As Kenneth Branagh’s film vies for an award at this weekend’s Oscars, others who grew up near him share how leaving changed their lives
I was born in 1959 at 168 Mountcollyer Street, the same street that birthed Kenneth Branagh in 1960. I was the third of four children to a Catholic family. On Sundays, we would play out in Alexandra Park after the mass. But I remember the swings being locked up. Protestant kids didn’t play on Sundays, they had Sunday school.
I grew up as an only child in the suburbs of Belfast. I avoided the worst of it, but you were very aware of the searches and barricades in the city centre. I went to university in Dublin, then came to England for my MA; I didn’t think I’d be leaving for good. I felt relatively free until I was about 14. A lot of my friends were Catholic, we played football together. Then there was this huge change: everything closed in around you very quickly. A Catholic chemist got shot – he didn’t die but the bullet grazed his forehead – a supermarket got blown up, there was a lot of ethnic cleansing.On Bloody Friday [21 July 1972], They shut off all the buses. I had no idea what was going on, so I started walking through the city centre.
I lived in Finaghy, south Belfast, and you could see the hills from the kitchen window by the sink. You felt hemmed in. Even living in a leafy middle-class suburb, there was that nightly soundtrack of fire engines, gunfire, the rattling of bin lids.
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