Читать книгу Billy Connolly - Pamela Stephenson, Pamela Stephenson - Страница 8

It is late fall in Philadelphia, 24 November 2000. An eclectic crowd is jammed into an arts-district theatre. Few people are still hugging their weatherproof outerwear, so under the seats are strewn woollen, nylon, or leather garments that have slid silently downwards as bodies began to relax and shake with hysteria.

Election time in the United States is a comedian’s gift of a social climate. ‘If you don’t make up your mind about your president pretty quick, the country’s going to revert to us British,’ threatens the shaggy, non-voting Glaswegian with the radio microphone, ‘and look at the choice you’ve got! Gore – what a big fucking Jessie he is … and George W. Bush – God almighty!’ A rant against politicians follows, and so do cheers and applause from this thoroughly fed-up bunch of voters. ‘I’ve been saying all along: don’t vote! It only encourages the bastards!’

The harangue eventually switches to introspection, and soon the theme is the march of time, probably inspired by the fact that this is the night of his fifty-eighth birthday. He bashfully announces this to the throng, which prompts a rowdy bunch on the right-hand side to instigate a swell, until the entire audience is singing happy birthday to Billy.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ he wails at them. ‘Behave yourselves!’ Every single detail of his highly embarrassing prostate exam has just been shared with all these strangers, yet the intimacy of a birthday celebration is making him very uncomfortable.

Later on, in the dressing room, there is a tiny cake from his promoter. Billy has just moaned to his audience that his birthday cake now holds nearly three boxes of candles, but the promoter’s sponge-and-frosting round has only four snuff-resistant flames dancing above a chocolate greeting. As always, Billy is shattered, sweaty, and still in a fragile trance from the show. I shower him with kisses and praise for a brilliant performance, but he slumps glumly in the couch, staring fixedly at the cake.

He is transported to the circus in Glasgow more than fifty years ago. Among the most terrifying characters from his six-year-old experience were, ironically, clowns, and one of these scary, painted monsters is riding a unicycle while balancing a birthday cake on his shoulder. Unaccustomed to being celebrated for being alive, wee Billy has never seen a birthday cake before that moment. ‘Look!’ he cries, to the amusement of his sister and aunts. ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’

Nowadays, I like to order an extravagant loaf of breadshaped chocolate birthday cake with candles for Billy, which he always hugely enjoys, but back then, at St Peter’s School for Boys, special treats were unheard of. Absolutely everything seemed threatening. A boy was to march in file and remember his arithmetic tables or else. The punishment for noncompliance involved several excruciatingly painful whacks with a tawse, an instrument of torture made in Lochgelly in Fife. It was a leather strap about a quarter of an inch thick, with one pointed end, and three tails at the other. The teacher’s individual preference dictated which end Billy and the other boys would receive. Most liked to hold the three tails and wallop the culprit with the thick end. When a boy was considered a candidate for receiving this abuse, he was forced to hold one hand underneath the other, with arms outstretched. The tawse was supposed to find its target somewhere on the hand, but Billy noticed that teachers seemed to take great delight in hitting that very tender bit on his wrist, and making a nasty weal. Most of the boys, however, were quite keen on having battle scars.

Rosie McDonald, the worst teacher of the bunch, whom Billy describes as ‘the sadist’, would make her victim stand with hands, palms up, about an inch above her desk. When she wielded her tawse, the back of his hands would come crashing down painfully on top of pencils she’d placed underneath. That was her special treat in winter, when the chilly air made even youthful joints stiffer and more sensitive. Among her pupils, Rosie had favourites, but Billy was definitely not one of them. Scholastically, he did not seem to be grasping things nor keeping up with his homework, so Rosie assumed that he was lazy and stupid and punished him viciously.

