Swept Away Like a Dream

What is life all about and who cares? Maybe it’s a dream, maybe it’s a penance. Lots of people have many different ideas. Who can say there is no God yet, equally, who can say there is? It’s all opinion. Maybe Brian Clough was God and we didn’t notice (winning two European Cups with Nottingham Forest was certainly the stuff of miracles). 

Everything ends and most folk are forgotten until some nosy bugger resurrects them. There they are dead thinking they’ve escaped with all their little secrets intact and someone like me digs it all up again. Uncle so-and-so was a uniped and the other yin wasn’t really his child at all. All my dead relatives hate me for this.

Just wee things like having a great aunt with the name Letitia known as ‘Lettie’. The quartet of sisters – Lettie, Nettie (Janet), Mary and Jeannie. Married to Jim, Jim, Willie and Sam (Sam and the first Jim being the brothers Bryden). Actually it was a quintet of sisters, the youngest being my mum’s mum, Maggie (Peggy), who was married to the handsome Robert. There were brothers too. Rob who was at the liberation at Belsen where he may have contracted the disease that killed him. “I’d eat shite if it would make me better” were the words he left behind. There was Joe who died by falling into an empty gas tank. And there was Tom of whom I know little.

 The mother of this tribe was Jeannie Weir who died only weeks before my mother was born in Airthrey Castle, Bridge of Allan, a maternity hospital for evacuees only days after the start of World War Two. The father was James Hamilton who died in the mid-1920s.

 A good Protestant family and me now a Tim. My ancestors will be on the red, white and blue side of heaven black-affronted by my apostasy.

Actually, that’s not entirely the case. My great-aunt Nettie committed the unthinkable long before me by marrying the Roman Catholic Jim McGuire who lived up to every stereotype by often lying drunk in his bed with his bunnet on. ‘The lost weekend’ Nettie cried him. They took on the parenthood of a Catholic mother’s illegitimate son (another Jim) and sent him to a Catholic school though he was moved to a Protestant one as he held the juvenile notion that the statue of The Virgin Mary was going to fall on him. 

The Tim, Jim, was a gas-lighter. No doubt often lit-up himself with his favoured cider as he strolled his patch applying illumination.

Mary’s husband Willie (Wullie) only had one leg. He’d lost one in the First World War and finally succumbed to gangrene during the Second. Mary was with her good-natured and beloved husband as he died and faced the twelve mile hike back from Erskine Hospital to Bridgeton Cross during the black-out. I imagine this the loneliest walk imaginable, her heart breaking and her little legs ever-wearier as she went back to tell her children and face the rest of her life alone.

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

We are dust and shadows.

So Young, So Young..!

My mother walked with me in my pram the five miles from East Kilbride to Hamilton and then back again. She was a young woman and lonely in her new environment, or perhaps it was the only way to stop me bawling the place down indoors. Nobody walks to Hamilton for no reason, it’s not that kind of place!

Trying to think my mother's thoughts that day nearly sixty years ago. Newly-wed to her rather unconventional husband, five-years-older and more worldly-wise. The hopes and dreams of a young wife. Would her wild man settle down and finally aspire to the things that she did? He seemed to view conformity with extreme distaste. But, for now, maybe commonplace thoughts like what he might like for his tea tonight or maybe some new outfits for the growing bairn.

The almost brand-new flat in East Kilbride, like a dream come true for her if a little out of the way. She’d lived her whole life (except for those few months when she was ill in London when they’d first married) on the west-central side of Glasgow, next street down from the buzz and glamour of Sauchihall Street, and now she was nine miles away in this pretty Lanarkshire New Town. You’d think she’d want to be as far away as possible from the hell of her family home, but she missed her mum and her sisters (even her Dad) in a mournful what-might-have-been kind of a way.

Her new neighbours – some transported from the slums of The Gorbals – were older and street-wise and Jean – for that was and still is my mother’s name – was somewhat daunted by them. In their basement Bath Street flat, she, her mother, father, two sisters and elder brother were somewhat protected from life in the poorer districts of Glasgow, some would say ‘the real Glasgow’ where gang culture was common and children still ran barefoot. Her dad was a motor mechanic and brought home (sometimes) a wage which allowed them to see themselves as a little ‘above’ that sort of existence.

These things matter in any society! Not snobbery, just the way of things. Her in-laws, though, they were a pair, at least the mother was. ‘A right yin’ they’d call her in vernacular. ‘Fur coat and nae knickers’. Already she’d upset her new daughter-in-law. Not good enough for her boy, it would appear. It was unspoken between them but it was odds-on that they’d headed for London after their marriage at Martha Street Registry Office for the simple expediency of getting away from their respective parents. Her father a raging alcoholic, his mother a woman of slum-cunning who perhaps wasn’t quite the full shilling! A semi-illiterate who’d grasped and fought her way out of the Shettleston tenement she was dragged up in to somehow through art and austerity achieve the respectability of a Garrowhill semi-detached and an aspirant husband who gladly kept out of her way.

She thought of these things as she strolled pushing the pram through the sun-treacled day, the country air filling her longs and offering bucolic smells which were new to her. This is nice, she thought, and somewhere in her frantic brain she supposed it was, though it crossed her mind that she was somehow running away from something, maybe even herself…!

