by Rikki Brown
As a pre-going-to-school treat my parents had taken me to Calderpark Zoo where I caught Scarlet Fever. This was a death’s-door scenario in the early sixties. There were so many diseases that it was practically impossible to get through your childhood without catching something unpleasant. The NHS inoculated us against everything they could think of: diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid, measles and, my personal favourite, polio. Not my favourite disease I hasten to add, it was my favourite because immunity didn’t involve an injection – it involved being treated like a pony and given a sugar cube.
Despite this, some diseases still got through. However, almost dying of Scarlet Fever and taking a very long time to recover was worth it because I enjoyed the day, as the zoo had good stuff like polar bears and lions. Lions are usually big and brave in the jungle, but this lot spent their entire day looking like they were shitting themselves because they’d found out the council had built Easterhouse a mere couple of miles away from their unnatural habitat. Thinking back, Calderpark Zoo (which eventually became Glasgow Zoo) had loads of animals – wallabies, camels, rhinoceroses, bison and even elephants. I’d seen elephants before at the annual Christmas Circus and Carnival in the Kelvin Hall, although I should perhaps say that I’d smelled elephants before because the whole Kelvin Hall smelt of elephant crap. I defy any Glaswegian who, for whatever reason, comes in contact with the smell of elephant crap and doesn’t immediately think ‘Kelvin Hall’. The council may have turned it into a transport museum and a sports arena but the Kelvin Hall will always mean elephant shite to me.
Glasgow Zoo eventually closed down but it wasn’t an immediate closing, it was a slow painful process as the zoo struggled on with less and less animals until no one really wanted to pay to see the last remaining few – one chimpanzee and a couple of gerbils. When the animals died, the zoo couldn’t afford to replace them, but it did beg the question, what happened to the animals that died? How do you dispose of a rhinoceros’s body? All I can say is that during the lengthy and painful demise of the zoo there seemed to be a much wider range of meats available at the local snack bar and restaurant.
Scarlet Fever kept me off school for a year, which, as it happened, really wasn’t much of a problem because for the first twelve months the entire curriculum involved no more than instructions on using writing implements without getting them stuck up your nose. Now I’m not bragging here, actually I am, but at the end of my spring first term, despite being one year behind everyone else, I came first in the class. Or ‘First For General Excellence’ as it said in the book I received as a prize. Looking back, maybe I was a genius. Well, it was either that or the rest of my class were effing idiots. This was in 1963/64, a completely, completely, completely different time. I’m labouring the completelies here because the book I received as First Prize for my General Excellence (probably also an understatement) was Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit Stories. A book that nowadays may not be looked upon as completely PC, but it was a different time and you can’t go around rewriting old books to suit modern sensibilities just because the very easily offended go out of their way to find something to be offended about in them.
In the early sixties schools still proudly displayed big maps of the world on the walls with the British Empire marked out in red to show just how much better than Johnny Foreigner we the British were. The fact that my First Prize for General Excellence contained some pretty dubious racial stereotyping really wasn’t thought of as an issue. Not in an era when the logo for Robertson’s Jam was considered no more than the logo for Robertson’s Jam. We’re now actually a bit embarrassed about the British Empire’s role in the world, so embarrassed that the city of Glasgow recently apologised for slavery. Good that they apologised in 2009 because it’s best to nip Glasgow’s role in the slave trade in the bud before it gets out of hand.
I don’t think it was a personal apology because there was no one to apologise to so it was more of a ceremonial PR apology to attempt to take the bad look off 90% of Glasgow’s architectural gems being built using the profits from rum, sugar, tobacco and cotton, and Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit books. What form did the apology take? It was more than likely a council official saying ‘Helluva sorry by the way. Here, have a Glasgow’s Miles Better t-shirt which I’m sure more than makes up for the whole profiting from the slave trade thing.’
