Summer Nights

Portobello, where I live nowadays, used to be a favourite resort for holidaying Weegies and their chirpy music-hall comedians (Tommy Morgan for one, who was a legend in these parts)

My auld Granny was a great fan of Sydney Devine the Galsgow music-hall sensation. To me, he was to music what Beanfeast was to dysentery, but she'd belt out a tune of his now and again, usually on pension night after a couple of nips of Bell's.

There were two Scottish soldiers facing a firing squad and they were asked for their final requests.

The first said..

"I'd like like to hear Sydney Devine singing The Crystal Chandeliers"

The second was asked, and what is yours?

He said "Could you shoot me first?"

I believe I would have concurred!

I grew up in the west of Scotland in the 60’s and 70’s when the world was photographed in black and white and Technicolour only seemed to make the blood on the streets seem redder. Glasgow was a violent city and prided itself on the image. Billy Fullerton, Jimmy Boyle, Walter Norvell, these were fierce individuals, in reality and in popular culture, young lads or lassies sought to emulate them or lusted after them. If you were ‘gemmie’ you were a local hero.

Stories about slashings and nailing people to the floor were the oral gangster comics. ‘So-and-so runs with so-and-so’ were the words around the scheme and wee guys nicknamed Jeb and Ged and Franko were notorious. Local schemes had gangs named cool names like ‘The Fleet’ and ‘The Mad Skwadd’ and if you run with them you had to prove yourself and slash and thieve and fight. Initiation was everything. Failure at any stage and you were demoted to the ranks or cast out altogether. To be a shite-bag in Glasgow was only a marginal step up from being some sort of kiddie-fiddler.

On summer nights, there would be gang-fights at some sort of locale where the police wouldn’t even bother attending. Let them get on with it would be their attitude. Let them chib and kill each other, it’snot our affair, we’ll pop off and have a bacon roll and a coffee and turn up after the event when the shows over and maybe pick up a couple of young yins to make the charge sheet look good.

The degree of ferocity of these battles could depend on the area and what was at stake. In Maryhill, the cost to certain individuals could be severe because these would be serious territorial tribal and wars. 

The Maryhill Fleet, for example, were a notoriously ‘nasty outfit’. With them, it wasn’t just a matter of what street the other mob lived in but what lucrative crime opportunities were on offer. In the Gorbals, Boyle was running a money-spinning lending operation where faces would be cut if loans were renaged on. In other areas, it was just a matter of local pride, impressing lassies who wore tight leather skirts and because there was fuck all else to do. The gangsters got the girls and the prestige and, after all, what was not to understand about that?

In ‘The Fields’ which separated Arden and Priesthill on the very fringes of south-west Glasgow there existed such an arena: an amphitheatre surrounded on one side a hill from which spectators gazed and beyond a plains that ran into the sundown horizon which may have led to Barrhead or a circle of hell, no-one really knew or dared to investigate.

In the middle the antagonists engaged. The ‘Priestie’ and the ‘Darnley Toon Tongs’. At the time, we didn’t realise that the root of this enmity was likely sectarian like a great many rivalries in Glasgow are. Celtic/Rangers, Protestant/Catholic, likely you could have found something qausi-religious in nature in the entire Glasgow social/political/economic/cultural milieu. You and your family would be sussed long before the Boy’s Brigade initiation stage, for Christ’s sake -and, remember, it usually was for the sake of that Jewish revolutionary – and a cub-scout toggle was maybe all your little Catholic soul would achieve. The idea of a Protestant being a resident of a place named ‘Priesthill’ was unlikely so the Arden/Darnley true-blue loyal would be a natural foe of this perceivably Papish scheme.

In ‘The Fields’ the peacock rivalry would be played out. One ‘team’ would emerge from a weed-blown underpass and the other would be waiting for them in the penalty area of a dirt football pitch strewn with dog-shit and old tins. The first ‘attack’ would be stick throwing – fence sticks spun-hurled at shin height so that if they connected they incapacitated opponents to allow further rushed attack by foot. Then the other side would retaliate by rushing the stick-throwers back through their underpass to safe home-grond.

This would go on for a while until the next part of the initiation took place.

The ‘Leaders-aff’. These were the guys that proved themselves sufficient for the ultimate pride-fight. These fellows and a few lieutenants would come forward like Gladiators only with David Essex hair-do’s, Doc M’s and wide, wide flares: mock Glam-rock warriors who would afterwards return home to listen to Dystopian David Bowie songs about androgyny and living on planets far away from East Renfrewshire.

Meeting in the middle, they’d offer a few badly aimed boots and a flurry of punches until honour had somehow been served. We, up on the hill would offer oaths favouring our supposed side just to signal affinity and somehow not be the utter non-participants we so obviously were.

