“Is that Avril the section leader wummin?”
“Erm….yes, yes it is. Can I help you?”
“Aye ye kin. I’m phoning up on behalf of Edward Bryant. He
won’t be in today”
“O dear. Why is that?”
“He’s drunk”
Happy times in the 1970s when nothing much mattered,
certainly not your job. This was before everything turned sour in the country,
and government’s started making things tough for poor folk. You had less to
worry about in the 70s. So long as you were able to afford the new Lynyrd
Skynyrd album, that was all that mattered.
The landscapes were different. There was innocence that
would soon be lost when you began to realise the Tories were cunts and despised
those not doing as well as themselves and their like. Bankers, wankers and
tight-buttocked golf-clubbers hell-bent on ‘getting on’ at any cost especially
someone else’s.
A man-boy like Edward Bryant could afford his friend Jack to
phone him in drunk because if it came to it, he’d just leave his pishy wee job
as Assistant Collector of Taxes and go and work somewhere else, probably the
DHSS who were always taking on staff as fast as they were constantly shedding
them. You signed on there one week and were the other side of the wire mesh the
next handing out the money.
These days, work is a more seriously scientific affair.
Phone in drunk now and they’d have you at an Occupational Therapist answering
questions.
Being Scottish in London at that time was an interesting
thing. Many of us thought we were down there to show the English the proper way
to get steaming drunk. Some never made it outside the confines of the Kings
Cross/Euston station proximity. They just holed up in some dive near the
station, got moroculous for two years then went back up the road.
“How was London, son?”
“Some place, maw, some place”
As a boy I had O.C.D. though no-one had heard of such a
thing. I was so scared of my Dad dropping dead that I’d be forced to do
everything three times. Not four (don’t even like writing ‘four’ even to this
day), not two but three, always three. And I always had to touch every paling
on the way to school. That was a lot of palings as a big metal fence ran the
whole way the length of the estate (to keep weans away from the burn but, as
usual, a space was made to get through by some bright spark wrenching one of
the palings away to leave the gap, but I couldn’t go through this because I had
to touch every paling three times)
Sometimes I even had to repeat myself twice when talking to
folk. They’d look at me oddly; sometimes they’d get angry and say ‘I know I
heard you the first time. Fuck you telling me again for…..TWICE!’
I wasn’t the best fighter at school or even in my class. In
fact, I often got picked on. I was the tallest in the class, but I couldn’t
fight. Not a good combination. Wee rufftie-tuffties could enhance their ‘rep’
by battering me. Until eventually, I was so notorious for being ‘a shitebag’
that reputations remained unenhanced by giving me a doing: everybody could do
that!
Life’s shite when you’re picked on. It colours everything
for a long, long time until well into your fifties you’re telling the whole
sorry tale to a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist somewhere in Edinburgh.
Once I met a friend who had somewhat similar superstitions
about members of his immediate family dropping dead because he didn’t perform
certain repetitive tasks. Once, in a pub in Leytonstone, I cruelly suggested to
him that his father would come to a sorry end if he didn’t immediately do a
‘goat dance’ in front of everyone in the pub. Of course, he had to do this.
This bloke was Davy who was Jack’s younger brother. He
resembled a bare-arsed banditti, a fiery haired Jacobite down in London to
claim the throne for the bonnie Prince. Davy, like me, could and would drink
himself to a stand-still. I’d received a substantial debate and Davie was loth
to let me out of his site for a minute. Indeed, he took me back to the bedsit
where lay asleep his intellectually challenged girlfriend, Theresa. I was
invited to sleep alongside them on their double bed (nothing remotely dodgy,
you understand. Davy was to homosexuality and threesome shenanigans what Anders
Breivik is to The Koran). On the ensuing nights I would pretend to sleep as the
bed rocked to their urgent couplings. In my drunken snoozings, I’m sure I heard
a conversation containing the words ‘gie Eddie a go’ but I may have been
dreaming.
Theresa was a cunning, cheerful product of the nearby Essex
countryside. Upon cashing a giro at the local post office she was asked for ID,
upon which request she produced a photograph of herself signed at the back. For
some reason never ascertained she had it in her mind that Lester Piggott, a favourite
of her horse-race loving spouse, was the president of South Africa. Not bright
intellectually perhaps, she knew every shop in the area that would give tick
and would have a fiver off you before you even knew you had one. She was sex
mad, making demands on poor Davie that even the most lustful Jacobite couldn’t
aspire to.
Jack came later. We met him off the tube at Leytonstone tube
station and were drunk within the hour. This is how Glaswegians greeted each
other in London (in Glasgow too, actually).
As is traditional, Jack sneered at me and eyed me with
violent derision every time I opened my mouth. I was friend to his younger
brother and therefore an interloper. He couldn’t resist my charming humour,
however, and we quickly became friends too.
Jack was a Jekyll and Hyde drunk. Jekyll was a nice man;
generous, smiling and pleasant to be around. Hyde was an abject pain in the
arse and barred from most of the pubs in the area that we all drank in.
As I say, it is the Scots duty while residing in London to
uphold every stereotype attributed to them and, in this endeavour, Jack Wildman
was magnificent. When drunk, he could have wound up Mother Theresa of Calcutta
in an instant. If he were present in ‘The Life of the Saints’ their devotions
would have been ruined. God himself would have bolted his celestial doors to
escape the earthly attentions of a well-oiled Jack.
Jack was one of those drunks who never slept, no matter how
much everyone prayed he would. He’d cavort, sing, rile, annoy, insult, injure,
poke, laugh, deride, shout, provoke and prod all night and all day as if whisky
were a barbiturate. Every gulp energised him to new heights of pestiferousness,
and woe-betide the man, woman or child who attempted to take it away from him.
Jack was no great fighter, but he could annoy you into
submission. One time he pestered Black Jerry so much for a line of his speed
that Jerry gave in and gave him the wrap to take to the gents. Jack sniffed the
lot and sat all night bending the ear of the man now bereft of his sulphate
with all sorts of shite about rabbits, times of trains and a lifetime’s
memories of supporting Partick Thistle.
Dark and long-haired and forever wearing a long leather
coat, indoors and out, on a blustery, windy night, coat billowing, he could easily
be mistaken for a drunken, cacophonous warlock from some nightmare poem of
Burns. Tam o’Shanter mad on speed and cheap wine.
Jack was once exiled from England and sent back up the road.
During the riots of eighty-one he looted a toy shop in Walthamstow and stole a
Bugs Bunny Baby Buggy for his young kid in Glasgow. It was brought on as
exhibit 1 in court much to the amusement of all concerned (except, it seems,
the judge).
Jack was a bit of a ladies man on the quiet and was
particularly sought after by fat lassies. Why this was I couldn’t say for sure
but, as I say, when sober he had a quiet gentleness to him that maybe they
responded to. They maybe felt safe with him and not as self-conscious about
their weight. Whatever, it was always big lassies with Jack and he’d disappear
into his room for days with his lucky lady, she only re-appearing for tea and
food but never alcohol. Jack would stay sober for these little trysts, for give
him even the briefest sniff of it and the whole thing would end in high farce
and harsh words and Jack likely singing Dylan’s ‘Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat’ at
the top of his strangulated voice.
Amazing that he was to become Minister of Sport in the
ill-fated Callaghan government. He was the one that implemented guaranteed
promotion for Partick Thistle and the club bar to be open to three pm.
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