Читать книгу Billy Connolly - Pamela Stephenson, Pamela Stephenson - Страница 7

Billy Connolly, King of Comedy, Master of Mirth, Chancellor of Chortling, as his children have been instructed to address him, is quivering in the wings of the spectacularly cavernous Hammersmith Apollo theatre.

‘Pamela, what the hell am I going to say to these people?’

Horrified, I turn to face him .Oh God, here we go … he’s not bluffing. Now there are two of us heading for a full-blown fight-or-flight fit. Is it possible that this time, the first in history, he might actually freeze, forget, stammer, storm off stage or batter someone? I do not fancy witnessing his death by four thousand excitable Londoners. They begin to roar as his name is announced, clapping in unison and stamping their feet. It’s the start of tonight’s war, the one he always declares then dreads.

‘You’ll be OK …’

I watch him arm himself mentally with an opening shot. As usual, he’ll take no prisoners. I’m a white-knuckled wimp when the enemy’s battle cry reaches its pitch … then suddenly he’s off. A blinding circle of light assaults him and I see his face change to a fighting calm. ‘Scot of the Anarchic’ is stepping out fearlessly into the front line. He might be gone for quite some time.

The bastard’s done it again. Frightened me to death, and he’s going to win after all. I peer out into the centre of the fray and witness a beautiful armistice, achieved in the first few disarming sentences from his scowling, apologetic mouth. There is always such a peace for him out there in that spotlight, probably the only place he’s truly happy. Each time, it seems he’s given another chance, a chance he’s driven endlessly to re-create; it’s a chance to gain mastery, to triumph over – he can almost see their faces out there in the audience – Mamie, William, Mona, Rosie. I notice that tonight it is especially Rosie who must be slain as he launches into hilariously savage tales of algebra and abject humiliation.

He is strutting, striding, tilting at windmills. I’m thinking, how weird that he is so aroused, furious and vindictive, yet his face at times seems almost beatific. Swathed in disgustingly musty wing velvets, I peek out at the front row. As individuals, these are hardly soldiers: T-shirted people, they are settled in comfortably to be transported to places where petrol prices, the babysitter, the in-laws, are replaced by tyrants and tenement buildings, by little old ladies in fat, furry coats, and the ubiquitous, noisy farts. It will all end in tears and some very sore bellies. I can finally breathe. He is blessed; encircled most brightly not by forty thousand watts but by his own fiery, evangelical fuck-youness.

Ironically, Billy’s very earliest memory is one of being terrified by a circle of light. Until he was three years old, he and his beloved sister Florence slept in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen. One evening she aimed a mirror reflection onto the wall, allowing it to pirouette and chase him until he screamed for mercy.

He had been born right next to that alcove on the kitchen floor, all eleven pounds of him plopping out onto freezing linoleum. The rage that followed this unceremonious introduction to the world has never left him, although it was a serendipitous launching for a future enemy of the bourgeoisie. For eight months he nestled in a wooden drawer with not one Fisher-Price contraption in sight.

His family’s living arrangements were similar to those of thousands of other inhabitants of Glasgow, a city that had come to be defined by row upon row of late-nineteenth-century apartment buildings known as ‘the tenements’. These fine architectural soldiers had originally been created by Glasgow’s Improvement Trust, as model housing for working-class families. But by the time the Connollys moved into half of the third floor of 65 Dover Street in Anderston, many of them had deteriorated into rotting slums that would need more than a spot of paint to ‘take the bad look off them’, as Billy would say.

The classically derived elevations in red or yellow sandstone were usually pleasant enough, but the interiors were thoroughly depressing. A dingy central staircase, stinking of cabbage and cat piss, spiralled upwards to the flats. Two or more poky apartments were squeezed into each floor, usually with just two rooms apiece, and a communal lavatory out on the landing. Some families were lumbered with the ‘coffin end’, or corner apartment, which was even smaller than the rest.

The buildings themselves butted right onto the street and were usually entered via an interior alleyway known as a close. The ‘Wally’ closes, as some were called, were beautifully tiled halfway up the wall, with a leafy motif running along the top. Such finery, however, ended abruptly at the threshold of a darker, often treacherous, tunnel known as the ‘dunny’ (short for dungeon), that dead-ended in an enclosed rear courtyard, itself a veritable assault-course of broken bicycles, flapping knickers, and reeking middens.

Considering it now through a haze of nostalgia, Billy says the Glasgow tenement is a New York brownstone without a fire escape. Some of the buildings certainly had grandeur and, like their New York counterparts, are now sought after by the well-to-do. Billy’s first home was not one of those. The Dover Street flat had only two rooms: a kitchen-living room, with a niche where the children slept, and another room for their parents. The entire family bathed in the kitchen sink and there was no hot water at all. As an enduring legacy of his early cramped existence. Billy is now quite uncomfortable in large living spaces. He sighs over the phone to me from fabulous hotels all over the world: ‘They’ve gone and upgraded me again. Bloody Presidential Suite this time.’

I let him off lightly, because I know it’s a genuine problem for him. Others who achieve renown cannot wait to sprawl sideways on a California King four-poster with a big-screen TV in every corner and a whirlpool on the deck, but not Billy. He has never really liked our Los Angeles house because of its unfamiliar spaciousness, and prefers to hide out in his tiny study for hours on end, drinking gallons of tea and plunking on his banjo.

