Only when Nan and Nell were dead did I learn from my birth certificate that I was a bastard.
Through most of my schooldays boys and girls had separate playgrounds and sat on opposite sides of the classrooms. When five or six I started noticing the girls’ side contained someone fascinating – a girl who seemed better than the rest, and who I wanted to continually stare at and come close to, had that been possible. Her name was Roberta Piper. Nobody told me my desire for Roberta Piper was a weakness but I knew I would be mocked if I admitted it and hid this desire so completely that I am sure none suspected it. Slowly, from small signs, I realized most boys on my side of the class felt the same about Roberta Piper and were equally reluctant to admit it. We shared a general idea that girls were inferior creatures, why? I suspect we were trying to reject the power Roberta Piper and her kind had over us, without exactly knowing what it was.
In the summer holidays Nan, Nell and I always had a fortnight in an Aitch Eff guesthouse. Aitch Eff (I later learned) stood for Holiday Fellowship, an organization founded early in the twentieth century by middle- and working-class Socialists who wanted social equality for all and felt that sharing holidays was a step toward it. They leased big houses in mountainous and coastal parts of Britain where members enjoyed most of a good hotel’s facilities without paying as much, and where staff and guests mingled in a friendly way I thought natural and ordinary until years later when I stayed in a conventional hotel. In our second week at Minard Castle on Loch Fyne Roberta Piper and her parents arrived. When they sat down at the morning breakfast table Nell asked me, “What’s wrong?” I suppose because I was blushing or had gone pale. I whispered that the girl was in my class at school.
“How nice! Your little girl is in this young man’s class at school!” said Nell, and began a cheerful conversation with Mr and Mrs Piper who agreed with my aunts that Roberta and I should sit together. We did, which I both wanted and hated. I saw she was willing to chat with me but I could not say a word, my heart was beating too loudly and my face was too hot. “I’m afraid our young man’s terribly shy!” said Nan and all the adults treated this as an entertaining joke. I hated that and hated Roberta because she was grinning too. For the rest of the holiday I insisted on us eating at a different table from the Pipers, which the aunts thought a pity. I was then six or seven.
This hopeless, helpless, useless obsession with Roberta lasted through primary school. At secondary school she was replaced by someone it is pointless to name. These fascinating girls changed as we advanced from one year to the next, but among boys in my class there was a general agreement about which one she was. I sometimes heard bolder, coarser ones discuss her and speculate on who might “get her for a lumber”.31 By that time a new sexual distraction had entered my life: American comics.
Throughout Scotland and (I suspect) Britain most children’s leisure reading was printed by D. C. Thomson Ltd of Dundee. Each week before the age of ten we took The Dandy and Beano, jocular cartoon magazines with characters like Freddie the Fearless Fly, Lord Snooty and his Pals, an ostrich called Big Eggo and a kindly cowboy of immense strength called Desperate Dan, who lived in a land that was partly American West and partly a British suburb. These comics had a minimum of words, speech being printed in bubbles coming from people’s mouths. At secondary school age these were replaced by The Rover and Hotspur whose every double page had a serial adventure story in printed columns, with a single quarter-page illustration in black and white under the title. No girls, no women were in these stories which were about ordinary, believable boys like ourselves assisting detectives, explorers, athletes, soldiers or scientists. The aunts ordered these comics for me from Barretts, the Byres Road newsagent. I first saw American comics at school in the days following examinations, when our teachers were busy marking the papers and let us read anything we liked. Some students brought in these astonishing novelties: magazines with brightly-coloured pictures on every page, showing the adventures of super-heroic adults and villains with amazing powers and no children at all. Women among them had faces and figures like Hollywood movie stars but often wore less clothes. About sex the American comic publishers were as puritan as Thomsons of Dundee. They evaded it by showing violence instead. Fantastic punch-ups and explosive shooting matches were continuous, with much capture, bondage and torture. I had never before seen anything so exciting, except in Tarzan films. I instinctively knew my aunts would dislike these comics and that I should never bring them to the house, but fellow pupils had more than they could read at one time so I borrowed a few, after which Wonder Woman and Sheena the Jungle Girl drove Roberta Piper’s successors out of my head. With real girls I could only imagine chivalrous courtships leading to marriage, but there was no limit to what I could imagine doing to Sheena. I was entering the state described by a character in Albee’s Zoo Story, who says American men start using pictures of women as substitutes for reality, then use women as substitutes for the pictures. I only reached the second half of that state after the death of my aunts.
