My Life As A Miniature

If my parents had followed the Beckham Model of being named after where one was conceived I would have been named Clydebank Wylie, an appellation which may not possess the same cache as Brooklyn Beckham but does own a certain industrial robustness which could have pleased my militant socialist of a father.

My mother was an intelligent if naïve young woman who was convinced I was indigestion almost up to the very minute of my birth. Her own father was a roaring rage of a man too often too drunk to love. He came from a Glasgow which may or may not still exist where domestic abuse and tyranny was a lesser shame than having the police at the door. He reigned with self-righteous terror and left my mother to a lifetime of dark anxiety. My father if he gave her nothing else gave her his zany humour and a rock to hold onto when the waves came a-crashing onto the timid, shifting sands of her soul.

My first and probably best friends were imaginary. Solly was a young Jew with ambitions to become a bookie and Bobo who was somehow significantly younger would later go on to be the first imaginary friend, certainly in East Kilbride, to identify themselves as ‘recreationally transgender’, a concept so alien to the mores of the little New Town that he was formally banished to live with the imaginary wolves on Fenwick Moors, an experience he would not survive.

So, Solly and I moseyed around the fields and woods reminiscing about our abandoned friend and discussing likely favourite’s for the upcoming St Leger. In many ways, he was more like a dodgy uncle than an imaginary friend and I finally escaped his clutches when he emigrated to Australia where he was to be imprisoned for certain fiduciary discrepancies involving ‘young prostitutes’.

East Kilbride seemed a verdant and bucolic place to a little boy who understood the meaning of neither of those words but possessed even at a tender age the soul of a poet. In later life I would get to visit the other four ‘New Towns’ in Scotland’s Central Belt and decide that EK got by far the best deal in this particular arena of town planning.

Irvine, Glenrothes and Livingstone were grim and doughty enough but Cumbernauld was surely ‘built for a bet’. Constructed about a dozen miles north-east of Glasgow in the hope that no-one would ever see it other than its inhabitants; it represents a concrete blot on an already bleak landscape. Betjeman didn’t include it in his poem only because Slough scanned better. The fact that it won ‘architectural awards’ is only further proof of a Masonic plot in this strange country.

I seemed to spend much of my callow youth ‘catching bees’ a pursuit which, on sober reflection, was inane and useless and quite possibly cruel but none-the-less pleasurably time-consuming. Summer days were long and sunny and compensation for the crippling cold winds that flew in from some Arctic Siberia via the Fenwick Moors to the west. These winds invalidated the need for such as trains and buses. If one wanted to traverse to Glasgow one just opened the flaps on one’s bomber jacket and gusted the nine-miles like some latter-day wind-surfer.

‘Templeton’s Corner’ my father coined it, a place in the centre of town where one turned into Princes Square as if into a wind tunnel and stopped in one’s tracks mouth gasping like a dying goldfish and leaning Pisa-like into its relentless draught. It was the perfect excuse for being tardy for work “got caught in the wind” and this was accepted unquestioningly. Templeton’s was one of those pre-super supermarkets where one was encouraged to self-shop. It was the first place I experienced the thrill of self-shopping without paying.

The world was a curiously dull place back then in the early sixties. It is a cliché to describe it as monochrome but in memory it often is: even the dog turds which proliferated on the pavements were somehow grey, wizened and wasted and kids waggled bits of it on the end of sticks to threaten and tease. Even the ‘swinging sixties’ seemed to pass us by “Didnae happen in East Kilbride, son” and the only drugs on offer were Guinness and Valium and maybe a pickled onion with your chips as a treat.

Drunk men (and women) were in abundance and one could see them staggering blindly and hopelessly but always, somehow, finding home where a wife had been kept waiting, mince-themed meal baked to a frazzle in the oven but still not above criticism by the sozzled king. “Is this mince fae a tin” he’d howl as if that was nature’s worst aberration: tinned mince. Give tinned mince tae yer man fur his tea and you could no more disrespect him if you took up prostitution and traded from the pavement outside..

Teatime conversations could revolve solely around the quality of mince.

“This mince fae Bryant’s is no’ bad, Eck. I’ll mibbe get it again”

This last is a question that hangs in the air like it was a petition to abolish slavery or to return to the Gold Standard.