It is 5.30 a.m. in wintertime Glasgow, 2001. On my way to the airport for a transatlantic flight, I ask Jim the taxi driver to make a detour.

‘You know Dover Street?’ I inquire. ‘It’s around here somewhere.’

The fact that the Hilton Hotel is now in Anderston speaks to the gentrification of the place. We cruise along Finnieston Street, now home of a Citroën dealership, PC World and the golden arches. ‘It’s quite a decent area …’ Jim is eager to be informative. ‘Not as rough as it used to be.’

Argyle Street is now split in two by the motorway. As we approach Singh’s corner shop, on the ground floor of an original tenement building at one end of Dover Street, it becomes evident that all the houses on one side of the street have been pulled down. In their place is a small, grassy square that faces a fashionable business centre on the next parallel street. Several modern buildings have replaced tenements on the other side of Dover Street itself, pale-brick imitations of the sandstone originals.

I search around in the drizzle and I am relieved to find that No. 3 and No. 5 Dover Street are still standing. The grimy, four-storeyed blocks of flats are graced with white lace curtains that deter me from peering into the street-level apartments. While Jim smokes patiently in the cab, I stand in the silent street trying to evoke the past. It’s easy to become fanciful in the early light, seeing the spectre of Billy’s mother, fast-wheeling the rain-soaked pram around Singh’s corner to get herself and the weans into the shelter of the close.

When I arrive in Los Angeles, I describe the scene to Billy. He is unmoved. ‘Yeah, they pulled my first house down and I’m upset,’ he jokes. ‘Now where are they gonna put the plaque?’

As an infant, William Connolly junior was a blond, brown-eyed puddin’ with a face that would ‘get a piece at any windy’, as they say in Glasgow if you look pitiful enough to score free sandwiches. He was a war baby, born on 24 November 1942, just as his father was preparing to leave for Burma.

At twenty-three years old, William Connolly senior had been conscripted into the Royal Air Force, a fate that interrupted his career as an optical instrument maker at Barr and Stroud’s. He always considered himself very lucky to have been accepted as an apprentice at that firm. If he had not been dux of St Peter’s School in Partick, he might have been one of the many jobless victims of the rampant anti-Irish feeling that existed all around Glasgow at the time.

At twenty-three years old. William Connolly senior had been conscripted into the Royal Air Force, a fate that interrupted his career as an optical instrument maker at Barr and Stroud’s. He always considered himself very lucky to have been accepted as an apprentice at that firm. If he had not been dux of St Peter’s School in Partick, he might have been one of the many jobless victims of the rampant anti-Irish feeling that existed all around Glasgow at the time.

His father, Jack, was an Irishman whose family members were among the seven million victims of the potato famine, grinding poverty and relentless discrimination, who had been emigrating from Ireland since the seventeenth century. Many had sailed to the United States and Canada, risking typhus and dysentery in the ‘coffin ships’ and New World quarantine camps, but Jack’s Connemara-born family had sailed to Scotland and settled in Glasgow in the 1920s. It was probably the better choice. The average length of life for Irish refugees who reached the Americas was six years after landing. The American streets were not paved with gold after all, but rather Irish immigrants were expected to pave the streets themselves and to do so for very low wages.

Expectations of Scotland-bound Irish emigrants were not so fanciful, yet Glasgow society echoed the Yankees in being highly prejudiced against the Irish, due to religious, racial, cultural and economic differences. In Glasgow, there was also the fear that jobs would be lost to the incomers. In America, the ‘Know Nothing’ hate group murdered Irish immigrants and destroyed their property; in Glasgow there was a concerted effort to deny them jobs and lodgings. One of the most popular songs of the 1870s said it all:

‘I am a decent Irishman and I come from Ballyfad

And I want a situation and I want it mighty bad.

A position I saw advertised is a thing for me, says I,

But the dirty spouting ended with “No Irish Need Apply”.’

Similar exclusionary signs were out in force in Glasgow in the 1930s when Billy’s father was looking for work, hung in places where jobs were available for Protestants only. The notice outside Barr and Stroud’s was only a little less overt than usual. ‘Apprentices wanted’ it read, ‘Boys’ Brigade Welcome’. Being Catholic and half-Irish, William had not been a candidate for membership of the staunchly Protestant Boys’ Brigade, an organization founded with evangelical zeal in the previous century by one William Smith who wished to promote health, constructive activity, and a moral soundness among Glaswegian youth.

Jack Connolly had married Jane McLuskey, a Glaswegian lass from a devoutly Catholic family, who bore him seven children, six of whom survived. William, born in 1919, was the youngest child after Charlie. John. James. Mona and Margaret; while a younger sister named Mary died of tuberculosis when she was only eight. William himself was a sickly child, spoiled by his mother and bossed by his oldest sister, Mona. He had problems with his eyes, and needed several pairs of chunky, brown-framed spectacles. He was passionate about football, and insisted on the supremacy of the Celtic team until the day he died. Even though he had been promising at school, children of the depression had little opportunity for further education, so he taught himself logarithms, and how to speak Italian and German.

