Paperboy by Tony Macaulay

Author:Tony Macaulay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter 11

Scouts, Bombs and Bullets

Every day I was learning about goodies and baddies, so I was. I could soon tell in an instant who were the goodies and who were the baddies. I acquired this skill mainly at home to begin with: my granny, for instance, was brilliant at it. This was an exceptionally good foundation, but I needed to develop greater proficiency still and got ample opportunity to do so on the streets, with the able assistance of the other paperboys. My expertise was then honed by teachers at school, and then blessed by teachers at Sunday school – as often by what they didn’t say as by what they did say. Finally, my powers of judgement were perfected by paying attention to the subtext of my favourite television programmes and, of course, to the pages of the Belfast Telegraph itself. If there had been an Eleven Plus in goodies and baddies, I would have passed it, for a cert.

There were, you see, goodies and baddies everywhere. The world was divided up that way. It said so in the Bible and Thunderbirds and on the news. There were goodies and baddies in our street, in different parts of Belfast, in different countries throughout the world and right across the whole universe, in fact. So, it was important to be able to establish precisely who was good and who was bad. Generally speaking, goodies were friendly and baddies wanted to hurt you – so it was much safer if you stuck with goodies and avoided danger by staying away from baddies. They might even want to kill you, and hence it was sometimes better to try to kill them first, before they got a chance. As a pacifist paperboy, I struggled with the concept of a pre-emptive strike, although I had once used this approach most effectively, when my wee brother was threatening to scoff a whole jar of crunchy peanut butter, by striking him in the eye with my scout woggle.

Of course the most important starting point when learning about this moral spectrum was to recognise that you were always the goodie. You were a goodie because God had made you that way. It was great to be the goodie, except when your big brother called you a ‘wee goody-goody’ for six months after you had got saved at the caravan. It meant you were always in the right and much better than the baddies.

Obviously, Protestants were goodies and Catholics were baddies. Soldiers and policemen were goodies, while paramilitaries were baddies. Well, the UVF and the UDA were mainly baddies, but Mrs Piper always said that we would be ‘lost without them to protect us, even though they’re bad boys and rotten to the core’.

Wee hoods from down the road were always baddies, and grammar-school teachers were goodies – apart from the ones that nipped you under the arm for no reason and then taught you what a sadist was. Doctors and ministers and poke men were goodies, but bookies and priests and tick men were baddies.

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