“FRANKY’S not going to heaven,” piped up Beano. “My ma says he’s going to hell!” Silence. Nervous whispering spread among the lads. Franky hitched up his pants.
“Feck Heaven!” he said. “Who wants to play harps and sing all fecking day?” I’d rather play football.”
Writing a book was not a natural or obvious choice for Michael O’Hara, a retired manufacturing engineer from the Falls Road. But then his granddaughter Chloe gae him the final push to take the bull by the horns when she asked him: “What was is like when you where growing up?”
So, at the tender age of 68, Michael wrote, illustrated and self-published his book The Blackie Boys, a series of short stories based on his childhood days on the Falls Road. It features his friends and their life and adventures around the Blackie River, which flowed from its source in Divis Mountain above Belfast and ran through the Beechmount area of the city where they lived.
In the book, Mick and Franky rule a gang of 10 lads, aged between seven and eight, and then there is Beano, who is only four-and-a-half and desperately wants to join. The characters are based on Michael himself, his brother, his cousin and his childhood friends. And all the action revolves around 'the Blackie'.
Born in Belfast in 1946, Michael grew up in a very different world to the one we know today. “There were no mobile phones, no cars – not in our street anyhow – no television and very little else.” And yet The Blackie Boys takes a look into a reasonably recent past, “My childhood is not a major step back in time – it’s not that long ago – but the changes are phenomenal," Michael says.
“As children we grew up on the banks of the Blackie River, which meandered, through our lives.” For the children in Beechmount, the Blackie was the life-blood of the neighbourhood, a play area, a meeting place, a dumping ground for dead dogs and cats. It represented a land where time could be forgotten and where the imagination ran riot; for Michael, it remains an evocative symbol of youth.
Michael, who now lives with his wife in Ennis, Co Clare, says he always had a passion for art. “I had already started to draw pictures from my childhood because I wanted to record how things were back then, so I illustrated my first short story, ‘round the backs.’ Little did I know that these pictures of childhood memories would ever become a book."
A large portion of his stories are centered on his childhood home, which was his grandmother’s fruit and veg shop, Meleady’s. Mrs Meleady was one of the original “fadgies” an Irish speaking community of fish and fruit sellers from Omeath, Co Louth, who settled in Belfast after the Famine.
“Life on the Falls was very close knit and my grandmother’s shop was the hub of the community," he says.
Michael explains that although the Shankill was quite close, he and his friends didn’t mingle with his Protestant neighbours. “It wasn’t beat into us to keep away but we knew not to cross the invisible line between the Shankill and the Falls. Our whole life was centered on this area of the Falls and the Blackie River,” he says.
By happy coincidence, the book was launched recently in the Fáilte Feirste Thiar (Visit West Belfast) centre, a building that was formerly Michael’s childhood home.
The Blackie Boys can be purchased online at theblackieboys.com and at outlets in west Belfast including Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich
