Baldy Pubes

Moving me forward a year in primary school didn’t work out to be the best idea. OK, it was recognition of my early brightness, but more negative consequences were soon to become apparent. Moving into secondary school I was, of course, a year or so younger than the other boys in my class and important biological changes were afoot at least for them but not, disastrously, for me.

There they would be in the changing rooms (for swimming, where removal of underpants is a prerequisite unless one is willing to spend the rest of the school day wearing sodden trunks under one’s trousers) flaunting and comparing their budding pubes while I attempt to hide my scrawny, chicken-headed pre-pubescence. The boys soon caught on.

Thus, I found myself one evening at home in the bathroom attempting a somewhat inept remedy for my shame and humiliation (to make things worse I was at least six inches taller than the other boys which made my pubic baldness even more of an oddity to them). Luckily, I have head hair and not bald like the boy with alopecia in a previous school. Although, maybe if I was bald all over this would give some exotic allure like maybe I was space alien. Being considered a space alien was more attractive to me than my current identity as ‘baldy pubes’.

“Hi! My name is Baldy Pubes. You may have heard of me from the other boys. Would you care to go disco dancing with me one evening? Go on! Share in my shame”.

I would remove cuttings from my head hair and apply these to my pubic area to create the simulacrum of surging maturity. But, how to do this? Glue? We had no glue in the house that I knew of and asking my parents for it would give the game away.

“Da, we got any glue in the house?”

“No’ sure, son. Whit dae ye need glue fur?”

“Disnae matter. Sellotape?”

I managed to find the family Sellotape myself. I considered masking tape but that would be somehow too industrial and a tad obvious. No, Sellotape would be grand. It was next to invisible next to the skin. I had envisioned a job a cosmetic surgeon would be proud of: pseudo-pubes curling elegantly and ostensibly against a background of apparent skin.

I cut the hair; I attach it to the tape, but this concoction is not readily accepted by my skin. Next morning, I have my pants full of hairy tape which is not all together secured and anchored down. Still, I am desperate and will try anything.

I thought pubic baldness was humiliating but what followed in the changing rooms was something that has entered the folklore of the school. I might even have made the alumni list, but I didn’t wait around to check.

“David Wylie attended this school 1972-74. Started in the highest class and finished in the lowest but what he is most remembered for was….”

New Town

I mind the rag-man with his horse and cart trundling along Baird Hill bawling his indecipherable incantations, a cross between an oath and a howl. Ye’d give some old clothes yer maw would provide you with and he’d give you a balloon or a twirly windmill on a stick in return. These folk were considered to be tinkers and on no other level did anyone associate with them. No wee chats or ‘How’s it going?’. It was accepted on both sides that they were from an alien world, somewhere ‘out in the country’, some Romany camp-site with wooden caravans and dirt-encrusted children.

Street-grubbers, totters, rag and bone men. The ‘bone’ part referred not, presumably to human bones collected but the discarded bones of animals, still a macabre notion but such were valuable and used maybe for knife-handles or children’s toys. No-one knew who, ultimately, wanted the old rags or why? It was just how these folk made a living and no-one asked questions.

Same with ‘the ice-cream’ van; Twaddles. This was a long white affair that played Greensleeves so you knew it was coming. “Double-nouget for me,” “O a bar of Tiffin,” said my da when he was asked Tiffin or Five Boys and my ma would have a bar of Old Jamaica which was considered exotic.

Looking back, Baird Hill was a quiet street that bent like a snake all the way around The Murray. A quiet street in the New Town of East Kilbride which still shone like a new pin in those early days until some arsehole or arseholes decided to cover the centre of it with a ‘shopping mall’. It had been pretty before with Princes Square and the avenue of shops leading down to The Royal Stuart Hotel where the footballers stayed before big games.

Sketch Ma Baws

Most people grow up in a place they profess to love yet want to escape from. This was not the case with me. I never desired to leave Glasgow and yet I owed it no favours. Why should one love a place that has treated one so badly?

Stockholm Syndrome, only in my case Glasgow Syndrome.

I never wanted to leave and cried and mourned when I had to. Yet, I wasn’t even brought up there. I spent the first decade of my life in South Lanarkshire without even knowing it. As far as I was concerned, East Kilbride was on the outskirts of Glasgow: Greater Glasgow. Glasgow the city was our focal point and all my relatives lived there. My Granny in Bridgeton then in Toryglen. Aunties and uncles in Drumchapel and Bridgeton. In fact, thinking of it, the rough little hamlet of Bridgeton was the focal point of the focal point.

