It is winter in Los Angeles, 2001, with temperatures at a low of 74°F and air quality at fair-to-awful. The landscape below our plate-glass kitchen wall is a typical Hollywood Hills scene: the lights of Universal Studios spread out before us, with only the hourly explosion and pyrotechnic display from the ‘Waterworld’ show interrupting the dull roar of the freeway. Billy is looking unusually smug as he approaches our kitchen dining table, carrying a steaming bowl of his own excellent macaroni cheese.
‘One helping for Doctor Connolly,’ he grins mysteriously as he spoons out the delicious pasta for me, then goes to serve himself, ‘and one for the other Doctor Connolly.’
I glare at him suspiciously. ‘If someone has gone and offered you an honorary doctorate, I’m going to puke.’
‘Glasgow University. Doctor of Letters, no less. I’m to receive it in July. Wanna come?’
It had only taken me six sleep-deprived years to achieve my PhD in Psychology. ‘Try to be nice,’ I tell myself.
It is another remarkable and well-deserved milestone for a man who as a boy had been labelled ‘stupid’. Billy left school at fifteen years old, along with many of his friends who were not considered candidates for higher education. His academic shortcomings had become more and more apparent to those who subscribed to the notion that intelligence is the ability to do maths and write essays that have a Beginning, a Middle and an End.
Billy certainly does have an extraordinary, creative intelligence but, early on, he did not have a key to his unique filing system. Now that key is miraculously found when he gets on stage. He has filed away an astonishing wealth of otherwise useless information that emerges only during his show. His kindred spirit, he says, is the actor Sir Michael Caine, who is given to ending his idiosyncratic trivia vignettes with the words, ‘Not many people know that.’ Billy adores Michael as a fellow potato-grower, thespian, and head-chatter merchant. ‘He’s the only man I know who thinks a bit like me,’ he declares.
With school behind him, Billy had to decide on a career path and join the workforce. He had been drawn to engineering, although he told his science teacher, Bill Sheridan, that he aspired to be a comedian. ‘Well, I saw you playing football at lunchtime,’ said Mr Sheridan, ‘and I think you’ve already achieved your ambition.’
Billy became a messenger boy in John Smith’s bookstore, delivering books to readers all over Glasgow and beyond. In between deliveries he sat in a tiny space beside the dispatch desk, exactly at eye level to a range of Nevil Shute novels. ‘Might as well give them a go,’ thought Billy.
He began with A Town Like Alice and tore through every one, for he appreciated Shute’s simple storytelling style. Next he found his way to the Robert Burns shelf, and laughed out loud at his poem To a Louse. Billy thoroughly connected to the national bard’s outrageous and irreverent notion of writing a poem to a louse he spied crawling around the bonnet of a woman he saw in church. He has had a passion for Burns ever since.
Billy did not last long at John Smith’s. He had been puzzled when he noticed some fellow employees throwing what seemed to be perfectly good books into the dustbin outside the back door. The men were operating a book-stealing scam, and Billy became one of the casualties of a purge that occurred when the thefts were discovered.
There was an opening at Bilsland’s Bakery in Anderston, so Billy became a van boy, delivering bread and cakes to grocers as far away as Bathgate and Armadale on the road to Edinburgh. Later on he helped out on the run to Paisley, adjacent to Glasgow. The bakery is now some other business, but Billy says you can still see the square chimney tower displaying ‘Bilsland’s Bread’ from certain rooms in the Hilton Hotel.
Billy thought the van drivers were hilarious patter merchants, always cracking jokes and making irreverent asides about the management. Tony Roper, who later became an actor and director, was a driver-in-training when Billy met him. He was a sharp-looking chap, with Tony Curtis hair, long bug-ladders (sideburns) and drainpipe trousers. He had shortened his brown bakery coat in order to complete the teddy-boy look.
The drivers and delivery boys got a very early start, first congregating in the bakery canteen to make themselves sandwiches with the fresh-baked bread, then swishing down tea from a jam jar at their first delivery stop. Billy was learning new and vital universal truths, such as the dangers of eating a fried egg sandwich while standing up; when he bit into it, the yolk would explode and fly down the sleeve of his Bilsland’s jacket. Egg stain, he noted, is nature’s Superglue.
