Dessy

I never knew my Da’ until he died then I didn’t know him a bit longer. When my mum gave birth to me I wasn’t expected to live. Maternity was contagious and mothers were wheeshed away to Brae Holm in Dumbarton for it to pass. Da’ was about the age I am now, about fifty, and went to the pub with his pals to celebrate or commiserate. There was no way of knowing because he didn’t talk much to us, his children. It was more in terms of orders. ‘Turn that over, that’s rubbish, complete garbage,’ he’d shout from the kitchen doorway, just as me and my brothers and sisters and 15 million others had all tuned in to watch Top of the Pops. My sisters, Jo and Phyllis, moaned, flicked their hair and flapped their hands about, banging doors as they retreated to their room. My older brother, Stephen, would slip quietly out of the house to smoke and drink and fight. Smoking was frowned upon, but singles could be bought at most newsagents for five pence with Kola Kubes, Sherbet Dabs, Sour Plums and Cinnamon Balls, which were my favourite and turned your tongue black. And smoking at least was seen as keeping you out of trouble. Underage drinking got you into trouble and fighting was the fault of the drink and that wasn’t anybody’s fault. When my brother Stephen couldn’t find anyone to fight he fought with his mates Jaz and Billy Quinn, but not in a bad way.

Me and my wee brother, Bod, sat squashed knee to knee, bum to bum, into the same front row seat on the floor, with our backs against the real orange leather upholstery of the chair. The Venetian blinds shut off the distraction of daylight and the chairs were angled, like Daleks, towards the telly. We weren’t that bothered about missing Top of the Pops, but in later years when Da’ said the same thing when Star Trek was on, whether it was on a Tuesday or a Thursday, or whatever night, then I held a life-long grudge. It didn’t affect him much. Da’ didn’t have anything to do with us. He lived in a cave at the end of pier at the end of our hall. The only reason we visited him was because our mum also slept beside him at night. When we became rich enough to get a phone installed it sat on a little table at the front door with a brown cushioned seat where you could talk comfortably. On the first ring, however, Da’ would be sitting straight-backed in bed, where he did his reading, waiting to see who answered. His room door creaked open and he’d stumble bare-footed to the top of the hall, where it swung ninety degrees towards the front door, snorting like a dragon through his nose, and waiting until the phone had been put down. If it was one of my sisters he would retreat step by step back to his lair. If it was one of us boys, however, he could hardly contain himself. We’d look up into the shadows of the hall and know, know he’d be waiting. All of our phone calls thus tended to be a ‘hi,’ and a ‘bye’ with a bit shouted in-between. There was no explaining that you didn’t pay for incoming calls. ‘What do you think you’re doing? That’s no’ a piano,’ he’d say, ‘that’s no’ a piano’. He had a lighter tone with my sister’s Jo and Phyllis. ‘Who was that you were hee-hawing to on the phone this time?’ Phyllis his ‘wee one,’ could tell him off, and Jo could argue with him, something he didn’t allow us boys to do.

