I’m standing in a disused quarry on the very outskirts of
Kilmarnock; not so much standing as planted,
feet firmly apart as if in a martial arts stance or the haka stance of the All-Blacks, yes that’s what I’m doing, I’m doing
a Kilmarnock haka, a Glaswegian stuck
in Kilmarnock by mistake via the Bohemian life in London haka. A what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-in-this-back-of-beyond haka: screaming at the clouds in the
sky, at the rain pelting down, emptying my lungs of my immense frustration, the
day-to-day Kilmarnock-ness of it all.
I am the man in the disused quarry screaming and stamping, crying and laughing.
Screaming ‘NOT THE GARDEN CENTRE AGAIN
TOMORROW’ ‘NOT ANOTHER WALK TO THE SHOPPING CENTRE’ ‘NOT A LOOK IN THE GONK
SHOP WINDOW AND THEN HOME FOR TEA’
‘GET ME FUCKING OUT OF
HERE...!’
I am the mixed-up man with the mixed-up wife. A rootless
two-some torn between a sense of family and place and a wild yearning to be
free of both: seeking a non-existent comfort in the mundane and the ordinary, and
a Milligan-esque disdain of such imposters.
Rootless and fancy-free; making knee-jerk mistakes in my fifties.
Still searching for the real me.
Lonely Boy
I was born on a Wednesday in the cold February of 1935 in a
house in Shettleston, Glasgow. This much is true. My mother, I was later to
learn, was a coffin polisher, my father an engineer, an odd social-occupational
arrangement.
Contrary to my adult claims, I was raised in Garrowhill, a
semi-affluent area of the city. An aspirant
area in a semi-detached house: not a single-end, or a tenement, and definitely
not a slum. I honestly wish I had been brought up in less exalted
circumstances, it would have fitted my later image of myself more easily, but,
perhaps I wouldn’t have rebelled.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have had anything to rebel against.
I rebelled against my father, poor man. Card-carrying Mason;
bowler-hatted, establishment man. I was to rebel against all of that big-time.
I never managed to dis-own his melancholy though, that was too hard-wired. My mother
and father went on to aspire their way to Ayrshire suburbia. I chose the
opposite direction. Perhaps I was the only individual, in the whole of Scotland,
maybe in the history of the world, other than the religiously committed, to
seek to aspire downwards. I was to
become determinedly, downwardly mobile.
From an early age, I saw my mother as an unusual woman. Very hard-working and very determined, she owned
both coldness and warmth. As a child, I often felt my existence to be an
encumbrance to her, like something that for reasons of social propriety had to
exist but was otherwise in her way.
Though, when she had time, she dispersed in my direction all the appropriate
coo-cooing and loving baby-talk.
She was the youngest of thirteen in a family that really did
come from the slums of Shettleston.
Father an unemployed seaman, mother in
service, my mother had grown up with poverty. That’s what made her so
determined and wilful enough to claw her way out of it by whichever means she
could. One of these means was my father. How did she, plain-looking and
six-years older, manage to snare herself an engineer? By dint of this occupation, he could have, in
the parlance of the times, ‘done better’. A snazzy-dressing, ruddy-faced young
engineer would surely be looking for other than this woman. She had clearly
turned his head by some means – sex perhaps? Had she prostituted her way out of
the gutter? Quite possibly! This was a woman of feral cunning. He was the
possessor of a naive innocence. He was a callow twenty-two when they married;
she twenty-eight; unusual for the times. The age-gap was common, but it was the
wrong way round.
They were a couple of stoaters right enough. In all my time
with them, I never knew them to have any friends. Nodding acquaintances and
neighbours perhaps, but never friends round for a meal and a drink, never a
night out at the pub or a club. Every penny earned went toward their aspirations
– onwards and upwards.
Even as a child I could tell it wasn't a happy marriage.
There would be vast expanses of weeks when they wouldn’t talk to one another. A
child picks up on that. These are the nineteen-thirties, way before any notion
of child psychology or sophisticated parenting. As a child I was well aware I
wasn't born out of love, I was born more out of convention. Being aspirational
they were super-careful to play by the social rules. Couples didn’t remain
childless unless for biological reasons, so they had children (though my
brother didn't appear until nine years after me when my mother was in her late
thirties, so they only just scraped under the conventional wire in achieving
the super-average amount of two children). A great many children were born out
of convention then, they still are. Love didn't necessarily enter into the
equation.
Did I love them? Of course, I did. I was their child. Did
they fuck me up? Of course, they did. They were weird parents. Up until my
brother appeared I was lonely as hell.
On the fringes of
social exile
Didn't matter that I lived in a slightly posh neighbourhood
I was still in the catchment area for the school where the slum kids went. Life
is all about breaks, this was a bad one.
I found out early on that I was not naturally disposed
toward violence and aggression. When you’re perpetually being picked on for
being ‘the posh kid’ this is a problem. The east end of Glasgow does not look
sympathetically upon scared kids – it devalues the currency of an area proud of
its tough reputation. You have to shape up. This is why one day when I was
twelve and having a bad time at my new secondary school I found myself running
at a crowd of boys in the playground whirling a potato on a string above my
head. What good would that do, I hear you ask?
Does it hurt being assaulted by a swinging potato?
It does when there are razor blades implanted in it....
You should have seen them run.
Due to my parent's constant vigilance over money, or rather saving money I found myself sent out in
many a bizarre outfit. Certainly, my clothes were never the fashion of the time,
such as it was. Most boys were dressed like mini-versions of their fathers.
No-one was dressed like me though. No-one else had their
trousers patched with bits of carpet. No-one else wore a welly and a shoe, one
on either foot. This unusual pedal assemblage will tend to mark you out from
your peers. Even wearing no footwear at all was more acceptable than a
wellington boot on one foot and a plain old shoe on the other. The shoe was brown too whereas the welly was in the
traditional black – even the colours didn’t match. How I dreamed that one day
the shoe would at least be black like the boot. No footwear at all had at least
the dignity of poverty, you had nothing more to lose, but, a welly and a shoe?
It raised too many undignified questions both for myself and my peers.
Principally; did my parents think so little of me that they would send me out
like this? Had they no inclination of what this would mean for a growing boy?
And, by the way, carpet is, almost without exception, heavier than trouser material. This
leads to pronounced sagging especially when wet.
And it seemed to be constantly raining throughout my
childhood.
Rain and bombs
Four years-old when the war started, six-years-old when the
first bombs dropped on Clydeside, but what does one remember at that age? My
father had constructed our Anderson Shelter perfectly and well ahead of time.
My dad was a perfectionist who seemed to be supremely competent at everything
he turned his hand to. I had no option but to rebel against him, I certainly
had no hope of matching him. This, he would let me know on a consistent basis
throughout my upbringing. Could never mow the grass properly, paint a wall
correctly. He’d always check the work and invariably make me do it again, or if
it was totally useless, re-do it himself.
‘Robert, you've missed the edges. You have to learn to do a
job properly, what have I told you?’
Thing was, it was impossible to meet his standards, so what
do you do except dread him ever asking
you to do anything – a cold fear clutching at your innards as you were summoned
to his shed.
So we’d sit in our perfectly assembled shelter during the
air raids wondering where Goering’s targets were that night. Mrs McParland and
her son from across the road were allowed to share our shelter and as they were
the only ‘visitors’ we ever had, even on such an un-social circumstance it was
felt by my father that an effort had to be made to entertain our guests. This
brought out another side to my father, a side that couldn't be more unexpected
to those who knew him if he’d started doing a strip-tease.
My father, wouldn't you know it, was an accomplished banjo
player, at least he was accomplished enough to accompany himself singing such
songs as ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’ and ‘Down Kentucky Way’ (he was a big
G.H. Elliot fan). The sight of this normally quiet man, as unprepossessing as
can be, transformed into a blitz-night Vaudeville entertainer left me
open-mouthed with wonder. What the rest of the street thought as these sounds
emanated toward them I have never found out. People didn’t speak of very much
at all to one another in those days. It wasn’t the done thing. The weather, road
works, and the price of fish – these were the topics of conversation.
‘Conventional conversation’ – that’s a phrase that sums it up nicely.
Until the arrival of my beloved brother when I was nine
years old, I was a lonely, solitary only child. I didn’t fit-in at school or in the outside world of play and friendships,
and even my home life was essentially a lonely experience. I wasn’t allowed to be in the house when my
parents were out and this made me a latch-key
kid long before some social worker invented the phrase. A subtle difference
with me was, I didn’t even possess a key. On cold days I waited out the hours
until one of my parents came home crouched in my father’s green-house. As an
adult I would write this poem about it, appropriately entitled Greenhouse;
I needed a refuge, a
place to be warm.
Away from a Scottish
wind
Which sought-out the
thin, and the lost?
I was denied entry to
the tailored place,
The buttoned-down,
swept, and washed house
Where warmth was
tidied away;
Where cakes and kisses
were carefully counted,
Except in monsoon
times when love,
And, kisses were
profligate.
I needed the thin key
to
The garden-end
greenhouse
Where I could sit away
from the cold and
Disappointment, a
place to sit-out the
After school hours
Until my mother lit
the ice palace,
And offered comfort,
cold as the
Frost-breathed
interior.
‘The ice palace’, I like that. Even if I do say it myself.
Our area wasn't hit much by the air-raids, a few stray
explosions at Sandyhills. One day a broken Messerschmitt was transported on a
lorry up the Shettleston Road, I remember thinking how alien it looked with its swastikas and unfamiliar design. The
cockpit and one of the wings was missing, obviously it had been shot down. Some
of the boys were allowed to get up on the lorry and investigate further, see if
there was any blood, but I was too timid and squeamish to join in.
Though, as you’ll have gathered from my whirling potato
story I wasn't always so timid. The old bugger across the road, Mister Watt,
was always complaining to my father about me playing football in the street (I
was football mad). He’d sequestrate my ball when he got a hold of it. In
retaliation, I painted the stone lions which adorned either side of his front
gate. I wonder if it was because he was a staunch Rangers supporter that I
painted them green.
Any social outcast in the world will tell you that the only
friends and allies he’ll make are other social outcasts. My friends were like
me, strange and socially inept in some way. One of these was another ‘posh boy’
from Camp Road where I lived. He was a gentle chap called Jamie Campbell and
his social embarrassment was that he was fat and wore spectacles. He looked
like you might imagine ‘Piggy’ from Lord of the Flies. I was very fond of Jamie
and we were both pleased to have found a kindred outcast. It was with Jamie in
the woods behind Garrowhill Park that I saw the giant. The giant was about twelve feet tall and spindly like a big human jenny-long-legs. He had a hat on
his head which he lifted from his head and smiled at me. I was absolutely
petrified to the spot and so was Jamie and we never told anyone about it
afterward; it was our secret. We never went back to those woods either though
we often dared each other that we would. If he’s writing his story right now,
he’ll be telling about the giant too.
My best friend was my Grandpa Matthews or ‘Skipper’ Matthews
as he was known around the Shettleston/Tollcross area. He fancied himself a
sort of ‘Para Handy’ figure and told tales of puffer boats and the Western
Isles. It’s likely his only ‘sea-faring’ experience involved the Govan Ferry,
but he was a kindly old man so his past went un-questioned. He was my mother’s
father and would spend some time with me, a commodity that few in my life
seemed prepared to invest. His choice of entertainment though was rather odd.
He’d hide little stubs of pencils that he’d collected around our little area of
Tollcross Park and give me clues about where to find them. I’d spend hours searching
for them as he sat puffing on his pipe like The Old Man of the Sea.
Gangs of kids used to play at the sand quarry off Hamilton
Road. The quarry had been long disused and was just sheer walls of sand at the
bottom of which was two large pools of water. I would tag along with the other
kids always aware that I was there through their sufferance or because they
plain hadn't noticed me. I tried to impress them with daring jumps or being the
first to palm a baggy-minny but, it was to no avail. More often than not I’d
end up walking off on my own and into my own little world.
My internal voice was really my best friend during my
childhood and on for the rest of my life until the day I died. Is this the same
for everyone? I’ve never really asked anyone. I’d invent games at home with my
marbles, football-orientated games and I’d provide my own commentary. I’d
devise elaborate golf courses on the carpet which was patterned with both
squares and circles – squares were bunkers and circles were greens. I’d flick
the marbles deftly up the fairways and on to the greens in regulation par. I
could amuse myself in such ways for many hours.
Like every child, I had great dreams for myself. I’d be a
real-life Dick Barton:Special Agent
or I’d play centre-forward for Celtic like Jimmy McGrory or Jimmy Delaney.
This Celtic-supporting was the first clear indication of my
rebellious nature; of the thrawn bugger I was to become. Not only did it make
me the only tim in a school full of huns, but it ran completely contrary to
my father’s Rangers affiliations. My father, the card-carrying member of
Kinning Park Rangers Supporters Club now had a Celtic-lover in the house.
