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the car, pulling up the handbrake with a screech.
    â€˜You stay here!’ he commanded, as he grabbed the pickaxe handle from the back seat and sprang out of the car. He ran up behind the wee hood in the dark. It was raining now, and everything looked blurred through the windscreen. I watched my father unleash the weapon with force across the wee lad’s back. I feared he was going to kill him.
    The hood stumbled on the impact, yelped like a beaten dog and ran for his life. Now I felt sorry for him. All this for a packet of Wrigley’s and a Thunderbird 2 badge. Dad had hit him so hard that he had lost his own balance and landed in a puddle on the pavement in his good trousers and cut his hand on the kerb. He looked like Captain James T. Kirk, after fighting a monster alone on a dangerous alien planet, all sweaty and bloody, determined to save the crew of the USS Enterprise . By this stage, however, I just wanted him beamed up as quickly as possible.
    â€˜That’s the end of him!’ my father announced when he returned to the car, soaked, breathless, bleeding and sweating.
    â€˜It nearly was!’ I thought. ‘No son of mine is gettin’ robbed by no wee hood!’ Dad proclaimed.
    I had expected the robber to be brought to the police: now I was afraid the police would arrest my father. Fortunately, the RUC had other priorities at the time.
    My father drove us home very quickly, and his heavy breath steamed up the inside of the windscreen. This was the same car we went on picnics in. Within a few minutes we were back home and he was just Dad again, falling off the sofa, laughing at posh Englishmen talking to a dead parrot on Monty Python’s Flying Circus .
    My mother was appalled by the state of his soaked and shredded slacks. She had fifteen more weeks at 99p to pay for them, and now they were ruined. She ended up using them to clean the windows. But I knew she was secretly pleased by the protective pickaxe blows for her son. She tended to Dad’s injured hand like Florence Nightingale nursing the soldiers in my school history book. She called him ‘Eric, love’ and he called her ‘Betty, love.’
    Everything was all right again. I felt safe and protected by the strength and toughness of this new action-hero dad. He was like Clint Eastwood, only bald with glasses, and this Wild West was in Belfast.
    I understood that this was the Northern Ireland way. If someone hits you, you hit him back harder. It felt satisfying and powerful, but I knew this way solved absolutely nothing. I saw it every day in Belfast. Tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Catholic for a Protestant. Men excusing heinous acts of inhumanity to protect or liberate ‘their’ people, belligerently sowing pain and bitterness for generations to come. I suppose it made them feel potent and powerful too. I got a little taste of it that night with my father and the wee hood, but I spat it out. It sickened me. There had to be another way. I resolved that I would be Belfast’s first pacifist paperboy.

Chapter 3
The Belfast Crack
    â€˜P atience is a virtue,’ said Mrs Rowing, in a gently reproach-ful manner.
    The Rowings lived just around the corner from us, in the newest red-brick semis in our estate. These newer houses were basically the same as ours, but being more modern, they had no larders, smaller gardens, and the toilet and bath were in the same room. All the modernity of 1970s Shankill living was reflected in these most up-to-date of dwellings, which had central heating in some rooms and an outside water tap at the back door. The outside tap seemed to impress everyone, which I couldn’t really understand, because my granny had a toilet outside her back door and it impressed no one. Running water in your back yard was not a universally applauded amenity.
    Our family home however, while it was one of the older semis, was years ahead even of the newer