We lived in a four-in-a block prefabs I imagined could be opened up with a big tin-opener and a big hand pushing down and inside. They were post-Second World War shells of a house, with the wind blowing through the steel frames and ice forming on the inside of windows, giving us double-glazing. One of Da’s tricks was to open all of the windows ten minutes before my mum got in from her job as a Home Help, ‘to let a bit of air in’, and start ‘gutting the place’. My wee brother and me froze in stages, trying to watch telly for warmth. Turning on two bars on the electric fire wasn’t an option, while he clattered the hoover about between chairs, and regarded as the worst kind of mortal sin,. But if he was putting on the full performance before my mum got in, invariably all the chairs in the living room were piled higgledy-piggeldy on top of each other to get at the dirt beneath them. The kitchen, however, was his domain. He liked to sit on the edge a kitchen seat short-sightedly staring at the heels of socks the grain pulled tight against the round frame of a Vaseline tin as if they’d darn themselves. He peeled potatoes, made endless cups of tea and snacks, whilst listening to Radio Athlone, a station we all detested. The flap from the grill door was a temporary table, where he placed his mug and could reach out like an octopus for all the things he needed which were within arm’s length. Making tea was a full-time occupation. Tea was shovelled loose- leaf out of the tin caddy with a brass measuring spoon, and into the tea-pot which was heated on the electric ring and often stewed. Sugar helped save stewed tea. Two sugars was the norm to wean kids, but some, like my brother’s pals, took four or five in a mug. Lips had to be pursed in a closed-mouth kiss so that leaves didn’t swill around your mouth and stayed in the bottom of the mug. If there was one room Da’ insisted on gutting it was the kitchen. In better weather the kitchen table, two kitchen chairs and an orphan chair that came from nowhere would be put out the backdoor and onto the concrete stairs that led to the back garden. The bread bin and any odds and ends would be piled on top of them. When it was raining, as it always was, the table chairs and knick-knacks would be plonked into the living room, or out into the hallway. The cooker would be pulled out from the wall, so he could sweep behind it. He’d have his head in the oven and start scouring it with the corner of a Brillo pad he’d saved for such an occasion. My mum would know he was hash-bashing because as she walked up the hill she would be able to see all the windows open. Before taking off her coat and hanging it on the wardrobe door in the hall she would shut all the windows,, but would have to wait to make our dinner, while Da’ huffed and puffed and complained because the place was like a shite-hole.

All Da’s pals were called by their second name. There was McBride, McNamara, McGinly. They were our Uncles. When we were wee everybody was our Aunt or Uncle, apart from daft Rab up the stairs. He’d thick black framed NHS glasses which steamed up when he had his crash helmet on and sat diagonal on his broad nose, but was pigeon- necked, so that he looked at you sideways anyway. Daft Freddie was daft because he was daft Rab’s brother, but also daft in his own right, because all he did was stand at the side of the curtain and look down into our street with his head slanted to one side so that he could drink Tennant’s lager, look up the skirts of the Tennant’s girls printed on the side of the can without having to move anything but his lips. To the casual observer he looked as if he was mumbling prayers, but he wasn’t because he wasn’t a Catholic. They were not my uncles, but we were related by proximity. Our four-in-a-block was like a stage set and the house would shake when they started fighting. Instead of using the common place ‘ya fuckin’ bastard’, daft Rab would screech, ‘Freddy-Freddy, a’ll bloody well kill yeh, ya bastard’.The ceiling of our living room bounced like a wrestling ring, and the yellow light-shade jumped and flickered like a cinema projection as they rolled about killing each other. In particularly hard fought bouts the squares of the -yellowish from smoking- polystyrene roof tiles would sometimes fall, usually at the corners of the living room, or hang unstuck. Sometimes for a bit of variety they killed each other, first thing in the morning, in daft Freddie’s room which was above the girl’s, or during the afternoon matinees, in daft Rab’s, which was above us boys. They never grappled in the room above my mum and dad’s, because that had been their own mum’s room and was preserved that way in case she ever came back from the dead. My Da’ used to let out the longest sigh, shake his head, look over his specs and complain to my mum, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, those two half-wits are at it again, you better go up and do something’. But sometimes he’d look over my mum’s pink framed specs. He couldn’t find his own and had simply picked hers up and put them on the end of his nose. Daft Rab, like any good neighbour, left mum a spare key for emergencies. She used to go up and we’d hear daft Rab doing a bit of shouting about ‘that bloody bastard’. He didn’t usually swear, especially in front of my mum. After it had quieted she’d come down the stairs shaking her head and go into the kitchen to drink tea and smoke a mild cigarette, such as Embassy Mild, because only men smoked Woodbine Full Strength which turned the Anaglyptic piss-eyed yellow.

