There is a grown man in the bed beside me, crying in his sleep. I am woken by the pitiful child-like sounds emerging from his greying beard. His anguish seems to intensify, to the point where I can no longer tolerate it, and I decide to wake him. In his dream he was drowning, running out of breath as he swam underwater. He was trying desperately to get up to the surface, searching in vain to find air.
‘Why the hell did you wake me? I didn’t get to the good bit!’ He’s furious with me for interrupting this five-decades-old recurring nightmare too soon. What normally happens, he explains, is he discovers he can breathe underwater. Apparently it is exhilarating for him to rediscover, every time, that he does not need to die, for he has discovered a way to manipulate the physical world.
It is 4 a.m. but I lie there silently marvelling at the symbolism in his dream, for under traumatic, even life-threatening conditions, Billy did manage to survive where others would not have done. In childhood, that dream must have been a hopeful message from his unconscious mind that there were highly creative solutions to the horror of his daily life. In adulthood, he has certainly found them.
After failing the eleven-plus exam the first time, Billy eventually scraped into St Gerard’s, a secondary school that proved to be a far more comfortable environment for him, for he received better treatment by his teachers. His uniform was smart enough to impress his father: a green blazer, grey flannels, green tie and new shoes. To his horror, the aunts completed the outfit with a maroon canvas briefcase. No one else had one of those. The hottest book-carrying item was a gas-mask holder converted into a shoulder bag.
Billy’s first maths teacher at St Gerard’s was Mr McNab, who made a striking entrance in a blue serge suit, white shirt, claret-coloured tie, black shoes and a modern haircut. McNab eyed his new class as if they had just fallen off the Cleansing Department wagon and the boys knew from day one there was no kidding this man. His first move was absolutely excellent: he swaggered over to the metal waste-paper basket beside his desk and stamped his foot inside it. Without taking his eyes off the class, he back-heeled the basket so it slid across the room and crashed against the door to prop it open. ‘You got your books? You’d better have.’ Every book hit the desk.
Billy idolized him and was inspired to enjoy his subject. It was the same with Mr Costello who taught geography. Everyone remembered his lessons because he was so funny and nobody ever failed. Costello smoked in the classroom, although he was obviously a chest case, wheezing and coughing all the time. Other teachers would raid the toilets where boys were smoking and would sling the culprits into detention, but Costello would cruise in and ask for a light.
The school environment was filled with a refreshing cast of characters for Billy to observe and sometimes emulate. In the technical-drawing class, Mr Corrigan’s stunted moustache earned him the nickname ‘Hitler’. McGarrity who taught woodwork was nicknamed ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’. Barney Hill taught English and would re-enact scenes from Shakespeare astonishingly badly, bringing the house down.
Campbell, another maths teacher, was not above thwacking people; however he had the thinnest belt in the school so no one minded. He called his belt ‘Pythagoras’ and the name was inscribed on the leather. There was a huge ruckus when ‘Pythagoras’ suddenly disappeared. Billy discovered later that it was his cousin John who stole it, cut it into bits, and put it back in the drawer … a great act of derring-do, and a most symbolic act considering John’s persisting Oedipal angst. Eventually, the great day came when Campbell got a new belt.
‘I’d like to introduce you to my new best friend,’ Campbell announced to the class. He brought ‘Pythagoras 2’ out of the drawer.
‘OOOOOOH!’ went the class.
‘Who’d like to be first?’
All the hands shot up.
‘OK. everybody out!’
So they all got it, one at a time, and relished it.
Billy still struggled with his academic work, but the atmosphere at St Gerard’s was much more supportive and he managed to pass his tests. He still couldn’t get a grip of arithmetic, so Florence tried to help him at home. Fractions and decimals were fine, but long-division was torture. Algebra lost him altogether. ‘Why should I learn algebra?’ he fumes at his audience these days. ‘I’ve no intention of ever going there.’