The Ends of the Earth

It wasn’t that she wanted rid of him so much as she wanted to put as much geographical space between herself and him as she could possibly manufacture. In the first instance, this is just to another city a mere 60 miles away so it is no problem for him to commute on through and stay with her in her mum’s house where there also appears to reside a number of young women whose central occupation at once becomes startlingly apparent due to their almost constant partial nudity.

But now, she has taken a further step away from him by moving to a little town just outside St. Ives in Cornwall where she shares a beach house with an Australian surfer named Judd. No matter, he can still make bi-monthly visits but is somewhat disappointed to be offered the ‘guest room’ which he suspects is an only partially converted coal cellar outside the confines of the main house where she and Judd appear to share more than just the basic amenities.

But, this latest news! Venezuela! I know little of this country except roughly where it is. She is living among the Wayuu people teaching them ‘courtship dances’ and the harsh environment they live in on the Guajira Peninsula is notoriously difficult to get to and dangerous due to the firearm trading. Still, I trade in some Ernie bonds and, though it takes me a month, 

I manage to get there before being held captive in a disused drainage pipe. I manage to catch a glimpse of her dancing seductively for some of the elders before being despatched out into the scrubland after being whipped to within about an inch of my life.

Last I heard she was training to be an astronaut!

The Timid Happiness of Esme Collins

“I’m shit-scared of being happy. Closer it gets the

edgier I become”

The doctor looked at the gentle face of Esme Collins and the words ‘shit-scared of being happy’ meandered around his synapses in a lazy fashion as if there was indeed a peg for this coat to hang on but he couldn’t choose which door it was behind.

“What does happiness feel like to you, Esme?”

“Erm…nervous, anxious, sort of edgy” She squirmed in her seat as if to demonstrate the meaning of these words.

“It makes me feel like a calamity is just around the corner so I might as well bring it on myself, get it over with”

Dr Phillips, a good medicine man who truly wanted to help his patients, wondered what state of mind it was to be scared of being happy. Did that mean your comfort zone was misery? or just the numb blandness to be found in anti-depressants?

Dr Phillips did not know. He pretty much knew his parents had been ‘depressed’ though they didn’t talk about it in such terms. ‘Quiet desperation’ was a phrase that suited them perfectly. Old school. Just get on with it and tell no-one your business. Acquire the things of life that bring you comfort and never be late for your work. No-one ever spoke of this fear of being happy, but it probably applied none-the-less. 

He remembered his Dad, his ruddy cheeks and sad smile. Resigned to whatever it was he was resigned to.  What mad dreams had raged in his head? Was he ever truly young? People weren’t in those days. There came a time very early on when you started wearing the uniform of oldness. In his dad’s case a suit or a blouson for comfort.

Esme’s grandfather would have been wearing a bunnet at fourteen and pit boots.

Their two worlds knew not each other. And yet? The common bond of humanity.

He wanted Esme Collins to be comfortable in her happiness.

P.P.N-D.M-N.B.D.

The manager looked at the sick/fit note for perhaps the sixth or seventh time and still he thought he was seeing things. A shiver of terror ran through him: Early-stage Dementia! Maybe it had started? Maybe this was the way it began: reading words that are not there.

'Pre/post/no-deal/maybe-not Brexit Depression' then, in brackets '(P.P.N-D.M-N.B.D.)'.

He looked up at the face of Charles McGinty: this McGinty who was suffering from this strange malaise.

"This a joke, Charles?"

McGinty's face took on a measure of shock. He'd been off for two weeks and this was his 'welcome back' interview and he was being accused by Billy Morgan, his manager of 6 years in this paper pulping plant of basically falsifying a doctor's script-pad.

"Naw Mr Morgan. Doc says that's what ahv goat. Shouldnae be back really, still feeling dodgy"

“So, you’ve got this….” and here Billy Morgan had to look back at the script “this Pre/post/no-deal/maybe-not Brexit Depression?”

“Aye”

“And what’s the score with this…how does this manifest itself?”

“Well edgy, man. Really, really edgy”

“Edgy?”

“Aye, but really edgy” Charles McGinty emphasised the word really as if to illustrate something alien that had crawled into his underwear and started tickling his balls.

“And a doctor diagnosed this?”

“Worst case he’d seen, he said”

“So there are others?”

“Christ aye! There’s an epidemic. Huv ye no’ heard?”

Billy Morgan gazed out of his office window. There were children playing in a play-park, birds chirruped in the trees. On the horizon the sun faded on the late October day.

There was a queue outside his door.

The Magic Biscuit Barrel

My mother used to drag a reluctant me up Great Western Road every so often to visit an old neighbour from her Bath Street days. Nice auld biddy, a Mrs Purves: no family and left all alone in the world. They’d talk about old times and share funny stories. I’d sit sullen and emotionally cauterised by life (a posture I may well have maintained well into my forties). She’d give us tea and shortbread on fancy china crockery but she wasn’t a snob, she just had nice things (her husband had been a successful photographer).

One day, when we were making ready to leave, and my mother left the room to go to the toilet, Mrs Purves presented quite a snazzy looking biscuit barrel. It looked all gilt and gold and had frosted glass. It was the fucking snazziest looking fucking biscuit barrel I’d ever seen or ever would.

