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Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness/Notes From Overground:10

Robert K Hogg

We trudged back to the main road without any incident. I had felt some
apprehension in case the man that had shouted at us reappeared but there was no sign
of him. We had climbed the fence a bit further along just in case. I assumed he was a
farmer or some local. May be he’d shouted after us as walking though the field
damaged the crop. It was as likely to me we did no harm at all and he was just
another busybody who’d forgotten his own boyhood or was so embittered and
complacent now, that all he cared about was reminding us of who was the boss of
what; that this was his land. It was God’s or at least the world’s is how I looked at it.
That was where my awareness of my own freedom originated as we had traversed the
length of those fields earlier. It was a matter of context. The world was always
laying down the rules (and what was the world but the domination and browbeating
of the oldsters) and this was supposed to be an escape from the rules, from having to
sit at a desk for most of the day at school and carefully phrase every other thing you
said and even thought, and it was even worse at home.
It was absurd that this interfering idiot had tried to spoil our fun even in leisure
time - the school holidays – with his petty preoccupation over territory. It was the
same all over. We had got out of our town to temporarily escape this. We could get
this crap from other kids too if we found ourselves in the wrong area. Fortunately I
stuck to the large parks and even cemeteries. Anywhere there was an expanse of
earth and trees and bushes. Anything to experience a change from other people and
concrete. That was why it didn’t matter that the main road was only a mile or two
away at most. We could feel as free as if we were in the Highlands wilderness. Until
we were eaten by a bear. No bears there. I knew I would go back again sometime.
So I could indulge in the sense of having no cars or concerns. Like the Law Hill and
Balgay Park it would be a means of escape, only a more satisfying one. Its
significance for me went beyond anything I could articulate. All I knew was I was
drawn to it. In the meantime there was books and football and more birds the odd
fight if need be. I did go back but left it a bit late in the day but I was still determined
to set foot in the same area.

I didn’t get as far as the hill where I’d suffered the last time, but I did stop to
climb a tree after a pigeon - perhaps a wood-pigeon had flown from. The tree was
there on its own, bereft of any fellow companions. It seemed odd a bird would build
a nest in such a conspicuous spot until I recalled I was probably one of the very few
people who ever walked through there. It wasn’t even high up. There was an almost
grown fledgling there, eyeing me alertly before it got up on its feet. I knew I had
better not hang around this time after what happened before back in the old flats by
Lochee Road in Dundee. Walking alone this time, it felt somehow uniquely different.
I liked Alex a lot and knew he liked me but there was an even deeper sense of
freedom in being alone there. It meant I could allow my thoughts and the sensations
to flow along as they came to me. I could experience the landscape and myself
without having to filter it or interrupt it or even feel inhibited by the presence of
another, however slightly. All I had to do was watch where I was going and not do
anything impulsively and I’d be fine. I stopped to examine a thicket for a moment
and just then a bird flew by high in the sky and as I watched it I thought to myself,
somewhat archly, what a classically picturesque nature scene this is, myself as a boy
at this moment in time, and then an unexpected thing happened. In that moment of
inner and outer awareness it was as if my mind briefly and almost imperceptibly
expanded and time seemed to stop just for a split second and I felt something I had
never truly felt before, though I had experienced it in the briefest of glimpses and less
intensely or overtly. In this instance the past and future seemed to fade in a very real
way and that moment felt like all there was and all there needed to be. And as
quickly as it had come, it was gone.
I had focused on the scene with a certain degree of flippancy, probably feeling a
bit self-conscious over what I felt was a somewhat precious or even pretentious
observation and it had as quickly shifted into something else entirely. In its way it
was like the opposite of pain and my previous experience when with Alex and getting
stung (Not a comparison I was capable of making at the time, of course). What it was
was my first real inkling, my first real glimpse of eternity. As if that wasn’t weird
enough (and again, I didn’t make any connection between them) I had the surreal
experience of the earth underneath me feeling as if it was somehow emanating a
strange energy. Admittedly I was walking on a rather springy section of grassy turf
and in my ignorance I may have mistaken its zinginess for some odd energy due to
the sensation of bouncing. But the emotion I felt, of happiness and pure joy in being
alive seemed as connected with the ground, the earth, the world, as it could be I just
happened to be feeling happy and optimistic under the circumstances. What I’m
saying is it felt objectively real in some sense. That there really was an energy I had
somehow attuned to in that moment or it had attuned to me or both. In a more
protracted and immediate way than the glimpse of the eternal, I again felt that this
was really what life was about – because I was experiencing it. My former life – and
the life I would go back to – was only a pale reflection of this reality. Life if we
really wanted it to be – if I wanted it to be, could be a joy forever; or of not forever,
then as long as we lived in this strange world.
This was a glimpse, a taste of another world, a transformed world and a
transformed mind. It didn’t last of course, but in a very real way it has as I knew I
would never forget it. Or if I did it would come back to me. But the truth is it was
living in the moment again and I neither thought of the future or the past. I was
perfectly happy where I was. I neither thought of nor needed L. It was almost as if
she was there in my mind. The emotion was the same, but again it wasn’t an overt
connection I made then. It felt almost odd to have to be going back across the bridge
and to Dundee and school, it all seemed so irrelevant, yet now I felt an intense
affection at the thought of Alex, and Alan Anderson, and John Reilly and everyone
else I knew, including the girls I paid little attention to and the ones I did, and of L.
I had no idea what would happen with her if anything, yet it didn’t seem to
matter. I had never felt very urgently about the situation as, only a kid, still at
primary, I lived in the unconscious if mistaken belief it would last forever. Now I
knew it didn’t matter what happened and that in some sense I couldn’t articulate it did
last forever and I had nothing to worry about. Life meant well by me and the world
meant well by me and that meant the creator meant well by me – whatever happened.
An insight I came to forget as the next few years went by. But, unbeknownst to me,
the strangeness wasn’t over by a long shot. Back in town, it was business as usual.

My cousin Jimmy (a ‘ginger’ and a year or so older) and me – Jim to me; it was
our mums who called him Jimmy in the same way my mother called me Bobby – are
taking a walk up to the Law Hill. Or at least that’s how they might describe it but for
us it’s a trip, an expedition, and exploration in the literal sense of the word. We’re not
going there to pass the time though there is some truth is that as there’s far less to do
in my room than there was in his: I don’t have any games to speak of – it’s a place for
being alone and reading and thinking and consoling myself and having a laugh with
my brother; my self-made therapy and way of offsetting the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune and the impostors in the place of my elders and betters, and
anyway, we’re glad to get out and get away. Hanging around on home turf with my
mum within irrational and ugly tantrum distance (about fifteen down to two feet) is
no place for any even-tempered kid to be, and due to my sensitivity and intelligence.
I’m all the more prone or vulnerable to experiencing excruciating embarrassment and
humiliation. She knows this of course, but if I know it I all too quickly forget it in the
blaze of her psychopathic self-righteousness. Generating pretexts for her tirades is a
practised art with her now. Maybe it always was. Better to be out and about looking
for even scarier monsters that might not exist. I was less inclined to dismiss the
possibility when I had the daily reminder I was sharing my life with a women who
seemed to be possessed the majority of the time. ‘Jimmy’ was probably aware of
this. It was understood that when he came along with his mother – and he only came
because he could see me; his dad had better things to do – we’d get out of the house –
a council flat, as was theirs - as soon as was acceptable. There was a story I had
heard about ‘the Purple Man’ who lived somewhere on the Law. I’d never heard the
phrase ‘urban myth’, which would have given more of a sense of detachment from
the story.
I would walk up Campbell Street that led straight uphill to the Law in the lamplit
darkness some winter evening and the thought of this unfathomable creature would
drift to mind and before long I would be picturing him or it having walked down
from the Hill in the darkness and now he or it was skulking in the semi-darkness of
the closes I had to pass, my only other option to take a longer route from the other
side or cut straight through the back green to our close from the back, but this meant
having to walk in almost complete darkness by the garden sheds aligned in rows
there; the ideal opportunity for some nameless entity to skulk there in the darkness
and pounce on me as I passed and before I made it to the safety of the well-lit
sanctuary of our close, through even then I had to open the back door and what if by
some inexplicable and malignant chance it were locked? A vivid imagination could
make the most mundane walk home fraught with subdued anxiety and potential
terrors. I didn’t really believe it. Why then didn’t I just cut through the back green
when it was quicker and even more interesting? These were questions I could ask
myself at the time but never answer. There was nothing to be done about it. Kids
suffered from irrational fears and I was still a kid so that’s the way it was. Maybe I
wasn’t fully in control of my fears, my thoughts and even my mind right now, but
when I grew up or as I grew up, things would be different. My image of The Purple
Man gelled into this oddly light-spotted creature. Almost an alien being of some
kind.
It was years before I recalled another episode of The Outer Limits I’d been left
on my lonesome to watch some years before. I still have the little more than the
vaguest memory of it as the only thing I can recall – if memory it is and not a dream
is of people in what can only be a cinema watching a movie on screen. It’s of this
large humanlike being, very dark and no features that I can recall bit studded with
ethereal looking spots of light. I’m sitting watching this mesmerised, at the age of
five or six and suddenly, startlingly, impossibly, the creature steps out of the cinema
screen and for a flattering and unnerving moment my mind considers the possibility it
has stepped out of the TV too or this will be its next move. Whether the audience
panicked and ran, I can’t recall. I’ve always had the memory it was as that would be
the logical reaction, but maybe my mind when blank then I was so freaked out.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and thanks be to my
mothers relative neglect or indifference that I was fortunate enough to witness such a
mind-blowing scenario at such an early age - my first awareness of a dislocation of
reality as I had so far understood it. At perhaps five yours old I was introduced to the
possibility that nothing might be as it seemed and life and the world that I took to be
so real may be nothing more than flickering, flitting images on a screen. The mind
wobbled. If this was the case I wasn’t even remotely conscious of it of curse, but it
all went into my subconscious just the same. Life might prove to be far more
interesting than I’d known it to be so far with the foul-tempered woman in charge of
me. It also introduced the possibility of strangely spotted weird and possibly alien
creatures whose motives were as much as mystery as their origins. Spiders from
Mars I could look upon as like a surreal dream though they were as disturbing as they
were fascinating. If any ever appeared – and I was pretty sure they never would as
the thought also didn’t bear much thinking about - I would kick them thru the railings
and over the plettie (But I knew they would be far more intelligent and organised).
The most alarming image was the thought of seeing any in the small entranceway
from our outside door to the sitting room where we were. They’d be pretty big and I
couldn’t imagine stamping on their upturned and malevolent little faces. The
memory of them soon passed or so I’d assumed. I can recall approaching those old
flats from the rear in the dark, on the Hilltown where we lived – they were
demolished and replaced by multi-stories not long after) and feeling some trepidation
but never did I picture a gang of malignant-minded talking alien spiders from Mars
there waiting for me that I can recall. Which is just as well. Perhaps the
apprehension I felt over what my mother’s mood might be offset more intangible
creepy considerations. But I do have an image where I’m feeling so anxiety-stricken
I’m wondering if I’m capable of overcoming it enough so as to face the walk up those
often dark spiral stairways. It was a relief when I came to the landing before our
floor and could see the light from the nearest flats. I felt an obscure wish to know
how they lived and what they did in there. A part of the more mundane and everyday
questions I knew wouldn’t be answered, as that’s how life was. Worlds of separate
lives and separate homes and separate interests and goals. It seemed silly in a way
that I couldn’t do whatever occurred to me; that we couldn’t all be friends in a way.
Even with the weird and frightening beings I saw on TV. It was a pity they usually
meant us so much harm, or at least they did that hick Western town, running up all
over the floor and up and down their ceiling with their little legs. When I watched Dr
Who with the old white-haired Doctor and the episodes with the Zarbis who were big
insect-like creatures and a part of their head was detachable and when it came off and
ran over the floor I had to hide behind the settee. The Daleks I could handle. Later, I
was so enamoured of them they were a favourite drawing subject and I loved the
futuristic effect when they ‘Exterminated’ some poor character, so it was a
disappointment when I saw the movie version of the series some years later where
Peter Cushing, he of the Hammer Horrors I’d seen, fought with Daleks who’s deadly
weapon now consisted of a bland-looking knock-out gas. A year or two after we
moved to a better council I could cower behind the settee when Frankenstein was on
TV, as well as flit from sitting-room to kitchen as my Granddad was there, keeping an
eye on my mother and things had a semblance of normality again and I could laugh
over my own fear rather than repress it and feel guilty about. It was as if the
approaching Frankenstein monster’s – Frankenstein to us – filled the flat. Perhaps it
was the sequel, and I was filled with dread for the newly wed he was about to murder.
The shower scene in the movie Psycho was an almost unbearable flurry of knife
slashes and blood. It was nothing of the kind of course as well as made in black and
white but my imagination filled in the rest.