Part of Billy’s problem turned out to be lack of retention. He could understand a lesson perfectly, but an hour later he hadn’t a clue. To this day, it’s the same thing: he can read a book and enjoy it immensely, but afterwards he remembers remarkably little about it. ‘I only ever needed to buy one book and read it every month.’ he boasts.
By the time Billy was fourteen, the inner-city population had grown to the point where the Glasgow Corporation was alarmed by the level of overcrowding in the tenement houses, and began a programme of slum clearance. In some neighbourhoods, the dilapidated buildings were torn down altogether, but in Stewartville Street a proportion of the families were moved elsewhere in order to reduce the number of inhabitants in each building. Billy’s family, along with hundreds of other tenement dwellers, was relocated ten miles away, in a housing estate in Drumchapel.
Within the cheaply built, two-storeyed house with a pebble-dash façade, the Connollys’ new flat was more spacious and they were overjoyed to have a bathroom and separate kitchen for the very first time. Most importantly for Billy, he no longer had to share a bed with his father and, presumably due to the lack of opportunity, his sexual abuse came to an end. Mona continued to beat him, but Billy was getting bigger and it didn’t seem to hurt him so much. Recognizing her physical disadvantage, she moved on to sly mind games, such as leaving accusatory notes for him in drawers and biscuit jars, and undermining his confidence with peers.
Drumchapel itself, known as ‘The Drummy’, was an ugly, litter-strewn wasteland. There was mud everywhere from the building sites and people had nowhere to congregate, not even a little café. Shops appeared after a couple of years, but until then everyone had to buy food from mobile grocers and butchers. Billy thought it was a dreadful, primitive way of life. Florence had some friends who had also moved to Drumchapel, so she was quite pleased about the move. Billy and Michael were less thrilled. There were no schools in Drumchapel so they were given travel passes to take the bus into Glasgow, but the buses back home were full of bevvy merchants with ‘broken pay’. Traditionally, men were expected to hand their sealed wage envelopes straight to their wives without spending any of it. Since there were no pubs in Drumchapel, they would leave their work and head straight for the pub in town before heading for home drunk and thoroughly skint.
It was pleasant, though, to be right on the edge of the countryside. There was an extensive woodland near Drumchapel, the Bluebell Woods with little burns, or streams, and fields with grazing cows. Children could roam around paddocks, swing from trees and chase rabbits. Billy caught a glimpse of a wild animal for the first time, and couldn’t believe his eyes. Wild humans also abounded: ‘rough’ kids from Pilton Road would hang out in the woods, acting like Jesse James. They ambushed Billy a few times, so after a while he was scared to go there.
The Connollys, who now lived in Kinfauns Drive, looked down on the people living at right angles to them in Pilton Road, whom they considered ruffians because they were ‘slum clearance people’. The Connollys had been moved out of a slum, too, but they felt there was an important difference: their building in Stewartville Street was not being torn down, rather it had just been emptied. They were really quite snobbish towards the Pilton Road folk, and disapproved of their lifestyle and lack of respect for their own property. There were paths trampled right through the middle of their gardens, since they weren’t the kind of people who were delicate about daisies.
Billy loved lying in bed listening to the Pilton Road folk on a Friday night, when they all had riotous shindigs and ended up plastered and punch-happy; he and Florence would scream with laughter. The party always sounded jolly at the beginning. An accordion would be playing and the folk would be belting out ‘On the Wild Side of Life’ and ‘Nobody’s Child’, but Billy and Florence never had to wait long for the ominous sound of breaking glass that heralded a ‘handshaking’, a fight to settle a grudge. The terminology of violence in Glasgow is wonderfully understated: a ‘Glasgow kiss’, for example, is a brutal head-butt, while a ‘Glasgow grin’ is a knife-slash across the face. The familiar sound effects would continue. Amidst cries, curses and the crash of breaking china, someone would shout, ‘Stop the band,’ and the accordion would whine down. Then, Biff! Boff! There’d be a general ‘rammy’ or free-for-all.
‘Get tae fuck!’ would punctuate the air, then the slamming of a door as if someone had been tossed out on his ear. The troublemaker could then be heard marching down the close:
‘Shove yer party up yer arse!’