In 1963 I was playing in my bedroom when I heard my mother shout, ‘Oh my God! They killed Kennedy.’ There had been a newsflash on the telly made by a grim-faced newsreader. In the days before twenty-four-hour rolling news a newsflash was a big deal because it was never good news. The programme you were watching would be interrupted by a newsflash graphic and a man – it was always a man – would appear saying, ‘A dead bad thing has happened.’ Although in the case of STV, if the news came in during the day, they interrupted their daytime programming, which was only ever a picture of a Scottish scene accompanied by the song ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ playing on a loop. No matter if you tuned in at 10am or 11am or 12.45pm or 2.13pm, it was always ‘Charlie Is My Darling’. Compared to some of the stuff STV broadcast nowadays, ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ with the countryside scene is practically Bafta Award winning.
In 1968 I was playing in my bedroom as usual when I heard my mother shout, ‘Oh my God! They killed Kennedy.’ A different Kennedy this time, obviously. Now I’m only guessing here but I think it was my mother’s exclamations of shock that inspired South Park’s, ‘Oh my God! They killed Kenny,’ catchphrase. Being six, I was a bit easy oozy about the J. F. Kennedy assassination and watching the footage of the motorcade I didn’t think that it was terrible, I just thought ‘nice car’.
Primary school is the school we go to where we formulate our early opinions of the world but all I can recall is the teachers perpetually telling us a story concerning the whereabouts of Chicken Licken and Turkey Lurkey. One of the two had a nasty bump on his head, I forget which, and the whole plot centred on where and how he received his injury. What was to be learned from this literary masterpiece still defeats me. Perhaps it was subliminal. We did, I suppose, also have Janet and John books and they couldn’t have had much influence on me because I can’t recollect even slightly what they were about.
We were the post-World War Two generation and we carried our books in what we called haversacks, which were khaki canvas bags that had been previously used to carry gas masks. Probably wouldn’t have looked out of place in the biological warfare section of my toy cupboard. We wore a lot of ex-army surplus clothes because they were cheap and hard-wearing. It had quite an effect on the school photograph, what with half the class looking like school kids and the other half looking like Chinese generals.
In retrospect I suppose I did learn a lot from those years though. For instance, I could tell a parent’s taste in home decor by the wallpaper they’d covered their kid’s school books in, and I could tell a fellow pupil’s father’s income by looking at the price on his or her dinner ticket. If your father had a good job you paid 4/6d a week, not so good a job and 2/6d was printed on your dinner ticket. If your father was amongst the lower paid the price of a weekly dinner ticket was 1/3d and if your father was unemployed you were issued with a free dinner ticket. The Data Protection Act was decades off, so many decades off that not only was your father’s income there to be seen by every dinner lady, or anyone within seeing distance, but if your father didn’t have a job this could be seen by almost everyone because your free dinner ticket was a different colour from the paid ones.
There was no sensitivity when it came to the nit nurse either. If she found you had nits she’d shave your head. Not completely, but not far off it, and if she found you had impetigo she painted your lips with gentian violet. There was nothing subtle about having your human rights breeched and some pupils returned from the nurse with either a shaved head or bright purple lips, leaving them marked out like a plague victim with a yellow cross on their front door. Children are insensitive and referred to anyone with nits or impetigo as hav
ing the ‘meegy’. One unfortunate girl in my class whose name was Kim not only had nits and impetigo, but she also had scabies. Kids can be cruel and in this case they were The Lone Ranger cruel because she ended up being called Kimo Scabby for the rest of her time at primary.
It wasn’t just the three aforementioned inflictions that led to ‘meegy’ accusations, if your house smelt of cabbage that was a sure sign of ‘meeginess’ too. Many houses did indeed smell of cabbage and in this age of nostalgic fond memories of the sixties I’m surprised, actually, that no one has invented a smell of cabbage spray to bring the aroma of that era back into the modern age. A cabbage-smelling house was usually a sign of abject poverty and a wholly cabbage-based diet but it was also part of a grand master plan.