The Bilsland’s management issued cotton work coats to protect the delivery team from looking like giant floured cutlets when they returned home. At first these jackets were a faded hazelnut-brown but, shortly after Billy started in the job, there was a policy change that turned out to be a drastic mistake. Billy was among the few who were delighted when Bilsland’s issued new green jackets with a yellow half-belt to replace the old brown ones. The management had failed to realize that the new uniforms represented a victory for the green-wearing Celtic supporters and there was uproar by employees who happened to be blue-wearing Rangers supporters. They insisted that, for the good of the company, there was still plenty of wear in the old brown coats, so they carried on wearing them.
Billy hankered after a job that involved travelling to exotic foreign parts. On his way to school, he had crossed the River Clyde every day on ferries run by Highland men. ‘Mind your foots!’ they would shout. Chugging across the Clyde, Billy had been able to observe welders at work in the shipyards, as well as ocean-going whisky ships that regularly crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America. Billy became desperate to go away to sea, to the interesting-sounding places where the ships had been registered … Arabia and Shanghai, Baltimore and Tierra del Fuego. The steamers provided constant proof that there was a whole fascinating world out there, ready to be visited.
‘I think I’ll join the merchant navy,’ he announced.
‘You’re off yer head … they’re all homosexuals in that outfit!’ his father thundered, in a staggering display of denial and homophobia.
So Billy applied for a job where he thought no self-respecting gay man would ever be found, as a tradesman in the shipyards. ‘I became a welder to escape the worst excesses of homosexuality.’ he explains to people, with a large degree of truthfulness.
The various shipyards on the River Clyde provided the most employment in Glasgow at the time. The shipbuilding industry had grown massively since the first shipyard opened in Govan in 1840. When Billy was taken on as a welding apprentice in Stephen’s Shipyard, the industry appeared to be a thriving, testosterone-driven domain. No one would have predicted then that its glory days were over and that, by 1980, the docks would be empty, with just a few rusty cranes rising out of vast riverside wastelands.
While lamenting the demise of Glasgow’s shipyards. Billy appreciates one positive effect: ‘Glasgow used to be a black city.’ he says. ‘It looked as though it had been drawn in ink. Now it’s lost its industry, Glasgow looks like a watercolour. It’s as though someone has learned to work the skylight.’
Billy remains unshakably nostalgic about the Clyde. ‘The Clyde almost runs through my veins … I touched it all my life.’
The schools along the Clyde fed the shipyards with employees. The neophyte entering them was in for a great cultural shock, for when the massive gates closed behind them, it was a very male society. At the end of the day, the horn would go ‘whooo!’ and thousands of ‘bunnets’ would run out, the lame workers first in case the able-bodied tradesmen ran over them. ‘If you were just driving innocently by and saw that,’ observes Billy, ‘you’d say, “Fuck! Those shipyards are a bit rough, aren’t they?’”
Before taking up his apprenticeship, Billy was required to work in other shipyard jobs until his sixteenth birthday, so he first helped out in the joiner’s store, sorting out screws, hinges and other supplies. His supervisor, a tall, one-legged man in his fifties called Willie Bain, liked to entertain himself by putting the wind up his new assistants. He would complain loudly and pointedly about not being able to get the kinds of boys he wanted, and he had Billy quite terrified of running errands to the cellar.
‘Mind them rats now! They’re the size of collie dogs!’ he would shout, adjusting his cloth cap. On Billy’s first day. Willie took him to visit the glue-maker. It was important to be friendly with the man up at the glue pots because he might let a boy heat up his lunch pie on his stove. It was just before morning break when they stopped by the glue-maker’s hut. ‘Right Tam, we’ve got a new boy.’
‘Aye, right,’ said the glue man, wiping his hands on his messy overalls. He hurried over to peer closely at Billy’s face for a few seconds. Billy was intrigued by the man’s bunnet, stiff and greasy with the putrid stuff he created. Then the glue man stood back and squinted at him through half-shut eyes. ‘Turn him round. Aye.’ He surveyed his profile. ‘Aye, turn him the other way. Turn him right round again. Aye …’ There was a short pause. ‘Catholic!’ he pronounced confidently. Apparently, the glue man had never been wrong.
