Nothing much changes in the mean streets of Ardoyne. The Prods and the Mickies are still at it, fighting the eternal unholy war of Ireland.
It was the same when I was growing up there during the real war in the early 1940s. Well, not exactly the same. Our heaviest weapons were stones, accompanied by the familiar roars of ancient bigotry. The battlefield was the Dump - an open and barren waste of ground that stretched from the fringes of the Alliance housing estate (Protestant) to the top of Jamaica Street (Catholic). The Dump was used as a dump. Sodden and ruptured mattresses, stained smelly straw from dog kennels, cinders, buckets with bottoms eroded by rust - for these and for everything else that the binmen refused to take away, the Dump was a final resting place.
But for us children the Dump was sacred ground. It stretched like a no man's land from our Protestant slopes across to the tightly packed rows of Catholic streets. It was here we rallied daily (weather permitting) after school to face the foe on the other side. Neither side knew for certain what the fighting was for, except that we were Prods and they were Mickies.
Battle order
There was a tradition of battle order which both sides honoured. We would line up, pockets heavy with stones, with about five yards between each boy. They would assemble in similar formation on their side. Someone would shout "Charge" and the wild screaming hordes would scramble over the rough surface of the Dump - not to engage in hand-to-hand combat but to find a safe foothold to hurl our stones high in the air. Only once can I remember anyone being hit. We suffered the casualty during a spirited counter-attack by the Mickies.
Some unkind words had been uttered about this character's slowness of advance during our last skirmish on the Dump. Anxious to prove his worth, he stood valiantly throwing his stones until the Mickies were almost upon him and all but he had fled. Then, suddenly aware of his solitariness, he turned and raced after us.
He had just reached the protecting fringes of Alliance Avenue, which ran across the Dump, when a large stone thudded into his back between the shoulder blades and sent him sprawling on his face into the roadway. "For Christ's sake," he wailed after us, "Don't leave us on me own. They'll kill me if they get hold of me. Wait for me lads."
But the bold Protestant lads had no intention of stopping their rapid retreat and the Mickies, satisfied with driving us from the field, retired and left the moaning Prod to himself.
In spite of these juvenile forays the streets lived in uneasy communion or cautious co-existence with each other. They knew little about each other's attitudes and aspirations, and they were not interested.
Much in common
Yet, as in other working-class areas of Belfast such as the Falls and the Shankill the Catholic and Protestant people of Ardoyne had much in common. Families were generally large, houses small and overcrowded, amenities limited and work scarce.
Economic need was a leveller. Six evenings a week my brother crossed the Dump to deliver the ubiquitous "Tele" (the Belfast Telegraph) to the doors of Jamaica Street and the other Catholic streets of Ardoyne. The man who delivered our morning paper, the Northern Whig, was from Jamaica Street. From Jamaica Street too came youths with battered prams selling bundles of wood to kindle the fires of the Protestant grates of Alliance.
We went to the picture-houses on the Crumlin and Oldpark roads and later to school in the city centre by way of Jamaica Street and Flax Street. Occasionally we would be stopped by child inquisitors and asked to declare if we were Catholic or Protestant. With no sense of betrayal or guilt, we always replied that we were Catholic. Had we not been taught in Sunday School when learning the Creed that we were the true Catholic followers of Christ and that the other Catholics were just a crowd of breakaways?
Childish encounters
Violence was done to none during these journeys along alien paths. If childish encounters became heated there always seemed to be a loud-voiced adult in a convenient door to disperse an over-zealous gang and secure the right of passage of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.
Times have changed in Ardoyne. Today there is a sterner regime on the Dump. Barricades separate the streets and the people. No one wanders from the ghettoes. More sinister and dangerous weapons have replaced the stones of boyhood. Blood has flowed. The bitterness is much deeper than the youthful and ignorant prejudice of yore.
The peace process is a peculiar animal.