Warrant sales were commonplace and many times the Sheriff Officers would turn up and pile up a household’s furniture outside the close for sale to scum. There’s no other way to describe the vultures who turned up to make a huge profit by buying their belongings for threepence and selling them on with a 10,000% mark up. The grand master plan was to make everything you owned smell of cabbage because no vulture would then want to buy it. Everyone empathised with the victims of warrant sales because the attitude was ‘there for the grace of God go I’.
The ladies of the warrant sale houses found it hard to make ends meet, especially because in a lot of the cases they were in debt because the man of the house had drunk away his pay packet. You couldn’t consolidate your debts in the sixties – you could only cover your debts by having your wardrobes, chairs and couches sold off by people who were ‘only following orders’. It was an excuse that wasn’t accepted at Nuremberg and an excuse that wasn’t accepted in Easterhouse either. This led the locals to vandalise cars belonging to those involved in executing warrant sales, an act the police turned a blind eye to because they had no love for debt collectors either. It was always the council who set the Sheriff’s Officer on people either for non-payment of rent or rates. It was hard if you were poor to get into other debt as you couldn’t get credit in the first place. Hire purchase was only available if you could pay a third down on what you were buying, and if you were poor the very last thing you’d have would be a third to put down on white goods. You never saw warrant sales in the well-off areas and people from the richer parts probably didn’t even know such a draconian practice existed. Any posh folk who happened to get lost and ended up driving through Easterhouse in their fancy car would have noticed the tables and chairs outside the close and assumed that Easterhouse wasn’t as bad as people were saying because it has Parisian style street cafes.
Life at school was an endless whirl of egg and spoon races and snotters. The teachers didn’t talk to us much, but they did talk at us plenty. In fact, the only time I remember being spoken to directly at Wellhouse was when I was asked if I had a hankie, which was the teacher’s way of saying, ‘For God’s sake boy, wipe your nose.’
Wellhouse was a Protestant school and we had a Catholic school opposite, the name of which was Blessed John Ogilvie. Next to that was an enormous Catholic chapel – the usual sort of enormous Catholic chapel always found in poor areas. Why were the chapels so big and the people so poor? I suspect it was probably something to do with how every Friday night priests and nuns would go round the scheme visiting Catholic families to collect money for the chapel building funds. Why people would prefer having a giant chapel before having food on their table is beyond me.
Blessed John Ogilvie’s became St John Ogilvie’s when he was canonised after a miracle was attributed to him. I can’t remember what the miracle actually was but I think it involved him being prayed to prior to Celtic’s match against Inter Milan in the 1967 European Cup Final. The only thing I do know about John Ogilvie I learned from the very accurate and informative website Wikipedia, where it lists him as one of Glasgow’s very few Christian martyrs. The reason that Glasgow has very few Christian martyrs is because given the choice between death and changing your mind about something, the average Glaswegian will lump for the mind changing every time. We’re not stupid after all, and even if you didn’t agree with what you were changing your mind about it doesn’t count anyway if you had your fingers crossed behind your back. How could John Ogilvie not know that, and all the other Christian martyrs for that matter?
The other big chapel was St Benedict’s and I know even less about St Benedict, but since Benedictine monks make Buckfast I’m guessing he’s the Patron Saint of Coatbridge. I was jealous of the Catholic kids because they never seemed to attend school much thanks to days off in the celebration of what seemed like 365 saints. No that’s not true, figuring in weekends they must have only had 261 saints because a saints commemoration day never fell on a Saturday or a Sunday as that would just be daft because they were off anyway.
Religion was completely beyond me. I thought it was to do with whichever team you supported. Turns out as I lived in Glasgow I was right. Rangers fans went to Protestant schools, Celtic fans went to Catholic schools and Partick Thistle fans were atheists who were home schooled. What about Clyde fans? No one knew any so it was thought that they didn’t actually exist and Clyde and it’s fans were simply an urban myth.