“Aye, it’s no’ bad, hen” says he whilst thinking that the butcher Bryant is a notorious womaniser who is aye making suggestive jokes about the girth of his sausages.

“But you know I like the Dewhurst mince. I know he’s further away but there’s never any gristle”

The matter is now closed!

I started school, and from then at the age of five until the age of sixteen when I left I hated every single painful minute of it. I left having learned how to read and write and add up and subtract but apart from that the only thing I learned was that I was prone to being bullied and that Richard Nixon’s middle name was Milhouse. A paltry reward for eleven years spent.

On my first day at Murray Primary, I stood out somewhat due to my apparel. I was the only one wearing bikini bottoms and a flying helmet and they clashed with my faux-leather moccasins. My father told tales of his own childhood when his mother sent him to school wearing one welly and a clog and his trousers patched with pieces of carpet and now I was following on in the family tradition of being roundly humiliated at school.  He scared his little tormentors off with a swinging potato laced with razor blades but I owned no such chutzpah. I stood there in the playground startled already the internal bruise of shame forming as boys and girls in uniform grey pointed at me and laughed.

Like most towns in the west of Scotland East Kilbride was a sneaky place certainly when it came to religion. Everybody had to know '‘who was who?’. It was common knowledge that if one’s family was of the Shinto persuasion there was no way your son was getting to join the Boy’s Brigade. Similarly, Zoroastrians were not welcome at the local Knights of Saint Columba bus trip to Saltcoats.

I was entered into the world of Cub Scoutery and suitably apparelled with woggle and my Uncle Bill’s old army brogues (at least four sizes too large) I popped along one dark-set night to join Akela and the other troops. It showed that even at such a young age I was heavily influenced by my father’s far-left views and Republicanism when I refused to sing the traditional God Save the Queen at the end and was asked to leave…..for good!

I balk at this show of defiance now as I was such a timed child; sheltered even and untutored in the often cruel ways of humans and from such an early age I am already isolating myself from their company. I’m using phrases such as ‘funnily enough’ and employing words such as ‘elegant’ to describe the playing style of certain footballers and this is not acceptable to my peers. They look at me as though I derive from a separate species.

My neighbours are only of interest to me now at the end of my life. My parents perhaps knew them only to be the usual bigots and gossips “Your man’s been sacked, Jean, for causing a strike” but I now find I owe them greater depth. Take old Rosie upstairs. An old-before-her-time Jewess and only twenty or so years after a war and a holocaust; did she have friends or relatives who were somehow fatally involved? Was she a spinster due to this? No-one ever said.

Rosie was a not-so-secret imbiber of the ‘electric soup’, that wine whose grapes if they were ever trodden upon at all, it was with feet shod in smelly socks. Emva Cream, Commondary St John for those flush with rent rebates. Lanliq and El Dorado for the down-at-heel. Rosie would borrow ten bob from my mother in order to buy herself a bottle but she’d always return it and there would appear the added bonus of a plate of fritters or a pan of greasy soup left at our door (also Matzoh bread which was as alien to us as dressed crab).

Others up our wee ‘close’ seemed nondescript enough but were either poisonous or kindly in their own way. Some had been slum-cleared from such as The Gorbals and were therefore a little more hard-edged than my parents who had emerged from the upper-working and lower-middle classes (my mum would relish the respectability inherent in these social descriptions, my father would deny them to the hilt and move the conversation on to something else – the privations of Trotsky in his prison cell, perhaps!).

Some, like also-old-before-her-time Mrs Gillespie from the first floor retained the old tenement habit of ‘windae-hingin’’. Thus, she would lean on her sill and bawl conversation across the street to another of her type in frighteningly broad Glaswegian too rough-hewn for many of us more genteel types to do more than guess at its fundamental meaning.

I had some version of night-terrors as a youngster. I would wake up unbidden in the night and run about the house babbling anxious nonsense for which my father would profer a light slap on the chops until I was free of fear again and put back to bed.  My father was forced to travel to London town to acquire gainful employment after attempting to start a wild-fire strike at Satchwell’s, the light-engineering works where he was Shop Steward’s convenor. Even the rank and file voted him down and he was summarily dismissed and effectively blacklisted from work in the area.