Billy’s first day as a full welding apprentice, the day he turned sixteen, was unbearable because of the noise. All around him, men were working with machinery that screeched and whined as it sliced through metal. The caulkers, whose job it was to make the ships watertight, were hammering with pneumatic tools that sounded like machine-guns fired at close quarters. The noise was so ear-splitting, Billy never thought he’d last the week but, within a few days, he had suffered permanent partial hearing loss, so it became quite bearable.
Every one of Billy’s senses was assaulted. The searing light that showered out from welders’ equipment nipped his eyes, while a putrid stench from the adjacent sewerage works wafted around his nostrils, overlaid with the sweet, sticky odour of HP sauce, jam or biscuits, depending on the cooking schedule at the nearby co-operative factory. Nowadays, Billy loves the Australian phrase, ‘That smells like someone just puked in a gardenia patch’ (it has to be said with the right accent). The expression takes him right back to the shipyards.
A group of sixteen-year-olds: Christopher Lewis, Hector Clydesdale, Ginger Brown, Joe West, George Picket and Billy all started their apprenticeship together in 1958. They were a lively collection of lads who were about to go through a great deal together, including puberty.
Christopher Lewis, known as Wee Lewie, was six inches smaller than the rest. Billy himself was only five feet tall and could get a child’s fare on the bus until he was seventeen, so he was relieved to have Wee Lewie to look down on. Lewie was a dark, pointy-featured imp who was always the ringleader when it came to any kind of mischief. Hector was his physical opposite, a strong, sturdy lad from Maryhill. He was more mature than the others but was severely teased because his middle name was his mother’s maiden name, which made him ‘Hector Jolly Clydesdale’.
Ginger had the nicest red hair Billy had ever seen on a man. He was a very friendly soul, as was George, a lanky, diehard Celtic fan. Billy already knew Joe since their first day at primary school. They had attended St Gerard’s together, and Joe had even been at Bilsland’s for a few weeks while he was saving up money to go to Lourdes. Joe was a handsome leader, very popular with the girls, and Billy emulated him in the way he smoked, dressed, and went dancing at the weekend. Joe, on the other hand, had always felt sorry for ‘Wee Billy’, as he called him. Sensing his shyness and sensitivity, he tried to protect him.
The expert-in-charge who taught them all to weld was Willie Hughes, a lovely, fat man with a moustache who resembled King Farouk of Egypt and was appropriately nicknamed. Farouk would never be seen without his soft hat because he was as bald as a baby’s bum. He was a true shipyard man, born in Taransay Street, a road in Govan that had houses on one side and the shipyards on the other.
All the apprentices had expected to be conscripted into the army, but had missed it by eighteen months, when National Service was abolished. Billy was terribly disappointed: he had been looking forward to being in the forces like his father and flying off to see the world. He had noticed that his slightly older contemporaries who went to the army were men when they came back. They had only been abroad for a couple of years, but their voices were deeper and they had all sorts of clever tales to tell, of visiting exotic places and meeting fascinating people from other cultures.
The boys knew Farouk had fascinating war tales to tell and, when they were fed up with welding, they would seduce him with his own nostalgia. ‘Were you ever in France?’
‘Och, aye.’ He would then launch into some hair-raising story in which his regiment served as cannon fodder for a beach landing.
Their welding school was about eight by twelve feet and each apprentice had a welding cubicle that was safely partitioned off from the harmful rays of his neighbour. The boys practised welding pieces of scrap metal together in every possible position: flat, curved, overhead and vertical. After being cloistered together there for a few months, the novices were finally allowed out to work with other tradesmen. Once in the main section they did the preparatory job of tacking, applying tiny temporary welds to hold a stretch of prefabricated ship section together until a journeyman came along to complete the work.
