by Rikki Brown
That was one reason, the other was that we had a Saturday off because we had a cup final on the Sunday and they wanted the team to stand in Glasgow City Centre in their blazers collecting money for Scottish youth teams or some other such charity, if it even existed. I think my actual words were, ‘Aye, that’ll be right.’ This was met with me being told, ‘If you don’t turn up on Saturday, don’t bother turning up on Sunday.’ I didn’t turn up on the Saturday, ergo. On Sunday they won without me and I thought that was the end of it. But the coach came to my door on the Monday night asking me to come back but I refused because I just couldn’t be arsed with all the hassle and the getting kicked up and down the park during every match. My dad was pretty angry because he envisaged a career in football for me but I had other plans and I really wanted to train as the rear gunner on the late night bus to Castlemilk.
My mother was glad though because we weren’t the richest family in the world and keeping me kitted out was expensive. My boots were Puma and they cost £7, which then was about a quarter of my dad’s weekly wage, then there was the blazer and flannels, etc, even more expense, and not forgetting the studs which had to be replaced frequently. Nowadays you can get all that stuff at Primark for about £3, or for nothing if you wait for the Primark sale.
The only upside of my time at Celtic Boys Club was when I met Jock Stein and he spoke to me. The Celtic ground staff were on strike and as the club had an important European tie the youth teams were drafted in to clean up the stadium. And do you know what Jock Stein said to me? He said something that I will never forget. He said, ‘Naw son, that’s not how you work a brush, come get yer back intae it.’ It was a very proud moment. Celtic didn’t pay us, the strike breaking scabs that we were, instead they gave each of us a packet of Golden Wonder crisps and a jubilee. Perhaps Celtic paid their ground staff in crisps and jubilees too and that’s why they were on strike. I wish now that I’d kept the crisps and the jubilee because I’m sure some daftie would, given their provenance, pay a fortune for them on eBay. There are those who claim that Big Jock knew what was happening at the Boys Club but in all honesty I doubt it.
Once or twice my mates and I played rounders but we found out that unless you were throwing the ball or trying to hit it, the standing around on the off chance it would come in your direction was pretty boring. Another sport we played was tennis but that was only ever during Wimbledon because that was the only time the staff in Blairtummock Park could be arsed opening its two fenced-in tennis courts. For about 10p you could hire a racket and a ball. A ball, singular, so you couldn’t do the putting the spare balls in your trouser pockets and make ‘hey look, I’ve got giant testicles’ jokes. The ball itself that you got to hire for your 10p was so old it didn’t even bounce and would land with a dull thud and practically stop dead. It was so lifeless that the only way you could get a rally going was to get within three feet of the net and keep it in the air by hitting it underhand at each other. The rackets, too, could have done with being restrung because you shouldn’t have been able to get the ball stuck in the strings. Still it was nice of the Fred Perry Museum to donate his old 1930’s wooden rackets to the council.
The courts didn’t even have proper chalked markings because that probably meant having to re-mark the courts every couple of days. Instead they laid plastic strip markings and nailed them down, and they weren’t even nailed down properly because after about five minutes of playing they’d rise up a few inches and you’d end up tripping over them. The nets fared a bit better as they were indeed the regulation three foot six, but only at both ends because they drooped down to a non-regulation nine inches or so in the middle. The fat kids thought this was great because it let them jump over the net if they won. And this was all, of course, if you could play tennis at all. I went for a game with a mate once and the park attendant told us we we’d have to share a racket because someone had stolen the other one. The theft came as a bit of a shock to us because how could anyone manage to sneak a racket past the incredibly tight security of the man sitting in a small hut next to the courts reading a paper. The bigger question was, however, how exactly do you share a racket. It’s no wonder therefore that Scotland doesn’t produce that many tennis players, but it does explain why Andy Murray is so good. It’s because he never had to share a racket in council tennis courts in Glasgow.
Admittedly there was a bowling green next to the tennis courts but really, come on, bowls isn’t a sport. It’s just something old people do while they are waiting to die.
When my family eventually left Easterhouse for East Kilbride my dad joined the Red Deer Bowling Club in Westwood (no relation to my school) and they competed every year with other East Kilbride bowling clubs for a trophy sponsored by the Cooperative Funeral Society. So, bowls, old people waiting to die, definitely. I think winning the cup entitled the victors to a 10% discount on a funeral. Every September the Co-op would give the bowling clubs leaflets warning, ‘Book your funeral now to avoid the winter rush.’
When my Father passed away his entire bowling club descended on the funeral meal like locusts and ate everything. One even had the cheek to tell me that we’d run out of sandwiches. Well, maybe if just a couple of you had come to represent the whole club instead of two busloads of you greedy bastards turning up then there would have been enough food to go round. But no, a big day out for them, obviously.
If you are planning a funeral for a loved one who’s a member of a bowling club, have the funeral in the late afternoon because even free food can’t compete with Countdown. Incidentally, we didn’t use the Co-op Funeral Society for my dad’s funeral as I thought that them sponsoring a bowls tournament was not only a wee bit cheeky but a big bit ghoulish.