Then, as if some hard-man Liberace had been invited to top the bill, he came from the tunnel. Mad Max before such a cinematic figure had even been fomented in an Apocalyptic imagination, worn-leather and mental as a trapped bull astride a souped-up chopper, a motor-bike made of steel and grease. We felt like we could smell the engine fumes high on our hillside coup  Hell, for all we would recollect, he may well have had a horned helmet. He roared out of the Priestie’s tunnel like some mad beast let loose after an enforced captivity

On the hill, we gazed on like spectators at a Spanish bullfight. Who the fuck was this? He roared his crazy cycle, pulling on the acceleration like he was twisting the neck of a rooster, roaring at the confronting gang as to a row of skittles in a bowling aisle. But, not only that, as if that were no threat enough, he wielded some sort of tribal sabre above his neck like a bare-arsed banditti who was particularly upset over Culloden.

“Yaaaa bastttaaaaaaards” he roared and the opposing gang froze for a split-second.

A collective “Fuck sake!” and the Darnley Toon Tong decided that ‘Fuck this’ was the best strategy.

The dust cleared and the summer haze filled the void. The hillside crowd dispersed and returned home for a tea and toast supper.

“Where d’ye go tonight son? Have a good time?”

“Aye, Da, just the fitba’ ye know”

At my young age I instinctively sussed that any true revelations may have seen me confined to the family home for the next month.

Ged Bryant and the Flying Eye

To say that Ged Bryant was drunk was like saying the Mersey was a body of water: it was that obvious. Staggering and falling, laughing and cursing, he sang a faltering song as he weaved his lanky, inebriated form up Hardman Street, Liverpool.

He decided he needed to urinate in imitation of a wanton racehorse.

Up this wee side-street here, he thinks. Pulls out his walloper and begins to let loose the amber fluid. Such sweet relief! He la-las his way through, funny enough a song by The La’s. Very appropriate for Liverpool, he thinks. Jangly, Beatle-y band. My Christ, there’s enough of this piss coming out: maybe he’s leaking alcohol. He chortles at the thought and the possible headline ‘Man leaks to death on Roscoe Street’. Something of the Raymond Chandler about it.

At first, he thinks the voice is in his head, until he looks up, his lad still in hand and spouting furiously. And, he hears..!

“YOU ARE COMMITTING AN OFFENCE AGAINST PUBLIC DECENCY. PLEASE DESIST AND WAIT FOR THE POLICE CAR WHICH IS ON ITS WAY’

He can barely make it out through the glaring lights, but the megaphoned voice gives it away that there is actually a giant speaking fly hovering some fifty feet above his head. The noise from its engine is hideous like the devil’s own hoarse breath.

“PLEASE PUT YOUR PENIS BACK IN YOUR TROUSERS AND WAIT THERE PEACEFULLY FOR POLICE ATTENDANCE”

Fucking hell! Is this actually happening? He finishes his piss and does as the voice ordered. He shields his eyes against the flashing lights. He’s in no fit state to do a runner, though having a helicoptered policeman bark orders at you from the dark heavens does tend to have a sobering effect. Two policemen emerge from a car at the end of the alley and walk towards him.

It’s a fair cop…!

I heard one morning on City Radio which operates out of that non-sensical space-age tower which dwarfs the Liverpool sky-line that a group of lads had allegedly stolen an entire street of valued Yorkshire-stone cobbles somewhere in Knowsley (my guess is Huyton) and rumbled off north to sell them.

But, you try taking a piss in the place.

 

Poor Auld Wattie in His Gothic Space Rocket!

 The Gothic Space Rocket is right in front of you and probably no Edinburgh resident any longer notices it other than as a postcard landmark in the centre of this impressive city. Although how you could possibly ignore such a thing is beyond me. Massive, dark-stone space rocket like Thunderbird 3. I’ve seen workies abseiling up and down its crags and crenulations, cleaning and repairing, or maybe just because it was there.

Auld Sir Walt sits there in white marble effigy under the great stone structure. Forever. Unmoving. Rain and shine; wind and bitter cold. He looks like he was wishing he was back home in Melrose and that he hadn’t been so clever at toadying up to German royalty.

It has 70-odd effigies within it, all characters from Scott’s novels. The auld gimpy bugger who was probably wiser in his Scottishness than someone as mere as I would ever be willing to give him credit for.

Lefties such as myself will bang on about the chain-gang he created a hundred feet below Salisbury Crags to dig out The Radical Road: men who believed themselves skilled and politically educated and who took on the system in their ramshackle way in 1820, he reduced – some say as a form of work-creation, I say as a punishment for their subversive actions – to digging out a 12-foot wide path on Arthur’s Seat because Wattie and his friends liked the view.

