Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my Jane.

  Je t’aime, Je t’aimais, Je t’aimerai.

  And to my beautiful children and grandchildren.

  And to Snoop and Oliver who sat with me while I wrote

  it, occasionally looking at me and wagging their tails to

  encourage me.

  CONTENTS

  dedication

  preface

  prologue

  one the best sparring partner in Britain

  two next to nothing

  three Man, that’s ma hobby!

  four a real Glasgow hard man

  five nothing like a romantic sea cruise

  six sunny South Australia

  seven the city of tomorrow

  eight cardboard inside our shoes

  nine the sound of breaking glass

  ten messing with the kids

  eleven the last bit of light

  twelve we were damaged goods

  thirteen please let it be her

  fourteen because I love you, son

  fifteen smoke and mirrors

  sixteen the time our worlds collided

  seventeen don’t let the name down

  eighteen everybody thought I was fearless

  nineteen a murderer but a good bloke

  twenty cheap speed and beer

  twenty-one who had hit who

  twenty-two white trash

  twenty-three what are we going to do now?

  twenty-four you’ll hear more if you shut up

  twenty-five wouldn’t be dead for quids

  twenty-six do you want to join our band?

  twenty-seven I was never coming back

  epilogue

  acknowledgements

  photos section

  about the author

  copyright

  PREFACE

  Where do I start? How about this? This is my story. This is the way I saw things. It might not be completely accurate and it might not be the way others saw it. But this is how I saw it.

  Scotland was my first home. Cowcaddens, a suburb close to the centre of Glasgow to be exact. One of the only places in the world you can get your heart broken and your jaw broken at the same time. More than just my birthplace. It holds a place in my heart like nowhere else in the world except for maybe Australia, where I grew up, learned about life. The lucky country. But I was lucky to make it through my childhood in one piece.

  I love these places equally and I feel both have helped make me who I am and for that I am grateful. But I have to look at both of these places to really see why I am who I am.

  Time and trauma have taken what I was born with and what I have experienced and brewed it all into what you see before you now. Some of what I have done has not been pretty to watch. Imagine what it was like to live through it.

  But here I am. Still living and still learning. You’ve got to love life. You might not always get things right but there is always a chance to make things better if you work hard.

  I spent most of my life running from my childhood and now it seems like my time to face it. This is the story of a lifetime spent running away. Running from fear. Running from shame but at the same time running from hope. I am not running anymore. This is the story of an imperfect childhood that has led to me becoming an imperfect adult. But life is not perfect. And it is short so make the best out of it you can, with the tools you are given.

  My folks made mistakes – all parents do. Some mistakes were bigger than others but I don’t blame them for anything. They came from worse poverty than I did. They had very little education, no help and very little hope in their lives. Life must have been overwhelming for them nearly all the time. I always feel I had luck on my side, someone looking over my shoulder, keeping an eye out for me. My mum had no one looking out for her but us kids, and we were too small to help her, no matter how much we loved her.

  Every choice my parents made, every bit of pain or fear I have felt, has brought me to where I am today. I am far from perfect but I am here and I am me. I have a beautiful family and a great life and through writing this all down I feel I can finally let a lot of the past go. I don’t need to hold on to it anymore. There is no blame. It’s no one’s fault.

  I want to pass on what I have learned to my children. I know they will have to make their own choices and their own mistakes, but now I will be around to help them deal with them. Meanwhile, I want to thank my parents for bringing me into this world and my brothers and sisters for sharing so much with me. I apologise to all of them for any pain I have caused along the way.

  PROLOGUE

  Ah. Nothing. That’s better. Nothing at all. No pain.

  ‘Hey, pass that whisky back over here.’

  From the moment I start to drink, I feel absolutely nothing.

  When I first started taking drugs and drinking, I found the fear that had filled me since I was small almost disappeared. The fear of not being wanted. The fear of letting my guard down. The fear of letting anyone in. The fear of being found out. The fear of not being worthy. The fear of looking into my own eyes. It was gone. All of it. As long as I stayed smashed.

  ‘Come on. Don’t hang on to it. Give me some.’ I’d drink it down and for a minute, I’d stop breathing. ‘Oh yes. I needed that.’

  Whoosh. The air rushed back into my lungs. I was still alive. But was this what I wanted? That minute I swallowed the whisky. The minute when the air stopped filling my lungs. That was when I felt peace.

  It was like being in a trance. I drank, then I slipped away. Into the void.

  The odd times that I did have to be straight I could feel fear racing back over me like a freight train. Then I’d drink, and it was gone.

  ‘Give me a line.’

  All I had to do to not think or feel was get fucked up. I might never have to feel again.

  ‘Give me everything.’

  Maybe this is why, for most of my childhood, my dad was drinking himself slowly to death. Not wanting to feel his own pain and not wanting to see the pain we were feeling. Those nights when he had drunk just enough to want to talk to us but could never really get it out. Or did he try and perhaps I was too young to listen to him? ‘I’m sorry, son. I love ye. You kids deserve better than this. Better than me. I need to let you know why I’m so fucked up.’

