My parents are young – just teenagers – when they meet at work. Irene is a secretary, working at a woollen merchant’s in Edinburgh that supplies high-class Savile Row tailors such as Gieves & Hawkes. She is from Kirkliston, a small town in West Lothian where everyone knows each other, and each other’s business. They certainly know Irene’s mother’s business, because she has left her husband for another man and has had a baby by him, and in 1960s small-town Scotland that is big news indeed. Irene leaves school at fifteen, without qualifications, but like many working-class people is far from stupid, as she’ll prove in later life. She becomes a secretary and is working hard to earn money for her family when she meets Gordon Hendry. He’s a tall, gap-toothed young guy, the well-dressed son of a bookmaker whose background is a cut above Mum’s. Despite being shy and reserved, Gordon is attracted to the outgoing, chatty girl behind the typewriter. They begin courting, the inevitable happens and she is pregnant. There is more scandal about Mum’s family to tut over behind the curtains of respectable Kirkliston. Mum leaves home under a cloud and moves to Edinburgh, hoping never to have to return to the town she calls ‘Peyton Place’.
At first, Mum and Dad live in one room of his grandmother’s apartment in St Leonards, just below Arthur’s Seat. They must share an outside bathroom with another couple and, at eighteen, Mum is now preparing for life as a full-time mother. There will be no possibility of her going back to work now – in this era, women who have babies don’t do that sort of thing. And in January 1969 I come along – blond and (according to my mother) beautiful. Three is more than a crowd in an already cramped apartment and so my parents move to Robertson Avenue, Gorgie, which is where I spend my early years.
What do I inherit from my parents? Looks-wise, I’m like my dad, and in personality too. He’s a quiet guy, not given to a huge amount of conversation and not one for having masses of friends. So it’s appropriate that I’m given his first name as my middle name. From my mother? Skinny ankles and, more importantly, her drive and determination; I’m nothing if not a determined kid, despite the shyness. When I’m first up and walking I take a ramble down the stairs of the apartment and out on to the busy Edinburgh street. My mother is pegging out washing in the back yard and hasn’t noticed I’ve gone until a passing stranger kindly returns me, having spotted me out on the road. There are tears and slapped legs in equal measure. My determination not to be fazed by much is put to good use when my mother finds herself reluctant to overcome her fear of mice and sends me toddling into the living room before her, so that the little creatures will scuttle out of sight before she arrives.
It’s obvious we’re not living in the best of circumstances and by 1972, when my brother Keith has arrived, Mum and Dad decide to move out of the city. New estates are being built in Baberton, south-west of Edinburgh, and it’s to Baberton Mains that the Hendry family decamp. My dad is now working in the fruit-and-vegetable wholesale business and still needs to be close to the city’s fruit market in Gorgie, where he’s spending long hours learning the trade. Another kind of education is going on at my new primary school, Juniper Green, but right from day one it’s obvious I’m no scholar. I enjoy learning to write but other subjects, particularly maths, are beyond me and will continue to be so right through my school career. I make efforts to keep up but, to put it mildly, I’m just not that interested. I like lunchtimes – even if the thick skin on the custard that smothers the treacle tart makes me feel slightly weird – and I also like sports, but I have an aversion to swimming. I’m aware that as a very small child I fell into a stream and remained under the water for a few seconds before being hauled out, screaming at the top of my lungs. Though the details of this incident have long since been buried, the feelings of suffocation and panic persist and I’m very reluctant to join the crowd of excited kids heading to the local pool. If I can get out of it, I will.
I’m small for my age, so although I appear to have good coordination and movement I’m none too keen to get involved in sports that involve a degree of contact. I hate rugby and, although I will play it, football can be intimidating too because I don’t like being tackled. I have a low threshold for pain and would rather avoid confrontation than get into the thick of the action. This is a pity, as I love football. Gorgie’s boundaries include Tynecastle Park, home of Heart of Midlothian Football Club, the team my dad supports. From an early age I’m taken to home games by Dad and his brother George, inevitably known as ‘Dod’ (a nickname for George peculiar to Scotland). Before kick-off we make a pilgrimage to a nearby social club, smoke-filled and packed with men who are full of beer and chat. I sit on a tatty plastic chair and swing my legs a foot from the floor while munching a huge Wagon Wheel biscuit bought from the paper shop. Dad, Dod and their pals seemingly talk endlessly about Hearts, accompanied by pint after pint of McEwan’s Export or Tartan bitter. I’m bored out of my mind and I hate the smell of smoky clubs – ironic, really, when so much of my future will be lived out in them.
