A breezy tale of Belfast and Johannesburg

Memoir: Stealing Water By Tim Ecott Sceptre, 235pp, £16.99The North wasn't a very pleasant place in the 1970s. So when Tim Ecott, a student at Queen's University in Belfast, used to say that he lived in Johannesburg - and that he was flying home for Christmas - his friends must have felt an occasional pang of envy. "They imagined," he notes wryly, " a south African idyll where white people sat beside swimming pools and were attended by black servants."

The reality was very different. In her decrepit house on Natal Street his mother, Pamela, kept two automatic pistols; a Beretta in the chimney breast "for emergencies" and a Browning on the bedside table. Pamela ran a curiosity shop called The Whatnot, and often sent Ecott's 12-year-old brother to the scrap dealer's with a bag of jewellery - and a gun, just in case.

It was a precarious existence, but that wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing was that they had to steal water. Electricity they could manage. Every time they were cut off, Pamela knew how to restore the power by lifting the manhole cover in the street outside. Water was much trickier; you needed a special wrench to get the stopcock open. The water company didn't cut you off until you hadn't paid for longer than six months, but when they did, in that climate, you had a major problem.

Pamela rigged up a hosepipe which nicked a trickle from the next-door neighbour's outside toilet, but it was too little to be of much practical use, and she didn't think it was safe to drink. So the Ecotts had to lug bottles and containers full of drinking water home from the shop every day - a two-hour walk, often in searing heat. They would take larger containers to a garage forecourt and stock up there on Sunday nights, when the garage was closed. But only when their Volkswagen Beetle was going, and only at night, when they weren't likely to meet traffic cops, because the car was neither taxed nor, strictly speaking, roadworthy.

Hence the title of Ecott's book - the most startling title, surely, ever to grace the cover of an Irish memoir. The vivid image of stealing water is a memorable snapshot of the grubby, edgy poverty in which the family lived. It's also an ironic comment on Irishness, for however poor Irish families may have been in the past, however miserable or dangerous their lives, stealing water was never really an issue. Misery doesn't feature much in this story - the tone is light, even effervescent, and the narrative crackles and fizzes along, making it an easy book to read. Apartheid doesn't feature much either, except when Ecott ends up working in a hotel where he is the only white employee.

The ironies, though, are multi-layered. Ecott's father was English, a British Army man in a family of soldiers; his mother's father, and her three brothers, were also in the British Army. So despite spending his early years in Bangor and Newcastle, Ecott has always spoken with an English accent. Which, as he points out, doesn't mean he can't be Irish - indeed, it comes in very handy when he comes back to the North for holidays. "That way I can't be judged: is he Catholic or Protestant? Nationalist or Brit?"

FOR A READER from south of the Border, this is a pretty bizarre perspective from which to view, not just the world, but ourselves. But on the evidence of this affectionate, generous book - which, needless to say, could hardly have been published until very recently - it's also a pretty healthy one. It provides the same jolt of slightly scandalised recognition as, for example, Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People. It is, however, much less "literary". Ecott is aiming for a breezy, boy's-own adventure-story style, and for the most part, he achieves it.

The exceptions are the passages in chapter seven, In the Shadow of Irish Mountains, where his descriptions of the Mournes read like paragraphs from a different book - a travel book written by a visitor, complete with verdant greens and bare browns, ancient glaciers, and a countryside with "its Celtic heart untrammelled". Eek. Happily, there's very little of Ecott the lugubrious landscape man, and lots and lots of Ecott the people person - and where the book really comes to life is in its portraits, not just of life in South Africa, but of his parents.

Ecott père is, in another ironic twist, more absent from the narrative than present in it; a shadowy figure who prizes self-sufficiency above involvement and who, soon after the move to South Africa, comes back to Ireland and leaves his family behind. One minute he's down and out and living with relatives, the next he's flitting around the Middle East training bodyguards, selling jets to Arab sheikhs and carrying a pen that could shoot a bullet. By this stage, of course, he is no longer a serving army officer.

But it's fun-loving, gin-drinking, wheeler-dealing Pamela who's the undoubted star of Stealing Water. Ecott's affection for her is as palpable as it's exasperated, and she easily outshines even the colourful cast of misfits who wash up at The Whatnot - Carl the Cat Burglar, Rex the Forger, John the Hippie, the gay couple who run the porn shop next door (illegal under apartheid, of course, but one of them is an ex-policeman, so that's OK). And Ollie the Jeweller, who, one night, owns up to murder. And that's not even the half of it. If this is all part of our heritage, we're surely the richer for it.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist