Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  So let’s talk about football for a minute. Football was something else in Scotland. Growing up I thought there were only two football clubs in the whole world – Rangers and Celtic. To say the names alone at the wrong time has been the cause of many a violent incident. I have never seen anything like the Scottish football fans anywhere else in the world. In Scotland, football is really much more than just a sport: it is about religion, it is about repression. Football teams are all most people have to look up to. They are gods; the only light in a very dark existence.

  Rangers are basically a Protestant team with the same colours as the Union Jack, whose devotees sing songs about loyalty to the crown. The chants they scream out at football matches cry out for the blood of their one true rival, Celtic.

  Celtic fans fly the Irish flag, and are of course Catholic and hate anything to do with the monarchy. They too have songs and chants about standing knee deep in the blood of their sworn enemy, Rangers.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking here. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of a laugh and taunting the other team. This sort of stuff happens all over the world. Good healthy rivalry, right? Wrong. This is way beyond healthy. This is deep-seated hatred. If you shout out a team slogan or wave the wrong flag in the wrong place, you can end up battered and bleeding. If you wear the wrong colour shirt in the wrong place, you can end up dead.

  I made the mistake of going to an Old Firm game when I was much older, when I first went back to Scotland in 1980. The Old Firm game is what they call it when these two teams clash.

  My cousin Joanne was dating a guy called Jim Duffy, who she has since married. Anyway, Jim was a great footballer and a great bloke. He later became one of the best footballers in Scotland. As it happened, at the time he played for Celtic, although on this day he wasn’t playing. He knew I was from Australia and wasn’t caught up in the brutality of the rivalry and he didn’t think twice about getting me some tickets for the game when I asked him, but he gave me a little advice. He said, ‘Don’t wear the colours of either team, keep your head down and don’t yell out too much.’ But I was travelling with a good friend of mine, a girl called Jan who I was seeing at the time, and when we arrived at the game, she was wearing red boots, blue jeans and a white top – Rangers colours. And it was too late to change. Jim walked us to the game and left us outside the stadium. His last words to us were, ‘Meet you here after the game. I’m not sure where your tickets have you seated, so be careful.’

  I took our tickets and went to our seats, not expecting anything other than a great game of football. I was in for a shock.

  As fate would have it, with me being brought up a Rangers supporter, and the colours the young lassie was wearing, guess where we were sitting. Right in the middle of the Celtic stand. I was in neutral colours as instructed but I looked at my date and I thought that I might be in trouble. I’ve been told that Celtic supporters can smell blue blood a mile away. Luckily for me, the stand we were in seemed to be mostly filled with older Celtic supporters – the ones who had long ago given up killing people for fun. Not only that, they immediately knew by our accents that we weren’t from around there. I did bung on a bit of an Australian accent out of fear and self-preservation.

  ‘G’day you blokes, where do you get a beer around here?’ I asked loud enough to be heard all around the stand. Luckily Jan was a pretty girl and I’m sure that helped. The Scots get all charming when there’s a good-looking girl around. They didn’t kill us and much to my surprise we survived the game relatively unscathed. I was the target of a few jokes but all in good fun and I could take that. I was a little wounded, as Rangers lost one–nil in extra time, but I would live.

  Anyway, what followed was the most frightening display of soccer hooliganism I have ever seen. Both teams’ supporters took turns charging onto the field. It was like trench warfare, charging from the safety of their own end, onto the pitch and into noman’s-land. More people joined in every time.

  What went on in the name of football on that field scarred me for life. People were being beaten to the ground then picked up and clubbed with lumps of wood. The police were taken by surprise by the scale of the riot and tried everything to stop the violence but they couldn’t; it was out of control. In the end they had to ride through the screaming crowd on horseback, swinging big sticks, knocking people to the ground, in an attempt to break them up.

  In shock, we went to meet Jim. We found him on the street outside the game, surrounded by Rangers supporters. Jim had picked this place thinking it would be safer for us than being left standing among the Celtic fans. But here he was, in the worst place he could possibly be, surrounded by thousands of rampaging lunatics, burning green shops and overturning green cars. We walked in silence back to Jim’s car, heads down, none of us daring to look at anything or anyone. It was a long, long walk. As a Celtic player, Jim would have been a prize trophy for one of the marauding Rangers supporters. If they had recognised him they would have put his head on a stick and marched up and down the street. I read that this was the most violent day in Scottish sport since 1926. It certainly felt like it. This was not sport, it was war. I lost my taste for football that day, at least until I was back in Australia where being brought up on sport included being good sports.

  But believe it or not there were times when Scotland would unite, when the Celtic and Rangers fans joined forces and became brothers, bloody brothers; but only when Scotland played. I often wondered how they could have hated each other so much and then become partners in crime so easily. There was only one thing that made it make sense, ever – England. We all hated the English. The Scots could put away their petty arguing and fighting to go and start petty fights with the real enemy – the English. Now I see how it all works; all that fighting with each other was just training for the real battle against England. After all, we are all brothers, we are cut from the same bloody cloth. And of course there was a host of songs to be sung about ripping our old enemy apart and tearing out their black hearts – if they had hearts – not to mention lots and lots of songs about being away from Bonnie Scotland that always seemed to sound better when being sung on Scottish soil. Funny that.

  I think that the English people knew why Hadrian’s Wall was built on those days when the two national football teams met in England. I’m sure they were sitting at home wishing it was about twenty feet higher and a lot longer and didn’t have a train line running through it. They had songs about the barbarians from the north that were equally as bad as the Scots’ songs. But no one ever listened to them where we came from.

  The Scottish fans would hit London like a pack of berserk Vikings, ready to rape and pillage and on the odd occasion watch football. If they actually won a game, the partying went on for days. I hear the English girls seemed to look cuter when we won. But we never won too often. And there was no way any nice English girl would put up with a drunken Scottish soccer hooligan chasing after her in traditional dress, waving a Scotland scarf, shouting out obscenities and lifting up his kilt at passersby. So it mostly ended with packs of lonely, drunken Scotsmen crawling around the streets of London looking for unsuspecting victims to fight until they ran out of money for booze and got the train back to Scotland. If they felt really bad they could always start a fight with each other on the way home. This was the Scottish way. Always one more battle to be won before you got home and curled up with a good bottle.

  In 1977, my uncle went to England by train to see Scotland beat England at Wembley Stadium. It was such a rare victory that the Scots celebrated by taking the whole pitch home with them. My uncle tells me that on the train ride home, a particularly drunken Scotsman gave him the penalty spot from the field. They took the goalposts, the nets and most of the grass back to Bonnie Scotland and, for a short time, drank and sang together as friends. Next day it was back to the hate and fighting.

  I know, like half of Glasgow, that a lot of my relatives’ ancestors came from Ireland, probably during the potato famine when thousands
of half-starved, angry Irish folk fled Ireland by boat and landed in Glasgow and Liverpool and anywhere else that would have them. They brought their hatred of the English with them so they fitted right in when they landed in Scotland. As I said before, we both hated the English. It was a hate that dated back more than seven hundred years but for some reason it is still so real to this day that they can taste it. They sing about it and fight about it and cry in their drinks about it, not necessarily in that order. But it is the cause of much pain where I come from. Everyone seems to have some sort of scars; if they aren’t from fighting they are emotional.

  Not all my scars are emotional. I have a scar on my right wrist but not from fighting. I didn’t get any of those until much later. I got this one from go-carting. I can’t remember whose cart it was – we probably stole it – but I somehow ended up driving it at very high speed down a hill. It was only a small hill in a back court between a bunch of tenements. The back court was about the size of a small tennis court but we didn’t have tennis courts in Cowcaddens. This was just a place behind the buildings where families put their rubbish. The water drained off the roofs and flooded the back court. Whenever it rained it looked like a stormwater drain, so it was slippery and dangerous. Just how I managed to get up any speed in there is beyond me. Anyway, high speed for a four year old is not that fast. I wasn’t the best driver; I’m still not the best driver come to think of it. And I suddenly realised that I was about to hit a wall. So I jumped off while the cart seemed to be going at breakneck speed. This is another one of those patterns that keeps recurring in my life.

  I didn’t break my neck, but someone had thrown away a rather large mirror and there it was, right where I was about to crash. I landed straight on it. I broke my fall and I broke the mirror with my hand, so my seven years’ bad luck started that day; in fact, maybe it was backdated a few years. I remember blood spurting like a fountain from my wrist as I ran home. By the time I reached my mum I had lost a lot of blood.

  There was a hospital nearby so I was rushed to casualty for eight or ten stitches. It seemed that the hospitals in Glasgow were specialists at stitching up gaping wounds. Who would have thought, eh? As luck would have it the cut had just missed the main artery in my wrist by a whisper, otherwise I might have bled to death. But I didn’t and I was tough, so everything was all right.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  a real Glasgow hard man

  I don’t recall spending much time with my grandparents except for my granny, my mum’s mum. She lived a life that I could only speculate; it made my life look tame. The world tried to break her but failed, leaving an old woman with nothing but memories and a broken heart, but she was still standing. She lived alone until she was eighty-something. And she was as tough as nails. The women in Glasgow all seemed to be really hard.

  She helped bring me into this world and for that I thank her. Life couldn’t have been easy for her and even though she could sometimes get a little wild, she was always loving and funny. I have vague memories of her husband, my da, but they are not very clear. They didn’t live in the same house and hadn’t for as long as I was around. My granny and he were friends, but I don’t remember seeing them together. Maybe they didn’t talk at all, who knows. That probably worked out fine for them. Da lived alone, except for his best mate, Jackie the border collie. Dorothy, my big sister, was his favourite but I don’t think he had a lot to do with us.