To be fair, he didn’t mind much. I suspect he was a member
of these things more for his own quest for respectability and advancement than
any rabid hatred of all things Catholic. As long as no-one important found out
his son was a traitor to the cause then no harm was done.
So my rebellion was perhaps ineffectual, though my love for
Celtic Football Club was true and genuine for the next sixty years until I
resigned indignantly from life in the ‘Socialist Burgh of Hackney’ at the age
of seventy-one.
The Best Gift They
Ever Gave Me
My brother, Billy, was born when I was nine. He William
Wylie, me Robert. I never felt ‘put-out’ for one second by his arrival, quite
the reverse. I felt that the world had offered me a potential release from my
loneliness, and I loved my brother deeply until his premature death at age
fifty-six in the year two thousand. I would take him for walks in his pram, I
would talk to him and make sure he was comfy; I would make him gurgle and
smile. Later, when he was able to walk I would insist that he learn to fly by
whizzing around the front room until it made the poor wee mite cry and my mum
told me to stop.
Even later, I would teach him to be a Celtic supporter too
and we would play crazy tricks on my dad. Once, in the even more salubrious
locale of Clarkson (the Wylie aspirational plan was paying off) we made a sign
with Joe’s Cafe written on it and a finger pointing in the direction of my
dad’s garden shed. Puzzled ‘customers’ had to be disabused of their desire for
refreshments and sent away disappointed.
Second-son syndrome kicked in in Billy’s favour and he was
never, to my knowledge, forced to wear strange clothing (I have to confess here
that my ‘welly and shoe’ situation only lasted a few weeks one winter until a
cheap, hardy pair of shoes could be found but that I was kitted out like that
at all I think speaks volumes of a thrifty attitude to parenting – my parents revelled in the rationing times, it
provided an excuse for strict domestic economy – they must have felt a little
exposed when it came to an end).
Billy and I would become comrades in our fight for survival
in the crazy family we belonged to.
We’d also become significantly damaged by
it in our own unique ways.
My mother as I mentioned was a coffin polisher. Well, she
was a French polisher whose job was to polish coffins. This she did at Fyfe Douglas – Casket Makers in
Salamanca Street, Parkhead and she worked all the hours she could get. Even
when she was bringing me and my brother up as small children she’d take us
along to work with her. There was no crèche; we were just there in our prams
beside her as she worked. When she wasn’t working in the coffin factory she
would take jobs cleaning in local schools. The money she earned from this along
with my father’s above-average wage went toward saving for the next step up the
ladder – the next house to buy, the next car.
The household sacrifices made to facilitate this upward
mobility were manifold. Only buttering one slice of bread when making a
sandwich, all washing-up done in cold water, in fact, use of hot water for any
activity, even personal hygiene, was at a premium, bath-time was never a warm,
cosy affair. And the food we were served was ‘cheap and cheerful’ only without
the cheerful. Cold meat and potatoes were a regular offering.
My mother’s psychology would merit a PhD thesis. As a
concerned adult, I was advised by her doctor that she probably had ‘mental
issues’. She couldn’t be argued with, any dissent or argument aimed in her
direction and she’d spit at you like a goose. It’s almost certain that she
couldn’t read or write, and despite her rise up the ranks with my father she never
lost the ‘stain’ of poverty. She dressed like an old woman when still in her
forties and was a constant embarrassment to her very image-conscious husband.
As part of their social demeanour started to include works
dinners and events and holidays abroad, my mother’s bizarre behaviour and style
of speech must have had him cringing in his seat. She was pre-Hilda Ogdon with
her malapropisms and oral irregularities. A popular song at the time ‘See the
Pyramids along the Nile’ became in my mother’s tangled imagination ‘See the
Peerie-Wees That Laugh and Smile’. She
was loud and gauche whereas my father was quiet and only ever sought
respectability. To say he had the wrong wife would be a mistake in only one
sense. Whether by her pushing and bullying him or, whether by mutual consent,
possibly a bit of both, they both achieved what they had set out to do; they
made it to suburban respectability. In all other senses, they were surely
completely incompatible.
My mother informed my future wife who she delighted in
upsetting, that she was ‘glad all that was over with’. She was referring to
sex. By this time (they’d be at their final destination, a beautiful and
well-situated ‘retirement’ bungalow in the ‘well-to-do’ outskirts of Ayr) they
would barely talk to each other at all; my father would spend as much time as
he could working on his prize-winning roses or in his shed making a variety of
different wines, all of them tasting like the Madeira he’d started with. My
mother’s domain would be indoors; each of them seeking to be where the other
wasn’t. They’d only put on a show of
togetherness when I would visit with my sons (but increasingly, not my wife).
I got my own psychology almost equally from both; the gentle
sadness from my dad, and a bit of cunning manipulation from my mother. I also
developed her primitive Munchausen into something a wee bit more sophisticated.
I don’t think my brother ever truly knew who he was and would very quickly seek
the drug and alcohol habit that would lead him to an early grave. He sought
oblivion and he was successful in finding it.
As a prolific poet in adult life if writing about my family
I only ever really wrote about my father and my brother, and the latter only
because he was dying or dead. Greenhouse
is the only poem, other than A Letter to
Dead Parents, where I refer to my mother at all. I think if I had written
about my mother at all, I may have had to face myself too much as well.
Psychologically I think I resembled her too much. My father I felt an affinity
with but in a different more mournful way.
I always felt my father was a sad and unfulfilled man. He
was a respected engineer but was never pushy enough to get himself into any
serious positions of authority. Of course, maybe he had no real ambition to,
but it always seemed that he was always being overtaken, even by people he’d
trained.
He worked at ‘Mavors and Coulsons’ just off Bridgeton Cross (and my
father would have said Bridgeton not
the courser Brigton, an important
cultural identifier that), and he was of the brown-coated supervisory staff
(the one photo I’ve seen of him and his colleagues actually has him peeking out
from the very back row). The company made and invented equipment for the mining
industry and I’m pretty confident that if you delve deeply enough into the
archives you’ll find my father was responsible for inventing at least one
mining device, although what it is I have no idea. I visited him at his work
once, a fact I recounted in the following poem My Father in Memory;
As I approached the
factory gate
I recognised the smell
The same oily exciting
smell
That touched our house
When my father came
home
In the late evenings
And I would stretch to
kiss his red cheek
Smelling the oil, and
soap
My best school shoes
Rattled on the
drizzle-covered
Uneven cobble-stones
The old man in the
gatehouse
Welcomed me in his
Brown store-man’s coat
And with an old man’s
smile
Took me up the greasy
metal stairways
Towards the noise
Somewhere above
In the great machine
shop
My father waited for
me
His silver hair matching
well
The gleaming metal
Being worked in the
machines
“This your boy Tom?”