‘And don’t you come fucking back!’
Nowadays, Billy performs fragments of parties and singsongs that originated in Pilton Road: Scotsmen have this great habit of singing about missing Scotland when they’re still there:
(Singing)‘When I’m far across the sea …!’
‘No you’re not, you’re in the living room.’
‘Shut up, it’s the only song your father knows.’
Every family in Drumchapel was given a minuscule piece of land for growing vegetables or flowers, so the Connollys had a garden for the first time. Billy was put in charge of growing potatoes, but he had no idea what to do with the curious seeded vegetables he was given, so he just dug a hole, threw them in and scattered some earth over the top. After waiting in vain for them to grow a few times, he finally got the hang of making furrows. He bought packets of flower seeds from Woolworth’s and planted purpley-red primulas, Livingstone daisies and sickly-pink gladioli.
It was in Drumchapel that Billy developed his penchant for night-scented stock, the fragrant flower whose lovely perfume wafted into the house on summer evenings. When the weather was decent, Billy liked to cycle. Most of the children in Drumchapel had bikes or tricycles. Billy’s father gave him a second-hand New Hudson bicycle, a beauty in metallic purple. He would cycle away along the Great Western Road towards Loch Lomond and, in clement weather, he would even ride to school.
The New Hudson was not really a racing bike, but Billy winged his own Tour de France, in toe clips and Reg Harris Fallowfield cycling shoes with a Union Jack on the tongue. His granny let him have Uncle Teddy’s old woolly cycling jersey with the name of a local team, the ‘Glenmarnock Wheelers’, on the front. It was full of holes, but Billy loved it, imagining it made him look a bit like a real cyclist.
It was such a relief to be able to escape from home and visit his pals who lived in other towns. Billy McKinnel came from Bearsden, an up-market district in north-west Glasgow. It was absolute luxury to sit watching television on Mrs McKinnel’s white-and-gold, floral sofa in its squeaky, plastic covering. The Glaswegian comedian Chic Murray, a hefty riot of a man with a tartan suit and a cloth cap, came on the box one day, telling a story about two men called ‘Simmet’ and ‘Drawers’ – ‘simmet’ means singlet in Scotland and, of course, ‘drawers’ are underpants. Chic’s tale was all wordplay and absolutely the funniest thing Billy had ever heard. Mr and Mrs McKinnel were roaring along with the boys. In the story, the Drawers’ son had just announced to his father that he wanted to go and live in America, and his father was admonishing him: ‘Don’t let the Drawers down!’
At that moment, Billy slid over the arm of the couch, for he lost all mastery over his body. He lay on the floor completely convulsed, and Billy says he knew right then, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would spend his life being a funny man. The only comedians he’d previously heard were radio stars like Ted Ray, who all had English accents. Chic Murray, and the variety theatre comic Jimmy Logan, had a profound effect on Billy because they spoke with Glaswegian accents and talked about things that were familiar to him.
One afternoon in March 2001, spluttering laughter from a thousand mourners violates the sombre atmosphere of Glasgow Cathedral. Billy has stepped into the pulpit, nicely understated in a black suit, with bright orange Buddha beads and a diamanté scarf. ‘I bet you never thought you’d see me here!’ He smirks at the largely Protestant congregation.
Billy glances down at Jimmy Logan’s Saltire-draped coffin lying beneath him in the nave. ‘I made him laugh one lunchtime,’ he boasts. ‘There was ham on the menu so I told him, “You’ve been doing it for years, so you might as well have a bit!”’
As a young teenager, Billy found himself drawn to following funeral processions and visiting graveyards. Thoughts of suicide were not uppermost in his mind, but he was intrigued, perhaps even obsessed, with some notions of death, especially tragedy, martyrdom, glory and the peacefulness of resting below the earth’s surface. There was certainly something very appealing about a state in which he no longer had to do battle with Mona, Rosie and William. It was a dangerous time for Billy for, like all teenagers, the finality of death had not yet sunk in.