The path is closed now and, I suspect, maybe always will be. They claim it’s cos of falling rocks – and, after all, no city wants boulders falling on top of curious tourists – but I suspect it’s Wattie’s revenge. 

It ranges too high over him and embodies the triumph and endeavour of the enlightened underdog and the aspirations of the ignored to make him feel comfortable in chiselled marble effigy. After all, all he has to gaze upon is the Princes Street traffic and baffled Orientals taking photo’s as a matter of course. Even his mate Melville round the corner has a 70-foot view of the posh New Town around him.

From the Radical Road, one has wider horizons!

Wummin', Man?

She had yon dark eyes- two of them. See when a wummin has dark eyes, you can see yourself in them like you were a trout in a midnight pool with a hook in yer mooth. Allure is all about captivation and wance your captured, well, that’s it until the day you’ll wonder why your jaw isnae sore wi’ the hook even still. Such is the wonder with womanhood. The other side of the equation is that you just might rue you ever expressed an interest in the first place. Attraction is just so arbitrary.

I was lucky to suffer such an aching longing for Carol Vorderman, the former Countdown number-cruncher. Nae way I was ever gonna meet her by the way. The curvy delicious wis inaccessible to me and it was as well to both of us. I wis a nae good waster fae Carmyle and she was a glamourous hostess fae Channel 4. There was very little in it for her except, of course, the utter animal lust of the thing, me being hung like a decent-sized pit pony and having a twenty-five percent discount on my Council Tax (she could even have helped totting my bills up!)

Mind you, I did bump into a couple of Page 3 glamourites wan time, aw big tits and perfume. I shared a lift with them in the Mirror building as I was attempting to collect tax from their big sweaty boss who later flung himself aff a boat off Tenerife. Christ! The fumes from their bodily powders near had my eyes streaming, either that or it was my post-juvenile lust blinding me. Three floors up and by the time we’d reached the top my senses were scrambled. Me in my raincoat tae, I must have looked like Frank Spencer wi’ the horn.

Wummin’, man! Whit wid ye dae wi’ thum?

Mannequin Mystery

 

There was a time when you could see in folk’s windows quite easily. Maybe people felt less concerned about privacy? Maybe they were more innocent times when folk were less inclined to get up to anything so private as to keep secret?

Just out walking or from the top deck of a bus or on a train passing by a row of back windows you could quite clearly see into folk’s living rooms and quite often bedrooms too. Not like some Peeping Tom, just curious about people’s lives. Mostly they’d just be sitting at their tea anyway or watching the telly but, occasionally, just very occasionally you’d catch them at something more out of the ordinary: scratching their arse or giving a kid a slap or flinging a plate at a wall, or maybe a wifie crying. Just everday life but meaningful none the less.

I used to get the 2 through Brigton Cross on my way back from school in the winter months. In the summer I’d walk if the sun happened to make an appearance or the drizzle wasn’t too bad. In Glasgow you take whatever chance you can get to donner about the place to make up for the time huddled up indoors out of the cold and glaur. Anyway, in the winter months by the time the bus got to Brigton after school it would be pitch black and the chip shops were lit up like so many Edward Hopper scenes all fluorescent and thick with steam, the air redolent of vinegar, stoor and India Pale Ale from the pubs which seemed to exist every three doorways. I sat on the top deck where folk were still allowed to smoke, and the air was acrid like a diseased lung.

“He’s bad wi’ his chist”

“Ah’m no’ surprised oan eighty o’ thae coffin sticks a day”.

“Poor conductor having to breathe aw this in on an eight-hour shift. Mind, he’s goat a gasper oan ‘imself”

This one night I was puffing away on a Regal and absent-mindedly gazing out at the streets and tenements up Main Street. Wee lassies wi’ big packages of chips for the nights tea, shilpit’ dugs shaggin’ up a dark close, the odd drunken faither stoatin’ towards home to give his wife hell for only tinned mince for his scran.

Then I saw her.

Framed in a first-floor window illuminated by a single bare light bulb and a coal fire at her back; a woman who appeared to be painting a mannequin.

I just had the briefest of glimpses as the bus accelerated through the early rush-hour traffic and headed up toward Shawfield but the image made an impression on me. She’d been painting the face of a mannequin which was dressed in what appeared in a tuxedo and stood in the centre of the room in some sort of dias maybe a fruit crate and there was yer woman with a wee thin paintbrush seeming to add features to the bare faced manqué.

Her concentration was total.

Every evening I looked out for this but never witnessed it again. I guessed she was involving herself in theatre work but I could obviously not be sure of this.

Weeks later my Granny asked me had I heard about the woman who’d jumped fae the Dalmornock Bridge into the Clyde?

I says, naw, and she says, aye, lassie went in and dinnae come back oot despite the best efforts o’ the famous Riverman.

The Riverman fishes everybody oot in the end.