The Yard (Brandon Originals S.) - Softcover

Wilson John Haire entered the Belfast shipyard as an office boy at fourteen. Brought up mainly in rural areas, he was suddenly thrown into the world's biggest shipyard, a huge cauldron of twisted metal, great baulks of timber, the freezing sea, death and terrible injuries, where the day-to-day philosophy was fatalism.
He writes also of the rural world he continued to live in while working at the yard, and of its cruelty towards human beings and animals. But despite the hardship and conflict that are evoked, there is laughter and joyfulness, and people's spirits are lifted in the most unexpected circumstances. He leaves the shipyard at 21 to become a bouncer, and experiences the contrast between life in the yard and the make-believe world of the ballroom, while at the same time encountering the first terrible pain of relected love.