11
SOCKS AND DUGS AND ROCK’N’ROLL
Third year at school was the year of division. Those who were leaving, namely Jacko and Eddie, formed a different pack and would while away the days either dogging it or smoking behind the games hall. They decided that they were now adults and would soon be going out into the world to make their way, the rest of us were still kids with, in some cases, three years still to go.
I was staying on, as I wanted qualifications in the hope of avoiding a manual job. I had seen the workmen building the new school extension in mid-winter and thought bugger that. The men were blue with cold with their breath turning to frost as they swore when their hands were too numb to get their thermos flasks open for some hot soup.
No, I wanted a cushy job. In fact my only ambition was to make the most amount of money for the least amount of work, but then again, isn’t that everyone’s?
Only Winker, Wilco and myself in our crowd were staying on. Nearly three quarters intended leaving as soon as they legally could. It was quite sad really as a lot of them had brains but the call of the overall in the Wills Cigarette Factory was just too strong. Everyone who left at fifteen ended up there, drawn by not only good wages but the monthly allocation of free fags as well. We settled down to our studies with a new vigour and for the first time we actually listened to what the teacher had to say. The teachers, however, viewed this with great suspicion.
Mr Brown, our woodwork teacher, was by far the most suspicious. He became so nervous of our intentions that he’d check that we hadn’t sawn through a leg of his chair before he sat down.
About two weeks into the term he entered the class and found Winker with the class Ug’s – Bugsy Millar’s – head locked in the vice and thumping him with a piece of four-by-two. Winker had caught Bugsy looking at his willie in the shower after P.E. and took exception to it. Mr Brown belted Winker but the relief on the teacher’s face was evident and it was obvious he was glad to see the class returning to normal.
In English we started to do Shakespeare, which was met with an attitude approaching hostility. All the thys, thous and ancient dialect was beyond our comprehension and we just recited it parrot fashion, unsure of what exactly was coming out of our mouths.
Our English teacher was a goo
d-looking woman in her mid-thirties, Mrs Cairney, and she had this habit of sitting on her desk with her feet on the chair in front of her. From every angle you could see up her skirt. Winker and myself were always stuck in the front row and got more of a view than anyone else.
One day Winker turned to me and said, ‘Christ ye can almost taste it can’t ye?’
Fortunately, she never heard that comment but when she asked Winker to read something off the board, he replied, ‘Well maybe if ye moved yer fanny out of the way I could see the board.’ It was plain for all to see that she’d heard that one. Winker was stunned. He hadn’t actually thought that his mouth would say what his brain was thinking but it did. The class sat in shocked silence. Winker was dragged out of his seat and along to the headmaster’s office where he was given twelve of the belt and suspended for two weeks.
When he was allowed to return to the class we were about to do Hamlet and Mrs Cairney had a special treat in store for Winker.
He was given the part of Osric the Fop. She went on in great detail explaining exactly what a fop was, which was basically a Shakespearean big Jessie. Sort of a cross between Scotland’s celebrity big jessies Colin and Justin. This only resulted in Winker dogging English for a further fortnight to avoid being labelled a Jessie for the rest of his school life.
I was given the part and I suffered.
After two weeks Winker returned, figuring he was now safe as the die had been cast. Wrong. He was given the part the moment he popped his head round the classroom door. For about a month everyone called him Larry Grayson and every time he entered a classroom there would be a shout of ‘shut that door’. Winker did take it in good humour, mainly because he had to because he couldn’t have battered everyone. To do so he’d have had to batter at night and batter double time at weekends just to keep on top of things.
Around this time we gained a new addition to our crowd. Big Ally Dixon, a tall blond kid who wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Hitler Youth. He was a very brash and abrasive character who had knowledge far beyond his years. He joined Winker, Wilco and I, and the four of us became the school pupils committee for our year where by we were allowed to take teachers to task over any grievances, real or imaginary, we may have.
One of the major moans was the school never took us on trips anymore.
Not since Hush Hush had we engaged in any extracurricular activities, so after a lot of argy bargy it was decided that a trip to the theatre wouldn’t bankrupt the school funds. We didn’t decide the theatre, the teachers did, because the education department had a list of trips they’d fund and as the list only comprised of theatres or museums, the theatre was chosen because it was top of the list of two.
Unfortunately the trip coincided with our curiosity with alcohol and we decided to visit a pub before we went on down to the theatre. We arranged to meet in the Stevedore and Taylors pub at the top of Buchanan Street (sadly no longer there, they should have put up a plaque saying 99% of under Glaswegian under-agers had their first drink on this site).
I arrived first in my new three-piece suit looking as much an eighteen-year-old as a fifteen-year-old can possibly look. To my astonishment the barman asked me what I wanted and not being too well versed in the arts of ordering a drink, I said, ‘A drink of beer please.’
‘What dae ye mean a drink of beer – a pint or half pint?’
‘A pint.’
‘A pint of what pal?’
‘Guinness.’
I got my pint of Guinness and sat down, it tasted vile and the only reason I had asked for Guinness was because I’d heard the comedian Dave Allen talking about it on the telly. I sat with it feeling very ill at ease but trying to look as though I had been in pubs all my life. The other three came in, Big Ally went up to the bar and ordered, he was also served and brought the drinks over.
