“The role of the parent is to become a willing scapegoat.”
Iain Sinclair
‘So, what’s going to happen now?’
So thought the two brothers entirely independently of one
another and a great many miles apart. They were now, whether they liked it or
not, travellers on a journey of the mind. A mother, mutually shared, with
‘early dementia’. That dread word, the mental equivalent of ‘cancer’. If
there’s an ‘early’ there must be a ‘middle’ and a ‘late’ and all the stages in
between.
The two brothers.
What do you call two brothers who envy each other’s writing
skill?
Scribbling rivalry!
Secretly at each other’s throats for a lifetime (for
fisticuffs were never an option), the one (me) pretends to be talented while
the other envies the pretend talent. A curious affair which has been allowed to
fester for more than half a century.
And now this!
The one battleground where they could both vie for attention
and acclimation, and it was disappearing by the day. The poor old dear was
beginning to misremember who did exactly what for her and when.
“Did you buy me this, son, or was it your brother?”
It was me, maw. It was bloody well me!
Virtue signalling had now become a redundant enterprise.
Watching her in her anguish and knowing that you are one of
the only two people on the entire planet that she looks to for even the merest
crumb of comfort and consolation. All the love of a mother gushes through her
constantly. She looks at me like any animal looks at her young. Unbending,
unflinching fondness. She is Mother Mary in her hospital bed which has been
transported to her bedroom in her little flat. This is the bedroom she once
shared with the co-procreator of two boys, but he is long gone and her memory
of him is fading and distorted. Mother Mary with a small flock of just two.
Yet, there are times when I can barely offer a mere
pipette’s worth of care in return. Resentment burns through me and a sullen
rage which is articulated by cold, unpliant body language.
Why is this?
A quality in her or a quality in me?
Probably, both!
My mother, my brother and I are never in this same room
together, not even in these sad and unusual circumstances. She will never
understand why. It’s a small room and the presence of the three of us would
fill it as if it was occupied by lumbering, awkward giants all talking at once.
Or bellowing. My brother doesn’t like me even in the flat when he’s talking to
my mother, it seems to cramp his style as if I’m sitting through the other room
listening and judging him (it’s hard not to hear the conversation in such a
confined space and it would be too blunt of him to actually close doors.
Politeness abides even where hatred pervades.) I could stand my ground and
suffer his edgy annoyance but – for a quiet life – I’ll just go for a wander
around the charity shops for the umpteenth time and come back when he’s gone or
going.
Text message me to him…
‘Hi pal. I’ll be back in around half an hour’.
Him to me…
‘OK, I’ll shoot off around then’.
We’re not used to this new arrangement. Me being here purely
by necessity and not safely 400 miles away.
(I found a book on one of these charity shop exiles entitled
‘Families and How to Survive Them’. Pointedly, I left it in full view on the
living room table. I’m a smug, self-satisfied bastard at times and don’t always
recognise how ‘difficult to deal with’ I may have been to them
over the years.)
No, we couldn’t be in the same room as our ailing
stroke-victim mother. We’d be competing for the same air, and it would be by
now so awkward that we wouldn’t know how to conduct ourselves. By taking the
lead or – God forbid! – taking her hand as an offering of solace I’d virtually
be declaring sibling war.
O, there’s no shortage of love here, it has just been distorted
down the years by time, distance and personalities. By misunderstandings,
misinterpretations, mis conceptions. We all have different, confused
perceptions of each other and our part in this little drama.
Four victims.
Four in a family and aw bullied at school and beyond. Iz
that no’ wan fur a family psychologist? Or is it a more common occurrence? It’s
mibbe no’ something folk would want to admit to. It’s mibbe a source of great
shame and embarrassment. I know that when I’m lookin’ at my faimly I’m reminded
too much of myself!
Being bullied in Glesga is nae better or worse than being
bullied and humiliated anywhere else but, maybe because of its image as a
rufty-tufty city, it is somehow more intensely shameful. In Glasgow one is
known as a shitebag if one is a timid, non-aggressive creature who can’t fight
back. A bag of shite!
We were a family of four such excremental containers.
This mother of mine who lies immobilised (she could
get up with some assistance and effort, but her psychology is dead against the
very idea) was born into disaster. She was squeezed out into the world within
the walls of a miniature castle that was being used as a makeshift maternity
hospital for evacuee mum’s-to-be from war-threatened Glasgow (WW2 had started
only three weeks before). She was born to a grieving mum who had lost her own mother
only very recently and her father was mad for drink which he consumed in
Campbelltown Loch quantities. Not many years later he would be forced to add a
bitter grievance that fuelled, along with the alcohol, terrible and terrifying
emotional violence.
The odds were against little Jean.
On top of all that, she would grow to be tall for a girl and
easily picked on with her guileless smile and doe-soft eyes.
Wartime Glasgow was darker even than usual and everything
was rationed, even love. Feeding a family was a neat trick made even neater
when your husband, the father of your children, turned wages into wine. My
mother’s wee auntie Mary who had bow-legs from the rickets was forced to walk
the 12 miles from Erskine Hospital in a black-out just after her beloved Wullie
had died. He had died from injuries suffered in the first war and she’d to get
back to their children in Bridgeton who were being looked after by a sister who
had her own weans to care for. What a walk for the wee wifie! Through the night
with her grief along the ink-black Clyde and not, as a mother, even the option
of jumping in.
My mother was ‘too nice’ right from the off. A lack of
confidence and love can do that to a child, they feel they have to ‘earn’
affection but in my mum’s case this tactic didn’t work. ‘Too polite’ was one of
my granny’s criticisms of her, half in disgust and half in motherly fear that
her eldest daughter was ‘saft’ and easily ‘taken a lend of’. She grew up in her
first eighteen years in the West End of Glasgow – Bath Street, Sauchihall
Street, Glasgow School of Art, Woodside, Charing Cross, Great Western and Byres
Roads. The Locarno dancehall. King’s Theatre, The Mitchell Library. The
‘cultured’ part of the city. A basement flat in a ‘respectable’ tenement next
to a Protestant church. Her father, Robert, when he wasn’t drunk or in the
process of becoming so, was a mechanic and part-time chauffeur with Forsyth’s
department store on Renfield Street. He’d maintain their vans and drive their
heid-yins to their meetings and golf courses. No doubt they liked him for his
respectful ‘patter’ and the slightly ‘gallus’ angle of his cap. They didn’t
know or care that later on he’d be birlin’ home to terrorise his family with
his jibes about them ‘holding him back’.
