Chosen One

Bryant’s younger brother, Mikey, was determined he wasn’t going to suffer his brothers fate. To Mikey, part of Bryant’s trouble was his appearance: he seemed to want to look like Mick Jagger long after that look was anywhere near in style, if it ever was. The ramshackle, ruined, rock and roll wastrel-look of his cohort, Keith, was uber-cool, but Mick was a skinny-camp prick. Bryant wore bell-bottoms and a feather-cut with some Bay City Roller-cheap top and purple baseball boots with stars on them. Mikey looked on his brother with sorrow. How could he look up to such a no-hoper?

He was going to have to go it alone.

Mikey became two-tone. He had shoes that resembled badgers and never had a hair out of place. Mikey was a cool mod. He listened to The Specials and knew Rude boys. He wouldn’t even go to the shops for his mum without grooming himself for about half an hour to make sure he was immaculately tonsured and groomed. That was the thing about being a mod – the brand names and the neatness. Ben Sherman, Fred Perry, Paolo Vandini. You had to have the right stuff and wear it well.

They say that young Mikey was ‘accident prone’ but I don’t believe that was the full story. I’d say that deep down inside the boy, in his fevered anxious mind, he’d do almost anything not to be at school.

Even dislocate a knee.

The scene is Whipps Cross Hospital, Leytonstone and Bryant has been called to attend to his brother who has ‘fallen’ down some stairs at school. Did he fall or was he pushed?

Mikey: Nobody ever told my story before. No-one remembers me except me. What it was like to be me.

I come from the land of rain, and wind seeping through the recesses, the cold sneaking through the tiniest gaps in the window frame. I come from the East where the West was far away. A riddle-me-ree.

In the Swinging Sixties - “the sixties didnae happen here, son”. We went from the fifties to the seventies with little in between.

I had a brother that didn’t notice me hardly at all, too caught up was he in his own daily tragedies that I would later inherit. I looked at him with young, loving eyes but he’d disappeared.

A loving family none-the-less: a peripatetic family for sure. Running from and running too. Change of schools always fraught and feared. Once, big brother in big brother playground in a fight and lost embarrassingly. “You’re brothers a shitebag”. Shame by association. Did this happen? Yes, it did but I’m not sure I was made aware. Maybe I just knew.

(much teenage swearing in consultation room as knee is slammed back into place. “FUUCKIIING HEEEELL!!”)

Even to another country where my accent was used as a reason to taunt and humiliate. A stranger in a strange land - “Thought you Jocks were hard”.

Forced to re-evaluate, you see me now. “Zoot Suit, white jacket with side vents nine inches long”

I created my own way to fit in.

I wasn’t supposed to go to Brighton. I told my mum I was just with friends when I phoned, but she heard the announcement on the station Tannoy. Ears like an eagle-hawk, my mother.

The Banker

Boab Bryant was an inventor of games. “It’s four runs if you hit the dust-bin, son” or “the square’s in the carpet are the bunkers, but this yella one’s the green”. A lonely boy himself, he appreciated his children as little late-found chums to play these games with. When they played cricket with his home- made bat, Boab Bryant gave his sons nick-names. Wee Alan was Bishop Muzorewa and Bryant was Nabadinge Sitole. This honouring of African political leaders was a theme he enjoyed and appealed to the ‘Goonish’ sense of humour in them all.

What he couldn’t do, though, was re-invent the rules of golf.

Every time my Da had a tidy win on the horse’s (which wasn’t that often “once backed a horse that drowned at Catterick, son”) he’d buy himself an Arnold Palmer shirt. He had a fondness for the man and the shirts. He’d have liked to have played like the great man too. Unfortunately, as a golfer, he was more Lilli than Arnold Palmer. Having purchased clubs that had all the whip of re-inforced concrete he clattered and grunted his away around the course with all the precision of a busted clock. 

