BITS FROM THE FAMILY TREE

BITS FROM THE FAMILY TREE

Early Years: The unintended smuggler.

Before I was married getting to Strabane on a Saturday night to walk up the Main Street and down the Back Street was exciting and adventurous. But I missed out on the experience of dancing to the showbands in the Palindrome . Or hearing, in the absence of a bar, the now famous catchphrase – Are you going for a mineral.

Sometimes my mother would send me to do a ‘message’ for her in Strabane with instructions to come straight back.

I remember one day I was getting ready to go to my work in the café in Lifford and my father told me to bring cigarettes from our Ballindrait shop to be sold to the customers. All business, I filled a shopping bag to the brim with cartons of twenty packets of John Players and Sweet Afton cigarette.

At the last minute my mother decided she wanted something out of Joe Harleys shop in Upper Main Street in Strabane. I think it was a Christmas tablecloth. I’m sure she expected me to get off the bus in Lifford, deliver the cigarettes to the Café and then walk across Lifford Bridge to Strabane and get what she wanted.

As we neared Lifford I decided that I’d stay on the bus, go on to Strabane, do my mother’s shopping and walk back along the High Footpath to Lifford.

John Mc Callion, the bus conductor, waved to the men manning the Lifford Custom Border Post as the yellow and red Donegal bus navigated the old Lifford Bridge (built in 1730) and headed for Strabane. I sat on looking out of the window at the familiar sight of fishermen, waders up to their hips, fishing where the River Mourne met the River Finn.

It never crossed my mind that I had to pass the Northern Custom and Excise Post on the other side. It was only when the bus slowed down as it approached the Camel’s Hump, (the British Army had a post there in the 1970/80s that I realised what I had done. Smuggling cigarettes across the Border from the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland was a serious offense. Worse still, the hundreds of cigarettes I had in my shopping bag would be confiscate.

My heart speeded up. My father would kill me.

As usual, the very officious looking custom officer with his braided tunic and peaked cap displaying the insignia of the Crown, stepped smartly onto the bus and started to tread his way between the seats until he reached the  back, asking as he went of each passenger, “Do you have anything to declare.”

I suddenly found I had a great interest in Strabane old Railway Station which could be seen from the bus window.

I didn’t declare the cigarettes. And I never ever told my father how close he came to losing them.

G C Hill 2018©