At seventeen, Florence was struggling too. She had boyfriends and tried to keep them a secret, for she was bearing the brunt of Mona’s jealousy and frustration at the lack of romance and advancement in her own life. Terrified that her niece might become pregnant outside marriage, as she herself had done, Mona became more intrusive and paranoid than ever. One of her dirtiest tricks was trying to get Billy to follow Florence when she went out one evening. He complied as far as the end of Blackcraigs Avenue because he knew Mona could see him from the window. When he saw Florence enter a friend’s house he waited for a while before returning with some story to mollify his aunt.
The more Mona sensed that Florence was slipping out of her grip, the more she verbally attacked her, frequently accusing her of ‘getting above her station’. ‘Who do you think you are? Who are you trying to kid?’
Fortunately, Florence had her own room by now, and she simply retreated there most of the time. She was enjoying considerable success at school and had already applied for teachers’ training college. She knew the time would soon come when she would be out of the house altogether. She was lucky enough to have a small transistor radio, so she could drown out Mona’s tirades by listening to Radio Luxembourg: And now, according to the time on my H. Samuel Ever-Right Watch, it’s time for David Jacobs,’ the announcer would boom.
Billy found a different way to escape. During his last year at school, he worked as a milk boy. He has that in common with his friend, hero and master of sibilance, Sean Connery. At the opening of the Edinburgh Film Festival a few years ago, someone asked the actor if he’d ever honoured them with his presence there before. Sean replied, ‘Yeah. I used to deliver milk here.’ Mark Knopfler, who eventually made his name in the rock band, Dire Straits, was on Billy’s milk route, as were two rival football heroes: Bobby Evans, who was a Catholic Celtic player, and Willie Waddell, who played for the Protestant team, Rangers Football Club.
‘Should I pee in Willie’s milk?’ wondered Billy.
Billy and his fellow frozen snotters made their deliveries from a little electric milk float. They ran back and forth to distribute the milk, while the float just kept gliding along the street. When snow lay on the ground, there were excellent high jinks to perform, for they could hang onto the back of it and ski. The boys rose at four in the morning to collect the milk at a farm, where they made tea to warm and waken themselves. Ever intent on tomfoolery, Billy liked to wait behind the cow for the raw milk lads to arrive, then whip the safety catch off an udder and zap them with milk. It took him ages to perfect this technique, but he eventually became an expert.
Psssht!
‘You dough-heid you!’
Billy loved playing practical jokes. His and every other Glasgow schoolboy’s favourite shop was Tarn Shepherd’s Joke Shop, which sold the best stink bombs known to man, rich with sulphuric awfulness. It was considered a great wheeze to saunter in there and inquire, ‘Hi Tam, how’s tricks?’
A favourite prank the milk boys relished was leaving empties where someone would fall over them in the middle of the night. They would listen gleefully for the crashing and cursing that meant their wicked strategies had paid off. Unfortunately, the tables were turned on Billy one freezing morning, after another wee dobber threw a snowball at him. Billy ducked and ran, but he took a flier over a knee-high fence. He clattered down on top of his bottles, cutting his left index finger to the bone and slashing a tendon. His subsequent tendon transplant surgery meant that he was off school for months on end. When he returned, he was immediately belted on the injured hand for letting off stink bombs on a bus headed for the sports ground.
Billy’s tendon transplant had far-reaching academic consequences. He left school with nothing except proof that he had been there and a couple of engineering certificates. His cousin John stayed on and eventually shone at university.
A crowd of Glaswegian schoolteachers is clustered around a microphone in the MacDonald Hotel, singing their own specially written version of ‘Que Sera Sera’. The performance is for the benefit of Florence at her surprise sixtieth birthday party. I can’t make out the words but their performance is accompanied by giggles and knowing winks.