She beckoned me over to where she was seated on a comfy big chair like a throne and said ever so quietly..

“Listen ye wee scunner! Yer Maw’s good enough to bring you all the way over here to eat yer weight in ma shortbreed and aw ye can do is sit there looking as if yer gonna burst oot greetin’”

I was taken aback by this woman who’d suddenly turned into Big Annie fae the steamy. She had a look on her face that would have made a Clydeside docker gulp and apologise for breathing.

“Now I’m gonna gie you this biscuit barrel and tell you how it works”

What did she mean ‘how it works’? I was confused. You opened the lid and took a biscuit out if there were any. Maybe the auld yin was losing the plot.

She saw the doubt in my eyes and went on..

“It’s no’ any old biscuit barrel, stumur. Ye don’t think I’m givin’ ye any old biscuit barrel, do ye? This is a magic biscuit barrel. A magic biscuit barrel”

I was beginning to get really feart now and wished my mum would hurry back from the toilet. Her auld pal was talking shite about magic biscuit barrels.

“Me and ma Harry used to have great fun with this biscuit barrel”. Auld Mrs Purves was looking into the near distance and licking her lips at some memory that I really didn’t want to know about.

“All ye have to do is open the lid and make a wish into the barrel. But it can only be for good things for other folk, not for yourself. Harry would make one for me every Friday night and I’d make one for him. That’s the way it works, do you understand? Never for yourself, but what you wish for others might be good for yourself as weel. That’s all you need to know. Maybe you can think of some way of taking that peely wally look aff yer…O hello Jean, just havin’a chat with wee David here. My he’s a right wee blether”

My mum, having re-entered the room, looks at me quizzically and I revert to silent and morose mode.

“Why was Mrs Purves giving you a biscuit barrel, anyway?”

This is on the bus into town as we wend our way back home.

“Erm, I said I liked it and she said she didn’t want it anymore, so she gave it to me”

“You said you liked a biscuit barrel?”

“Aye…I mean, yes”

“David, if we won the pools, it would be hard to even get a murmur from you these days, but you liked Mrs Purves’ biscuit barrel’

I decided I shouldn’t, and didn’t want to tell her it was a magic biscuit barrel.

That night and fed up with a new game show on the telly, Probe My Anus with Bruce Forsyth, I crept away into my room in search of my new toy: the magic biscuit barrel. It was indeed magic, as every time you finished the last biscuit it would immediately replenish itself with Mint Viscounts, Caramel Logs, Tunnock’s Teacakes and Blue Ribands. Or, this may have been my mother’s doing. But, while it was empty, you could ask it to do anything.

“Go get the coal from the bunker” The bunker was away at the end of the block and one had to brave the cutting winds coming in from the Fenwick Moors while you heaped the family coal-bucket full of the jet black sleet stones.

Of course….fuck all happened!

Stupit auld cunt!

Doggin' It

When I was a boy growing up in the west, the best thing about going to school was most certainly not going there at all. For this reason, and a few others besides, I started off top class, first year and ended up bottom class, fourth year. I started it off with all the bungalow kids from the better catchment areas and ended up playing three-card-brag at the back of the class with kids from out where the buses don’t necessarily go.

Best thing of all though was ‘dogging it’ or, sometimes better still, convincing your ma that you were near fatally ill and should be kept off if only for fear that you’ll bring about a fresh plague outbreak (poking sharpened bits of bog paper up my nostrils was a favourite of mine for a while; the resultant sneezing bursts being alarming enough for your mum to lock you in your room and chuck in the odd bottle of Ferguzade every now and again).

‘Doggin’ it’ made you feel so free though and fearful implications such as grown men battering your lily-white hands with lumps of leather pushed determinedly to the back of one’s mind. Like a cross between Tam Weir and Jack Kerouac (funny place, Scotland) off you’d stroll around the streets of nearby shopping districts.

Pollockshaws and Shawlands were reckoned safe – though, I once - gloriously - got a wee lift home from the polis while truanting in the latter. They chased me under a big rhododendron bush in Queen’s Park and I got the nee-naw nee-naw back to the school, emerging from the Panda like some Cool Hand Luke character or Bogart as he beats the rap.

You’d head about the place with your head in some juvenile dreamland; half-cogitated notions of lonely housewives beckoning you over to their Mansewood palaces, naked flesh peeking seductively through bri-nylon nightwear. You’d dream about never going back to school at all (I kept this up for about a week once, virtually living in the woods behind the seventh green at Cowglen’s Golf Club, peeking furtively out at putters, more Huckleberry Hound than Finn. By this time I had turned into some non-carnivorous Sawney Bean muttering ‘a right rickmatic o’ fowk the day! Aw Booyang and gledgy-eyed’ without any notion of what I was on about and probably suffering from some mad delirium brought on by living in woods behind golf greens.)

You were always but always found out in the end. The police would get you or some nosey neighbour would grass you up to your mother. “Your David no weel, Mrs Wylie? Jist that ah saw him down the shops wi’ some other boys”. Us doggers had to keep away from the highways and byways of the generality to elude detection. I imagine Glasgow in the 1970s whose parks and tree-lands were scattered with school-avoiding teenagers of a certain social stamp all furtively keeking from behind trees and bushes: all Winston Smith’s attempting to confound the Thought Police.