Domestic violence, like alcoholism was a social ‘hidden’
back in those black and white days. Folk knew it happened, they could hear it
through the walls, but it was never mentioned or acknowledged openly. It
certainly wasn’t a topic on any wireless version of ‘Trisha’.
This was my mother’s first big mistake in life and one for which
she was to pay for the rest of her days.
My ma talked trite about shite because my da talked heavy
about everything else, politics, jazz, modern art and Stalin, though not always
in that order. My old man was autodidactic like many a poor individual who’d
received a woefully inadequate education at school and forced to play ‘catch
up’ for a lifetime as a result.
She tried to offer a balance to her visiting son by showing him
cushions she’d bought or a ‘new tea-tray for 99p, son. D’ye like it?’ while my
da spraffed on about the need for a general strike or Picasso’s Blue Period.
I’d be in the place less than a minute and I’d be struck mute by this jarring
polyphony. My da would be waiting expectantly for my opinion on Stalin’s
betrayal of the republic in Spain while my mum proferred a new spider plant for
my perusal and did I want a muffin with my tea, or would I just have soup?
By this time, they’d be living in north London (which, in
itself, is a long, long story). My da as a young, young man had had a checkered
and somewhat erratic career in a variety of jobs: factory hand, tram conductor
(and, briefly, tram driver until he was involved in a collision on Jamaica
Bridge), grocery shop manager. He’d been a militant trade unionist, industrial
saboteur, and works football manager (Rawlplug FC. I can still see the team’s
photo in my mind’s eye and the smart red and black striped Man City ‘away’
kit.) He’d also been a semi-professional dancehall crooner, that’s how he and
my mother had met…
“See if your da had been a rotten singer, son? You’d never
have been born!”
Then, giving into his raging frustration and a desire to
express his principles more usefully he re-trained as a social worker and very
quickly rose through the ranks. This rapid rise was due to his ability and
enthusiasm but also his willingness to apply for and accept jobs that few else
would touch with a bargepole. The Homeless Families Unit in Foresthall Hospital
in Springburn where he took on an established order that ran the place halfway
between a prison and the Poor House it had once been. Then, in the
mid-seventies (1976 – the summer of sun and The Who at Celtic Park) he became
the first ever social worker to be attached to Waltham Forest Housing
Department. His co-workers were so unenthusiastic at his appointment that they
didn’t even have a desk or an office ready for him. They also protested at his poster of Gaugin’s
‘And the Gold of Their Bodies’, a depiction of two semi-naked Tahitian females.
It’s porn! said they. It’s art! said he and the wrong foot was got off on.
My father spent his whole life attempting to eradicate his
childhood or, at least, change the narrative. He’d have been ‘the posh boy’ at
school and would have been bullied as a consequence. He was the firstborn (and
for nine years the only born) in the pristine household of aspirant parents
living in the ‘up and coming’ district of Garrowhill in the far east end of
Glasgow. His peers would be largely from Shettleston and Baillieston which were
far more ‘rough and ready’. To further alienate him, his mother dressed him
strangely with economy being her watchword…
“A wellie and a clug, son. A wellie and a clug..!” he’d tell
me, almost proud of this abject image.
This bizarre pedal combination is likely an extrapolation
(my father was prone to this like the Be Bop musicians he revered) but the
invention is instructive.
And trousers patched with old pieces of carpet?
So, one damaged, fearful, stressed-out victim met similar
one night at the dancing and a legal union was declared three months later at
Martha Street Registry Office. My eighteen-year-old mother, not sure what love
is but it’s a pleasant feeling and she doesn’t get too many of those, and my
dad, a lonely outsider of twenty-three glad to be a good thing for this
good-looking lass who seemed to laugh at his silly jokes. An odd couple,
perhaps, but one made in a benevolent heaven.
My auld Granny Wylie would fling confetti over them and
advise my mum in a loud, uncouth voice…
“Remember, hen!! Ye’re a wummin noo!”
They were to have two sons – me and my younger brother,
Alan, five years between us. My bad luck and subsequent bullying have, I
believe, a direct bearing on my relationship with my wee brother who as a wee
boy looked up to a bigger brother who was suffering torments external and
internal. For as long as I can remember I’ve been nervous of being out of doors
with Alan for fear of being picked on and utterly humiliated in front of him
(this happened once when we were both, briefly, at the same primary school and
his little face still haunts me as he with a little friend tried to cheer me up).
Also, it seems to me that I picked on the wee man rather a lot. Do the bullied
become the bullies of those who’ll allow it? Or, more likely it was shame, and
a pathetic desire to prove myself.
What happened to me was somewhat unfortunate and really
quite comical if it hadn’t had such a detrimental effect on my self-esteem at
such a young age. The Murray Primary School in East Kilbride is where I was
brought to be educated and unhappy. Before, I had wandered free, jumped burns
and climbed trees. Life was sweet in the pretty, wee New Town of East Kilbride.
I knew nothing of fighting or pecking orders but being tall for my age, my
little classmates gave me the honorary title of ‘Best fighter in the class’, a
position I had done precisely zero to deserve.
This was to be my undoing.
The piper played laments, maybe even pibroch’s for all we
knew, in the lock-up garage area at the end of the block. The whole of East
Kilbride was treated to the skirl and flute on the soft summer breeze. Maybe he
was practising for the Edinburgh Tattoo or keeping his hand in on leave from
military manoeuvres? Or maybe it was a lament for the Malloch brothers who’d
perished together in the sea on holiday in Morecambe?
This was perfect enchantment. A bucolic summer evening and
Brigadoon had come to life in The Murray. East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire,
south-west of Glasgow the big industrial metropolis where they made ships and
trains and merry on a Saturday night. East Kilbride was Glasgow migrated,
houses and factories for the new workers and their families. Cold houses with
coal fires and heavy condensation in the winter (especially the winter of ’63
which covered everything in six foot of snow). My mother, a lonely and slightly
bewildered young wife would walk me in my pram the five miles to Hamilton and
back. Just for the sake of getting out the house. She’d chat to me, and I’d enjoy
this uncomprehendingly as she’d describe the day, the colour of the flowers and
tell me my daddy would be back soon and that he was only away working ‘to take
care of us’.