At the summit of the Law there is a quite high and definitely hollow monument
made from concrete. A large metal door closed off the entrance. There was no
budging that one. What was as maddening as it was tantalising was there was a
significant gap of an inch or two between the bottom of the door and the concrete
base. But no matter how long I might crouch there peering into the darkness the
darkness stubbornly persisted. Sometimes I thought I could see the odd shape or
even a platform of some kind before it faded into the blackness again as if it had
never been and as I knew was more likely to be the case. A minor event that became
the usual fodder for dreams after the image came to mind that the interior contained
skulls. Now I dreamed of going into a cave full of skulls. A scene common enough in
adventure movies now, but unknown to me at the time and I awoke in semi-terror, it
had seemed so real. The aura of the place in the dream had been of death or
cannibalism, of violence and savagery, chaos. Interestingly I somehow got it onto my
head or had picked up a rumour from somewhere – or as likely had come to it by a
process of association or misunderstanding, that there was a hidden entrance
somewhere on the Law that led inside, possibly to a further network of tunnels or
caves. I felt sure I had a rough idea of where this could be. It was to the right side of
the big wall at the back and down the side a-ways. We could approach it from the
side as it wasn’t too steep at all and most of the Law was covered in grass and
brambles and the rest. And sure enough, when we made our way there after along a
side road and climbing up rather than taking the usual winding path to the summit,
there did seem to be an area that looked as if it could be an entranceway – if we put
our minds to it – but it was ‘blocked’ by so much discarded rubbish and debris of all
kinds that shifting even a section of it would be a monumental and hazardous task. I
was in a way, relieved. My mind had been full of the notion of a tunnel that might
contain all matter of exotica but I knew also that the existence of one was as about as
likely as us sprouting a pair of wings and taking off. At the bottom of the section of
the Hill we were on was a mass of small firs. It was a fair distance down to there but
the side of the hill wasn’t steep enough to present any danger. The longish wall,
made from old blocks of stone and slate was off to the side, adjacent to a main path
and a fair ways up. Behind that was the old WW11 shelter. We could either go home
or wander around pointlessly or go and have a look at that, so off we went. There
wasn’t much to see. The heavy metal door sat open making it easy to get in but there
were no surprises anyway as we could see already through a small windowless square
in the side of the shelter. Inside it was damp and dingy, the concrete floor covered in
assorted crap; old newspapers and rotting pieces of cardboard, a dirty plastic crate,
broken pieces of wood, bits of brick and stone. There would be no adventures here. I
couldn’t imagine anyone spending any time in there. It felt like an outdated artefact
from a grimmer and more brutal age, yet somehow unreal. It was smaller than the
ones by where I stayed. This probably because it was there only for any people
caught out walking if the warning siren for a bombing raid went off. I couldn’t
imagine the Germans being in the least concerned with such an inconsequential place
as Dundee, our home town. That it could be involved in such monumental historical
events however indirectly gave it an almost cosmopolitan aura. For me it was a place
of cloying triviality and small-mindedness for the most part. It seeped into ones very
self and felt as if it rotted ones best resolve I’d have used the terms parochial and
hopelessly provincial if I had been aware of them. My awareness of the town’s
history was also as non-existent. I knew my Granddad had some shrapnel in his leg
as he had shown it to me once when he was putting on a sock or his shoes. I couldn’t
picture the incident as a reality and yet it had definitely happened. Again, it seemed
so cosmically vast compared to the daily petty fears and concerns I went through. It
amazed me my mother and bo didn’t worship his footsteps they walked in. The man
was a kind of giant possessed of almost supernatural courage in the face of life-
threatening odds.
Or so it seemed to me. Their stupid fights and petty hatreds and dislikes of each
other and others came to seem all the more absurd, school fights ridiculously trivial.
He had even taken me to see the film Tora, Tora, Tora at The Astoria, about the
Japanese conflict with the Americans. I’d have been bored out of my mind if it
weren’t for granddad’s commentary through a good part of the movie, telling me
what was going on. I loved him and his enthusiasm was infectious. I was interested
because he was and wouldn’t have dreamed of expressing boredom. I’d still have
preferred it was a Carry On movie or a spy thriller though. A kid is a kid. This was
the same guy that couldn’t understand my enthusiasm for comics. And one
afternoon, when he was staying with us for a while, we were watching some TV – it
was showing some old black and white film of the war. Some men were rushing up
the stairs of some old looking flats, not unlike the ones we had moved from some
years before – it was probably as much that association that brought the scenes to life
– and were going from door to door, sometimes coming out empty-handed, but as
often reappearing at the window as they threw the children out of it or over the
railings form the door. I was flabbergasted; gobsmacked. I’d never seen such a
thing, even in films - movies. I’d had no preparation for it. Not from school, not
from him. I was outraged. And deeply puzzled. Was this real? ‘Is this a film? (I
was pretty sure it wasn’t) Did that really happen?’ I asked my granddad in
undisguised exasperation. ‘Yeah’, he said. ‘Really?! Did they really throw the kids
out of the window?!!! ‘YEAH!’ His vehemence surprised me. Now I was feeling a
bit hurt as well as baffled. I couldn’t have known that he probably felt guilty. That it
wasn’t a subject one discussed with kids (though I couldn’t see why not). That the
simple fact of it was he had no idea why grown men would treat life so casually or if
he did it wasn’t open for discussion. The truth was I was as morbidly fascinated as I
was repelled by it. And his response didn’t ease matter any. It only made it all the
more disturbing if that were possible. It was the casualness of it that shocked me.
That a life could be snuffed out with no more concern than if these children had been
pigs for the market – or a bothersome insect. It was another world; another and
frightening way of being and of existing. What’s more it was this world. That was
the scary part. Oh I knew people did die like flies and were murdered willy-nilly all
over the world, even in our town. What I didn’t expect was to ever see it (or at least
not on daytime TV when the scariest thing was I might die of boredom trying to
watch an episode of the soap, Crossroads because LE had once said out loud to class
or our teacher it was her favourite programme). That made it all too real. These
matters would have to be looked into at some point in the future, probably through
books, as it was clear the adults and school weren’t going to be enlightening me
anytime soon. And even if they had it wouldn’t explain how such events could
happen at all. In those few moments the world had become a bleak and horribly
dangerous place. Thank God for Hans Anderson and Tarzan and Batman and Robin
and the ever-amusing and witty Spider-man, or Superman against the Nazis (boy was
I to have my eyes opened) and Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson with their
more manageable villains and dangers, and Billy Bunter, and the William books, and
Jennings and Derbyshire, and Adam Adamant the Victorian time-traveller, and Bob
Hope and the cartoon Gigantor granddad sometimes watched with us, and The Man
From Uncle and James Bond and Manfred Mann, and The Archies and The Banana
Splits and Cartoon Cavalcade with Glen Michael and Alex, and LE and all the other
things that made life worth living – though I’d love to see Robinson Crusoe on Mars
again. The director used the same spaceships as in the mind-blowing War of The
World’s, only they moved differently but just as compellingly. This time they were
more like humming birds in the way they could move from side to side, but I digress.
Jim and me walked down off the path to have a closer look at the wall that straddled
the top of the deep bank above the trees below. An accident waiting to happen. I
don’t know how it came about. Perhaps I had thought we could slip and slowly slide
down the slope to the bottom and had given it an experimental try-out. Me first,
naturally. Whatever I was thinking it was a Kamikaze notion. Gravity was getting
the better of me and to my horror I couldn’t seem to get back up on to the back.
Worse, I was slipping down against the dry earth. The only thing that was holding
me in place was my grasping a hunk of grass or shrubbery that jutted out. This was
serious. This was no joke. Jimmy didn’t seem to be grasping the gravity of the
situation. He knew I was a good climber. Did he think I was taking the piss? I was
too frantic too be embarrassed. When he asked again if I couldn’t just pull myself up
– though he was taking no risks in trying to reach me any more (he’d tried and
couldn’t), I roared at him to go and get someone. I was terror-stricken for some
moments, genuinely in fear of life and limb. If I didn’t die from the drop – and it
looked at least forty to fifty feet, I was as much in fear from the thought of the fall as
was at the thought of the impact and lying there with broken bones. I couldn’t see a
tree or two protecting me from that height. If I were lucky I’d be impaled and die an
equally agonising death. That it might come to this. Me, the ‘fearless’ scaler of
many a high tree and bridge such as the one on Balgay Hill, haunted to boot (I’d
edged along the outside, holding on to the side). Now I was to be thwarted and
humiliated and possibly ended because of a freak accident, a miscalculation. I
couldn’t even describe it as a moment of carelessness as that was the essence of
climbing. One didn’t do it or even attempt in a distracted frame of mind, however
slightly. It was about concentration. That was how you got through it and the only
way you got through it. One didn’t leave dangerous heights to chance or serendipity.
Now I was stuck on a fucking slope of earth I had mistakenly assumed would be a
cinch. What had I thought I was checking anyway? If it wasn’t manageable then you
were in trouble. You estimated it before you committed yourself as there might be no
turning back. That was how it worked. What was I thinking? I was as furious at
myself as I was at my cousin. And would he really come back with anyone? What if
he hadn’t taken me seriously, or couldn’t find anyone? What if he didn’t come back
at all? He was taking too long. The sudden panic had eased a bit. I was alright. I
had only panicked because I had lost my footing as my sandshoes slipped on the
earth. I’d been trying too hard. Clearly my shoes were gripping the earth of the slope
or I would be at the bottom as I had thought was going to happen and it hadn’t, I was
still here. Rationality and a cool head might save the day still, along with my arse.
By the time Jimmy’s head then his shoulders poked over the top again I was getting
well on my way. ‘Someone’s coming!’ I think he said. Or had he said he couldn’t
find anyone. Did a young man turn up only to see I was fine? Or didn’t it matter any
more as I really was fine? The memory of the outcome is gone. All that mattered
was that the danger was past and I wasn’t lying among a clump of trees at the bottom
in a heap.

I was as fervent about exploring the immediate environment and books and
comics as ever. The ideal situation for me – a favourite happy coincidence was when
I would stumble across any books in the old tenements just around the corner from
us. Along with my curiosity – to me they were free gifts, as pleasurable in their way
as a Xmas morning – I knew I was finding them pretty much as the former tenants
had left them. I could wonder about their lives. how many were in the family and
what ages? Would I have liked any of the boys? What were the girls like? What
would they think of me? Where were they now and why had they left? I could
conjure up all manner of idiotic fantasies and unlikely scenarios. Perhaps another
love of my life I would never look upon. Perhaps these were the very themes of one
of these books that lay scattered over the floors, beside rickety old beds that had been
left, or old wardrobes. There was even a row of deserted single floor flats that looked
like old shops, these behind the big pend (close) on Campbell Street. Sometimes I
did come across packets of washing powder and other stuff reminding me of old TV
ads I’d seen (Now I can watch ads from the sixties and before and feel like old Father
Time, marvelling at the vividness of that period). Another flat seemed to be an old
watchmakers shop or so I liked to think, as there were bits and bobs of the insides of
rusty old watches and clocks lying in an old drawer or two on a raised platform that
could be a counter; a quaint or creepy story just waiting to happen, as again I could
speculate if to no avail as to who had lived here and what their lives had been like.
The amazing part is of how curiosity overcame my natural reaction of repulsion over
the prospect of sometimes facing a barrage of assorted spiderwebs, dead maggot-
ridden pigeons, the possibility of rats - though I had never seen one, and sometimes
disgusting smells, though the musty odour of old buildings came to be quite pleasant,
partly because I associated it with the freedom of walks out in the wild, meaning
local parks and climbing trees and wandering old woods. One time my brother and
me had got our heads so covered in dust and other crap from some old house we’d
been exploring that mum had went through our hair with her special nitpicking comb
bought just for that purpose (only now do I see the ‘tragic’ irony). ‘They’re coming
out in clumps!’ she marvelled. She’d let them drop onto a piece of paper and kill
them with her nail. We never told anyone of course. We’d have been the object of
ridicule by some for months if not the rest of our days. And that was just my mother
in one of her more fundamentalist moments. Who needed true religion when she had
the whole world to use as a pretext to make me feel bad about myself?
Some of the books had the typescript of a foreign language. I think they were
Polish. Maybe I’d come across a title that made that clear. They were probably
immigrants during or after the war, or maybe there happened to be a Polish
community in the area. Whatever the case, they were gone. Hassled by the local kids
and gangs? Maybe the locals had driven them out unasked on behalf of the
Ubermenchen across the water. Or saw their opportunity when the winds of ill favour
drifted their way. The creeping psychosis of the times. Or nothing of the kind. But
some how I can’t imagine they were left in peace. Kids from my school would
ridicule the kids from the ‘deaf and dumb’ school (as it was termed) behind the old
Rep Theatre. They were furious. I was a surprised by their aggression as I was at the
thoughtless emotional cruelty of the cretins who made ape noises and the circular
movements of their fingers against their own heads to indicate they were loony or
backwards or both. I never knew how accepted I was and we all were until I saw
how outsiders were treated. For a moment it felt weird to be seen as normal.
Something was very askew.
Alex and I were often out of an evening. We spent a lot of time together.
Sometimes I’d go back with him to his place after school and his mum would be
there, a friendly woman. She’d get on with some ironing or making the tea while we
watched TV. Alex seemed to like TV even in company. I preferred to watch it alone,
whether it was kids programmes or thrillers and films. There was a different vibe to
Alex’s household. This became apparent when his dad came home and we all sat and
watched soap or film and a couple kissed. I felt smothered by my own
embarrassment but Alex only laughed – pointedly. I could only dream of such
unselfconsciousness and openness in the presence of adults. Sex and love didn’t fit in
with my environment. That involved being a real person and in our house I was
anything but that. What I may have felt or thought or wanted was nigh on irrelevant.
Romantic attractions, or any kind of emotions were something I had come to keep to
myself. One didn’t express any kind of happiness or joy in the presence of the
terminally unhappy and resentful. It really would be a case of ‘What are you so
fucking cheerful about?’ I kept my little highs and lows to myself along with any
major ones. There was no real communication with such people, let alone opening
up or forgetting myself in their presence. Alex was either a visionary of some kind or
a bit crazy. He took things too far. On the way home from school we would be
almost helpless with laughter, or I was. Literally; I felt quite weak with laughter. I
was all laughed out. It was a characteristic of my cheerful outlook and personality. I
was the instigator in that sense. John at school had the capacity to explode into an
almost hysterical laughter which was infectious but there was also something affected
about it, as if it was marred by ego and immaturity. Maybe he was a bit frightened of
me and it was my slightly guilty feelings about that. I’ll always recall an afternoon
with the even-tempered Alan Anderson when we had to go along to the health centre
for some reason; maybe we’d missed a jab at school. I filled in the time waiting with
a spiel of humour about nothing. It stemmed from the affection I felt towards him
and the sheer amazement of being alive. It was as if humour could create almost a
cocoon of joy. Like Alex, there was a consistency to his personality. Most of the rest
were fickle and capricious though I had yet to learn that. Sometimes Alex’
uninhibited antics amazed me (And ‘thrilled me’ I could say, but that would be
ridiculous). Walking up Ranking Street from school we would let women pass so
they were ahead of us then he ran up behind them and jumped on their backs and
grabbed their tits then leaped off just as quickly before any of them could get hold of
him. The boy was mentally deranged. A laugh riot. I squirmed in amusement and
anticipation over the looks on their faces as his small hands clamped onto their
untouchable parts. I couldn’t believe it. He got to feel their tits, however briefly. It
wasn’t how I pictured my fist experience of feeling anyone’s tits; it wouldn’t be the
kind of memory I wanted. Sex and women were too serious a business to treat so
irreverently. The women would stop dead in their tracks. Some would shout out in
shock and surprise. Others were more quietly embarrassed or furious. One of two
even managed a laugh when they discovered it was only an school-kid. A rather
unattractive and tough looking young woman proved to be true to my quick
estimation of her character and after her initial surprise started laying into him with
her umbrella. He had an older sister. I can only think this was the reason for the
differences in our attitudes. One afternoon when we got back from school – we
didn’t go back to mine's/my mum’s as she was invariably in a foul mood and talked
to me as if I were dirt – and there was no one home. He was still in a wildly
boisterous mood, and appeared with a sponge and chased me around with it. I didn’t
want to get too excited in case I broke anything and I or we both got in trouble. Then
he was back in the bathroom and as I came in he squirted me with something. It was
going all over the bathroom. This kid was nuts. We couldn’t put a thing out of place
at home. He seemed to have no fear or consideration at all. Maybe they had a
different way of behaving here I thought. Maybe he could do literally what he liked,
was impossibly loved and spoiled. Whatever the case it was immensely liberating in
its way as if nothing mattered but his own fun. But who was going to clean up the
mess? Then his mother stuck her head in the door, asking what was going on and hit
the roof – figuratively speaking. The difference was that as angry as she was she was
always in control. As exasperated as she was angry. She didn’t verbally abuse him or
lay into him with her fists. I envied the normalcy of it all. It was obvious he didn’t
know what it was like to live in fear and ambivalence, never quite knowing what
might happen next. I felt a kind of sickly envy over the thought, the realisation that
my childhood, our family life, such as it was, would never be normal and carefree. I
did bugger off as quickly and discreetly as I could though. When I asked him later
what the outcome had been he said he’d been made to clean it all up before he got his
tea, then she relented anyway and did the rest herself before dad got back. The
jammy, crazy bastard.