When exam papers had been marked my chances of borrowing these comics ended, for outside the classroom I was ashamed to look at them when others could see me. My pocket money would have let me buy many but I was appalled by the thought of a shopkeeper recognizing my vicious depravity as I pointed to an American comic or nudist health magazine and said, “That one please!”. I sometimes wished an atomic war would kill everyone in the world but me so that I could enter any of these shops and shamelessly gloat over all that excited me.
But drunk with sherry on this special Saturday afternoon I did the deed without an atomic war. In part of the Cowcaddens that was demolished in the 1970s I stopped before the right sort of shop and, with a thrumming excitement in my lower stomach, stared shamelessly at the covers of paperback books in the window. One called Love for Sale showed (from behind) a line of chained-together blondes wearing only knickers and high-heeled shoes, being urged across sand dunes by a man with a whip. Beyond the display I saw the back of a customer buying something. When he left the shop I hurried in, laid my briefcase on the counter and, looking away from the shopkeeper, pointed to Love for Sale and said, “That one please and . . . yes, and also that . . . and er, hm hm hm . . .” (I pointed to American comics on racks along the walls) “. . . I’ll take that and that and that and that too. I’m buying for a few friends.”
“It’s nice to have friends,” said the shopkeeper pleasantly. I was horrified to suddenly see she was a small woman a bit like Aunt Nell. With a face that felt red hot I flung down some pound notes, muttered “Keep the change”, zipped books and comics into my briefcase, rushed out and hurried home.
I found the aunts having afternoon tea with a friend of their own age and sex.
“How was Stewart and his mother?” said Nan as I looked round the door. Nell asked, “You look flushed, have you been running?” “Things went quite well,” I said, “In fact too well, that’s why I’m flushed. Mrs Doig insisted on pouring me a glass of that sherry you gave her and I’m not used to it. I’m going to lie down in the study for an hour or two. Please don’t bring me anything. See you later.”
In the study I turned (for the first but not last time) the door key that locked me in, then spread my purchases on the desktop and doted over them, masturbating three times in succession. After that, sick with self-disgust, I would have burned them in the study fire had the season been cold enough for one. Instead I locked them in a desk drawer and afterwards kept the key in my trouser pocket.
Perhaps a fortnight passed before an appetite for new pornography drove me out in search of another dirty bookshop, because I never bought from the same shop twice. After drinking all the sherry left in Grandpa Tunnock’s three-quarters full decanter I set out with my usual excuse of going for a walk with Stoory Doig, astonished that my aunts did not see how drunk I was. Before every full bottle of sherry had been drunk my pornography was nearly too many for the desk drawers. One wet Sunday I locked the study door, spread my fur
tive library on the hearthrug and went carefully through it, scissors in hand, cutting out pictures that most excited me and burning the rest – which reminds me what a strangely different world I and everyone else then inhabited, a world as different from 2005 Glasgow as 1954 was from the world of mid-Victorian encyclopaedias.
