by Rikki Brown
There’s a great line in Rab C. Nesbitt when Rab is up north with Jamesie and he tells him not to annoy the locals because ‘they’ll take ye up the hills and shag ye and eat ye’. That’s how everyone saw Torran Road. The Torran Toi instilled fear in everyone and even the Skinheads mentioned their name in hushed tones.
It transpired, as I was to find out much later, that their reputation was unearned and completely unfounded. I had a mate called Kenny Lochhead who lived in Trondra Place, which was directly opposite Torran Road. All that separated him from them was a river of tarmac thirty feet across called Wellhouse Road. Kenny had this ridiculous Beagle called Nicky that was off its head. We were walking him one evening and Kenny stupidly let Nicky off the leash and he shot straight across Wellhouse Road, straight in the direction of Torran Road and straight in the direction of a group of the Torran Toi. Kenny ran after him shouting for me to go with him. I don’t remember my exact words but I’m sure they were along the lines of, ‘Aye, watch me, that’s the Torran Toi.’ So solo Kenny ran after Nicky yelling, ‘Come on.’ Then the strangest thing happened. The Torran Toi thought he was running at them, shouting, ‘Come on,’ and they ran away. There were about six of them, one of him, and they ran away. After that I never looked at the Torran Toi or Torran Road in the same terrifying light ever again.
As a footnote, Kenny’s crazy dog broke his veranda window and nosed the fridge door open and ate all the plastic fittings. Not the food, just the plastic fittings, and he also ate the phone. His parents had to get rid of Nicky and told Kenny they’d given him to a farmer who was using him as a gun dog. Kenny actually believed that. He probably still does. Me, I always thought farmer was euphemism for vet and gun dog was a euphemism for put to sleep. So Kenny, if you happen to be reading this, your mother and father murdered your dog. Regardless of all the everyday violence, 99% of it was directed at opposing gang members and despite what people say about Easterhouse in that era, if you weren’t involved in a gang, life was much the same as it was in most parts of Glasgow. No one lived in fear. Yes, there might have been short bursts of it, but in general it was as safe an environment as any for the civilians.
6
INTO THE SEVENTIES
So the seventies began. The decade when it was a very bad idea for rock stars to have names that started with the letter J. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin all died from drug overdoses. The result of which was if you were a rock star whose name starts with the letter J, it’s best not to bother making any long-term plans. For me it was back to Westwood, the school that wouldn’t burn.
There was talk of a ban on the belt because some bleeding heart liberals, a teacher’s words, not mine, were claiming that it was a barbaric practice. But the ban was years off and it was lucrative business as usual for the teachers’ supplies company who provided them. I often wondered if the teachers were issued with a belt by the Education Department or if they bought their own. Perhaps the day they graduated as teachers they were issued with a belt and told, ‘There you go, there’s your Glasgow Education Department belt, swing it with pride and try not to hit yourself in the face with it.’
As it was all just talk about a ban on the belt, the headmaster announced over the tannoy who was to pay him a visit to be punished for doing a runner from the church service. I think that probably took up most of his first week back because it was a long, long list of names. His second week back was taken up with belting pupils who’d misbehaved at the service, and that was a long list too. In their defence, the church service was performed, if that’s the right word, by the Reverend John Cook. He was a lovely man but through no fault of his own he was very partially deaf and this led to him singing slightly out of time with everyone else. Some people found this hilarious and those who couldn’t hide their hilarity ended up on the headie’s list.
The Reverend Cook loved Jesus Christ Superstar and for a while the sermons he did when he visited the school weren’t actually sermons at all, they were him playing Jesus Christ Superstar at the fullest volume the school’s sound system could manage. Being so very partially deaf, this helped him hear it, albeit slightly, while everyone else in the assembly hall was lying writhing on the ground with blood pouring out of their ears.