Asked a worker nearby
“Yes, this is Robert”
Dues had been paid on
both sides
-Correct things said
Somehow I felt smaller
and thinner
Than I already was
Out of place in this
metal kingdom
Ruled by a sad king
With silver hair
I was glad to get out
Into the dirty cobbled
streets
Away from the eerie
sadness
And the warm smell of
oil
Veiling the
unfulfilled dreams
Of a rosy-faced,
silver haired man.
You can tell I loved my father very much; I just didn't want
to be like him.
I grew up in this post-war environment when young people had
to make a choice. Were they going to follow tradition and become like their
parents or was there another path they could follow? The late forties and
fifties was a time for rebellion in many spheres. The British public threw out
Churchill and voted in a government that was radical and offered social and
economic improvements to the masses. At the same time, young men like myself
were desperately seeking alternatives to becoming replicas of their fathers. Rebellion for me took the shape of
Celtic, Socialism, Charlie Parker and
Spike Milligan. Virtually everything my father wasn’t about. I wonder if he
ever took it personally.
I didn't even leave school with the basic Leaving
Certificate so undistinguished was my academic prowess. I don’t remember this
ever being addressed, neither parenterally or by my school-masters.
Being the
posh kid from the posh area you’d think there would be expectations that I
would succeed beyond the hoi-polloi but I was left to drift somewhat aimlessly
into sub-mediocrity. This can happen to un-favoured kids. Not in the least
popular among my fellow pupils, I was considered an odd fish by my teachers too
– ‘neither fish nor fowl’ as one would describe me. What I lacked, crucially,
was confidence and I wasn’t being offered any from any quarter. Entering
adulthood and beyond my mother, more than once, offered the opinion that
‘you’ll never be the man your father is’. Why thank you mother, how helpful!
Yet, weeds will grow through pavements. Lack of any positive
stimulus from school or at home forced me to manufacture my own. I had become
quite a perverse, self-sufficient individual, at least in terms of resolve.
Using this facade I was able to shrug
off all the negative press and move forward at least with an idea of myself. At
any rate, even my father had to agree I was good at one thing;
“Quick son, there’s a
horse and cart”
My Dad, a great
rhubarb man,
Seldom missed a chance
to
Send me out into the
streets
With brush and shovel
To gather up dung
In a big galvanised
bucket.
I delighted in his
delight –
A full pail of the
smelly stuff
He taught me to mix
the dung
In a steel barrel –
“slosh
In the water, son, and
feed
The rhubarb” “Your Ma
will
Make us Crumble with
it”.
If I had lived in
A Welsh village I
would
Have been known as
“Robert the Dung”.
The other thing I was good at was singing. My musical
sensibilities were acute. While others were turning on to rock and roll I was
mad about Be Bop. I liked Charlie and Dizzy then Miles. I dug Sarah Vaughn and
Billy Eckstein more than I dug Sinatra, he was too main-stream, though I admit
I dug Bing Crosby, loved his tone and the control
he had of his voice. He swung more
than people gave him credit for.
I wanted to be a singer too. So I became one.
I did have back-up careers in the RAF and as a Glasgow
Corporation tram-driver.
I was that singing brake-man.
The singing was the main thing though, and I embraced this
profession diligently. I knew hundreds of songs and sang with dozens of bands,
the famous Billy McGregor Band among them.
It was one night after singing at the Yoker Civic Hall that I was
approached by a well-known figure on the semi-professional circuit. ‘Cuddles’
Duguid was a pianist in the Digits McPhee mould. Bit of honky tonk, touch of
ragtime, all the standards, but, like me, he was a jazzer at heart.
He had a band The
Nighthawk Syncopaters and he wanted me to sing with them. My stage name was
Eddie Warner so it would be Cuddles Duguid and the Nighthawk Syncopaters
featuring Eddie Warner. The thing that was important to me about Cuddles
and his band was that they had no time for the brash and the showy. They didn't
want me to sing like Buggy Greco, all bouffant and toothy smiles, they liked
the music I liked, the songs that I liked; the ballads that had been covered by
our Modern Jazz heroes – Autumn Leaves,
Someday My Prince Will Come, My Funny Valentine, September in the Rain, East of
the Sun. I was a purist. Cuddles and the band would play pick-up for all
sorts of style of singer. This was the era of rock and roll. Popular crooners
were Perry Como and Bobby Darin. Pat Boone was another popular favourite. I
would have no truck with any of these. I wouldn’t cover their songs; I wouldn't
adopt their style of presentation. Not for me the Buddy Greco cabaret-ruffle
and his gallus ‘showbiz’ shazzam.
We played in dance halls up and down the west coast of
Scotland and, when not singing with Cuddles I’d be entering and winning talent
contests. Of course, this fame, however parochial led to the welcome attention
of females.
There were strict protocols in those days when ‘going out’
with young women. These would sometimes see a person ‘seeing a girl home’ to
far-flung places like Yoker by bus then not having the money to get the bus
back to Clarkston. For those of you that do not know Glasgow (and even those of
you who do), that is a long fucking walk, with perhaps only the darkness, the
rain, and the wind for company. It had to be done though, especially if you
wanted to see her again.
Cuddles had an interesting way with the ladies, famous as he
was for telling them ‘jist pull doon ma singlet when yer finished’. He was a
dumpy little man who wore galoshes onstage and chain-smoked, but he was a very
competent pianist and a skilled musician which you had to be then. You had to
know hundreds of tunes with the ability to transpose any of them to any key.
This would be around the time of my service with Glasgow Corporation
Transport as a tram driver. I was discharged from National Service with the RAF
on medical grounds; they thought I was a nut-case. Evidence for this would
eventually seem conclusive when I attempted to run through a solid wooden door.
I had issues, shall we say, with
authority and taking orders. I had by this time become quite unconventional in
terms of my world view, or perhaps anti-conventional
would describe it better. Like all true outsiders, I had psychological and
emotional defiance towards everything I believed had cast me out. I did not
like National Service. Assigned to the Mountain Rescue Corps I would joke to my
children and wife at every given opportunity that in all my time there I never
knew of one mountain that needed rescuing. My eldest son would recite this to a
bemused gathering at my funeral in the London Borough of Enfield. The truth is
that I was extremely emotionally disturbed in the RAF, hence the running at
doors. They even made me ‘Senior Man’ of the barracks at one point, I think in
an attempt to encourage me to join in.
