by Rikki Brown
Despite our attempts to create our own amusement, there was not much for entertainment around Easterhouse, for, aside from all the social ills, the biggest problem Easterhouse had was a lack of facilities. It was fine if you wanted a newspaper, which you could get from Pat O’Neil’s, one of four shops on Wardie Road. It was also fine if you wanted milk because then you were spoilt for choice between Templeton’s and the Co-op, and if you fancied a chop for your tea, the fourth shop was the butcher’s. Other than that, anything else meant a bus ride into Glasgow. But now, in 1972, the Shopping Centre opened.
It was supposed to have been built many years earlier but there were said to be mine workings under the whole of Easterhouse and no one would take the responsibility for the centre ending up disappearing down a mineshaft. Eventually someone in authority decided, ‘Aw for god’s sake stop fannying about and build the thing,’ and it was built.
When it was finished it really wasn’t the shopping metropolis everyone had been hoping for. In fact, it seemed to only cater to an older generation because it had a Galls Wool Shop that sold wool, knitting needles and patterns. Also, when Fine Fayre got around to opening their supermarket within the mall, they got Moira Anderson to cut the ribbon. For younger readers, Moira Anderson was the Cheryl Cole of her day. But only if Cheryl Cole was a big posh wumman who sung traditional Scottish songs. No offence to Moira Anderson, who I know to be a lovely woman because I met her years later when I was the writer on a comedy quiz show which celebrated BBC Scotland’s 75th anniversary, but come on, Moira Anderson? My theory was that someone wanted to find out how many pensioners lived in Easterhouse and the best way to get them all together in one place at the same time to count them was to announce that Moira Anderson will be at the Fine Fayre at 3pm on Friday. I think the posters read ‘Meet Moira, Buy Some Wool’, and if they didn’t, they should have.
All the OAP’s crowded in and for health and safety reasons all the doors had to be left open to help ventilate the place because of the overwhelming stench of perm lotion. Having said that, it was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall in Scotland. The ideal place to shop when the temperature outside reaches a phew, pure boiling sixty-two degrees. It was also the proud owner of a terrazzo floor. And everyone thought, ‘That’s brilliant, a terrazzo floor … by the way, what’s a terrazzo floor?’ Easterhouse today has a new giant shopping centre called the Easterhouse Fort. If they are trying to regenerate the place with a new message of hope for the future, isn’t calling the centre after a building where people would gather together for safety just taking the piss?
The original mall was built amongst a group of other new buildings collectively known as the Township Centre, the foundation stone of which was laid by the Right Honourable Dr J. Dickson Mabon, Member of Parliament and Minister of State. He laid the stone in 1969 and by the time they’d announced his full name and titles it was 1972 and the project was finished. The Township Centre included swimming baths, a Labour Exchange and a very busy Social Work Department. The Township Centre boasted spaces for over 200 cars – 100 burnt out and 100 on bricks with the wheels missing.
A year later in 1973, the police station opened and this allowed the police to respond to call outs a lot quicker than they had in the past. It was estimated that, being within the close vicinity, the cops could now knock a whole five minutes off their usual three-hour response time.
There was also now a library that contained books. In 1972 in Easterhouse, the reaction to that was: ‘Books? … naw you’ve lost me.’ The library only existed because local women had lobbied the council. Basically local activist women, the ones who always start a public statement by saying, ‘Well, speaking as a wumman putting on a voice …’ The statement usually made for a library was, ‘Aye, ma wean has got tae go all the way tae Shettleston tae knock books, and that’s just no good enough ne’er it is, is that no right Betty hen.’ The reason Betty is mentioned is because they all had a pal called Betty who they took with them to back them up.