The rooms in nearly every British house were heated by an open fire burning in a grate inside a fireplace, a cavity in the thickness of the wall. The fire was fed with lumps of coal from a big brass jug called a scuttle on a tiled section of floor in front of the grate. In terrace houses the scuttle was filled from a small basement room called the coal-cellar; and in tenements from a stoutly made box called the bunker on the stair landing. Coal-cellars and bunkers were filled by men who carried the coal in on their backs in huge sacks from an open lorry that usually called once a month. Did each sack contain a hundredweight? Half a hundredweight? A quarter? I only know that twenty hundredweights made a ton and once, when older, I tried to lift a full coal sack and failed. The sacks came from a great heap of coal in a yard called a ree in Scotland. Everywhere people lived had a coal ree a few miles away except in parts of the Highlands and Islands where folk burned peat. The coal rees were on branch railway lines along which coal-burning steam locomotives brought trucks of coals from the mines, the last of which closed in Scotland four or five years back why am I going into all this? Before the 1960s almost any photograph of an inhabited British landscape showed a trail of steam drifting across. They were so common we did not notice them, did not even notice them vanish with the coming of electric trains. Glasgow made coal fires illegal around 1970 when it began losing its heavy industries. This put an end to amazingly thick winter fogs that had been killing folk with poor lungs for more than a century. This information is necessary to explain how I managed to burn so much paper without my aunts noticing. Even so, they would have smelled it had I not spread the job over two weekends. From then on I kept my special selection of cut-out heroines and suggestive pictures between the pages of Cruden’s massive Concordance of the Holy Scriptures.
For I had begun to find the words in the books and comics repetitive. The fantasies they inspired were quite separate from the great Rabelaisian-Balzacian-Ovidian-Aristophanic romance I dreamed of making me famous one day, a romance in which the women were princesses or witches, and free agents. In my perverse alternative story they were completely managed by very kind or cruel men, all powerful aspects of ME. The cover of Love for Sale indicated how they could be connected in a single narrative. I was not as insatiable as some Turkish sultans. After the paper holocaust the slaves in my harem dwindled to six with two permanent favourites: Jane Russell as she appeared in The Outlaw film poster (still a popular male sex-icon in the fifties) and Sheena the Jungle Girl. The other four were continually replaced through my fortnightly excursions in search of yet another dirty bookshop. The absence of these shops today is another sign of changed times. Pornography that was prosecuted as criminal in 1950 can now be bought in almost any shop, and things once illegal in print are shown and openly advertized in video films. Only child pornography causes public outrage now, and I would be remembering this phase of my life without shame were it not for Stewart Doig.
I hated lying to my aunts about him. It is also impossible to pretend something for a long time without making it come partly true. Three times a week or more I had to share a desk with Stewart and guilt led me to reply less and less gruffly when he spoke to me. Perhaps loneliness also inclined me to want a partner in crime. One day I muttered to him, “Listen, I don’t want to be seen talking to you –” (this opening was so brutal that I hastily added) “– you or anybody else here. I don’t want to be thought pally with anyone in this school or in sight of this school, but would you like to go a walk with me Saturday afternoon?”
He stared and nodded. I said, “Meet me at the flagpole in the Botanic Gardens at two, right?”
Again he nodded, open-mouthed. I bent my face close to the jotter I was writing in and muttered, “If you say another word to me before then I won’t turn up.”
What a nasty wee bastard I was.
We met at the flagpole and I took him for a walk along the disused railway line running from the Botanic Gardens down to the Clyde by way of two or three derelict railway stations linked by short tunnels. I was bringing him to a dirty bookshop I had found in Scotstoun, near Victoria Park, and meant to prepare him for that by discussing sex. This was almost impossible. Stoory and his mother belonged to a Christian sect called The Brethren who disapproved of sex. Instead we passionately discussed Evil, which Stoory thought started in the Garden of Eden when Eve, tempted by Satan disguized as a snake, ate God’s forbidden fruit that gave knowledge of Good and Evil. I argued that God was wrong to punish Adam and Eve for eating the fruit, as they could not know they were doing evil until they had eaten it. And since God had created the Satanic serpent it must have been His agent. In such discussions every answer to an objection raises other objections. The desire of Stoory and me for the last word kept us arguing fervently until at last we reached the shop where I halted and interrupted him saying, “Change the subject! Some of this must interest you. It interests most men and certainly interests me.”