The Factory

The factory smelled of grease and oil and, subsequently, so did my father. Grease oil and wood seared by a band-saw. It was an industrial smell with a timber tinge. My father’s hands would have nicks and cuts and often his nails were blackened by a fallen stack or an errant hammer blow.

In summer, I’d sometimes take him his lunchtime sandwiches - his ‘pieces’. I was a wee boy among big, working men and lads who played football on the lunch-time pitch. Hard, fast games though I’d be treated with kid-gloves and complimented for a well-trapped ball or a good pass.

 “Well played, wee man”, though even at eleven or twelve I was as tall as some of them.

 My Da was fierce at his game, often flying into tackles and, once, squaring up to one of the local hard man. I was as timid as the chaff from the hay.

 The factory was the place for men of steel.

I Want to Sing for Mrs Popeye

Everyone’s got a story. This is a truism, but, think of it. All the billions and billions of stories past and present. I just live in this wee town on the edge of Edinburgh, but this wee town, this wee sleepy hamlet contains enough stories for a lifetime. An endless episode of Jackanory.

What about the Bulgarian family. What is their story? They are the most industrious family in Portshee. Bin-rakers and beggars people cry them but, whatever it is they do, they sure graft at it. I put an auld hoover down by the bins the other day and they had it away before my back was turned. Fix it up and sell it. More money for the family back home. Many people deride them as ‘bloody immigrants’ but theirs is an interesting and somewhat sad tale of exile and toil. How would we like to be displaced in a foreign country leaving many of our loved one’s behind. I’ve heard folk decry them for hogging all the computers in the library for the internet but, really they are just contacting family and friends back home. Who could begrudge them that?

What about the auld fella at the bottom of the close, what’s his story? Poor old bugger can barely get about due to a seriously gammy leg. Does he mind that I’ll wait ages holding the door open for him when I see him hobbling home? Probably he does, as it makes him try to pick up speed. Probably hates my guts for doing it. Walking past his flat reminds me of when I worked in a bookies in the auld days. The acrid smell of fag smoke. Pungent like a diseased lung.

I was the very last board-marker in the UK. Marking up the prices and the results, red, blue and green. ‘Bags forecast from Fontwell’ would have me scurrying along my wee platform, marker pen at the ready. Sometimes you had to be like one of those mad cartoon characters, all arms and legs whizzing trying to keep up with the fanny on the tannoy thing – Derek Thompson it was – smarmy fuck and no friend to board-markers. Auld style bookies for auld yins soon to be dead, then the SIS screens for the new breed of mug. Death of the board-marker! No-one ever thought of that. The auld punter’s chum. They’d chatter away to the board-marker (probably trying to put him off; make him put up the wrong price) about the horses or dogs they’d backed or about their neighbours or their grandkids or whatever. Auld yins will spraff about anything.

There’s an auld yin in this town that dives about on his wee Motability go-kart like a mad thing. He’s got some sort of Tourette’s that makes his arms flail like a cowboy on a bucking bronco and his involuntary shouts at passing pedestrians are random and not always clear.

“Nyaaar grunt nyeef” he shouts and tries to turn it into a greeting, wee go-kart jerking and whizzing and spluttering as his arms wave ‘hello’ and ‘help’. He speaks often to Mrs Popeye who runs the wee caff of the same name. There’s a hairdresser called ‘Bluto and Olive’ next door which is run by a Kurdish bloke. There’s obviously some local, historical connection but I’ve never been able to get to the bottom of it.

Mrs Popeye speaks to everyone. Except me.

This town is split in two but tries to get along. There’s a posh side, and there’s a not-so-posh side. The posh side has craft bakeries and beer shops and twee little outlets selling artifacts nobody needs at prices only a few can afford. The not-so-posh side has pubs with all-night licenses and charity shops. It also has one of those ‘pay-day loan’ shops and a Co-op Funeralcare.

I have an inkling I’d be an asset to the funeral industry. I don’t do too well with living humans so I’d mibbe fare better with the dead. Also; I look bloody great in black and there’s nothing sexier than grieving women.

I’m a very sympathetic/empathetic sort of guy, actually. I’d be very good with folk when a loved one had just died. Take everything off their hands, give them that relief at least and be someone they could talk to. It’d be quite genuine too, nothing phony. I actually quite like people in extremis, when they’re vulnerable. It’s the run-of-the-mill mundanity day-to-day that gets me down. In relationships, I’m the greatest thing in the world when she’s depressed or upset. When she’s happy and in let’s-go-for-a-picnic-with-my-friends mode, then I fall apart and can’t take it.

Load of shops owned/run by be-turbaned folk in this wee town. An Asian mafia. They don’t half graft though, eh? Never off sick or late, always first to have your Guardian ready. Totally reliable and totally canny. Wee guy in the sweetie shop even sings you a wee Asian tune as he reaches for your baccy. ‘Anything else, sir? Papers?’ I always want to ask them about how they find it here, what do they think of Scotland and that, but you can’t really can you? Sounds like you’re asking how they like the weather. A wee bit seedy somehow.

I’d like to know, though. From what I can gather immigrants have mixed feelings towards us which they generally keep to themselves which, given the current political climate, is probably just as well. Be great if they were all on truth drugs.