Everyone who knows Billy today is aware of his considerable, albeit unusual, intelligence. However, he does not process information the same way that many others do. Psychologists currently ascribe diagnoses such as ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or ‘Learning Disability’ to such a way of thinking and, in the more enlightened educational environments, there is understanding and help for such children. In addition to having a learning difference, however, Billy is and was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a person suffering from past and present trauma, and these factors all conspired to make concentration and left-brain activity extremely challenging for him. Rosie thrashed him for many things that were unavoidable, considering his organic make-up: for looking out the window, for breaking a pencil, for scruffy writing or untidy paper, or for looking away when she was talking. He used to stand outside her classroom because he was too scared to go in. Eventually, someone would either push or pull him inside, and Rosie would start on him for his tardiness. ‘Well look who’s here! Well, well, well! Slept in, did you? Well, maybe we should wake you up.’

Once she got her favourites, James Boyd and Peter Langan, to run him up and down the classroom holding an arm each. The most humiliating part for Billy was seeing his play-piece, a little butter sandwich that he carried up his jersey, come jumping out in the process, and being trampled on by all.

Rosie was always furious and suspicious with the class. When she strapped people, she did it so violently that she invariably back-heeled her leg and kicked her desk at the same time, so eventually it featured a massive crater of cracked wood. Other teachers would pop into her classroom from time to time for various reasons and Billy would be amazed to see them occasionally having a laugh with her. They think she’s normal.’ he would marvel, ‘a normal human being. Probably if you asked them what she was like, they’d even say she was nice, this horrible, terrifying beast.’

Billy still believes the bravest thing in his whole life was the day he decided to stop doing homework. Just never did it any more. The first morning after this epiphany, he awaited the inevitable with a new-found, insolent calm.

‘Have you done your homework?’ demanded Rosie.

‘No.’

‘Out here.’

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

‘Sit down.’

The next day it was the same thing, and the next, and the next. Reflecting on it now, Billy recognizes that he probably wouldn’t have been able to do Rosie’s maths homework anyway, and was too intimidated to ask for help. In common with most people who have a learning disability, he is afraid of many tasks and procrastinates as a way of trying to deal with that fear.

Rosie was not the only tyrant in Billy’s six-year-old life, for Mona had started taking her frustration out on Billy, and he was experiencing her, too, as a vicious bully. Mona was exactly like Rosie: suspicious, paranoid, and sadistic. She had started picking on him fairly soon after they had settled into Stewartville Street. At first it was verbal abuse. She called him a ‘lazy good-for-nothing’, pronounced that he would ‘come to nothing’, and that it was ‘a sad day’ when she met him.

She soon moved on to inflicting humiliation on Billy, her favourite method being grabbing him by the back of his neck and rubbing his soiled underpants in his face. She increased her repertoire to whacking his legs, hitting him with wet cloths, kicking him, and pounding him on the head with high-heeled shoes. She would usually wait until they were alone, then corner and thrash him four or five times a week for years on end.

Billy, however, had been in a few scraps in the school playground and had decided that a smack in the mouth wasn’t all that painful. The more experience he had of physical pain, the more he felt he could tolerate it. ‘What’s the worst she could do to me?’ he would ask himself. ‘She could descend on me and beat the shit out of me … but a couple of guys have done that to me already and it wasn’t that bad … I didn’t die or anything.’

In fact, the more physical, emotional and verbal abuse he received, the more he expected it, eventually believing what they were telling him: that he was useless and worthless and stupid, a fear he keeps in a dark place even today. As a comedian whose brilliance now emanates largely from his extraordinarily accurate observation of humanity, he has gloriously defied Mona’s favourite put-down: ‘Your powers of observation are nil.’ She was the only person Billy ever knew who said the word ‘nil’ when it wasn’t about a football result.

Florence was sometimes physically present when Mona mercilessly scorned and beat her brother. She would stand there frozen and helpless, immobilized by fear and horror. The mind, however, has a marvellous capacity to escape when the body can’t. Psychologists call it ‘dissociation’ and view it as a survival mechanism. Florence mentally flew to a far corner of the ceiling and watched the hideous abuse from ‘safety’. ‘I was there, but I wasn’t there,’ she explains now. ‘I was outside, looking in.’ It was very traumatic for her too, and very dangerous, for dissociation can leave an indelible mark on the psyche.