  ‘Don’t tell me why. I don’t want to hear it. I’m scared, Dad. Why is it all so hard?’

  But he never talked to me. He never let me in. He just left.

  Did he feel scared, like I do? Did he lie awake, afraid of anything and everything, like I do? Did he drink until he could feel nothing and pass out cold, like I do?

  He said he wasn’t afraid of anything. ‘Don’t be afraid, son. You don’t be afraid of anything. You’re strong like me.’

  Even my big brother John told me, ‘I’m afraid of no man. I’m afraid of nothing that breathes.’

  Now I know John was lying. He was lying to me, to himself and to the rest of the world. John was surviving. He was so scared that he was dangerous. Dad was the same. Afraid and dangerous. Especially to those people who were closest to him.

  Just like me.

  I can see it now.

  * * *

  The Royalty Bar sits right in the middle of Cowcaddens, a very Protestant part of Glasgow. Around here you could be a Sikh or a Hindu, a Sufi or a Buddhist, a Muslim, even an atheist – so long as you weren’t Catholic.

  The door of the pub swung open and crashed against the wall. All heads in the bar turned towards the door and looked at the figure blocking out the light. He was big and ugly, sort of like Charles Bronson after a hard night. Maybe it was the way his knuckles dragged on the ground behind him, I’m not sure, but he looked tough. Hi
s nose was spread across his face and his teeth were like a row of condemned buildings. It seemed that in every direction in Cowcaddens, something looked condemned.

  ‘I’m the fuckin’ toughest guy in Glasgow. Does anybody here want tae argue wi’ me?’ he snarled.

  I could feel the muscles of the old guy next to me tighten up. He wanted to take him on but decided against it.

  I had just arrived in Glasgow for the first time since I’d left nearly twenty years earlier. I came from this place called Cowcaddens, one of the rougher parts of inner-city Glasgow. Now that I think about it, all of Glasgow is tough, but it’s home. This is where it all started.

  I came to see where I came from, to find my people, and even though I’d grown up twelve thousand miles away, in a place where the sun shines all day and there are beautiful beaches with girls in bikinis baking in the sun, and hardly anyone carries cutthroat razors for protection, something about this scene felt very familiar to me.

  I was a long way from the pubs and clubs of Australia where I had got away with murder and made my living singing and chasing girls. Tonight I would not get away with anything, tonight I was out of my depth. I started to get up but my Uncle Jackie, my official guide for this homecoming tour of the bars of Glasgow, grabbed me and sat me down. As I looked at him, I knew it would be better to say nothing. He told me later that this same guy came into the bar a week earlier and started trouble, and one of my uncle’s friends hit him on the head with a hammer a few times. Apparently all it did was make him mad. Maybe.

  So we sat quietly and said nothing even though I wanted to stand up and hit him. The gorilla in the door looked around the room, breathed out and spat on the floor. Then turned around and walked out into the cold night. He was going to the next bar to see if he could find someone who would take him on. That’s what he did for fun. This was my welcome home.

  ‘See you next week, Charlie,’ my uncle whispered under his breath as the beast left the bar. I think he was hoping to take him down one day, but not tonight.

  I knock back a wee dram of whisky while my uncle gets us a refill. He drinks fast; these really are my people. Here in Glasgow they all seem to order the same thing: a whisky with a beer chaser. I drank in this bar every night I was in Glasgow and never saw anybody drink the beer. We would order one beer chaser and have twenty-five straight whiskies. And at the end of the night the beer would still be sitting there, as warm as it was when it was first poured. It was just an excuse to have a whisky.

  At this rate I’ll be out on the street singing before the pub shuts but so will the rest of the bar so I’ll fit right in. I feel happy to be here but I notice that as usual there is a nagging voice in the back of my head screaming, ‘You don’t deserve to be happy, you are no good.’ I have never really been chasing a dream. I’ve been running from a nightmare. I still wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and afraid. Afraid that life will catch up with me, and all the things I’ve done wrong will swamp me like a tidal wave and drag me down. Drag me back to where I belong.

  My next drink arrives.

  ‘Oh, fuck I needed that,’ sighs my uncle, the colour slowly coming back to his cheeks.

  The truth is I have felt like this and heard this voice since I was a child, long before I was capable of doing anything wrong. Long before I ran away from home, long before I escaped from life through drinking or taking drugs. Long before I made records, even before I joined a band, and a long, long time before I almost let everything important to me in this world slip through my fingers. Was I born feeling unworthy, afraid, even guilty? What happened to me?

  We order another round and we sit and begin to talk, awkwardly avoiding anything too personal even though it might shed some light onto why we are sitting here drinking ourselves into oblivion. We both talk too much and say nothing at the same time. I can feel my head starting to spin but I’m used to the feeling, I’ve felt it for a long time now.

  ‘Let’s sing a wee song,’ shouts my uncle and my first night in Glasgow has begun with a bang.

  CHAPTER ONE

  the best sparring partner in Britain

  Scottish people fall in love very easily, even more so on Saturday night. I think it is because we are all crazy. If I had to go to war, and I had the choice, I would surround myself with Scots. Then again, I would think twice about going to the football or a wedding with them. We can find trouble anywhere. A Glaswegian could start a fight at a funeral, even his own.