“You Scots think you’re so great. Well, you’re a big bunch of wasters too shit-scared to even take control of your own country”

We might well get a shock if our immigrants were impolite enough to say what they really think.

Mrs Popeye speaks to everyone but I have no clue where she comes from. She has the prettiest smile and I think she may be Mauritian. Somewhere exotic-sounding anyway. Exotic and sunny. So how come she ends up in a wee Scottish town on the edge of Edinburgh? What’s the story, Mrs Popeye?

I want to sing for Mrs Popeye!

Brian Zeus and his Children of the Sun

Brian Zeus had two children whom he, or rather his wife had named. Valhalla, who was aged four, and Calendula, aged seven. He had attempted to disappear both of them at least twice. Brian’s wife Hettie had disappeared herself many years ago and was now co-habiting happily with a lapidary of some note on the Isle of Mull. His name was Malcolm and Hettie was no doubt the new gem that Malcolm was finessing. She liked being finessed and fussed about and admired. Thing was, she tired of if just as you had become utterly devoted to her. She didn’t like that at all.

Brian Zeus was not what people called ‘a good man’ He and his children currently lived on a beach in the north-east area of Edinburgh and survived on stolen Pot Noodles and bottles of milk snatched from doorsteps in the early hours.

The locals called him ‘Sawney Bean’ the maybe-mythical cannibal supposed to be born in East Lothian, not far away at all. Others called him Catweazle due to his straggly beard and hair.

The children were beach-urchins muddied with sand and salt, pungent of drift-plant and sea kelp. They’d have conniptions if you called them ‘urchins’. Urchins were hedgehogs of the sea, spiny and covert, Calendula and her brother were ‘children of the sun’, at least that’s what their father said, and his word was their law.

Brian Zeus had a great many opinions to impart to his children. He’d also taught them the meaning of the word ‘conniption’, so they enjoyed ‘having conniptions’ at the slightest provocation.

Calendula Zeus was rather a sullen little seven-year-old, untrusting and, to be honest, downright awkward and bad tempered. Her father called her Calendula Conniption, and her brother offered his own version of that appellation. ‘Calendulum Connipsy’ was what he called out to her as she stamped her feet and beat the fire with a branch. She not-so-secretly hated him for this.

Brian Zeus had been having difficulties with the proper functioning of the Frontal Lobe part of his brain, only he wasn’t aware of this, which, in some ways, was a blessing. It allowed him to continue believing that his actions were rational, and this in turn imbued his children with a certain confidence in his parenting (although, in their heart of hearts they knew there was something basically wrong with what had been happening in recent months). This confidence was not shared in the slightest by various key authorities like police, school, and social services.

Those were intent on coming down on Brian Zeus like a tonne of bricks. Sympathy for the poor man was one thing, but when his activities started affecting careers, well, that was a whole different ball game.

“Calendula, come away from the water. There’s jellyfish everywhere”

Calendula was at that age when a child can refuse to be stubborn, if only to test the boundaries, and if the little girl but knew it she was deliberately preying on a sense that her father was somehow losing authority over her, in fact, that she may even have the powers – though she wasn’t really aware of what they were – to further weaken his position. There exists something quite dark in children that they haven’t yet learned to deny and subsume. They really quite enjoy seeing their parents suffer at their own hands. Calendula wanted her Daddy to suffer because he’d driven her Mummy away.

“There’s a killer in all of us, you know?”

The children’s faces were lit up like stars by the blaze from the fire. Their father had this recurrent theme of their being killers in all of us.

“There’s a killer instinct in every living thing, even trees. An ordinary seagull would peck your little hearts out to protect their fledglings, maybe even for a piece of bread. They’re very vicious. But, human beings are the worst killers of all, because we know exactly what we’re doing when we kill. 

That’s why we must travel quickly and alone”

Valhalla picked at his nose and surreptitiously ate what he’d found there. Unlike his sister he had every faith in his dad, and hung on his every word as if they were sweets and teddy bears. His dad smelled of fudge and old smoke.

“Money is the root of all evil, son, never forget that”

The sea loomed darkly, only the moon could touch its cold calm. The trees hished and hushed, and somewhere a night-bird hootle-ood to no reply.  The chidren slept like logs in their little make-shift tents, perhaps it was the gentle rhythm of the late summer rain. Children knew little of danger undercover of a warm tent.

Brian Zeus knew little of danger because every day he was losing his mind that little bit more.

No-one but no-one could convince him why he should not stay with and look after his children in anyway he pleased, even if that meant a shared, feral, day-to-day existence where he would feed them, educate them, keep them warm and best of all befriend them.

They were the only friends he had any chance of keeping.

Rumpledumps

Mrs Gillespie smelled of bay rum. Whether this was some perfume she used or it oozed from her pores was a moot point. She wore a five o’clock shadow that Bluto would have been proud of and had forearms like Jersey Joe Walcott. Mr Gillespie was a thin, weedy bronchial chap who smelled strongly of latakia and seemed constantly to be placed half a stride behind his wife.

Speculation would be rife around the neighbourhood about the nature of their ‘romantic life’ and many a crude joke was shared over who took ‘command’ on such instances. That they owned and ran the local sweet shop was an incongruity on a par with Laurel and Hardy piloting an aircraft. Yet, if you wanted ‘penny dainties’ or ‘joob-joobs’, theirs was the shop you aimed for.