He looked at my pint of Guinness and said, ‘That’s a fucking Tim’s drink.’
He took a sip from his own glass containing lager and went off to the toilet.
We sat and surveyed the surroundings, the place was full of wee Jimmys with gruff woodbine voices who spoke in some strange dialect we couldn’t understand. I later found out that this is the common language of those in the advanced stages of alcohol abuse. We should maybe have guessed how advanced their alcoholic abuse was when they waved money at us saying, ‘I’ll gie ye a fiver fur yer liver.’
Big Ally returned from the toilet and said he’d been in this pub a hundred times before and therefore he was a regular. We sat in awe as he criticised the staff, the decor and the fruit machine, which he referred to as a ‘rip off’. He went up to the bar and returned with a brandy and a cigar then sat back down looking a bit like a gangster in an old black and white movie.
‘No bad brandy this, it’s Napoleonic.’
He took a drink and then a large puff on his cigar. It looked really cool until he choked and spat his drink all over Winker and Wilco’s faces.
‘Aw jeez oh man.’
The whole bar turned round to look at us and there we were, four fifteen-year-olds, two looking embarrassed and the other two looking wet.
We drank up and left.
We met the rest of the class down at the Citz – the Citizen’s Theatre. We had two teachers supervising us and they gave us the rules, stay together, stay out of the bar and stay out of trouble.
Ally said that the teachers could go fuck themselves and asked me if I was coming to the bar for a drink at half time. I think it’s called the interval in the theatre, I told him.
‘Well are you coming to the bar in the interval then, Laurence fucking Olivier?’
‘We’ll see.’
But after watching a very actor-y pish play about the Americanisation of Japan in which the lead character said ‘Gee Dolores’ all the time, I was ready for any diversion at the interval.
‘Mon, we’ll hide in the corner, no one will see us.’
He only had enough money left for one brandy, so there we were, Ally with his brandy and smoking a cigarette, and Wilco and Winker outside looking in through glass panels in the wall.
Ally must have had a very weak bladder because he asked to me to hold his drink and his fag as he was going off for a ‘desperately needed pish’ as he put it. Stupidly I took his accoutrements and was standing with them when the teacher walked in.
He saw me and came straight over.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?’
I started to stutter but denials were useless as I had the evidence in my hand. Ally came back in, clocked the scene and got off his mark.
I reported to the teacher next day and got six of the belt.
A month after this I had my first real drink. It was someone’s sixteenth birthday party in Blairtummock House, the large mansion in the public park. It was the only thing remaining from the family who had once owned the land Easterhouse was built on before they’d wisely sold up and moved on. It was now hired out by the council for functions and we were all invited to attend on the Saturday night.
Big Ally said he would arrange the bevy so pre-party we went up to his house for a wee swally. When he said he would arrange the swally we thought he meant a can of lager, but no, his father worked in a whisky bond and periodically he would drain the sediment from the bottom of the vats and take it home with him.
On its own, the sediment tasted vile but diluted with cream soda it was very palatable indeed, so palatable that you couldn’t even taste the alcohol and I like to think that we’d just invented the first ever alcopop. You’re welcome. At that age you have no concept whatsoever of the effects of alcohol and there we were knocking back pints of the stuff.
At first we felt great, absolutely great, the world was ours and everyone was our friend.
We left Ally’s house and staggered the 400 yards or so to the party and made our big entrance. We had arrived ‘nae bother to us by the way’.
I spied the school captain sitting next to a girl. I shuffled over and in my a
lcoholic inhibition, said to him, ‘I think you’re a fucking prick.’
Statement made, I then collapsed on the floor and started, for the want of a better phrase, puking my load. I dragged myself off to the toilet and just lay there with my head down the pan. One by one Ally, Winker and Wilco appeared and did the same thing. We lay there for three hours unable to move. I asked God many times to let me die but he obviously wasn’t listening. We were all wretching violently and anyone who entered the toilets could see our backsides in a formation puking team sort of a thing. We should have been hospitalised because we definitely had alcohol poisoning.
We couldn’t move and lay there semi-comatose. We were getting a lot of verbal abuse and kicks up the arse for hogging the toilets and at one point someone came into my cubicle and pissed over my head. I like to think he was aiming for the pan but in retrospect he probably did mean to piss on me as I was pissing him off.
The party ended at ten o’clock and we had to leave but couldn’t stand unaided. We were gathered up by those more sober than we were and taken along to another party. I had my arms over two guys’ shoulders and my feet were getting dragged along behind me. On the way there I lost a shoe. We reached the other venue and it was a smarty party, i.e. no drink and just sweeties and ginger. For east coast readers, ginger is a generic term on the west coast for a soft drink.
I was hauled into the living room and deposited in front of the TV where I collapsed in a heap, much to the annoyance of the host’s father who was trying to watch Scotsport. Drunk and dying though I was I still managed a snigger when I heard an Arthur Montfordism. He said, ‘The Celtic fans came expecting steak and went away with mince.’ Not up there with ‘what a stramash’, but still brilliant nonetheless.