To Noel
(Celebrating an 80th Birthday Milestone)
Today, 11 December 2020, my dad, James Noel McBride turns 80. Having dabbled a little in lockdown with writing, I thought well why not write something for him? Wouldn’t that be a great present for the man who has everything!! I can’t say though it’s been easy to package up eight well-lived decades into 2000 words and I hope he forgives any poetic licence or factual inaccuracies but here goes. I’ll start with the hard bit, the experience that probably highlighted the fragility of life and defined my fairly late transition into adulthood.
On an unremarkable Wednesday evening in November 1996, around 9pm, my Daddy had a massive heart attack. I was still living at home. It was the pre mobile phones era and I was enjoying a lengthy conversation and racking up a hefty bill with a friend on the upstairs landline. My sister was at University in England, my mum watching a programme downstairs. When he made it to the bedroom, I knew something was badly wrong. I called 999. I do not recall anything I said. None of us really knows how we will respond in a crisis. I went into organisational mode, opening the gates in case the ambulance might need to reverse into the driveway, switching off lights, turning off the television, finding coats, money, keys. Each minute felt like an hour.
I remember the darkness outside, my friend ringing back in a panic, following behind in the car as the ambulance made its way slowly through Dundonald to Newtownards. I remember the silence of the waiting room, the emptiness of the hospital corridors, being handed a leaflet on cardiac arrests, trying to read it, focusing on the after-care, without even knowing what the before meant.
Four months later, due to the expertise of great surgeons and the wonders of the NHS, my dad had a quadruple bypass. I walked a circuitous route to work the morning of the operation, praying the whole way, overcome with relief when the telephone on my desk rang and I knew he was successfully through it and back into ICU. Visiting him that night on the high dependency ward in the Royal Victoria Hospital, I realised the gratitude of answered prayers.
I am not sure how many proper conversations we had before it, but post the trauma of 1996/97, during his recuperation and then after his retirement, we’d go for regular lunches together at the Rose Bowl on the Belmont Road. We kept to his favoured traditional cuisine - quiche, mince pie, lasagne, always accompanied by coleslaw, maybe followed by a piece of apple tart with cream and we’d emerge from its steamed up interior, smelling like we’d been cooking in the kitchen all day, our clothes needing a visit to the dry cleaners.
Almost twenty-five years later, there have been other periods of ill health (he jokes about the tablets making him rattle) but, we are so blessed that due to the miracle of modern medicine, he has walked two daughters down the aisle (galloping in my case, I never could pace myself), acquired two sons-in-law (very useful for heavy lifting), and enjoyed the birth of six grandchildren, the eldest, my niece, Hannah, in a perfect double celebration, turned eighteen this week. To Hannah, my nephew Daniel and my four girls, Alice, Lucy, Ella and Lydia, he is just Papa.
I know only snippets about his childhood. Born in Bloomfield Street in a two-up, two-down terrace in East Belfast, during the Second World War, he was evacuated along with his parents and two older brothers to Lisburn, as the Belfast Blitz destroyed large parts of the city. I know he had pneumonia, no inside toilet, a tin bath in the backyard, he carried his school books across town in a tool bag, his father worked at the docks, his mother spent considerable amounts of time at the Mission Hall. Black and white photos taken during a youthful enthusiasm for photography, show a close-knit, happy home. The loss of his eldest brother John in 1970 devastated both him and my Uncle George, whose eighty-fifth birthday will be celebrated in February, just a few weeks after the Strand Cinema, which they both frequented in their youth, also turns eighty-five.
When he left Grosvenor High School, age seventeen, he started as an apprentice in the Royal Insurance, remaining there for forty years, choosing a mouth organ, as the gift that would mark his retirement. During the 1970s and 80s, he played snooker at lunchtime in the YMCA, he popped into EDCO in Queen Street regularly to replenish our stationery supplies, he travelled on the number 17 red bus, arriving home at exactly 5.40pm every evening, he even supported my fledgling career as an Avon lady, distributing catalogues and collecting orders from the females in the company.
