by Rikki Brown
That summer saw the release of Deep Purple’s ‘In Rock’ with the cover that had the band’s faces carved out à la Mount Rushmore in the States, and it is estimated, mostly by me, that Deep Purple’s ‘In Rock’ was the LP that was carried around under the arm more than any other. People did this a) to show that they were into rock, and b) they had the Deep Purple ‘In Rock’ LP. This was the LP under the arm era and it seemed that everyone went round with one under their arm. I have no idea why because unless they were lugging around a Dansette and a car battery to power it, the LP couldn’t be played. Perhaps it was one of those people who decided that it was indeed a ridiculous thing to do and went away and invented the iPod. Having said that, Tomorrow’s World did indeed accurately predict that one day, music would be portable, but the future device they featured looked like a brick and probably weighed more than one. Tomorrow’s World predicted a lot of things, of which about 1% actually panned out. The other 99% included the hover car and the jetpack we’d all be wearing to take us to work on the colony on the moon that we’d be living on.
The thing I remember most from that summer was Babs, the leader aff of the Pak, and his family moving in to the close to the left of mine, into the house vacated by the late Orangeman’s family. Babs, the leader aff of a rival gang, now resided slap bang in the middle of Skinheadland. Given the way of things, this could have been considered a dangerous thing to do. But as I’ve previously mentioned, the Skinheads were terrified of him and I could be mistaken here, what with the mists of time, but I think they got him a house-warming present.
For some reason he asked me one day to accompany him to the bookies. Not a real bookie but a back street bookie in nearby Banton Place. You would go to the back of the close and knock on his bottom floor kitchen window, he’d open it and take the bet, all the time in shifty mode in case the police were around. The chances of the police being around were zero but he preferred to err on the side of caution. Babs won that day and decided that I was lucky, so from then on I was his mascot. For me, this meant that every time he went to the bookies I had to go with him and as long as he kept winning I’d be pretty safe. As it turned out he won all the time, although thinking back it wasn’t because he was good at picking winners, it was because the bookie was too scared to tell him he wasn’t winning.
Babs preferred to visit the bookies personally, but others like my Dad didn’t. They laid their bets by putting a newspaper in the front window. That was the super top-secret signal recognised only by the bookies’ runner who would walk about the streets looking for the signals and appear at your door to collect your line and wager.
Being under Babs’s wing was like being a Made Man in the Mafia. I was untouchable and I found out how untouchable one day when we walked round a corner and encountered the Skinheads. They parted to let us through but as we walked past, one of them made a comment about my boots. My mother had bought me them and made me wear them even though they looked like the boots victims of polio had to wear because of their callipers. Babs looked straight at the one who’d made the comment and told him, ‘If you’ve got a problem with him, you’ve got a problem with me.’ He even made the Skinhead apologise to me. If Babs hadn’t have been there, I would have had to have agreed with the Skinhead, saying, ‘I know, what a wanker I am,’ before limping off as though I was indeed a polio victim. The reason being, ‘Yeh well, I’ll bet he feels bad now, that’ll teach him.’
Babs must have been about nineteen and didn’t have a job. I don’t suppose being the leader of a gang qualified him for much other than as leader of a gang, which is something very rarely seen in the situations vacant at the Job Centre. ‘Wanted Gang Leader, must be very mental, and able to furbish references as to his mentalness.’ He existed on dole money and the gang subs his gang members paid him weekly. The subs were meant to go towards paying fines but as the police never caught any of them, they therefore never ended up in court to get fined and Babs had one hell of a nest egg. Babs spent most of the summer with me and my mates sitting on the hill opposite my house. He’d regale us with stories of gang fights while chain smoking Kensitas Club and drinking El Dorado, a cheap fortified wine. Even though he was leader of a gang he never seemed to do any actual gang leading. Occasionally, a couple of the Pak would sneak into the area and he’d go off out of earshot to issue them with orders and they’d go away and he’d come back.
However, Alka, the leader aff of the Skinheads, decided that it was doing his reputation no end of harm having a rival gang’s head honcho living on his turf and not having even pulled him up for it. That was the expression used; pulling someone up, that and digging someone up. One afternoon in August, Alka sent Nervo to confront Babs and tell him that Alka wanted a square go. Poor Nervo was so scared of Babs that his nervous tic was worse than it normally was and it was all he could do to stammer out the challenge. Not that it was a challenge like a gauntlet being thrown down; it was Nervo giving Babs the message, and I quote, ‘Alka’s gonnie rip you.’ Babs looked as unbothered as I’ve ever seen anyone unbothered by anything and the square go was arranged for that night, the venue being the spare ground in Stepford Road adjacent to the back of the shops on Wardie Road. About half an hour later, Nervo came back to inform Babs that Alka couldn’t make it that night but he re-arranged to ‘rip’ Babs the following week. The following week then became the following, following week and eventually never took place at all. Alka was obviously trying to call Babs’ bluff in the hope that he’d have declined the squarie, but he didn’t and Babs’ reputation as a headbanger remained intact whereas Alka’s reputation had gone from headbanger to total shitebag.