Those who didn’t find the Reverend Cook’s out of time singing hilarious ended up on the list for finding the Reverend Cook’s assistant absolutely hysterical. I can’t remember his name but everyone called him Jesus because he was a trendy hippy minister with long hair and a beard and he looked like Jesus. He also wore a big wooden cross so large that if Jesus had been about a foot shorter he could have been nailed to it. But that wasn’t what made people laugh, it was the fact that he called everyone ‘man’ and would punctuate his sermons with it. I’m sorry but there was something genuinely funny in hearing from him that the Good Lord was ‘cool and groovy, man’. In the telling of the parable about Jesus changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana he said, ‘Jesus’s mother said they have no more wine, and Jesus replied, what a downer, man.’ I’ve looked in the Bible and nowhere does it say that Jesus ever said, ‘What a downer, man.’
The main hilarity came when he played his acoustic guitar. I mean the guy was a walking cliché. The reason everyone laughed was because he just wasn’t very good at it and when he was singing he had to stop singing every few seconds to change the chord. He was simply awful, as were his songs because they were always ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ and ‘Kum By Ya’. Someone can’t play the guitar Lord, Kum By Ya, but that’s not stopping him Lord, Kum By Ya. He never ever said goodbye when he was leaving; he always pointed and said, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you,’ and the reply he always got was, ‘Yes, I know, and he wants me as a sunbeam.’
After the fortnight of the headmaster bringing his beltings up to date, he returned to his headmasterly duties and the spring term began in earnest. It was my birthday in February and having a birthday was a dangerous undertaking. No one admitted having a birthday because of the dumps. As I was turning thirteen this would mean that, according to some birthday by-law, each of my fellow pupils had to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of the day of my birth by punching me fourteen times on the back. One for every year I’d managed to stay alive and one for luck. Although the one for luck was less of a rule and more of a guideline because they could punch you just for luck as many times as they wanted. I’m positive that people who suffer from back problems in later life have the dumps to thank for it because having your spine malkied with brutal force every year must surely leave some sort of long-term damage. On this occasion, I actually was lucky because no one knew it was my birthday and I escaped unscathed. My mates did know that my birthday was in February but they didn’t know the exact date.
For my birthday that year my parents had got me a pair of Levi’s, the ones you had to buy two sizes too big and sit in the bath in them until they shrunk to your size. The first time I wore them I was told, ‘New denims by the way, you’d better have no got them for your birthday.’ This would have meant my birthday had passed and I’d kept it to myself. Which I had. No one called them jeans back them, we called them denims. I have no idea why, other than Easterhouse had a lot of girls called Jean and this might have led to copyright problems.
I didn’t know it at the time but my birthday jeans/denims led directly to me eye-witnessing events that eventually led to a murder. Two new families had moved into Wardie Road, one in the close to the left of me and one two closes to the right of me. I don’t remember their names but the one to the left included the father who was as staunch an Orangeman as you could get and the one to the right included the father who was the Orangeman’s mate and drove private coaches. Come the July marching season, the Orangeman who was in the Orange Walk (which, thinking back, seemed to have had a lot of members) would hang a large Red Hand of Ulster flag from his veranda. The flag in itself was bad enough but he also played ‘The Sash’ and ‘No Surrender’ at full blast through the open veranda door. Obvio
usly a lovely, rational, tolerant chap.
There was one Catholic family in his close, the McLachlans, one of whom, Peter, was my pal. The Orangeman was the neighbour from hell, not just for the Catholics but for everyone because the Protestant/Catholic thing was never a local issue. The Protestants probably had more disdain for him because he was a total embarrassment to their faith. No one complained to him, though, as he was one of those people who you couldn’t complain to because if you did, you’d end up on his ‘list’. He did disappear to Belfast for two weeks and as it was right bang smack in the middle of the Troubles, it was rumoured he was away fighting for the UVF. He returned with a stooky on his arm and it was said he’d been shot in the arm. The Belfast connection was further confirmed one afternoon when Peter and I were accosted at the back of the close by a shifty looking bloke who asked us in an Irish accent if we knew where he was. Seems the Orangeman wasn’t in and the Irishman was becoming impatient and wanted to know if we knew where he drank so that he could go and ‘buy him a drink’. When the Irishman said ‘buy him a drink’ it was laced with menace. So much menace that Peter and I put two and two together and came up with IRA. We didn’t know where the Orangeman drank so the Irishman left and we thought no more about it.