The apprentices were distinguishable from the fully-fledged welders by their jackets, which were brand-new, ivory-coloured rawhide. More experienced men’s were rustcoloured and thoroughly worn. Everything the apprentices had was new-looking. Their tea cans were shiny, their steel toe-cap boots, known as ‘steelies’, were unscuffed and their jeans were pristine. Everybody else was in rags with the general ruftytuftyness of the shipyard life, and Billy just couldn’t wait to be all torn and tattered, not least because it might save him from being a recipient of journeymen’s japes. ‘Eh, Wee Yin!’ A crowd of seasoned welders would beckon him over. ‘Will ye run to the store and get us a bubble for the spirit-level and a pot of tartan paint!’
Eager to please, Billy would unwittingly head off on a wild goose chase. After waiting half an hour in the store when he’d been sent on an errand for a long stand’ and fending off ridicule when he asked for ‘a couple of sky hooks’, he decided not to be so easily fooled the next time.
‘Scurry off and get some Carborundum!’
‘No fucking way,’ he contended, soliciting a tongue-lashing from Willie Hughes, who truly did need the oddly named grinding paste.
At the apprentice school, the boys had general schooling and instruction in matters of welding, metallurgy, citizenship, and general knowledge. The apprentices learned, for example, that préfabrication was the most important new development in shipbuilding, and was the speciality of the yard where Billy worked. Instead of building the entire ship outdoors, plate by plate, the welders assembled large chunks indoors in building bays, and then took them outside to be joined to other structures. Other tradesmen generally envied welders: theirs was the newest trade and they were the highest-paid workers in the shipyards.
One afternoon, apprentices to a multitude of trades from all over the Clyde were given time off to attend a screening of the Oscar-winning documentary called Seaward the Great Ships. It was all about shipbuilding right there where they worked. They had eagerly awaited being transported to the Lyceum cinema in Govan, but the outing turned into a dreadful shambles. Some of the boys had sneaked a quick pint at lunchtime, and the mood in the theatre was already quite lively. A few minutes into the screening, the narrator intoned the fatal words, ‘And then came the welders, the kings of prefabrication.’ That did it. A big roar of self-approval went up from the welders.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ shouted everyone else.
A great shangie started, in which the welding apprentices were set upon and walloped by apprentices from every other trade. The film flickered off to a white screen, the lights came on and the entire audience was ejected from the cinema in disgrace.
Billy’s happy band of apprentices lived to fight another day. Their antics were reminiscent of his boyhood cronies and their mischievous games, only now they were playing with grown-up toys. They were always setting traps for people and playing irritating and dangerous pranks.
Wee Lewie, who was usually at the forefront, invented a legendary trick. There were always bits of steel lying around on the decks, and it was the job of an elderly worker to pick them up and load them onto his wheelbarrow for removal. One particular day, he parked his wheelbarrow in one of the building bays and went off looking for scrap. Lewie dragged the wheelbarrow a yard or two and welded it to a strip of metal that was used to earth machinery. After the unfortunate worker returned and filled it with scrap he found the wheelbarrow impossible to lift. Thinking it was now too heavy, he started removing his scrap one piece at a time to try to make it lighter. The wheelbarrow was nearly empty by the time the old man realized it was welded fast to the deck. If only he had scanned the upper deck earlier, he would have spotted five or six apprentices watching him, trying to stifle their laughter.
Another great trick Lewie invented was an extremely dangerous one. He would beg a paper bag from someone’s lunchtime sandwiches and use an oxyacetylene torch to fill it with flammable gas, tying it up with a bit of string once it was fully inflated. Then, on a makeshift pulley, he would lower this bomb down several decks to the riveters’ fire on the floor of the engine room, where a worker would be heating up the rivets until they were nearly white-hot. As soon as this man turned his back to throw a supply to the riveters, Wee Lewie would lower the bag towards the fire, until boom! It would explode. Charcoal and loose debris would fly all over the place.
Billy found himself in trouble for his own favourite trick, which involved giving people electric shocks. It was a two-man operation. When it rained and there were puddles on the deck, an accomplice would loiter on the deck quite close to a designated puddle. Billy would wait underneath the deck with his welding equipment, directly under this puddle and, when someone was walking through it, his accomplice would signal Billy by knocking twice on the deck with a piece of metal. Then Billy would zap the victim from underneath by creating an electric current through the puddle and giving him a very nasty buzz. Next time it would be Billy’s turn on top to see the effect. One of his accomplices in that dastardly trick is now the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Alec Mawson, who used to be a plater. All the apprentices thought this was a scream. The shocked and furious men would try to murder the young perpetrators, and would chase them for miles throwing nuts and bolts, anything within reach, but Billy could run like a deer when he was sixteen. ‘If I catch you, I’m gonna hang yer jaw off yer face, you wee crawbag!’