Billy, on the other hand, put his energy into trying to defend himself from Mona’s blows by shielding his face and body with his arms. His adrenaline would surge and, although he was no match for her, at least he managed to avoid getting broken teeth. He remembers the blood from his nose dripping onto his feet. Billy is a survivor: in common with many traumatized children, he adopted a pretty good coping strategy. If you ask him about it now, he says, ‘It sounds hellish, but it was quite bearable once you got your mind right. It doesn’t kill you.’ But his scars ran deeper than flesh wounds, especially those from the humiliating words that accompanied his beatings. Being too young to come up with a rational, adult explanation for it, he could only make sense of Mona’s sadistic treatment by fully accepting what she said, that he was indeed a sub-standard child. ‘I must deserve this,’ he decided.

Mona’s paranoia and suspiciousness were relentless, pathological and extremely alarming. An older boy at school gave Billy a small model boat that he had made in woodwork class.

‘Where did you get that?’ Mona asked him accusingly.

‘A big boy gave it to me.’

‘Don’t tell lies. Why would anyone give you a boat for nothing? Come on! Tell me! Where did you really get it?’

There was no other answer, so she pounded him until he bled.

Margaret wasn’t as manic a bully as Mona but she was on her side. She had been very beautiful when she was younger, a hair-dresser’s model at Eddy Graham’s. Eddy’s shop smelled of rotten eggs, and Billy always wondered how she could sit through such a terrible smell. Billy admired Margaret’s sense of style, but thought Mona looked an absolute mess most of the time. For a start, she never put her teeth in unless she went out. This wasn’t all that unusual, for at that time in Glasgow there was a fashion for having no teeth. When National Health false teeth became available, people of all ages thought it was an excellent idea to replace their existing teeth with those new, shiny, perfect ones. Some would actually have their teeth taken out for their twenty-first birthday, as a pragmatic choice, since they were eventually going to fall out anyway.

Whenever the auburn roots of Mona’s dyed blonde hair began to grow out, she would send Billy down to Boots to buy her peroxide.

‘A bottle of peroxide, please, twenty volumes.’

He would carry home the little brown bottle and be swept in by a vision in slippers, a pale cardigan and a skirt and apron. Hoping to catch some young man’s eye, Mona and Margaret both dolled themselves up whenever they ventured out. When nylons were in short supply, the sisters would get creative with Bisto, plastering the gravy all over their bare legs and wandering around the city stinking like a Sunday dinner.

On 8 May 1949, when Billy was six and a half, Mona mysteriously produced a baby son whom she named Michael. Her paramour was a local man who had no inclination to marry Mona; his identity remained a puzzle to his own son until adulthood. No one ever explained the situation to the growing Michael at all; as a matter of fact, he was presented to the world as a brother to Billy and Florence and nobody seemed to question it. In those postwar years, there were many similar situations and, curiously enough, the otherwise judgemental society seemed to tolerate it.

Today, having a famous ‘brother’ has hardly helped Michael to ward off speculation about his birth circumstances. At first he thoroughly resented those who drew attention to his situation. ‘But I’ve learned to just shrug it off,’ he says now, with questionable insistence. ‘Whatever people say about me, Billy or the family … I don’t care.’

Michael’s arrival at Stewartville Street was, in many ways, received as a great blessing to the Connollys. The group of uncomfortably related individuals that made up their family were able to focus their love and attention onto the tiny, innocent being who was unconnected to Mamie and provided biological motherhood for Mona. He was an angelic baby, doted on by his mother. Billy was enchanted by him too and would heave him around in a ‘circus-carry’. Even William could love him, without interference from the past; when he looked at his own children he saw Mamie, but that thorn was absent in his relationship with Michael.

‘I think we were a normal family,’ Michael maintains. ‘I had a great childhood.’ In contrast to the experience of Florence and Billy, Michael received plenty of positive attention, gifts and special treatment. Looking back now, Michael believes he was spoiled, but I think he just received what children rightfully deserve, a sense of being loved and appreciated.