‘Stop the chatting,’ I think, ‘let’s just get to the game.’
Eventually we’re there, pushing our way through the turnstiles and up on to the terrace, where the sound of the crowd is like the crashing of ocean waves. At the top of the steps the atmosphere really hits; all these people, pushing and shoving, bawling and bantering, singing their hearts out, just waiting for Jim Brown, Drew Busby, Jim Cruickshank and the rest to emerge from the tunnel. When they do, I swear the roar can be heard right across Edinburgh.
Winger Bobby Prentice is my favourite. Very often we’re standing up close to him, as he’s playing at number eleven, and right from a young age I notice the flair with which he sweeps and dribbles through the opposition. No messing around or safety play here: Bobby is heading for the goalmouth, to score or to set one up, and the home crowd is pushing him on. Dad and Dod are roaring, jumping up and down when Hearts score and bawling their ‘advice’ when they don’t. I see the contrast between my dad’s quiet demeanour at home and his animated personality in the ground. This is the way he lets off steam – during the week he’s incredibly hard-working and he’s almost always late in at night.
Back at school on a Monday I’m keen to copy what I’ve seen on the pitch the previous weekend. I’m small but I’m quick, and I earn a place in the football team. We play on Saturday mornings, and on Friday nights I’m beside myself with excitement, cleaning my boots, laying out my kit and just preparing for the match ahead. Like Bobby, I play on the left wing as I can kind-of kick with both feet, but I’m still not confident up against the bigger guys who want to send me sprawling across the pitch. As I say, I’m not into pain.
We play badminton at school and I work my way into that team too. I like the competitive element and that it’s a non-contact sport. We play various tournaments against other schools around Edinburgh, including at the Meadowbank Stadium, which hosted the Commonwealth Games in 1970. At one such tournament there I’m the only player in my team not to win a game. I’m gutted. The fact that people are watching me crash to defeat makes it worse. My parents try to console me.
‘It’s just a game, Stephen.’
‘It’s the taking part that counts, not the winning.’
‘Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.’
But I don’t want to lose. I want to win, and not just that – I want to win well. I want to beat everyone else. I hate losing.
I also hate tartan. One summer, when I’m about eight or nine, my dad’s sister gets married and Keith and I are employed as pageboys, in matching kilts and jackets. We’ve probably had our hair cut into the same style too. I feel like the biggest idiot and I swear that from this day forward I will never wear a kilt again. Mum seems to enjoy dressing Keith and me up in similar clothes, and at another family wedding we’re kitted out in matching dark-brown velvet jumpers and flared cream trousers. I might look back now and cringe, but my parents are snappy, stylish dressers and I’m inheriting that. I’m starting to learn what I like and don’t like.
Maybe the desire of my parents for us all to look well dressed comes from an upturn in their fortunes. By the end of the 1970s Dad is out of the wholesale side of the fruit-and-veg business and, with a partner, has obtained the lease of three greengrocers’ shops; one in Inverkeithing, one in Dalgety Bay and the third (and largest) in Dunfermline. He’s working harder than ever, and as a family we’re seeing even less of him. We’re a happy family, I think, but there’s not much sitting round the dinner table discussing things the way families on TV seem to do. More often than not it’s our dinner on our knee and Crackerjack or Top of the Pops. Dad comes in late, having gone for a pint on the way home from work, and goes to bed. I don’t see much closeness between him and Mum; no hugging or kissing, or much affection of any kind. Being young, I think nothing of this. Later, the gap between them will widen more obviously.
Dad’s work gives the Hendry family little time for holidays and often Keith and I – sometimes just I – go off with Mum’s mum, whom we call ‘Granville’. She and her second husband Dod take us and their son George (who is just a few years older than me) away in their caravan into Ayrshire or around northern Scotland. The scenery is spectacular, of course, but often the weather is less than kind and we spend days looking out of the caravan’s plastic windows into the wind and rain. I’m badly travel-sick too, which doesn’t add much to the holiday atmosphere, but despite all this we always manage to have a good time and a laugh. George and I get on particularly well and we snigger uncontrollably when Dod farts loudly as he wakes up in the morning.