A mis-hit ball could induce spasms in the land itself never mind his tension-racked joints and limbs. He was the best I ever heard at producing ‘paaaaaaang’ noises. Man and machine in perfect disharmony, he made an enemy of those golf clubs and they were enemy enough to begin with.

The course took some beating too. A Glasgow Corporation Course on the edge of Rouken Glen park. It was tufted and scuzzy, worn-out and pale, not here the lush verdancy of your private courses which were always several cuts above, this was a course for manual workers and those that didn’t work at all. “They don’t use tees here son, ye hit yer ba’ aff a Tennant’s lager can”

He’d wake me around six in the morning when he was off work at the Glasgow Fair, we’d have tea and toast then wander the three miles up through The Puggy and past his work at Rawlplug, eventually arriving at the first hole of Deaconsbank golf course before the green-keepers arrived (this meant we didn’t have to pay, we’d be away out on the course by the time they clocked on). We’d ‘paaaang’ our way around the course, clumping around thick rough for errant balls that were sliced, hooked, topped, shanked off the straight and narrow. All this ineptitude made the odd sweetly struck ball seem like a miracle from heaven, an awed silence followed this rare occurrence when time stood still, the birds stopped chirping in respect and ‘nice shot, Da’ was uttered in wonderment. One time, I swear I witnessed a tear in his eye and a catch in his throat as he answered “thanks, son. Aye, no’ bad”.

In a matter of minutes, he’s clugging and hacking away at the hard sand in a bunker shouting “fucking game. How ye meant to….?” this followed by sand-wedge hurtling and spinning out toward the fairway achieving greater distance than his ball was ever likely to.

We’d finally reach the long, rolling last hole, battered and beaten, score well into treble figures. But, of course, we can never play the eighteenth because it leads back to the clubhouse. It is now that my father plays his banker, and to this day I often wonder how much of his tongue was in his cheek. Given that we’d just given one of the worst approximations of the ancient game that could ever be witnessed his utterance “just mark us doon for a five at the last, son” is as remarkable to me now as it was then. I more than half expected maybe a look or a laugh at the astonishing ironic bravado of this statement, but unwilling to offend the sensibilities of this loveliest of men I dutifully pencilled it in “5”.

It looked so out of place…

Honour

Bryant had never been in prison, though he used to pretend that he had to his other Glasgow friends in London. “Aye, Bar-L. Just a two-stretch”, he’d lie, craving their admiration. He doesn’t catch their doubting glances to one another. They already find him an odd duck “Cannae even get stoned wi’ the fucker”.  Self-conscious Bryant makes those around him self-conscious. Wullie O’Marra had broken a wee boy’s leg one time during a wee kick-about on a patch of grass at the edge of the scheme. Hadn’t it been Bryant who had carried the wee lad home to his mother while O’Marra and his cohorts had fled? This act is taken for strangeness. He is ‘other’ than his townies, his fellow Glesgawegians.

“He even fucken talks different”

Bryant was raised in a family in which the dominant force – his father – believed in self-education. He talked about everything from a Marxist, trade unionist, leftist perspective. Bryant and his little brother learned early words like pickets, marches and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. Jimmy Reid was preached more than Jesus Christ then vilified as a class traitor when he started writing for The Daily Mail. 

Boab Bryant had been black-listed from all light-engineering work in the west of Scotland and had been forced down to London to find employment gainful enough to provide for his family (for a time, he was a mayonnaise mixer at the Heinz factory in West London). His trade unionism was political, involving industrial sabotage and wildcat strikes. Shop stewardship was hatred of bosses rather than careful negotio-amelieration and protection of custom and practice. No manager of discontent, he.

Bryant’s mother was told by eager neighbours “Jean, your man’s been sacked” before he’d even walked up the road. He’d called a strike over pay and conditions and his own membership told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine; GMB regional office had torn up his membership card before his very eyes.

Boab was the son of gentle Alan, and everything that Alan was Boab became the opposite. Alan the Rangers man, Boab chose Celtic; Alan the Tory, Boab moved to the extreme left. Alan, aspirant middle-class, Boab the downwardly mobile, eventually achieving the ultimate success of moving his family into a tower block on a Glasgow scheme.