Everything Michael did was magical to the adults in the household. ‘Listen to him sing!’ they would chime. ‘Look at the way he eats!’ As a toddler, Michael did have one interesting talent. There was a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records in the flat and people would say to him. ‘Fetch me the record of Mario Lanza singing “O Sole Mio’” and Michael could always select the correct one, even though he couldn’t read.

Michael was unaware of his mother’s treatment of Billy, for Mona was very secretive about it, and, understandably, he still finds it difficult to accept. Billy is convinced that his father also did not know about all the beating and neglect that was going on at home. William was absent most of the time, for he worked long hours at the Singer sewing-machine parts factory and was then out most evenings. Florence experienced William as a shadowy figure, coming and going with irregularity. ‘He just thought home life was boring, I think, and pissed off,’ is how Billy explains it now. ‘Fuck knows where he was going … I have no idea.’

When he wasn’t working. William was usually off playing billiards and having a great time with his mates. This was fairly typical for men in those days. It was the job of women to raise children and, besides, who wouldn’t have wanted to escape that household? William was a member of a club of men who’d been friends since childhood. The ‘Partick Corner Boys’ rented a room behind the cinema. On the bottom floor was the meeting room of a secret society called the ‘Buffs’, the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, and upstairs was William’s club, which was always jam-packed with drinking men playing billiards. William would take the children up there after twelve o’clock Mass on a Sunday so Florence could practise on the piano. Billy would roll the balls around the billiard table and William would chat with his friends.

This relaxed atmosphere was a stark contrast to life at home. There, the normal misunderstandings of childhood were tolerated in Michael, but not in Billy or Florence. One day, Jesus had come into conversation at home and Billy referred to Jesus as having been a Catholic, which was his seven-year-old misunderstanding. Aunt Margaret corrected him. ‘Jesus wasn’t a Catholic, Jesus was a Jew.’

‘Oh,’ he said with innocent surprise, ‘does that mean we’re Jews?’

‘Where did you come up with that one?’ she sneered, and continued to ridicule him about that until he was in his teens. ‘Does that mean we’re Jewish?’ she would mimic him.

Even Billy’s friends who were much poorer seemed at least to have love in their houses. Frankie McBride had a mother and granddad who loved him; the McGregors down the road were a wild bunch, but their parents adored them and their house was fun. They were always shouting and laughing, and they were rejoiced in for things Billy and Florence were being pilloried for. Of an evening, the oldest girl would be going out with her boyfriend and her younger siblings would be teasing her:

‘Your boyfriend’s skelly [cross-eyed]!’

‘No he’s not!’

Their mother would intervene: ‘He’s a lovely boy. Don’t you say that!’

Then the father would stir: ‘He’s a big bloody Jessie!’

‘No he’s not!’

In the Connolly household, the children daren’t say ‘boyfriend’: there would have been an explosion. It would definitely have been unwise for Billy to have mentioned the kiss he got from pretty blonde Gracie McClintock. It happened in Plantation Park, known to Billy and his pals as ‘Planting Park’, in front of the Queen Mother maternity hospital. The Cleansing Department had a dump there where the boys would find all kinds of interesting rubbish, bits of bikes, old rags and even machine parts. One day, when he was foraging there, some friends called to him: ‘Billy! Grade’s in the bushes! If you come down here, you can get a kiss!’

So Billy joined the line of five or six youngsters and eventually it was his turn to have a totally new experience. ‘It was the nicest thing I remember from my childhood.’ he says now. ‘It was like a bird landing on my mouth. Nobody had ever kissed me before: adults, children, anyone. I used to hear boys at school complaining about their mothers kissing them, and I remember thinking, “That must be amazing! No one ever kisses me …”’

As Billy sat in his school classroom, doing battle with Rosie, he could see the windows of his home across the street, and the prospect of returning there in the evening was far from appealing. He loved having school dinners because it meant he didn’t have to go home. Mona couldn’t cook to save her life, and Margaret was worse. Billy and Florence ate mostly fried foods and foul stews, and pudding would usually be a piece of dried-up cake smothered in Bird’s Custard. Mona specialized in repulsive sprouts, and Billy was beaten in the face until he ate them. ‘Billy tried Mother’s patience,’ reports Michael. ‘She wanted things organized and she was loud about it. She would say, “It’s Billy’s turn to do the dishes” and he would say “No!” and run out.’