William was a strict Catholic, but it is unlikely that his tortured aspect and taciturn nature were entirely due to religion. His father Jack may have passed on some of his formidable qualities to his son for he was the epitome of stoicism and pride, as illustrated by a family story that has been handed down from the 1920s. The tale is set just before the pubs closed one New Year’s Eve, or Hogmanay as they call it in Scotland, ‘the same as other people’s Christmas, but without God to knacker the proceedings’, as Billy puts it. Jack, who was extremely fond of a drink, bought a ‘Hogmanay carry-out’: a paper bag with a bottle of whisky and a few bottles of Guinness in it. On his way out of the pub, he made the mistake of putting his parcel on the beer-soaked floor. He strode home to see out the old year and welcome in the new with a skinful of Guinness, not realizing that the brown paper had become sodden and weak. A few streets from home, the bottom fell out of the bag and, to his horror, the contents smashed and spilled into the gutter. Jack returned home empty-handed and recounted the sad story to his wife.

‘What in heaven’s name did you do?’ she asked, appalled. Quite apart from the personal embarrassment, Hogmanay is the most important of all Scottish celebrations and there would have been no time or spare cash to replace his loss. The man stared into the middle distance, chin in the air. ‘Jack walked on,’ he declared.

Jack was a slim, good-looking man with a handlebar moustache. He managed to support his wife and children by working as a labourer, a plater’s helper in the shipyards. The job required great strength so, despite his thin frame, he must have been quite wiry. His son William was also svelte as a youth, but he eventually tumesced into a bloated man with the biggest neck in the world. Nowadays, Billy always complains, ‘I don’t want to wear a tie. I’ll look like a man with a head transplant!’ He got that look from his father.

At Barr and Stroud’s in 1940, William had not been fully focused on his work. At twenty years old he had met a teenager called Mamie McLean, of the McLean of Duart clan from the isle of Mull, who returned to her mother’s house every evening with hands covered in fine red dust from polishing the lenses of rangefinders. She was a handsome and volatile sixteen-year-old, with long, dark hair and a forthright expression. The only girl in the family, Mamie had developed a strong personality and a self-protective sense of humour. She had a fine ability to stand up for herself, although that may be an understatement; some say she was the type of woman who could start a fight in an empty house. She was fast on her feet, and would always streak out ahead of her brothers, Neil. John, Edward (Teddy) and Hugh, in their holiday seafront races. At the Protestant Kent Road School in Glasgow, Mamie had shown herself to be bright, but with a war on there was generally little emphasis on education, and so she went to work.

Wartime Glasgow was a sinister place to ‘court a lassie’. As evening fell, a sickly, green light spread through the streets as people scurried to get home before the blackout. Bombers occasionally dumped their lethal loads on the city, the worst occasions being two nights of non-stop bombing on 13 and 14 March 1941. which were devastating for citizens from the industrial areas of the River Clyde. The ‘Clydebank Blitz’ left two-thirds of that town’s population homeless, and killed or wounded thousands, but the only casualty in the McLean household was their pet canary, who perished when a land mine blew open the shutters. Mamie’s father, Neil McLean, was an air-raid warden and, before a local air-raid shelter was built, everyone in the largely Irish Catholic neighbourhood would sprint to relative safety in the bottom floor of his tenement. Every time there was even a hint of a bang or whistle from the skies above, Mamie and her brothers would be deafened by exhortations from their fellow refugees. ‘Mary, mother of God, Jesus and Joseph and all the saints!’

They were nearly drowned in holy water. This must have been particularly irksome for Neil, a Protestant whose own father had been a Boys’ Brigade officer. A diminutive Highlander from the west of Scotland, Neil’s father looked out of place in Glasgow, still wearing his navy, deep-sea cap with a shiny peak. He had even hung fish to dry on a small rope outside his city tenement window.

‘Well, Mr McLean,’ the Catholic corner boys would bait Neil, imitating his ‘teuchter’, or country, accent, ‘did you find the Lord today?’

‘I wasn’t aware I’d lost him.’

The ‘corner boys’ were the casualties of the jobless depression years. With no money and nowhere to go, men would stand around in clumps at every intersection of the city, just blethering and shooting the breeze. Neil McLean, however, was never one to be idle. He had been a warehouseman for McFarren, Smith and Glass, but when he lost his job he spent his time cycling and running a football team. They were hard times for him and the family, but unlike many of his contemporaries, Neil kept his standards and avoided strong drink. They were able to eat because his wife, Flora, managed to make a living cleaning houses and offices. One of her employers was a Highland woman, a Mrs Morrison.

‘And what does your husband do, Flora?’ she asked one day.

‘Well, Ma’am, he has no work.’

‘Did he ever think of trying to get into the Corporation?’

‘Och, no one gets into the Corporation today.’

‘I’ll speak to Mr McKinnon.’

In those days, every bus and tramcar of the Glasgow Transport Corporation had ‘General Manager: L. McKinnon’ written on its side. Out of the gloom of the depression, Lachie McKinnon found Neil a job as a conductor. He was eventually promoted to an inspector and was with the company for forty years until he retired.

Neil, or ‘Big Neilly’ as he became known, was a rigid man, a strict disciplinarian who frightened the life out of his subordinates and caused his children to wish he would take a drink from time to time. He stood straight, walked like a guardsman, and never left for work without a starched collar, black tie, and gleaming buttons. Despite all that, it was rumoured that he was secretly quite timid, ‘a big fearty’ as they say in Glasgow, and would send Flora to the door whenever he was called upon in his role as air-raid warden.