Alex and me were often out of an evening. Later, we’d wait for the late bus that
stopped at the crossroads that led to Beechwood, say our hurried ‘See ya’s’, then he’d
jump onto the open platform at the back (as they were in the late 60’s) which took
him home, some twenty minutes away if he walked it in the dark. The bus was in
darkness having finished its route and so had no passengers or conductors. A free
ride in the dark as he held onto the pole watching the road go by with the breeze in
his face. I was almost tempted to jump on with him to experience it for myself if it
weren’t for the walk back. I didn’t want to be in Beechwood by myself at night
anyway. There were some tough kids that lived there or violent and cowardly ones
though I’d never had any trouble going there and back with him. It made no
difference to me. I stayed where I was. One night we were walking around and we
noticed a slightly odd looking man out walking his dog. He seemed to be eyeing us.
We laughed a bit to each other, probably because he was creeping up out. If there
was any element of our good-humour being directed at him I made sure I didn’t show
it. I’d seen him around often enough. He lived at the top of the pend that led from
Logie Street; a part of Lochee Road, and opposite the bottom of Cobden Street.
Always alone with his dog and usually always unshaven or if not, he gave that
impression, or if that was the influence of Enid Blyton’s somewhat proto-fascist
Famous Five influencing my perceptions then he at least had that curious look some
people have as if of having a stocking permanently over their head and face. You
know wot I mean. Tam McD had once imitated him after seeing him shouting after
his dog as he passed, saying ‘Dima Dima!’ as if it was the weirdest thing anyone
could possibly say when the bloke had been only shouting for his dog, but that was
the sometimes mean-spirited Tam for me. I grinned appreciatively. Walking now
along the Tuledelph area where I was to incompetently do my paper-route in my
teens, Alex glanced back and said ‘there’s that guy again.’ It was unsettling, as he
had just walked his dog. So maybe he was going somewhere on his own now.
Unless of course, he was following us. We stepped up the pace. Dima Dima stepped
up his too or so it looked, I couldn’t be sure. ‘He’s following us’, Alex said. And
laughed. We were walking as fast as we could now while the weird and crazy adult
kept up with us. I laughed to cover the fear I felt by now as we broke into a gallop
and looking back. The bastard was running too now. That was it. Suddenly we were
the rabbits being chased by the greyhounds. We ran as frantically as our little legs
would carry us. Alex was a better runner than me, possibly the best in class, though I
was no slouch either, but this nutter – and only a madman would brazenly pursue a
couple of kids at length in the street even in semi-darkness – was right behind us and
there was no sign of him letting up. We ran around in a circle for a bit as my mind
raced. What did he want? Clearly he meant us harm? How much harm? Was he
going to beat the crap out of us in the street? Would he get laid in with his feet as if
we were older kids? What if he was truly mentally deranged and didn’t know when
to stop? Or dragged us by the scruff of the neck back to his place to do god knew
what? Lecture us? Tie us up? Keep us prisoner for days or weeks? Tell us how
lonely he was as we pleaded for our lives? Starve us? Shag us? Eat us? All of these
and more? I was absolutely certain there was no way I would allow this man to catch
me. Alex was too. We’d run until we dropped. We ventured to look around. He was
nowhere to be seen. We’d done it. We laughed in fright and relief. Then he was
there behind us again, breaking into a run. All we had done was got ahead a bit. The
bastard of the pend wasn’t letting up or letting us off so easily. Clearly he was a man
who kept grudges. We ran at full tilt again until we were almost out of breath and
looked behind. There was no sign of him, so we kept walking on some ways, and
then as quickly as we had thought we’d lost him or he’d given up he was there again.
The bastard was relentless. We were running uphill now, getting close to Billy
Forbes’ council flat, only I wasn’t sure which one it was and didn’t want to risk the
chance of being trapped anyway. Stuck in an enclosed space with the local screwball
was all we needed. What I realised, with a sense of sinking dread was that we were
coming to the end of the road. This was the part that led onto Balgay Park from the
side – this side. It would be better to run off to the left and down the steps or grass
that led to other levels of road and flats. But that meant he’d be running downhill
too. Eventually he would catch us, or one of us – maybe even me. I knew I was
getting out of breath and Alex must be feeling the same way. We just about kept
apace for the most part. There was no indication of any passer-by stopping this guy.
I had enough of the charade, enough of the madness, enough of the liberty taking and
fear-mongering. I was close to panic. It was time to begin pounding on some
windows. I glanced back. He wasn’t there. We kept on running anyway, until we
were a good distance on and felt safe enough to forget about him. Even if we had
thought of going to the cops, knowing where he lived we knew it would be a waste of
time as they would twist it around somehow for us to be the bad guys, as would my
mum and bo. It’s what they did. We all but shat our pants.

I took another solitary walk across the road bridge to Tayport. It’s impossible to
recall whether it was during a school holiday or simply the weekend. It may have
been a Sunday afternoon. Classmates had their own lives at the weekends or other
obligations to see to. I liked to watch a bit of wresting on Saturday afternoons when
there was no one around. I think my mum and bo were at my granddads before they
went off to his local pub. Maybe he was staying with us by then as I feel the warmer
memory of him being around sometimes. Wresting was like a live cartoon, only I
took it at face value. When I heard it was ‘fixed’, a choreographed charade I felt
cheated. It seemed outrageous that the programme itself or the TV link person hadn’t
made it clear what the set-up was beforehand. It was if I felt betrayed by my
previous perceptions of events, that they couldn’t be trusted if I had been so easily
misled. I would have to be more alert. The world took on a slightly darker, sinister
tinge. What else was I being kept in the dark about? I began to watch more films
instead – a natural progression from staying in our room reading when my mother
was around. When my granddad lived with it felt safer to move around more freely,
marred only by the haze of cigarette smoke that wafted odiously from the kitchen,
though my granddad smoked too. They all did, though the bo was often out doing
some carpentry jobs or going for a sly drink. I caught a film with Spencer Tracy as a
Greek fisherman who takes in hand a proud and spoilt little rich boy, played by
Freddy Bartholomew, who also played David Copperfield. I was intensely moved by
the self-sacrifice of Spencer Tracey’s character at the climax of the film. I had never
thought anyone could be so brave and even cheerful in the face of certain death. I
resolved to try and watch a film every Saturday; as many films as I could in fact,
while keeping up with reading. I would even make a list of what I watched and write
something about them if I could keep it from my mother’s prying eyes. I never kept
it up of course. Circumstances change; the subtle dynamics of the everyday
dysfunction of living with clinically insane people, and interests shift. And anyway, I
began going to the local Astoria most Saturday evenings. This meant that I was at the
mercy of whatever was current at the time, but most of the films were excellent. The
James Bond movies induced an almost otherworldly sense of omnipotence, where
every problem could be breezily overcome and life was one long idyll of sex,
romance, and expensive living in extravagant mansions. This was the most obvious
aspect of almost every movie I saw. Compared to the perfunctory living space spent
our days in, everyone in films seemed to spend their lives flitting from one barn like
space to the next. Apartments, as they called them looked like mini-tennis courts or
football pitches, often with a separate areas with the same level, divided by a few
steps or with a spiral staircase that led to other levels. The Bond movies featured a
break-in at Fort Knox and shoot-outs at the vast underground complexes maintained
by the arch-villain and his henchmen and lackeys for their nefarious purposes.
Everything was big. In the sci-fi movie Planet of The Apes, the cynical Taylor,
played by the fit-looking Charlton Heston and his buddies travel through not only the
far reaches of space but of time, before their spaceship crashes and they have a new
planet to explore, far into the future to boot, before it all goes pear shaped. But it was
the musical South Pacific that captured the sense of sheer otherness that had been
only hinted at in other films. I loved the music by John Barry for the Bond movies
but they were an assertion of personality; the dynamism of Bond himself. There was
something more impersonal about South pacific and this was of course partly because
it was about the South Pacific; an impossibly far off and exotic place to any working
class kid. And nothing captured this emotion, this perception more than the song,
Bali Hi. I swooned with inexplicable longing over the portrayal of this ‘mystical
island’ of the song. It was as if it represent something of far more profundity than a
mere song or actual place – exciting as the thought of that was. And the song melody
captured the emotion perfectly. It was a wholly different emotion to what I felt over
the dilemma of the sailor who had to decide between the young and pretty native girl
who was so obviously in love with him, and the less exotic but no less nice woman o
his own place and time. I felt anguished over thought that no matter whom he chose,
one of them would be terribly disappointed and hurt, devastated even. It was almost
unbearable to watch. Even though I knew he had to make a choice my I couldn’t get
beyond my emotions and new that if I was in that position I couldn’t have dealt with
the expression on the face of the native girl when she knew he was leaving; that he
hadn’t chosen her. He did the right thing of course. He had his own life and culture
and she would get over it and meet a nice local man and marry him. As my life was
circumscribed and provincial, meaning anxiety fear lay just under the surface most of
the time, and here was a magical island with a beautiful girl with all the fruit and veg
and animals to live on one could ask for, his choice was baffling to me. I was
conveniently unaware I was projecting all I felt about L onto the lovely island girl,
having either forgotten about her or dissociated this contradiction from my mind in
the face of the sailors romantic dilemma and her anguish over losing him. Somehow
L and love and exotic islands didn’t gel in the mundane and often crude reality of the
everyday world. And yet it was as much the music of the period that reminded me of
her and oddly, they did seem to merge into one at times. And the songs were
composed and recorded here or in America as was surely the case with the songs of
the musicals (and pop songs) I loved as well as that they often originated and were
filmed here along with actors whose background, however unlike mine, lived in the
same world, on the same island, if not the same city, such as the kid in Lionel Bart’s
Oliver! – Mark Lester – with whom I had identified so much when I saw it –even if
he did seem a bit of a wimp at times compared to the Artful Dodger. I had rarely
been so mesmerised by a film. It was my dad who took me to see it when he was
through to see my gran and me. If only he knew the effect it was having on me. I
was the Elephant Man at his first pantomime. I was there with him in his every
disappointment and moments of elation and fear of the future and indecision, as well
as there in the cart with him when he arrives in London. Ron Moody was brilliant as
Fagin and the songs were infectious. I would have given anything but losing my
brother and granddad (and L) to live in a huge old building with a crowd of friendly
kids and a relatively carefree life. Or so I thought. The death of Nancy at the hands
of the seriously mean Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes put a nasty pall of reality over it all,
though earlier there was Oliver’s earlier if temporary escape into the bosom of a
comfortably rich and caring family, and I had wished I was him too. Nancy’s singing
about how she ‘lavved him’ – Bill Sykes – was all the more tragically poignant, if not
seriously warped if it was love that had ensured she couldn’t escape her fate. It was
as the saying went; love made her blind. But it was obvious even to me she was
throwing it away on a self-centered brute; that he was ‘no good’. It was puzzling that
for all her intelligence and looks she couldn’t seem to see this when it was surely
obvious to everyone in the cinema. Maybe it wasn’t so much what was wrong with
love as that there was something wrong with hers. I knew that in some obscure way
it reminded me of my mother. But Nancy seemed more human to me or my feelings
were far less ambivalent because like me she cared about Oliver too. My mother was
intent in reminding me I ‘only cared about myself’ (As it had precisely that effect as
far as she was concerned, it was hard to argue with that even if I had wanted to).
Later I tried reading the original of Dickens’ Oliver Twist but it was too dry or adult
in style for me and I gave up after a chapter or three, though I liked the way each
chapter was preceded by a short synopsis of the events to come. It could be better for
me I could think and just may have, but there was no Bill Sykes forcing me to break
into and burgle the homes of the rich, or climb down sooty chimneys as in other
stories such as Hans Anderson or Charles Kingsley. I never got around to reading
Kingsley for some reason, though I had a novel or two; a title such as The Water
Babies probably didn’t peak my curiosity in the face of the other Children’s Classics I
accumulated, along with acquiring and reading comics assiduously.