No doubt Billy was viewed as an ornery child. He is still disorganized and oppositional, the former being a wired-in state and the latter a coping style. Typical early difficulties for people with learning differences include tying shoes and telling the time. Billy could do neither of those things until he was around twelve years old, and he was absolutely pounded for it. Everybody tried to teach him to tie his shoes, but they all eventually lost patience. One fateful summer day, he was with his father on holiday in Rothesay. On the pier there was a clock next to a garish light display of a juggling giraffe. William was peering at it. ‘Eh, Billy, what’s the time on the clock over there?’

Billy began to reply, but never finished the sentence. ‘The big hand is on the …’

WHACK! ‘That’s not the time! What’s the time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Billy can still remember the very spot on the pavement.

‘You don’t know?’ William exploded. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How old are you?’

William’s remoteness and constant absence from home meant he knew little about his children. His role became pretty much reduced to that of ‘Special Executioner’, administering extra-harsh beatings for especially vile sins. ‘Sometimes.’ recollects Billy, ‘when father hit me, I flew over the settee backwards, in a sitting position. It was fabulous. Just like real flying, except you didn’t get a cup of tea or a safety belt or anything.’

Billy was aware that his father was thrilled with Florence’s excellent scholastic progress, although William never once told her this. Billy himself was a great disappointment, since he did not seem bright, and was rotten at football. He dreamed of having a son like Billy’s friend and hero, Vinny Maron – a football genius, even at eleven years old. When Billy and Vinny practised heading the ball against the wall, Billy barely managed to get to ten. Vinny, however, could do four hundred. Grown men would gather to watch him playing in the street. Eventually, Celtic Football Club tried to sign him up as a professional player, but he went away to become a priest and ended up drowning in a swimming accident during his time at Sacred Heart College in Spain.

There was a very insistent priesthood recruitment process at Billy’s school. A stern man in a soutane would sweep into the classroom. ‘Who doesn’t want to become a priest?’ So, of course, everyone had to want to be a priest and was required to sign a piece of paper verifying that fact.

Then the recruiter would try a new tack: ‘Does anyone want to be a Pioneer?’ This meant swearing off drink for life and, to prove it, a Pioneer wore a white enamel badge displaying a red sacred heart, with tiny gold rays emanating from it. You can still see Pioneer pins around Glasgow, sported by men in their sixties or so, who are very proud of them.

Therefore, at seven years old, Billy and his pals all swore off the drink as nasty bad stuff, even though Billy had peeked inside pubs and really looked forward to being a man and doing ‘manly’ things like getting pissed. The pub seemed to him like a fabulous place to be. A peculiarly appealing smell of sawdust, beer and smoke came wafting out of the door, and he could see all the men roaring and shouting and having a great time.

His local pub, the Hyndland Bar, was on a corner, and boasted one door in Fordyce Street, and the other in Hyndland Street. One of the coming-of-age challenges among Billy’s peers was to avoid being apprehended while running deftly in through one door of this adults-only establishment, past all the customers, and out of the other door. It was considered very heroic to have achieved this several times.

Another great challenge was the terror of the cobbler’s dunny, or dungeon. There was a cobbler’s shop nearby, owned by an unfriendly little man with a moustache. This cobbler was always repairing his shoes, mouth full of nails, facing the window of the store so he could keep an eye on passers-by. Like all tenement dunnies, his was very dark, made so deliberately because these were places where lovers would go when they came home from the movies or dances. There were few cars for courting, or ‘winching’ as it’s called in Glasgow. Johnny Beattie, another Glasgow comedian, says you can still see the mark of his Brylcreem on a dunny wall in Partickhill Road.