At four o’clock each day the opposing factions would gather on a hillside to throw clods of turf at each other and the Catholics would shout, ‘Proddie dogs eat the frogs,’ and we’d shout back, ‘Catholic rats eat the cats,’ and they retort, ‘Naw we don’t, this is Friday so we’re having fish.’ It never got any nastier than that, not initially anyway. We’d see the Catholic kids being taken to the chapel in what we assumed were wedding outfits. The wee boys in suits, and the wee girls in mini wedding dresses. We didn’t know it was their Confirmation, we just thought they married young.
When I was nine I was sent to a social experiment called the Trondra Place Annexe. My new school Easthall was going to be completed in six months but before I was to attend it Glasgow Corporation’s Education Department decided to conduct an experiment which entailed sending both Protestant and Catholic kids to the same school. I say school but the experiment was so half-hearted that it wasn’t even a proper school. It was a block of six newly built closes that they’d neglected to partition off into bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, etc, but had walled in to create classrooms. They also fenced it off with ten-foot-high mesh and I think it was on the second day that it was renamed the Gulag. Not by the pupils but by the teachers. It was a completely pointless exercise because the classes weren’t mixed and the only time we did ‘integrate’ was at playtime. So there wasn’t much of a lesson in religious harmony to be learned from Gulag schooling.
During my time there I only really learned one thing and it was in the playground, and it wasn’t learned from a teacher, it was learned from listening to Catholic girls skipping ropes to the rhythm of the singing of: ‘King Billy had a ten foot willie, took it to the woman next door, she thought it was snake, she hit it with a rake, now it’s only three feet four.’ There was a Protestant skipping rope reply to this, which began with: ‘Hail, hail, the Pope’s in jail …’ but what the rest of it was I can’t recall.
After the experiment was over I was sent to Easthall School and I actually took things in because at that point when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I always said, without hesitation, ‘A bin man.’ Why? Well for a start they got to ride on the back of the bin lorries, which must have been quite exciting. My career choice was aimed slightly higher than a job with the Cleansing Department thanks to the influence of my teacher Mr McFarlane. He lectured that although we were the children of a working class background there was nothing wrong with the betterment of one’s social standing and he gave us inspired speeches on great Scots who had risen from the ranks of the under privileged to become doctors, soldiers, politicians and inventors. Up until he told us we were under privileged we’d no idea we were, especially me because I thought, ‘Under privileged? I cannae be, we’ve got chocolate biscuits in the hoose.’
Mr M
cFarlane would say, ‘Name me one famous bin man.’ Well there was one – Rakey Russell, the epitome of his profession, the ultimate midgie man. Rakey became a legend because of his ability to find riches amongst the rubbish, and he would share his soup from a flask with us on cold winter mornings and for that he was well liked. His back garden was like the yard in Steptoe and Sons as every treasure he found had a use and he could fix almost anything. A broken chair, a burst couch, he even found a use for old 78rpm records by melting them and moulding them into plant pots for his garden. Basically, what other people threw away he treated like the lost treasure of the Incas.
Rakey was deemed well off because he had a car. His Ford Anglia was a sign of affluence to us, as car owners were few and far between in Easterhouse, so much so that the Easterhouse chapter of the Tufty Club Road Safety Campaign had zero members. The chances of being knocked down were less than zero, and to get knocked down by a car would have meant having to go really, really out of your way to position yourself in front of one. Rakey’s car was funded by the money he made from the woollens he found on his route. Rakey got money for his discarded woollens, all we got for ours was a balloon from the ragman. Therefore Rakey was smart, we weren’t. Rakey lived with his brother, a man simply known as ‘The Knifeman’. Not because he went around stabbing people but because he went around the scheme with a whetstone on a wooden trolley he’d made for sharpening knives. He’d blow a bugle to indicate his presence and for sixpence he’d sharpen any knife on the whetstone that he operated with a foot pedal. He usually drew a decent-sized crowd of kids who gathered to watch the sparks and go ‘ooooh’. He ended up in trouble with the police after they’d got a tip off that he was sharpening steel combs for gang members, who were trying to get around the laws regarding the carrying of offensive weapons by having the implement of a hair care regime sharpened into a ‘steelie’.