The only time mum wasn’t able to stop a fight was when daft Freddy knocked my wee brother Bod off a bike and strangled him. Bod was only about seven at that time and I’m not sure whose bike it was because nobody in our family had one, but it was probably one of the more affluent neighbours that lived in a land where bikes were ‘tuppence-ha’penny’. He’d been ‘in the wars’, as they used to say, and when he’d been about five had already set himself on fire. I don’t remember this episode although I was obviously there, because I was about nine and he used to sneak into my bed and lie beside me, because he was scared of the bogey man. I’ve a composite memory of it; fragments, of place and time. Sleep-smoking was not uncommon. It was early morning and mum and dad where having a long lie. My mum used to leave her cigarettes, an ashtray and box of matches at her side of the bed. Bod sneaked into their room and started playing with the match box and scratching matches against the grain, testing them and himself and the coloured whorls of his cotton jim-jammies jacket caught fire. Mum flung him in a bath of cold water. There must have been sirens and screaming and panic, but I can remember nothing but hospital visits and the burn from his stomach to chin, which retreated as he grew older to scar tissue that could hide under a t-shirt. At that time he had been up at the lane, beside the Hillhouse’s house, near the High school, and came in crying. It was one of those days when everybody was crowded into the living room and adjoining kitchen at the same time. Da’ shot out of his chair and our Stephen followed and the rest of us weren’t that far behind. Da’ rang on daft Rab’s bell and banged, banged, on his front door. We stood criss-cross footed on the concrete steps and heard the echo of pounding feet on the other side of the sheet- metal wall of the carpeted stairwell. The front door opened a crack at first and then a daft Rab sized gap. My mum grabbed at Da’s arm, trying to pull him away and Daft Rab was trying to explain, with his jaws going as if chewing penny- caramels and sideways spit bubbling like Alka Seltzer out of his mouth, but all we could hear was ‘Dessy, Dessy’. Then daft Freddy appeared at Daft Rab’s back and we all gained a stair as we climbed up behind Da’. Our Stephen gained the landing at the top of the stairs behind him. He had always been thin faced and ferret quick. Daft Rab was trying to block his front door with a lumpy body held together with red children’s braces, and blunted fingers that kept hitching up his trousers. Stephen sneaked round the side and under his arms and banjoed daft Freddy, who fell backward. My older brother followed him in and got a few dunts on the carpeted stairs and, in a noisy scrum of legs, arms, and glasses knocked off noses, daft Rab and daft Freddy got us out and their door shut. Later daft Rab came to our door. Mum let him in. We could hear his deep donkey voice braying in in the kitchen. Mum smoked fag after fag during the pow-wow, until the kitchen looked as if it had been attacked by smoke bombers. Thereafter they contented themselves with rolling about their own rooms, above us, and my mum still went up and down as if nothing had happened. Daft Rab still went out on his scooter twice a day on a run to check whether the street lights were working, a job he did for the Council, and every year he sat the proficiency test for his 50cc scooter and every year the reflective white L-plates stayed firmly tied to the bike’s frame until he had to get a new scooter and moved the same L-plates onto it.

If I jumped over the privet hedge and went up for Cammy and Jim then their parents weren’t my uncles of aunts because they were Protestants, but they were still Mr and Mrs Henry. Below them was the Summervilles. John Summerville hung around with us, when he didn’t need to watch his wee sister Janey Mong, but usually he did. His dad, Mr Summerville, was away working for the Shah of Iran, and his mum, Mrs Summerville, was an alky that peed the couch and had an affair with a guy from the Bowling club at Stevenson Street, which we found so funny, because his name was Hector and there was a children’s programme called ‘Hector’s house’, which featured a giant dog with its tongue hanging out. John stank of shite because Janey Mong stank of shite so we used to say, ‘Oh, Oh, Pongo,’ and hold our noses when we saw him with Janey trailing behind him shouting, ‘John, John, me, me,’ but then we quickly became bored with that and just treated him as we would any normal boy that stank of shite.