Flora was a robust soul who did not agree with him in all things. She went to Mass on Sundays and made clandestine arrangements for the children to be baptized as Catholics, although at Big Neilly’s insistence they were formally raised as Protestants. Small wonder religion was never openly discussed at home, although Flora and her sisters had a few tricks up their sleeves. ‘Now remember, Mamie, which hand do you shake with?… The one you use to bless yourself.’

Flora loved to laugh and decorate herself with clothing and costume jewellery. She would get herself ‘all done up like a kitchen bed’, as they say in Glasgow – tenement alcove beds were always made up early and carefully, in case visitors arrived. When Flora went carousing with her girlfriends at a tea dance in town, she was definitely the best turned out cleaner in Glasgow. ‘There’s nae pockets in a shroud,’ she would say.

Her husband was no fashion victim, but believed in the importance of having just one made-to-measure suit for special occasions. His was wrapped carefully in brown paper and placed inside a tin in the wardrobe. Fortunately, there were very few special occasions to attend, so Big Neilly had no idea how often his good suit was missing. Flora, who was kind-hearted to a fault, saved many a near-destitute family by allowing them to pawn it until their crisis was over. Thus was the measure of poverty.

Mamie was their second-born. The McLeans, all seven of them, lived at first in a top-floor tenement flat with one room and a kitchen. Later, they flitted to a flat that seemed like a castle after the old one, for it had two rooms. Mamie’s brothers required a great deal of attention from their mother. Ted had two or three operations for ‘the mastoid’, John sat at home in disgrace because he played truant, and Hughie was weak with chronic bronchitis. When war broke out, Hughie, a sensitive nine-year-old, was sent to Dunoon to stay with an aunt. He was not treated kindly, and sorely missed his mother. It broke his heart to see her only on Sundays, for the short walk from the ferry to his aunt’s house and back again.

Mamie was always up for an entertaining time. After Hughie returned to Glasgow, she occasionally took him to the Metropole Theatre. There was a flourishing music-hall tradition in Glasgow in those days, and the pair particularly enjoyed the performance of a tubby singer called Master Jo Peterson, a strange woman with a strong soprano voice who wore a choirboy’s uniform.

It is hard to imagine exactly what Mamie saw in William. He took life far more seriously and is said to have ‘made stubbornness a virtue’. Later in life, he was known for the extroverted bear-hugs he forced on fellow punters at the Dowanhill Bar in Partick, but in the forties William was a somewhat morose and secretive figure who spent much of his life under the thumb of his sister Mona.

At twenty-one he was ‘an older man’ to Mamie, who by contrast was talkative, histrionic, and was easily led into good times. As World War Two was just beginning, the pair would tramp to the York Café at the bottom of Hyndland Street. They ordered hot peas in vinegar followed by a ‘McCallum’, a vanilla ice-cream sundae with raspberry sauce and Empire biscuits (they had been called German biscuits before the war). William and Mamie would chat for hours about their newest co-worker at the factory, the price of a pair of nylons, and the doings of Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps William offered Mamie an escape of sorts. One might speculate that, in the light of all the demands placed on Flora by her sons, her work, her neighbours, and her undoubtedly high-maintenance husband, she had little time to focus on Mamie. Certainly Big Neilly was no warm and fuzzy papa, so William may have been the first person to show a special interest in her. Whatever it was that connected her to him, in the space of a year or so she went from school to work to pregnancy to marriage, in that order, and almost entirely missed her adolescence.

At least William made an honest woman of her. They were married on 25 November 1940 at St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, a fine, red sandstone, nineteenth-century building in William Street. The Glaswegian Irish never gained political power like their New World counterparts, who eventually dominated American politics, but they were similarly galvanized to establish their own churches, schools, hospitals and orphanages. There is no mistaking St Patrick’s Irish patronage, for in addition to its name, the interior boasts polished wooden pews adorned with carved shamrocks. The building is clearly visible from the lift lobbies high up in the Glasgow Hilton.

‘See that church?’ Billy always forgets he’s pointed it out a million times. ‘I was christened there.’

Florence was born exactly five months after Mamie’s wedding day, on 25 April 1941. She, William and Mamie moved into the grubby apartment in Dover Street, and attempted to have a life together. It was a boring one for the seventeen-year-old, who was simply not ready for marriage, let alone motherhood. She tried to cope with the baby most of the day, expecting some amusement in the evening, but when William came home, he had a face like a wet Monday and buried himself in his newspaper. Her second pregnancy must have been as unwelcome as the first, but Billy arrived nineteen months after Florence.

Billy’s current nickname, ‘The Big Yin’, does not refer to his birth weight, but it would have fitted. He was an absolutely enormous newborn: eleven pounds, four ounces, to be exact. Mamie endured her labour alone, first in the freezing alcove, then finally squatting on the kitchen floor, no doubt fully regretting the day she had first met the co-perpetrator of her agony, who was by now busy planning his own escape. William’s engineering skills were demanded by the Royal Air Force, so he flew far away to tend the engines of Lancaster bombers in India, Burma and Africa. Like thousands of other wartime brides, Mamie wondered if he would ever return.

