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The white-with-a-little-brown, right-angled streets that we knew so well in the days when we played hide-and-seek - when we believed one street was exactly like the other, and that it mirrored others - had become fearful places by the time of my eleventh birthday. We boys received regular and very stern warnings from our parents about us venturing out late at night, warned we should avoid dark alleys, warned not go into areas we did not know, and warned about being in the company of those we did not know.

“Boys, you’ll soon find out that there’s things that people don’t like about you. Especially you two, you boys. People don’t like Catholics around here.” Dad was serious, but he had no strange crease between his eyes or anger in them. He was sober and careful, insistent and wise. This was man talk. This was man-to-nearly-man talk. This was serious. 

“This could save you boys from getting a beating, or killed, so listen to what I’m telling youse,” pressed our father. Mum agreed, and urged us to stay close to the house, to venture not too far from the door of Number 43.

“Okay. Why?” we asked. Mum pleaded again for us to remain close by, not to wander too far, to be careful whom we chose as friends.

“Yeah, okay. But why?”

“Just listen to your mother, boys. If you don’t want to hear what we’re telling you then fine, on your own heads be it. But don’t come crying back here, to me and your mother, saying that we never told youse.”

With her forearm Mum swept an arc and in an instant the boundary of our nighttime play became the street directly outside the house and along the entry between the front and the back, if the eldest son and his boyos were elsewhere. During the day we could play in the fields and the garages, but no further than another couple of streets away unless we knew where we were going, or we were meeting someone we knew, and that we got there and back before it got dark. Being Catholic became even less fun than usual.

At night our parents would gather us round and lead us in prayer, our backs turned to Jesus and to Mary with Child. We prayed for the souls of the dead and the safety of the living, always ending our prayers with the chorus, “...and if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Before we knelt in prayer Mum or Dad would close the new living room curtains. Mum had bought heavy curtains for the upstairs and downstairs front of the house, and Dad forbade us to drag the sofa toward the hearth: it had to remain pushed tight against the wall, holding fast the curtains that we folded tightly one over the other. We closed the blinds ever earlier, regardless of the season. We were under strict instruction to put no lights on without first closing the blinds and curtains, and only our parents could answer the door after sunset. We stopped asking why and simply obeyed. As we prayed we could hear the eldest son and his friends in the alley, and we thanked our God that we were safe for now, in the house. Evel was returned to the safety of The Vatican. 

We began to feel fearful living in the house and walking on the streets, and the friends we dared visit were the ones we knew we could trust, even though we knew of no reason why we should not trust all and sundry in our Hollies world and beyond. We made no new friends in the street. We learned that the friends we could trust were those with whom we went to school, the ones with whom we made our First Confessions and Communions and Confirmations. They often were the friends who lived near the church we attended, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic Church, or those who went to its school, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic School, the same place our father attended after the dilapidated school in The Commons closed its sepia doors and ejected the dilapidated children, around the time the white and brittle spider webs finally cracked and splintered, loosing their hold, becoming only decorative and benign.