Now back to the jeans. When you became fashionable for the first time, even just from the waist down, you can’t go back so I wore my Levi’s 24/7. After about six months, bleaching jeans became fashionable and as my jeans weren’t bleached, I was so last year. So late one night, when everyone else was in bed, I sneaked into the kitchen and got a bottle of Domestos and a bucket and I went out onto the veranda to bleach my jeans. The subterfuge was down to my mother telling me that I wasn’t to do it because it would ruin them and money doesn’t grow on trees. Technically paper is made from trees so my mother’s argument was only half correct, tree wise. So there I was, furtively redesigning my jeans, when I heard hurried footsteps and saw the Orangeman running past my close with a paint-brush in his hand. It looked suspicious and it was because his pal the coach driver’s car had been daubed with 1690s and FTPs.
I discovered the next day that they’d fallen out because he’d found out that the coach driver had driven Celtic supporters to a match. That’s how Orange the Orangeman was. But he also wasn’t the brightest lunatic bigot because he painted the bigotry on with emulsion and the coach driver managed to remove it without much difficulty. Was that the end of it? No. The following week and, bizarrely, I was out late at night on the veranda again, this time hanging my bleached jeans up in the hope of drying them overnight so I could wear them the next day to school, and this time I heard an almighty clatter and the Orangeman ran past again. This time he’d chucked an entire can of orange paint over the coach driver’s car. He’d taken advice from a paint expert because he used gloss for his second attack. About a week later the Orangeman was found in his house stabbed to death. He’d been stabbed seventeen times, which even the Easterhouse police thought might actually be a murder, as opposed to the wounds being inflicted by a self-harmer. My immediate reaction was that the IRA man found him and did it but the police arrested the coach driver. After the murder and arrest both families moved away, much to the relief of everyone in the vicinity, and every time I wore my Levi’s until they stopped fitting me it was a denim reminder that religion can be taken much too far.
That spring back at school there was a serious shortage of qualified teachers and we had student teachers unleashed upon us. They’d probably hoped for a posting in Kelvinside or Newton Mearns but as their bad luck would have it they ended up in Easterhouse – the educational equivalent of cannon fodder. They just didn’t have the same authority as real teachers and we knew it. The four I remember were two French students, one was Mademoiselle Menet and the other was French/Senegalese and his name was Monsieur Foch. Another was for P.E. and his name was Charles – that was his first name and he insisted we call him by it – and the fourth was a Mr Hunter who not only taught English, but also was English.
Unfortunately for Mademoiselle Menet, she had a deformed hand with very small fingers and, being completely insensitive thirteen-year-olds, we called her Fingers. Not to her face, because that would have been too completely insensitive, even for us. Monsieur Foch? Come on, what is it with the French? In primary we had Madame Anne Slack and her puppet Patapoof and now in secondary we get a teacher called Foch. It was as if they were putting obstacles in our way to stop us learning their language. Whenever a teacher was within earshot between classes in the corridor, Winker would shout Foch and when he’d been grabbed by the scruff of the neck he’d explain, ‘Naw surr, I said Foch. Brown asked me what the new French student teacher’s name was surr.’ This was bought by every teacher except the head of French, Mr Crawford, who belted Winker for it.
Everyone from the first years up to fifth years hated getting Crawford for French because he’d give you homework, mark it out of ten, then think of a number between one and ten and everyone whose homework mark fell below the number he thought of got the belt. As for Monsieur Foch, his command of English wasn’t that brilliant and Winker ended up belted again by Mr Crawford for convincing Foch that the inverted commas he’d written on the blackboard weren’t called inverted commas, they were called perverted commas.