Working in the city centre in the midst of the Troubles, he witnessed first-hand the Workers’ Strike (navigating barricades to get my baby milk), the horrors of Bloody Friday, his colleague shot crossing the street just yards from the office. Living on the outskirts of Belfast, occasionally we’d hear the blast of a bomb in the distance. With no Twitter, no news updates, no instantaneous contact, we’d just wait until there was a phone call from him to say all was well. Roads cordoned-off with tape and army vehicles were a regular sight and I am particularly fascinated by his tales of evacuating on all fours from the fourth floor of the building on the corner of Wellington Place through a narrow passageway into Parsons and Parsons, exiting into the street past the rows of black tie dinner suits. It’s a quarter of a century since he officially left the ‘Royal’ but the lifelong friendships he made there remain. There have been many outings and Christmas dinners with his pensioners’ group plus regular catch-up coffees in Binky’s, Starbucks, Costa, Clements with Norman, Jim, Ian and many others. (Although from my understanding, the chat tends to focus primarily on comparing ailments and treatments).
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He taught me to swim at Avoniel Leisure Centre (I have an exceptionally unique breast stroke, requiring most of the pool to clear to allow space for my arms), he played us songs on the guitar (Val Doonican has a lot to answer for with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat” and “Delaney’s Donkey”), he showed us his ambidexterity (as a left-hander, he was forced to learn to write with his right when he started school), and when he travelled on two-week long trips to ‘head office’ in Liverpool, he’d return off the overnight boat with books for us. ‘Peter the Pup’ is a treasured memento from those times. He drove my sister and I everywhere - to piano lessons, Youth Club, Brownies, Girls’ Brigade. For my birthday one year, he packed about eight of us into a Ford Fiesta to watch Leila Webster at the Lyric Theatre. After I’d left home, with no means of transport, I’d often emerge at the end of a college evening class to find him waiting in the carpark to give me a lift home. He even drove me to my first date with my husband, Russell, peering out suspiciously as he dropped me off round the corner.
He’s never been a cook. His lamb chop, baked potato and beans is notoriously the only meal he could manage to put in the oven to feed us when my mum wasn’t available. He, is however, excellent at opening packets of biscuits, finding and finishing cakes and demolishing whole Toblerones. After his heart attack, he wondered was it due to his passion for Ulster fries and his persistent sweet tooth, but perhaps it was just an unfortunate combination of diet and a hereditary tendency towards blocked arteries. When we meet, socially distanced and outdoors of course, to blow out his extensive candles, we will have platters of food - sandwiches, wraps and traybakes prepared by our local café, Jellybean. Without even being asked, because she has been serving him his favourites for years, Gill will provide him with his ‘usual’ - a chicken, pineapple and bacon toastie along with an extra large caramel square.
In 2017, my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Meeting my mum, Jean at a dance in the 1960s, I am forever impressed by his enthusiasm to maintain their relationship. With the bus only going as far as the bottom of the Dunlady Road, he would walk the rest of the way up into the Craigantlet Hills to visit her and back down again through the pitch black countryside. I still get great amusement at his photography phase continuing after their marriage, with shots of Jean posing beside every item of furniture they owned in their first home.
I have written previously about our shared love of books, our trip to New York in 1999, the second-hand bookshops he introduced me to as a child. He loves to remind me of the occasion when resplendent with page-boy hairstyle and dressed in double denim, I handed over my purchase to the man behind the counter, who said “thank-you son” as he handed me back my change. As the shops re-open today after further Covid-19 restrictions, I know his first outing will be to No Alibis in Botanic Avenue where David has looked after his reading needs and his passion for crime fiction for almost twenty years. It is fitting that the launch of his collection of short stories Inking In the Outlines, published in 2013, was held there.