I came across a large (or thick) book in the Lochee Library called Bevis: The
Story of a Boy. This was all I needed. It was a bit ambitious for me compared to my
usual fare of smaller volumes of the Billy Bunter, and the Jennings series – though
like the William books these were more like a collection of separate stories than
novels as such and the William stories could be pretty lengthy, almost wearingly so if
it weren’t for the fact they were so inventive and wittily written. The Bunter books
were bonafide novels. Paradoxically, the time flew as with most of Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five, and The Mystery of…series, as I became involved in them. Bevis was
around three or four hundred pages with small print. I gave it a good shot before I
was distracted with something else. I got about halfway through it. The last thing I
can remember is something about our boy Bevis leaping over a wall and vanishing.
That makes it sound like a fantasy story. It isn’t. Anyhoo, I never found out what
happened to him nor have I ever come across a copy of the novel since. In the
meantime I took my library copy along to Fife with me. I wasn’t quite sure why, or
when I would even get an opportunity to read it, but it seemed the thing to do, as if I
wanted to bring these disparate elements of my interests together, however separate
on the surface. Once I had tried reading Dickens’ Great Expectations, and though I
soon gave up sometime after Pip found digs and a job in London – shades of Oliver
Twist in some other more fortunate alternative world, there was the scene where Joe
and Pip are making jokes while sitting at the dinner-table in the face of their foul-
tempered matriarch, that struck me with the force of a revelation it was such an
emotional release to see such a scene portrayed in print it reminded me of my own
situation so closely, minus the escaped convict and secret inheritance. I felt an
immense sense of relief just from knowing another adult knew the situation well and
what’s more, identified with me – through Pip of course, as I identified with him. But
I had no doubt Dickens’ saw the world through my eyes, and this back in the 19th
century. What was immediate and claustrophobic to me was already known and
understood all those years ago by a mind more enlightened and kinder than the
opinionated boors in charge of me and who had scorned eve my books and talents. If
I could have taken all my books to Fife and built a den out of them to live in, I would
have. Not really. That and find a fishing rod and live on the fish I’d never catch or
know how to skin or build a fire to cook or have anything to cook it in. I was a city
boy through and through – I didn’t have a clue, but I could dream. Maybe one day I
could live out in a cabin I’d built myself in the woods. Just me and my books and the
sounds of birds in the daytime and the gurgling of a stream at night, though I’d
probably need a gun in case of intruders. Such as bullies (or the local equivalent of
the Purple Man or worse if I was too well hidden in the wilderness for anyone to
stumble upon), and to shoot and skin rabbits, and then of course I’d need a record
player as well as a radio, and a little TV wouldn’t so me too much harm either, but
then if I had no electricity…And I’d be lonely without a girl. Clearly I hadn’t
thought this through. I could mull over it again when I was older and more informed;
a day I couldn’t imagine coming. The walk along the pedestrian walkway of the road
bridge seemed as interminable as ever but I enjoyed the sight of Dundee receding into
the distance as if I were leaving it forever, about to embark on grand adventures, like
Dick Whittington of the nursery rhyme, or Jonathan Swift’s Robinson Crusoe. A
novel I read later and really enjoyed. He had been stranded on the island and yet the
paradox was his situation was the perfect symbol of escape. He had a whole island to
explore and to himself. There were dangers of course, but he was resourceful and
had overcome them as well as learned to be self-sufficient, and just in case he died of
loneliness the mysterious Man Friday had appeared. Like Crusoe – based on
Alexander Selkirk, he was almost a real person to me. Tarzan may have had his Jane
but he was somehow less believable in the long run, though his origins of how he was
left there were convincingly dramatic. But I couldn’t picture a man living in the
jungle surviving lions and tigers and the rest. Or I knew I couldn’t. Nor survive on
Crusoe’s island for that matter. I had barely weaned myself from the make-believe
world of Disney’s The Jungle Book and Snow White from some years before. I had
been utterly enraptured but it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about with your
mates. I was both Snow White, running for her life and lost in the forest, and Mowgli
with his friend, the big friendly bear Baloo, then later, squinting at the girl smiling at
him over her shoulder as she carried her pots or whatever it was. But most of all I
was Snow White, in fear of the beautiful but cold-hearted Queen who wished her
dead just for existing and harming no one; I knew even then it was somehow her
innocence, her guiltlessness she hated so much. I was so relieved the woodsman
didn’t have the heart to kill her on the Queen’s behest, but it seemed almost as cruel
that fate had abandoned her to her fate in a dark and creepy forest, the poor girl, and
whadayaknow, it was the animals who cared about her and came to her rescue, if
temporarily, until she discovered the cottage of another much misaligned bunch, the
dwarves. It was the unimportant and the relatively shunned and secretive that came
to her aid. The people with power and intelligence only resented her such as the old
hag, the witch with her rosy apple of death in the form of a gift in smiling
friendliness. I was so affected by the movie it invaded my dreams with all the
vividness of the original for a while. I liked every alternative world Disney’s
animators came up with such in Lady and The Tramp, but nothing topped the drama
of Snow White or the songs of The Jungle Book, as far as animation went. As with
the songs of Rodgers and Hammersteins’ South Pacific and The Sound of Music,
there were moments when time stood still. It was remarkable how a silly little song
such as Happy Talk could be so captivating, but, again, the lyrics were as important
as the music and fit it perfectly. Camelot had the same effect. It was the evocation of
another time and place, as soon as Richard Harris got off his horse and began singing.
A place like South Pacific where there was no smallness and love was always in the
air, or if there was, and real danger, as in Snow White, then love and goodness would
always prevail with a little help from one’s friends. I liked to be a friend to my
younger brother and others but that was as much because it made me feel good about
myself, as I wanted my barrages of humour to make them feel. It aroused a version
of the same emotions, but without feeling any need to try and express the shifting
thoughts and emotions I was experiencing as I grew up, so I internalised them, having
no idea if anyone else ever felt the same way. Until it was clear the L seemed to look
on me in the same way I looked on her. Then I didn’t know what to do. My mind
and emotions seemed to go blank. Reality would only shatter the illusion, as reality
was stronger and more harsh. I didn’t dare risk it. Not that I was aware of this in any
real way. I doubt I gave it more than a few moments thought at a time. Somehow the
future would resolve itself in some way unknown to me as yet. Somehow I would
magically transform my fears and sweep all other considerations aside. I would yet
be the hero of my dreams. Just not right now. First I had to read and educate myself
in the ways of the world and understand better how it worked as well as understand
my own mind better, and keep my imagination alive and morale up through reading
and improve on my fighting skills, pretty good as I was, all things considered. None
of which seemed to alter the fact I was as good as a fly stuck on flypaper, obliged to
go to school – which was excellent for the most part as it was immensely stimulating;
not so much the lessons as the personalities of my classmates and even some teachers
– it was feeling like a leper a home that was a daily trial. But over weekends and
holidays I could wander to my heart’s content. My mother wasn’t in the least
concerned as to where I went or what happened to me as long as it didn’t cause her
any bother. Whatever trouble I might get into would be of my own doing and
probably deserved. The annoying part of course was she was usually right, but not
always. I generally only cared she didn’t much care when she was there and I
couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t allow such musings to cloud my mind or my mood when I
was outside. There were far brighter things to focus my attention on, such as the
sunshine shining down on me as it always did, whatever my mood or circumstances.
Or I could stop for some minutes to climb the platform and look down at the
impressive expanse of water below and again wonder how long I would survive in it
if by some mad impulse I finally couldn’t resist throwing myself in. It was so far
down it might knock me out but it probably wouldn’t, then I’d have to try and swim
until I was exhausted and drowned and sank to the murky depths below - or froze to
death and sank to the murky depths below. Maybe a mermaid would save me. I
wondered if such a being could really exist. Not here in such a mundane location
that’s for sure. But if she did she would somehow revive me and guide me down to
her undersea kingdom, just like the Submariner’s in the Marvel comics, or a Hans
Anderson story I had once read. Stories were all well and good but these were the
stuff of fantasy; they were only stories and that’s all they ever would be I knew. The
flitting if intense awareness of some other reality I would experience through music,
or even a passing thought, was forgotten almost as soon as it occurred; as ephemeral
and insubstantial as a dream. But books themselves did exist as did the music I liked
and the fields and woods I loved to explore and as I had the time to do it if some of
the time, then the world couldn’t be all bad. It was people, who were more
problematic, because they were unpredictable; or sometimes all too predictable. And
girls. But out in the wilds so to say, alone, I was the master of the world just as in the
Jules Verne novel, if not quite. As it said at the beginning of Stingray, the ‘super-
marrionette’ series on TV, ‘anything might happen in the next half-hour’. Not
dangerous I was pretty sure, but even the thought of potential injury could be more
bearable than the prospect of series embarrassment; a strange and unsettling
realisation.