The fact of the matter was that he was working down in
London because he’d fallen distinctly out of favour with the local employers in
the light engineering industry due to his insistence on having their workforces
out on strike. I often wonder if he was secretly glad to get away, finding
himself and his dreams tied down to a wife and a son. He went down to share a
gaff with the younger brother he adored and who had saved his youth from a more
permanent desolation just by being born. How long he was away I don’t recall
and certainly don’t want to bring up the subject with my mum in her current
abjectness. One thing my mother is not keen to be reminded of is her past.
My father was a good dad but, to him, us two boys were the
wee friends he’d never had as a child. A desolate child, his parents didn’t
trust him to be home alone after school while they were out toiling to gain the
next social position. He was forced to wait in his father’s greenhouse until
they returned and his presence among the pristine furnishings could be
monitored. He’d make up games for us to play out the wee back green with the
cricket bat he’d fashioned at work. ‘A four if you hit the bin’ and the little
trio would while away hours with pleasure and excitement. Games of golf indoors
with marbles, the squares in the carpet acting as bunkers and greens. These would
have been solitary games he’d devised as a lonely child and now he could re-enact
them with his self-made tribe.
The long walk to the public golf course on early summer
mornings to avoid paying the greenkeeper.
“They don’t use tees here, son, it’s Tennant’s beer cans!!”
My da unwittingly depicting a Giles cartoon as he fails for
the umpteenth time to get out of rough or bunker and is flailing and screaming
oaths of frustration before finally flinging his club a much further distance
than he’s been able to scud the ball.
He’d take me and my brother up the woods to make wee fires
and bake potatoes. At these times I could forget my woes and the next day at
school.
By the time I’d hit my teens, my father had achieved success
in his pursuit of ‘downward mobility’ and we were now living eighteen up in a
tower block on the southside of Glasgow. He’d now rebelled conclusively against
the aspirational conservatism of his parents and, in particular, his
gentle-melancholy, silver-haired father. Where his father was conservative and
Conservative my father had become a firebrand socialist and where the elder had
risen slowly up the socio-economic ladder aided tirelessly by a cunning and
determined wife, the son had achieved council scheme status. Where the father was
a bluenose Rangers man who possessed aprons and daggers of Masonic rank, the
son chose ‘The Celtic’ as his team to follow. The ultimate sacrilege for a
Protestant in a sectarian city.
My dad’s mother, Granny Mary, was a coffin polisher among
the many other menial jobs she grafted at to supplement my grandpa’s salary as
an engineer. She was determined they were on ‘the way up’ from the very outset.
Finally married to her ‘good catch’ at the ripe age of twenty-eight to a man
five years younger, she’d polish coffins well into the night to earn more
pennies, each of which became a prisoner.
She was no oil painting!
What attracted the shy, funny, handsome would-be Dandy in
white spats who was training as an engineer?
I’ve no idea and it boggles my mind to this day.
My mother had summoned a policeman to her raging,
drink-fuelled dad and this was the cause of her ostracization. The wee
nine-year-old was so scared that he was going to do physical harm to her mother
and her wee sisters that she ran round to the police box on Sauchihall Street
and ‘telt the polis man’. This was considered by her parents as an even greater
social crime than the domestic violence itself. ‘Huvvin’ the polis at yer door’.
For this crime, and to protect her from her affronted father, she was sent to a
home. How this arrangement was brought about I don’t know and will not at this
stage ask but it is an event that has stayed with my mother for a lifetime. She
says she could even see her father on his work travels in his van from the
vantage point of her new-found incarceration (I believe the ‘home’ was
somewhere further west and up Hillhead way.) and was puzzled as a wee lassie as
to why she had ended up there. In typical Scottish style it was not something
that was ever referred to let alone explained, forever afterwards.
My mum’s father – my grandfather that I barely knew – it
transpires after many years of shrouded mystery, had a legitimate grievance
against his wife and mother, it was thought, of all of his children but, due to
respect and fondness for my granny I will spare the detail. It’s safe to say,
though, that although he had always been a heavy drinker (a blight that destroyed
his own father who, after losing a successful business and marriage died in a
homeless hostel in Tobago Street) and perhaps not the best husband and father
his new and volcanic rage did not just appear out of thin air.
What harm? What a betrayal? A daughter, particularly an
eldest one, wishes to revere her father. Indeed, she says that when he was
sober, he could be kind and humorous and she wished only for this version of a
father but all too often, and along with the rest of the family, she got his
rage. Many, many years later after a long, enforced estrangement she made
contact again with the now single old man living in a room in Maryhill. She was
still seeking the kind, humorous version but he was always itching for her to
end her visit so that he could go drinking with his dodgy pals. Of all my male
relatives he was the only one who didn’t have a problem with ‘looking after
himself’. It is said that, well into his sixties, he stabbed a man in a fight,
and he could always be called upon by his own mother, reputedly a bit of a
bitch, when family matters had to be sorted out with fists.
How did my granny cope, day to day, week to week, year to
year, being married to this man? Like all working-class women of that time, she
just did! It was very uncommon for a woman of her class to consider divorce.
Divorce was for posh folk. In societies eyes a divorce would be a failure, a
social stigma. It was an Andy Capp world and a woman struggled through…somehow.
Some turned to drink though my granny didn’t. Maggie was too stoic. Maybe she
felt she had a wrong to put right. Maybe she still loved him. Or, more likely,
she stayed because there was little alternative and she wanted the children to
have a father and, anyway, maybe he’d calm with time.
It was only when she could finally see he hadn’t and that he
never would that she left him. A midnight escape as he lay drunk to a kind big
sister in Bridgeton.
Maggie was the youngest of nine. She had four sisters and four
brothers. The four brothers died before they were forty (one was just a child).
Joe fell into a giant tank at work and left behind a wife and six kids and
another picked up a mysterious disease probably from helping to liberate Belsen.
