After the wee man in the PARK ‘N’ RIDE hut signed you in, then you boarded a clean, single-decker bus for the rest of the journey. And so in a few minutes, provided someone out there in the vicinity of the town centre wasn’t bent on mayhem which at the source had allegiance to the paranormal as happened in the Middle East a long time ago, you were soon in town. It was a much neater, cleaner business and at last an option to avoid citybus’s more gruelling options.
I’m not aware of black taxis on the Shore Road in the early 70s run by those illustrious men of certain organisations connected to religions, but later on I used them. I’d include “women” of organisations had I ever seen any, or been aware of them throttling taxis up and down the road. But I never saw aul nor young dolls doing that, and when we were invited to learn to make petrol-bombs by an envoy sent into Graymount School for recruitment purposes, we were given to understand that if we joined these organisations it would be a low-key thing of maybe serving tea after riots and polishing up milk-bottles before they were filled, lit and chucked. The world back then was “ill-divid,” for women’s roles were reductionist sort of do’s, but I personally wasn’t keen on killing people and wrecking all round me so in this regard it didn’t matter to me. But here’s a thing: as walls are well-known to have ears, the teachers must’ve been in the know that someone was in there trying to drum up a band of criminals’ skivvies, but there was no caning for that. That was ok because it connected to religion - presumably. But well dare you go down the one-way system the wrong way! You were beaten for that all right! A most peculiar set of affairs. It gives me the shudders thinking of the anger in teachers’ eyes if you forgot your foggin’ hymn book, and the sadistic pleasure of knocking 7 bells out of you for the infringement. But recruiting people for paramilitary activities? Yes, no problem! No bother! That was grand.
However, later on in life I got a taxi of the black variety every day to Carrick when I worked there. Standing in the wind on the Shore Road you’d have got into nearly anything to complete your journey, for at certain times of the year and whims of the tide it could be sewage-farm putrid. Our Road was wrecked by others’ rubbish. By the way, I’m a bit worried about saying “black” taxi such is the highly strange world we now live in.
Do you know it occurs to me that all words will be banned soon. We might end up that all we’re allowed to say is LOL. That’ll be fine and dandy until the LOL Tribe of Central America suddenly becomes naked because of more deforestation, their primeval realities exposed to a gaping public. Someone “liberal and caring” then says we can’t say LOL in vain because it’s insulting to them, and that’s that. The very last expression is gone. Talk is over. Fight for the use of language! and fight to make people see that any insult is only in their head, not yours!
Anyway, this taxi was 5 pence cheaper than the buses and the fella who owned it was great chat and possessed human qualities in so far as he was willing to engage in the frankest of discussions about life, hopes and the things he saw along the wayside as he ground his way to Carrick (rather than “drove”) for the sound inside that taxi was worse than the buses. In fact, on a sort of audible pro rata base, had that taxi been enlarged to the size of a bus it would have sounded like a plane taking off. It would’ve given those buses a run for their money in the noise stakes. It was difficult to hear the fella, but nevertheless we cheerfully yelled at one another sat side-by-side on the front seat as the Tram Depot and The Tel Star fell back into the distance and the openness of Whiteabbey Village ahead. I never liked the place, though, for there was something heavy and forbidding with the big, gray swollen sea and a hidden part of the village like a sly entity waiting in the wings to leap out for some nefarious purpose.
Years later I got to know several people at the heart of the village. But I never did get to understand how and why it all worked. Why they allowed an ice-cream parlour in such a tiny place is beyond me. I don’t mean this in a judgemental way. Back then Carrick, the much bigger place a few miles down the road, allowed nothing new in. Carrick took duck-all new. It fought any change like blazes. It ignored the need for it. It resisted it when it couldn’t ignore it. It fought with stony silences and maybe a bit more. It just fought the need for change off the premises. Was it something lingering from the Normans? Something in the air that swirled and repeated, swirled and repeated established when these Frenchies got going and set the tone? I’ll not bother mentioning to you a current issue which makes me dovetail. You’ve brains in your heads. . Yet tiny Whiteabbey took an enormous ice-cream parlour! These things make me think no end.
The Jordie back then was a good old place to go at night, and funnily enough religion never came into it as people mixed fairly well. There was a fella in there who did magic tricks and card tricks very well. We always wanted to sit at the table with him and his pals for they were absolutely focussed on the magic tricks, and not others.
