Maura's story is a fascinating one. In 1956 she was a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl from west Belfast who became attracted to evangelical Protestantism through people she met at work and converted to Free Presbyterianism. After conflict with her family over her conversion, she left home and was taken to Scotland by people associated with the Free Presbyterian Church. Her disappearance caused a sensation, with accusations that she had been abducted and Ian Paisley's name becoming closely associated with the affair. Paisley later played a recording of Maura at a packed Ulster Hall rally in which she described her Catholic faith as a "religion of fear and dread". Eventually she returned to Belfast and, following court proceedings, went back to her family on the understanding that she would be free to practise her chosen religion. She later returned to Catholicism, married a Catholic and raised her three children as Catholics.
Malachi recalled having a religious tendency himself at fifteen and discovering that "you can be too religious." You could become a "wee Holy Joe", he said, and be unpopular because of it. He contrasted that with the normal teenage business of going to dances, meeting people and getting out and about. That wasn't quite the Catholic Belfast I knew.
Admittedly, my experience came roughly twenty years later. I grew up in Ardoyne in the 1970s and 80s, so I wouldn't use my memories to contradict what Malachi remembers from an earlier generation. But listening to him made me think about just how peculiar the label "Holy Joe" becomes when applied to actual teenage lives.
On paper, I probably qualified. I became an altar boy at about seven and remained one until I was twenty-one. This wasn't some little operation involving two boys appearing on a Sunday morning. At one stage I remember perhaps thirty or forty altar boys. We were divided into sections around St Gemma's, St Paul's and St Pat's, roughly ten to a group, with a structure among the older altar boys and positions of responsibility. The top altar boy, the president, would generally be around eighteen. Being an altar boy was a big thing in Ardoyne.
It could also be surprisingly profitable. At weddings the best man would normally give the altar boys something. By the 1980s I remember £20 each being fairly normal. At funerals somebody might slip you a fiver in the 1970s and later a tenner. Get a few weddings and a couple of funerals in a good month and I could come away with £60 or £80. Not bad wages for a Holy Joe.
Yet I don't remember being an altar boy as separating me from ordinary teenage life. I was also a Boy Scout. At sixteen or seventeen I was going to a rockabilly club. Rockabilly wasn't a passing teenage costume either. I'm 58 now and I'm still in the jeans and boots. My teenage behaviour wasn't particularly saintly.
I smoked my first joint at fourteen before going to a Scout meeting. At sixteen I got drunk at a Scout camp and threw up in front of one of the leaders. At seventeen I got drunk at a party, fell asleep and some bastards shaved half my quiff off. I eventually rolled home with half a quiff. My emerging sex life wasn't exactly being conducted according to the catechism either. And I was still an altar boy.
Maybe people did think I was a Holy Joe. I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I never experienced being an altar boy as requiring me to inhabit some separate religious world from other teenagers.
Another part of Malachi's interview struck me. Recalling the Catholic culture he knew, he spoke about the priest being saluted when you passed him in the street and described the laity as living under the authority of the priesthood and hierarchy. Again, that wasn't my experience of Ardoyne.
I knew priests from the age of seven until I left the altar at twenty-one. I never saluted one. Nor did I regard a priest as possessing some extraordinary personal authority over me. To my young mind a priest had authority in much the same way a schoolteacher had authority. There were circumstances in which you did what you were told, but I didn't walk around regarding either as a superior species.
None of this means Malachi's memories are wrong. They are his memories. Mine are mine. There is also a generation between the Catholic Belfast he describes and much of the Ardoyne I remember. The Church itself changed enormously over those years.
Malachi talks about the Catholicism of Maura Lyons's time as a religion in which hell was real, leaving the Church placed you in serious moral danger, confession was routine and clerical authority permeated Catholic life. I don't doubt that world existed. A photograph of me serving Mass would have told you something true about me. I was an altar boy. A photograph of me in the Scouts would also have been true. So would one of me dressed rockabilly and heading for a club. But none of those photographs on its own would have told you who I was.
Perhaps that's what bothered me about the "wee Holy Joe" description. Religious involvement, religious belief and obedience to religious morality are three different things. They can overlap, but they don't have to. I could serve Mass, collect my wedding money, go to Scouts, listen to rock 'n' roll, chase girls, drink, break rules and turn up again at the altar. I was a teenager.
Had I been sixteen in 1956 rather than the 1970s, perhaps the Church around me would have exercised considerably more power. But 1956 was also the year rock 'n' roll and rockabilly were exploding into youth culture. Knowing myself, I suspect the result might not have been entirely different. I probably would have been an original Ardoyne Holy Joe with a quiff.
The Church could tell you where I was on Sunday morning. It couldn't necessarily tell you where I'd been on Saturday night.
 |
| 🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly |
No comments