It was the tradition in those times for girls who had left the family house to visit their mothers on Sundays. As far as rationing would allow, Flora would cook a Sunday dinner of stew and dumplings, or leftovers and ‘stovies’, a dish made with potatoes and onions. All the family gathered then. Hughie would help Mamie get the pram up and down the stairs and he soothed the little ones while Mamie chatted. But, apart from Sundays, Mamie had little of the social contact she craved. She rarely heard from her husband. His sisters Margaret and Mona would look in from time to time, but Mamie hated their nosiness and attempts to take control. She thought they came more to criticize than to help. ‘She’s just a daft wee girl,’ sneered Mona behind her back.

Overcrowding and poor maintenance always ensured that tenement life spilled out into the streets, the grimy domain of vendors and tramcars being an extension of the inhabitants’ living space. Socially, the tenement was a vertical village, and everyone knew everyone. A neighbour, Mattie Murphy, who was about the same age as Mamie, sometimes watched the infants when Mamie left the flat to do her washing in ‘the steamie’, as Glaswegian public laundries were called. She claims Billy was ‘a cheeky wee devil’. He was full of mischief and had no problem answering back. One teatime, Mattie was cutting up a sticky bun covered with pink icing when Billy spied the end piece that had the most icing. ‘I want that fucking piece!’ It was startling language for a three-year-old.

‘You’ll get none,’ threatened Mattie.

‘Then I’ll touch you with my chookie.’ The infant hard-man began to unbutton his flies but, after catching sight of Mattie’s horrified face, he ran around and pinched her bottom instead. He got no iced bun that day.

It was not the only preview of Billy’s renowned outrageousness. Mattie’s daughter, Roseanne, was sitting on the pavement with some other children one day after an exhausting game of ‘Peever’, a variation of hopscotch that was played with a can of shoe polish. Billy came sauntering along the road and decided that he needed to pee. In those days, little boys would just unbutton their flies and urinate into the gutter but, while he was doing so, Billy caught sight of the adjacent group of girls and just couldn’t resist turning sideways and spraying their backs. He was definitely a handful.

Mattie found Dover Street life in the 1940s more riveting than the music hall. A woman whose livelihood was prostitution resided on the ground floor of one of the buildings. The residents of Dover Street apparently conspired to help this woman rip off her customers by ganging up on the men after they had paid their shillings. ‘Bugger off.’ they would cry. ‘You’re giving the place a bad name!’

This conspiratorial behaviour, however, was sporadic. Quite often the temperamental sex-worker would go for an evening stroll in her underwear, challenging other women who lived in the street, whom she accused of gossiping about her, to come out and fight. It got to the point where residents would bring chairs out each night and sit waiting for the show to begin.

Tragically, Mattie lost her own son. He was home from school with a cold and, short of clean nightwear, his mother had insisted he put on his sister’s nightgown to keep warm. When both parents were out, Mattie’s boy leaned over too close to the fire and a spark sent his nightgown up in flames. His sister was powerless to save him. Before the boy was buried, the streetwalker amazed everyone by turning up and throwing herself on his boy-sized coffin in a great demonstration of wailing and sadness, shouting heavenward at the top of her voice. ‘Why couldn’t you have taken me instead of the wean? I’m bad! I’m bad!’

Billy and Florence played out on the street from a very early age. It was Mattie who searched high and low for them after they disappeared one evening. Their neighbour, Mr Cumberland, had come home from work, desperate to get to the pub. ‘You’d better get those bloody kids in first,’ said his long-suffering wife, who also liked a drink or six, which is a fact Billy omits when he tells a version of the story on stage.

Mr Cumberland had eight children, so, driven by his thirst, the wily man went out onto the street and got as many Cumberlands as he could find, then just made up the numbers with any other children he spied. Billy and Florence were scooped up with no questions asked and thrown into bed with the others. Later that night two Cumberlands were found roaming the street, which gave the search party a useful clue, and the exchange was eventually made.

If only Mattie had been asked to help out more in those first years, Billy and Florence might have had an easier time. Mamie was disintegrating, probably depressed and, unknown to her family, was abdicating responsibility for the children who were horribly neglected. Billy had pneumonia three times before he was four. Officers of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were called in when Mamie left them alone with an unguarded, blazing fire. At three years old, Florence was expected to care for Billy without an adult present. She was an anxious, often tearful child, with dark curls flopping over a high forehead and charming ‘sonsie’, or roundly appealing, face. She was always Billy’s ‘guardian angel’ as he calls her now, but she sorely needed one of her own. One evening when she was alone looking after Billy, she fell into some hot ashes. She screamed for help, but no one came. She never received medical attention at the time and as a result she lost the sight of an eye.

One winter morning in 1945, three-year-old Billy woke up wanting his mother. Wearing only a tiny vest, he went toddling along the freezing hallway to her bedroom. He hesitated just inside the door to her darkened room, surprised to see a stranger sitting on his mother’s bed. The man was brown-haired and bare-chested, and stared at Billy as he finished putting on a sock. As Billy tottered closer, the stranger shoved his bare foot up against his forehead and gently pushed him backwards until he was out in the hallway again, then closed the door with the same foot. It was Willie Adams, his mother’s lover.

