Before The Troubles Came

Before The Troubles Came

By Paul McCann

There was something innocent about the life we lived back then before the troubles came . To put it simply we lived like the shamrock around crocks of gold  in the green and the green , living the dream telling stories as long as your arm and doing no harm to anyone. We kept our eyes peeled for the fairy folk on as we spoke of the banshee’s who awoke us all about the dead before the dawn of the day . The coming attractions of mysteries could only be seen by those who were wrapped up in the enchantment of life as it was , long before the troubles came .

We were lucky in many ways to have spied the colours of glass marbles as they flickered in the sunshine of summers spent around spare ground and there were we found our fortunes playing games with so many names , we passed our time in a magic world far away from fear before the troubles came .

How quickly we turned into football fanatics who walked as if we were the men from uncle with secret identities for we had a mission to be better than the rest of the crowd . We wore our coloured scarfs and football rig shirts like lads of some famous teams with woollen pompom hats to keep our ears from getting frostbitten in the wind in the winters before the troubles came .

There were songs we sung and others we hummed and some we just made up in our heads and we were barely just out of short trousers but standing tall on the streets where the children still played and grown ups were never seen in between the borders of dreamland and reality . There were never any dramas back then before the troubles came .

Still and all there were days when we never lost a game and we never had any shame and there was no one to  blame for doing anybody any harm and suddenly things began to change with colour TV sets and even steel tips on boots and shoes with steel shawed heels so you could hear people coming before you actually saw them . It was a bit like the troubles you know , s you could hear them coming before you actually saw them what was happening almost like the shadow of a gunman  you could say . Well it had to come I suppose because everything was going so perfect back then before the troubles came and none of us saw it coming ,

I can still see the faces and the smiles of the wee boys and girls I knew . I will never forget those times where we were all transfixed on a rare time when we felt something good and wasn’t it just the best time of our lives and we didn’t even know it back then , before the troubles came ,.

We screamed and we had fun and we were all on the same team on fields of  green and we all won free kicks and imagined we were all the referee for a  moment before the game ended and the troubles came .

The End