ANYONE raised on a housing estate will recognise the camaraderie, grassroots decency and innocent abandonment of outside play that characterises Hearthlands, about growing up in the White City estate in north Belfast.
Part memoir, part social history, the latest book by acclaimed historian Marianne Elliott tells how the mixed-religion estate came to be built, of the people who lived there and of what happened to it in subsequent years in what also turns out to be a riveting history of Belfast post-Troubles.
The former peace commissioner, honoured along with Liam Neeson in Dublin last week when she received Presidential Distinguished Service Awards for the Irish Abroad 2017, Elliott was also awarded an OBE in 2000 for services to Irish Studies and to the Northern Ireland peace process.
She's better known for her non-fiction writing, particularly her biography of United Irishmen founder Wolfe Tone (1989) as well as Catholics of Ulster: A History (2000) and a biography of United Irishman Robert Emmet (2003).
While initially she set out to tell the story of mixed-religion housing in the north and the work of the former Northern Ireland Housing Trust, Elliott inevitably realised that she needed to tell the story of her own childhood too.
"Hearthlands is an alternative history of Northern Ireland showing how successive governments supported mixed-religion housing, even against vested interests like the Orange Order," explains the author, who was for 18 years director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool.
"I wanted to tell the story of mixed0religion, working-class housing throughout Northern Ireland but that would have taken a lot of time and a team of researchers. I was also aware that the people who lived on these estates were getting older and passing away so I felt that time was running out to do the research.
"I felt I could tell the story from the vantage of the estate that I grew up in so I was a participant observer – but Hearthlands is also a social history of Belfast at the time.”
While the housing estate as she knew it is now gone, and the one built in its place is a mainly Protestant community, Elliott was delighted to find out that some Catholic families still live there today.
"Hopefully, I have conveyed just how people had lived amicably together before the Troubles as I believe strongly that the Troubles didn't have to happen, as we weren't that polarised,” she adds.
"I worked as peace commissioner in the early stages of the peace process in 1993 on the Opsahl Commission. Through this I became involved with mixed-religion groups of women in north Belfast who had grown up in similar mixed areas in Belfast like myself.
"They were saying that their communities had become polarised during the Troubles and had tried to maintain friendships across the divide over the years but were worried that the next generation, their grandchildren, won't remember how it was. That was my take on it as well as I felt very strongly at how Belfast had become so polarised during and after the Troubles.”
Elliott was only a year old when her parents Terry and Sheila Burns moved into the White City along with her four-year-old brother Terry in 1949; two sisters, Geraldine and Eleanor, later made up the tight-knit family.
They were one of more than 100 families, mostly made up of young parents with young children, both working-class Protestants and Catholics, who populated the well-designed houses with big gardens and large open green spaces located between the Antrim, Whitewell and Serpentine Roads, close to Greencastle, four miles from Belfast city centre. For many of the families, it was the first time that they had the benefit of utilities such as mains water, electricity and an indoor toilet and bathroom.
The Burns home was the last house before Cave Hill and the children enjoyed the freedom of being able to play so close to its nature park while scrambling over ruins left behind in the aftermath of the bombing that took place during the Second World War.
In 1963, when Elliott was aged 15 and attending the local Dominican Grammar School, the family left White City as her parents got a mortgage for a home in Newtownabbey.
She captures her own memories in the book but also those of her mother, who died in 2014, and other neighbours, such as Flo Kelsey who told her about the horrors of the Blitz and the extraordinary kindness of the American GIs.
She does not shirk from telling of the less idyllic happenings that impacted on the estate, such as the sinking of the car ferry Princess Victoria on its way to Larne in 1953 with the loss of 130 lives.
The scandal of the Patricia Curran murder, still unsolved, at her upper-class family home nearby Whiteabby in 1952 was a major talking point. However, nothing shocked and saddened the White City community more than the discovery that the woman behind the stealing of babies from their prams in Dublin in the early 1950s was a well-respected mother on the estate.
:: Hearthlands by Marianne Elliott is published by the Blackstaff Press and costs £12.99 from bookshops and online from www.blackstaffpress.com
