Transcript
ROSEMARY
Terry and I had got a house in Pine Street in the Donegall Pass a year before we married, and I then worked in Magee’s on the Donegall Road, the famous Magee’s Tailoring. I used to walk down the Donegall Road at night after work and meet with Terry, his brother Robbie would have been there when they would have been ashore, and we would have been decorating the house, and doing it up, stripping it down, quite free and quite happy, not in any way afraid of anything.
INTERVIEWER
You were telling Terry about the woman next door.
ROSEMARY
I said, ‘That woman next door is nuts, Terry’. She said to me, ‘If anything happens, you can knock the wall. Like he’s got something on top of the wardrobe and all’. And Terry looked at me, and I said, ‘She said they would get us down into the Markets and all’. And he was going, ‘Aye, aye, Rosie, don’t be listening to people like her’. Then when the papers were full of the stuff and you know then, like that then the burning, the people started getting burned out in Bombay Street [a predominantly Catholic street] and areas like that there, I said to Terry, ‘Is there any chance that could happen to us down here?’
And it took months for it to develop. It became obvious that we were, we were living in danger, where we were. It became obvious. Clusters of people at night standing at the corner talking, whispering and abuse, you know, all that was going on. So, I said to my mammy about it and she said to me, ‘Don’t be saying to your, daddy. Rosemary, maybe you should come up here and stay with us for a wee while, you know’.
We would have been back and forward to our house down in Pine Street, you know. And it was during the day, but I took it upon myself to go down one day and I thought I was the bees knees with our Sean in his red pram and I pushed him all the way down. And I got down into it and out in the yard, there were all these bottles broke and my back windows were all broke, you know. And all these porter bottles were smashed in the back yard. (Interviewer: your own backyard?) Yes. And the woman next door wasn’t there. I came out and I tried to get her, and she wasn’t there. And this one across the street shouted, ‘Your Fenian neighbour’s not there. She’s away back to the Markets’. And I looked over and I said, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do here?’ I was really petrified. Then I realised that the doors were all closed and there was a terrible feeling in the area.
INTERVIEWER
Did you feel you were being watched as you left the house?
ROSEMARY
Easy, yeah. The hair on the back of my neck was standing. And I said to Terry, ‘Will we get out? Will we get up back up to Ballymurphy’? He said, ‘Just keep walking’. So, we pushed our Sean’s pram down Pine Street, which ran in an L shape, went like that, like that, that. We lived this way, down, and they were all, kind of, you know... nobody was saying anything to us and nobody was giving us any abuse, but you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, you know.