The Summer of '76

It was the summer of 1976 and the sky was filled with sun. Every bird on the planet sang a song and water became the precious commodity it always was. A blazing sky beamed on Epping Forest and the hollow ponds were dry as the grass in Africa.

He wore a post-Bay City Rollers t-shirt and a pair of purple baseball boots his mother had found in a dress-your-son-like-a-nob outfitters on Leytonstone High Road. There was the insidious stench of fresh cow shit in the air and stag beetles mated furiously on the steaming pavements.

The Wurzels topped the charts.

Crispy Pancakes were still plump and winsome. The laws of the market had not yet thinned their sauce to the consistency of Pipistrelle vomit.  Capitalism, in essence, is miserly. Shave another centimetre off a Bounty Bar every three years and charge twice the price. Make the kids pay more for less.

1976 was the end of innocence...!

Tam Bryant was sixteen years of age and this was his first year living in England, let alone London. His mind was in a fug. Since moving from Glasgow he’d become increasingly Glaswegian though this approach didn’t help when seeking to purchase things in shops or when buying tube tickets. The amount of times he’d heard ‘sorry, mate?’ and ‘could you repeat that?’ One time when he’d asked for a Daily Mirror he’d been handed a Toffee Crisp by the shop-keeper. His natural Scottish paranoia and sense of inferiority had kicked in and he wondered if they were taking the piss.

He wore his Celtic scarf at all times. He wore his cultural identity like a badge and had begun drinking accordingly.

His guardian angel, if such a thing had existed, would have questioned exactly why he was so sorry to leave his native city for it had never been very kind to him. A gentle giant with sticky out ears and an aversion to hand-to-hand combat of any and all types, he’d been bullied for years in and out of his various schools. Even some of his teachers had bullied him. They seemed to despise his cleverness and had stepped back and watched as he’d slid from the top class down to the very bottom where the pupils had played three-card-brag and picked at each other’s plooks.

The trucks rolled by on busy Whipp’s Cross Road and the eponymous old hospital peeped grandly through the branches of the Forest Glade. Further east, a drunk man in Walthamstow was being thrown off a bus for urinating in the aisle. London was a metropolis of little towns each with their own history and character. If Leytonstone was a Dickens character it would be Mr Fezziwig with a hint of the Havisham’s. A kindly place where some of the residents had a screw loose. A modest Bohemia on the edge of a dense forest.

Someone always knew someone who’d once toured with the guy who used to be in so-and-so. Leytonstone attracted social workers and schoolteachers. It housed retired dockers and psychiatric nurses who worked at Claybury Mental Hospital. Or they may have been employed at Leytonstone House, itself an institution for the mentally bewildered. You would often see denizens and staff wandering around its proximity pointing at traffic or mouthing oaths the meaning of which even they did not understand.

Tam Bryant would watch them and wonder if the inability to think and feel clearly and rationality and have folk look after you would in any way be a good thing. It seemed to him that life was too complex and full of hurt and humiliation. Incarceration may at least save you from the bulk of it.

The bees buzzed on the cotoneasters and high above a jumbo jet was whisking folk to perhaps cooler climes. The British clamoured for summer heat but when it came it often overwhelmed them. Old biddies at bus stops would moan ‘oh this heat, I can’t be doing with this’ while dressed in roughly the same apparel as they would be in October save the rain-mates.

Around the corner from the Bryant household (a three-bedroomed terraced council house on a leafy road) was a Hindu temple. In the autumn, the summer colours would be resurrected by the hundreds dressed in yellows and greens and reds gathering on the flat fringes of the forest where a giant tent would be erected for the Diwali festival. The grazing cows there would be especially safe among such a community.

If Tam Bryant was ever teased out of his emotionally cauterised state it would be to wonder at this bovine presence which often crossed the main road and down into the road where he lived. No-one ever seemed to question this event. Whose cows were they? And who came to take them back? Sometimes, and almost like mules, they stubbornly held their ground in the face of traffic and Bryant laughed at this inconvenience to motorists. Another of his father’s influences: he disliked cars and their drivers.