In London, I am told by my mother, the old man worked as ‘a mayonnaise mixer’ at the Heinz factory out in Acton, the town where he stayed with his young brother and his friend. My mother and I were left to fend for ourselves on the meagre pounds he could send us, some welfare and the NHS orange juice we collected each week. My mum would take me in my pram on long five-mile walks to Hamilton and back provided the wind was not wailing and the rain streaming down the gutters.

One day a young lad named Rab Russell joined our class and decided to tutor me in the ways pf playground scrapping which I had heretofore had no experience of. Despite my bizarre and decidedly effete appearance (spangled ‘halter’, tartan mini-kilt and my father’s old work-boots) it was decided by the rest of the boys in the class that I was the ‘best fighter’ despite never having raised a fist in anger. 

This decision was merely based on my height but we were all soon to be disabused of this fanciful notion by Master Russell repeatedly bouncing my head off the playground tarmac (I, pathetically, claimed victory for ‘first blood’ as he’d grazed his fist while punching me).

I had let everyone down: the school, my class, the town, the region of South Lanarkshire through being erroneously cast and playing the part so very, very ineptly.

Visits to Glasgow were frequent as my Granny had at last vacated the marital home and was living in a ground floor flat in a tenement slum just off Main Street, Bridgeton which she shared with some unfriendly rats and the odd cockroach. She knew Bridgeton well and had the odd sister nearby for company and support.

Bridgeton Cross was best on dark nights, the cold air redolent of chip vinegar and stale beer. The street lighting gave the streets a funereal gloom and the muffled conversation of men intruded as pub doors opened and closed. Were they arguing? Glaswegian men spoke as if they were constantly declaring war but were probably just telling a joke. Chip shops cast Hopper-esque luminescence on black moon-spangled pavements and the odd drunk staggering home to a world weary wife and weans expecting fritters.

Wee Davie owned the tiny sweet shop on Madras Street. He was a kindly wee chap as a sweet shop owner should be and he liked the children that, in large part, provided his custom. He loved to give me a wee sweetie for free just because I shared his name. “Mrs MacCallum’s wee grandson, Davie, just like me” he’d chuckle and a chocolate-covered dainty was mine even before I’d chosen from the ‘penny tray’. Only he and I (and a tiny woman called Mrs Crumb the ‘pea-shooter’ woman) knew of his secret identity as a verse-quoting superhero, the scourge of the criminal classes and local Celtic supporters (the difference between the two he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, always distinguish).

Resplendent in Union Jack balaclava and the very tiniest briefs on which frontage was hand-stitched a bejeweled Red Hand of Ulster he emerged from behind jars of Soor Plooms and Midget Gems like some tiny, semi-naked John Knox ready to fend off fiends and Fenians alike.

“Half a league, half a league, half a league forward” he bawled while waving a kiddies plastic sword and riding his white milk-float in the general direction of the Calton where the legions in green would congregate at their Churches of Rome.

The next day he was back at his counter casually flirting with auld rain-mated wifie’s and chucking wee lassies under the chin.

Wee Davie, defender of the true faith!

Areas of Glasgow are weirdly delineated with boundaries a secret known only to inhabitants and near neighbours. You can be in Bridgeton one minute and ‘The Calton’ the next but it’s best you know the difference and don’t stray too far from your own ‘bit’ unless you want to risk ‘a doing’. This can be for reasons of religion (Bridgeton, for your information, is known as a Protestant area where a certain football team is definitely favoured, The Calton is known as a Catholic area where the other team is tops) or just for the sake of it.

Youths and young hardy men will start a gang merely to defend their own territory for no other reason than it’s theirs and they feel they should. Hence Glasgow gangs will denote an area; Maryhill Fleet, Bridgeton Billy Boys (area and religious affiliation), Govan Young Team and so on. Many of these gangs are just boys messing and having the odd fight with a rival gang, some are more serious with serious crime-committing gangsters involved who will end up notorious guests of the Scottish prison system.

As a youngster of maybe eight or nine I was ‘initiated’ into the Young Kilbie. This involved being thrown down a small incline next to the football pitch at the back of the school (I vaguely remember it may also have involved stealing fireworks through the back window of the local newsagents). East Kilbride has never felt part of ‘Glasgow proper’ and its violent notoriety and this would be just another attempt to toughen up its image The trouble with the YK, I think, was that there was no rival gang with which to scrap!