The Five Sisters
The Hamilton sisters out of Benquhat, Ayrshire. The farmhand
father died when the sisters were just bairns and the mum moved them to the big
city so she could somehow earn their keep. Letitia (Lettie), Mary, Jeannie,
Janet (Nettie) and wee Maggie. The sisters were resourceful, kind, funny and
they supported one another in times of need and crisis. Lettie kept to herself
up in Cranhill while her husband, James rode his horse and cart around
Bridgeton and The Calton selling Irn Bru. They had twin boys, Sam and Bert.
Mary we’ve already seen on her long walk of grief in the dark. Willie, her
husband, had lost a leg in the first war and used a prosthetic that he let the
kids play with while he rested. Jeannie was married to Sam Bryden (brother of
Lettie’s James). They had a son, Jim, who had emigrated for a tenner to
Australia. My mum’s brother, Jack, on his travels as a merchant seaman had
tried to track his cousin down but the address he’d left turned out to be a
run-down shanty-town and he was nowhere to be found. It was later discovered
he’d returned to Scotland and was found dead in his flat in Bridgeton. He’d
been a heavy drinker.
Another drinker was Jim McGuire, Nettie’s husband and a
Catholic to boot! (a controversial coupling particularly around ‘Orange’
Bridgeton home to the original ‘Billy Boy’, the thug Fullerton). Jim was a
gas-lighter for ‘the Corpy’ and wore his bunnet to bed. Nettie was unable to
have kids, so they ‘adopted’ a relatives son born out of wedlock. He was a kind
though anxious boy also named Jim who would later suffer a ‘breakdown’ perhaps
brought about by a crisis of identity. At a Catholic school he had run home in
a panic to his mum. He said he was scared the statue of the Virgin Mary in the
main entrance was going to fall on him. They moved him to a Protestant school.
My granny never spoke about her past, good or bad. The
subject was never up for discussion although somehow it hung there like a
phantom. Her past was who she was and why she was where she was. It was enough
for her that she not be in her past and any return to it mentally would
be a futile exercise. She was a no-fuss woman with a ready laugh and the forearms
of a docker (years of washing nappies in the sink and weaving carpets in
Templeton’s). She’d have a wee quarter bottle of Bell’s on Thursday pension day
and sing a wee song or two for my Uncle Jack and I sitting mortified and amused
by this ageing woman’s crooning. Maybe this was a wee - strictly unacknowledged
-emotional safety valve for her, after which she’d fall asleep snoring loudly
(a trait she shared with my Uncle Jack who made sounds like a dredger on the
Clyde all through the night in the bed next to mine).
My granny was pretty and blonde in her youthful womanhood.
For a great many years, she was the only one left of her wee family tribe.
One teacher – a Deputy Head, no less – told my parents who
had been summoned to the school after my latest infraction that, in her opinion,
I had no character or personality whatsoever that she with her long experience
could discern.
“That would mean you don’t exist!” my mother would exclaim
after informing me of this damning criticism. But that teacher had a point; I
didn’t feel that I had any coherent identity at all. If I did have a purpose in
life, it was as a target for bullies. I felt like I crept about in perpetual
fear of being picked on and humiliated. I’d pick routes almost unconsciously,
because they were bully-free.
As I’ve said, my school-life started auspiciously in East
Kilbride by being deemed ‘best fighter’ by my tiny peers. This undeserved title
was rendered ridiculous by a young boy from Glasgow-proper who’d just joined
the school. Obviously, he’d been told the age-old advice, a father to a son
starting a new school…
“Find out who’s the best fighter, son, and take him on. If
you beat him good and well. If you don’t the other kids will know you’re a game
wee lad and leave you alone!”
This is what he did and found he’d taken on a right wee
scaredy-cat that no more knew how to fight than he knew how to fly to the moon.
I was shocked into a cold fear and found myself unable to respond in any way
that was at least respectable to the challenge. I found myself to be way more
flight than fight.
Abject humiliation. I’d let down my little friends, the
class, the school. I’d even let East Kilbride down. Glasgow proved that it
ruled.
Thus, I chose my path in life or, at least, let it be chosen
for me. One who treads lightly and quietly but has no big stick to hand.
I’ve noticed through this wretched life that physical
cowardice is not such a big deal to others as it seems to be to me. Others can
be ‘Gentle Giant’s’ and ‘pure shitebags’ and seem to laugh at the fact. So, my
early experience of shame and degradation have marked me badly, I seem to have
spent the rest of my life, and, most certainly, my childhood, with a heightened
awareness of my vulnerability.
We move from East Kilbride as my father has found work on
the southside of Glasgow. He is to be a machine fitter but has not trained as
such. He blags the job in order not to remain a floor-sweeper. We move to
Toryglen for a matter of months, but the neighbours are noisy and troublesome
to my mums nerves so we are now on the eighteenth floor of one of five tower
blocks in Kennishead on the very south-west of Glasgow bordering East
Renfrewshire.
Leaving East Kilbride. I cried like a baby. My father is
angered by me ‘behaving like a big lassie’. I get bullied at my new school when
they quickly learn of my shitebag status. I get bullied in the back green of
our new home when an older boy pummels me for a reason I no longer recall. My
mother shouts from the window ‘hit him back, son, hit him back!!’ which only
makes it ten times worse. Now the woman in my life has it confirmed through her
own eyes that her wee son is a craven coward. Maybe this is another reason why
we move again?
Running away. Always running away.
My father was an intense man. His tenseness made him so he
always needed to prove himself. One day, on this same back green of my recent
shame we get involved with two young local lads in a game of ‘heidy-fitba’’.
Two teams of two, two-touches to score, the goalie ‘serves’ with a header to
start the play. My da and I are a team. He plays ferociously, leaping and
bounding like a young salmon up a stream. One of our opponents hits a fierce
shot toward our goal. Ny father throws himself at it, not to save it with his
hands but to meet it with his forehead. This he does with a wild cry of
‘Splooongeeeeey!!’ (he was fond of making up words) and the ball disappears
over the back-court wall and many hundreds of yards down a hill.
In my memory he cackles insanely after this furious demonstration
(maybe he did?) and the two guys eye him a little warily thereafter and avoid
his tackles. Maybe it was meant for me as a lesson, from father to son?
Act demented and folk will leave you alone!
