Northern Irish writer Robert Graham captures memories of a long-gone Ulster childhood

Robert Graham, a former Campbell College student, said his new book, The Former Boy Wonder, is in part a chronicle of his love affair with his birthplace.

In the novel, the author’s second, he conjures up happy memories of a 1960s Bangor childhood, including learning to swim in Pickie Pool and Saturday afternoons spent at the Tonic Cinema. The book also features recollections of clothes shopping in Anderson and McAuley and later on, when the family moved to Belfast, attending Rory Gallagher gigs at Belfast’s Ulster Hall.

Graham, a creative writing lecturer at Liverpool John Moore’s University, left Belfast in 1974 to attend university in England. He said the book, with its themes of midlife, first love and fatherhood, had been on his mind for at least a decade and he is excited to finally have it in print.

A Bangor childhood

The novel is not autobiographical, though there are similarities between Graham, 66, and its main character Peter Duffy. These include a Bangor childhood, the loss of their fathers at a young age and being based in Manchester, where Graham now lives with his wife Rachel and their three adult children.

The story takes place across several time zones and locations, including Northern Ireland in the 60s and 70s and Manchester and London in the early 1980s and the 2010s.

The Former Boy Wonder charts the highs and lows of 49-year-old music journalist Peter Duffy as he increasingly finds work hard to come by. The story follows the music fanatic, and father-of-one as he tries to repair his marriage – a campaign that is threatened by the possibility that his first love, Sanchia Page, might come back into his life.

From that point, Peter descends into a full-blown mid-life crisis, risking his relationship with his wife and teenage son in the process.

The Tonic Cinema

Graham said: “This novel has been coming together for the last 10 years, but my love for my birthplace has been growing ever since I left.

“Since 1974, I’ve been visiting family in Belfast at least three or four times a year, In that time, I have discovered more and more of the natural beauty of the North as well as the South, from the Glens of Antrim to the Galway coast, and my appreciation of the people I belong to has grown just as much.

“Vivid childhood memories come flooding back each time I visit, and I have used them in the book, including swimming lessons in Pickie Pool. You’d come out of the water freezing, the coach would pass you a mug of hot Bovril, and you’d try to drink while shaking all over”.

The art deco Tonic Cinema on Hamilton Road, which was demolished in 1992 following a fire, is another significant location in the book.

Graham said: “From the ages of six to 16, all the films I went to see were in the Tonic, which with its 2,000 seats was apparently the largest in the whole of Ireland at that time.

“There, my mates and I would see Saturday afternoon matinees, the likes of Goldfinger, It’s Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“Waiting for the Pearl & Dean ads to end and the feature to begin, we chewed Paynes’ Poppets and drank Kia-Ora.

“In the novel, a photograph of the Tonic becomes an emotive symbol of the father Peter Duffy lost.”

Anderson and McAuley’s

Other recollections of Graham’s that feature in the novel include those visits to the clothes department in Anderson and McAuley’s, which went out of business in 1994, larking about on Ballyholme Beach, and after-school jaunts to Taylor’s newsagent on High Street, Bangor, to buy DC and Marvel comics.

Graham, in common with his protagonist Peter, has been an obsessive music fan since childhood.

He said: “Growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, the bands I was reading about in the NME never came to play.

“The one world-class act you could rely on in those days was Rory Gallagher, the Cork bluesman, who played the Ulster Hall at least once a year. Back then, those shows were thrilling to me – astonishing, really. Poor old Rory, like so much from my youth, is long gone now.”

In his 20s, Graham briefly managed punk band The Membranes and was a music writer for Manchester’s now defunct what’s on magazine City Life.

He said: “Manchester, in contrast to the Belfast of my teenage years, was a place where it was possible to see any major band that passed through town, from Elvis Costello and The Clash to The Stones, but also to be a part of the scene when homegrown talent like New Order, The Smiths and The Fall were breaking through.

“Working at City Life, I got to interview Morrissey and Marr just before The Smiths first album came out and Mick Hucknall before Simply Red signed with a major record label. For a boy who had been a teenager in a band-starved Belfast, it was a transformative experience.

“As the years have gone by, I have remained a huge music fan, but I have also realised that when I was growing up I didn’t know the half of it about the glories of Ireland, my homeland.

“I hope my portrait of 60s and 70s Northern Ireland in The Former Boy Wonder will strike a chord with readers who grew up in that era and, for those too young to remember, perhaps it will evoke the Bangor and Belfast of 50 years ago.”

The Former Boy Wonder is published by Lendal Press, priced £12.99

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