As a child, to me, it seemed to be always dark in Bridgeton but sometimes in the light of summer, it was actually a place surrounded by verdancy. Glasgow Green, Richmond Park and the Clyde nearby running purple from the dye expelled by Templeton’s carpet factory, an orientalist building emulating the Doge’s Palace in Venice. In the darkness of winter, it smelled of chip-shops and the great many public houses trading there. There were bonneted men cartoon drunk and staggering and blousy women not too proud to fight in the street.

The Bridgeton Umbrella was the central symbol of the area, yet few knew why it was there. It stood at the junction of London Road, Main Street and Dalmarnock Road, a domed structure of iron and stone. People met under it and, it is certain, some would have used it for shelter from the often-incessant rain. Gangs would no doubt congregate around it in readiness for the rumble ahead. Bridgeton had a history in this respect. Billy Fullerton and his Billy Boys were not a musical combo. Not unless you liked the sound of razors slashing flesh.

 And, by the way, if you were local and without airs you called it Brigton, the ‘g’ as hard as concrete.

We’d visit my granny there who lived in a ground-floor tenement flat on Madras Street with her youngest daughter who was ‘dux of the school’, a dark, intelligent lassie who fought her corner with two older sisters and a big brother. The father – my grandfather who I barely knew – was left to further assault his liver and fuel his temper somewhere in Maryhill.

My granny was a loyal woman who liked a laugh. She invited affection but wasn’t the greatest at handing it out. She’d had a long, hard time of it and maybe had a lot she liked to keep to herself. Still, there’d always be a few coins for ‘the grandweans’ on the sideboard on the way out.

My mother and I would wait on Dalmarnock Road for the bus home to East Kilbride. More often than not she’d be aggrieved at some slight, real or imagined. Families are like that. The closer you are to people the more they can wound you and my mother was soft, polite and sensitive, likely cowed by the emotional violence she’d grown up with. She’d become in some ways the whipping girl since the night she’d fetched a polis to her father, scared as she was for the safety of her mother and wee sisters during one of her fathers particularly troubling drunken rages.

Back to EK and the cold yet cosy flat on Baird Hill in The Murray district of this bright New Town. East Kilbride came into being as a New Town in the 1950s but had existed in the village sense for generations. The thing about it is that, as one of the five New Towns built in Scotland around this time, it seems to me to be by far the prettiest and most well thought out. Nine miles south-east of Glasgow it is a town surrounded by farmland and country-side. It had its own built-in industry just waiting for a work-force. It was essentially built as a way of clearing the slums of Glasgow so it had a population of young families and folk from the likes of The Gorbals and Anderston: a Glasgow shipped out to the country, so to speak.

It is here that my father would start his one-man campaign of militant socialism. My auld man was born into upper working class respectability but didn’t necessarily like to be reminded of the fact. Garrowhill was leafy-laned and semi-detached and his parents were aspirant for more even if it meant deferred gratification for their eldest son all alone and lonely for nine years until a brother was born. He wasn’t allowed inside ‘the ice palace’ as he would later coin it in a poem and would need to wait for his workaholic parents to return home in the greenhouse for warmth lest he soil the furnishings.

Somewhere along the line he rebelled against his parent’s conservatism and seek to shift the world to the left. He was to become a scourge to light industry in the East Kilbride area literally on one occasion putting a spanner in the works. For this and other activities, he was ‘black-listed’ and forced to seek a wage as a mayonnaise mixer in west London. My mother was left with me and would walk with me in my pram the five miles to Hamilton and back no doubt bewildered by the man she’d married. All she wanted was a cosy home without all the anger and rage she’d left behind and she’d found herself with a budding John McClean aggrieved about just about everything in the Capitalist world surrounding him. Frying pan into the fire? Not quite. There was enough mutual love and adoration to see them through but it would be a bumpy road.

I’m not sure even now what I, as a child, made of the place I was formulating my world in. My senses and emotions were cauterised early by humiliation. As such I tended to stroll about alone in a worried daze with only imaginary friends for company (and I very soon fell out with even them!). When in company, I was too wary to enjoy the experience and was certainly among the stragglers, the limpid, craven hangers-on.

It was natural then that I would attract and even seek the company of other limpid, craven hangers-on. Outsiders tend to gravitate toward one another. Thus, you are in the company of the socially shunned, the weirdly dressed, the folk named ‘Smelly’ (actually ‘Smelly’s were beyond even our pale. They were the super-shunned.), kids with speech impediments, and, for sure, kids that allowed themselves to be bullied and picked on.