The Outsiders
Cool kids forever concerned about image and ‘rep’ don’t want
the persecuted and shamed hanging around with them so, as an outsider, you take
whatever you can get; usually other poor buggers who are similarly socially
vilified. Posh kids ‘fae the doacter’s houses up on the hill’, kids not quite
immaculately attired (every class seemed to have a ‘Smelly’ “ah’m no’ sittin’
next to Smelly , Miss. He’s boggin’!! Surely the teachers didn’t call him/her
Smelly as well?), other bullied kids, overly shy kids, Kids that just didn’t
‘fit in’ for whatever reason. A whole gallimaufry of outcasts to choose from.
Of course, membership of this ad hoc and essentially
unfortunate social grouping is preceded by a journey not over-laden with glory.
It has been a walk of some shame or other and all of its somewhat reluctant members
are aware of this whether they acknowledge the fact or not. We don’t really see
ourselves as a proud group at all.
None of these outcasts dress in the latest, accepted
fashions. If they did there’s a chance they’d be among the in-casts. That
smelly doesn’t dress conventionally is taken for a given. He seems to prefer
(or has had foisted upon him) a distinctly ‘matted’ look. He wears an anorak so
covered in grime that it’s not easy to discern its original colour. His shoes
look like he has inherited from a tramp who has been found floating in the
Clyde. His hair may never ever have been washed and his fingernail are
black from what looks like oil or grease (or even his own excrement). Miss
Smelly has a similar look but with slightly more feminine attire.
I have my yellow loon pants and bizarre footwear. Aside from
my uncle Billy’s army brogues I have – for the more socially flexible occasions
– a pair of purple baseball boot with white stars attached or a pair of clumpy,
clog-like affairs in a sickening tan colour. In every school photo I appear in
a garish polo neck jumper which jars badly with the rather more ordinary clothes
as worn by my little class mates. Having thought of this over the years I have
wondered why my parents allowed this. Had my father not suffered acute
embarrassment at school with his bizarre footwear and carpet-patched trews? Why
did he allow his son to suffer similar approbation? I could only assume it was
some sort of Boy Named Sue thing. The character in the song had to fight
because of his girly name, so maybe I had to fight back because I looked like a
circus freak?
I can almost laugh about it now. But not quite!
Getting moved on a year at primary school wasn’t, with
hindsight, the great idea that everyone thought it was. Sure, it was
recognition of my comparative cleverness but there were side-effects no-one
seemed to have envisioned. Now the bullied kid with the funny clothes was a
year younger than his classmates and, moving into secondary school this was to
prove excruciatingly problematic as all us boy-kids raced headlong into puberty.
Well, not all of us, my peers all would a full year before me and the
manifestation of this was glaringly obvious while changing for swimming class.
Me with my ‘baldy one-incher’, them with their sprouting
pubes of many colours.
“Whit are you doin’ in there, son. Yer brother needs the
toilet!”
If my father had known what I was doing he’d have hoped I
was merely masturbating. Sellotape does not adhere at all well to skin was what
I learned, particularly with little clumps of hair attached to it!
I began secondary school in the top class. Year one, class
one. I finished in year four, class eight. The very lowest of the low. I hadn’t
just been bullied by my peers; the teachers had joined in as well. By being
class clown (and a good one, too!) I may have endeared myself to my fellow
pupils and maybe even have avoided even more beatings, I had also infuriated
several teachers who took it upon themselves to express this anger rather
violently. If ‘getting the belt’* had been an Olympic event, then I’d have won
gold easily. Mr Masson – an art teacher, no less – knew that by law he could
only give me six measures of the tawse would send me to ram-rod straight and
be-blazered resident psycho, Mr Steel for further whacks.
Hilpark Secondary is situated atop a hill in the Mansewood
area. The bus driver had a wee transistor radio on, and ‘Rebel Rebel’ was
blaring tinnily. The bus was stowed with schoolkids all bawling and shouting
and acting hard. When they all bundled off, they had to climb the hill past
‘the good houses’ where the posh kids lived. The posh kids also attended
Hilpark. From the top of the hill, you could see the five tower blocks on
Kennishead Avenue, standing almost stately in the ubiquitous drizzle. The boy
looked back wistfully and wished he was home in comfort and safety. The tricks
he’d employed lately to stay off school had become quite extreme, one time
fixing his dad’s alarm clock and making him late for work which had made him
furious. His dad was a trade union rep and his credo was to give the bosses
nothing on him not even one day’s loose time-keeping.
The boy dreaded school. He’d have much rather spent whole
days at the dentists. They’d ‘rectified’ their ‘mistake’ almost immediately and
within days of trying to bond with his top-class schoolmates they’d bundled him
out into the second-top class without so much as an explanation. He and Angela
Bone had been the top two students in their last year at Carnwadric Primary and
she’d gotten to stay in the top class so he was puzzled at the omission. They
didn’t appear to like the ‘cut of his jib’, was that it?
He skulked around the school fearfully finding shadows and inconspicuous
nooks where he could hide and cower at break times. Only in the class did he
light up like a Music Hall comedian, never missing an opportunity for laughs.
He farted and sang and threw out one-liners like a pro. He was the Harry Lauder
of Hilpark. All his little classmates loved his performances but his teachers
took a different view and who could blame them? Carefully planned lessons were
being ruined by this skinny tit near the back.
One day, in the Technical Drawing class, one teacher, Mr
Fraser, had had enough.
“Right you, Wylie, through the back!”
A wee workshop room at the back of the class, like an
outsized broom cupboard. He wanted to use his strap to reduce my hands to pulp.
Maybe he wanted to render them useless for his craft, my Technical Drawing days
would be over. He used the leather like a whip, like a very angry teacher-man
whipping a child. I drew away from one of his more energetic efforts and this enraged
him further and he started strapping me around the legs and arse before he
seemed to ‘come to’; to regain a sense of what he was doing.
Half a century later I’m reminded of this event by an
ancient schoolfriend I happened to bump across on Facebook; one of those
‘Glasgow Memories’ pages.
“Good to hear you made it through, pal. Always felt guilty
not stepping in for you that day in the techy class!”
“Not your problem, pal. Ended up doing a bit of teaching
myself.”
