Everyone is now used to the guerilla graphics along the walls of certain parts of Belfast, like stills out of war films. But before all that, Belfast streets were remarkable for their lively verbal comments and wall slogans. Not just "Up the Republic" or "Remember 1690", but urgings of religiosity, among other themes. Sport, too. "Come on the Reds" was not anything to do with Communism. The Reds were the amateur soccer club Cliftonville, playing on a ground known as Solitude (because that was the name of the house that formerly occupied the ground). So "Up the Reds" was commonly found on walls and gable ends, in chalk or paint.
Another source, and a popular one, of reminders that we are mere transients on this earth came from sandwichboard men (who paid for them he didn't remember). They were invariably minatory, from his memory. "Prepare to meet thy God", or "The End is nigh". The message had to be relatively short. But on the noticeboards outside churches, often with fine frames, and glass-covered, he remembers, were colourful announcements of the subject matter to be treated by the Reverend So-and-So in his sermons on Sunday.
They would not have the crude impact of the others, and you sometimes had to stop to take it all in. Always, of course from a Biblical quotation. The names of the clergymen were frequently arresting. He remembered one whose name was Wylie Blue. These would be on the established Protestant churches: Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist. But there were small halls where many sects unknown to other worlds flourished, and used more of the Hell-Fire technique.
Sometimes the Christian sloganising was rudely inflammatory. Dervla Murphy qouted a wall statement NO POPE HERE and underneath it, in a different hand or colour, "LUCKY OLD POPE". She was amused.
And how many people climbed up to Mac Art's Fort on the brink of the Cave Hill cliff, out of curiosity to see if there had been a change in the scriptural slogans on a rock that stood about 100 yards down from that promontory? It changed often. Imagine what fervour brought a man (or woman) with paint and brush up 1,000 feet to warn people to beware the wages of sin, or words to that effect. It was done all the years the old man lived there. Not a house within a mile.