I’m joking about the not knowing what books were thing because everyone could read, at least everyone I knew could. They had to able to read to fill in buroo claim forms. And my friends and I spent many a happy hour reading the Glasgow Parks Department rules sign at the entrance to Blairtummock Park. The rule we read most while sniggering like schoolboys, which we were, was the one that said, ‘No prostitution.’ Not that the Parks Department thought that hookers would ever ply their trade in Blairtummock Park but they were just covering every eventuality. The only way they could have plied their trade in Easterhouse would have been if they accepted Provi cheques. Then again, if hookers ever did fancy a change from Blythswood Square, they could solicit with impunity because another rule was no drinking in the park and that was really all the park was mostly ever used for.
To further enhance community spirit, some residents’ committee or other started an Easterhouse festival complete with a girl who’d been crowned the Easterhouse Queen. They didn’t want to call her Miss Easterhouse because that might have sounded more like an instruction to taxi drivers. On the opening day of the week-long Gala, the Easterhouse Queen was driven round the scheme on the back of a coal lorry that had been cleaned up for the day. She’d be driven about waving at poor people. Who did she think she was, the Pope?
During the festival many free events were held and the events must have been pretty bad because I cannot remember a single one. I have my suspicions, though, that there were a lot of cookery demonstrations, exhibitions of knitting and church socials with tea and biscuits. The local MP Hugh Brown did turn up during the festival and shook a few hands, but only after insisting they were scrubbed with Dettol first.
Easterhouse was staunchly a Labour area. Always has been, always will be, but surely if people want things done in Scotland they should vote Tory? Of course, the Tories do nothing for Scotland, why should they? No one votes for them, so Scotland doesn’t count. I firmly believe that we should vote Conservative even if we don’t really mean it because if we did, they’d be a lot less apt to ignore our problems if we actually meant the difference between winning and losing an election.
What did change Easterhouse for the better wasn’t shopping, or political will, or new swimming baths, a library, an Easterhouse Queen or a social works department megastore. It was the new M8 motorway that changed the landscape forever.
The Monklands canal, known locally as the Nolly, was filled in and the M8 followed its path. This cut Easterhouse in half and made it harder for the gangs to move so freely about because it wasn’t easy charging across a motorway to fight their rivals. Not with cars belting along it at 70mph and them trying to avoid getting run over like the frog crossing the road video game. Beforehand, two-lane road bridges spanned the Nolly and they allowed easy access but after the motorway was finished, only narrow foot bridges spanned the M8. Bridges so narrow that one gang member armed with an empty Irn Bru bottle could have held it for weeks. Any gang trying to take the bridge from him would have taken hundreds of casualties before realising that it was a bridge too far.
During the building of the motorway the engineers would periodically use dynamite and its use was preceded by a warning siren. This didn’t really have the desired effect of clearing the area but led to people rushing to a distance they deemed reasonably safe to watch the explosions. A pensioner three closes down from ours reacted differently to the siren. She’d lived through the war and whenever she heard it she’d hide under her living room table crying and shouting, ‘Bert … Bert, the bloody Germans … Bert.’ Thinking back, it really wasn’t safe because rubble would fly for hundreds of yards always just narrowly missing terrified cows in the fields adjacent to the M8’s route, so maybe the OAP was right, perhaps the contractors were bloody Germans. I must ask Bert, if I ever find out who Bert is.
10
SINGLE AND A MATCH
Being a fast runner in a Glasgow scheme meant one of two things. Either you’d trained as an athlete, or y
ou’d trained as a shitebag. The former, if you were fast enough, helped win you medals and the latter, if you were fast enough, helped you outrun whichever gang happened to be chasing you. Running was never really seen as a sport because the general attitude was a sarcastic ‘wow, you can put one foot in front of the other and propel yourself forward a wee bit faster than other people can, you’re brilliant, I wish I was you’.
Not that my school had that many ‘athletes’. When I say not many I mean we had one. His name was John Tucker, but he only became a runner and a pretty good runner too because he was absolutely crap at football. Every time the ball went anywhere near him he let out an involuntary squeal, panicked, swung at it and completely missed. But during the sports days held on the last day before the summer break he won every event. He never lost, because it would have been hard to lose to the fellow competitors in the 800 metres who’d run the first 200 metres, given up and walked the remaining 600 metres smoking fags.