The only real low point of every summer was my annual family holiday. When I was thirteen my dad had got himself a car, a Morris Minor, which made everyone who got into it look a bit like Noddy. I hated the holiday fortnights away because I missed my pals, but mainly because we only ever went to a small cottage in Prestwick or to a caravan at Maidens. Even before the new M77 was built, Prestwick was still only about forty minutes away, so as a holiday it was hardly a far-flung destination, it was just down the road a bit. Maidens was slightly further away with another nine minutes on from Prestwick to reach Maybole and a further three minutes via Maybole into Maidens. Even on daytrips to either destination it’s hard to find something to do to fill an afternoon but fourteen afternoons, fourteen mornings and fourteen nights? Forget it.
The most exciting thing that ever happened to me at Prestwick was finding a dead seal washed up on the beach, and the hours of fun I had poking it with a stick. That aside, Prestwick was an evil place because it had an outdoor swimming pool and it was the reason why Prestwick’s population has never increased. Any man who swam in the freezing water lost the use of his testicles for the rest of the year. It was also used by scientists carrying out experiments in cryogenics. Ten seconds in the pool was enough to completely freeze a human body. This leads me to believe that Walt Disney must have been cryogenically frozen using Prestwick’s open-air pool. I did learn to swim in that pool but only because my dad plonked me in the shallow end and told me if I could make it to the other end I could get out. I was like Rebecca Adlington, only faster. In fact I was like a torpedo, a torpedo with hypothermia.
Admittedly, Prestwick also had a boating pond, and that’s fine if you owned a toy boat. I didn’t. It also had a putting green, a penny arcade and go-karts. Putting is boring, you ran out of pennies in about four minutes which dropped to two minutes if you played the Penny Fountain, and the go-karts were out of my price range. So, wandering about aimlessly was about it for Prestwick with the occasional High Tea to look forward to. Fish and chips, with peas, a cup of tea and two slices of bread. That was considered a really special treat. Who would think that a special treat, Bobby Sands?
Maidens was a whole different ball game. These holidays usually comprised of sitting in a caravan taking a coma while the rain battered off the roof. Maidens had no facilities at all so there was even less than nothing
to do – nothing apart from sitting on the harbour with a small wooden fishing frame with orange nylon fishing rope. The whole harbour was dotted with bored Glaswegian kids sitting, not catching anything with the fishing frame because no one had ever caught anything using them. I’m sure the people in the shop facing the harbour used to piss themselves laughing while watching us all. More than likely they had great time saying, ‘Look at those Glaswegians trying to catch fish, fucking idiots.’
The day we arrived on any holiday I counted down the days until it was over. I stopped short from marking the wall on the caravan with a nail like convicts count down the years in prison, but only because we would have had to pay for the damage. Once it was over, my Dad would pack the unused deck chairs and the case into the car and we’d head back to Easterhouse and I was never as glad to see anywhere as I was then. We returned with stalks of rock with the names Prestwick or Maidens running through them and would hand them out with a card with the name of a good dentist on it.
8
HUSH HUSH
Back at school, it was time to start second year. Not straight into school I hasten to add. All the ex-first years, who were now second years, hung around the gate to watch what – if anything – would be inflicted on the new intake. This year the headmaster had got it right and the area was patrolled by teachers and jannies so no one suffered anything, which was nice for them, albeit hugely disappointing for us. We were also there to check out the female intake for talent. It was common knowledge that girls only fancied pupils of the year above, as dating someone in your own year was considered uncool. As we were now second years, we assumed every first-year female would fancy us.
Puberty was kicking in and with it came an interest in the opposite sex but in the age of innocence we had all our facts totally wrong. Sex education was a thing of the future and in those days we had to discover things for ourselves. For instance, we thought a poof was a cow’s joabie, because … when a cow did its business the result was something resembling a pouffe chair. Made perfect sense to us! It was only when Winker wrote ‘Franny McCafferty is a Poof’ in the mud during a football match and Franny’s big brother gave him a kicking for it whilst explaining to him what a poof was did we find out what it actually meant.
We had this mate Billy Tonagh who was a couple of years older than us and he told us his brother had done ‘it’ with a girl. His brother had explained to him the process and now he was relaying it to us second hand. He told us that a man puts his thing next to a woman’s thing and they got this wee electric shock and that was it, dead simple.
One of the assembled listeners took the whole thing quite literally and thought all that he was missing was the electricity. So he got his father’s old car battery out of a cupboard and jump-started himself with a set of jump leads. He ended up in hospital but his name said it all – Willie Burns. We were so naive that we didn’t even know what the derogatory term ‘wanker’ that we applied to everyone actually meant. All we knew was that every time we used it in the classroom we were given the belt.
The sex discussion continued and we all jumped in with snippets of knowledge. Eddie had been leafing through his mother’s catalogue, the bra section to be exact, and discovered what breasts were for thanks to a picture featuring a front opening bra for breast-feeding. That’s not how he put it though. He told us that a woman’s diddies served the same function as a cow’s bagpipes.