The weather was mild, with only the merest of cooling breezes. Before long, I
came to the wooden house. Again, there was no one there that I could see. Perhaps
they kept it on only as a place to visit. I walked on until I came to low brick wall on
the same side of the road as the house, then turned into the gap that led up the
winding path. The tire tracks of a tractor had made deep furrows in the drying earth.
I tried to balance on the peaks as I walked, enjoying the feeling of the softer sections
of semi-dried mud sinking under my puny weight, my foot sometimes slipping to the
side; somehow all the while mindful of the book I was holding. Almost my only
immediate reminder of my other obligations to the world I knew and was leaving
behind with every step, however symbolically. There was the old barn again, the
reminder of a way of life as unknown to me as colonising the moon. There was no
one around to interrupt the smooth progression of my reverie, the taking in of the
sights and sounds that had made so vivid an impression before. This time I followed
the path to see where it led me. I felt as alone as if I was in the midst of a vast forest
yet wholly at home. A strange sensation was washing over me again. It was
something that I knew I could even put into words though they only hinted at the wild
expansion of limitlessness, of aliveness I felt. It was that it was as if these woods and
countryside, though themselves only an infinitesimal section of the world, of life, of
being, somehow contained all of it and not only that but it was for me and anyone
like me, meaning anyone that shared the same emotion, the same unequivocal
enjoyment of it as I did. And also that in some real way this was our world, my
world. My everyday self and personality knew that this wasn’t and couldn’t literally
be the case and wasn’t, yet the conviction, the sense of timelessness, of there being
no real boundaries so grew that I allowed this other self to sink into it until I
positively wallowed in the sensation, all the while aware that perhaps all I was doing
was enjoying the illusion, the thought of what it would be like to have the whole
world at my disposal and do as I pleased, harming no one. The sense of elation, of
lightness, of having no cares and concerns was so intense and all-encompassing, I lay
down on the path face front and read a section of the Bevis novel, contrasting the
description of nature with the real thing as if I had gained some deep insight that
brought the words alive in a way I could wonder if this was what the author had
intended all along and perhaps he did. If not, I was as thankful of his existence
knowing he was a catalyst, an integral part of what I was experiencing now. I could
wallow in my own boyhood knowing this was exactly where I wanted to be. There
was no need to feel ridiculous or even self-conscious in any way as there was no one
else around and yet right now I felt as if I had never been alone at any point in my
anxious little life, or if I had, then this experience was somehow truer as if life had
taken on a strange yet oddly familiar warmth and whatever appearances to the
contrary, it meant well by me and by everyone. It wasn’t that I disliked people or
simply that I was free from the constant demands of dealing with them on every
level, but that they were somehow too preoccupied with themselves and trivialities to
see the beauty and grandeur that was all around us if only they would look at it and in
themselves. And by extension, in me, as I often saw it in them as with L. And I
knew she saw it in me. On some deep level I was in love with her but either didn’t
know it or refused to acknowledge it in myself let alone to her, though I could
express it indirectly through playful competition as during class and that didn’t mean
tormenting her outside class through hassling her or pulling her hair as some kids
will, as I’d never have understood that. I simply avoided her outside of a class
setting. There was always some schoolfriend I was with anyway, whether for better
or worse. Later, after she had asked me out through a friend and I had blanked it, my
thoughts would wander vaguely with intense if subdued longing to where I had heard
she lived as if it and she were about as approachable as Shangri-la. Out in the woods,
there was no such reserve on my natural impulses. In my love for nature, the feeling
seemed to blend into one, into abstraction, yet paradoxically it felt no less real for
want of a specific object. If anything it was as if it was more intense because there
was no interference in allowing the emotion to expand. I was less intimidated by the
abstract than I was by the specific as my everyday self was in abeyance whereas in
my everyday life I could feel I was expected to perform and prove myself and my
worth in some way. I might feel and behave as if I were ‘on the spot’ even if I
wasn’t. Walking along the path again I came to a large pond on my right, just off the
path, behind which was the continuation of the wire fence and the fields beyond. The
water looked imperturbable and marvellously itself as if it had always been there,
surrounded by grassy reeds and various species of trees I knew but didn’t know
which was which. Beech? Oak? Scots Pine? Monkey Puzzle? I didn’t have a clue.
Nor did it matter. Trees were trees and I was whatever I was and the water looked so
calm and other, I wished I could drink in its essence and become part of it.
I walked farther on. The light was becoming duller under the canopy of trees as
they became more profuse, giving the road in front of me an aura of self-containment.
The path slightly to left in a wide arc. In front of me was a low wooden fence
separating another woodland area. Then there were two men and a younger man
climbing over it, wearing what looked like work clothes and boots. One or two were
carrying a spade and other tools. This shortly before I came by them. They glanced
at me perfunctorily as we passed each other and carried on. Used to living in town
there was no reason to greet men in passing. I did feel different here and thought that
perhaps it was more natural for people to acknowledge each other when there were
only us around, but as soon as I saw them the same old personality was back. And
anyway I was more comfortable with my peers. Then the thought came to me that
they hadn’t been the least curious, weren’t territorial in any way, asking me where I
was from or thought I was going. If I were in their shoes I’d have at least asked to
have a look at the book I was carrying. I reflected that maybe they didn’t get time to
read or people who chose to work in the ‘country’ weren’t interested in books and the
kids who read them. The more I thought about their lack of curiosity the more I felt
puzzled by it. But I knew that as I hadn’t spoken to them there was little reason for
any of them to speak to me. A thought that didn’t come to me was that even in
relative isolation – or because of it – was there was no reason why any of them
should be the one of his fellows to express an interest in a lone boy, carrying of all
things, a large book in the middle of nowhere. In brief, I was the one who wanted to
talk to them but was too inhibited to do it or felt it would be presumptuous of me.
When I wasn’t behaving like an impulsive madman, I was thinking too much,
weighing up the most innocuous situations which others for all I knew gave barely a
moments thought. The thought of which only made me feel like a maladjusted
bookworm again, when the reality was it was all new and unfamiliar to me whereas
to them it was merely routine and I had little to envy them for. The path had curved
around the fence and veered off to an adjoining dirt road that led through large
buildings on either side I took to be barns, then broadened out into a wider area
beyond and to the right of which was a longish and study looking cottage of sorts. If
I was more adventurous I thought, I would knock on the door and some buxom
farmers wife might answer rather than the nasty old hag of fairy stories as in Snow
White, and Hansel and Gretal with her cottage made of gingerbread or whatever it
was, and ask for a drink of water or even if they might make me cup of tea or better
still, offer me a Coke or even some fruit juice from the fridge – and some chocolate
cake would be nice. But I never did anything like that as no matter how hospitable
anyone might be – and it would be a pretty slim likelihood anyway, I wouldn’t be up
to it as I would be too bashful, not knowing quite how to act or what to say,
especially if by some miracle there were any strange girls around. (Or if not, I would
have to talk inanities in gratitude and I wasn’t interested in that either.) It wasn’t a
risk I was willing to take. I’d surely look like some quaint beggar, a desperate and
ignorant little oik from town. My ‘loneliness’ and ill at easiness would be written all
over my face. I looked curiously at the sturdy looking door and around me again and
retraced my steps. There didn’t seem to be anyone around anyway and what
windows there were on the house were closed and curtains drawn. Walking out of the
wide driveway I hoped I didn’t meet the three workmen on their way back if this was
where they’d come from. They might think I’m up to no good. Now I could either
go back the way I had come and sidetrack over to the fields I’d walked through with
Alex before – I wanted to see the hill again, this time without the benefit of
experiencing it through a haze of pain as before – or carry on along this path beyond
the farm until I got bored, which wasn’t likely, or found something interesting, which
was. Sometime after, the thicket on my left began to thin out. There was a crumbling
low wall some of the ways along by the side, which now came to its crumbled end
before beginning again some yards farther along. Looking through the vista of
thicket and assorted young or skinny trees I could see it went on a fair ways until the
thicket was too thickety to see any further. Short-sighted and too vain and absent-
minded to keep track of glasses -spectacles - when I got them I was so used to my
slightly hazy perception of the world I never questioned it except for when I had
trouble seeing which bus was coming but that was easily solved by pulling at the
sides of each eye and squinting ‘Chinese-style’ as we might describe it in our casually
racist way. I turned off the now almost non-existent path to wander through
aimlessly through the thicket like the Frankenstein Monster in miniature. An analogy
that if it had even flitted through my mind for a second may have had me turning on
my heels and scuppering my purpose for being there; to explore what to all intents
and purposes was for me a new world virtually on my doorstep. I passed easily
through the clumps of thin trees with their barrage of branches. There were no nasty
surprises of nettles or muddy patches underfoot. The air was windless, pleasant, and
cool. Before long it would be getting into late afternoon. I didn’t have a watch as
when I did, the cheapshit little things which were all we could afford of course would
slip off my wrist during some moment of mild or wild interval or distraction, to my
mother’s intense disgust. At other times it and they would stop working either
because they were cheap crap or I had broken it in impact against something or both.
As my mother was so fond of reminding me I ‘brack and broke ahin’. I didn’t care
about a watch. Or I liked it when I had one but all it would serve here was to remind
me of the constant haranguing and bullshit anyway, and every other association that
came with it. (And now I realize that is all it was a pretext for). I was Robinson
Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn rolled into one. They managed without a watch, so so
could I. Fortunately I could manage without a pipe and a hunting knife and
makeshift fishing rod too. I could even sing out here if I wanted to but I preferred the
natural sounds around me, though there wasn’t any birdsong that I could hear or
anything else come to that. All in all it was all pretty calm and silent but not in the
least eerie, though one thought of the Purple Man or any other mythical monster and I
would, if not to be a goner, have to dismiss any such thoughts if they came to me; but
that rarely happened in the daytime. I wasn’t prone to spoiling my own enjoyment
and the earlier mood, if mere mood it was, lingered still, if more subdued now; there
was still that sense of otherness and magic in the air, as if the world was putting on
this show just for me, or of not quite that, then serendipity had somehow led me to
this place. That and my own two feet.
Then, off the side, a concrete tower, shaping itself out from morass, ridiculously,
like something out of a dream. The plot was thickening, if not by much but this was
interesting as it was unexpected. There it stood amidst the weeds and undergrowth,
tall against the sky and the trees around it, spattered with green and brown patches of
Lichen. About two-thirds of the way up and just below the rounded parapet was a
titled inscription:
The Princes of Wales. 1923.
This was intriguing. My knowledge of history was patchy to say least, nor was I
remotely interested in the Monarchy; that was my gran’s subject so I took it to be the
obsession of choice of old ladies, such as some girls oddly romantic enthusiasm for
ponies and mine for birds and their eggs and habitats. Perhaps my gran and girls had
a romantic fantasy of some Prince coming to rescue them when they it was
discovered they were of royal blood or somesuch nonsense. For me it was all oddly
quaint and oddly related, like my gran’s enthusiasm for Jimmy Shand and his Band
and Scottish Country Dancing and her pride in her native country of Scotland which
she would pronounce in an absurdly pretentious way, denoting respect and reverence,
which repulsed me in some way I found difficult to articulate, but now I see it was
because of my awareness of the provincialism, conservatism and small-mindedness
that lay behind her nationalism. Politics was surely the most boring subject on earth.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would voluntary preoccupy themselves with such
bland tedium. I barely gave it a thought. Gran’s preoccupation with the Monarchy,
her reverence for the Queen – she would occasionally show us her commemorative
cups and saucers as a special treat – only confirmed for me that it was based on a sort
of snobbishness, though her interest in history seemed genuine enough; she read
historical novels. But I still felt it was all based on a kind of wish fulfilment fantasy
based on the belief she and we were actual commoners compared to royalty, these
important figures of history which to her were history, where, I suspected, the
ultimate fantasy, second to discover she was distantly related, would be to be
acknowledged or recognised by the Queen in some way, such as an official title.
What was absurd to me was that this was her voluntary choice of what gave her life
meaning – her pride in her nation and that she (and we) was one of the Queen’s
subjects. Nor being a woman, I couldn’t really empathise with her position I knew,
but what I felt pretty sure of in some obscure way was that it was silly, somehow
second-rate, to be putting all her faith in a bunch of people, an organisation, however
large and powerful, (and I had no idea just how powerful) outside of herself. She was
or could’ve been surely as interesting to herself if she’d really wanted to be.
Probably not, but that’s how I looked on it. The Monarchy and politicians and their
followers were the bland leading the bland and I disliked her snobbish sense of
reverence, the apparently harmless enthusiasms of a harmless older woman because I
knew it was somehow unhealthy and immature; that it limited people in a nasty
mean-minded way and was itself the reflection of an outdated anachronistic way of
seeing the world, exemplified perfectly in the limited outlook and interests of my
gran’s, though she did tolerate ours with good humour, allowing us to watch Batman
before some dreadful soap came on, which she admittedly followed with intermittent
interest while she saw to some dishes or laid the table for a snack. She was as
tolerant of the comics I bought too, repeating the title with glee. In fact she could be
quite funny, surprising us by describing something as a Topper or a Beezer – the titles
of a couple of the comics I liked along with POW! and Wham! and Smash! – The
early incarnations of Marvel in the UK, before I moved onto cyborgs and vampires
and sci-fi and Conan the Barbarian and The Silver Surfer and the rest. We lived in
different worlds as became more pronounced as I got older.
I walked around to the right of my new-found tower and found an opening, then
peering in, walking in cautiously. The light was more than adequate as it came in
from a gap in the centre above. A tightly curved wooden stairway led up to the
parapet. The stairs were sturdy enough. I could examine the graffiti on the rounded
wall as I climbed the stairs. I was amazed at one scratching which declared it was
rendered back in 1864, marvelling at the distance in time between the scribbler, until
I recalled that the tower itself was erected decades later, then felt a bit foolish if
somewhat puzzled as it clearly stated 1864. 1964 wouldn’t make much sense either.
I felt as if I had walked into some weird time anomaly version of The Tardis in Dr
Who. The only way I could make any sense out of it was to surmise that the date on
the front of the tower wasn’t an indication of when it had been erected but perhaps
was visited by the then Prince of Wales back in 1923. Either that or someone had
intentionally written a nonsensical date on the wall as a kind of practical joke, or
better still, they somehow knew I was coming. Sometimes I felt reality was playing
tricks on me, certainly in moments like these. Gran would perhaps have thrown some
light on the royalty aspect, but one didn’t hall ones gran along with one on hikes. I
couldn’t understand what Prince Charles would be doing opening a building out in
the semi-wilderness anyway, until the thought came that having his name on it didn’t
necessarily mean he had to be there for such a commemoration. Resigned to the
thoughts I was perhaps destined to feel myself to be ever clueless and not coming up
with a clear answer on any account I promptly dismissed it to take in the grandeur of
the view, which looked above the small trees and across the River Tay to home bleak
home: Dundee. But the specifics were as good as forgotten in the impersonality of
the landscape. Again, it seemed almost unfair that I couldn’t stay here forever in this
relative abstraction, just me and the landscape and this tower where I could stand as if
I were the king of my own little castle and domain without a care in the world. (Until
the locals got wind of Kid Frankenstein having taken up residence on their land and
came and smoked me out of house and home) But I’d miss my brother; and even
gran. And I’d have to eat. I knew I was utterly domesticated, wholly unfit for any
notion of surviving in the ‘wild’. I wouldn’t last three days. But I relished the
thought of vanishing for a while and ‘everyone’ wondering where I was. If only
bodily appetites weren’t so constant in their demands. I hadn’t brought anything to
eat with me, but nor was I hungry yet. Nor had I made any effort to eat more than
usual before I came out, as we generally ate what we were given and that was that
short of raiding the cupboard and fridge. Asking for extra provisions would only
have entailed telling my mum where I was going. That would be tantamount to a
conversation and in the real world, which just wasn’t how we interacted. We may
have shared the same space but as I felt she barely tolerated me at times and her
almost constant state of hostility towards me was another of those exasperating but
incomprehensible, and more to the point, fundamentally uninteresting mysteries, my
healthy impulse – or the only choice I felt I had, was to ignore it in the face of far
more interesting ones such as the unfathomable mystery of why anything existed at
all; a mostly unspoken question, which for me permeated much of my waking life
and thoughts, lending to it a sense of frequent wonderment over it along with strange
moments of epiphany where I would be suddenly struck in amazement over the fact
of my own existence. Part of the sense of wonder lay in the awareness that my life
was as unlimited – or limited – as the thoughts I chose to think, along with the
directly related thought that the future was open and could go in any direction I
chose; that I might feel very restricted now due to circumstances and feeling
beholden to others who expressed their responsibilities towards me in a resentful way
through having power over me, but this wouldn’t last forever. The future might seem
as far into the distance, further, then the stretch of landscape and water in front of me
along with the walk back through town, but as sure as would be walking through that
town on the other side of the water; as surely as I felt both stuck in time, yet
paradoxically free now through my thoughts, the future, short of murder, mishap or
mayhem, would come, as would mine, whatever that entailed. I could dream of being
a great writer, like H. G. Wells, or Jules Verne – I had read some of Wells’ short
stories as well as some of the novels of Verne (I’d come to Wells' sci-fi novels in my
early to mid-teens) but it was in thinking of no specific objective that conjured up a
panorama of the future far beyond the confines of this time and place as if echoing
my awareness of further landscapes and vistas I knew were as beyond my immediate
sight as were the realities of the billions or trillions of galaxies and stars and worlds
out in the furthest reaches of apparently infinite space. The thought of having to
choose to be or do anything at all only interfered with such a perception. I knew that
in reality the future wasn’t literally limitless of course but incontrovertibly finite and
that I could as much do and be everything as much as it would be possible to not do
or be anything at all. Yet somehow, this was the truth of the matter, and in those
moments I was sure of it; though the contrast with my everyday self and reality and
circumstances made it seem all the more unattainable and so all the more agonisingly
distant. In short, I was a typical Romantic, without knowing who the Romantics were
– or if any teacher had ever described any of them as such, I had either forgotten or it
went in one ear and out the other.