The sports day was always an afterthought and only ever mentioned the day before at assembly when the headmaster would dismiss us after the Lord’s Prayer and then say, ‘Oh hold on, I almost forgot, tomorrow is our annual sports day.’ The preparations consisted of the janitor tying the only twenty feet of bunting the school possessed to the mesh fence next to the track. The small Union Jacks were so old and faded that I don’t even think they were left over from V.E. Day. My guess would be that they were left over from a street party to celebrate the lifting of the Siege of Mafeking.
Equal lack of preparation went into deciding who would run and the competitors would be picked, not on the basis of athletic ability, but on the basis of who was standing closest to the teacher when he was deciding who would do what. During my first two years at secondary my mates and I buggered off as soon as the events started but in third year the girls in my class had started to develop breasts so we hung around to see what they looked like when they were running, and we weren’t disappointed. When you’re fifteen, 32As are an incredibly big deal.
The annual Sports Day aside, sport at my school was always a double period of football, usually unsupervised because the P.E. teachers would divide you into two teams, hand you bibs and a ball and tell you to beat it. Of course no one wanted to go in goals but that was settled democratically by a vote in which the only candidate for that position was the fat kid who always won by a landslide, which he’d probably caused anyway by falling over his fat feet. Fat kids got stuck in goals because that was the natural order of things. If a fat kid refused to go in goals we threatened that we’d treat him like Piggy and get all Lord of the Flies on him. The Lord of the Flies threat was actually very good news for the education system because it meant we’d read a book.
Without the existence of fat kids, each class as I recall had two, every match would have been played without a goalie. I’m pretty sure this had been taken into consideration when pupils were being allocated classes on arrival at secondary school because the fat kids would be separated, weighed and counted to ensure that each class contained the required tonnage in goalkeeping quota. In those less enlightened times every fat kid’s Christian name was replaced with Fatso and they’d go through their entire secondary education with that moniker. That’s just how it was. If you had buckteeth you were called Bugsy, acne sufferers got called Spotty and if you were a wanker you got called Wanker. It wasn’t meant to be nasty, it was meant to be descriptive.
The sad thing with the fat kids is that they probably were overweight through no fault of their own and did indeed suffer from a glandular problem. Fast food didn’t exist in Easterhouse and the closest chippie was a bus ride away in Shettleston and by the time you’d walked to the bus stop to get the bus there and from the bus stop when you got back you’d have burnt up the fish supper calories anyway. The health Nazis didn’t exist in the seventies either as it was only a mere decade after doctors were still insisting that smoking was good for you. I have a football programme from 1972 which features full page adverts for both Rothmans and Regal King size, and a double page spread devoted to the entire Tennent’s range of products including Charger Lager, Hemelling, Tennent’s Extra and Super, Lamot Pilsner, Breaker Malt and their alcohol-free lager Barbican.
Barbican didn’t sell very well because not only was it alcohol free, it was also alcohol free. Just two of the reasons no one bought it. If someone had the audacity to criticise your diet, your drinking or especially your smoking with the ‘you are taking years off your life’ speech, their lives would have ended prematurely too – seconds after they’d finished their health Nazi lecture. We are talking about a time when the ice cream van not only sold ice cream but for 3d they’d sell you a single and a match. That is a single cigarette and a match to light it with. We are also talking a time when no one bought a kettle, a chip pan or an ironing board with money. Everyone acquired such items by smoking Kensitas Club to collect the coupons, which then would be exchanged for household goods and little luxuries in the Kensitas Club shop located above the Grand Fare in Cambridge Street. For 500 coupons you could get a kettle, 700 a chip pan, 800 an ironing board and for 20,000 a brand new pair of lungs.
Life expectancy still isn’t that great in the East End of Glasgow and according to the United Nation’s Health Committee, the average person in the East End can expect to live slightly longer than a gangster rapper, but slightly less than an IRA informer.
