Those Shameful Blue Pyjamas


By Turlough
- 193 reads
Those Shameful Blue Pyjamas
‘I’ll see you tonight Tommy,’ I would say, or ‘I’ll see you in the morning Tommy,’ depending upon which of the day’s two pub closing times it was that had just passed.
Tommy’s reply was always, ‘I hope so Terry lad’ with a hefty hint of doom in his voice as if he was expecting that, at best, one of the two of us would drop dead before Leeds’ old Victoria Hotel reopened or, at worst, there would be a mighty wind, so mighty as to lay low all the public houses of the Earth.
We had this same exchange of words at the end of every shift that I worked and I was sure that on the days that I wasn’t pulling pints and washing glasses he would have gone through this same morbid farewell routine with one of my colleagues.
In the England of 1980, the pubs all closed for two and a half hours every afternoon (and double that on the Sabbath) which meant that Tommy had to tear himself and his feet away from the sticky stale-beer-infested carpet and the familiar comfort of the stained and battered old table near to the midway point of the long bar and go home twice a day, seven days a week. When I heard in 1988 that the licensing laws were to change to permit all day opening, Tommy was the first person that I thought of. Would his week simultaneously change to comprise of seven incredibly long sessions instead of fourteen very long sessions or would he show restraint with self-imposed siestas? At that point, however, I’d changed jobs several times so I hadn’t seen him for donkeys and I had an inkling that he may have heard the landlord’s bell ring for last orders for the final time.
Wee Tommy Pattison had been born in the East End of Glasgow in the 1930s and insisted that he had been a Celtic supporter from the moment he burst free from his poor mother’s womb. During the early part of his life he never missed a match. Even when he’d no money he’d always managed to get a turnstile operator to turn a blind eye or his pals to give him a leg up over the Parkhead stadium wall. Although a short man, he wasn’t the first Scot to have been referred to as ‘ten stone of barbed wire’ so his requests for help in this way had really been demands, and the tone of his voice and his muscles meant that they were rarely turned down.
Back in May 1967, something incredible had happened that meant he would see his beloved team play football for a final time. It was a long story that he apparently took great delight in telling. So one cold afternoon almost thirteen years after the event, when none of his drinking partners had braved the weather to join him in our bar and I had very few customers to serve, he recounted to me in full the tale of how he had gone all the way to Lisbon to watch Celtic beat Inter Milan in the final of the European Cup. At the time, his family had said he couldn’t go because he had no money. His workmates insisted he couldn’t go because he wouldn’t be able to get time off from his porter’s job in the markets. Public transport employees the length of the rail journey from Glasgow Central to Lisbon Central (as he called it) told him he couldn’t go because he didn’t have a ticket for the trains, let alone for the game. But he went anyway.
For most of the 1,300 miles of railway track and the short ferry crossing from Dover to Calais, he hid in toilets to avoid conductors. He lived off bread and cheap wine that he bought using the few crumpled Clydesdale Bank ten shilling notes his fiancée had insisted he saved towards their wedding, and on the day of the big match he found a way into the stadium through a hole in the fence along with a fair few other supporters from both sides. Beating the Italians by two goals to one, Celtic became the new European Champions. They were immediately hailed as legends. They were crowned ‘The Lisbon Lions’, which is an epithet that those men have retained to this day. The streets of Portugal’s capital became the scene of a massive party as everybody who had made the journey from Glasgow was elated and inebriated, until it was time to go home.
Young Mr Pattison had spent every penny of his nuptial fund and, left behind by fellow supporters who had taken him under their wings on the outward leg but who were suddenly in a hurry to get home, he was all alone in a foreign land. He set off Scotland-bound on foot, hitched lifts from sympathetic lorry drivers, hid in yet more train toilets and guards’ vans, and even raised a little cash to finance a short stretch of the journey by working as a labourer on a building site in a small town in France, the name of which he couldn’t remember. Then, several months after his team’s magnificent victory, he arrived in Leeds, only slightly more than 200 miles from Glasgow and home. But there he was physically ejected from his train by a burly ticket inspector, and threatened with prosecution if he ever tried to cheat the British Railways Board out of revenue again.
This was where his journey ended. His sister lived in Leeds. She was a sewing machine operator who had married a coalminer and together they had moved to Yorkshire where they knew there would be ample work. He had remembered someone in Glasgow saying that the couple lived in the Woodhouse district of Leeds so that was where he headed to ask around in the pubs, of which there were many at that time, in the hope of finding someone who could tell him the whereabouts of his sibling and her spouse. Eventually, after several nights spent sleeping rough, he was successful.