The goal for Billy and his seven-year-old pals was to run the gauntlet of this long, murky, subterranean corridor. It had offshoots where all sorts of weird and wild things dwelled – everybody knew that – things gruesome and dreadful, with terrible intent. At the end of the run there were stairs that curved sharply before eventually leading back to the close. Horrible murder and torture lay just around that bend, not to mention ghosts. If a boy had done the cobbler’s dunny, and had made it uncaptured through the Hyndland Bar, he was a leader of men; he was Cochise, the heroic Apache chief from Billy’s Saturday afternoon cowboy movies.

Billy was always gashed, scarred and full of stitches from his attempts at such glory. Once he got caught in the cobbler’s dunny by the man himself, and was heaved into his house. ‘You crowd of bastards, I’m fed up with you. I’m telling your father.’ That was the moment when Cochise shit his pants.

‘Now I’m gonna tell you all something that will probably prove very useful in your lives,’ Billy announces to a Scottish crowd. ‘I’m going to tell you what to do if you get caught masturbating …’ I had been sitting in the audience wondering when would be the most appropriate time to allow our three youngest children to come to see their father in concert. As I watch him play proficiently and enthusiastically with his caged penis in front of three thousand hysterical people, the words thirty years old flash into my mind.

‘The opening line is all-important,’ explains Billy. ‘Say “Thank God you’re here! I was just walking across the room, when the biggest hairy spider came crashing out from behind the sideboard there and shot up the leg of my trousers. The bugger was poised to sink its fangs into my poor willie …”’ The activity in question is, of course, a healthy one if privately or consensually performed; however, Billy’s outrageous and frantic self-pleasuring pantomime, as well as that thing he does about having sex with sheep, were giving me substantial pause for thought.

Billy’s battle with the morality of masturbation, indeed of sex in general, began when he started to go to confession. At first his confessed sins were pretty tame, such as telling a fib or stealing a biscuit, not enough to shift the padre’s gaze from the football results. On Saturdays the Glasgow Evening Times sports edition was a pink paper, and was clearly visible through the grille. One evening, however, Billy scored heavily: ‘I’ve had impure thoughts, Father.’ His confessor had been checking to see how Partick Thistle was doing, but the nine-year-old’s precocious words got his attention.

‘Oh, and what were these thoughts?’

‘I was thinking about women, naked women … Father … Frankie McBride’s got a book with naked women in it.’

Frankie McBride was a little pal who lived around the corner from Billy.

‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Three “Hail Marys” and count yourself a lucky boy. That could lead to terrible things. You know, son, these books aren’t in themselves sinful, but what they’re known as is “an occasion of sin”. Do you know what an occasion of sin is?’

‘No, Father.’ Billy knew fine well.

‘An occasion of sin is something or someone that leads you into sin.’

‘Oh yes, Father.’

‘You beware when you’re around those books. There are many books like that. Any impure acts?’

‘Yes, Father.”

‘With yourself, or with another?’

‘With myself, Father.’

‘You should stop doing that immediately.’

‘Yes, Father.’

He never told Billy he’d go blind: that was a school-playground tale. The school playground was an excellent place to obtain misinformation about sex, a new anti-Protestant joke or a drag on a scavenged cigarette-butt. There was entertainment there as well, in the form of regular executions. Mr Elliot used to chase chickens with an axe in the school’s kitchen garden and he would chop off their heads right there in the playground.

Despite his doubts about the clergy, Billy longed to be an altar boy. He helped out in St Peter’s Church, doing chores right next to the sacristy, where the priest emerged, and where the vestments and Communion wine were stored. Billy was fascinated with the vestments and was captivated by the gorgeous colours and embroidery. Priests would often come to school during the week and quiz the boys about the colour of the vestments, in order to check if they had been to Mass the previous Sunday. Billy was a regular Mass-goer at that point, but sometimes he couldn’t remember the visual details and he would be beaten.

Billy never dared to steal the wine like some of his pals. The sacristy was full of surprises. Someone discovered that Communion came in a tin, and had even been brave enough to try some, but in those days Billy was shocked: ‘That’s Jesus,’ he thought, ‘you can’t go eating Jesus, stealing him out of a tin.’

