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.