We laid down a long sheet for a lobby door and an AP man snapped our pic and said it was a good one and walked back with us behind the police lines. We chatted and he said he was from Jacksonville, Florida, and couldn’t believe how dark it was so soon, and I explained, having taken geography, that Belfast was on the same latitude as Moscow and the panhandle of Alaska and the nights were long in summer and in winter you paid the price.

The AP man jogged down to the offices of the Belfast Telegraph. The army boys got in their Land Rovers and drove to base. The coppers yawned and changed shifts, and the crowd, such as it was, was drifting away now and back to other occupations.

We laughed when our photograph appeared on the front page of the evening Telegraph. There we were rebuilding the proud city, the indomitable faces of Belfast. “Their Spirit Will Not Be Broken,” a headline proclaimed.

Aye, just our bloody backs, a man called Spider said.

But we walked with swagger as the vans unloaded the last of the big plates and the side windows and the boards for the pub.

We worked, the rain eased, the wind changed, and papers, fragments, bits of the hijacked car, and pulverized brick and glass coated us as we moved. The dismal stuff of explosion so familiar now in many cities. A confusion of words and particles that the poet Ciaran Carson calls Belfast Confetti.

Putting in the windows would take weeks, but that was the purview of professionals. At the end of the day our work was done, the glass unloaded, and we were paid off with a wee bonus for no breakages and no thefts. A few of us saved the dough for Christmas presents but most went to the Mermaid Tavern for a pint or two.

We drank and bought rounds of the black stuff and ate pickled eggs and Irish stew.