Billy and Florence were alone and frightened when their mother left. She just closed the door and never came back. Eventually there was a lot of wailing and shouting, and then they were cared for by nuns in a place of polished wooden benches, stained glass and whispering. There was disagreement in the two families about who should bring up the children. Flora wanted them, but William’s sisters, Margaret and Mona, stepped in and took over. It was Mona who, responding to a neighbour’s concern about the constant crying resounding throughout the tenement, had gone along to the flat with her brother James and found Florence and Billy crouching together in the alcove bed, freezing, hungry and pitifully unkempt. She and Margaret eventually took young Billy and Florence to live in the Stewartville Street tenement in Partick that they shared with James, who was recently back from the war.

The children never saw their mother again when they were growing up. She came once to see them when they were still very young, but the aunts chased her off like a whore. Later she turned up with one of her brothers, but again, she was refused entry. That’s when Mamie punched Mona. Flattened her right in the doorway.

Margaret and Mona were an odd pair. Mona was born in 1908 and was thirteen years older than her flightier sister. Like all unmarried women getting on for forty in those days, Mona was terrified of being stigmatized as an ‘old maid’; by contrast, Margaret had a twinkle in her eye and no shortage of dancing partners. Billy found both sisters rather forbidding at the outset, although they tried to be kind and welcoming.

Margaret still wore her Wrens’ uniform, a stiff navy suit with brass buttons and a collar and tie. She’d had the time of her life when she was based in Portsmouth but, after the war, she settled down to life as a civil servant, writing up pension claims by coal miners who were suffering from pneumoconiosis, the black lung scourge. Margaret had wonderful red hair. Some evenings Billy and Florence would watch her flounce off to the dance hall in a cloud of ‘4711’ toilet water, stylishly draped in kingfisher-blue taffeta.

Mona was a dour and dominant force in the household. She was a registered nurse, working at night in a crowded ward for patients with chest complaints such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. On occasion, she did some private nursing so there were syringes lying around the place and strange rubber hoses in a drawer. The children could never work out what they were for. Mona dyed her curly brown hair a bright blonde, and was definitely no fashion plate.

Billy thought his Uncle James, on the other hand, was very glamorous indeed. He had been caught in a booby trap in France when he was with the Cameron Highlanders, so he now had only two fingers on his left hand. He modelled standards of grooming and hygiene that had previously been missing from the children’s lives, always polishing his shoes, ironing his shirts, and inspecting Billy’s teeth for adequate brushing. Both children had needed delousing when they arrived at Stewartville Street. Standing up naked in the sink, they were scrubbed vigorously with scabies lotion, a cold, viscous substance that left a milky residue on their skin. Their hair was deloused in an agonizing process involving an ultra-fine comb and a newspaper placed on the floor so they could see the lice when they landed.

Billy was grateful for the new and unfamiliar air of brusque kindness all around him. The four-year-old slept in a cot in the aunts’ bedroom, and felt happy to be tucked into a clean bed, even if he was chastised horribly for peeing in it with great frequency. He could not understand their problem with that; in the past he’d always done it with impunity. Many things changed in the children’s lives. They were given new clothing, sent to them from New York by their Uncle Charlie, William’s elder brother, who had emigrated to America. Florence was over the moon with her new stickyouty dress of pale lavender watersilk, while Billy became the proud owner of a pair of beige overalls. Nowadays, Billy has a pathological aversion to beige apparel, and especially attacks the wearers of beige cardigans, but back then he thought he was the kipper’s knickers.

Consistency became part of the children’s lives for the very first time. Every morning, right after their porridge, the children would be given a delicious spoonful of sickly-sweet molasses, followed by a vomit-making dollop of cod-liver oil. Billy begged to be given the oil first. ‘Why, oh why,’ he wondered, ‘can’t I have the nice stuff last to take away the nasty taste?’ But he was always given the molasses first.

His aunts were not the only ones who believed the hard way was the best way, and that safety resided in suffering. Billy says that many a Glaswegian has cast his troubled eyes on a brilliant, sunshine day and muttered, ‘Och, we’ll pay for this!’

Every evening after supper, Uncle James knelt down beside his kitchen alcove bed to say his prayers. The notion of communicating with an unseen entity was new to Billy, but he happily went along to Mass and quite enjoyed watching the whole colourful spectacle and singing loudly along with the congregation.

Then, as now, he enjoyed the pageant of life swirling around him, and the bustle of Stewartville Street was particularly appealing. Most days he played with marbles and little tin cars in the gutter outside his close. It was a perfect vantage point from which to study the activities of the milkman, the coalman, the ragman and the chimney sweeps. If he played his cards right, he could be heaved high up onto the horse-drawn cart of one of those workers for a ‘wee hurl’ to the top of the street.

One day, while Florence played ‘chases’ and ‘hide-and-seek’ with other neighbourhood children, Billy began drawing on the pavement with a piece of chalk. He was soon apprehended by an angry policeman who tried to march him indoors. The officer was barely inside the close when he was stopped short by old Mrs Magee, a tiny Belfast woman, who gave him a terrible time: ‘Away and catch a murderer, you big pain in the arse! Leave the child alone!’

