Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson
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
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