Each football team consisted of the fat kid in goals and ten centre forwards, which basically meant two packs of ten running after the ball in an assortment of ill-suited footwear. If you were very lucky you had football boots, but most people played in sandshoes that had all the support of ladies pop socks, or in school shoes or Doc Martens. We never had strips, except on school team match days when we were handed a stinking top each that hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in months. In most cases it was only the crap on them that held them together. The smell was indescribable – actually it isn’t. Think of the disgusting public toilet stench of fusty urine and mix that with the disgusting stench of urinal cake. Double that by a million, and that’s about half as bad as the stink was. Flies would fly close and then buzz off quickly saying, ‘Jeez oh, that’s even too much for me, I’m off to soak up the aroma of a much more fragrant dog shite.’
Football back then was a brutal contact sport and the only way you could get yourself sent off was if you’d concealed a claw hammer about your person and felled an opponent with the business end of it. If you weren’t the victim of a random act of violence, or a fair tackle as it was called, then the playing surface would get you.
Playing on grass was almost unheard of as most school pitches were red ash, a surface on which a sliding tackle left you requiring a skin graft. Sometimes the wound was so bad that you had to visit the hospital where the doctor would take one look at it and phone the police to report they are dealing with a patient who’d been tied to a car bumper and dragged along the road for miles. Red ash though was a luxurious velvet cushion compared to a black ash pitch, which was made of crushed volcanic matter. I say crushed but it was never crushed as much as it should have been. This meant it started the season as 50% ash and 50% sharp chards but ended the season as 40% ash, 40% sharp chards and 20% bone, muscle and skin tissue.
We did have grass in Easterhouse, but you weren’t allowed to play football on it. The council had erected signs on every patch of grass that read ‘No Ball Games’. I think they didn’t want their grass hurt. Dogs could crap on it, you could smash glass on it, you could even stab someone on it, but if you went anywhere near it with a ball, the police would come and arrest you. This happened to my brother and his pals when they were caught by two undercover cops. That it wasn’t deemed a waste of police resources to have two undercover cops staking out a small patch of grass shows the mentality of most of the police in Easterhouse at the time.
‘But officers, there’s a man getting stabbed over there.’
‘Stabbings are ten a penny son, what you
lot are doing is far more serious, it’s heinous.’
They were lifted and taken to the police station by the undercover cops who’d noted that not only were they breaking local by-laws by playing football on the grass but they also had the cheek to use the pole holding up the ‘No Ball Games’ sign as one of the goalposts. My parents had to go to the cop shop to get him where they were dealt with by a police sergeant who looked at the charge sheet and shook his head in disbelief before releasing my brother and handing him back the ball that the undercovers had confiscated.
Talking of balls, even the balls we played with at school were dangerous as the standard issue was the Mouldmaster, basically an indestructible, solid-hard rubber cannonball with a dimpled surface. If you were stupid enough to header it you were left with at worst brain damage and at the very best a dimpled imprint on your head that lasted for months. It wasn’t just responsible for serious head injuries because I’ve seen really tough gang members cry when it hit them on the bare thigh. I’m talking guys, who would let their Alsatian practise it’s vicious biting on their arm without even a murmur, being reduced to tears by the smack of a football. In summer it was painful but bearable, in the winter however, when your legs were cold, the pain was excruciating. This leads me to believe that in preanaesthetic times the Mouldmaster was kicked against one leg to take your mind off the surgeon hacking off your other leg with a saw.
The game itself was different, too, in that era as there was none of this modern ‘oh hard lines, good shot’ appreciation pish you get nowadays for a good try. No, if you shot and missed, no matter if you’d taken the ball from your goalie and dribbled your way past an entire team and overhead volleyed from forty yards out and hit the bar you’d hear, ‘You missed ya fucking prick.’ Personally I thought that P.E. teachers really shouldn’t be using that kind of language but the P.E. teachers I had, Mr Cranston and Mr Ure, were the kind of teachers who did. So much so that they’d write, ‘Fucking prick missed a sitter,’ on your report card. I might be making that up, but from what I remember they probably did.