He stopped, stared and began blushing, but as long as I stood there he could not bring himself to look away. This gave me confidence. I said, “In my opinion none of that stuff is very wicked – I buy some every week. My people don’t care what I buy with my pocket money. Will I buy you some?”
He shook his head slightly, meaning no, and perhaps even whispered “No”. I kept bullying him until at last he admitted interest in a photographic publication called Health and Nudism, with a cover advertising an article inside called Eves on Skis. More boldly than I had entered such a shop before I went in and emerged with Health and Nudism and much more in my briefcase. I handed over two magazines in a quiet corner of Victoria Park. He pushed the lower half of them down his trousers and covered the top half with his jersey, saying miserably, “My mum will murder me if she sees any of this.”
“Have you a bedroom to yourself?” I asked, suddenly worried. He had. I suggested he hide them under his mattress or a carpet. He said, “Maybe they could go behind the coal bunker on the landing. But then I couldn’t get looking at them. Please take them back John!”
I said implacably, “Certainly not”.
“Alright, I’ll try the carpet.”
We resumed our theological discussion and separated before reaching a conclusion. Stewart’s last sad words, “Are we going a walk next Saturday?” were answered by a lofty, “I’ll think about it.” O I was nasty, nasty, nasty. And when the aunts later asked (as usual) about Stewart I said, “Frankly, I’m finding him a dreary soul. I can’t stand the Old Testament religion he goes on and on and on about.”
Nan sighed and said, “Yes, religion does have a dreary side.” She went on to say something about the state of Israel being founded by modern Socialists, people nothing like the old Children of Israel because centuries of persecution by Christians and others had taught the Jews tolerance, so they would eventually treat Muslims within their national boundaries as equals, despite the enmity of those outside it.
This was on Saturday evening. I was only slightly worried when Stoory Doig did not come to school on Monday morning because he was often off sick. But he joined the class after lunch break and alarmed me because I saw he was avoiding me. The subject was science which split the class into groups of four or less at separate benches. Stoory and me had always shared a bench by ourselves, but today the teacher (we called him Tojo because he looked slightly Japanese) said, “Make room for Doig here,” and put him on the far side of the room so I had a bench completely to myself. This was unprecedented and noticed by the rest of the class. A little later Tojo, passing near, murmured, “Feeling lonely, Tunnock?”, with a glance that may have been whimsical but made my blood run cold. For the rest of the afternoon I expected every moment to be summoned to the headmast
er’s office and receive half a dozen strokes of his Lochgelly tawse,32 three on each hand. I had never been belted but had seen it done to others, and hoped the pain of the first stroke would make me faint. Nothing of the sort happened. As I left to go home some boys overtook me and asked what was up between Doig and me? I said, “Ask him.”
They said, “We did and he won’t tell.”
I hurried away from them saying, “Neither will I,” and one shouted after me, “Don’t worry, we’ll find out!”
I passed that evening sick with fear and dread, refusing to answer my aunts’ anxious questions but finally yelling, “I can’t tell you anything.”
I locked myself in the study, removed my paper harem from Cruden’s Concordance, masturbated furiously several times, burned all of it while drinking the final bottle and a half of grandfather’s sherry, then managed to put myself early to bed without falling down. I slept so soundly that I either outslept a hangover or was still drunk when I wakened at the usual hour, for I felt bright and cheerful. I had no memories of the previous day until halfway through dressing they recurred like an ugly dream. At breakfast with Nan and Nell I tried fooling myself into thinking the whole business might have no further consequences, especially since the aunts said nothing about my queer conduct the night before. In the 1950s an efficient General Post Office delivered letters twice daily, the first delivery before breakfast. Between porridge and boiled eggs (ours was always a two course breakfast) Nan took a letter from an envelope, read it more than once then said, “John, your headmaster asks me to visit him at eleven o’clock this morning. Do you know why?”
Old Men in Love Page 12