This proved futile and I endeavored daily and actively to find a way out.
One intriguing though tragic event happened during my
National Service. One of the other trainee airmen hung himself over the bed
next to mine; in his suicide note, he mentioned me as being the cause of this
drastic action. He said that I’d been using my meagre authority to bully him
and that this had sent him over the edge. This was truly puzzling to me and I
actually ended up comforting his parents and travelling to Yorkshire to attend
his funeral. My superiors along with his family seemed to accept that he was
finding National Service a difficult and lonely affair (there were many more
suicides during National Service than the general public got to know about,
there were six to my knowledge in my brief experience of military service), and
that he was a young man pre-disposed to depression. I have always thought that
maybe he saw in me a kindred spirit who he’d failed to impress or befriend.
Rather a spiteful thing to do though; blame someone for your suicide.
Another memorable fact from my time as an airman was that I
was the singer with the Kinloss Kalamities
Concert Party, and there are not many that can say that.
Tram driver was more my measure. A working-class position if
ever there was one, and requiring very little skill. I started as a conductor
then gravitated toward the driving job. People who have known me well would say
that I was temperamentally unsuited to any sort of driving position: in later
life I was never to achieve a driver’s license, being advised by one instructor
not to pursue the ambition as I had a tendency to be ‘dangerously
pre-occupied’. He didn’t need to tell me this,
Glasgow Corporation Tramways
advised me of much the same thing after I’d run one of their vehicles off the
rails and almost up a close, a collision I had anticipated by running up the
stairs to avoid the worst of it.
I had enjoyed the tram driving though; my route was Newlands
Garage on the south side of the city to University in the north-west. I used to
‘clank’ my future wife’s young sister as she made her way home from school in
Woodside. On more than one occasion I would catch my mother *(we were living in
Clarkston by now in a very smart bungalow indeed. Upon leaving the RAF, I was
unaware that they had moved there from Garrowhill as they hadn’t seen fit to
tell me) pilfering the copper coins from my bag of takings which could have
cost me my job if I hadn’t cottoned on.
The End of the Single
Life
It was through singing in the dancehalls that I met the
woman who would be my wife for forty-eight years. I used to enter and win
talent competitions at The Locarno in Sauchihall Street. Sometimes the prize
for these was free entry into ‘the dancing’ for a week. ‘The dancing’ was a way
of life for young people in Glasgow in those days. Everyone dressed smartly in
the latest fashions. I preferred to wear ‘Billy Eckstein’ shirts and had my
hair combed back in a sort of proto ‘DA’ or ‘ducks-arse, more Tony Curtis than
Teddy Boy which was a whole different ball game. Girls dressed in kitten shoes
and wide crinoline skirts with tiny waists.
There were a great many dancehalls in Glasgow in the mid to
late fifties. For me, The Locarno was chief, but there was also the Denistoun
Palais, the Barrowland, F & Fs, Green’s Playhouse, The Plaza on Eglinton
Toll and many, many more. I must have sung or danced at all of them at one time
or other and many more up the east and west coast of Scotland; Bobby Jones in Ayr,
the Duke in Kinloss, and The Palace Ballroom in Rothesay. As I’ve said I
wouldn’t conform to singing other than the beautiful ballads of the Jazz
Songbook and I think that this was what ensured that I wouldn’t endure or
progress as a singer. I’m not even sure how serious I was about it. I was glad
of any applause I got, and the attention from females was very welcome indeed.
It was my lovely singing voice that brought the attention of
my future wife, Jean. On only our second date I was due to sing at the Locarno.
She’d enjoy telling our two boys later on that if I’d been ‘rid-rotten’ she’d
have been off her mark and maybe we’d never have got married.
Glasgow in the mid to late fifties was a brash city. It was
a city full of itself and its own myth. The novel No Mean City written in the 1930s had confirmed its reputation of
being a violent and dangerous city to socialize in. Glasgow then as now does
its best to live up to its own stereotype. It was a dark city, ill lit by its
sodium street-lamps. Its night-time soundtrack was drunken shouts and smashing
bottles. You never knew the minute when it would all kick off. Violence was
fuelled by Benzedrine and strong drink.
The same mixture that induced me to take a flying hieder off
the balcony in The Locarno. I laid myself and a couple of dancers in hospital
with that one; lucky they were there to break my fall.
Don’t ask me why I did
things like this, probably a death-wish combined for a yearning for attention.
I wanted to be different and accepted all at the same time. Go figure!
Jean and I were married within three months of first meeting
much to the horror of our respective families. My own mother would never see
Jean as ‘good enough’ for her son. By then my folks looked down, quite
literally, on most of the rest of Glasgow, living as they did high on a hill in
posh Clarkston.
Jean’s father was an alcoholic mechanic and they lived in a
basement in Bath Street, not exactly a slum, but not exactly Clarkston either.
I knew that Jean and I were in love; I also knew she was anxious to get away
from her brute of a father, terrorised as she and the rest of her family had
been by him for many years. An arrogant man at the best of times, they dreaded
his return from his boozing sessions when he would create havoc, not with his
fists thankfully but with his threats and protestations that he was ‘better
than them’. She told me tales of him bringing home live lobsters and boiling
them in a pot for his own edification.
She told me she had fetched a policeman to protect her siblings one
night when he was raging mad at her mother. Neither her father nor, sadly, her
mother ever forgave her this action. It seemed that domestic violence was
socially acceptable, police involvement was not. She’d brought shame on the
family with her sisterly action.
For the sake of youthful newly-wed adventure and in a handy
maneuver to escape our respective families we buggered off to London to live
and hopefully find employment. I worked at the big Heinz factory in Harlesden
as a mayonnaise mixer, and as a trainee butcher with The Coop. We lived in a
large bedsit in Kensal Green and we were happy. Why did I get married so
quickly? Well, Jean and I just seemed to fit. She was attractive to me and
maybe I liked the way she needed me. She was the first person who ever did.
Jean suffered a debilitating kidney illness when we were
about a year in London and we decided to go back to Glasgow. This would be the
first of many moves up and down the country. We were to become a restless
couple for many reasons, never really becoming settled anywhere until the very
end when it was almost too late.
‘Che’ Wylie
It was around this time that I was becoming politicized and,
true to character, I didn’t do this by half measures. I became an industrial
saboteur and militant union rep.
All my working life I refused to compromise. If factory
owners would not change conditions or increase wages – I’d put a spanner in the
works. Quite literally. I’d break machines.
I’d call wildcat strikes.