Considering the number of pranks they played, it is amazing Billy was only caught once. There was a beefy caulker called Sammy who wore a Rangers scarf to work, and very unwisely, Billy decided to taunt him up close one day, relying on his swift-footed ability to escape with impunity. ‘Eh. Sammy! You’re a big blue-nose bastard!’ This was the term of insult for a Rangers supporter. As planned, Billy took off like the wind, but he tripped over a bucket and Sammy managed to seize him by the throat. ‘You little Fenian tosspot! I’ve a good mind to wring yer neck!’
Serendipitously, Sammy noticed a pot of blue carpenters’ paint lying on the deck, used for marking the next job. In an inspired act of retaliation, he painted Billy’s nose until it was completely blue and held him there till it was dry. Billy received his just deserts when he had to walk through the whole shipyard to get turpentine paint remover from the ambulance room. People were laughing for miles.
There was a surrealist sensibility lurking in the minds of the apprentice tricksters. They were fond of daubing the heels of workers’ boots with silver paint, achieved by lying in wait on the deck below. The apprentices found surprisingly sophisticated amusement in the fact that, although everyone on the shipyards was drab and dirty, selected victims unknowingly had silver heels.
Less sophisticated was the trick that involved bending a welding rod into an ‘S’ shape, skewering a piece of greaseproof sandwich paper onto it, then hanging it from the back half-belt of someone’s overalls. The recipient would trot around sporting his tail, to the great merriment of the pranksters. It was considered an even greater wheeze to set the tail on fire, so the victim would stride for yards with flames licking up his backside.
Billy looks back and says it was lovely then, being a man in a man’s world: but in that first couple of years he was really only a youth in a man’s world. Being with men all the time, however, was helping him to become more mature and independent. Even so, Mona still attacked him whenever she got the chance. When Billy arrived home after work, she would start on him with her sarcasm: ‘Oh, look who it is! Willie the welder.’
Billy would protest, ‘Your father was a shipyard worker!’
‘Well, I’ve got a profession!’ Mona would sneer.
Billy escaped from the house whenever he could. His father gave him a new bicycle, a deep burgundy Flying Scot, which he once thought was a thing of astounding beauty and grace. He cycled for miles at a time, sometimes way over the hill called the ‘Rest and be Thankful’ and as far as Dunoon, where he believed his mother lived. He was full of imaginings about her, wondering what she looked like now, and if she had other children. He couldn’t remember her face, but he would occasionally fix his attention onto some wild-looking woman in the street and wonder if she were Mamie. The aunts had said she was violent, that she had once turned up at their door with a knife: it was all so confusing. Saddened by feeling geographically closer to her, he would take the ferry across the Clyde to Gourock and cycle the long way home.
Some days Billy cycled to his grandparents’ house. Big Neilly would address him on tiptoe with his hands behind his back. ‘A pound in the bank’s your best friend,’ he would say, being given to lecturing rather than conversing. When he showed his grandson his gardening secret of throwing tea and eggshells onto his prized sweet peas to make them flourish, Billy thought he was a magician. In a way he was, for one day he produced a trump card, seemingly out of nowhere. ‘Your mother’s in town,’ he said as Billy arrived for a visit. Big Neilly handed him a written address.
‘Is my … mother in?’ Billy gurgled to an unknown man who answered the door to a strange house.
‘Come in.’
Just inside, he was utterly shaken to see Mamie standing right there in the dark hallway, wearing a camel-hair coat. She seemed pleasant, not like the demon that had been served up to him.
‘Oh, hello Billy,’ she said and gave him a little hug. She took him out into the street but he could barely see her in the twilight.
‘Well, it’s been nice meeting you,’ she added quite casually, sending him on his way.
