history master at school, David Coffey, approached me in the library one day and asked me, when I was just fourteen, what I wanted to be in life, he heard just two words: newspaper reporter. And even years before then, the newspapers my Da had brought into our humble 14 shillings a week home in the looming shadow of the gasworks wall every morning had injected ink into my blood.

And it has never left it since.