It seemed that Boab Bryant was determined to swim against every tide that rolled before him.

Later as rather a senior Social Worker he fought for women’s refuges, even though the women themselves hadn’t really wanted him too, he fought for those at the very bottom of the socio-economic food chain. He even fought to have a print of Gaugin’s Two Tahitian Women on his office wall despite colleagues calling for its removal as obscene.  Later he was prescient in setting up furniture-sharing schemes and counselling wife-beaters in the wilds of Ayrshire and beyond.

He died, this mental, gentle, damaged man of honour, in the Socialist Burgh of Hackney in 2006. When he took his last desperate croaking breath in that sad but necessary hospice the thunder roared in the high summer sky.

First Steps

First steps in life are very important. Bryant thought of his first steps into the school system: Murray Primary in East Kilbride. On the very first morning this frightened, sensitive wee boy had literally shit himself then cried through fear and shame. To have earned the nickname ‘Shitty Knickers’ on your very first day at school is some achievement and maybe even unique in world history.

Years later the first steps into a pub. The fatal journey into the warmth, the bustling chatter, thud of dart on cork, click of cue on ball. The busty Asian behind the bar, pearly white teeth, when she threw a dart her top rode up exposing sleek woman skin. The roaring lads were all agog.

Bryant fell in with the Irish builders. There was Kango John who shook like a palsied man. If they’d have known of it they’d have said ‘Parkin sons, but they knew he’d become a prisoner of his work instrument; he shook in sympathy with it. ‘One Round Foley’ – named thus as he’d only ever been known to buy one round and that back in the slurry mists of another drunken time. Once, to charm a lady who resembled a pit pony, he’d treated his hair to shoe polish to hide the grey. Unfortunately for him, and possibly the pit pony, he’d been caught in the rain and turned up at the North Star resembling a tearfully dishevelled Black and White Minstrel who could have sung ‘Mammy’ and had coins thrown at him.

Jonny Currie, a hard little man made of Galway teak, a work-horse who laid the black stuff as if it was both friend and enemy that he defeated for fun six days a week. How these men survived was a question for anatomical science. Up at six to sit in vans smelling of stale Guinness, socks and farts so noxious that Bryant, on his first day with them was almost forced to leap out of the back doors into speeding traffic. Then work. “We’ll have the fourth pile today, sure. Get this fekker finished” says Currie, hardly a bead of sweat on his feral face. Bryant has been demoted at least twice on his first day. Too weak for the roller and tearing up the tar with the balance bar; useless with the spade, soft hands all bloodied and blisters. “You just fetch the water, make sure we’ve enough”.

Then pub. Not that we hadn’t been in one in the dinner hour. Consumption of beer by labourers goes back a long way in history to when it was a staple, and atavistically this indulgence remained as money wasted and sweated out within the hour. Every night was a session. Guinness and whisky, Guinness and Whisky. A German scientist once conducted a study of these drinking habits and concluded ‘they should all be dead in the grave’. Not these boys. Session after session, night after night. Carousing weekends up in the dancehalls of Kilburn. The National, The Gresham where never a dance was danced. Late licenses had them flocking. Then work, six days a week, never a day off sick, never a mention of ‘hangovers’ in the van, then huge greasy Ulster fry’s before making the start.

Bryant, Zelig-like, pretended he was an Irishman. He wasn’t Bryant at all, but Murphy from Cork. They, not really caring too much, indulged him in this sad fantasy. Trying to fit in.

Aside from Catholic procreation (I can only imagine of the drunken kind) the only other activity these men took a part in was attendance to mass of a Sunday morning. You’d see them rushing out of the chapel doors around noon, dressed in Puckoon-style shabby suits and ties careering down Leytonstone High Road for the doors opening at The Crown. From sacred to profane in world record shattering times.

‘The dancer that dances in the hearts of men’