Transcript
INTERVIEWER
I just want to start by asking you when and where you were born.
ROSEMARY
I was born in rooms above a pub in 1a Elizabeth Street, off, which ran between Albert Street and the Grosvenor Road [off The Falls Road]. (Interviewer: I hadn’t realised that). Nowadays they call them apartments, but we had rooms. It was actually my granny’s rooms that my mother lived with and my mother, my father and our family and my grandmother and her son, and at some stage along the way, her other son Mickey and his wife and child lived there as well.
INTERVIEWER
That was a lot of you.
ROSEMARY
A lot of us in the one room, in the one area now. I was two and a half when we moved to Ballymurphy, so that area I don’t remember. Well that’s where we came from first and we moved to Ballymurphy.
The streets were safe and the streets were great. But when the older boys Seamus and Liam and fellows of their age like, played football in the streets or they had card schools and all, the peelers came gave them a hard time, even in them days. Of course that was in the early 60s when they were teenagers. You used to see fellas caught in the card schools leaving the money on the ground and away flying because the peelers came. And kicking football in the street, the peelers would have come to your door. My da being the way he was used to say, ‘What do you want Mac’? He used to keep them at the door. He would never have let a peeler in through the door. Never would have. Our family never gave my mother any trouble in that sense, but the peelers provoked it.
At that time, Ballymurphy was 60/40. Maybe 70/30, but I think it was 60/40 at the time. We had Protestant neighbours in our street. The Crosbys across the street, I mean they were characters. I would still see people from the Crosby family and ‘Hello’, and we had a UDA, a B Special lived up the street. I didn’t even know what a B Special was, you know what I mean. You know I remember him, this man going out in his uniform and walking, but I didn’t know. Everybody lived together. I don’t remember, I basically had the best of both worlds. Everybody just helped one another, and the neighbours were fantastic, they were just brilliant.
In my teenage years, we had great times. I went to The Jig from a very early age, twelve. People can say what they like about the Jig in Coates Street I absolutely loved it and was there to the day they closed the doors.
In school, everybody used to borrow jumpers and batwing, skirts. Everybody exchanged clothes. That’s how you survived in the dance world, you borrowed everybody else’s clothes. Because there was no way my mummy could have afforded to keep up with the style then, because I was at the age where I was still getting my clothes for Christmas and in July. We all got dressed for July, the 12th of July. Isn’t that amazing? Everybody got dressed for the 12th of July. That was your new clothes and Christmas.
INTERVIEWER
When did you meet your husband to be?
ROSEMARY
I met Terry when I was about fifteen. I would definitely only have been about fifteen and a half. He thought I was older like, I’m sure. I met him outside the Plaza. We used to go up in the lift, with the bouncers and be the first into the dancehall.
We saw all the big bands. Like, we saw Dickey Rock and Joe Dolan and Eileen Reid and the Cadets. It was brilliant. So that’s where I met Terry.