Newlywed and newly working at a parts manufacturers in East
Kilbride I was elected Shop Stewards Convener. I wasn’t a particularly shrewd
Shop Stewards Convener. Never was a cool and cagey negotiator. I got sacked
after calling an unofficial strike over a wage demand. The members voted
overwhelmingly against it shouting ‘fuck off Wylie’ from the shop floor. The
management pulled me in and sacked me (it was weeks since I found out they’d
effectively black-listed me as well). The AEF refused to back me and I was
thrown out of the union.
How’s that for a Shop Stewards Convener?
Being blacklisted isn’t fun or good for the family economy
or morale but in a way I was immensely proud of the fact. It caused untold
problems and I couldn’t find a job in the Glasgow area or beyond for love nor
money but at least I stood for something and wasn’t just an apathetic
drone-pleb allowing myself to be shafted without protest. This was a
continuation of my love-hate attitude toward my fellow workers. As a political concept I adored them, in
reality, I had feelings for them bordering on contempt and found it hard to
forgive them for not standing up for themselves and taking over the world as
Karl Marx had predicted they should.
They seemed more inclined to seek divisions between their
own fellow workers than uniting and demanding changes. In one shitty job I
managed to procure in East Kilbride, literally sweeping the factory floors, I
was identified as a Celtic supporter and therefore assumed to be a Catholic.
For this ‘crime’ I was advised in no uncertain terms to leave this employment.
No protection was offered from the union reps for they too were of the Rangers
persuasion. It was, in fact, a Protestant closed shop, an entity not unheard of
in the west of Scotland. Employers must have been well gratified by these
self-imposed stratifications within the work-force.
It was some time before I was able to obtain in employment
in the Glasgow area again, and even then I had to lie to get it. Still living
in East Kilbride I applied for a job as a Capstan Setter in a factory on
Thornliebank Industrial Estate called Rawlplug. I knew what a Capstan lathe was;
I just didn’t know how to operate one. I got books out of the library and
studied them but when I started it was obvious to the bloke at the next lathe
that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Luckily, he was a decent sort and
very slowly tutored me in the ways of it.
Very soon, the management got to know of my militant past
and one of them called me into the meeting. He told me that he believed in
giving people a second chance but any repeat performance at Rawlplug would mean
trouble for me.
You’d think that would tober me. Not a bit of it. Within six
months I was shop steward.
One interesting development in this period was that I was
chosen to manage the works football team. I even got to choose the strip, the
smart red and black striped Manchester City away strip tops, black shorts, and
black and red socks. I put together a skillful, hardy little outfit and we won
promotion from the fourth to the third division of the Renfrewshire Works
League in the first season. I also took them down to Essex for a five-a-side
tournament, an enjoyable little jolly for the chaps although I didn’t partake
in the liquid shenanigans being a tea-totaller not by choice but by dint of on-going
stomach complaints that would one day kill me.
Resurrection Man
For me, my story as a man doesn’t really start until I
qualified as a Social Worker in the mid-1970s and became Head of the Foresthall
Homeless Families Unit in Springburn, Glasgow. I approached this post in a very
political manner too and, as usual, my socialist principles brought me up
against many obstacles. Funny how, when you’re trying to do the best for the
people you are employed to help, you manage to step on so many of your
colleagues’ toes.
With the crucial support and encouragement of my wife I left
factory work (before I was sacked and blacklisted again) and began a CQSW at
Moray House College, Edinburgh. This experience opened my eyes to a new world
populated by idealism and females who resembled Dory Previn, an esteemed folk
singer of the time. I attended meetings and soirees, drank wine and sucked on
the odd spliff (though this activity caused me extreme paranoia and was not a
habit I pursued).
People with a life-long lack of self-esteem tend to either
disappear into the woodwork or feel the need to prove themselves in very
immediate and dramatic ways. From the start, I was out-spoken and insistent on
strong left-wing principles as being the only way to take on society’s ills. I
was a crude pain-in-the-arse to some and a ‘bit of a star’ to others. There’s
no doubt that my previous life as a factory worker gave me much needed
credibility as ‘the genuine article’ – probably the only working-class student
on the course in actual fact, and I played this for all it was worth.
I took this to extremes at times, as you might expect. A
serious ‘domestic’ broke out high up in the tower block next to the one we
lived in. Articles of clothing were being strewn out of the high veranda, and
some sort of fire seemed to be blazing within. Oaths such as ‘I’ll do it’
rendered the evening air and a crowd had gathered below to gawp and in some
cases, shout encouragement. I made my way through the crowd and took a lift to
the appropriate floor. On arrival on the premises I bellowed supportively “Look,
I can help, I’m a Social Worker!”
“Fuck off!” was the no-nonsense reply.
I sorted out a secondment at Foresthall Homeless Families
Unit in Springburn to the north of Glasgow. I couldn’t believe the conditions
there. The residents were treated like prisoners or mental hospital inmates. It
was on the same site as the old Barnhill Poorhouse and the ‘poorhouse’ culture had
remained. Residents were encouraged towards servility while senior staff wore nurse’s
uniforms. These people were homeless for Christ's sakes, they weren’t ill or
subject to the Victorian Poor Laws.
It was run like a penal institution to
secure people who had committed no greater crime than being poor and without a
home. I railed against this regime from day one, and though only a mere student
of social work I made my feelings very clear about how abhorrent I felt the
place was. Others, younger and more enlightened among the staff agreed but had
not the authority to change it.
Almost on the day I qualified as a Social Worker the job of
Head of Foresthall Homeless Families Unit was advertised in The Glasgow Evening
Times. I got the job because of my evident conviction to make changes and, as
was to be the case again and again in my life, no-one else really wanted to do
it.
Newly qualified and already a senior manager, it was going
to prove a tough task ahead. I was branded ‘Marxist’ to those that stood against
me. I had no reason to disagree with that, it was what fired me on. I changed the name to ‘Foresthall Family Care
Unit’. I felt it conveyed a more positive image. I told them we were here to
help and serve these people not oppress and belittle them. I told them the
uniforms had to go. I told them the living quarters had to change from
dormitories and wards and be renovated into rooms where families could enjoy at
least a little privacy and autonomy.
I told the Social Work Department Field
Officers in McIver House that they couldn’t refer just any families that were
proving problematic to them, there had to be proper quotas and evaluations. I
told the staff they had to be more democratic in their dealings with each other
and the residents and less authoritarian.
In short, we had to move at least into the twentieth
century.
I brought in my own assistant. I encouraged staff
sympathetic to my views. I tried to come to terms with my objectors. When this
failed, I fought tooth and nail with them until they either moved on or toed
the line. Christ! I had more trouble with my own colleagues than I ever did
with any of the residents.