All though childhood we played endless games of football. Heidy-kicks were played against Summerville’s hedge and the chipped green paint of Chalmers’s wrought- iron double gates on the opposite pavement. Like ‘Kirby’, where hitting the ball against the kerb counted as a goal, only two people were needed to play. So I could play heidy-kicks against Jim, or Cammy, or even Summerville, who was rubbish. Bigger games of football were played on the grass parked triangle with older boys. Vanda Henry, Jim and Cammy’s eldest sister, also played. In her ten -bob black sannies she shimmied like a long haired kitten and was much better than her brothers ever would be at football, before she was tackled with bottle blondness, which revealed diamond cheek bones, tricked with the shadow of beauty and future glamour. Her sister Lorraine had a pancake face, no such problem, and didn’t play football so we didn’t see much of her. Side-offs involved the best players picking from the best to the worst for their team, and the teams playing until ten, or more usually, twenty goals were scored. Things to watch out for were dog shite and Chalmers. There wasn’t much of the former. People usually had children and not cats or dogs. The Summerville’s had Sandy, a golden Labrador that was cute as a puppy, but used to spend most of its mid-life years lolling with its tongue out, in their front garden, barking at anyone that passed and chasing car tyres. Chalmers, a scarecrow of a man, was much harder to deal with. His garden sloped down onto the grass triangle where we played out epic games. He’d start by chapping his window at us. Then he’d come out to shout and wave his arms. Some of the other older kids would give him cheek back, but with Dessy across the way I never would. By some kind of spoil-sport magic, Chalmers’ got a ‘No Ball Games,’ sign erected on the middle of our football pitch. Our games had to move side-ways onto the road or he would call the police on us.

Mrs Bell was through the wall to us with Peter, who had Down’s syndrome, the same as Janey, but was bald with a monk’s tonsure and well-fed barrel body, wired together by a clean checked shirt and plain coloured tie, ever-pressed slacks, with small black shiny shoes poking out. He was also the same age as my mum, so didn’t count as a Mong, had in a way outgrown it, but neither did he count as an Uncle or adult. The great mystery was that Peter’s second name was Clive and not Bell. This was hushed up. Us kids weren’t meant to know. He was just Peter to us. We couldn’t have cared less. I taught Peter how to read from Janet and John Book 4. He liked hovering around our house and learning to read. Dessy, however, didn’t. He liked him being next door, pronto, with Mrs Bell. He didn’t even like my mum going next door to help old Mrs Bell with the few things she couldn’t manage herself. ‘Sufferin’ Jesus,’ he’d huff and puff, when he found out, ‘what do you need to go next door for now?’

Everybody called him Peter, apart from Mrs Bell who called him ‘Pete.’ She used to recline in her chair like a statue of Queen Victoria, the two bar electric fire flinging out heat, with her T.V. Times and antimacassars, smoking Embassy Mild and flicking ash into the stand of her ashtray. What I coveted most, when I was sent next door with a message, was her letter opener on the mantelpiece which was shaped like a gold dagger. ‘That’s enough Pete’, she’d say, because Peter had a tendency to ask whoever was visiting how Mrs--, and he’d mention somebody, and their date of birth, and when their birthday was, and how much of a nice woman she was then he’d move onto somebody else, and much the same thing would happen. Only it didn’t, because Mrs Bell used to just send him to his room. He loved music of all kinds, especially military martial music and was allowed to play a 33 rpm for a few spins until Mrs Bell decided that also was enough and Pete should go to bed. Mrs Bell was a pensioner, or old fossil as we used to call them, and about the same age as Piltdown man. Our imagination could not stretch that far back, so the scandal of Pete being a Clive and not a Bell, never touched us.

Up above the Bell’s was Mr and Mrs Douglas, but they were really old, about late fiftyish, with no children. He worked in Rolls Royce, but drove a red car. We didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us, although sometimes we would jump their hedge in the Grand National summer event, across all the hedges in our backs, finishing up and over their hedge and onto the dump at the side of his garden, just for the hell of it.

Japanese cars hadn’t been invented yet. My Uncle John McBride was the only person we knew with a car, a green Ford. McBride was always wheeler-dealing so that the price he paid for it kept coming down until I’m sure Uncle John was paid for taking it off the guy’s hands. It was a great runner. That was all that mattered. Being partially blind, having no MOT or Insurance and no license didn’t stop the car being a great runner. McBride had been known to squeeze our whole family, five kids and my mum and dad, into that car and take us to Wemyss Bay about forty miles away. There wasn’t even room to be car sick. Needless to say, when my Uncle John had to sell that Ford after about five years he got more money than he paid for it, because it was such a great runner.