There was an evangelical establishment in the street at number twelve, called Abingdon Hall. It’s still there today, a red-painted gospel hall run by the Christian Brethren that boasts regular social events such as ‘Ladies Leisure Hour’ and ‘Missionary Meeting’. Back then, Protestant children could attend meetings of a youth club called ‘Band of Hope’. Billy and Florence began to find creative ways to sneak in for the exotic experience of a slide show of the Holy Land, a cup of tea and a bun. Billy decided that the appeal of the Protestant faith was the absence of kneeling. Never one to shy away from a good sing-song, he joined in with the best of them:

‘There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide

Hallelujah!’

When their visits to that Protestant stronghold were discovered. Florence got the blame and was given a terrible row by Mona: ‘You’re the oldest! You should have known better!’ It was as if they’d sneaked into a peep-show.

By now, Billy was becoming aware of the stigma that was attached to his assigned faith. One day he was with a little pal, happily shooting marbles into a drain, when he heard an upstairs window being hurriedly thrust open. Her grandfather leaned out, pipe in hand: ‘Marie Grant! What have I told you about playing with Catholics!’

After a few months of living with the aunts, Billy began settling into their routine. He wondered where his mother had gone, but no one seemed willing to discuss that with him. He overheard adults around him gossiping about her in scathing terms, which further confused and saddened him.

Although Mamie had been banned from the house, her mother Flora visited the children from time to time and brought them sweeties and chocolate. There had been no sweets for them during the war so anything sugary was quite a treat. Grandma wore a fur coat, dangly earrings and lots of perfume, and looked exactly like a Christmas tree. The aunts disapproved, but Billy thought the sun shone out of her behind.

She was fond of boxing, and would sneak them pictures of her idol Joe Louis and talk about all sorts of interesting things. She always knew when Billy was talking rubbish. ‘Your head’s full of dabbities,’ she would cluck – a dabbity was one of those cheap transfers children licked then stuck on their arms. Flora became known for her trenchant sayings. She had left school at thirteen to go to work, but always had a ready answer for anyone who tried to outsmart her. ‘Well, if we were all wise, there’d be no room for fools!’ she’d jibe, or, ‘Perhaps I didn’t go to school, but I met the scholars coming out.’

All too soon, Uncle James had a bride-to-be. Her name was Aunt Peggy, and she was delightful, fresh off the boat from Ireland. She was entirely comfortable with her country ways and resisted changing them her whole life. Billy was fascinated by her style of speaking. She addressed everybody as ‘pal’ and referred to boys as ‘gossoons’. The newlyweds eventually moved to the nearby district of Whiteinch and were sorely missed by the children.

Someone must have told Billy that his father would be coming home soon, because every time an aeroplane went by he would gallop to the window and ask if it were he. Everyone knew it wouldn’t be long, as over a million men had been demobbed and returned to their homes after VE-Day had lured the citizens of Britain into the streets for dancing and endless celebratory parties in 1945. It was a time of great rejoicing when William finally walked in the door in March 1946. Billy hid under the table and watched huge, black Oxfords and stocky, navy trouser legs enter the room and march towards him. A vaguely familiar head topped with an air-force ‘chip poke’ hat (the shape of the paper packets in which chips were sold in Glasgow) appeared under the table. It scrutinized him for a few seconds, and then a meaty hand proffered a shiny gift to coax him out. It was a wonderful toy yacht, with its hull painted green below the waterline and red above. Billy loved that boat. It had real ropes that actually worked, and he sailed it many times on Bingham’s Pond just off the Great Western Road.

It was odd having their father back. As was so often the case when men returned from the war, he was a stranger to his children and had been robbed of the chance to establish an early bond with them. William never spoke to Billy and Florence about their mother’s departure. He simply settled into the Stewartville Street house, stashing his massive metal air-force trunk under the bed. His name and service numbers were painted on its side, along with the words: ‘NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE’. That sign always troubled Billy. Why, he wondered, didn’t they want my father on the voyage? What did they have against him that meant they wouldn’t let him go with the rest of the men? Florence and Billy used to heave out the trunk and inspect its mysterious contents. They thought it was brilliant. They found bits of engineering equipment, their father’s wire air-force spectacles, and photos of him in India standing around with five other men, all in outlandish leopard coats, grinning and posing for the picture.

On Sundays, William occasionally took the children to the Barrowland market, known to all Glaswegians as ‘The Barras’. It is a bustling place for street vending, which used to be as much a market of human variety as of inanimate goods. Billy and Florence were amazed to see grown men eating fire and selling devilish cure-alls.

Billy was astounded to see men allowing themselves to be chained inside sacks, and women throwing knives at them until they miraculously escaped. Mr Waugh, a circus ‘strong man’, actually bent six-inch nails with his teeth before Billy’s very eyes.

‘Stop Barking!’ boomed John Bull, a balding man in a double-breasted suit who stood in Gibson Street hawking his Lung and Chest Elixir. ‘Asthma! Bronchitis! Whooping Cough! Croup! Difficulty breathing and all chest troubles! Absolutely safe for all ages!’

Billy eagerly sought out ‘The Snakeman’, known as Chief Abadu from Nigeria, who claimed his snake oil cured everything from hair loss to a stuffy nose. He acted out crude impersonations of a woman gripping her chest in pain or all blocked up with catarrh, offering to rub samples on selected folk’s hands. To Billy’s disappointment, no child ever got a whiff.