My dad is quiet, gentle, undemanding, considered, with impeccable manners and simple tastes. He always walks on the outside of the pavement to protect me from puddles. He is a man of few words, with no real inclination toward public speaking. He has never sought an audience nor a stage. It is probably slightly odd to compare a Northern Irish gentleman to that iconic American feminist trailblazer, Gloria Steinem but when she said, “Because, you know, we choose to express ourselves in the way that is most natural, and I became a writer because I didn’t want to talk”, she described him perfectly. He’s a writer and his preference is to communicate on paper. And he’s always written, taking correspondence courses initially when we were small and joining Ards Writers’ Group when it became more practicable in the early 1990s. Yet, despite the desire to remain out of the limelight, there are many times, he has truly risen to the occasion when it mattered, recording stories for the blind, sharing his work on the radio and most poignantly, starting off the funeral service for his dear friend, John Graham by reading the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”.
I have benefitted endlessly from his practical ability and his generous availability. When he helped me renovate my first house, my abiding memory is of his hair sticking to the grease of the ceiling when we pulled out the kitchen cupboards. His patience (I’d definitely watched too much ‘Changing Rooms’) was endless, painting and re-painting rooms when my initial colour choices turned out to be a total disaster (he was always dubious about that shade of terracotta). When four pre-school inductions nearly tipped me over the edge (11.15am finishing times, everyone!), he took on the majority of the drop-offs and pick-ups. For many years, his granddaughters thought there was a permanent hole in his trouser pocket as he repeatedly asked them to search for the money that had fallen out round the car. When they found the coins, they got to keep them and deposit them in their money box. He’d collect them all from three different schools every Monday, only forgetting one child, Alice, once (I doubt he’ll ever forget her tears and the huge hug she gave him when he arrived to collect her from outside the secretary’s office)! When my car was hit by an ‘R’ driver on the Upper Newtownards Road just on the cusp of rush hour, he came to my rescue, bringing his claims investigator talents to the fore, crossing and re-crossing a major thoroughfare to take road measurements in between traffic light changes!
My childhood home is a testament to his DIY skills. He built my sister, Catherine and I our first dolls’ houses. There are cornices, dado rails, shelves, cupboards, that evidence his expertise with a saw and a piece of wood. He keeps all off-cuts (just in case!) He owns every type of power tool imaginable. Need a long-handled hedge trimmer, an angle grinder, a cordless drill, an electric sander - Noel will have one. Despite my warnings about shielding, not leaving the house, letting me bring any essentials, I discovered he had been slipping out to go to B&Q during lockdown to acquire the materials he needed to repair the garage roof. Then, to make matters worse, he’d climbed up to do it. When the toolbox containing the tools that had belonged to his father was stolen, along with all the memories they evoked, I know that caused him great pain.
As I was growing up, when the decorating sheets came out, so did the record player and he’d sand and varnish, scrape and paper to Simon and Garfunkel, Lena Martell, Elaine Paige, Neil Diamond. I can’t hear “Cracklin’ Rosie” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water” without seeing a wallpaper table, a roll of woodchip, a vat of paste and a plank precariously balanced across a staircase.
If my dad has taught me one thing, it is that you can never be alone if you have a book. He is at his happiest when left in peace to read, to listen to his CDs or watch his DVDs. He still talks about ‘going to the movies’ in the front room, retreating there with a new film or a boxset and a TV screen that has got bigger and bigger as the years have progressed. He has also taught me that humility, humour and hope can take you anywhere and leave you far richer than any fame, fortune or philosophy.
So, from one writer to another and because his words are far superior to mine, I will leave the final word to him, self-penned and included in the inscription of Inking In the Outlines:
“Noel McBride was born and still lives in Belfast. He does not hold a degree in metaphysics. He has not, in his time, worked variously, as a binman, coffin polisher, bouncer in a nightclub nor (perish the thought), been a male model for an art class. He has never climbed the north face of the Eiger (he has trouble climbing to the top deck of the number 4A bus) nor paddled up the Orinoco in a canoe. He does however confess to single-handedly disabling the lift mechanism in an office block in central Belfast (from inside the lift!). He is the same age as Cliff Richard but refuses to dye what remains of his hair and considers himself the better singer”.
Happy birthday, Daddy!
Love, Deborah