His sister, although distressed by his turning up on her doorstep with his tramp-like appearance and aroma, took him in as she thought his staying there for a while might help her overcome her homesickness. Scrubbed up and forced into making the promise that he would improve his behaviour, he found a job in a tailoring factory and started to do alright for himself, eventually falling in love and marrying a local girl, Kath, with whom he had at least three children that I knew of. He never returned to Glasgow because he was afraid of the battering he might get from the family of the fiancée that he’d so cruelly left behind, as well as from his own family whose good Roman Catholic reputation he had tarnished. His own family, however, would travel down to Leeds to visit him from time to time. I met them on several occasions and it was clear that there was never any sign of domestic violence or even animosity towards him from them. In fact, they seemed like a lovely, tolerant and very forgiving group of people. Their preference for Skol lager over the traditional local ales from Joshua Tetley’s old brewery caused him to mistrust them though, as he considered all those ‘fancy new German beers from Scandinavia’ a bit pretentious.
Tommy never left the house without his all-weather clothing. This comprised of a black tweed suit with shiny elbows and knees, and a white-ish Bri-Nylon shirt. Around his neck was a dark green tie that had been tied in the same knot since the day traffic lights were installed in Shettleston, and adjusted twice daily for the sake of getting it over his head once in each direction. That head was permanently protected by a tammy of the green and blue tartan of the Pattison clan, the woollen ball having been cut from its crown so he didn’t look like an English tourist. This ‘bonnet’, according to Kath, was never removed for any reason other than the positioning of the green tie. On very cold days he would pull it down a little to cover the tops of his ears and on very hot days he would tilt it back to expose an extra inch of his sweaty forehead to the fresh air and protect the back of his neck from the intensity of the Leeds sun. On his feet he always wore a pair of black PVC shoes. I didn’t pay enough attention to notice if they were the same pair every day but one lunchtime, after a heavy overnight fall of snow, he arrived at the bar about thirty minutes later than usual wearing a pair of wellingtons inside of which he had tucked the bottoms of his trouser legs. Other customers remarked with great amusement that he looked like a member of the band, Duran Duran. After such humiliation, the welly boots were never seen again in public. For him to have been so deeply offended we assumed that he must have been a fan of the rival Spandau Ballet group.
Tommy would visit the long bar in the Vic fourteen times every week. Very occasionally he would miss a session if his bronchitis was playing him up, and he would always boycott our pub, and every pub in the country, for a day and a half after the Chancellor’s annual budget in protest at the extra penny that was usually added to the excise duty on a pint. He always drank Tetley’s mild, erroneously believing it to contain less alcohol than bitter and kinder to the human digestive system. I remember the cost of a pint of mild being 31p at the time. Bitter was 33p and those who chose to drink it would brag that they could have three pints and still have a bit of change out of a pound note. Consequently, most of them would go home with 3p in their pockets at the end of the night. I once pointed out to Tommy’s friend, Scrapyard Eric, that if he maintained the same pace of his bitter drinking every single night and saved all those pennies in multiples of three in a tin, it would mean that once every eleven days he’d have enough money for an extra pint, which was equivalent to thirty-three extra pints every year. Excited by this news, he once spent an entire evening trying to calculate on the back of a beermat with a little blue biro stolen from Ladbroke’s betting shop the effects of a leap year on his finances. The statistics were even better for mild drinkers, like Tommy, but Eric remarked that mild was a ‘lasses’ drink’.
Despite his extraordinary intake of beer, Tommy never appeared to be drunk. He would pride himself in only having four pints at lunchtime. ‘One pint per hour is enough for any man,’ he would state philosophically. Evening sessions were five and a half hours and during those he would have more companions around him to keep pace with, so the flow rate was increased. I could tell when his pint count had gone into double figures as he would start singing My Love is Like a Red Red Rose as a fond acknowledgement of the respective verse-writing and singing talents of Robbie Burns and Kenneth McKellar. At this point he would send his love, Kath, to the bar to buy a whisky and just a half pint glass of mild (he didn’t want to appear an alcoholic) and a Babycham for her ‘beautiful self’.
I once asked him how he could afford to spend so much of his time and money sitting in our pub with a pint pot in front of him. Looking around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping before he spoke, he confided in me, ‘The secret is that I don’t smoke. Cigarettes are an awful waste of money that can be better spent on things that won’t harm your body.’ I heard from other sources that he was sponsored heavily by the Department of Health and Social Security, having been signed off work on the sick years earlier when doctors had found a shadow of something on his lung. Probably a shadow of a pint! The wages that the lovely Mrs Pattison brought home from her office cleaning job covered the cost of their food, rent, gas, electricity, clothes and the habitual August bank holiday Monday bus trip to Scarborough. I imagined that their gas and electricity bills were quite low as neither of them were ever in the house to use any.
