Watsons and McNeil, drowning 25th August 1972.

The boys that drowned in the nolly, Dalmuir canal, on 25^th August 1972, were much the same age as me. Children of the Cuban Missle Crisis. We went to the same school. Their four white coffins where placed in the church my family regularly attended, St Stephen’s, but I’d little memory of them, other than folklore and warning of what might happen to you if you went near the canal. A bogey-man story. The boys who died were William, George and Robert Watson, aged eleven, ten and nine of Kitchener Street, Clydebank, and their friend, ten-year-old John McNeil also of Kitchener Street. Our family lived in a tenement on Dumbarton Road. The boys would have gone to Jennie’s shop which was below us for sweets and comics (and fags) and Maise’s for messages. We were worlds apart, but just over the road.

Lifetimes later, I’m moved into the Castle Street tenements, which used to be called Kitchener Street. Jellicoe Street running parallel, where a father did his son’s shift at work at the Royal Ordinance Factory and came back to find the house gone, the street gone, and all fifteen of his family, the Rock’s family, wiped out during the first night of the bombing, The Clydebank Blitz. These were the kinda thing I knew, but not people I knew.

I wrote a novel in which a wee girl drowning in the nolly, was a major plot point (I brought her back to life), but there was no resurrection for the Watson brother’s or their pal, John McNeil. I guess many of us have got stories of near-drowning experiences.

My da, Dessy, used it as a learning tool. My brother Stephen, or Sev, as he liked to be known, would have gone to school in grey short trousers, blue shirt and banded tie with William, the oldest of the Watson brothers. Danced on one leg while showing my da the front crawl in the old baths, opposite the Police Station at Hall Street. My da’s test was to pick Stephen up and drop him in the deep end, six-feet. Sink or swim.

I watched Stephen drowning when we went on a trip to Wemyss Bay. Up until then, the highlight of the trip had been tea tasting of wood smoke my da made on a campfire. Buoys had been set out to show the deeper water on the ferry route to Rothesay. My brother had swum out, far beyond everyone else, and held on to one. I rushed to tell my da, he was drowning, but he seemed in no particular hurry, squinting at me to make sure. By the time my da was breaking through the waves, my brother was swimming back to shore. Perhaps I was joking. No fuss was made.  

The water in the nolly was about ten-foot deep in parts, but it was largely unused in 1972, no boats or traffic, with silt and weeds encroaching and holding hands and making it seem much shallower and murkier. Singers factory waste once discharged into it, and as a civic act to keep it clean, filled it with goldfish which swam in shoals through junk routinely dropped, before they disappeared to predators.

The stone and dirt path cut through overgrowing trees and weeds.  Police walked the bank and used grappling hooks, which recovered three of the bodies. The stink from the sewerage plant behind them. The fourth body was found by a diver from the navy, who cried when he lifted his mask and the body onto the banking.   

Every generation is told not to swim in the canal, but ignore their parent’s warning. Hall Street baths were still open, but so were the new modern baths a block along from them at Hume Street, with a seven-foot deep end. They still had slipper baths with hard grey soap, and with an aged attendant, because not all the houses in Clydebank had a bathroom or a bath. Our house on Dumbarton Road, for example, fitted into that category.  

My pals and me walked from Parkhall, our tin, jerry-built, three-bedroom council houses and bathrooms, down to Dalmuir and along the canal path to the new baths in Clydebank. Each session was an hour long. We queued outside, paying our ten pence fee at the turnstile before being let in to curtained cubicles echoing with shouts that ringed with the smell of chlorine and dash and splash of the pool.  An envelope, in which the attendant kept your money and valuables, cost extra. But everybody tucked their money into their shoes, confident no thief would think to look there. After forty-five minutes the attendants blew a whistle and hooked us out. We wriggled away, but were on the clock.  Usually, we kept our trunks on, flung a towel over your shoulder and rushed outside to get a better place in the queue for the next session. Clothes stuffed into a plastic bag. Hot chocolate, soup, or a cold drink cost another ten pence from the machine in the foyer. But that was a rare treat.