When my sister Jo got married and moved down to Wemyss Bay my Da’ decided to walk down and see her. He didn’t believe on wasting money on buses or trains and liked walking. He often walked to Parkhead to watch Celtic, about twelve miles away, and walked back when the game was finished. If my Uncle John offered him a lift in his green machine he’d say ‘a don’t mind’. He’d never agree to anything, whether if it was if he wanted more potatoes, or a lift to or from Parkhead, his answer was always ‘no’, or ‘a don’t mind’, as if whatever was being offered had been forced upon him.

Like many of his generation he did mind and distrusted foreign food. There were always scare stories about Chinkies cooking cat and dogs. Rats, of course, were a great delicacy. Even mum wasn’t immune to this idea, she didn’t like any of that foreign muck, so that whenever we never had potatoes for dinner we had chips. Da’ even had a pal from the army called Paki and he ate the same as us. Da’ and McNamara when they got drunk on banana rum rattled on about The Gothic Line and Paki. Paki was one of their great friends from the Italian campaign during the Second World War. He didn’t come from Pakistan, he came from The View, where all the older Catholics in our area came from, and his mum and dad had some Italian blood so he was more tanned than the rest, with black hair, hence the Paki title, which stuck to him even in middle age. My sister Phyllis was the first one in our house to buy a curry. We all thought it smelled terrible and made faces that said it looked like food mixed in a toilet bowl. When we tasted it we thought different. We couldn’t get enough and the smell was Pied Piperish. Phyllis had to eat her curry outside. Da’ was the worst. He used to get an outsider of white bread from the bottom of the loaf and say to her, ‘put a wee bit of your Chinee on there,’ and he’d hold out the slice of bread and wait for her to put some down on it. He never said Chinese. That would be like giving in. It was always Chinee and he’d put another slice of white bread on top and make a Chinee sandwich, which he didn’t mind and would slabber down. He didn’t use cutlery much. Perhaps as a throwback to the Gothic line he attacked his food as if it was sitting on a mess tin, sometimes with a knife, and sometimes with a spoon, and never with a fork.

Da’ didn’t believe in noise. He liked the telly on full blast at 6 a.m. even though there was nothing on but test card music, Radio Athlone in the kitchen discussing Farming News and the prices of milk, and doors slamming shaking the house as he wandered from room to room. Everything was ‘san-fere-ann’ at that time when nobody in the world was up, but him. That was when he made the toast for our breakfast before school. He’d grill the white bread and put margarine on it until it bubbled and glazed, like a smashed windscreen. About half eight he’d crash into the room and put a cup of stewed tea, with two sugars, down at one side of your bed with a slice of toast sitting on top of the rim, getting steamed in a tight circle from below. The rest of the slice of toast was hard as cardboard. He’d put it back under the grill to heat it up so the glaze of the margarine peeled off like dandruff. ‘There’s your toast,’ he’d say, and ‘cup of tea, cup of tea.’ He’d say that twice in case you never heard him. There would only be me and my younger brother in the room. My older brother would have gone through the same routine before he went to work earlier, as would my sisters, who hid the toast underneath the fireplace.