His bid to be an altar boy was thwarted when he and some other boys, who were all the same height, were chosen by a priest to help at Benediction. In that service, most of them would be lined up along the altar railings holding candles. The envied, glorious one, however, was the boy who stood up higher than everyone else with the golden thurible, proudly dangling the vessel so it puffed out incense at the end of every swing. Everyone wanted to be that exalted creature, so when Billy and his same-height friends filed into the sacristy and saw the thurible hanging there on its special hook, each and every one of them made a dive for it.

‘I saw it first!’

‘No you didn’t!’ There was a loud and furious scuffle that ended when the priest stormed in and grabbed them all by the jerseys.

‘Out! Out! And don’t you darken this door again!’

Billy continues to love incense, although the last time that sweet and heavy smoke drifted towards him was years ago at Bob Geldof’s wedding, when the late Paula Yates glided down the aisle in a scarlet ball dress. It’s really a good thing he doesn’t go to church any more, because if he saw a thurible nowadays he might loudly interject, ‘I don’t like to spoil the party, but your handbag’s on fire.’

Despite his early horror at the graphic gruesomeness of Catholic statues, Billy grew to like the ritualistic aspects of the religion and he was grateful for the safety and comfort it provided. He loved the hymns, and today laments that many of the old tunes have changed. ‘Now the Catholic Church sounds like the fucking Bethany Hall,’ he moans.

At school, he had religion every day, just before lunch. It included music taken from books of folk songs, which delighted Billy, and launched his interest in folk music. They used to sing ‘Lilliburlero’ (now the signature tune for Billy’s favourite radio station, the BBC World Service) and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, and ‘Glorious Devon’. ‘Heart of Oak’ was a great favourite, too, and Billy would give strong voice to the rousing chorus:

‘Steady boys, steady.

We’ll fight and we’ll conquer, again and again!’

With the exception of the folk singing, Billy was frustrated at the dullness of religious studies at school. What really piqued his interest was the stuff no one would cover, such as ‘Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?’ The teachers seemed to dodge such subjects, and were not open to questions. Billy certainly had a great deal of curiosity about many things. For example, on the back of his classroom jotter was a table of weights and measures. It was headed Avoirdupois’, which he pronounced ‘avoid dupoy’, and he longed to know what it was all about, but no one even mentioned it. There were so many intriguing mysteries. He was madly interested in geisha girls but, when he asked a teacher what they were, he was beaten for ‘being immoral’.

Billy’s cousin John, a very thin boy, also attended St Peter’s. Billy largely ignored him, since ‘Skin’, as they called him, was in a lower class, but reports of John’s cleverness, elaborate practical jokes, and truant behaviour filtered through the school. John’s mother was at her wits’ end. She would watch her son being escorted into the classroom in the morning, but by the time she got home, John would already be sitting comfortably in their kitchen, warming his feet and drinking a mug of milk. Legend had it that when John’s father had returned from the war, three-year-old John had darted out from behind the door and savagely kicked him, in protest for having returned to spoil the cosy life he had with his mother. Apparently, this Oedipal rage never left him. Billy’s father advised his brother to take a very hard line with John. William’s thinking on many subjects was very black-and-white.

After Michael’s arrival, the living space at home had become even more cramped. Mona and Margaret shared one room, with Michael in a cot. In the other room, which was a living room by day, Billy shared a sofa-bed with his father. Late one night, when Billy was ten, he woke to find his father ‘interfering’ with him, as he puts it. Then, and for the next four or five years, his father’s frequent sexual abuse was a mystery to him, like being in an accident. ‘The most awful thing,’ says Billy now, fully grasping the anatomy of shame, ‘was that it was kind of pleasant, physically, you know. That’s why nobody tells. I remember it happening a lot, not every night, but every night you were in a state thinking it was going to happen, that you’d be awakened by it. I would pray for the holidays. I couldn’t wait for us to go to the seaside because then we had separate beds.’