So, I wasn’t imagining it. It really did happen.
It’s hard to be a big brother when you’re also a big
six-foot four scaredy-cat! You spend your life hiding in plain sight and making
out that’s not what you are at all. Really, you’re a bit of a boy on the quiet
and take no shit from anyone while at the back of your mind you know you’re
perpetuating a big, fat lie.
You’re a shitebag from a family of shitebags
My brother and mother are honest about being bullied. They
don’t mind admitting it and the effect it had on them. My father and myself
felt we had to lie about it or at least muddy the waters. Father and elder
brother, the two most ‘protective’ roles in any family. My father perpetuated
the unlikely myth of him implanting razor blades in to a potato attached to
some string like a psycho-conker and attacking his playground foes with it like
a knight of old with a mace.
Again, myth can be instructive. Even if untrue or only
partly true such an elaborate invention is surely indicative of some form of
desperation. I myself have accepted plaudits for certain violent happenings
that I was very little involved in. One evening and off to some pub in
Leytonstone a most unusual thing happened. I turned to respond to some
innocuous statement uttered uttered by an acquaintance and my forehead made
heavy contact with his nose. This was truly and bizarrely accidental but all
present thought I had meant it and my identity as a tall broad-speaking
Glaswegian confirmed them in this view. I protested my innocence but, secretly,
I was glad to receive these admonitions. Somehow this event filtered back to
relatives (the bloke with the sore nose was a friend of my Uncle Jack) and I
got the rep as a ‘hard man’ which I never vehemently disputed.
Being bullied ruined my relationship with my family. It also
ruined my relations with friends and at least one girlfriend. It also led me to
a life of drink, self-despair and dissipation. It’s a wonder if I achieved
anything at all. For me, it wasn’t just a school experience that I could shake
off and then move on from, it was too damaging for that. I headed instead for
self-destruction.
My brother became a Mod. He became a Mod for the same reason
that I became ‘class clown’: he was tired of being picked on. My brother had
been yanked out of Scotland at aged ten and made to attend an ordinary school
in Leyton, east London owning a Scottish accent. Like me, he didn’t possess the
‘fight gene’ and was bullied mercilessly, once dragged around the playground by
his hair. Even his teachers couldn’t understand what he was saying. So, his
fightback was fashion and a group to belong to. I also wonder if he sensed the
shit his big brother was going through and the ramshackle way he dressed and
thought ‘fuck that!’. I like to think I may have contributed thus.
By this time, I’m beginning to discover pubs and drink. They
and it offered some sort of warm glow and an identity. I drank like a young
Glaswegian in London in the seventies. That is, at every opportunity.
It became my identity.
It replaced character and personality.
I was also good at darts and pool.
The ’get-out-clause’ called death does not seem so imminent
now as it did when she was truly ill just after her stroke. Mysterious
infection after infection (probably contracted in the various hospital wards
she was to frequent) gave her the pallour of an eighty-two then eighty-three
year old not long for this world. I think she banked on this but now she has
gotten better, and the full horror of her predicament is hard for her to face.
A virtual prisoner in a bed in a room dependant on ‘carers’ to come in four
times a day and take care of her needs, however intimate. A physical prisoner
she will also be forced to witness her mental decline as she lies there.
‘Emotional dysregulation’ is a rather softer version of ‘losing the plot’. She
already sees the world in a new and none-too-endearing way. Is she in a play?
Are there two people here or only one? Are you my real son?
There she lies bemoaning her fate in her own mind. Alone
with these thoughts that are none to pleasant. Even the telly, her erstwhile
saviour before this catastrophe, is ineffective at best as a distraction.
Everything she sees on that wee screen seems to remind her of something else
that upsets her.
Maggie and her Father-In-Law
John MacCallum was a nice man, but he came to a bad end. Yet
at one time he had the world at his feet.
Glasgow in the late 40s and early 50s was a dark, murky,
austere place and there was little pity for the fallen; the alcoholic; the
shambling wrecks who roamed its streets and slept fitfully in its hostels. Such
a man became John MacCallum.
He wore the same clothes he had on when he left his family
back in Greengair only now the material was threadbare, his shoes scuffed and
worn from all his shuffling around the streets of the east end in search of
food, shelter and cheap drink. The Great Eastern on Duke Street at The Drygate
was a favoured haunt for the Glasgow down-and-out but he couldn’t always afford
even that and had to resort to the hostel on Tobago Street which was riddled
with all manner of beasties and plagues.
Post-war Glasgow was an unforgiving place: a cold and lonely
place if all you possessed were memories of better times. He whiles away the
long hours in his fly-blown doss, the air redolent of stale urine as if it has
seeped into the walls, the blankets on his rickety bed inured with dead men’s
sweat.
This has become his ‘place’ in life, and he wondered
constantly why life was any longer worth living.
If the skies were clear he’d visit nearby Glasgow Green and
watch the wifie’s hang out washing, sitting just close enough to hear their
chatter but far enough to avoid their gaze upon his unkempt frame. They’d have
toddlers and kiddies with them playing in the mud and screaming gleefully in
the exhilarating fashion that children do over nothing more than a balloon or a
duck that’s come to play.
This activity was bitter-sweet as it made him think of his
own children. Kids that are now grown and he is forgotten to them, like a ghost
or a faded image in an old photograph. The mother – his wife – was a cold bitch
who wanted the best when times were good but wanted nothing at all of him now he’d
fallen.
The Glasgow Green washing waved cheerily on the summer
breeze, but John MacCallum could not return the joy and simply made his way
back to his dank abode.
In another part of Glasgow, a woman – a mother of four and a
wife to one angry, often-drunk man – is toiling her way through another day.
She is 34 and every day is much the same as the last: washing, cooking, tending
and hoping, just hoping that he won’t come in drunk tonight. She thinks about
nine-year-old daughter, Jean, currently in a care home on the outskirts of
town. Put there to escape the rage of her father after fetching the police
after him on a night he seemed to be on the edge of committing terrible
violence to his family. She was only protecting her mum and her wee sisters,
but he couldn’t quite see it that way. It seemed that terrible domestic
violence (though it wasn’t called that then) was less shameful than having the
police at your door.
A good deed never goes unpunished.
