Chip Pan Fire

 Every household in council-house Scotland had to have had a chip pan fire at some stage. It was a rite of passage, an initiation. The middle-classes were having mental breakdowns behind chintz curtains but the rest of us were setting scorching hot lard ablaze.

Ours happened when my mum wasn’t at home and away attending the funeral of one of her lovely aunts. My da was chip-maker for the day. We lived in a ground-floor flat with a verandah in East Kilbride where Siberians used to come to feel what real cold was like. This day was unusually sunny which caused hysteria in the locale, and no one quite knew how to conduct themselves.

All of a sudden there is a stramash in the kitchen. A window flies open, my father bellows some industrial oath, and a flaming chip-pan appears as like a meteor falling from the skies. I look at my baby brother who is rubbing rusks into the carpet and he gurgles what sounds like ‘Da’ ‘F**king nutter’ and ‘chip-pan fire’ (He always was a canny wee soul). The flaming chip-pan falls on the tarmacadam of the wee verandah. There it burns until extinguished with the damp dish-cloth that should have been applied in the first place. The indentation it makes is still there 25 years later when I returned for reasons of nostalgia.

My father could be an explosive man. He had a manic energy which could express itself in many ways. Football could be a catalyst for this or the sudden urge to run like a madman laughing manically. Two instances spring to mind when I was but a callow boy scared of his own shadow and everyone else’s come to that. Over on the pitches at Kennishead he was in goal for a big man’s game of 11 or 27 a side. A striker broke loose with the ball and headed towards goal. My father flew out of his goal like a man running from several snakes and upended his befuddled opponent with a full-blooded scissor tackle. The fella spent about five seconds airborne before crumpling in a broken heap on the grass. A barney ensued with several of the broken man’s team-mates making their feelings all-too clear to my father who had his arms out in innocent supplication saying ‘Whit? Was just a tackle’.

Another football-related incident was playing ‘Heidy-Fitba’’ out the back green with two young robust men opposing my father and me. The ball was a Mouldmaster, a vicious football-sized medicine ball that hurt even if you kicked it. One of these young bucks unleashed a fierce shot aimed at our goal. My father rose like a demented salmon and ‘stuck-the-heid’ on this missile with a strange shout of ‘Splooooongaaaay’. The ball finally rested several towns away.

Those fella’s never played with us again.