You could try to fool Mrs Gillespie but you were onto a loser. The game with sweetshops was to ask for the proprietor for something that either didn’t exist or way high up on a shelf necessitating the little ladder on wheels that they utilised.

“Quarter of Rumpledumps, please”

“Quarter of what?”

“Rumpledumps. They’re up there behind you”

And if they fell for this and looked for them long enough, you and your mates filled your pockets with chocolate bars and whatever was in reach. But, you never got away with this with old Gillespie who’d more likely say..

“Rumpledumps, my arse! Now get out of my shop before I clout ye”

There were rumours that she ‘procured’ young boys with evil and lascivious intent and any boy of about thirteen or more who secretly didn’t wish this was the case was a liar to himself.

At that age, a boy's fantasies run wild and strange, so that even thoughts of seduction by middle-aged sweet-mongers who looked like they’d just gone ten rounds with a lamp-post induced significant libidinal stirrings within youthful loins.

After all, Suzie Quatro was never likely to visit Carnwadric.

Dead Granny at the Spooky Church

Don’t ask me why I ended up sitting in the spooky church! Curiosity, definitely, but also some strange stuff happening recently: pictures falling from walls, things turning up where they’re not supposed to be. Hard to make any sense of and it feels foolish telling folk. I’ve just had this feeling.

Mostly women in this wee Spiritualist Church just back off the main road. Wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking. Wee grey building where strange things are meant to happen. Inside it’s clean and tidy with a wee alter-dias at the front for the mediums to ‘perform’ on. Wee blue hymn book on every chair. Women seem more prone to this stuff. Men say ‘pah! Load of rubbish’ Women say ‘guess what she told me, it’s uncanny’

There are a few men here but their body language is different. It suggests scepticism. Arms crossed, almost huffy look on the face: defiant.  ‘This wasn’t my idea, just humouring the wife’

Some of the mediums seem better attuned to their business than others. Folk are gasping and nodding in rapt affirmation. There have even been tears. I’m in a dwam of fascination. Can these people really make contact with the dead. If not, why would they claim to do so? What is it all about? They’re just wee wifie’s, there’s no money or fee involved. All of them appear to be good-natured, apple-cheeked auld granny’s, not your glamorous con-artists at all.

All of a sudden I’m nudged by the woman next to me. She nods toward the podium where I appear to be being addressed.

“Yes, you sir’. My insides turn to ice. I’m told to respond vocally so as to make the contact stronger with ‘the spirit side’. I clear my throat and offer ‘hello’, not sure who I am saying it for, the medium or ‘the spirit side’. Both, I assume.

“Have you a grandparent on the spirit side”

Well, given my age, this would appear a safe bet but I say “Aye…I mean, yes”

“Lovely looking lady. She’s got her blue jacket on and she’s pointing at as if to say do you remember her blue jacket?”

Again, somewhat of a generality, but she did happen to wear a sort of padded anorak affair which happened to be blue.

“Erm…aye, aye I do”

“Lovely smile and a good singer too”

Fifty/fifty bet I guess but it so happens she was. Aye at the Clyde Club. Couldn’t get her off the stage after a few whisky and gingers. Laughter from the congregation as the medium chuckles at my spirit granny singing.

“She has something to tell you, something she feels quite strongly about”

I wait breathlessly for this pronouncement from my dead relative. Some family chicanery. Yer maw wisnae really yer maw, it was me. Yer Uncle Charlie was gay like you thought.

“She says…..” Big pause here for effect. Wouldn’t be surprised at a drum roll from the beyond.

“She says you’re needing a haircut. It’s an awfie mess”

Aye, very good Granny.  Huvnae changed, eh?

Memories of a Far Distant Past

This was a time when you could still buy five Park Drive. When men wore bum-freezer jackets and the young women all looked like the Queen. The air was different back then: it was redolent of grease and the smell of fish and chip shops, sour pale ale, and farts parped beside coal fires. My grandparents smelled of apples and Pledge and welcomed you at the door cheerily then were parsimonious within. Sex had only just been invented and, somewhere near Blantyre a man saw his wife naked for the first time after eight years of marriage and filed for divorce.

Chimneys were set alight on a regular basis by burning sheets of The Citizen, a paper which regularly published my father’s socialism in letter form and his opinion on away grounds that he’d watched his beloved Celtic play at. For this reason, he was never again safe to visit Motherwell.

The weather was either gloomy or bright. When the wind blew it moved the slates on the roof. Public transport wasn’t necessary as one simply spread one’s coat like wings and hang-glid to nearby towns and back again with the reverse wind.

Men seemed perpetually drunk and women became expert at concealing black eyes with subtle make-up. If a wife had a ‘good man’ it meant he gave her ‘house-keeping’ promptly on a Friday evening then stayed at home to watch Z-Cars.

Kids sought out scrambles at the the weekend where substantial silver and copper was fought over then spent on gobstoppers and ice poles.

Auld Rosie the Jewish woman from upstairs traded pans of soup and potato fritters and matzo bread in exchange for loans for bottles of sherry wine. I wish I had been older and able to speak to Rosie and ask her gently about her life. Never easy being Jewish anywhere in the world, it seemed, always folk had something snidey against them. Maybe she had folk who hadn’t survived the Nazis? Maybe there was a reason for her proclivity toward the booze?