Tam had become un-moored from his family in a gradual way over many years. His beatings and humiliations at the hands of his peers was a secret he kept from them and this private shame had rendered him sullen and uncommunicative. He felt deep shame about himself and by extension those that had created him. The bullies had stolen more than simply his dignity, they’d stolen any normal relationship with those closest to him and, indeed, the rest of the world. It had made him a solitary individual with dark thoughts aimed toward himself. Friendships foundered in the wake of his self-destruction. Less hurtful that he destroyed them rather than face the inevitable rejection.

His thoughts since moving south to London were obsessively about how he could return north.

For revenge!

Somewhere on these bright streets, there was the chiming noise of bells. An ice-cream van played ‘Greensleeves’, a very tinny version. The children ran out of their doors as if from a house fire. The sun shone benevolently on young Tam Bryant. He barely noticed it.

Weeds and Nettles

The feeling was grief, pure and simple. A devastating grief that was somewhere in the post: it hadn’t had a chance to express itself. She wasn’t even sure she was supposed to express emotions. No-one in Scotland ever spoke about ‘emotions’. Emotions were for toffs.

The night was darker than anything. Black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat, as Wullie would have said. She almost might as well have been blind, just putting one foot in front of the other and trusting there was terrra firma for the next footfall. Her poor Wullie had died not an hour before in that far-off hospital. Wullie her love. Her lovely man Willie. Wullie her husband. William and Mary. Wullie Michie was finally and irrefutably no more but he’d left a wife behind to walk crying through the bleak, blacked-out night.

There had been a scorch of tears at his bedside. Complications from his long-suffered gangrene picked up in the last war. Blighted in the first while fighting, fallen in the second while at personal peace. He one-legged, she bow-legged.

“Legs like Queen Anne chairs” Wullie would exclaim.

And now these little legs had to take her the long miles home.

The home without a husband. The home without a father.

If Mary could have articulated it thus, she would have said that grief was like hunger, a hunger forced to feed upon itself. And it was an entity so much bigger than her little frame as she walked lonely in the night and growing and growing with every painful step. How could she hope to encase it? It was bigger than her whole life. This is what she would find.

The thought of her four children – and strangely, the wee one who had died – and her abiding duty to them drove her on, the dank water lapping gently beside her. Wullie had so loved their children and they him. They had thought his wooden leg was a toy when they were younger. True poverty was having your father’s wooden leg as a toy.

Erskine was fifteen miles west of Glasgow and on the south bank of the Clyde. She’d have to walk this distance then cross on the Jamaica Bridge to trudge eastward a further two miles. This would surely take her all night but at least the dawn may light her way into the big city.

Wullie had been in Erskine because it was there they specialised in military amputees and where prosthetics were designed and made. They made them from leather and willow for lightness. A basket-type casing from thigh to knee then a wooden spar down to moulded shoe-shape. It was called an ‘Erskine leg’ and was designed by the craftsmen who made the luxury fittings on the passenger ships that had been built in the yards all up the dirty, deepened river. Wullie’s leg had been designed and built by Clyde ship-builders.

He made ‘ooh arr, Jim lad’ noises like Long John Silver to delight the children and hopped around after them in the tiny room and kitchen above the chippie. Sometimes the smells from the chip shop made them salivate and their stomachs rumble. The dusky ambience of sodium street-lights. The dank chill in the air. The breath of words at tram-stops.

A person’s absence was eternal. Everywhere you were and would be would be without them. Everywhere you are they are not and everything will always remind you of them. The strange paradox was that, though they were never there, they were also always there. This was how bleak grief was. How cruel.

She walked on, her back sore, her heart anesthetised for fear that she may collapse among these weeds and nettles. She had to think only of her progress home to her diminished family.

Way, way in the distance she saw a dull light which she took to be her city.