Yes, the taxi-driver!: He was an honest sort of broker, and his hopes to place a swimming pool in the back-garden of a local house caused him to be up and down that road like Billy-o from 6 in the morning to late at night. I think it bored him rigid though, I really do. Man and machine were drearily, noisily one. He had to shout and he had to keep his foot really pressed on the accelerator to keep the thing going at a maximum of 25 m.p.h. I reckon it was a limiting experience for a person of his intelligence. Re. the swimming pool: he never did get one built, but he amply made up for it with other embellishments and it caused a fight with the woman opposite who didn’t like it because she wasn’t able to compete. She ran out of space. You know how it is: prong a pink flamingo into your lawn and anything could happen.
However, it seems to be a black spot in my mind as to taxis on the road in the early 70s. I can’t visualise them with the inner eye. I’m sure they were there along with the prefabs, but neither of these things reached my consciousness. I’d urge people to cast back and establish what it is they can’t remember, because the omissions seem to say a lot. Some kind of clue to our own limitations. But precisely what they say I’ve never got to the bottom of. I imagine, though, that if we are ever are able to pinpoint precisely why some features elude us, then the fault can be rectified and a whole other raft of memories may be uncovered. I know people who remember absolutely nothing of childhood. Nothing. Their foundations in life either seem weak or based on something so alien to me I’ve never got close to the merest hint of it. Maybe it was alien to them too, and hence the obliteration.
Take this fella I knew. His son-in-law was at him all the time asking him what he could remember of yore. Sadly it’s not really inside the limited scope of this thread (as it took place elsewhere) for part it involved a huge row with a neighbour during which the fiery son-in-law, though riddled with arthritis, grabbed an ornamental sword from over the chimney breast and poked it through the letterbox of the neighbour. He wanted him out to face the music and twisted the ornamental sword that way and this way to, at the very least, prong a cap, while simultaneously demanding satisfaction verbally. But nothing happened, and so the sword was withdrawn out of the letter box and he leapt away as best as he was able. In his anger he came up with PLAN B. And so a further attempt to get this man out of his house to get the row going in earnest caused a settee to go flying over the hedge, but at all times the adversary maintained a petrified silence. I know his wife helped him outside with it and had a hand in raising it to the level of the hedge along with someone who was visiting for the day. It’s nice to see unity in households. What a shame we can’t continue with this tale for the same man owned a one-armed bandit and operated it out of his front-room, but there it is. He wasn’t from the Shore Road, more’s the pity.
Anyway, the father-in-law of this swordsman son-in-law forever frustrated the son-in-law no end because the latter was into local history and had a very keen recall. He wanted to meet someone his age of the same mindset. Someone reasonably observant and interested, but the father-in-law refused to be a substitute for the human idyll the swordsman sought. He either refused to remember, or genuinely remembered nothing at all, and every time I met the son-in-law he complained to me about this, because back then I spoke of my interest in this type of thing connected to where I grew up – the road. I sympathised with the man because good information and/or a willing participant in the exchange of information is like rocking-horse guano. I know this is a bit hard to follow, but the problem with this tale is that son-in-law and father-in-law had the same first name and if I’d used them it would’ve made you even more confused. How do you think I feel writing it?
Well anyway we’re done with the father-in-law, mostly, so now we can refer to the son-in-law with the full honorific and call him Mr. Joe Pollard, and Joe said to me, “What do you make of it that Joe remembers fog all about round here?” I thought about it. I thought about his life – what I knew of it as told me by Joe the S. I. L. - and could only tell Joe that there was one clue as far as I could see. One solitary clue in the search for the correct conclusion: that the answer was associated with the fact that Joe the F.I.L. as a young married man with tiny children took against fresh-air and nailed up all the windows.
As you read this you might think, what the………… But it’s like this. When images are no longer available on forums, man cannot live by “lol” alone. And so memories have to be stimulated one way or another, and things discussed at a deeper level of being to see what might come forth as a true revelation. So you’ll have to put up with this lot of nonsense, because I’d like this thread to have a future, and if it must remain imageless, I know just the person to stretch it out.
Anyway, where was I? Oh aye: Park ‘N’ Ride.
Finally my Ma decided we were going further afield than the man in the PARK 'N' RIDE hut. Then one night in the middle of the troubles - which were really the troubles of Middle Eastern people thousands of years ago when that lot failed to get to grips with paranormal life v. reality, and Northern Ireland and other places for some strange reason carried it on and sought to highlight it all by causing death and assorted mayhem, we went out in her car and the most bizarre near-miss took place. We were nearly shot by the peelers. ……..