But, I won the day.
At what personal cost, though? I suffered threats from the
IRA for not housing the families of their supporters. I became addicted to
Valium. I became a worry to my wife and family. I was living on the very edges
of my nerve.
It was the only way I knew how to do it. I saw what needed
to be done and couldn’t reconcile myself to any ‘softly, softly’ approach even
if I was capable of such a tactic. I was all guns blazing and no compromises.
My poem Tribal Markings puts it thus;
No regrets about
throwing
Cut-throat razors in
the air,
And catching them in
my teeth,
Such has been my
life-long remedy
For the itch of boredom.
True, the risk is
there
To miss, just that
once,
And I would have
minutes to reflect.
But better bleeding
swiftly
As the result of error
Than plodding the
safety road
Where the grass is the
same colour
On both sides of the
dry-stone dyke.
I have the tribal
markings
Denoting my creed;
A notch on cheek, and
jowl
When I haven't got it
quite right,
Where the blade has
missed the throat,
But has left its
impression
Nonetheless.
We all became human beings in ‘the Unit’. From being
down-graded and oppressed, the residents became the focus of our kindly and
thoughtful attention. The staff became motivated by ways of making the unit a
more comfortable and dignified place for both themselves and the residents.
Gone was authoritarianism, and in like a cooling breeze came egalitarianism.
We took in Agnes as a single woman. We didn’t usually do
this being orientated toward families, but Agnes was in such a bad way that we
decided to make an exception. She was clothed in a long coat and had a
‘tea-cozy’ hat firmly jammed on her head. She smelled pretty bad. We tried to
coax her to have a bath but at first, she resisted. Even with her hat jammed on,
we could discern what appeared to be a bad burn running down the side of her
skull. Eventually, and by her own volition, she agreed to have a bath. Two of
our female workers helped her do this but had tremendous difficulty removing
the headwear. By careful cutting, they managed to remove it, and what was
revealed was rather shocking. She appeared to be wearing a skull-cap, but on
further examination by the staff and a doctor, this ‘skull-cap’ was made of no
known fabric but was, in fact, Agnes’s hair congealed with an infinitesimal
matting of lice. She must have been ‘wearing’ this for months, maybe years.
We had the doctor shave her head and provided her with a new
tea-cozy hat to hide her baldness until her hair grew back.
Daily life in the Foresthall Family Care Unit was a parade
of incidents, events and sharp experiences.
Nothing ever seemed ordinary:
everything seemed new.
A Scandal on the
Grandest Scale: Money, Sex and the Abuse of the Vulnerable
Knowledge is a dangerous thing they say and they’re right.
Especially when it’s knowledge about one’s colleagues that implicates them in
scandal and corruption. Being wedded to the truth does not always involve
having the easiest life. I knew stuff about staff in the Social Work Department
and their relationship with the city’s bed and breakfast landlords. Sex and money
were at the bottom of it.
Extortionate rents charged by bed and breakfast
proprietors, sexual favours demanded of vulnerable mothers, a blind-eye by the
authorities in return for who-knows-what. Back-handers and blowjobs! Now that I
was de facto chief of Homeless
Families Social Work for Glasgow I quickly became privy to what was going on. I
had my moles too – only they were on the side of righteousness. I spoke to some
high up people but got nowhere. Eventually, I stated my intention to take it to
the press and was interviewed by Scottish Television.
The interview was never shown.
One night in a pub, popular with Social Workers in the
centre of Glasgow, I was approached by a very shady character indeed. His
message was clear and I had no option but to drop the matter. He said that
“certain people” would get “quite heavy” if I “interfered”!
It was all to come out later anyway. The whole scandal was
eventually exposed.
By this time I was working in London.
The Slightly
Lesser Scandal of the Gauguin Print
My first week in my new office after weeks being seated at a
radiator (I knew being the first Social Worker assigned to a Housing Department
was not going to be a popular appointment but being forced to pile one’s stuff
next to a redundant storage heater one was forced to use as one’s desk was
taking it a bit far). They didn’t appear to know I was coming, no-one,
apparently had warned them about this radical chap who had moved down from
Glasgow to take charge of the Homeless Families department. It seemed to me
that they were taking the piss; putting me in my place from the off. Some
visionary had had the bright idea to form a link between social work and
housing, but the housing side of things sure weren't welcoming it, and whoever
had chosen to employ me was lax to say the least in smoothing the way for me.
At any rate, now I was in my new office and I wanted to make
it my own little bastion from the enemies without and, no doubt, within.
No Housing Department had ever had a social worker attached
to it before. They had operated a purely points
system before and had never had been faced with the notion of deserving cases or prioritising in any
way that reflected the reality of the society around them.
In general, they resented the intrusion and the potential
alteration of their way of working and thinking.
People don’t generally like change.
It was my job to change things.
The first battle was on unexpected terrain.
First bit of décor I put up in my new office, once finally
assigned was an Athena print of Gauguin’s Two
Tahitian Women. This was to cause an almighty stink. A lady employee, a
Guides-mistress no less from the Lettings Section instantly objected to it; she
could see it through the window of my office, bare-breasts and all. I could at
this stage have taken it down, or moved it where she couldn’t see it, but,
maybe it was because I had been mucked about with the radiator and all, or
maybe I just thought she was a silly bitch, I decided to keep it where it was.
Diplomatic envoys came asking for compromise but I re-buffed them all. This is
a work of art, not pornography I said, I am doing nothing wrong, compromise
would suggest I was. It hangs in The Louvre, for Christ’s sake, and some little
pipsqueak’s had decided it wasn't suitable for the Waltham Forest Housing
Department. The Head of Social Services himself summoned me. Me, the new
appointee, already causing trouble, but I wouldn't back down.
The radical had arrived.
Funny what stupid people choose to find important when
there’s far more pressing stuff going on all around them!
The Tory Chief Medical Officer who once expressed the view
to me “Blacks should be more like the English if they are going to come to this country” labelled me a Communist and
campaigned for me to be dismissed from my post. I responded by agreeing that if being a
Communist meant opposing social inequality, and racialism, then “I must indeed
be a Communist”.
She had been used (before my arrival) to being able to spout
her right-wing views unopposed at the ‘difficult cases’ panel which met two-weekly.
Other gems included..
“People can’t actually be homeless if they can afford to
refuse whatever we are good enough to offer them” and “If young women are
obviously inadequate, they should not be allowed to keep their babies”
She would have fitted in well in Iain Duncan Smith’s DWP (of
which I am blissfully unaware here in the spirit world where I am pain-free and
happy as a linty).
