Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson
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