Many years later I dreamed of approaching a huge tower with a great door. As
with many dreams, this one contained a veritable phantasmagoria of emotional
resonance reminiscent of other periods and places and situations in my life from the
stairs of primary school onwards as I made my way up the stairs of the tower up to
other levels and floors, each with their own peculiarly distinct and strangely familiar
atmosphere as if, when I reached one huge floor, resembling an antique clothes store -
and was perched on the balcony for some reason, it meant more to me than I could
possibly understand. Perhaps it was reminiscent of the scene with Chaplin where he
roller skates with a girlwoman on one of the floors above in a large department store,
and again it captured that sense of romantic freedom perfectly, by transforming it
from a place of mere business and formality to one play and fun and relaxation; as in
a dream.
Back down the stairs in the living dream of the moment to ground level, damp
and dingy, watching out for old spiders webs again, not relishing the thought of
having to drag any of the dusty grimy things from my hair as sometimes happened in
the old flats back in town, picturing hundreds of baby spiders battling it out with the
nits for world domination of my scalp, then out into the cool afternoon light again
and looking back up to where I had just been, a previous self in a previous time and
space, a collection of moments, no different from this moment and self, yet subtlety,
imperceptibly changed, as if I had just had another experience of meeting myself, the
real me, the self that gets lost and bent out of shape through an endless series of
distorting images through others, distorting my perception of them too, when all it
needed was a moment within moments, to re-establishing the connection, however
uncertainly I’ll feel when the moment passes, but that had always been there, waiting
for me to choose, when I would drag myself away from the all the crap and
distraction. Out here in the country, about a half-hour from the main road.
I looked back at the inscription on the tower, trying to grasp the year of its
erection as a reality – trying to grasp the 1920’s as a reality and the differences there
were around me then and the life that bustled on in my home town, the same streets
and roads, the same buildings or most of them, the same parks and many of the same
trees, the birds and birdsong the same as ever under the same sun along with the
people who had long died but also the ones I knew who were alive now, such as my
granddad such as I’d seen him in an old photo, surprisingly slim and dark-haired in
contrast to the pleasantly pot-bellied, coughing and spluttering wreck he sometimes
was now due to his steady intake of roll-up fags. Was he puffing away in
obliviousness then, unconcerned about his future health, believing like me that he
lived forever? And my future grandmother, a disconcertingly busty teenager of
seventeen or eighteen with the temperament of a born old maid – I couldn’t reconcile
the two in my mind and one didn’t dwell on the dimensions of ones grandmothers
bust. Maybe she had really been one for the boys for all I knew, smoking and
drinking like there was no tomorrow, her head full of Glen Miller standards and
movie stars and Al Capone and The Cotton Club and her dreams of the stage –
because she’d mentioned it before and would mention it again; a step above every
shopgirl's dream of what it would be like to marry a film star or be one herself. But
marriage probably put paid to such fantasies; that and bringing up my father and
reconciling herself to the small town life of Dundee, day in and day out until he met
my mother when they were both too young and had me first and now she was a
grandmother and I entered the stage, soon wondering how it could come about I
should find myself in such a madhouse. But clearly, there were compensations, these
moments of contemplation, of feeling somehow detached from it all yet connected to
it in some larger sense. Time itself encompassed them all, me included, and my
mother in her humourless self-preoccupation, not so dissimilar to some of the silly
and conceited teachers, such as Ramsden, the old bat, that passed my way while
feeling trapped in time by them and their stupidity, because stupidity was what it was
for all their apparent intelligence; something important was missing and though it
might forever seem impossible to articulate, like my love for L., it was always there,
at the edge of my consciousness, like the wisp of an almost forgotten dream, or
somewhere I had been before, as beautiful beyond description as it was beyond
remembering clearly. Yet a perception that could come out of the blue unbidden,
attaching itself to a passing memory of a person or place, such as the view of the
stores in the lamplit dark, seen through the wide close from the Nethergate just before
H. Samuels with its distinctive clock – the favourite meeting place for dates, my mum
and dad included and maybe theirs before them, and me in some hypothetical but still
unlikely future where talking to girls I hardly knew would be as easy, as natural, as
talking to my mates, or following my own thoughts, .

I walked back, passing by the acrid looking pond and the rotting vegetation that
surrounded parts of its edges, then found a gap and climbed the wire fence. I wanted
to have a feel of the landscape again, and see it for my own eyes; it seemed the
natural thing to do. Maybe at the back of my mind I wanted to find out if it could
possibly be as strange as my previous visit, and that I was tempting fate in a way, or
the gods. Or wanted only to retrace my previous footsteps as, before long, I came to
the sparse looking old tree – I took it for granted most things here were pretty old –
where the pigeon fledgling had nested. It must surely have flown the nest by now
and I had watched for any adult bird as I approached. It still looked to me a bit of a
foolish spot for any bird to risk nesting there, it was so open. But on reflection, was
there any animal that could make its way up there? I wasn’t sure. I could think only
of mice or voles. Did rats live in the countryside? What about Ratty of Kenneth
Graham’s The Wind in the Willows? And what about the little Corncrake I had
crushed underfoot before, if accidentally? The parent bird would surely know
whether it was safe or not? I had been the aberration in the landscape at the time. Or
were they often scooped up and shredded by the farmer’s combine harvester or
flattened to a pulp under the tyres of a tractor? The idyllic countryside as horror
movie, like nature itself, ‘red in tooth and claw’. I glanced around me to make sure I
was alone, setting the Bevis novel down on some sparse grass by the sparse looking
tree, then tried shimmying up its thin trunk by wrapping my arms loosely around it,
and finding that didn’t work as my hands slipped off as I wasn’t Tarzan or some
aboriginal prodigy who climbed trees for a living, so I held onto branches as always
and pulled myself up almost level with the nest, then reached out and felt around to
save climbing any further. My fingers were met by a soft and pulpy mass. I knew it
was the fledging from before; I didn’t need to check. My lack of simple knowledge
of the countryside and nature infuriated me. A local kid would probably have the
answer all the questions I had and more. What was doubly infuriating was I felt I as
uninformed, as inadequate here as I often did in my own milieu, as if I it was destined
that everyone was forever in the know but me, and as if this somehow conformed
some inherent or congenital idiocy on my part. At the back of my mind I knew I only
had myself to blame; that it was greed that had brought me to this nest again anyway,
as I knew it was there, and I had been vaguely hoping there might be some eggs.
Now I just felt guilty again. I climbed down the few feet carefully, letting myself
drop to the ground, remembering to pick up my beloved book, feeling a twinge of
selfishness over that too, then walked in the direction of my special little island. Or,
The Hill of the Wasps. The thought of the nest being still around was marginally off-
putting. There was also the hint of a thought at the back of my mind that to actually
climb the hill again might only shatter the illusion. All it would be at best was more
buzzing insects and wading through bushes and branches. I could walk around it if
that was possible, or at least find a view of near the back from one side and see where
and how I had almost become a cropper and see just how bad it may have been if at
all. I didn’t find out, because by the time I’d trudged through the rough ground of the
field, dusk was fast approaching and it was a fair ways to get back so I turned on my
heels and hurried up my pace. But night descended very quickly so that by the time I
got back to skirt over the fence I could barely make out the trees in front of me.
Stumbling over the grass and onto the dirt path in the semi-dark was taking an
interminably long time as if the darkness itself was protracting the winding path in
front of me like some crazy dreamscape as I steeped gingerly to avoid the lumpy
furrows under my feet when I could make them out, hoping I didn’t step into any
muddy or watery patches. But what was really beginning to bother me was the way
the woods seemed to come alive with hoots and odd squeals and chirrups and rustling
in the undergrowth around me; my cue to get a bit freaked out but I knew my best bet
was to stay calm and not let my over-active -imagination get the best of me. As with
climbing it was imperative, a given, that I was the one who was in control and a
successful outcome depended on no one but myself and that was the whole point as
well as being the goal; a matter of self-control and feeling in charge of ones destiny.
There were no bogeymen or unknown horrors to deal with here either, or even known
horrors such as, er, Wild Boars or Grizzly Bears or ravenous Wolves or sex-crazed
Badgers or homicidal Hedgehogs or vengeful Corncrakes. Maybe the odd fox or
three, but I’d never heard of them attacking people; another query for my
hypothetical country buddy and counterpart, but not right now. I felt a minor wave of
relief when I saw I was coming to the end of the path where the occasional traffic was
passing along the main road. The lights of the Road Bridge to the left shone in the
distance, as did the lights of Dundee across the water, cutting through the gloom to
twinkle in the distance like profane stars. Walking by the wooden house by the side
of the road; in the darkness it looked almost mundane, as familiar now as knowing
the rest of the way home. The bridge slowly growing out of the darkness; it looked
almost stark and brutal in its utilitarian functionality, its unyielding and unapologetic
dominance in concrete. It wasn’t very late but I was alone on the pedestrian walk on
the bridge, probably as no one in his or her right mind walked along it alone. Young
and naïve I was still relatively oblivious to the potential dangers around me, but then
who would be hanging around a bridge in the darkness of a September or October
evening on the offchance some lone kid is going to come strolling along? My actual
thoughts or a reasonable approximation. The pedestrian platform loomed above me;
a matter of seconds and I was up there again, gazing moodily and poetically over the
dark water of the Tay. It seemed natural to feel a bit solemn in the face of an
immense and black stretch of very cold water. Now I could mull in morbid
fascination over the fate of the travellers back in 1879 when the original Rail Bridge,
replaced by the one in the distance, collapsed, dumping them all into the same sheet
of water below me. The reality of such a cataclysmic event was as difficult,
impossible to grasp, as was my morbid fascination; as if I wanted to experience what
it must have been like in all its horror yet not be touched by it. That would be the
deal; or my ideal – a future fantasy-ride some 500 years from now or 1000, where the
tastes of the terminally bleak and historically curious are catered to for a price. But
knowing it was a fantasy would never be the same even if it became possible. The
horror, the reality – and weird attraction, lay in the thought of it as a reality. And no
virtual reality machine, no movie could ever mimic that. It would be like trying to
not think of something; an impossibility. And that would be the same as trying to
forget something. Or write a story or a novel that captured every shade, every
permutation of a person’s life and emotions. Impossibility. It couldn’t be done. If
you could do that then you could include everyone you ever knew or were connected
with on any level and that would have to include all aspects of their lives too on to ad
infinitum. Or only to be lost in a surreally, indescribably unnerving drop to the cold
depths below, if you survived the buffeting and shock just before. An event which on
the face of it dwarfed my everyday little fears and concerns, making me feel thankful
I was still here standing on this solid platform, my irrational fears that it just could
collapse any moment to the contrary; but I wasn’t about to dismiss my own concerns
so easily. These thoughts were a part of them after all and if my thoughts were what
made up me then whatever concerned me was relevant and worthwhile and that’s just
the way it was I was pretty sure. Yes, I had a home and I wasn’t starving, but it was
all a con, a crock, a makeshift construct. I knew that psychologically, emotionally, I
was keeping myself just above the surface of the water. As soon as I stepped back
into ‘civilisation’ I slipped into the contemplation of disaster and death as if it was a
problem to be solved when it patently had no solution. But not to think of it didn’t
seem like any answer either. I came back to it again and again like picking at a rotten
tooth with ones tongue as if by some miracle it could be made whole again or
unhappen. And really, why would anyone want to experience anything truly
horrifying? How could anyone separate themselves from their emotions to
experience it objectively? Whatever that meant. Or was this really only my way of
covering or justifying the more disturbing thought of what it would be like to be an
observer, with no say or cause as to how the disaster came about, which meant no
responsibility or culpability, so no guilt. Then the thought that if our minds
developed to that extent, surely by then ‘we’d’ know how to prevent such disasters?
And that being in a position to ‘view’ such events would be a form of vicarious
sadism or ‘sadism-by-proxy’, whichever way one cut it? And would I like others
looking out on me as a source of entertainment? (Which I obviously was to some)
Huckleberry Finn wasn’t going to help me with these thoughts. I wondered what it
would be like to have known Mark Twain – Samuel Clemens. Another reality I
couldn’t grasp and would never experience, except through the fragmented and
limited assemblage of his books. Life was one vast vale of fragmented thoughts held
in time, superimposed by the constant awareness of and fetid attraction to mayhem,
murder, and death. Again, not something I was capable of articulating, but the
potential was there and I do it for that former troubled self now and every mind I ever
shared as now and will to come, for all the limitations I impose on it through my own
ignorance obstinacy and refusal of insight.