The last time I saw Tommy he was in hospital. It was Leeds General Infirmary that they’d rushed him to after he’d collapsed in the street. The entrance to the accident and emergency department was probably only slightly nearer to the Victoria than it was to where he lived. He’d have walked past it four times each day as he went back and forth on his quests to enjoy a skinful of ale so, despite the inconvenience of him suffering a near death experience, the location couldn’t have been more convenient for family and friends wishing to visit him and then have a drink to cheer themselves up.
I went to see him one afternoon while the pub was closed. I often struggled to fill the interval between my shifts, and to make the long bus journey to where I lived on the outskirts of the city, and back again, just wasn’t worth the time and effort that it would have taken. So a hospital visit seemed a very worthwhile pastime to fill my two-hour void. And also I’d missed the regular three minute chats we’d always had each time he came up to the bar for refill. He smiled more often than most of our punters, though it would have only taken a sly smirk once or twice a week to accomplish that feat. I’d never seen him between the hours of 3:15 and 5:30 p.m. before so I didn’t know what to expect when I saw him. Other pub regulars had warned me, however, that he had suffered a stroke and was in a bad way.
Half propped up in his bed by pillows greater in volume than he was himself, he looked pale and gaunt. In the time that I had known him he could never have been described as a picture of good health, but as he lay there with tubes and wires attached to every square inch of his exposed flesh, he looked like he hadn’t an ounce of life left in him. He was wearing little more than a white cotton hospital gown. His Pattison tartan cap made him recognisable but his dentures were strictly out of bounds, their absence making him appear barely human. A nurse explained that his apparel wasn’t in accordance with the normal hospital procedure but the first time he had come round after being admitted he had kicked up such a fuss about what they had dressed him in that they had had to make some concessions.
During his first minutes of consciousness he had looked around the room in an attempt to understand where he was and what had happened to him. Then, as a small degree of clarity kicked in, he noticed the colour of his pyjamas and kicked off in a blind rage, shouting ‘Blue! Blue! Fucking blue! Get this Glasgow Rangers proddy blue shite off my back!’ before returning to his comatose state for the remainder of the day.
At the point of transferring him from the emergency admissions area to the ward where he was likely to stay for quite some time for observation during recovery, they had clothed him in standard hospital wear to make him look respectable. Unfortunately, West Indian nurses working in West Yorkshire hospitals had little knowledge of sectarian football tribalism but they could understand that to leave him dressed as he was would only bring chaos and disaster. Kath and his family, whilst visiting, had confirmed that Tommy had never owned a pair of pyjamas of any colour, but if he had then they would certainly have been of Celtic green.
The day after his outburst, one of the nurses had managed to find a yellow pair in a store cupboard, but in his state of bewilderment he hadn’t trusted her and told her, in quite harsh terms, what to do with them. In the end it was accepted that he would stick with the white cotton gown that he had agreed to as an alternative to nudity, even though Kath had pointed out that he looked like he was wearing a shroud.
On the day that I visited him I didn’t stay long at his bedside as, having never experienced such circumstances before, I found it difficult to make conversation. He seemed very calm and at peace with the world as he drifted in and out of consciousness, but he wasn’t able to talk much. After half an hour of feeling a bit awkward I stood up, leant to put an affectionate hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ll see you again soon Tommy.’
Attempting a smile with his thin, almost paralysed lips, he mumbled a reply. ‘I hope so Terry lad.’
But I never did.
Image:
Where Terry met Tommy… the Victoria Family & Commercial Hotel, located in Great George Street, just behind Leeds Town Hall. My own photograph.
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Comments
A brilliant pen portrait -
A brilliant pen portrait - well done!
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Stood out from the page
Tommy really jumped out from the page, I could hear him. Great job
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What a character Tommy must
What a character Tommy must have been, a real eccentric that needed to be written about.
Enjoyed reading Turlough.
Jenny.
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Brilliant, really enjoyed.
Brilliant, really enjoyed. You are great at immortalising those you have met
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Beautiful. Yes, more
Beautiful. Yes, more wonderful character-filled episodes please!
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the character is in the
the character is in the character and he's right about that blue Proddy shite.
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So did I - what an
So did I - what an astonishing coincidence! : )
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This is our wonderful Pick of
This is our wonderful Pick of the Day. A treat to read in front of my dear friend, the electric fan, when I got home. Thank you. Do share on social media.
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