Charles the P.E. teacher thought he was a trendy with his call-me-Charles attitude. He was also the first person I’d ever heard use terrible clichés. After one football match, when we’d been horsed by a school from Cranhill, who’d played as a team while we’d played as eleven individuals, Charles lectured us with a ‘there’s no I in team’ speech. This was met with a direct attack on him from my teammate Wilco who said, ‘No, but there’s three Is in fucking idiot.’ Charles also stupidly told us that he didn’t believe in the belt. About a month later he did and became a major exponent of its worthiness as an aide to teaching.
Now, as shit teaching assignments go, the shittiest assignment was the organization of the end of term concert – an assignment that this particular year went to Mr Hunter. Before the break up for the summer holidays, the new intake traditionally ended the term by performing for the rest of the pupils. Hunter had to organize the first-year pupils’ contribution, which meant corralling a whole first-year class, that didn’t want to contribute, into some sort of passable turn. His big mistake was his misunderstanding of the relationship between Scotland and England, by which I mean that he didn’t quite get the Auld Enemy thing. This led him to believe, wrongly, that we were all right behind England’s bid to retain the World Cup in Mexico.
In case you’d forgotten, England won it in 1966. I thought I’d remind readers of their victory because the English may have neglected to mention it, what, since about ten minutes ago. His idea was to get the entire first year on stage to sing ‘Back Home’, the official England song for the 1970 World Cup, which was four years after 1966 when England won the World Cup, in England in 1966, the year England won the World Cup, in 1966.
It was a terrible idea and word got out of what the first years would be doing and the rest of the school came suitably prepared. You would have thought that other teachers would have maybe warned him of the error of his ways but they didn’t, which makes me think that they were just as curious as everyone else was to find out what would happen. Come the day, the curtains went back and the entire first-year class commenced singing, ‘Back home, they’ll be thinking about …’ We’d got to ‘about’ when the booing began and the missiles were launched. Tomatoes, clods of earth, rulers, rubbers, pencils and the likes. All during the song, which we did manage to finish, we watched teachers running up and down amongst the rows of seats, yanking out anyone who threw something. Pupils who were seen and knew they were going to get caught made sure they surrendered to a teacher who wasn’t Mr McConnell. Much in the same way that the Germans in World War Two made sure they surrendered to the Allies and not to the Russians. McConnell was the last person anyone wanted the belt from. McLellan handled the largest surrender becaus
e of his ineffectual belting thanks to his arm problem. That’s how my first year at secondary school ended, in a blaze of whatever the opposite of glory is.
7
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS PRESTWICK
The summer of 1970 was a good summer. The older generation always bang on about how it never rained and the roads were so hot they got tar stuck to their feet. Apart from the tar, that’s how I remember that summer. I also remember it because it was when I bought my first single. I did have a record collection, but it was pish. It comprised of ‘Two Little Boys’ by Rolf Harris because my adopted Auntie Marion who lived downstairs had given me it as a present the previous Christmas and a record called ‘Burning Bridges’ which was the theme song from the movie Kelly’s Heroes. My parents bought it after a visit to the flicks and I’d somehow, very much against my will, inherited it.
Buying a record was a big deal because in relative financial terms it was a big investment as we were skint. A record was 4/6d and the average pocket money was two shillings a week. So, as I say, a big investment. This meant that it took three weeks of saving to buy a record because you had to factor bus fares to and from Glasgow into the equation. I heard Dave Edmunds ‘I Hear You Knocking’ on the radio and I decided to buy that. Which I did, and the very next week after I bought it, it went straight to number one. I convinced myself that, as I’d bought it before it had even entered the charts, I was a ‘pop picker’. Much as I loved the song, I played it so much that within three days I hated it. But that’s what you did, you played it, and played it and played it, and when you got fed up with it, you turned it over to the B side and played that, and played that and played that until you got sick of that too.