It’s hard to know exactly why William molested his own son. He had the appearance of being extremely religious and, since the Catholic Church was very strict about the sanctity of marriage, he saw no possibility of divorce from Mamie or remarriage at any point: however, that doesn’t really explain why he chose this particular form of sexual expression. It wouldn’t be the first time extreme sexual repression in an ostensibly religious person has led to ‘unspeakable’ acts. As Carl Jung explained, denial of our shadow side will often cause it to rise up against us. Perhaps William himself had been sexually abused in childhood, as is so often the case with perpetrators. In fact, historical accounts of that culture and time would suggest that, in those overcrowded conditions, incest was extremely common.

At any rate, Billy kept the dark secret locked away until the early eighties, when he and I were sitting in our car outside the Glasgow hospital the night his father died. ‘That creep.’ I cried with him, and not because his father, in his scheme of things, was about to meet his maker. It was William’s hypocrisy that really got to both of us. He was always passing judgement on Billy for his ‘sinfulness’ and lack of conformity to the Catholic faith, while at the same time he was hurting him so profoundly … in so many ways. Since that moment, Billy has found various ways to heal and make adult sense of all his early abuses, but back then, when there was little safety anywhere in his life, what saved him?

For one thing, he absolutely loved reading. Not his school-books – he thought they were very dull, although the class would sometimes be read to on a Friday, and that was quite soothing. White Fang and adventure stories from Canada and the Yukon were popular. Billy often imagined himself donning a huge, woolly jacket and striding into the northern wildernesses to pan for gold, a perfect way to escape from Stewartville Street.

There was a comprehensive library system in Glasgow, and his local branch, a vast pseudo-classical building, was just across the tram-lines in Partick. It was wonderfully warm inside, and full of people of all ages, especially elderly folk. Every newspaper was there, mounted on a board with a special cord for turning the pages. Billy had worked through the infants’ section years ago, steamed right through the boys’ corner (Just William, Enid Blyton and all kinds of adventure stories), and when he became twelve he was finally able to swagger up the street with not one, but two books. That’s when he discovered Tibet. Once he came across Seven Years in Tibet he was completely hooked, fascinated by its isolation from the rest of the world.

Billy devoured books that carried pictures and diagrams to help him spot different types of fighter aircraft by the colour and shape of the wings. He made models of some of them, and spotted a number of war planes that were still flying in the fifties, such as the Dakota, a massive transport plane, and a couple of fighter planes, the Gloster Meteor, which had tanks on its wings, and the two-tailed Vampire. In those days, all aeroplanes were very different and so were the cars. No one would ever mistake a Humber Hawk for a Standard Vanguard, or a Ford Prefect for an Austin Seven. Billy’s favourite was the sporty Sunbeam Alpine, though he was thrilled when he spotted an Armstrong Siddeley, with its badge shaped like a sphinx, or a Triumph Mayflower, like a petite limousine.

Nowadays, Stewartville Street is accessible only to pedestrians, but at that time cars could drive in and park in the centre of his street. These beauties were never locked, so he would sneak inside to toot the horn and take in a deep whiff of leather seat. He thought all vehicles were wonderful things.

Another saving grace in Billy’s life was his love of being a Wolf Cub. In his navy pullover, green cap with yellow piping, Wolf Cub badge and an orange-and-green ‘neckie’ with its leather woggle, Billy happily trotted to school after hours.

‘Dyb dyb dyb dyb.’

Their tribal leader. Akela, also known as Mrs Lamont, a posh woman from up the road, would stand in the centre of the ring of Cubs.

‘Akela, we’ll do our best!’

‘Dyb dyb dyb dyb … Do your best.’

‘We’ll dob dob dob dob … WOOF!’

Later on, when Billy graduated to becoming a Scout, he found the boys were divided into patrols that had animal names. He had fancied himself as a Cobra or a Buffalo and was embarrassed to be placed among the Peewits. However, being a Scout gave him a love of the outdoors that has never left him. Billy still jokes about the novelty of a country visit for Glasgow city children of the time: ‘They take you to the countryside once a year. It’s supposed to be good for you. The teachers say: “See that green stuff over there? Grass. See the brown things walking about on it? Cows. Don’t break them and be back here in half an hour.”’