Chip Fat, Vinegar and Beer – Glasgow in the 60s

Bridgeton Cross, The Coocaddens, Knightswood all November dark in my memory. In tenement flats, they’d be laughing at Lex Mclean or Para Handy on the telly in black and white. Lights aff and just the lumens for illumination. Maw, Paw and the weans or maybe Paw will be down the Two Ways drinking too much beer with his pals. O joy of joy when he comes hame aw steamin’. Will he bring chips or a bad mood?

 

This was back when Glasgow was at the arse-end of being industrial and just at the beginnings of the slum clearances out to preservations like East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Drumchapel and beyond. Single-ends and dingey tenements on their last legs which housed folk that aged well before their time. I remember there being sunshine on certain days but it was never refulgent and copious, always sparsely spread out and miserly as if it were rationed and shouldn’t be binged upon.

 

Travel on the upper deck of a Corpy bus through Bridgeton Cross maybe about five or six at night as folk were settling doon to their ‘tea’ and you’d not only contract emphysema from the nimbus of passive smoke but you could look in people’s windaes and see family life in action. Each window like a picture at a social realism art exhibition. Too mundane ye’d think but No! This was the stuff of real life. Of Spam fritters and dinners fae the chippy and homemade soup made fae flank mutton that tasted like it was distilled in paradise. This was the whole world of gaudy wallpaper and three-piece-suite’s fae Goldbergs on the never-never. Young wifie’s with bee-hive hair-do’s and blokes trying to look like Johnny Cash. Brigton gun-slingers leaving Brylcream on illicit pillows.

 

I could see all this from the steamed-up window of a Number 2 to Rutherglen. All good and well and no doubt absorbingly interesting to the reader (or is it inducing a veritable tundra of yawning boredom?) But one day something a little more intriguing happened. I was spying on my early evening diners as usual when I spied through the window of a first floor tenement flat an unusually pretty young lady who had for company a mannequin dummy, not just a torso but a complete human simulacrum, which she appeared to be dressing and talking to to (either that or there was someone else in the room, but I couldn’t see anyone.)

I was only 14 and my hormones were raging like an electric storm, a post-pubescent tempest of eroticism had rendered my brain fevered and filthy with contorted images of the naked female form that would have baffled Picasso. Was this dark beauty so lonely and bereft of male companionship that she needed a dummy of one as a substitute? (It couldn’t be that she was simply some sort of designer or tailoress working on a commission or for personal satisfaction.)

I caught glimpses of my lady in the window perhaps two more times but something inside me told me it was a little creepy to be spying on this young woman; that I was some how sullying our ‘relationship’ - one that she was blissfully unaware of – by keeking in on her in this way so I determinedly avoided looking when I passed this way. She may still be alive, an elderly lady that had no idea she was once the object of the intense fantasies of a teenager on a Glasgow bus.

Conversation in a Pub

He’s melting my brains this auld yin with his prattling and whinging. You’re taking a risk conversing with the older generation. Sometimes it can be very interesting listening about wartime experiences and their time as shop stewards and that kind of thing but sometimes you just got bigoted auld fucks like this yin and his views on immigrants and trade unions ruining the country and that sort of offensive shite.

Offensive to me anyway but this yin hasn’t seemed to have taken that into account as a possibility. He hasn’t pre-empted his bile by saying ‘Hope you don’t mind me saying this, but this is just my view'. Naw. His type never do. The more knee-jerk and reactionary and ill-informed the more sure they are that they’re right and you’re just a blind fool if you don’t agree.

 

“Enoch Powell was right!”

 

“Enoch Powell was a mad, twisted, racist auld fuck!!” is what I think but don’t say. For some reason we’re meant to be respectful of these auld bigots and being Brits we don’t like confrontation. Except for auld Alf Garnet here, he’d love it.

 

“Surprising really that auld Enoch held those views,” is what I say. You have to treat the wilfully thick like you would a cat with a piece of string.

 

“How’s that, son?”

 

‘Son’. I’m fifty-two years old yet I’m still ‘Son’ cos I don’t wear a bunnet and a blouson and probably don’t drink at the bowls club. Scotland is nothing if not parochial.

