Read Online All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney - Free Book Online Page B

kidding on I was a commando . All the other weans had proper guns – toys, I mean, die-cast replicas that fired caps, but I loved that thing.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘My da used to say to me, “You watch what you’re doing with that, Gordy. That stick saved Ulster.” That’s what he always said: “That stick saved Ulster.” For years I never knew what he meant. Then one day he told me the story.’
    He motioned for the rifle and I handed it back. He gripped it in his fist and shook it.
    ‘It’s a dummy rifle,’ he said. ‘It’s not a toy, it’s a dummy. My granda used it in Carson’s UVF. Before they got the real guns, they trained with these. He took it on manoeuvres. All these men marching about the hillsides with kid-on guns.’
    ‘Your grandad was in the UVF?’
    ‘This is the original UVF I’m talking about. In 1912. Not the current lot. Not the gangsters. It was like a people’s army, to resist Home Rule. Then the war happened and they all joined up together. The whole UVF. One minute they were getting ready to take on the government ; next thing they’re in France, ready to die for King and Country.
    ‘The army let them stay as a unit. They called it the 36th Ulster Division, but basically it was the UVF. My granda went out with the Armagh battalion. He fought at Thiepval Wood. He was with Blacker’s Boys – the Armagh lot. Six hundred of them went over the top and only sixty came back. There’s a letter in the drawer there, where he tells my granny. He says he’s the only one in his street still alive: all the boys from Scotch Street joined up together, and he was the only one left. They went over the top with their sashes on, shouting “God Save Ulster” and “Fuck the Pope”.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the story, anyway .’
    The dog was at his feet now, sniffing his shoes, and he squatted down to pet it, gripping the gun by its stock.
    ‘After that, there was no way the Brits could force us into a republic. So the six counties stayed British.’
    He straightened up.
    ‘Anyway, there it is.’ He frowned at the hunk of wood in his hands. ‘The stick that saved Ulster.’
    *
     
    We took our coffee in the conservatory. Like his fancy front door it was too big for the ex-council house, ending six yards shy of his wooden back fence. In next-door’s garden a wee boy was playing on a plastic chute, scrambling up the ladder, dipping down the short slide and tearing round to start again.
    Orchardton didn’t touch his coffee. The biscuits he’d bought at the Spar lay neglected on a side plate. He just spoke, almost without drawing breath, looking across to the blue Garnock hills. Now that we’d started he seemed to find relief in talking. His voice was unhurried, authoritative , as if he’d expected such an encounter for years, and had marshalled his memories in preparation. He lit a cigarette and told me about his family, about his childhood in the East End, the boyhood trips to Northern Ireland, summer holidays in Bangor and Portstewart. In next-door’s garden the wee boy played on his chute, up and down, up and down. At one point I took out the Dictaphone and mimed setting it on the coffee table. Orchardton’s eyes tracked from the window to the device and he nodded, once, the flow of his talk never breaking, moving on to the next anecdote.
    Later that night, at my desk in Clouston Street, I tried to piece it together, put his spooling memories into order. Orchardton’s dad had come over from Belfast in 1946 with a suitcase and a demob suit. He had friends in Glasgow so he settled there, in a model lodging-house in the Calton. A friend got him a start in Templeton’s Carpet Factory. He married a local girl and they flitted to the top-floor flat of a Brigton tenement. This is where Gordon was born, the middle kid of three, in a two-room-and-kitchen in Baltic Street.
    He spoke fondly of Brigton, of the tight, hard life of the tenements. The smoky stone. The stink of shit from