I wandered through school as if in a haze and due to reduction in status certainly in pugilistic terms I had somehow decided to become the class clown and the very bane of teachers old and young. This was the sixties and at least one of our teachers would turn up mini-skirted. For us pre-pubescent boys this was fabulous and exciting though we couldn’t quite work out why. My wee friend Wullie’s mother also fascinated me. When I went to his door to ask him out to play she’d often answer in some low-cut housecoat or bathrobe of some sort and the dark delve of her bosom would fascinate my early predatory eye.

Behind the ‘washing green’ of our block of flats was a large plantation of young fir trees. This forest seemed to me to be vast and dark but really it only reached down the hill to the little swing park and the burn that ran gently by it (I would ‘jump’ that burn at its every turn and soak my clothes in the process much to my mum's bemused annoyance). Kids populated this enchanted forest like ants in a colony. Games of 'hide and seek' or ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine’.

It was a freer more innocent time and no-one knew the word ‘paedophile’, it never even entered our heads that we’d be abused in any way. The relationships between random adults and children seemed far healthier in those days. An adult may give you ‘a wee few bob’ or a sweetie but certainly didn’t expect anything dodgy in return. Of course, what I had no way of realising at the time was that East Kilbride behind closed doors was absolutely awash with every kind of kinky perversion imaginable. Mr and Mrs Petrie across the road, she of the heavy coat and the string shopping bag, he reeking of Ralgex, were at it on a nightly basis with every kind of sex toy on the market – in those days that meant a jar of Germolene and some clothes pegs - but you couldn’t hear them for sound of the ice cream van.

Speaking of adults, it was around this time that I became firm ‘pen friends’ with the very well-known pop musician Ringo Starr. He’d visited our little school on some charity event (‘Throat Lozenges for Africa’?) and I’d been introduced to him as my middle name is ‘John’ and this for some reason made him laugh and beam his lovely smile at me.

He’d write to me often from faraway places such as Hull and Australia, sometimes airing his little grievances about other members of his group; ‘George steals all his hair gel’ and ‘Paul farts all through the night’. We lost touch when he married Barbara Bach from The Dukes of Hazzard as she became jealous about our little intimacies and what she called our ‘toilet humour’. I often think of him and am glad to read he’s off the drink and no longer ‘sniffs the crack’. It’s a horrible habit especially when it’s the first thing you reach for in the morning.

Visits to my paternal grandparents were frequent. There I’d be in my spinning bow-tie and tartan lederhosen skipping with my father (yes, he’d be skipping too) all the way up the hill from Clarkston station to Ferineze Avenue and his parents detached bungalow which gazed over the entire vista of steaming old Glasgow. The elder Wylie’s were well on their upward rise, he an engineer of mining equipment she a workaholic to whom ‘every penny was a prisoner’.

My Granny had French polished coffins at Parkhead Cross and was now cleaning floors at a nearby school to save and save toward the next rung on the ladder. The youngest of eight from slum-land Shettleston she’d somehow secured in marriage this smart young dandy in spats who was at least six years her junior. God bless her in heaven but my auld Granny was no oil painting and had the social graces of the lowest navvie, so how did she manage to net such a catch? And where on earth did they meet: he from good Highland stock and semi-respectable Kinning Park and she from the lowly far-east of the city? It remains a mystery but something I ponder often.

Their house was spotless and strictly her domain my grandfather endeavoring as always to be anywhere that she wasn’t would be tending his immaculate gardening or making sumptuous sherry-wine in his garage. Clarkston is the kind of place that doesn’t change much over the decades because it doesn’t need to: it was built for what it is; a sturdy, residential area for folk who no longer needed, through the accumulation of wealth, to dwell among the hoi polio in the inner city. This was the ‘aspirant belt’ and had the golf courses to prove it.

I just took all this for granted as a young one not yet introduced to the subtleties of sociology. My Da’s parents were proficient social climbers while my Da wanted to smash the system that allowed such ambitions. My father was actually intentionally ‘downwardly mobile’ a fact that must have slowly dawned on his young wife who wanted nothing more than modest respectability. What was she to make of this madman who seemingly wanted to destroy any semblance of his relatively privileged upbringing and replace it with proletarian glory?