In 1971, I saw my first unfettered boobs. Okay, they were on a cinema screen and the owner of them was dead and was being fished out of a swimming pool, but I’m sure it still counts. Four of us decided that we’d try and get in to see Dirty Harry at the ABC cinema in Shettleston. We were fourteen and Dirty Harry was an X-rated movie, but Barry Norman said it was brilliant on Film ’71 and we thought it was worth a shot. We dressed as adult as we could and got the bus into Shettleston early on Saturday night. There was me, Eddie, Wilco and a guy called Bobby Thomlinson who we never went around with much because he wore a lot of crushed velvet and had bumfluff. Our thinking was he could get the tickets because, thanks to the bumfluff on his face, he looked much, much older than the fourteen-years-old that he was. He looked maybe fifteen, almost fifteen and a half. We arrived and we hung back while he approached the ticket booth because we hoped we’d look older from further away. We needn’t have bothered because the worker manning the booth couldn’t give a toss and Bobby bought the tickets without even a cursory ‘what age are you lot’ to at least look as though he was trying a wee bit to adhere to the British Film Board censorship ratings. We went upstairs and sat down and the first scene was the dead boobs scene and we thought, ‘Wow, so that’s what they look like.’ The movie did later on show another pair of boobs but they belonged to a fat ugly woman and they definitely didn’t count. I’m just wondering how many people can say that they saw their first ever boobs in Shettleston. Actually, it’s probably a lot more people than you’d think.
After the second year ‘hello again’ assembly, we were given our timetables and a double period of algebra was my welcome back to Westwood. I hated algebra because I just could not understand it and neither, despite his enormous intellect, could Winker. The teacher, Mr Russell, explained to us as best he could the workings of the subject. We just stared at him because it all sounded like gibberish.
Once, after banging on for about ten minutes on the principles, Winker put his hand up and said, ‘So fuck.’
Russell looked at him and decided that any reaction was better than no reaction at all and added that we could apply algebra in later life when we had secured gainful employment. Winker’s hand went up again.
‘What as, sir, fucking astronauts?’
Russell gave him the belt. Too much reaction.
The Maths teacher’s nickname was Tranny because he was hard of hearing and wore one of the giant pre-digital hearing aids, which made it look like he’d a transistor radio stuck to his head. Some pupils, not me, used to silently mouth answers to questions he’d asked them and because he could see their lips moving but couldn’t hear anything he would fiddle with his hearing aid because he thought it wasn’t working. It was just as well he couldn’t lip read because the answers they were giving him were wrong anyway.
Other subjects, too, seemed totally pointless, like Physics for instance. What was the reasoning of time in motion, a small-wheeled object running down a slope, attached to tickertape, to tell us its speed in comparison to its mass weight? Another ‘what as, sir, fucking astronauts’ moment.
To this day I have no concept of algebra. X plus Y equals Z, whatever Z is, and I have never used algebra or physics for anything ever. Not even once.
In September, we were offered the chance to go away for a week to the school’s camp in Millport. All we had to do to qualify was to get our parents to sign a form saying that, in the event of us not returning in one piece, the school couldn’t be held responsible. My parents signed the form with undue haste.
Millport was over the sea, well a wee bit anyway, and we were all really excited. Twenty-four of us were to go, plus Mr Menzies and a Miss Campbell. Roy Jones, the language lab technician, was going too. It was thought that the headmaster had sent him along to keep an eye on Menzies and Campbell because he suspected they were having an inter-staff relationship, which he frowned upon.
We set off in the school minibus bright and early one Monday morning. Roy was driving and us bad boys were sitting at the back as far away as possible from the alleged lovebirds who were occupying the front seats. The girls occupied the rest of the front half of the bus.
We spent the first half of the journey giving two fingers to any motorist who was unfortunate enough to be travelling behind us. We just did the two-fingered thing because the middle finger thing hadn’t reached the UK from America. But there are only so many times you can flick the Vs before it gets boring and after fifteen minutes it did. Everyone was in high spirits and inevitably the singing started. We, being the ‘lads’, refused to join in so the gi
rls started singing.
‘The back of the bus they cannae sing, they cannae sing, they cannae …’
They were interrupted by Eddie who stood up mid-chorus and shouted over their dulcet tones, ‘Naw but we can fight like fuck.’
Menzies was not a pleased man as he had hoped for a week of peace and quiet to continue with his wooing of Miss Campbell. He reckoned the outburst was a portent of things to come and realised he had gone away with the children of the damned. He decided to try a new approach with us, as he knew that threats and violence would not work, so he gave us his ‘little adults’ speech.
‘Right, that’s enough, we are all grown up here and it’s about time we acted like it. We have left the confines and the constraints of the school and we are going to have a pleasant week. We are going as friends, not as teachers and pupils, now you can call me Colin this week, Miss Campbell’s name is Linda and you all know Roy, so let’s be little adults.’
Winker thought the prospect over for a minute or two.
‘Colin.’
‘Yes Winker.’
‘Are you gonnie be spending the week trying to slip Linda the mitt?’
We arrived at the place the school called Hush Hush. It had been a secret naval base during the war and the name had stuck.