No-one seemed to be bored or depressed though there was talk that the women from the corner house had swallowed weed-killer and died a painful death. Everyone else made daisy-chains and got on with ‘things’.

Protestants joined The Boy’s Brigade, Catholics couldn’t even if they’d wanted to.

Language, certainly in the male world, seemed to be at a premium, like too much was to be given away by the use of words, though the women chirruped away like startled budgies when their men-folk were not around. Rumours spread around small communities like oxygenated bush-fires “Her man’s been sacked for organising a strike” “She’s left him and gone to live with yon gym teacher from the school. It’s the weans teacher, I believe” “Aye, tinned mince she served up. I heard he flung it at the wall”.

An aeroplane in the sky still evoked ‘ooohs’ and ‘aahs’.

Dougie Somner who later played for Partick Thistle crashed his Da’s car into the wall across the street.

My own father chucked a blazing chip pan out the kitchen window onto the wee verandah. You could still see the dent in the tarmacadam many years later.

One of the kids at school, a posh kid whose father was a doctor, invited me to tea at his house up near Brouster Hill. His house seemed like a gothic manse with a football-field-sized garden at the back. His mother served us egg and chips for tea. Surely not their usual fare (I envisaged an Elizabethan banquet with hog’s heads and quails eggs). Were they dumbing down on the food to accommodate the council house boy? Kindness or patronage? Even at a young age, I was class conscious.

As a child, I lived in an invisible world among trees and burns and the far-away (which was in reality no further than a five-mile radius). My imaginary friends, Solly and Bobo, were sufficient company to me. Where their names came from I have no idea but I was to fall out with Solly who emigrated to become a successful bookmaker in Australia. Bobo seemed to dissipate from the arena of my consciousness over time and as I got older, but I know he waits for me in the ether and, now in my fifties it is maybe time for a re-acquaintance, though I will now be like a grandparent to him, frozen as he is in time and on my whim.

I lived among trees and yet never knew their names. To me, they were giant climbing frames. Even to this day, I can size up a tree for climbing possibilities: where to put my feet for successful elevation. Yes, I think I’ll take that up again before it’s too late. Such a deciduous world, the verdant world of trees, and it’s true that they speak to each other, though their voices are not for human ears.

I think I saw a giant in the woods next to Murray Primary. A huge, spindly man with sharp teeth. He may even have looked at me. I couldn’t say; I was running away.

All my life, I’ve yearned to believe in ghosts and giants in the woods…

Paris or the Forest Glade

MacCallum had been on about it for weeks, months even, to the point where he was now forced to follow through with the idea. As far as he remembered - and many hundred pints had been swallowed in the meantime - he’d first broached the notion that he was one of life’s impulsive free spirits, was to impress Meeta the cute and curvy little Asian barmaid.

“Ach, I might just bugger off to the continent and busk my way around like I used to”

One week in France he was referring to when he’d come home after a  having run out of money.

“Ah get restless ye know, and have to just get away. Call of the wilds you might call it”.

The pretty barmaid who could barely understand MacCallum’s Glaswegian accent (she thought he was Australian) was barely listening to him anyway. She’d heard her fair measure of male shite over her years pulling pints and, anyway, to her literal Indian mind, if he wanted to be elsewhere why was he stood here annoying her. Let him chase his dreams not simply speak of them.

Other drinking buddies too were growing tired of MacCallum’s meanderings. “Aye, right” they’d begun to say when he started on his Wild Rover dialogue. Were they not well used to MacCallum’s lies and fantasies. Had he not told them he belonged to the Glasgow gangster clan of Jimmy Boyle and was down here ‘in hiding while some heat died down’. MacCallum, it was evident to all but the most suggestible, in his ragged denim jacket and torn plimsolls, was no more a gangster than he was a captain of industry or a Monseigneur in the Catholic Church.

And so, for prides sake if nothing else, he had to make good on his promise and come giro day had bought a one-way coach and ferry ticket to Paris, France.

They had a farewell drink for him the evening before, after insisting on viewing the ticket, and bade him a hearty trip, and only after he’d finally left for an early bed (about one am) did they confer on what a ‘silly tube’ he was.

MacCallum had barely walked an hour on the streets of Paris when, overtaken by a feeling of bleak, forlorn loneliness, he returned forthwith and was back in Leytonstone that very same night. They’d said at school that he possessed ‘no character to speak of’ and this was him proving it once again.

His problem now was to remain undetected for a decent length of time (say, a month) without being spotted by those that knew him. That way he could at least pretend he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, even if only to a limited degree.

In such a close-knit community, mind, this would not be so easy. The pubs were obviously out of bounds as would be the local shops, tube station, and even walking the streets would pose the obvious risks of bumping into someone that knew him, or someone that knew someone who knew him.

He’d either have to stay indoors for the duration, or….

Don an effective disguise.

Now, Leytonstone in those days was not unacquainted with the odd eccentric not to mention the odd weirdly dressed character. Early cross-dressers, proto-punks, retro-hippies, residents from Leytonstone House the local home for the mentally impaired, it was often hard to figure who were the sane and who were not.