  I have no recollection of my dad’s mum. I think she died young from a drinking-related illness. My grandparents all lived hard and except for my granny, they all died quite young. In Glasgow, if someone died, you didn’t bury them immediately; you would go around to their house a few days later and beat their liver to death with a stick. They drank a lot. I had an uncle who drank a bottle of varnish . . . he had a horrible end but a lovely finish. Sorry, I had to share that. It’s an old joke but a good one.

  I know I met Pop, my dad’s dad. I have vague memories of him being quiet and a bit scary. Apparently he was a real Glasgow hard man. Old-school hard. He was a bare-knuckle fighter, a champion during the Depression. He would fight for about thirty rounds in the alleys of Glasgow while everyone placed bets on him. Fighting in Glasgow is an art form and he must have been a master and a nightmare rolled into one. He made his money fighting. That was his job – being beaten or beating people to a pulp. My dad told us that during the Depression, when food was really scarce, if he won his fights he would buy the whole street bacon and eggs. When he wasn’t fighting I don’t know what they ate but it wasn’t a lot.

  I tried to track down more about him but no records of illegal bare-knuckle fighting were kept. The boxing officials in Scotland said it never happened after the turn of the century. They obviously didn’t live anywhere near us.

  I met an old guy when I went back to Scotland in 1980. I was in a pub with my uncle and I went to the bar to get a drink. We actually went to the pub at ten in the morning and sat in there all day just drinking slowly until it shut again at night. We seemed to be there every morning. After a while I asked my uncle jokingly if he was just doing this for me because it wasn’t necessary; I could live without a drink at least until after lunch.

  He very seriously said no, that’s just what he did. It looked to me like this was sort of a job: clock in at ten, drink all day and clock out at closing time. He was out of the house the same amount of time he would have been if he was working. We weren’t alone doing it either, and after a few days I had a whole bunch of new friends. Old and young, male and female, standing around outside the pub, looking at their watches waiting for it to open. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, they were there the same time every day, with coats and hats on, waiting for the click of the lock and the doors to swing open. Then they would pour into the bar, excitedly rubbing their hands together, ready for the first of the day. They looked a little edgy and very thirsty and they were all a little snappy first thing in the morning until they had their first drink.

  Now I like a drink as much as anybody but this was just a bar; nothing happened there, no entertainment, nothing except the odd sing-song. Then they would probably go home to their wives and eat dinner with nothing to say to each other.

  ‘What did you dae the day?’

  ‘Nothin’, just drank.’

  Anyway, I was at the bar, and I got served before this old guy and he turned on me. He was about eighty years old and five feet high and he wanted to take me outside for a fight. I was a bit shocked. Was he serious? Not knowing how to react, I laughed – not at him, but at the situation. He went nuts and I could see in his eyes that he was not kidding. Had it been a few years earlier, I’m sure I would have already been out for the count. He had the air of a man who, in his prime, no one would have fucked with.

  Anyway, my uncle came to his rescue – or was it mine, I’m still not sure – and said to him, ‘Hey, Jimmy’ (everybody in Glasgow is called Jimmy, by the way, even if you’re not called Jimmy), ‘this is Pop Swan’s grandson.’

  The old guy’s demeanour immediately changed and he even looked a little scared. He apologised to me and insisted on buying me a drink. Whether he was an old mate of Pop’s or an old foe, I’m not sure, but what I did learn from that meeting was if you accidentally caught the wrong guy at the wrong time in that town, it didn’t matter if he was young or old, you could be up to your neck in it before you had a chance to back away.

  Much later on, when I went back to Glasgow to do some shows, I was walking down the main street of Glasgow with Armando Hurley, a rather big black American who was singing in the band with me. Now Armando looked mean; he was built like a tank and had a mohawk haircut. Really he was a gentle soul, but you wouldn’t know from looking at him. He liked to bung it on a bit and keep people away from me. Anyway, we were crossing the road and this old guy with a cane was coming towards us.

  ‘Get the fuck oot ma way,’ he snarled.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ we both said. We were being extremely polite as he was an
old guy. But the streets were crowded and for some reason he thought we were getting in his way on purpose. He turned and scowled at me, ready to fight.

  Now this guy could hardly walk; he was about ninety. He glanced at Armando and turned back to me and then back to Armando quickly and said, ‘Ye wouldnae be so tough if you didn’t have Mister T wi’ ye.’

  Then he grunted and swore under his breath and kept on shuffling down the street, saying something about Armando’s mother as he left. I called Armando Mister T from then on. That’s the mentality of old Glaswegians. They can make me laugh or they can make me afraid very easily.

  Before we moved to Australia we lived at 22 Abercorn Street, Cowcaddens, close to the city. The old tenement buildings we lived in have now been turned into trendy inner-city dwellings but back then it was scary. Each building had a common entrance, or close, and a toilet outside in the back court. The back court wasn’t the nicest place. There would often be drunks asleep or up to no good in the back courts. People would be making out in them or being killed in them. They were dark and you couldn’t see into them from the street. So any time we went down to the back court was a traumatic experience. Unless, of course, we were with a bunch of mates or our brothers and sisters. Then we’d be the ones up to no good.