The weekends were kept for his best enactments. His speciality was hanging onto the window with one leg and scratching with his nails on a streak of dirt with his long grey nails. He was a daylight Nosferatu who pounced when we were meant to be having a long lie, clawing to get in. Through the shutters of the Venetian blinds his shadow would work its way along the ledge with a damp cloth wiping them down. Alexander, a window cleaner, with a stray dog that followed him about, did daft Rab’s windows above us for a £1, but Da’ thought he was a shitepole and paying money to get windows cleaned when he could skulk and cling was in his eyes a crime of the highest magnitude.
‘Am no’ daeing any harm am I?’ was his cry to any complaints from my sisters. As he got older part of his routine was to go to early morning Holy mass. It was never just mass. It was Holy mass, with the chest thrust out through his open necked shirt like a sticky-on cuirass. ‘Just content yourself,’ he’d say, to any and most queries. As an ex-Communist, he contented himself with a gold chain and little crucifix dangling. I think he’d taken it from my sister’s jewellery box. My Uncle John was ahead of him in this department. There was a lot of ink spent on religious rivalry. Jesus had never died so many times. He’d the crucifixion tattooed onto his right arm and, as if that wasn’t enough, got it wide-screen with the same mural tattooed from chest to stomach, and up covering his back. Da’ developed a magpie quality in later years wandering up to the shops with his sandals on and pyjama top, or for a bit of variety my mum’s pink anorak. He’d slip his feet into my best Weegin shoes, or dawn my black velvet Jacket to stroll around the Shopping Centre. ‘What harm am a doin’?’ he’d ask. His favourite get-up was a pair of Jesus sandals and pair of shorts. He’d be outside sunning himself at the first blink of sunlight. People would be passing with their donkey- jackets on and he’d be sitting or on his hands and knees picking daisies from the front lawn. That saved him having to cut the grass, but he didn’t take much interest in our garden. In warmer weather instead of putting on sunblock he’d plaster himself in Vaseline and slowly cook. At night his face would be thermalight red, a colour frequency that had only recently been detected on the sulphurous face of Mars. When he went to Holy Mass he showed a bit of decorum and stuck his penny a packet stick of P.K. chewing gum behind his ear for later. Holy Mass was a penance for him and always seemed to start ten minutes before he got there, but he was a creature of habit and would take the same seat near the front and side altar of St Stephens, where he would stretch himself out. His ideal priest was Father Bowles at Our Lady of Loreto, a Letterkenny man, who conducted masses like a Derby, with Jesus on the inside track, Jesus popping up and on the outside and Jesus winning it for God at the bell, and he’d still have time to shout and excoriate men for drinking too much and swearing too much and women for quietly being too much like women, and the cause of all damnation, and fling in, for a fast finish a shouted reminder that money was needed for roof repairs. All of this holiness and done in ten minutes. Longer masses by Canon Connelly had Da’ idling like a car left in the rain at a traffic light. He wasn’t good at concealing his feelings, so with no gum to chew, his eyes would roll and he’d look about him for salvation and let out deeps sighs and deep breaths like a swimmer coming up for air. He jumped up at the chance to go to Holy Communion and walked down the aisle and straight out the door, sticking his chewing in his mouth as he hurried. Like any good dramatist, he went in late and left early.

Da’ had a term for people he didn’t know, or didn’t like, and that was shitehouse. One guy in particular that used to make his face go purple with fury was that big shitehouse that worked in the public baths in Clydebank. The old baths at Hall Street were shutting down and the new baths at Bath Street were two-pence in. Every hour the pool was cleared, whistles were blown and sometimes shitehouse would be in the pool clearing us kids out. He was massive about twenty five stone. Da’ didn’t like fat people and the way shitehouse used to flubby-dubby up the pool and fling kids this way and that until the pool was cleared. We’d rush to get changed and stand outside shivering with towels around our waists with our two-pence, at the ready, to get back in. The irritating ones among us could afford a hot chocolate or soup, which was also two-pence out of the vending machine and tasted the best thing in the world. Shitehouse would be waiting for us like a capo on the inside, ready to throw his weight around. I never expected to see him again when the new baths closed, but I was wrong.

Da’ nudged me at my brother’s funeral. The Requiem mass had been said and we’d got out of the car at Dalmottar where a cold wind blows and it always rains. We couldn’t find the grave at first, which sounds stupid, especially when about one hundred people are behind you spread out like a black knotted mantilla. Da’ didn’t need to say anything, but angle his eyebrows and I heard the words clearly in my head, ‘big shitehouse’. He was standing beside the boards wearing the tan overcoat of the grave digger, with others wearing the same get-up. Later, I heard Da in the church hall, where we had the do, talking to McNammara about ‘the big shitehawk’. The shitehouse had flown. It was Da’s turn for Dalnottar next.