‘He was way ahead of his time,’ observes Billy, who is currently fascinated by the ‘faith-healing’ evangelists who use similar, charisma-reliant methods to sell God and health on the born-again Christian television channel in California. ‘Look at those pricks,’ Billy winces, ‘they must think people zip up at the back.’

One of the best parts of any Sunday outing was the journey, for they took the tramcar. Glasgow had an excellent system of tramcars, known in the dialect as ‘the caurs’. They had a peculiar electric smell, and shook from side to side so many passengers turned green after a very short while, but everybody loved them. Conductors, who were usually female, collected the fares on board: ‘Come on, get aff!’ they would shout, rudely shoving people. ‘Move up! move up!’

These cheeky women were both the scourge and the sweethearts of Glasgow, and they were immortalized in the music hall:

‘Mary McDougal

From Auchenshuggle

The caur conductoress,

Fares please, fares please …’

One conductor’s smart-arse retort reverberated around the city:

‘Does this tram stop at the Renfrew Ferry?’

‘I hope so. It cannae swim.’

In 1947, Billy’s Uncle Charlie came back from America to visit them with his young son, Jack, in tow. Dolly, his daughter who had Down’s Syndrome, had stayed at home with her mother. Everybody loved Charlie: he was the family love story. He had fallen for Nellie, a charming Glaswegian lassie whose family emigrated to the United States. Charlie saved up enough money to follow her to Far Rockaway, Long Island, where they married and settled down in that beach-side town. Far Rockaway is the closest point to Scotland in the whole American continent and Charlie lived there his whole life, never travelling further than Philadelphia.

Charlie was a hoot. Out of his grinning, ‘smart-ass’ mouth came some great sassy American expressions, such as ‘Hey buster, how’d you like your eye done – black or blue?’ He would sit in the tenement window three floors up with one leg dangling. ‘Hey guys, you wanna drink?’ He would squirt them with a water pistol.

Even Margaret and Mona loosened up when Charlie was around, and they all went to the variety theatre together. Billy used to tell people they were all going to America to live on his Uncle Charlie’s ranch and they were going to get a car each.

There is a hefty, red sandstone Victorian apartment building in Stewartville Street that was originally St Peter’s School for Boys. The sunken car park was once a playground full of youngsters careering pell-mell from corner to corner and Billy loved to sit with his legs dangling through the railings, watching them with envy. Sometimes he even caught some of the older students hurrying out at lunchtime, heading for a nearby shop where they could buy a single cigarette for a penny, and a slice of raw turnip for a half-penny. Billy thought they were gods. He simply could not wait to be a schoolboy, and imagined himself smoking cigarettes, eating turnips, and wearing fight-smart, studded boots that made sparks in the street. He soon got part of his wish, for the aunts decreed that it was time for both him and Florence to attend school.

Very young Catholic boys attended St Peter’s Girls’ School, and then moved on to the boys’ school once they turned six. Billy’s first teacher at kindergarten was Miss O’Halloran and, at five years old, he doted on her. In her classroom it was all Plasticine and lacing wool through holes in cards. Miss O’Halloran was amazed he could already write (Florence had taught him) and Billy was paraded round the school as a great example. He even went to Florence’s class where to everyone’s amazement he formed the letter ‘J’ on the board. But, despite his early star pupil status, Billy was terrified of the nuns, and was especially wary of Sister Philomena who had pictures of hell on her wall that looked like travel brochures. Billy assumed she’d been there.

When he moved up to the boys’ school at six years old, there was a harshness he’d not experienced in kindergarten. In the main hallway there was a massive crucifix, a bleeding, life-sized Christ that thoroughly spooked him. Billy had not yet been fully indoctrinated into the faith, but once he was at the boys’ school that occurred as swiftly and as subtly as a fishhook in the nostril: on his first day at the new school his teacher Miss Wilson informed him that Jesus was dead and that he, Billy, was personally responsible. And that wasn’t the only bad news. From now on, he was to be addressed as ‘Connolly’ instead of ‘Billy’.

Things were changing at home as well. William, who was probably traumatized by his wartime experiences, seemed remote and gruff to his children. He was generous as far as his means would allow and Florence and Billy looked forward to Fridays when he would come home from his job in a machine parts factory, bearing comic books, Eagle for Billy and Girl for Florence. But, although he could be quite flush with a full pay packet, he generally proved to be an inconsistent and absent parent.

As time went on and the children became less of a novelty, the aunts began to fully comprehend the sacrifices they would have to make in order to bring them up. It gradually dawned on Mona and Margaret that their single lives were now over, for dating and marriage would henceforth be difficult at best. Consequently, they began to sour, and the atmosphere at home changed drastically for the worse. There was a hymn at the time, a favourite of Billy’s. It was called ‘Star of the Sea’:

‘Dark night has come down on this heavenly world

And the banners of darkness are slowly unfurled.

Dark night has come down, dear mother and we

Look out for thy shining, sweet star of the sea.

Star of the sea, sweet star of the sea

Look out for thy shining, sweet star of the sea.’

And that’s what he felt had happened. ‘This is definitely different,’ he thought to himself at six years old. ‘God’s dead, my first name’s gone, and the whole fucking thing’s my fault.’