Laura Canning

Lurgan Champagne

Growing up here... nah, meant nothing really. We couldn't compare ourselves to other teenagers and feel oppressed and traumatised 'cos we lived where we did - we had nothing else to compare it to, so of course it seemed normal. The conflict was accepted as part of life, and we just got on with things without even knowing we were coping. Without even coping, cos there was nothing to cope with.

Being girls was a bit the same but in this case we knew we were coping. We knew that if we were caught fighting at school we'd get punished more than the blokes, and that some of us would get called dogs and ugly while no one would ever think of doing the same to the guys. But that was pretty much it; like growing up in Northern Ireland, we ignored it, we took it for granted, it was The Way Things Were, like poverty and air crashes and some babies being born with Down's Syndrome. So we just did what every other teenager did, male or female, Irish or British or American or Australian - we smoked one cigarette between six of us, and drank cider, and snogged people, and hung around on street corners instigating minor episodes of petty crime which were small enough but which made us feel like daring outlaws at the time.

The only time we got caught was when we were out drinking, and it was one of those nights when we were 14 or 15 that summed up Northern Ireland for me. You take it for granted and you don't think about it, but every so often something will happen, maybe something minor, and it'll make you step outside yourself and see where you live the way other people must see it - like everyone staring at you open-mouthed when you're abroad and you've dived under the table because a car's backfired outside the pub. . . that sort of thing.

We used to drink every Saturday night. We'd all get a few quid pocket money, (some lucky sods got a fiver), and every penny of it went on booze and the split for ten cigarettes for the group. I was always the one who had to buy the booze 'cos I was the only one who could get served. So it was always me, going into the offy with a heap of sweaty coins to buy cans and cans of beer, bottles of cider, maybe a quarter bottle of vodka if it was someone's birthday, and the ubiquitous Buckfast tonic wine, aka Lurgan Champagne. More than guns, bombs and the marching season, the effects and popularity of Buckfast is something that can never be properly conveyed to those not from here. Lethal stuff.

I was having a two-litre bottle of cider, Cathy and Bernie were on the Buckfast brew, and Jackie, Tricia and Geraldine wanted beer. As usual I came out of the offy expecting someone to clap me on the shoulder and say, 'What do you think you're doing?' But it was fine - I got round the corner to where the others were waiting and handed out the drink to be stashed safely up sleeves and inside coats.

The problem now was where to drink. Those who'd designed our town had considerately left loads of fields and woods and deserted spots where decadent teens could drink themselves into a stupor in comfort and peace, but the more remote areas could get pretty lonely, if you know what I mean. We'd had lots of brilliant nights just by ourselves but it was good being part of a bigger group - maybe 20 of us sitting somewhere drinking.The downside was that big groups tended to drink fairly close to the estates, so there was more chance of being caught by a dad walking past at an inconvenient moment, or of a sour spoilsport calling the police. Then there was the additional problem of 'bog-breaks'. In the middle of nowhere you could wander for ages o'er hill and vale and have your pee in peace. In a group near houses there wasn't much choice and there was always the danger of some spotty oik following you and trying to get a glimpse of your arse.

In the end we decided that these were necessary evils for the crack of the big group, so off we trundled to the Bridge Inn, an embankment beside the bridge over our pathetic local stream, which we always misleadingly referred to as 'The River'.

The Bridge Inn was great - it was really ours. The walls were all graffitied, and not just the naff 'She Loves Him' stuff, but pictures sprayed in technicolor as a backdrop to jokes and quotes. There was also the legend 'Laura Canning Loves Gary Lennon' written in permanent marker by a callous mate who thought she was totally hilarious. When we arrived that night there were already about 10 other people drinking, so we found ourselves some space, spread our carrier bags on the ground and huddled into our jackets against the wall to start the night's festivities.

It was just another night until the police turned up. Someone who'd walked past must have complained or else the police had been in the area anyway It didn't matter - suddenly they were there, right in front of us and we hadn't even seen them.There was no getting away One of them started to shout at us and Valerie burst into tears.We all started to think up our false names and hoped we wouldn't be lifted.

It was a game of roulette, giving false stats. If you were caught doing it, the police would definitely take you home for sure, but if you told them the truth they might lift you anyway So usually some of us did, and some of us didn't. I said I was Sarah O'Neill and my date of birth was 1971. In the end the only one of us that didn't lie was Bernie, which must have begged the question of why a 14-year-old was drinking with a bunch of 1 8-year-olds - not to mention why a group of 18-year-olds were drinking al fresco in the cold when they could legitimately have been in a nice warm pub. But it was OK.The cops probably didn't believe us, but they must have decided they couldn't be bothered taking it further. All they did was make us open the booze that was sitting there and pour it into the River.

Valerie was still weeping Buckfast-induced tears and we were all embarrassed by her showing us up. Jackie was about to weep too but she managed to keep it in till the police told us to move on. The minute they left, she started bawling. We crowded round her while the blokes looked away and shuffled their collective feet.Jackie's mum was really ill with cancer and Jackie didn't want to upset her even more by turning up at home in a police car. She cried for ages before we calmed her down. We distracted her by talking about where we'd drink now, and we decided on Chinatown, the group of abandoned houses on the edge of another estate.

