WOW

As I pounded the Roads of Glencairn selling my sweep stakes the war raged on around me and like most people I took it in my stride. I took some pride in the face that I was contributing to the cause, by raising money for the prisoners. One morning when …

Finally the day for Uncle Sam to be released from jail arrived and the whole family along with friends and acquaintances gathered to give him a welcome home party he would remember. All day long preparations were made for the night’s celebration and the house was awash with food and …

Although my little universe had been turned upside down and torn apart, I done what I had always done in a crisis and pushed things to the back of my mind and tried to get on with life. I thought of dad, mum and Shep every day and although the …

It was around 1976 that it first came to my attention that dad was ill and he was getting sicker and weaker by the day. He had always been a heavy drinker and smoker, but this was normal where we lived and we never really thought anything about it or …

Back in Belfast life went on as normal as possible in the circumstance’s and although my early memories of mum occasionally drifted into my mind, gradually mum became a vague memory of my childhood world. Once, a boy at school asked me where my mother was and I remember being …

Like the vast majority of Protestants in Northern Ireland apart from my Birthday, Christmas and our family holiday to Ballyferris, the 12th of July was the biggest and most important day of the year. In 1663 the Protestant King Billy defeated the Catholic King James at the Battle of Boyne …

Proud to be a Prod By 1972 ,when I was 6 years old I had all but forgotten or at least suppressed my early years with mum and her Catholic side of the family. I started to become very aware of the fact that I was Protestant and that the …

There were three of us, that night in 1963. Me, Larry and Frenchie Laton. We took a bus ride up to Baltimore to spend an evening at the old Gaiety Burlesque Theatre on East Baltimore Street. To get there it was necessary to take a bus ride from the fort to The …

On a sunny day in 1970 my osteomyelitis was finally given the all clear and I was on my way home from the hospital, for a couple of years at least. I was so heartbroken to leave Nurse Brown, that on the day of my discharge I hid in a …

My father John was born in 1944 and was the first of five sons and one daughter born to my grandparents, John and Suzy Chambers, who were both hard core loyalists from the Sandy Row area of Belfast. Dad’s early years were typical of working class Protestants of the time, …

What do you think is the meaning of the poem?

A formal analysis of the famous piece.

It’s nice to see the British sticking up for themselves, especially when the local authority is clearly in the wrong.

A life-changing experience in the French Alps.