There was Gimpy Ron who drew attention away from his extravagant, bow-legged sailors limp by wearing a threadbare old cabaret tuxedo he’d found in a skip outside a dry cleaners. Over the years it had acquired a culinary odour reminiscent of a brackish soup and what looked like a skid-mark motif as if he had been wiping cats arses with it. In a generous twilight he looked like an ageing Barry Manilow, if Barry Manilow had been bald, toothless and owned a pallor any self-respecting embalmer would be deeply ashamed of.

It was Gimpy Ron who was the first to espy the apparition that was MacCallum in disguise. He sees him scuttleshuffling through the trees in Forest Glade. Like some down-at-heel SAS veteran he hides-and-peeks half camouflaged by a green balaclava and makeshift battle fatigues (autumn-leaf yellow plus fours and a brown mock-leather bomber jacket, red baseball boots and a Scotland scarf make up the overall look).

MacCallum is kicking at the autumn leaves as if looking for lost keys but it’s actually an errant golf ball he seeks. He has a wedge club in his right hand with which he whips the lower branches of trees and shrubbery. He appears to be mumbling angrily to himself.

The Gimpster trundles away unevenly. His gimpy right leg strikes out sharply like a badly executed karate kick then folds back into even tread like a tram on a tram-line. His left leg has become so used to compensating that it is bowed like an archway. He appeared like a deeply arthritic Fred Astaire attempting to recreate better times. If this method of perambulation were an Olympic sport no one would watch.

He wonders at the behaviour of MacCallum whom he only knows through mutual friends. All the Scots of Leytonstone were acquainted by some strand or other, like they were a family of travellers from the north with a lineage in common. They had come to London to re-inforce certain stereotypes, principally drinking and fighting and ‘acting the cunt’. In this, they were performing admirably.

He would have to consult this syndicate of Celts (although many of them would hate to be named as such) about their ‘cousin in the woods’.

MacCallum had taken to spending the nights as well as the days in the Forest Glade. He had an old sleeping bag that kept him reasonably warm and he washed himself in Hollow Ponds each morning (and drank the water though it was reputedly ‘full of cow dung’). As for the herd of cows that came from he knew not where he greeted them cheerily and tore up clumps of weedy grass for them to eat. He’d began naming them but, with them being largely indistinguishable from one another he quickly became confused as to which was which and referred to them generically as ‘coo’.

“Mornin’ Coo”

The ‘coo’s’ were somewhat afraid of MacCallum. Perhaps the balaclava encouraged in them atavistic bovine fears of cattle rustlers.

His was now a chiaroscuro existence. He was a shadow in the lee of Whipps Cross hospital, a vast NHS Gormenghast of a place, it sprawled like a giant spider, one corridor alone – the central one – a mile long. He’d always liked hospitals but had no idea why. Maybe, he thought, because they were places of human caring and safe-keeping? This notion appealed to MacCallum. Hospitals contained the best features of humanity whereas outwith their domains the world could be a colder place.

MacCallum liked the old hospital best when it rained: it stained the red brick with a good soak turning it ochre and its black roof slates gleamed like black jewels. The rain pelted on MacCallum through the thinning leaves and he felt as free as the squirrels that scampered up the tree boughs. The nights were closing in with the changing season and the dawn was slow to rise over Snaresbrook courthouse. MacCallum had become expert at detecting its first blue-black stirrings. On a good day these turned to orange and then lemon and then the first hint of heat on the ground. He stretched his limbs and luxuriated in its warm glow.

Every week he had to visit the dole office on Hoe Street to sign on. Now that he was ‘no fixed abode’ he picked up his money on the day. He’d buy nuts for the squirrels and seeds and bread for the birds and ducks on the pond. For himself, he lived on a diet of porridge oats and honey and was quite happy until one day a delegation of three came to visit his little cubby hole in the woods.

“Fuck ye up tae, Davie. Yer a fucken laughing stock”

They’d brought a carry-out of about four dozen beers and two bottles of whisky (Scots never went anywhere under-stocked with booze, you never knew when disaster would strike and it would run out).

Tam Bain and the McCulloch brothers.

MacCallum refused a can that was offered to him.

“Take a drink!!” they all shouted at once. He took a drink and felt drunk after only one gulp.

“We a’ thought you were in Paris. Whit happened tae that idea?”

MacCallum shrugged an answer. The three synchronised exasperated expressions as if they were addressing a three-year-old that had just shit his pants…..again!

“I came back to live in the woods. Here in the Glade. At first it was just a way of hiding from folk who were thinking I was in Paris but then I realised that it was all meant to be. I’m much the happier chap living here in the woods and the ponds with just the beasties, squirrels and the coos. Who told you anyway?”

“Gimpy Ron” they all said as one.

The Gimpster, eyeing an opportunity for fame and a little financial award, spilled the beans to the Waltham Forest Guardian about ‘the man who lived in the woods’ and they had duly plastered the story all over their front page. This forced the police to arrive and evict MacCallum from his home in the woods.

Now he lives his sad old life of drinking and falling down a lot in public. He visits his animal friends when he can and, truth be told, he has achieved a certain notoriety. When he starts on with his ‘call of the wilds’ fantasies, even Meeta the luscious barmaid eyes him with somewhat renewed respect.

You never knew with MacCallum….