The meeting Billy had been building up to for twelve years had lasted less than three minutes. He was initially just embarrassed. He cycled off home, thinking, ‘What the hell was that? What just happened?’
For a number of days, Billy couldn’t make sense of it at all, but eventually he began to feel fury. Deep, uncontrollable, primitive rage. He couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but he felt cruelly violated in yet another way, robbed of the opportunity to be the ‘prodigal’ son to a ‘prodigal’ mother. In the fantasy he’d longed for his whole life, the moment was supposed to be a reciprocal one, where she scooped him into her arms, told him she was sorry for leaving and promised they’d never again be apart. He was furious too, at the divisive lies of his family.
For a number of days, Billy couldn’t make sense of it at all, but eventually he began to feel fury. Deep, uncontrollable, primitive rage. He couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but he felt cruelly violated in yet another way, robbed of the opportunity to be the ‘prodigal’ son to a ‘prodigal’ mother. In the fantasy he’d longed for his whole life, the moment was supposed to be a reciprocal one, where she scooped him into her arms, told him she was sorry for leaving and promised they’d never again be apart. He was furious too, at the divisive lies of his family.
‘She’s attractive!’ He was indignant… ‘She’s a nice shape. Brown suede shoes. Hair is nice. This is not the person who has been described to me: some wild woman with a knife. Big fucking anti-climax from where I’m sitting.’
Billy became a member of Stephen’s Apprentice Boys Club and attended weekend outings at various youth hostels all over the countryside. His cousin John often accompanied him. They would join in the merry throng, peeling potatoes for dinner just like in the army and eating rice pudding, heavy with currants and raisins. The real object of these outings was to keep young apprentices away from the fleshpots of Partick and Govan, in particular to keep them from drinking, which was a major occupation of most Clydeside workers.
Being the tricksters they were, John and Billy got up to a variety of shenanigans in the hostels. One of their favourite tricks was slicing people’s bananas inside the skin: holding the banana vertical, they would carefully stick a sewing needle into it at right angles, then move it from side to side so it dissected the flesh. They repeated this at one-inch intervals all the way down the banana.
In another ingenious operation, they would steal a person’s egg, make a minute hole in both ends and blow it empty. Then they wrote an ‘Excuse me’ note on delicately rolled-up toilet paper and slid it inside the egg. People who went to bed with their socks on were prime targets for the cousins. When one of these innocents was asleep, Billy and John would remove one sock and put it on top of the other. They thought it was hilarious fun to watch the victim searching in vain for his missing sock the next morning.
At home in the evenings, Billy and John hung out with girls in the street. Billy fell in love with red-haired Jeanette Canning, who lived next door to John in Drumchapel, and they went for walks together in the woodlands. ‘The blood was draining into my willie,’ says Billy. Previously he had not been very lucky with girls. At school he had fancied Anne Mallinson from afar, but his only contact had been occasionally swimming with her in the Clyde. Billy had summoned the courage to ask Rena Connell, a beautiful and popular girl, to accompany him to a dance, but she had jived with him once and then vanished: he later heard she married a policeman.
Billy was an apprentice for five years. His wages started off at only two pounds, six shillings and five pence, but he was learning a trade so the future looked promising. Billy still hankered after being an engineer, perhaps a marine engineer, but the two certificates he had got from school hadn’t helped him to get into engineering. According to Gus McDonald, who worked as an apprentice fitter in the same shipyard and recently took his seat in the House of Lords, the general mood on the Clyde was that Protestants got engineering, and Catholics got the black squad. Billy did know Catholics who became engineers, but they were in the minority. Gus was a big shot in the shipyard, active in the union and quite famous among the boys; Billy has always admired him.
Billy lionized a great many of the more experienced shipyard workers, and was thoroughly amused by others. Hughie Gilchrist was a rogue, an older welder with a hilarious take on life whom everyone liked. He always had salacious stories about attractive women he’d escorted home after the dancing on Saturday night. The man who set up temporary lights for the welders, the ‘TL’ man, wore a surgical boot and limped around moaning endlessly. As a sideline he sold his fellow workers Embassy tipped cigarettes, which came with coupons except that he kept the coupons. He was a chain-smoker, never removing a cigarette from his mouth long enough to ash it, so there was always a disgusting, long grey stripe on his overalls. Welders said Ash Wednesday had been named after him.
