First day at my new school was a nightmare. It was a cold, wet, miserable January morning and I got there while it was still dark. A thousand other boys arrived and I felt so out of place. This was Belfast and life was to be this way for another 5 years. A week before that I was happy going to school. That was in Africa, at a small school of about 300 boys and girls where life was gentle and where I knew what was going on. In Belfast I was beyond understanding; moreover, it was 1972 and I had been parachuted into the most troubled part of the city.

The school was a sprawling concrete mass, peopled with boys generally not likely to make a career in academia. Education was of the old style, administered with a bamboo cane and no imagination. I didn’t know what anyone was talking about and felt like a real oddity.

Class followed class all day: Maths, English, History. I had a packed lunch which I ate on my own. Most boys went to the dinner hall which looked rougher than a herd of thirsty Zebra fighting for space at the edge of a small water hole in my lost African idyll.

At about 2 pm the Chemistry class began. I was given a book and told to do page 16. I didn’t know what that meant and the boy beside me looked blank and uttered unintelligible grunts when I asked for an explanation.

Ten minutes into the lesson the fire alarm sounded and a cheer went up. The teacher tried ineffectively to get people to line up at the door and leave in an orderly fashion but that wasn’t going to happen. Chairs were flying, fists were shoved into people’s sides, shins were kicked and I was left bewildered and at he back of the crowd. The teacher found me standing confused, not knowing what to do and he explained that it was a bomb scare and we had to get out, out into the wet, cold, miserable, intimidating playground that buzzed with menace like a stirred up hornets’ nest.

It was habit by that time that someone would phone the school to say a bomb had been planted in it and that there were only 10 minutes to get out. That was the order of the day. Shops, offices, restaurants, everywhere got it, and no-one ever took a chance of it being a hoax. Too many bombs had already gone off in offices and bus stations for anyone to take a risk. Enough people had already been blown to bits.

I was left stunned and lost. I dropped my books outside and they were trampled to oblivion. The boys wouldn’t stay in the playground but spilled onto the road, onto buses and went home. I was afraid and uncertain. Which was the safest way to go? What about my books? How do I get home? Will I get home? What does home mean? Had I died?

This was my new life. It never got any better.