Billy chats with his cousins. Carmel, Mark and Sean, who are Uncle James’s grown-up children, while I whirl around the dance floor with John’s brother Eddy. Florence looks happily bewildered. Her grandchildren are tearing around the room chasing each other with a slimy silicone sausage. Later, as I sit with Mark, who is now a priest, discussing our shared passion for the Asian continent, I am distracted by a vision in scarlet crushed velvet. It is Billy, who has taken to the floor with his sister.
‘Look at them …’ I murmur.
Father Mark smiles indulgently, unaware of my focus. ‘They actually made it this far.’
Just before she turned eighteen, Florence was accepted into the teachers’ training college at Notre Dame in Glasgow. She was overjoyed at the prospect of living on campus with her friends and away from Mona. Florence had made sense of her life by developing a strong Catholic faith, which continues to sustain her to this day. ‘It’s really worse than death,’ she decided quite early on, ‘living a hellish life. There has to be something beyond it, just for the fairness of the thing.’
When Billy visited her on campus, he noticed a distinct, positive change in her. She had grown away from the rest of the family and he was very happy for her. They still went on Sunday outings together with Michael and pals from school, first slurping down hot orange at an Italian café in the Dumbarton Road, then heading for either the Botanic Gardens or the Art Gallery. The city of Glasgow boasts some gorgeous buildings and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery is certainly one of them. Some say that, after it was erected, the architect who designed it committed suicide out of despair, for the building was built backwards by mistake; but Billy says that’s just an urban legend.
Youngsters who visit the Art Gallery today are treated to a life-size Star Wars Imperial Storm Trooper replica carrying a ‘blaster rifle’ but, as a youngster, Michael was content with a slide in the vast atrium, where there were wonderfully slippery floors in black, white and gold patterned marble. If a boy landed on his backside during a slide, he could glance to the ceiling for a visual feast of turquoise-and-gold panels and gilt Tudor roses on a lush, red background. The names of famous composers were displayed on balconies above, and Billy learned their names long before he ever heard their music: Rossini, Wagner and Beethoven.
Billy loved the paintings upstairs. Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St John of the Cross’ was there as well as French, Dutch, Flemish and British masterpieces. Billy always needed a cup of tea after drinking in so much art, so it was lucky there was also a tearoom. They would finish off by poring over model ships from every era, suits of armour for very short kings, and terrible triumphs of taxidermy. Best of all, it was free.
Just after Christmas in 1957, not long after rock and roll had been invented, they saw a teddy boy right there in the gallery, languishing by a pillar beneath the massive pipe organ. Billy was in heaven: he had never seen a real teddy boy before, only cartoons, yet there he was, with his long jacket, drainpipe trousers and fat suede shoes with crepe soles. This god also had a bop haircut with big ‘sideys’ and a ‘DA’ (a duck’s arse) at the back, plus an earring. Billy had never seen a man with an earring before.
A week later. Mona was beating him up for something or other, and in the middle of it she suddenly accused him: ‘I know what you want. I know exactly what you want. You want to be a teddy boy!’ It was Billy’s finest hour. ‘Yes I do,’ he defied her bravely. That was the moment for him. She laid into him again, but by then he was untouchable.
Florence was already getting the bop look, with backcombed hair, white lipstick and dark eyeliner. She wore white high heels and net petticoats she stiffened by dipping in sugar and water. Unable to buy clothes, Billy too tried to get the bop look with what he already owned. He had some old narrow trousers that he strutted about in, but one day he came home to find that Mona had ripped them apart.
Then, one magical evening, a girl who lived in the next close invited Billy to the Girl Guides’ dance. When he arrived, couples were mostly dancing Scottish reels, but then one of the girls pulled out a Dansette record player and put on a seventy-eight record. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
‘Well, since my baby left me,
I found a new place to dwell.
It’s down at the end of Lonely Street
at Heartbreak Hotel.’
Everyone started jiving, and Billy had never seen or heard anything like it in his life. Shocked at the power of it, he thought, ‘That’s for us! It’s not for them, it’s ours, it’s our music!’ It was really rock ‘n’ roll that saved him. From that moment, he never looked back.