He had a rattling, chesty cough that volcanoed up from the soles of his feet. ‘That’s some cough you’ve got!’ remarked Billy one morning.
‘Och, rubbish!’ protested the TL man. ‘The graveyard’s full of people who would love my cough!’
The men Billy most wanted to emulate were the patter merchants. Some of the men were very funny when they blethered about everyday situations, their work, their mates, or the foreman: ‘Watch that sleekit bastard. Never play darts with him. Have you seen him throwing cigarettes at the gaffer’s mouth?’
It was survival humour; very accurate and raw. Some of it was racist, some of it about sex, and a lot of it was about religion. Billy found he could get a certain cachet with the big guys through his own comic turns. Jimmy Lucas, Bobby Dalgleish, and Willie McInnes heard him doing his Pilton Road-based impressions of pie-eyed people, singing at parties. ‘Eh, Connolly, come here. Give the boys some of that gallus singing.’
Billy’s brilliant portrayal of drunken would-be-crooners still has audiences clutching their stomachs. Quite a bit of his comedy, in fact, can be traced to his shipyard days. It gave him an excuse to sit with the fully-fledged welders at lunch, a rare opportunity for Billy to absorb their style, their one-liners and their manliness. They would heat a piece of metal until it was red-hot and toast their cheese sandwiches on it while Billy sat basking in the glow of their approval.
Lucas and Dalgleish were both Protestants from Greenock and, occasionally, they would stage their own mini Orange March, trudging up and down whistling ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ and ‘We’ll Guard Old Derry’s Walls’. Billy would add to the authenticity of this parade by wrapping a piece of cloth around his apprentice’s wire brush and crashing this makeshift drumstick off every metal surface in sight in time to their footsteps.
After they had wolfed down their lunch, Billy and his pals usually played football, but, if the weather was too foul, they would gamble with a dilapidated deck of cards. Three-card brag was a favourite: it resembled poker, at a penny a go. Wee Lewie turned out to be a genius player – a trickster, in fact. He could deal from the bottom of the pack and was always getting caught and having his arse kicked for it.
When they played football, Billy was the goalkeeper. He was chosen for that position because he was a rotten outfield player; however he was brave and funny and a great object of amusement as he belly-flopped in vain. As Billy grew taller and broader, he was able to handle the ball better. To his relief, he shot up rapidly in his seventeenth year. Welders used to pull him to the side and marvel, ‘Look at this fucker growing!’ They would stand him flat against the wall and look him over intently, as if they could see him lengthening before their very eyes.
Lunchtime football was a riot. There was a mentally retarded shipyard sweeper who got carried away with the excitement of it all. He would appear from nowhere and just dive into the middle of the game, desperate to get a kick of the ball. Everybody loved him and a big roar would go up from the welders when he leapt into the fray, tackling everyone within reach. Just before the summer break, some of the older welders cut the shape of a trophy out of sheet metal and awarded him ‘Player of the Year’. He was carried triumphantly around the park, and although he had no idea why, he knew it was a good thing and held the trophy high.
One group of shipyard workers never ever played football. The French polishers, who worked next door to the welding school, were the only women in the shipyard, apart from the office girls. They dressed in overalls just like the men, but wore headscarves instead of cloth caps. Billy and the others were quite terrified of them. The story was, if they caught a young apprentice they would put his willie in a milk bottle and tickle his testicles until he got an erection. The only way the bottle could then be removed was by smashing it. It was just like the myth about Santa: everyone believed it until a certain point.
Women had been useful for labour during the war but were now generally being ousted from the workforce and sent back to the home and kitchen. In keeping with the Zeitgeist that emphasized the dangers of working women, there was a great shipyard legend about a crowd of welders who were waiting outside their store for supplies of welding rods, gloves, or helmets. A French polisher was running past, late for work, and one of these welders shouted: ‘Don’t run dear, you’ll heat your water!’
Without missing a beat this girl squawked back: ‘Well you won’t scald your cock in it anyway.’
Apparently the man never said another funny word his whole life.