Picture by Sisley

I thought that working at the National Gallery would be some sort of spiritual, artistic experience. I thought I’d wander nonchalantly around its august rooms offering sage pointers on early Italian frescoes and the Flemish Masters to visiting Greek philosophy professors and Judi Dench. Before long, having impressed my superiors, I’d be asked to deliver lectures to visiting Slade students on the mocking majesty of Magritte (all of this from a history of art paperback gleaned from a charity shop in Camden Town just the week before).

I thought I’d be Sister Wendy Beckett without the wimple spouting sagely and reverently about ‘The Virgin in Prayer’ instead of which by day three, I was bored absolutely shitless and wishing I’d never applied for the post of Gallery Assistant in the first place.

Not to mention the uniform.

I don’t like wearing uniforms (I would not have been a good Nazi) and once curtailed my St John’s Ambulance career before qualifying for one. Women they say love a man in uniform but you never see those calendars appearing in the local mall of hunks dressed in St. John’s Ambulance uniforms - or gallery assistants for that matter.

The National Gallery, especially in the main pre-Sainsbury building, is a labyrinth. The bowels of the place are a maze of tunnels and stairways which somehow lead back to the central staff dressing rooms and recreational area. It brings to mind what The Pentagon may be like underground: a subterranean spider-like grid where human skeletons are found in out-of-the-way runnels clutching documents never delivered. 

They told me on recruitment that it could take me several weeks to be able to get used to its wynds and corridors and they were not wrong. Venturing forth from the central pod you feared could lead you to musty rooms where Sir Anthony Blunt had met his final end a la Edward the Second, the red hot poker now bleak and cold.

Other than the beautiful image of a prayerful Virgin Mother by Sassoferrato, her robe a brilliant blue, her eyes downcast in solemn shadow, the other picture that stuck with me was Sisley’s ‘Seaside: Langland’, one of a serious of studies he’d painted off the Gower Peninsula in the 1870s. It’s just an impressionistic image of a large boulder in a choppy sea but it is a captivating work. A pointillist mix of blues and purples and greens and greys expertly contorted into the figurative by a master. I looked at it closely every time I was posted to that particular little Sisley exhibition space and was mesmerised by its magic. But, there are limits…

I left on the fourth day and never returned. A tear of shame fell from the Virgin’s eye.

Wee Tam the Lady-Man

I’d just got on the bus – a number 4 to The Jewel – and there he was sitting there. My wee mate, Tam, dressed from head to foot as a woman; make-up, wig the lot. I was stunned and just stood there in the aisle holding everyone up. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d seen Hitler sitting there perhaps on his way to ASDA to peruse the vegetarian options.

‘Scuse me’ and ‘tut tut!’ I was getting from the auld yins behind me: the cast of ‘Cocoon’ that generally swarmed onto the buses at this time of day, probably on their way to ‘pissy-pants’ day at The Odeon. They'd get in cheap and have a free cuppa and a biscuit while everyone blethered instead of watching the film. Buggered if that’s what I’ll be doing when I’m that age, I’d rather fling myself off The Bridges and be done with it. Already because I’m past fifty I get those ads for funeral plans and Viagra. Seems like once you get old, capitalism just can’t wait to remind you about the availability of bendy slippers and incontinence nappies.

But, Wee Tam though, eh? I was sitting down by this time just a couple of seats back from him/her and I have to admit he/she looked quite glamorous, better than he ever did as his more usual male version. Wee Tam was not known for his sartorial elegance or anything like it. Trackie bottoms and the same jumper he’d been wearing for years and had never washed. Auld denim jacket and a Hibs bobble hat when it was cold. Now, as Tam-ess, he looked all primped and trim like he’d spent ages in front of a mirror before his public appearance. Nice checked woollen coat and the hint of stocking at the knee; heels not too high but enough to accentuate an unexpectedly shapely calf.

I sat there wondering how this had come about. How long had my wee mate Tam, who I’d known since we were at school and had been drunk with a hundred times, how long had he been doing this - this cross-dressing? Because that was what they cried it these days - Eddie Izzard and the Ladyboy’s of Bangkok and all that - cross-dressing! All very acceptable in these PC times, it seemed. But, in Lochend? At his age?