Her campaign failed.
I went into bat for the Women’s Aid Group in the Borough of
Waltham Forest (after their understandably stubborn refusal to even meet with me, a male member of the human
tribe, for many months) to help them found a refuge for their beleaguered and
picked-upon clients. I felt, when trying to persuade them of my commitment that
I was on trial for the violent sins of all men. I stuck my neck out because I believed in
their cause. Their cause became mine and we were successful.
As ever, I was ahead of my time.
By the time I left in November 1983, there were three
women’s refuges in operation in Waltham Forest.
Nearly the end
Retirement on medical grounds had been on the cards for some
time. I had been diagnosed with the obscure spinal condition Syringomyelia, which was to affect my muscle
strength and the feeling in my hands and extremities. My doctor told me to
‘make hay while the sun shines’ as it was a degenerative condition and the word
‘wheelchair’ was used ominously.
If I’m honest,
illness was central to my very being throughout my entire life. I learned from
my mother that you could use it to control the little world around you. I guess
this is what they now call Munchausen’s
Syndrome. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t actually ill. Christ! The twisted
tumour in my gut that finally killed me came from decades of knife-edge stress,
and though they could never conclusively diagnose any of this – they spoke of
ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome; they had me on a diet of charcoal biscuits
for a while, I kept Bisodol in
business for many years – I guess continual gut-wrenching stress played as big
a part as anything pathological.
The Syringomyelia
diagnosis was only arrived at after a series of lumbar punctures and tests
looking for MS and other scary possible outcomes. They concluded that I had a
gap in my spine which was caused as I was being pulled from my mother’s womb.
Maybe she worried
about the costs incurred by a new-born and decided to try and hold on to me.
I needed my
illnesses like an emotional crutch.
I needed the
attention and the control they gave me.
Return to Scotland
Kilmarnock: a big
mistake in one sense; a huge triumph for me in another. I did a lot of good
work in
Kilmarnock. I was instrumental in setting up an Advocacy Centre in the
town; I set-up the first ‘furniture scheme’ in Scotland; I became a one-man
counselling service for men who battered their wives and wanted to stop doing
so. I was a tour-de-force. I also
became desperate to get out of the place and get back in the game down in
London.
Jean was largely
miserable. Although, she did pursue a reunion with her father. I supported her
in this as much as I could. She seemed to need to square a circle of her own. A
daughter loves her father and wants so badly for the father to love her back.
She’d tell me of times as a young girl when her father, when sober, was a
friendly influence, would hold her hand and walk her to school. She knew that
there was little chance of re-creating any such bonding.
Her father, also
Robert was still a drinker living in a council flat in Maryhill. You could
only visit him in the mornings as his routine dictated that he begin his daily
drinking around lunchtime. At this time he would become edgy and that was your
cue to depart. Various itinerant friends would arrive for money owed or to
arrange loans on the strength of giros or housing payments. Jean was treated
politely but she so obviously wasn’t a part of this circle. It was sad in the
sense that she didn’t belong there; was being suffered in a way. Maybe auld
Boab was pleased to see her again after so many years, though I’m not so sure.
I was always waiting for him to ask her for money which I’m sure he did and
Jean never told me.
Kilmarnock saw me at
my best and at my worst. At my worst howling at the moon in this disused
quarry, at my best rousing people into local activism. Take the furniture
scheme. Such a simple idea put into action. People needed furniture, people
needed to get rid of furniture. All we needed was a wee bit of funding from the
council, a van and driver and some folk to shift furniture. Join it all up by
making people aware of the service and away we go - instant success. So
successful in fact that the local Labour big-wigs didn’t like it one bit.
Stepping on their toes you see. They needed to be seen as the saviours of the
poor, not that they ever actually done much in that direction. Warned me off.
Asked me if I was on an invalidity pension. Implication clear. Fuck off or
we’ll grass you up to the Social.
I started up Men’s
Groups. Real men with real problems. Drink, violence, marriage break-ups. People
think I’m perverse, and maybe I am in a way, but I meant it. I visited the wee
schemes – the Onthank’s, the Patna’s, the Irvine’s. I counselled men who hit
their wives, who drank themselves to near-oblivion, who felt they had no hope
of a way out. I argued with Men’s Group co-ordinators in the brisk tenements of
Byers Road, where they charged £300 for ‘Iron Man’ week-ends out in the woods
for middle-class wankers to run about and ‘find themselves’. I argued that this
was not the way that they had to broaden it out to include all.
Perverse? Of course
it was. You wouldn’t have got any of this lot within ten miles of the Onthank
Estate, but I had to make the point and was by degrees ‘excluded’ from their
little soirees (not always by degrees either, I was once asked to leave due to
me being a ‘disruptive influence’, the language of the School Governors they
possibly were).
Yes, Kilmarnock was
not an unproductive time for me in my quest to practice my socialist ideals at
a community level and you can’t move for ‘furniture schemes’ nowadays. My
eldest son utilizes them regularly in his welfare rights work in East Lothian.
There is a video in
existence which I think Jean still has of a presentation in honour of my part
in setting up an Advocacy Service in Kilmarnock. Jean and I travelled up from
England for it. Many local political worthies attended along with my brother.
It still exists to
this day. I, sadly, do not.
When I died in the
hospice, my toes were pointing directly at my head.
Tension.
Still-strained near
death.
Falling off the
precipice one last time.
If you had seen me
in my pomp, I went where others didn't; the unpopular jobs, jobs that required
confrontation required one to put one’s head above the parapet of career
security, playing the game, putting one’s interests firmly to the fore.
Never did any of
that. Always knife-edge stuff.
Why?
Go ask a
psychologist!
Selflessness?
Altruism? Ego? Justice? Rebellion? Political conviction?
All of these things,
and maybe more besides….
If you had seen me;
A dancer like dancers,
A singer like singers,
Food like food, and
Good enough to eat.
But I did not know
A time when all of time was mine;
Death was dainty, and kept its distance.
I could waste time, but
Could not love it.
And now when my clock
Is at twenty past ten,
Time fugits fiercely,
Pours down every drain,
Seeps through every doubt.
Time has made an enemy of me.
But, the consolation, if there is one,
Is that, I am not alone.
The big battle scrambles, and scrapes
Through every life,
Enemy of everyone –
A winner, and used to it.
But, never mind, I had my time,
Prime time, in the jargon,
Smile raising, eye sparkling,
Dance stepping time.
If you had seen me!
