Summer of 1974.
Sugar Baby Love was number one, the Wombles were lumbering up the charts and my sister teetered on yellow and black platform shoes... all set for the gaeltacht.
What’s the Irish for “break a leg?” my father wondered.
We painted the window frames badly at home, singing along to Radio 1 and trying to guess the pop songs on Bits ‘n Pieces.
I was 13 years old. That was the May of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike.
Until then, the Troubles were a distant news reel played out on streets far from ours.
We were not children of the Troubles, not really. Our parents threw a ring of steel around us. The local TV news was “pas devant les enfants”.
At the first hint of gunfire, smoke billowing, a woman sobbing, my mother would shush us upstairs to do our homework.
We glimpsed it visiting family in west Belfast – in barricades on corners. We stood high up at a window on Chapel Road, Derry, and watched smoke across the Foyle in the Bogside.
We tasted fear the year the Troubles broke out when we left Connemara early, my father and uncle talking late into the night in hushed voices.
There was tension in the queue at the border crossing, soldiers with muddied faces lying in ditches, guns cocked, twitchy.
That was the summer when my brother, in the back seat of our old Marina among his five younger brothers and sisters, had suddenly sprouted like a weed. He stood out.
The squaddie pointed a finger – told him to go to the shed. Asked had he a provisional licence.
“Is he a provisional?” my sister asked.
We pulled out of the sale of a fancy house in north Belfast. “We’ll hold off until this blows over,” said my father. It never blew over.
But that May of 50 years ago and the Ulster Workers’ Council strike was almost exciting.
The electric came and went at the faraway flick of a switch by a stranger.
My mother set up the gas picnic stove in the garage and stirred pots of smash and beans. We went to bed by candlelight.
Our neighbour brought churns of milk that the farmers could not use and served it free from the back of his van.
We lined up with bowls and pans and, quick, quick, when the electricity was on, my mother filled the oven and we had rice puddings until they turned us.
We walked to school in plain clothes – past men, their faces scarved, standing tall on barricades of tractors and slurry tanks.
My mother’s friend spotted a familiar face, called him out by name: “Shame on you!” she shouted.
My parents returned white-faced from their evening walk… they met a man with a gun on the road.
That summer after Stormont fell was spent in boredom for us painting window frames at home; the sun blazing down; picking stones from the molten tarmac on the road.
Time moved on and my sister and I went to university in Dublin.
“Was Queen’s not good enough for you?” asked one teacher.
Our friends were at Queen’s; they went home every weekend, did not go past Ciro’s on Great Victoria Street in the evening, held their breaths at the wave of a red torch flagging them down at a makeshift checkpoint on a country road.
In Dublin, we never quite belonged: “You lot come here, get your degrees then get out again,” said one lecturer.
We were not children of the Troubles, not really. Our parents threw a ring of steel around us
It is 50 years since the UWC strike. The Troubles are behind us.
Did it affect us? Not like some of those I love have suffered.
But spill tea over a white linen tablecloth and watch the stain spread. It leaves a mark like a bruise. Refuses to quite wash out.