Paperboy Read Online Free
Author: Tony Macaulay
less of a snob than I could ever have imagined. There were not too many paperboys from the Shankill around. Not too many Shankill boys around at all, in fact. I had been an impressive angelfish in a small goldfish bowl at Springhill Primary School, but at Belfast Royal Academy I was a guppy with raggedy fins in the huge expanse of Lough Neagh. Wee hard men from the Lower Shankill delighted in reducing the Belfast Royal Academy to a breast-related acronym: âHave you been inside a BRA all day, ya big fruit?!â they would shout.
It was at grammar school that I first discovered that most people made no distinction between Lower Shankill and Upper Shankill. We were all dirt.
The robbers from the Lower Shankill werenât big-time hoods or paramilitaries. They werenât like those Great Train Robbers or Jesse James on TV. Neither were they wee fat men in masks with black-and-white striped shirts and swag bags, like in The Beano . They were just wee hard men a few years older than me. I got stopped by them all the time. I guess I must have looked soft in my blue duffle coat and grammar-school scarf.
But, in spite of appearances, I was hard to rob. I didnât fight. I couldnât fight. Sure there were enough people in Belfast fighting anyway. So I just used my head instead. I kept an eye out for suspicious-looking teenage males in my streets on my patch on Friday nights. They were easy to identify. They walked like wee hard men, half march and half swagger. They wore tartan scarves and white parallel trousers and smoked.
Once I spied a suspected hood, I could disappear into the darkness through holes in familiar fences, under camouflage of garden hedges. Then, just in case my attempts at invisibility should fail, I hid the paper notes down my socks and dropped the coins down my boots. Robbers hadnât the brains to suspect that my Doc Martens held a cash stash. They thought boots were just for kicking your head in. So, when they ordered me to empty my pockets, or else they would âsmash my f**kinâ face inâ, and when they searched my pockets for cash, they got nothing. You should have heard the victory jangle of coins in my boots as I leapt over prim Protestant hedges between semis after an attempted robbery. There was, however, a cost to my zealous protection of Oulâ Macâs profits â painful blisters on my feet, from running on grinding ten- and fifty-pence pieces.
The worst part of being a Shankill paperboy was the constant fear that the robbers out there in the darkness would employ more violent techniques. It worried my parents too. I was under strict instructions from my father that I should inform him of any encounters with suspected robbers. I rarely did. I had worked out how to handle them myself. I used my head, like the Doctor preventing an invasion of Daleks. Instead of hand-to-hand combat, I too attempted to come up with a clever and cunning plan.
But one Friday night, it was different. The wee hood was only about sixteen, but he scared me. He wouldnât give up. I had already done my disappearing act a couple of times. He had already stopped me once, used the obligatory âkick your f**kinâ head inâ threat, and made me empty my pockets. Of course the money was safely snuggled between my toes, but he took my chewing gum and my Thunderbird 2 badge. Even that didnât seem to satisfy him, however. He kept hanging around and following me and I had to stop collecting money altogether.
The wee hood in question wasnât much taller than me, but he was plumper, and his parallels and Doc Martens were worn. He wore his trouser legs higher up the shin than me. This was an important indicator of the level of potential threat. For girls, the higher the parallels, the bigger the millie. A âmillieâ was a girl that smoked, said âf**kâ a lot and wound her chewing gum around her fingers between chews. A millie was the opposite of Sharon
It was at grammar school that I first discovered that most people made no distinction between Lower Shankill and Upper Shankill. We were all dirt.
The robbers from the Lower Shankill werenât big-time hoods or paramilitaries. They werenât like those Great Train Robbers or Jesse James on TV. Neither were they wee fat men in masks with black-and-white striped shirts and swag bags, like in The Beano . They were just wee hard men a few years older than me. I got stopped by them all the time. I guess I must have looked soft in my blue duffle coat and grammar-school scarf.
But, in spite of appearances, I was hard to rob. I didnât fight. I couldnât fight. Sure there were enough people in Belfast fighting anyway. So I just used my head instead. I kept an eye out for suspicious-looking teenage males in my streets on my patch on Friday nights. They were easy to identify. They walked like wee hard men, half march and half swagger. They wore tartan scarves and white parallel trousers and smoked.
Once I spied a suspected hood, I could disappear into the darkness through holes in familiar fences, under camouflage of garden hedges. Then, just in case my attempts at invisibility should fail, I hid the paper notes down my socks and dropped the coins down my boots. Robbers hadnât the brains to suspect that my Doc Martens held a cash stash. They thought boots were just for kicking your head in. So, when they ordered me to empty my pockets, or else they would âsmash my f**kinâ face inâ, and when they searched my pockets for cash, they got nothing. You should have heard the victory jangle of coins in my boots as I leapt over prim Protestant hedges between semis after an attempted robbery. There was, however, a cost to my zealous protection of Oulâ Macâs profits â painful blisters on my feet, from running on grinding ten- and fifty-pence pieces.
The worst part of being a Shankill paperboy was the constant fear that the robbers out there in the darkness would employ more violent techniques. It worried my parents too. I was under strict instructions from my father that I should inform him of any encounters with suspected robbers. I rarely did. I had worked out how to handle them myself. I used my head, like the Doctor preventing an invasion of Daleks. Instead of hand-to-hand combat, I too attempted to come up with a clever and cunning plan.
But one Friday night, it was different. The wee hood was only about sixteen, but he scared me. He wouldnât give up. I had already done my disappearing act a couple of times. He had already stopped me once, used the obligatory âkick your f**kinâ head inâ threat, and made me empty my pockets. Of course the money was safely snuggled between my toes, but he took my chewing gum and my Thunderbird 2 badge. Even that didnât seem to satisfy him, however. He kept hanging around and following me and I had to stop collecting money altogether.
The wee hood in question wasnât much taller than me, but he was plumper, and his parallels and Doc Martens were worn. He wore his trouser legs higher up the shin than me. This was an important indicator of the level of potential threat. For girls, the higher the parallels, the bigger the millie. A âmillieâ was a girl that smoked, said âf**kâ a lot and wound her chewing gum around her fingers between chews. A millie was the opposite of Sharon
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