They live in a basement on Bath Street that has bars on the
windows. It is their home and their prison.
“Maggie”. She hears her name called from the hall and opens
the door to her sister, Mary, who has probably walked all the way from
Bridgeton Cross on her wee, bowed, rickety legs. She has walked much further
distances than this, like the thirteen miles along the banks of the Clyde in
the black-out after her dear man had passed away in the Erskine Hospital. She
carrying her grief like a bag of bricks while desperate to get back home for
her – their – children.
“Mary. Good to see you, but what brings you over this way?”
Maggie is the youngest of the Hamilton tribe and therefore
treated in that special way, like she is still a bairn. She was the best
looking of the four sisters. Petite and blonde and with perfect teeth which was
by no means a given in the Scotland of that time, she had had many suitors, but
it had the sturdy, handsome Robert MacCallum that had caught her eye and
finally her heart.
He was a car mechanic when other men were factory workers or
worked in the shipyards. In this he took after his father, John, who – last
she’d heard – was in a bad way and living in some doss-house over east. Somehow
‘car mechanic’ sounded exotic as if having anything to do with cars at all
meant you had access to one. Maybe he’d take her for a drive out into the
countryside. Maybe back to where she’d been a child in Ayrshire, although why
she’d want to witness that squalor again she wasn’t sure. Maybe to be sure in
herself that she’d left it all behind. The mines and the dirt and the cold and
now here she was in the big city and married to a fine-looking chap who could
drive a car.
You don’t see what’s in front of you in the flush of romance
and you’re living in your little dream-world. He’d surely settle down and ease
up on the drink now that they were married and planning a family. In the
Glasgow of that time, what would be seen as alcohol abuse later on was merely
covered with the term ‘heavy drinker’. “He likes his pint” concealed a whole
world of heartache for everyone connected to the pint-liker. It became like
he’d rather be married to the pub, and she was just the chattel who cooked for
him and raised the children he ignored most of the time. Och, he’d be penitent
at times and maybe have wee chats with the eldest, Jack, share a wee joke with
wee Jean but you always got the impression that his wife and family were merely
a wee side-track until the main event when the pubs opened.
A woman who is married to a man who is married to the drink.
Not so uncommon in those days and not something that is seen fit to complain,
or even talk, about. You served your sentence in silence and lied when the
bruises showed. Sometimes she wished she had the physical bruises and not just
the emotional ones. At least then she’d have a proclamation ‘my husband batters
me, I am one of you’ instead of just this lonely terror known only to her and
her kids and a few close family. The mother – Maggie’s mother – had died just
days before the birth of Jean, days before she was evacuated to the maternity
hospital in Stirling. No time for grief with a new-born on the way and a war to
suffer.
Mary has news she knows her sister will want to hear. There
is a fondness between them, and Mary is happy to bring some cheer into her
sister’s troubled life.
“You’ll never guess who I set eyes on yesterday?”
“Who, Mary?”
“Your man’s da, John. I saw him doon London Road. My, he
looked shabby. Always such a smart man tae, as I remember”.
Maggie continued with her drying of dishes and wasn’t sure
how to respond to the news of the man that her husband had disowned ironically
and hypocritically as ‘an embarrassing auld drunk’. It made her panic to think
that her abusive husband did not even recognise that he himself had a drink
problem, in fact, how many times had he raged that it was she who drove him to
his drunkenness; that too was her fault among all the many other things.
One morning, many weeks on from Mary’s visit, Maggie sees
her eldest, Jack, off to school. Even at the age of thirteen as he was now, the
boy plans to head off to sea with the merchant navy if only for one reason; to
escape his da and the toxic household he’s been forced to grow up in. Can’t be
good for a young boy, she thought, to feel so powerless in the face of such
violent wrath and she could see it had made the boy just that bit timid. After
Jack is gone, she puts on her coat and heads off on her mission while fending
off thoughts of panic. If her husband knew the reason for her excursion,
well…she couldn’t afford to dwell on the consequences. She has the bairns both
in the same pram, wee Margaret excited about going on an adventure while the
bairn howls her wee eyes out, at such a young age and already a witness to fear
and trauma.
The clouds hung heavy, and it threatened to rain. The soft
marmalade light of the early morning flattered to deceive: the Glasgow weather
experience in microcosm. The universe is full of fuel yet very little of it
seemed to reach this dank, northern city. She took the river route from Bath
Street to avoid Robert’s workplace in the centre of town. The idea of somehow
bumping into him! What would she say? He’d rage for a year with his suspicions.
Through Anderson and along Broomielaw and finally to Glasgow Green and London
Road, she was. of course, starting her search here due to Mary’s information
but her father-in law could be anywhere in the city and her quest seemed a bit
desperate, but the poor man was in trouble, and she felt the need to help him:
to talk to him.
She thought of her sister, Mary, and how much she understood
her predicament and how good and sisterly she was toward her. Mary had lost her
dear husband Willie in the war through gangrene occasioned in the previous one.
He let the kids play with his prosthetic leg, let them marvel at the incongruity
of it: a leg not made of flesh and bone but wood and plastic crafted by Clyde
ship-builders and fitted in the Erskine Hospital where he was to die. Poor folk
seemed to go through so much pain and trouble and there was no alternative but
to just struggle through from day to day and just hope that things somehow got
better. Maggie had even wished her husband dead on many more than one occasion:
wished his beloved alcohol would somehow take him away or maybe he’d stagger
drunkenly under a bus. Certainly, the love had all gone but convention insisted
that a wife stay with her man no matter what. Only the better classes got
divorced, that way out was not, it seemed, for the poor.
As she walked, shushing the bairns and lulling them asleep,
she thinks of her other sisters. Lettie up in Cranhill with the husband, Jim
who drank vinegar straight from the bottle; Nettie up in Possilpark with her
Catholic husband, Jimmy and the child of her unmarried friend that they
unofficially adopted as their own: of Jean also in Bridgeton with Sam running a
pawn shop. Jim and Sam were brothers married to two sisters. All were
reasonably happy though with their own troubles while hers was the golden
marriage turned sour and emotionally violent. Not that she was entirely
blameless, not by a long chalk. One very bad mistake when she’d been looking in
her loneliness for love and a lifetime to face trying to make up for it though
she knew she never would. She was in purgatory here on earth.