I was friendly with a rotund kid named Jamie Campbell. He was considered ‘posh’ because he lived in a big private house up near Brewster’s Hill. From a socio-psychological point of view he was an interesting case. He was never ‘one of the gang’ yet neither was he bullied in any way. Kids, even at that age, would be aware that his relatively rich parents would have clout and there would be retribution for any abuse meted out. Bullies generally only ever bully their own because, certainly at that time, nothing much could or would be done about it.

Jamie told me his mother said to invite me for ‘my tea’ which in Scotland means the evening meal. Duly I went round there, and it was indeed a different world. Big house, big garden, demurely expensive soft furnishings. I was flabbergasted, however, to be offered egg and chips and some buttered bread. I expected a feast of hog’s head and salvers of beef with maybe a glass or two of claret to wash it all down, the sort of banquet a feudal king might expect. But egg and chips? For years this bothered me. Was that their usual fare or were they slumming it for the kid from the council house?

When it was a bright summer day in East Kilbride it conjured up Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas or any bucolic scene from an English novel. As I say, it was a pretty town with greenery all around and idyllic hamlets such as Eaglesham and Thorntonhall. Also, places like Clarkston where my Granny and Grandpa Wylie now lived having climbed to the next rung and were now in a very neat, detached bungalow atop a hill from where one had a panoramic view of all of Glasgow. They’d scraped to the very bone to get there, he an engineer with Mavor and Coulston’s of Bridgeton who specialised in mining equipment and she a French Polisher of coffins among the many other jobs of whatever menial nature she could get to save an extra bob or two.

My old man had been a tram-conductor for Glasgow Corporation when in his early twenties and, returning home to Clarkston after a late shift with his bag of takings, had caught his old ma trying to steal a few coppers from it. ‘Every penny a prisoner’ is a Glasgow phrase describing money-obsession and meanness and my Granny was smitten with this disease. She couldn’t help herself. Concerning the move from Garrowhill to Clarkston. My father was returning to Glasgow from his National Service as an Airman in the RAF and they hadn’t informed him of the move. He was told of this by his Garrowhill neighbours.

 

Squirrel Chasing Short-Arse

The strangest, strangest thing happened to me yesterday. I was walking down Niddrie Mains Road on my way to getting my underpants scraped for the summer when I bumps into my big mate Davie who was trying to chase a squirrel up a tree. Well, I say ‘big’ but this was the shock and I’m still not over it yet.

“Hiya, Davie, man….”

He looks at me with this hurt sort of knowing look on his face.

“Ye’ll have noticed?” he says almost confrontationally.

“Aye” I says “Ye’ve eh..”. He prompts me to go on by jutting his jaw like a fighter goading an opponent and, for the first time I realise I’m looking down on my friend instead of up.

“Ye, erm…ye appear to have lost….well…height!”

“D’ye think I don’t know that” he lunged, his face roughly at my shoulder level.

“Ah used tae be able to reach the branches o’ these trees nae bother”.

“Right enough," says I "Why is it you chase the squirrels, anyway?”

He looked at me as if I’d just asked why the sun rises in the morning or why the tide comes in and out.

“Somebody fucking has to d’aint they”.

I took this as a statement and not a question but ah wis beginning to wonder if someone had spiked my tea wi’ a tab ae strong acid. Ma big mate wis noo ma wee mate and ma heid was birlin’. I even let my bus go by, a number 30 up tae the fort so flabbergasted was I by this whole thing. If I’d got on that bus I’d have got to have sexual congress with Sinnaed Gilchrist up at her new flat in the Heights and later got battered by her new boyfriend, Cambo Sharpe who’s the leader aff ae the Niddrie Shamrock.

“Eh, whit height wur ye before, Davie?”

“Six foot four” he answered a little tearfully. He looked up at the squirrels hatefully like they were taunting him. I was almost afraid to ask the next obvious question.

“And what height are you now?”

“Five foot three”. With this he put his face in his hands, his shoulders rocking with the grief of the thing.

Fucking weird, eh? I hope I never wake up one morning one foot and an inch smaller. I’m only five-six as it is.