Most of the booze had been saved as it had been hidden in bags or under coats, and the night was still young. There was an army patrol on the main road so we had to go to Chinatown the long way round 'cos getting caught again was the last thing we needed. That was the only thing the Troubles meant to us if we thought about it at all - there was more chance of getting caught. Teenagers in London didn't have to contend with armed soldiers coming at them as they were enjoying a Saturday night drink.

So we avoided the soldiers and pushed through the bushes. There was no way we'd be caught twice in one night, we reassured Jackie, who was still a bit sniffly. That would just be mad.

It was mad in the end. We'd only been settled for about 10 minutes when another police patrol turned up. We had to go through the same procedure of names and addresses and dates of birth, though this lot were a bit more cunning and asked us where we worked, so we were all a bit stressed trying to think up names of companies, especially as we were, by this stage, well on our way to being drunk.

That's definitely it now, we thought, once they'd gone.We'd never heard of anyone getting caught twice in one night, so even though the police had told us to move on we operated on the 'lightning never strikes twice' theory, and stayed put.

The theory turned out to be very, very wrong. Twenty minutes later an army patrol, very sneakily we thought, ambushed us, two from either end of the sheds and two more on each side. They didn't let us stay on the ground and slouch at them in arrogant teenager pose; they made us get up and brought us through the bushes where we nearly tripped over two more of them and where my coat got snagged on somebody's gun. Jackie and Paul were interrupted in their snog in one of the sheds (Jackie had recovered somewhat) and were made to come out as well, with Jackie loudly and drunkenly complaining that one of the soldiers had kicked over her lager.

This was getting a lot more serious.We were lined up like we were in front of a firing squad, blue offy bags at our feet, some of us still holding our drink. (I'd dropped my cider bottle in the shock of tripping over a bloke and his gun and was hoping it had landed in a lucky way and wasn't glugging itself out onto the dirt.) There was something about this time, though, that made us a bit scared and we all separately and secretly decided we weren't going to mess about with false stats.

So when I was asked my name and address I gave my real one, but still said I'd been born in 1971 - everybody else did the same.Tricia gave hers and then, brightly and tactlessly said, 'My cousin's a Brit as well' while we all looked at the ground, crossing our fingers and cursing her silently. Then they came to Jackie. She must have still been upset over her mum because she didn't give her real name. The trouble was she'd forgotten her false one.The few seconds' pause was the biggest giveaway ever, and she was so drunk by now that we could actually see her making one up.

'Marie Devlin' she said finally, and gave her address as number 924 in an estate that only had 800 houses. We crossed our fingers again and one of the soldiers went off to check the details that we'd given them.

We'd been through this procedure many times with both the police and the army but this time seemed different. There was no banter, none of us saying, 'Oh, what's the big deal', and 'We're not doing any harm.' There weren't even any ticking offs or tuts. There was just dead silence. We looked at the ground and the soldiers looked at us and those of us still holding cans wondered if taking a gulp would be the final straw Bernie lit up a cigarette and for once there was no clamouring of 'After you' or 'I called it' - it was just passed silently along the line.

The soldier came back and we knew right away

'Which one of you said her name was Marie Devlin?' Our stomachs all dropped, like when you're really small and you've been caught doing something really big. None of us looked at Jackie and none of us looked at the soldier. We wouldn't have given her away and if he'd forgotten which one she was, she might have got away with it. But he looked at her and said, 'It was you, wasn't it?'Jackie ran.

It was one of those images you know you'll always remember and that, if it were photographed, would turn up on the front page of a newspaper - a drunken 14-year old girl running along a path, still holding her can of beer, and a man with a gun chasing after her. We took living in Northern Ireland for granted but at that moment I saw exactly how it might look to outsiders. Anything is normal when it's all you've known and you have nothing to compare it to, but something like that makes you realise that other people might be right; maybe we did have a lot to deal with and maybe growing up here was something that should be relevant and significant and slotted into our self-analysis. Here was my mate, she was 14, she was drunk and worried about her mum. And here was a soldier, chasing her 'cos she'd given him a false name. I thought about those teenagers in London.

He caught her easily enough. She was drunk and she smoked - we were all lazy and unfit. He grabbed her by the arm and brought her back over to the group. We all looked at the ground while he shouted at her for ages and Jackie started to cry - again. There was talk of being arrested and it being a Very Serious Offence to give false information. He was either genuinely angry or a very good actor. It went on for ages and Jackie kept on crying and we stood there angry and embarrassed for her, hoping she wouldn't get lifted.

She didn't. Fifteen minutes later it was all over. Our booze had been confiscated and we were told to move on and not to let them see us near there again. For a few seconds we just stood there, still in our firing squad line. Then we gathered around Jackie and tried to calm her down as best we could. She was hyperventilating from being upset and the booze wasn't helping. In the end Bernie took her home. The rest of us stood there, already recovering, already preparing to narrate the story to everyone at school on Monday. We'd been scared for a bit, but now it was funny

And then I remembered my cider and I stumbled back into the bushes to look for it. It had survived.