The day I drowned was a scorcher. Tar melted on the pavements, and we carved our initials on it, or, as a party trick, ate it. Football shorts and sannies. Tops tied around our waists. Slapping each other’s sunburnt and peeling backs, being a matter of honour, calamine lotion no longer working its magic and leaving a powdery scum. We’d stopped to watch some guys with a carry-out and rods fishing in the canal on top of a bay that jutted out. The older lads, Rab and Gordy had jumped down and into the water. I could sorta swim, splashing half a breadth across the pool of the baths when trying to catch my mates Cammy or Jim, in a game of tig. Summy was always easy to catch, because he was even worse at swimming than me, always last at whatever race we were running. Wendy the Wanking Machine might even let you feel her fanny if I caught her on the right day, in the right way. She was always good for a chasing.

Only I swum like a stone, I was at the bottom of the canal looking up at the light. Gordy pulled me up by the hair. The guys that were fishing came down to check I was OK, which worked out fine because Cammy stole two cans of lager, with glamourous pictures of leggy models embossed on the sides, from their unguarded carry-out.

A few years later, we headed down to Balloch on another hot summer day, during the school holidays. We tried to dog the train, not pay the fare going there or coming back. Most times it didn’t work. We’d spent all our money and it took three or four hours to walk home. But if you were allowed to stay on the train to the station beyond Balloch, where the Maid of the Loch was docked, it was money in the pocket. I was one of the first to climb up on the metal hut on the dock and dive into the cool water. It was about thirty feet, but I belly flopped.

Walking around to the beach which started off grass, with hundreds of colourful sunbathers claiming their bit of ground, then dropping onto stones which hurt unshod feet until we got in ankle-deep, then it became sand. Loch Lomond was ice-cold water. A jetty, rotted, like black tombstones in the water, gave us something to hold onto and explore. The jetty where the Maid of the Loch docked ran parallel with it.

Some people swum from one jetty to the other, but I was wary of it. I liked to have my feet on the ground. But Wendy the Wanking Machine had done it—breaststroke, half crawl, with a bit of backstroke. Gordy, even Cammy and Jim, who were no better swimmers than me.  Summy kept his head down and crossed doggedly. I couldn’t let them see it terrified me. I swam behind them as we crossed, one more time.

But it wasn’t like being in a swimming pool. The current in that stretch of water pushed me back. Every stroke I took didn’t seem to move me further forward, and when I looked up, the jetty was the same distance. When I looked to the shore I knew I’d never make it. I panicked and threshed at the water, shouting for help.

Wendy the Wanking Machine was first to reach me. Soon we had a convoy, with some bystanders coming over to help as they towed me back like an uninflatable duck.

‘Cramp,’ I said, tight-lipped. ‘Cramp.’  

Cramp was a killer. But so was the polystyrene packing lying around the old Turner’s site on the Clyde. Tam McSwiggan and Jim Smart pulled their pal Bernie Logue from a raft they’d put into the water on the Clyde side and clambered aboard. He couldn’t swim and it tipped over.  

Mr McLaughlin was walking his greyhounds down by the canal. He spotted the Watson boys and their pals playing with the polystyrene.  ‘Whit you up to?’ he asked.

‘Making a raft, mister,’ they shouted back.

But it was two rafts; they left their younger brother, James, onshore because he was too wee. One of their mates, Paul Harkins left them, because he had to go up the road to get their dinner.

Gerry Gallagher, who was much the same age as them, was fishing for goldfish on the bridge at Durban. He heard them shouting as they passed the bend at Yarrow’s Park. One of them went under, the others tried to help.

One of the guys I drunk  with in my local, ‘Tiny’ we called Paul, and we had a laugh, and I thought he was from Drumchapel. I never knew he was one of the Watson brothers from Dalmuir. His brother, Jaz, was there that day, the boys drowned. His partner, Tracey Pickering asked me, ‘How do you get a park bench, to honour them?’

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out,’ but I never did.

A ghost story. Water under the bridge for the rest of us.