Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson
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