Coming back to my earlier musings I knew this was only some aspect of my
personality I had grown up with, that it wasn’t really me. I could blame it on others,
my mother, who were quick to point out my (apparent) inadequacies, who would
endeavour to convince me I was lacking in something everyone else on the planet
was born with; common-sense, according to her. Presumably it was her common
sense that informed her of this. She and her common sense were on very good terms,
and were as unanimous in their opinion and contemptuous hatred of me for not
having any to speak of as she was of my equally blatant stupidity. A circular and
conveniently impregnable onslaught, a paradoxical viewpoint as vise-like, as
inflexible as one of those stiff penknives where I might chip a nail trying to prise it
open. Sometimes it was if the world was trying to provoke me beyond all endurance:
that most of the time it felt as if I was in a state of suppressed anger and frustration;
that the natural response of any sane and reasonable person would be to strike out.
Daily stupidities and assumptions and humiliations minor and major that if I were to
respond to them as I felt and knew them to be for what they were, I knew my
relations with others, with home life, with school, would shift from sullen or closed-
lipped tolerance to outright war. That there was conflict wasn’t in question. Their
often-unwarranted contempt and tyrannical outbursts and even demeanour made that
clear enough. What was almost just as intolerable was the complacent assumption I
could see on their faces, of their place in the status quo as they went about in their
trance it and so they could never seriously be called to account. The system worked
for them as it was on their side. I only had to think of the casual and threatened
nastiness, of dire consequences for anyone who such as hinted they might have an
ounce of self-motivated thought or humour, when our class had the honour of being
visited by one Miss Ramsden, some crazy old bint, bitter with bile and hatred of
hatred of us because we were young and powerless but we still had our whole lives
before us. But for the time being, this merciless harpy had us in the clutches of her
harpy talons and she would relish it as long as she could make it last. Short of some
loved one suffering over some agonising and wasting disease at the time, I see no
other explanation for such behaviour on her part. Time was suddenly an excruciating
and protracted thing as my emotions veered from a sort of horrified incredulity,
mixed amusement and self-contempt over her sarcastic humour, and the wish I could
slink between the space in the floorboards along with the almost imperceptible and
forbidden thought of what it would be like to walk out onto the floor and inform her
she should go and fuck herself. Because what with all this self-reverential grimness
and hollow humour I could really do with a bit of cheering up, a song and dance
perhaps, in contrast to this bizarre in the extreme assertion of one person’s
personality, headmistress or not; hey, there was a whole world out there. Of Batman,
and camaraderie with your friends, and beautiful girls, (as here, only we had to keep
shtum and listen to egomaniacal prattle) and woods and fields and music and the
future. I watched her as she prattled on in her concise and icy way, in her old
woman’s fashion sense with her dull skirt and tan tights and quaint little shoes, with
her pinched little features and tight lips. A part of me felt like the nothings were
supposed to feel, awed by her authority, powerless in the knowledge we had no say in
it. Another part saw it as absurd; that it was obvious she was an anachronism, a
dinosaur in a world of Science Fiction and Marvel Comics and Mungo Jerry and Joni
Mitchell and Smokey Robinson. I knew at a glance that she would hate them all and
me along with them. It was an outrage we had to be here at all, having to listen to
this vacuous egotist who so clearly detested us, or was it directed only to certain
members of the class? My own thoughts and feelings were surely all the
conformation she needed to justify it. I felt as if all her implied menace were directed
at me. As for her occasional and lame humour, it wasn’t fooling anyone, and perhaps
it wasn’t meant to and that was the overtly sinister aspect of the whole charade.
Because the born conformists didn’t have anything to worry about. It was the kids
who saw it for what it was who knew it spoke to them as it was meant for them. A
spark of individuality, an original thought or honest emotion was synonymous with
seeing oneself as a troublemaker, a marked man, the guilty party. The very set-up
had the effect of making me feel guilty. Not that I was capable of articulating any of
this to myself or was in a position to. In these situations I tended to go into myself
and examine my own troubling feelings and emotions. And as much as my fear
would negate my sense of self there would still be that part of me that looked to see
the situation as objectively as I could, the humorous, mischievous, intelligent aspect,
that saw it as ludicrous this frail middle-aged woman would think she could browbeat
me – and us – into seeing ourselves as nonentities by comparison. Try it out in the
street you old bag and we’d pelt you with eggs – of it weren’t for that she knew us. I
knew that on some level she was a coward as well as a bully. That in some way she
was no different from how she tried to make us feel. Because she threw away or
merged her own personality with her job and status and used them as an excuse to
indulge and exaggerate the more venal aspects of her personality in the guise of
moral instruction while everything about her patronising, condescending tone and
attitude told us she was better than us, even the pupils, girls, she supposedly revered,
compared to grubby little oiks like me. There was something seriously awry here. I
hoped that one day I would come to grips with it.

Listen to them, the children of the night; what sweet music they make. Bram
Stoker’s Dracula – The movie.

When I wasn’t drawing Batman or Spider-man or even Superman, who’s


costume I liked even if the character seemed oddly one-dimensional, I liked to draw
faces punctuated by scars with their stitches prominently sown, with sharp or missing
teeth or both, usually branding a menacing looking knife. To me this was funny: it
had impact; my way of dealing with the images from feature films that scared me or
if they didn’t, I knew of course that real menace and danger lurked out in the world;
this was my way of dealing with it. To draw or even paint a pretty, innocuous little
picture would be like a joke without a punchline. Drawing people who were a
combination of monster, villain, and victim was like a joke with a twist, as any good
gag should have. I could loop my tongue so that it protruded from the sides of my
mouth like the fleshy teeth of Dracula. Nothing so compelling as a man with sharp
fangs where his teeth should be. When I saw and heard The Beatles my ‘cousin’
Graham and me would jump up and down on the settee playing out imaginary guitars
and shaking our imaginary Beatle-cuts while singing our heads off to She Loves You
on Radio One through the TV. After I saw Lon Chaney as the tormented Wolfman,
my favourite ‘turn’ was to go through his transformation from man to snarling,
growling, ferocious Wolfman. It could be unsettling just how much I submerged
myself in the role, thrashing around for all I was worth. I could be aggressive at the
best of times and this was almost a way of expressing pent-up frustration and anger I
suspect, though I was never aware of that. This was probably the reason why we
played cowboys and Indians and the rest. I preferred to be the ‘Indians’ as they were
exotic as were their weapons. And anyway, the bad guys were always were
interesting – until it became apparent all was not quite as the Westerns portrayed with
the cowboy settlers and the Native Americans. On the other hand, when we went to
Graham’s place, he had a cowboy belt with holsters and a Colt 45. Combine this with
a cowboy hat with the frills around the brim and I was in my element, practising
whipping the gun form the holster and whirling it in my fingers as I’d seen in the
movies, or at least until I got bored with trying and gave up. Better to practice my
aim with darts at the board for a while – we were never allowed anything like this;
not because I might impale my younger bro or just as likely, the other way around,
but due to the damage we might cause and the noise. But at Graham’s, my mum and
his were so engrossed in their problems and gossip, we were left to ourselves. I could
practice with a small sharp kitchen knife on his door, trying to throw it like in the
movies so that it stuck but not knowing about weighted knives I could never get the
hang of it, to my intense frustration. Everything worked like clockwork on the
movies but that was films for you. No one I knew ever imitated any superheroes and
neither did I as it would be decidedly naff, but every kid practices Spidey shooting
his web at some point, though only a kid who’s soft in the head or on drugs could
ever imagine they might jump off a roof and fly, but it happens. The epitome of
lacking in common sense, as in what planet do they think they live on? I think I can
imagine putting myself in their shoes. That it’s a combination of wishful thinking
and confusing vivid dreams with reality. That or a combination of Ritalin and a few
screws loose. I can talk; my favourite movie monster, criminal, and victim rolled into
one that I loved to imitate was Frankenstein, with his stiff gait and bolted neck (at
least in some comics) and outstretched arms as if he was lost or searching for
something, his was the most emotive character of all. That, and I could mimic the
angry and incoherent noises Karloff made playing the monster. Like him, I could be
the lost soul, temporarily in control, venting my fear and anger on the world.
Something like that. To anyone else, including my classmates I just liked to imitate
famous monsters. My mother didn’t know anything about it as it was intended to
entertain and as my feelings were so mixed towards her and I knew she’d have no
patience with me anyway, I’d only end up feeling foolish. I was undemonstrative in
her company; it never crossed my mind. Unfunnily enough, her bo imitated Karloff,
this some year later. Predictably he focused on Karloff’s lisp. ‘Thome people thay
I’m a monthter but I’m not a monthter’ etc. We knew to laugh on cue. I managed a
convincing grin to appease his vanity. The awareness of which always spoiled the
effect he was striving for, for me at any rate. His egotism contradicted the essence of
good humour or any humour for that matter. The irony was that they behaved as if
they were possessed themselves. They were the everyday monsters, whether through
rage in my mum’s case or alcohol in his, no one batted an eyelid over.
I might not have any say in or control over their behaviour but I could regain a
sense of control if not exactly taming the monster, through becoming it in a sense. I
had immense depths of sympathy for the Frankenstein Monster and even the
Wolfman due to Lon Chaney’s haunted portrayal in a way I couldn’t muster for my
mother, as it was too immediate and too real. Further, I could identify with the
monster (Frankenstein, to us as we took it for granted the title of the movie referred to
the monster, or I did) in a subconscious and existentially horrified sort of way in that
like myself, he found himself alive and up to his neck in hassle and horseshit, none of
which he had asked for, alone in a hostile world. But worse, he wasn’t even a real
human being but a ragbag construct of various bits and pieces of different bodies, as
horrifying to himself as he was to others, the mind-numbing situation compounded by
the question of what kind of God would allow such a thing? None of which came up
in the original film, but I was intelligent enough to squirm subconsciously over his
desperately horrible predicament. It and he was a living nightmare. I watched the
film mesmerised in a kind of dazed horror as it went from unbearable to worse, as he
thought he’d found friendship through the old blind man in the shack – maybe
‘Frankenstein’ could live happily ever after there, under the circumstances if he could
keep hidden, but it wasn’t to be. Then he went on to compound his nightmare
existence in the scene with the little girl where they threw flowers into the water then
run out of them and he’s so happy and frustrated at the same time, Karloff’s emotive
portrayal making each scene in the movie all the more heart-rending, as he looks at
her and the scene cuts to the father carrying the drowned girl though the town. He
does throw her in the water, but that scene was cut from the movie then. Now the
murderer, constructed form the bodies and brain of a murderer will never escape from
the web of guilt he’s made for himself – but then as he never made himself, this
seemed only to confirm his fate and malignant destiny from the outset, as if even God
Himself were out to screw him over – destroy him or worse. This was the most
terrifying thought of all. His death by fire at the hands of the mob – many heads with
no brain – was the inevitable conclusion. To me, he was the most reviled,
unfortunate, human who had ever ‘lived’; he couldn’t even claim that in any true
sense. His life and death were unspeakably tragic on so many levels; it was almost
irrelevant he was a fictional character. He wasn’t even a bad guy. He was a child
himself in many ways. Killing the little girl through drowning had been an accident
through his childlike ignorance, if a pretty backward child to be sure, but a mistake
all the same and no more backward than the one-dimensional mob in a way, who
were out for his blood. The whole thing was oddly circular, but the people never
seemed to have any doubt over his motivations and born badness. It was all pretty
black and white to them. I had idea how others interpreted the movie. I identified
with and felt sorry for the Monster – along with the little girl. But to have hated Him
for it would have felt the same as allowing myself to be duped as the rather obtuse
villagers so obviously were in their unthinking reactiveness. And I was just a kid,
going through a phase, pretending to be my favourite monsters. But I really liked
when Fred Gwynn played Herman Munster of The Munsters, this in the ‘60’s, still.
He was obviously the Frankenstein Monster, only with a big likable grin, and usually
cheerful. Every face he pulled was hilarious. The homely Granpa was clearly
Dracula. I wasn’t quite sure about the tall guy as Lurch and the squat chrome-dome
as Uncle Fester, if he was in the original series. I took Lurch to be some kind of
zombie and Fester as a Golem – or imbecile sex fiend – if I knew what that was.
The empty flats at the bottom of the road on the corner, not far from school was
the perfect environment for me to instigate a monster hunt and I would show them
how it was done to get the ball rolling so they wouldn’t feel foolish and would get
into the spirit of it. The building was perfect as each flat was easily reached either by
stairs to each floor and because all the doors, where there were doors, were unlocked.
In effect we could chase each other all over the building to our hearts content.
Earlier, farting around outside, I‘d had an interestingly surreal reality dislocation
when cheerful ginger, John, had said, ‘Hey Bobe, catch’, and lobbed what looked like
a boulder at me. I simultaneously grinned in response then lurched in subdued
incredulity and disbelief that he’d thrown something large enough to injure me. I
braced myself in semi-shock to catch it as I’d no to me to dodge it, as it bounced
harmlessly off me. It was a dirt-covered piece of foam. I was as fascinated by my
own reaction and perception of the event as by his wit; that I could so easily be
deceived by my senses. That the shock of apprehension had been so real only
because I had believed it was. I felt as if there were a wider meaning, some deeper
metaphysical truth I couldn’t grasp. This wasn’t the ideal time or situation to expect
to find an answer. It was another experience to file in the subconscious, put on the
back burner for some equally obscure moment in the future when I was magically
wiser as well as older. The moment passed almost as soon as it happened.
Meanwhile back in the real world, my head was full of monsters. My enthusiasm
soon overcame any reservations or inhibitions. Any stick-in-the muds were obliged
to join in with the rest of us. They were probably intrigued to see how I’d pull this
off. In class I could be quite subdued as that was the nature of the situations as well
any reserve I would feel in the presence of girls. Alone with my mates – and I really
did see them all as friends – my artistic and organisational abilities came to the fore.
It had to be fun on the basis of equals as trying to bully anyone into anything would
only spoil the vibe, and anyway they’d have point-blank refused and went their own
way. Only good-natured enthusiasm could set this up. Now I had participants, actors
in my monster fantasy, it came to unexpected life. I was in my very own movie, with
a whole set at my disposal. It was Carry on Screaming combined with every horror
movie I’d ever seen – and some I hadn’t or had forgotten. I started the ball rolling of
course and chased them with stiff and outstretched arms as fast as my stiff little legs
would take, sprinting through a sea of plaster on old floorboards, barely keeping it in
mind until the last moment, to avoid walking straight into any gaping holes and gaps
near the centre of the floor where the plaster had worn away. At other times if I
caught up with one I would lay into the broken plaster that surrounded the thin slats
of wood and plaster that were left in a section of wall as if I was so obtuse or frenzied
with insane rage I was barely in control of my own actions, all the better to carry on
the illusion of the chase with. I think it worked. They couldn’t get away from me
quick enough. When I began to feel too tired it was easy to get one to take over then
the situation was reversed for me. I was in abject, if hilarious terror. I scrambled up
and down stairs and over the sides of banisters as a short cut as if my life depended
on it. Otherwise we wouldn’t have pulled it off, it wouldn’t be real for me. Then,
idiotically, when I felt I was cornered, I threw myself out of the frameless window,
forgetting not only that we were on the top floor - though in reality I hadn’t – but also
that there were no railings on the landing – the plettie – outside. I stopped myself
short anyway as I quickly ‘came to’. There was only a lone if thicker and square
metal pole jutting up from the corner of the plettie. Maybe it was the thought that if I
had thrown myself a couple of feet further, the railing was the only thing to have
stopped me if I was lucky, or maybe it was the thought that I had missed such a
dramatic if unlikely opportunity – I suspect I was almost disappointed I wasn’t
discovered clinging to it for dear life or that it had so obviously stopped my fall – but
I was suddenly hit by the pathos of the situation as well as the awareness of the
precariousness of it, surrounded by open air at the side of the building and the
expanse just over the edge, that, to my intense embarrassment I burst into tears, and
lay there for a while, slumped and feeling mighty relieved over the potentially close
shave and sorry for myself over the thought I could have snuffed out my future
possibilities in the space of a few seconds. The truth was I tended to get far too
overexcited, though now I can look on it as typical of my ability to enter into other
worlds, whether of music or landscape or character. No one said anything or even
laughed. They were as embarrassed I was. It was Carry on Bubbling. The
demonmonsters Frankenstein and The Wolfman and the rest were ignominiously back
in the real world, their illusion shattered. Monsterworld was never mentioned again.
Not by me, anyway.