I knew he knew I’d seen him as he’d fixed his gaze to look out the window as if maybe that would prevent me approaching him. But, of course, the second the seat next to him became available I had my arse on it. I could feel him tense as he sensed my presence. I noticed how shiny and sheer his stockinged legs were up close and felt an alarming stirring in my loins. If I copped off with this version of Wee Tam, would that be allowed? Could I claim I didn’t know it was him? I booted these thoughts violently out of my mind and gently nudged the wee fella.

‘Heh, Tam”

He shrugged his shoulders huffily and half turned around as if the effort was just about to make him boak.

“Aye whit?”

Even though I knew fine it was him the confirmation still shocked me. Must have been some part of my mind that still hoped I’d been hallucinating or maybe dementia had kicked in early.

“What’s the score ma pal?”

“Whit dae ye mean?”

This retort had me coughing and choking in disbelief and I had to take a swig from my wee bottle of American Cream Soda to ease my throat. The audacity of his statement! I felt like saying ‘I mean why is it raining’ or ‘why is the sky blue?’

“Whit dae a mean? Kin ye no’ take a wild guess?”

“Aw aye, the claes and that”. He fixed his gaze on the world outside. They passed what used to be Meadowbank Stadium but was now a pile of rubble. Memories of Lachie Stewart in 1970 at the Commonwealth Games winning his big race. Down past Jock’s Lodge where the two friends had shared many a laugh and staggered home together to their respective drums or stopped at one or the others with a massive carry-out enough to drown a horse.

“Ye look nice by the way”

Head jerks round rapid-style as if to fight.

“You taking the piss?” The eye-shadow, the pancake, all expertly applied. The wig framed his face making him appear demure but sexy with it. Come to think of it, Wee Tam hadn’t had any sort of relations with a woman for many a year, unless, that is, you counted Mad Lizzie from the high flats but you couldn’t call that a relationship. If it was, then Mad Lizzie was in a relationship with half the men on the scheme (and some of the dugs as well if gossip was to be believed). 

His last girlfriend had been wee Annie who’d died in that bizarre lawn-mower incident. Bloody thing had blown up with her sitting on it. First female parkie in Scotland. Rumours that it may have been a male rival usurped for the position that tampered with the petrol tank. Her demise had broken Tam’s heart as they were meant to be married the following year. Was this current behaviour some sort of strange reaction?

An uncomfortable silence between them as the bus trundles through Northfield past the house that Ken Buchanan had grown up in. The great boxer had once said that it was the bullying he suffered here that led him to take up the fistic art. Tam uncrosses and re-crosses his legs. The sexy rustle is unmistakable and I imagined creamy, welcoming thighs.

“Ahem. So you jist oot for a wee jaunt?”

He grunts in affirmation.

“As weel to have these things oot in the open, dae ye no’ think?”

A further grunt.

It dawned on me then that my wee mate, Wee Tam was treating me like I was a bloke on a bus trying to chat him up. He was giving me the cold shoulder. The hip-swerve. The brush-off. The deaf-ear. Some of the auld yins had been whispering about this possibility since I’d pounced on the empty seat leaving one of their number to stand in the area designated for prams. They thought I was a stalker. A nuisance. A sex-pest. A predator.

It wouldn’t be long before one of the auld poke-noses told the driver and I’d be ejected from the bus and on some sort of register before I knew it.

They didn’t know that this was Wee Tam Findlay dressed in drag and I couldn’t tell them. Dressed as a middle-aged Judy he may be but he was still my mate and I wouldn’t embarrass him in that way.

Tam, in his new sultry, almost pouty demeanour turned to face me full on and whispered provocatively if a trifle hoarsely.

“Is this no’ your stop?”

And he was right, it was. The bus moved slowly on after I’d got off and I swear I saw one of the old coffin-dodgers replace me in the seat next to Tam who gave the auld yin a beaming smile and his full attention.