  I vaguely remember being maybe four years old and looking out of the window on a Saturday night and being amazed at the scene on the street below at closing time. Singing, fighting, kissing and hustling, and that was just one couple. My mum and dad.

  Glasgow in 1960 was like a bomb site. As a kid it looked to me like everything was falling down. There was rubble and mess everywhere. Well, there was around Cowcaddens where I lived. I think it was what you’d call an inner-city slum. Years before, they had torn down the old slums and built our slum. It was grey and cold-looking, a lot like the people, and all the buildings were covered in a layer of soot from the coal fires. So were the people, come to think about it. You could smell the coal burning everywhere. To this day, the smell of a coal fire brings back a lot of memories.

  When I went back in 1980 it still looked the same. It was as if the war was still going on and the place had been bombed quite recently. I guess there were trees, art and music and beautiful parts to the city but nowhere near where we lived. The only art was written on the walls of the buildings in chalk and on the sidewalks in blood.

  Glasgow was, and still is really, a place that evokes mixed emotions in me. I meet Glaswegians socially and they are warm and friendly and very funny, but then I hear a Glaswegian accent on a dark street and alarm bells immediately start ringing in my head.

  But anyway, back in the sixties, most of the town still looked like the Luftwaffe had had a field day there. I always thought one day they’d knock it down and start again, nice and new, but they never did.

  In those days I thought my mum and dad were the coolest people alive. Mum was a beautiful girl and Dad was the Scottish boxing champion. They must have looked something when they stepped out on the town. Mum told me later that around that time they were in all sorts of dancing competitions. In fact, they were the jitterbug champions of Western Scotland for a while, a title that they won in a big dance hall near the markets of Glasgow. A place called the Barrowland Ballroom. This same hall became famous in the late sixties for a series of murders that rocked Scotland. Bible John, as he was known, followed young girls from the dance hall and brutally murdered them. He was never caught. The Barrowlands was also one of the first big places I played with my band when I went back to Scotland. I was excited to play in the place where my parents had had so much fun. I remember it was a great show but I felt uneasy in the hall. Like a lot of Glasgow, this place gave me a sense of belonging but with that there was an underlying feeling of fear.

  My dad could sing, fight, drink his weight in whisky and charm the pants off anyone – literally, but I’ll get to that later. I used to think that was all I needed to learn to be a man. He was the amateur featherweight boxing champion of Britain, so I guess that made my mum the best sparring partner in Britain. I’m not sure what my dad did in Scotland after he finished boxing; he probably worked with his hands, well his fists anyway. And I’m not sure if Mum worked; she probably had to, but regardless, things were pretty tough for us, as they were for everyone who lived around us. Glasgow was, and still is, a tough town.

  Dad won the title in 1956, I think. Apparently he was an amazing boxer, always fought fair and clean. He was offered money to go professional but he always said that pro-boxing was way too corrupt. He always tried to teach us that you had to be fair in sport, know how to lose graciously and win humbly. That was passed on to us as well as how to fight out of the ring. The difference was that out of the ring we learned not to be beaten at all costs. Do whatever we had to do but don’t giv
e in or lie down for anybody. These and other lessons have been backhanded down from father to son since time began in Scotland.

  Dad used to tell me how he would spend time in training out of Glasgow, in a town called Auchterarder. The air would have been cleaner away from the city so it was a better place to prepare for a fight. Maybe it kept him away from his mates so he didn’t drink as much too. I’m not sure, but I did hear his dad used to be his trainer. That would make sense; his dad was a very tough man and I can’t imagine my dad taking orders from anybody else.

  I never saw Dad without a cigarette in his hand. He started smoking at the age of five or six. His parents, like everyone else at the time, didn’t know the damage that smoking would do to you. There were posters saying how good it was for you. Then again, they did say the same about heroin, cocaine and of course whisky. So they used to send him to school with six Woodbine and a box of matches in his pocket. He never stopped until about sixty years later. That meant for sixty-odd years he smoked plain cigarettes, no filters, so he got the maximum amount of tar and nicotine.

  He ran fifteen or twenty miles every day for most of his younger days so I presume the running helped counteract the smoking. My dad was a champion but I think the will to win came more from his heart than his training. Dad never wanted anybody to beat him. In the end the only person who did beat him was himself.

  He always had a little cough, dry and ominous. Over the years I heard the cough get slowly worse and worse. He eventually stopped smoking because he was diagnosed with emphysema but by then it was too late. It killed him a few years later. Who knows – maybe that’s why I wake up in fright, not being able to breathe.

  I loved my dad, everyone did, except my mum after a while. When I was young I never saw any pain or fear in his eyes. I did see it much later as an adult when he could do nothing else but sit and reflect on his life to the sound of death banging at the door. I felt for him then; I think fear was a new thing for him. He could take pain, he was tough, but real fear was different and it only caught up to him when he could no longer outrun it or drown it in booze. I never let him know that I knew he was scared. That alone would have killed him. He died a tough guy.