Occasionally on summer mornings Dad will take me to the fruit market in Gorgie to buy the produce for the shops. I’m usually not one for an early start, particularly in the holidays, but now and then I’ll make up my mind to go with him. I like travelling in the van, and the feeling of going to work. At 5am the market is packed full of traders inspecting the goods and haggling for deals. The air is thick with the smell of ripe fruit, and the vivid colours are a wake-up call for tired eyes. Dad goes from dealer to dealer, finding the best prices for his customers. When he’s done, and the van is loaded up, we head for Dunfermline, Inverkeithing and Dalgety Bay, always stopping off at the same paper shop for breakfast – which for me is a can of juice and a Topic. Dad buys fags and we set off again, not saying much but not uncomfortable in our mutual silence.
Dad is spending more and more time in Fife, just across the Firth of Forth, where the shops are located. Eventually it is decided that it makes sense for us to move over the water and, conveniently, we have a house to move into. My Auntie Christine’s husband has a job in Egypt, so their bungalow is vacant. Dalgety Bay has seen a lot of house-building since the 1960s and its status as a commuter town near Edinburgh gives me the idea that it is a bit ‘posh’. The house is detached and has a garage and a garden – ideal for a family with two growing boys who need to run off their energy somehow. There are great views of the Forth Bridge across the bay and, although I must leave my school in Baberton Mains and finish my primary education in a new place, I’m not at all unhappy about the move. Within a year I’m a new pupil at Inverkeithing High School, a couple of miles up the road from where we’re living. It’s a standard school of the period, educating about 1,300 kids of varying degrees of ability.
My contribution to school life is unremarkable. Each day I go through the motions of turning up, attending classes, hanging around with the friends I’m making and going home. Aside from sport and English there is not a lesson being taught that holds the slightest bit of interest for me. I’m not stupid; I’m just not really ‘there’. My reports say things like, ‘Needs to concentrate more’ or ‘Is a bit of a dreamer’. I don’t hate school and I don’t particularly like it. I just take the attitude that it’s something you need to get through, day-by-day, until it’s finished. My chattering in class earns me the belt two or three times. In Scotland this is known as the ‘tawse’, a stiff leather strap a couple of inches wide, its end divided into two ‘tails’ like the forked tongue of a snake. These tails are the source of all the pain as they catch the palm of your hand. One time I’m belted by a science teacher for messing around with a Bunsen burner in class. The sting of it remains in the mind long after the physical pain has gone away. I feel it’s unfair, but I don’t complain – that’s not the sort of thing pupils do in the early 1980s.
Besides, it can be a rough school. Playground fights are frequent and because I’m still small I shy away from confrontation with bigger, older boys. And I’m not as keen on playing football as I was. Everyone appears to be growing apart from me, and they all seem interested in throwing their newly gained muscle around, particularly on the sports field. Small kids like me are useful targets and before long I’m forging my mum’s handwriting to get out of rugby and the dreaded swimming. I particularly hate having to get undressed for that – it’s all so embarrassing, and a drag.
But all told, Keith and I are lucky kids. At this time, Scotland is going through the recession which is hitting the rest of the UK, particularly in industrial and manufacturing towns and cities. But Dad’s business is doing well, and we want for nothing. We’re not spoiled by any means, but when Christmas or birthdays come around we always get the presents we want – golf clubs, bikes, sports stuff, Subbuteo. Christmases are fun times; the family are around, and Mum and Dad seem happy with life. As I head towards my teens my parents find it more and more difficult to buy me presents I haven’t already had. Which is why, in the run-up to Christmas 1981, Mum and I are trailing up the main shopping street in Dunfermline, the nearest large town, and she’s scratching her head as she looks in various toy-shop windows.
‘I just don’t know what to get you,’ she says. ‘You two have everything you’d ever want or need. What do you want, Stephen?’
Unhelpfully, I reply that I don’t know. And I don’t. I can’t think of a single thing. For my parents, the post-Christmas period always involves the headache of having to go back to the shops each January to seek out my birthday presents. In January 1982 I’ll turn thirteen and, like most young people on the cusp of teenagehood, I’m not the most communicative person in the world. I don’t know what I want out of life, never mind Christmas.
Eventually we come to John Menzies, the newsagent and general retailer. Mum looks in the window, then points to the biggest thing on display.
‘What do you think of that?’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Sure,’ I reply, ‘it looks fun. Yeah, that would be great, thanks.’
There is a sigh of relief from Mum.
‘I’ll have a word with your dad,’ she says, ‘but I’m sure it’ll be OK. I wonder how much it is.’
She cranes her neck to look at the price: £117. ‘Maybe I’ll put a deposit on it,’ she says. ‘Just in case it goes.’
Mum roots in her purse for a tenner and gestures me to the doorway of the shop. I follow her inside, wondering what it will be like to have a snooker table in the house.