Cider With Phyliss

The farce that was the Rubens family would have been funny if not for the debilitating and diminishing effect it had on their only son, Howard, or Rube as I knew him. It could have been written by Philip Roth or Joseph Heller, or maybe even Neil Simon: some Jewish writer who could appreciate the intricate dark comedy of a stereotype of Jewish family life. The neurotic, manipulative mother, the resigned and beaten father and the son in between who would be wounded by every mood swing of his mothers, every condemning, accusative word.

The father, old rotund Monty, feigned deafness especially to the rasping voice of Phyllis, the shrew he married. The fact that he could hear everything everyone else said to him with perfect clarity was never mentioned or questioned. It seemed to be accepted that it was only she that he would not hear.

That Rube was a disappointment to both of them was probably true, but he was an especial disappointment to Phyliss, and she made no bones about reminding him of this. She only had to come into the room to have Rube shaking and gulping with anxiety.

One time he came to visit me, and she rang him on the house phone (I guess she made Rube give her the number). She bawled and screeched and was obviously drunk or otherwise medicated, telling him he better get home, or she was going to burn the house down. Yet, it was he that paid frequent visits to the local mental institutions.

Once, when he was in Goodmayes, I wrote to his psychiatrist saying that if he truly wanted to get a handle on Rube’s mental state, they should look at Rube’s domestic situation and especially, his mother who was the real looney-tune in the family. I never even received the courtesy of a reply.

Rube had taken a few dozen pain-killers and was only saved by the promptness of the ambulance. A sperm had mated with an egg twenty-eight or so years ago and Rube had been the product. And now that product had opted to put an end to itself and failed. Even in suicide Rube was the loser. A child born to fail but with his parent's expectations attached like weights.

 

Rube was funny and clever and fancied himself a rock singer. Small, sallow and physically unprepossessing he relied on ‘lonely hearts’ for his women, and there were some strange one’s, let me tell you. Mad Ginny on her wee red moped with her bright yellow helmet. She looked like acne on wheels. Some would say you’d have to be a bit whacky to ‘go out’ with such as Rube and you’d have a point.

I was sat in a pub one day – not an uncommon occurrence – when I see plastered in the centre-pages of The Sun my old mate Rube being interviewed about his lonely hearts experiences.

“Some of them look like the back-end of a bus” says Howard Rubens, 29 of Gants Hill “but it’s better than nothing at all”.

Gants Hill. If it were entered into a competition for most boring, soulless locale in the world I, for one, would place money on it. Unless, that is, that for all this time, there has been a seething underbelly of raging lust going on, a cauldron of wife-swapping, bi-sexual, late-night coke parties. Roman passions sizzling amid the endless streets and terraces of semi-detached greyness.

But I somehow doubt it.

The day was arranged when we’d take Rube out of the looney bin and to sunny Southend for a meal and a breath of sea air. Rube, Monty, Phyliss and his two friends me and Ray. Ray was a prematurely bald ex-soldier and owner of a Gibson SG. This last possession was the only remotely sexy thing about Ray in any respect. A big lump of a Northumbrian, Ray was an amiable chap who still worked on a soldier’s rota; a strict timetable of chores which he was loth to ever betray. A shine ever-present on his sturdy brogues and the launderette always on a Thursday evening, that was Ray.

So, a merry party we were trundling to the coast in Monty’s car, auld, mad Phyliss chirping away in the front and Rube trying desperately not to listen in the back with his friends.

“Sing a song, Dave” he looks to me with pleading, anxious eyes.

“Whit song?” says I in improper Glaswegian.

“What’s whit mean?” pipes in Phyliss, the question aimed nominally at her husband who plays the deaf card to perfection.

“Spancill Hill, Dave. Sing Spancill Hill for me”.

Rube and I had often busked for a few shillings down the London tube, and this was one of the songs we performed. An old, very beautiful Irish exile’s lament.

‘And I woke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill’.

So here we were, three Jews, a Scotsman and an Englishman and I was going to sing this plaintive Irish air.

“Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by,

My mind being bent on ram-b-ling to Ireland’s isle did fly”

 “What’s ‘e’ doing?” pipes in Golda Meir from the front.

 “I stepped on board a vision and I travelled with a will”.

“Get ‘im to stop, Monty. I can’t stand it” wails Sarah wife of Abraham, her shrill tones competing with my singing voice. I take up the challenge…

“AND I SHORTLY CAME TO ANCHOR AT THE CROSS AT SPANCIL HILL”.

One verse is all I manage, and poor Rube is shaking and swallowing with the stress of the thing.

If we could just leave this witch in Southend and drive off! Maybe even bury her in the sand and let the tide take care of her.