My Granny and Granda were too odd a couple to be any sort of success on the social scene, assuming they even wanted to be (I suspect they did a little). Auld Alan was conventional in the extreme (an oxymoron, I know). Bowler hat, Mason’s apron, he dressed ‘old’ while only in his forties. Silver-haired and ruddy-faced, he voted Conservative and supported ‘the Rangers’. His wife, auld Mary Wylie nee Mathews could barely read and write, got her words wrong, had a strange stuttery neighing laugh and spat at you like a goose if you upset her enough. She could cause a blazing argument in an empty room and consistently embarrassed her husband with a variety of uncouth outbursts in inappropriate places. On being offered a cocktail in a posh restaurant in Tenerife she’d loudly exclaim to the waiter “this drinks fu’ o’ flooers, son” and cackle madly while her husband crimsoned beside her.

When my mum and dad were married and were off to London and a new life she saw them off at the bus station bellowing out advice to my young mum “Remember, hen, yer a wummin noo”. My mother would not join us on these visits to Clarkson through fear of her and her barbed comments.

My permanently indolent Uncle Billy, nine years my Dad’s junior, would be there sprawling too close to the fire and unaware that his legs were cooking. Probably he was grateful that the fire was on at all and determined to make the most of it. They were not mean with their smiles and welcomes and you always got a nice meal (silverside seemed to be popular) but money was their king for sure. My father in the late-ish nineteen fifties had been a conductor on the Glasgow trams. A certain shift would end at Newlands garage from where he could head for home with his takings. The auld Maw would pinch some of these tanners and shillings right out of his bag as he slept letting him run the risk of dismissal and worse. It is also said (and it was probably true) that she only took me out in my pram so as she could hoover up the goodwill ‘wee couple of bob’s’ that it was customary for Scottish folk to give to ‘the wean’.

When I smell roses I immediately think of my Granda: apples and roses was his smell and the smell of their house (along with furniture polish). He grew great big blooms and, knowing him, he probably won prizes for them. He was one of those chaps that could turn his hand to anything and would have done it well and expertly. This, I think, had a profound effect on my Dad from a young age: his old man was a hard gig to live up to and my Granny telling him ‘you’ll never be the man your father is’ would not have helped in the least. In later life, my Dad’s temper would be severely tested by even so much as an MFI kitchen unit.

There was a melancholy about my grandfather, an air of wistfulness as if somehow his life had disappointed him. Certainly, it was apparent that his marriage gave him no happiness although there must have been comfort in his nice house and garden. My dad told me of long six-month durations when his parents didn’t exchange a word to one another: she in the house, he elsewhere and only coming together for meals and bed-time. ‘Quiet desperation’ indeed but a show of solidarity for a family visit.

I remember these old days with some fondness. It was a time when we could leave our doors open; we got robbed a hundred and seventeen times in one year but we could leave our doors open. Pleasures and pastimes were simpler then. As a Christmas gift one time – I’d be about seven – I was given a stick and a handful of porridge. I loved that stick and still have it now (does it still retain a faint whiff of shite at the end? God knows I impaled enough of the stuff!). Back then I would use it for chopping down ‘jaggy nettles’ before I took to setting them alight and causing major fires.

There was no Political Correctness whatsoever back then, in fact, the opposite applied. You were free to abuse whoever you liked in those days with perfect impunity. My mother and father had long been devotees of Shintoism and we got hell from the Zoroastrian mime-artists that lived across the street.

They would shout “See you and your ritual bathing, ya Shinto bastards!”

We’d shout back “Fuck you with your continual conflict between the Gods of good and evil”

All just banter, really, and we’d all get totally blitzed at the weekends!

The piper practised his pipes in the garage area at the end of the block. Skirling and marching in step, the eerie airs must have lifted over half of the rooftops in the quiet Sunday town (was this how Scots praised the Lord?).

Was he lamenting the two young boy-twins of Baird Hill who drowned while on holiday by the sea, they each struggling to save the other? Perhaps a lambent tune for Kenny McKean who quite literally lost his head while speeding on his motorbike around the back-roads?

I’d be sent to the bunker for more coal for our meagre fire (my father was aye setting the lumb on fire wafting the broadsheet too close to the flames) so I’d get to watch the marching man with his noise-bag as he possessed the twilight with his song.  No-one even thought of asking him to ‘keep the noise down’.