 

“Well, with his Jewish background, you’d think he’d be more sympathetic to immigrants. Aside from the fact that was him that invited them over in the first place to supplement the workforce.”

 

This has got him so flummoxed he lets his pipe extinguish.

 

“Enoch Powell wisnae Jewish, son!”

 

“Aye he wis. I read his autobiography. Shenkie Lebowitz he was born. Parents from Lithuania. Changed his name cos he didnae think it would help him in politics. Lot of Jewish folk did that. Look at Barbara Streisand.”

 

“Barbara Streisand?”

 

“Aye, a load of people you widnae think were Jewish actually are. Tony Curtis wiz Bernie Schwartz, for example. Elvis Presley. Mick McGahey.”

 

“Mick McGahey?”

 

“Aye, the miner’s leader. Born Abraham Zoltie in Giffnock!”

 

“Christ! I didnae know.”

 

“Christ. Right enough. He was another one. Born Hymie Goldberg but hud tae change his name cos it wiz just a bit too Jewish.”

 

There’s the click of dominoes at a nearby table and the faint roar of traffic outside. I can hear the slow cogitations in this auld yins mind. He’ll have images building of auld greetin-faced Enoch wearing a skull-cap wi’ the Locks of David and thae shawls they wear.

 

There’s more than one way to cheer up your day.

 

 

 

Question

Brian Kilcline had only one tattoo on his body. He had emblazoned in ink on his forehead a crimson question mark. For this reason, the local kids had nicknamed him ‘Dr Whit?’

Whenever anyone had cause to ask him ‘Who are you?’ he would smile broadly and simply point to his question mark. This had the affect of precluding him from any and all government buildings and places where security was a watchword but the momentary satisfaction it gave him more than made up for that. Similarly, job interviews were never successful. Interviewers found it hard to keep their eyes focused anywhere other than Brian’s forehead and the ambiguity it represented and always found a way to never employ him ever in whatever capacity.

Whenever anyone asked him why he had a question mark on his forehead he’d just shrug as if the question had never occurred to him.

Newspapers and television shows became interested in him and, sure that he was a member of some sort of cult, looked for others similarly adorned in the forehead department.

And pretty soon they found them. If human beings are anything they are followers and copycats. In no time you’d find the odd soul dotted about who had a question mark on his or her forehead. Before long there were millions. Some of the Queen of England’s great-grandchildren were spotted at grand functions sporting bright crimson question marks on their regal foreheads. Slick Dildo, the new American President wore one ‘for a joke’ while giving a speech apologising for America’s brutal enslavement of black folk and for stealing half a continent from Native Americans and Mexicans. Everyone laughed.

And what of Brian Kilcline? Well, you see, what he had on his forehead wasn’t a tattoo but what the Scots called a ‘Dabbity’. Simply it was a washable ink image which he had applied himself and, even more simply, he washed it off.

For the rest, it wouldn’t be quite so easy..!

A Life of Sorts

I’d write something funny about my school days, but it would be a sacrilege to humour. An historical misnomer of staggering proportions. A bit like writing a book called ‘Fun and Laughter at the Somme’ or ‘The Cheerful Life of a Galley Slave’. My school days were the opposite of funny and eleven years of a waste of time (OK, I was rendered semi-literate and a quarter numerate and I could tell time but otherwise I left only with the curious knowledge of a few rudimentary steps to ‘The Valetta’ and ‘The Dashing White Sargeant’ and that President Richard Nixon’s middle name was Milhouse.)

I was even considered to be quite clever at one time and always in the top two in class but slowly this notion of me drained away like dishwater down a blocked sink and I ended up with the very lowest of the low; experts in housebreaking and boys that sniffed their own farts for pleasure. The well-jacketed lot from the better catchment areas that I was supposed to tag along with jogged away in the opposite direction to become land surveyors and executive officers in the Civil Service. (One of them even jogged away to become Ford Kiernan, the comedy actor.)