Old newspapers and crisps bags skittered and wafted in the
cold day and London Road presented a bleak landscape of old biddies in heavy
coats out looking for maybe a piece of flank mutton for the soup or maybe a wee
quarter bottle for a lunchtime cheer. The weans that weren’t in school were
dressed raggedly, their social class apparent on every inch of them. Poor
east-end kids who themselves one day would spawn their own progeny and so on
and so on.
Maggie is startled by a mass of starlings escaping a tree
like the flutter of a giant wing. They
darken the sky and then disappear unaware of any of the human joy and tragedy
that they leave behind in their wake. How she wished she were among them, free
as a bird and not a prisoner in a metaphorical cage, forced by social
convention and motherhood to remain within her own nightmare. It wasn’t that
she didn’t love her children for she did in her way, but she saw the life ahead
of her as a bleak road to nowhere, her only escape her grave.
Only last night he’d gone berserk again: a man possessed of
rage and self-righteousness. She’d ruined his life and they all held him back.
‘Another Hamilton bastard’ he’d bawled into the face of the tiny new-born
causing her to scream and cry in panic and confusion, the whole family in
turmoil and at the mercy of this relentless, merciless man. This is really what
prompted her to go on her search today. John MacCallum, the father of her
husband, had also been on the receiving end of his son’s wrath, doing his
mother’s bidding and ‘sorting the auld soak out’.
But, where to start? Mary had said the London Road, but the
London Road was long and winding from Glasgow Cross to the Cross at Parkhead
and who’s to say her father-in-law would be walking it this day? She toiled her
way to Drygate and asked at the Great Eastern, but they had no John MacCallum
on their books. She stopped short of trying any of the dozens of pubs she
passed – the Saracen’s Head or the Mecca Bar, or maybe the Protestant pubs at
Bridgeton Cross – it didn’t do for a wifie and her bairns to be loitering around
such places and God forbid she should be recognised. If only Mary would have
spoken to John, maybe got an address for him, but maybe he was drunk and not to
be approached relative or not.
And then, all of a sudden, as she headed past the
meat-market on Belgrove back down through the Calton, there he was, a shrunken
figure somewhat dishevelled but obviously trying for smartness, bent against
the cold wind. He was both embarrassed and pleased to see his daughter-in-law,
his facial features caught between a smile and a look of shocked surprise.
“Maggie! And are these your new wee bairns?”
John MacCallum had, some years before, patented a mechanism
integral to the carburettor of a motorised vehicle. One thousand pounds he had
received for his invention, and this had gone towards buying the fine bungalow
just outside Airdrie that his grasping wife had so desired. If he’d known her
attitude when the ‘in sickness’ part of their marriage vows had kicked in he’d
maybe have left her in their rented flat but, when thinking this, he knew he
wouldn’t have done it. He was too soft-hearted and that, indeed, was what she
had always preyed on until he’d fulfilled his purpose and become nothing more
than a nuisance to her and someone ill-talked about among her coterie of hypocrites
all of whom had their own wee peccadillo’s you could be sure of that.
He had his own wee successful business out there in that wee
Protestant town; mending cars for those that could afford them. At this he was
extremely proficient and his eldest, Robert, had followed in his father’s
footsteps but had paid him back with bitter disloyalty, just like his beloved
mother.
Lanarkshire worked that way. There were Protestant towns,
the more affluent, and Catholic one’s that were far from brimming with riches. If
most worked down the pits, then the Protestants got the better jobs, the
managerial and supervisory roles. Glasgow was the same wherever you went,
secret and not-so-secret discrimination along sectarian lines. John, by
allowing his alcoholism to become a matter of disgrace, had effectively ‘let
the side down. He’d become little better than a Catholic and now he shared
accommodation with the most down-and-out of that breed, with people with names
like Lynch and O’Donnell, O’Leary’s and Doherty’s. The only way he could sink
lower was with the final six feet of earth over him.
The most loyal order had been particularly disloyal in his
case.
“Ye no’ daen so well, John?”
She could be frank with her father-in-law in a way she
couldn’t with his son. John was mild-mannered and kindly, humble and
respectful. Maggie had looked for signs of his father in Robert and at times
there they were, but they only appeared in his sober times before the drink
obliterated them to hell.
“Ach, getting’ by, Maggie, getting’ by. Things will get
better. Maybe a job for me wi’ a wee mate”
Maggie doubted this but didn’t show it. She saw the
distressing signs of a man down a hole he would never get out of. His suit was
old and worn, his shoes scuffed and ruined and alcohol had taken its toll on
his complexion; signs of rosacea making his cheeks red-bloated and puffy and
his eyes filled with water, hands shaking as if due to a palsy.
They went onto Glasgow Green and sat on the very bench John
had been sitting on when watching the washer-women a few days previously. She’d
brought a flask of soup principally to offer John something nutritious. Maybe
she felt like mothering him? He refused the soup claiming ‘a dicky stomach’.
More like he was sick for a drink. If she’d learned nothing else from her
marriage, she’d learned the ways and habits of a heavy drinker. She’d give him
a pound she could not easily afford before she left. No point denying the man
for he’d only have to get his drink money some other way.
They chatted about family members and people they knew
mutually when he suddenly asked…
“Is it still as bad between you and Robert?”
She cried and he held her hand.
“Things were bad from the start, but since what happened
happened….”
“It’s no’ an easy thing for a man tae take”
And so, it went on. She was sorry to leave her father-in-law
but wee Joan had awoken and was crying for a feed and little Margaret was
getting bored. She’d named her eldest after this man, John, and she thought as
she left the park and headed home to her purgatory, I hope the boy grows up
with the best qualities of this man but not his fatal weakness. This city
thought it could substitute human feelings with alcohol and was none the better
for it.
She’d sought comfort with a friend of her man and now she
was paying a very dire price indeed. She knew she would need to leave him but
the courage for that was a long way off. For now, pushing her young bairns
along by the river, her penance awaited her for another day.
As for John? Well, his misery was ended not too long
afterwards, and his only mourner was Maggie who had sneaked out again to
attend. She stood alone at his grave after the service and said her own silent
prayer. Not all of it was for the dead man.
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