Belfast's Romeo & Juliet

Joan Lingard's Kevin and Sadie books turn 40 this year and Joan is coming back to Belfast to mark it with a doc I'm fronting for BBC Radio Ulster. The first book in the series "The Twelfth Day of July" introduced us to Kevin McCoy and Sadie Jackson, a Romeo & Juliet/West Side Story for Belfast in the Troubles. So I''ve been re- reading them seeing as the last time I read them was *cough* circa 1979.

To my joy, the two I've read so far "The Twelfth Day of July" and "Across the Barricades" still have the raw power of that first read. The illicit thrill of that divided love, the violence, sectarian hatred, the struggle to understand each other and then the reality of having to move away in order to live a better life. Kevin says to Sadie towards the end of the second book "Across the Barricades", "I don't like the way we've got to live. It's not living anymore. Not living the way I want it". And so he decides to go away, thus setting the scene for the third book "Into Exile". If I'm honest, I do remember getting a bit jaded by the end of "A Proper Place", the 4th book. Maybe I had just grown out of them, and Kevin McCoy, now a married man with child, didn't grab me as much as the young, dark eyed, dark haired teenage Kevin I had first read about. Instead I was fancying the guys in Smash Hits and Look In!

"Across the Barricades" is still taught in some schools here. The year 10 pupils reading it were born around 1997, a year before the Good Friday Agreement. Kevin & Sadie's Belfast must seem almost pre historic.

"Kevin and Sadie" goes out on BBC Radio Ulster on Sunday the 11th July at 1.30pm