If all of this had not been the case, I may not have found himself in a cubicle in the ladies toilet in a Scottish Government building where I was – somehow- a clerk on the payroll section. i had scored a perfect thirty in his competency-based interview where I’d had lied somewhat impressively through six ‘competency areas’ at one point telling them how I’d retrieved a wielded plant pot from a very angry and pregnant claimant in a job centre in England. My interviewers had nodded along appreciatively no doubt picturing a similar scenario with an off-shore trawlerman that they hadn’t paid premium bonus to. What they failed to ask me, incredibly, was if I was any good at manipulating numbers with the correct results appearing on folk’s payslips to which my honest answer would have had to have been a resounding ‘No, most definitely not’. Surely ‘competency-based’ should mean competency to perform the necessary tasks at hand or had the world really gone so far askew that you weren’t allowed for some reason to do with discrimination to address such matters?

I'd only begun to realise that I was performing my ablutions in a cubicle in the ladies toilet when I’d heard the click of high heels on the tiled floor. Was this some sort of ‘Trans’ thing? I tried to think of any such individuals who would be wearing high heels in the men’s toilet but came up blank. Hang on! There was a fragrance in the air not reminiscent of the gent’s lavs. Was it lavender? And had I noticed urinals in my rush to evacuate?

The penny dropped and I very quickly had to plan a strategy of escape, my faux pas undetected. I was already, after only a matter of weeks, considered somewhat of an odd-bod and to be found lurking around in the ladies would do nothing to improve this perception.

“He fooled us into thinking he was competent, your honour. We were given no clue as to his pederasty!”

This was my seventh stint as a civil servant of lowly rank. Three times employed by the dole in its various guises and three in the tax office. Other than the Child Support Agency these were the lowest echelons of government work. One serving benefit claimants who were to be generally despised and the other with errant taxpayers who were to be largely accommodated if they were rich and chased vigorously if they weren’t.

I’d had jobs outside ‘the service’ but had always ended up back in it somehow. Maybe it was just a continuation of school as a lot of work was. Instead of teachers, there were supervisors and ‘team leaders’ to keep you in line, some of them OK and some of them absolutely awful with atrocious people skills. Bullies and incompetents who made you wonder how on earth they’d achieved their position. In the old days, it was sheer favouritism and having a face that fitted but now, in this new-fangled fancy way, you did it by being good at competency-based interviews (plus a certain element of ‘face fitting’) and then you found yourself in a position you really weren’t suited for and the folk under you suffered as a consequence. They scatter-gunned their ineptitude at all and anybody willing to take such treatment. If you were unlucky in this regard and found yourself under the authority of such an ogre, you could find yourself just as much a victim of bullying in the workplace as you ever were at school.

Scene: Whitehill Secondary 1975

Mr Smith the ancient Maths teacher has given up trying to teach us his subject properly and either teases the class with his comic stuff, lets us all play three-card-brag or else lets us all out to play football on the blaize pitch. He’s one of the good guys and doesn’t believe in humiliating us or patronising us. Noone in this class is ever going to understand algebra or trigonometry or any arithmetic more advanced than how many ‘single’ fags you can buy at the local mini-mart for two bob.

Auld Smithy is a chain-smoker when given a chance, but his own sense of ethics forbids him from smoking in the class but the fingers on his right hand are a satisfying dark brown with nicotine stains. He may have been a school-teacher from the days of the Covenanters and he's too old now to change his ways. He picks the toughest boys in the class, the one’s with the long leathers and the high-waisted trews with names like ‘Big Ged’ and ‘Mad Hammy’ and gives them mad sums to solve and when they can’t he grabs them by the ears.

“What’s 70 times times 43,  boy?” he asks and the whole class howls with the fun of it. Even the ‘tough guy’ is laughing and ‘taking a beamer’ but we all love Mr Smith, and no one takes offence.

 This school is old school from Victorian times. It is drizzle grey and austere like a prim lady in mourning. It has an impressive alumni (Lulu and Alisdair Gray) and was once a ‘good school’ but those days are long gone. Nowadays it’s just an ordinary Glasgow Secondary school, the posher kids wear uniforms and are generally left alone to their own wee world of study and ‘talking properly’ and the masses gather in Bay City Roller-esque garb with feather cuts and the talk is gangs and smutty films and – always – there is a poor unfortunate soul in your class who is dubbed with the unfortunate moniker ‘Smelly’.