We’re back at the back of the empty flats some minutes from where we live.
We always find something to do. As always, it’s a matter of exploration, of
discovery, ingenuity and enterprise. Whatever that might entail. There’s the old and
dilapidated wash-house or that’ what I take it to be as it has one of those old clothes
presses with the rollers and a big handle to turn it, but it’s all rusted and damp and
stiff and the effort isn’t worth the results. The washhouse shed itself is too dank and
grimy to consider making a den out of where we might get out of the rain when need
be or sit around with some candles or even a workman’s lamp nicked from the
roadside. A good part of the roof at the side looks ready to collapse at any point also.
One time we went up the Law Hill; Billy, Mark, Graham, Keith, not forgetting
meself, and roasted some potatoes in the dark. We felt safe in numbers. No night-
terrors here, or Purple Men or Galaxy Creatures (The Outer Limits) coming out of the
night for us to flee in terror. The tatties, spattered with ash and dirt, were delicious of
course, because we cooked them ourselves. A pity we didn’t think to bring paper
plates and a big chicken, but as we scrumped for the potatoes ourselves somewhere…
the effect would be lost – the illusion we were outlaws, desperadoes; free of rules and
regulations and school and all the rest. Not that we’d have admitted any of this to
each other as such. Not in mixed company anyway. Or maybe it was just I, being the
most bookishly inclined, with my predilection for romanticising, always looking to
play a part. Back at the flats, with Billy’s younger bro, and Andy from downstairs, I
could play the big guy in charge, and feel it too, directing them to look for old lead
piping in the flats along with the fair whack we literally ripped off the roof of the
washhouse – I was surprised no one had taken it before. Sometimes I had taken lead
down to a factory or warehouse down by Polepark where they weighed it then paid
me for it. They also took rags – old clothes, to me. ‘Rags' conjured up an image of
tramps or Oliver Twist and his buddies. Sometimes I’d find the odd bag of them
sitting outside a tenement here and there on my travails. I didn’t like going there,
feeling ill-at-ease knowing I was dependent on the bloke’s goodwill not to cheat me,
and whatever I got I could never be sure whether I was or not. The upside was, it was
always no questions asked. The perfect environment for encouraging the flowering
of any current or future delinquent looking for money for nothing. It was a short-
lived enthusiasm. It was simple just to steal the things I wanted directly. When
Graham and Andy and me had put our haul of lead in a pile on the earth, we built a
small fire with sheets of old newspaper from the old flats and bits of would that lay
all around – someone having brought some matches from home for the purpose, then
when it was good and going, we twisted and pulled apart the longer lead piping and
placed them in the small bakery tins we’d stumbled across, putting them on the fire,
heating them in advance. I’d heard lead’s melting point was 1000 degrees centigrade,
and for some moments I thought it might be a ‘damp squid’ and noting was going to
happen, then the silvery liquid began seeping from the bottom, clear and pristine,
unlike the dirty pieces of lead it came from. I took the honours in lifting the first
painful from the flames, though how we did it I have no idea as the memory is gone,
but I handled it with the utmost attention, as careful as when climbing, not to spill
any of the silvery liquid, as careful over the thought of any 1000 degrees splashes
while they watched with rapt interest. We’d never handled smelted metal before. We
couldn’t do it in our kitchens for sure, nor even the back green as we couldn’t make
fires of course as the neighbours as the neighbours would be up in arms, and anyway,
it was too dangerous or would be seen to be, and that was as much a part of the
attraction. They didn’t take long to cool off and dry solid as the trays were small;
some of the lead bocks were marked where we had poked them in curiosity at
different stages of the cooling process. Then they were dry and we could flip our
Fort Knox-like bullion dollar haul from hand to hand, and it was
. All a bit anti-climactic, but the fun and the interest had been in the experience
of it all. That we had set ourselves a goal for part of that afternoon, however modest,
and seen it through. We didn’t have to sit around and ask deep questions as to why
things were as they were and how the future might be, or even go looking for smaller
kids to pick on as some kids did. One went with the flow and lived in the now and
sharing experiences and discoveries, however mundane, were the unspoken
communion we shared in knowing we shared a part of each others lives and that was
what we chose to do in those specific hours (And no older kids to appear on the scene
and spoil it by taking over). None of which came up in any of the Boys Stories I
read, probably for the aforementioned reasons. No similar episodes either, such as
when Tam McD’s big cousin Malcolm and big brother Jim – Jimmy to his mother –
‘that Jimmy McD’ to mine – tool pot-shots at Billy and Graham and Andy – and
possibly Mark, from the window of their top-floor flat with an air-rifle. Not a pistol,
but a powerful air rifle; the kind that sticks metal pellets in walls. Billy and Graham
showed me the large raised welts on their thighs. Clearly they were accurate shots
and aimed low. There may have been talk of Billy’s dad involving the cops, but he
probably feared any comeback. Older teens could use younger kids for fun and target
practice with impunity still, in the late 60’s. I was just glad I’d missed the bringing
on of the pain as well as the sense of guilt and persecution I Knew I’d have felt,
feeling I somehow deserved it or I was being singled out. I did have a close shave
one morning on the way to school, late, so I was running down Rankin Street at the
time, fortunately, which may have spoilt the aim of the kid who took a shot at my
head from the large houses that lined the street. I felt it as the metal ball or pellet
zinged by face, then like an idiot, looked in the direction it had come from, but by
then was well ahead in the game. For a moment, I thought of stopping and
confronting the fucker – put the wind up him a bit, then the thought came he might be
bigger than me, though if his mum or dad were in…they might tell me to fuck off and
mind my own business – and anyway, I’m late, and somehow or other I’ll be the one
who gets the short end of the stick here…looking at that big house as I went by,
looking for the tell-tale gap in a window, then feeling out of my depth. Another time
we’re up Camperdown Park, and going by some bushes and there’s the tell-tale
zinging of pellets flying past my head, and we turn to see some kids along with a big
fat older kid, and I can’t be arsed running as it’s undignified, so fatboy come over and
pops me point blank in the stomach and it’s unexpectedly painful and crumple to the
ground, I’m in tears; partly due to rage, and maybe in the hope of forestalling another
assault, and Larry laughs at this, happy to see me helpless. The kid had a talent for
mediocrity and guilt-mongering. I’d love to kick the big kid in the balls but the risk
is too great and he has the gun, and anyway, I was always shit with people I didn’t
know as they were an unknown quantity; where would it all end? Fatboy left it at
that. Maybe I was taking the fun out of it and it was easier to scare kids from a
distance. Or perhaps even, someone was watching by then; who knows. Another
little episode of the sort that never made it into any of the William stories I’d read, or
Jennings and Derbyshire, or The Famous Five and their magical dream-world
approach to solving crimes come to that, was when we went up the Law again, this
time armed with a box of matches to experiment with setting alight patches of dried
grass, only the wind caught it, and small waves of flames swept across the grass,
yards at a time, catching us by surprise and we wondered for a moment if we had
bitten of more than we could chew.
There were any number of incidents I never saw the equivalent of in my reading
material. Books like Treasure Island and The Swiss Family Robinson were
tremendously exciting but it was understood they were only stories. Having to
defend yourself from marauding natives with only the ingenuity of John Mills to keep
them at bay, as in the movie, wasn’t a realistic option. Zulu at the cinema was a more
realistic spectacle as was The Charge of The Light Brigade, but I wasn’t that
interested in watching the Imperialist forces for good decimate the ‘ignorant savages,’
and anyway, there weren’t any kids to identify with and that was the main thing. A
film like Planet of The Apes was far more exciting because it was so offbeat. The
premise behind it was genuinely unsettling as was the climax. I was nine when I saw
– it as released in 1968 – and pleased I’d grasped the impact of the ending, when
Heston/Taylor discovers they’ve been on earth all along. Time-travel, killer apes,
brain experimentation/dissection, and the re-writing of history. What more could a
boy’s enquiring mind ask for? Then there was the ultra-quirky Dance of The
Vampires (Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers). The Astoria displayed stills
from the current film showing, wooden cases outside. Peering through the glass, it
seemed to be vampires actually dancing, as well as other shots in the snow of
Polanski and Alfie Bass (Was this a horror movie or wot?). It was like nothing I had
ever seen before, and there were even pee-a-boo scenes with the delicately beautiful
orange-haired woman in the bathtub etc. – the lovely Sharon Tate. But it was still
fantasy. What the Planet of The Apes films had was a sense of real danger. The
sequel, Beneath the Planet of The Apes, was even weirder and more science-fictional,
with its deformed mutants living in the New York subway – and their ear-piercing
psychic powers; shades of the organ-weapon in the earlier movie, The Children of
The Damned, that I saw a good few years later on TV. The most believable, and
affecting for that reason, was Escape From The Planet of The Apes, when our
favourite apes from the first movie, Galen and Zera, travel back in time to the
wonderful world of the early 70’s USA. There are many amusing and alarming
developments before they’re hunted down like rats as with the earlier psychic kids
movie – based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoo’s – I’d never read it – as
was The Village of The Damned. Strangely enough, I did get a sense of realism from
reading Hans Anderson’s stories. What could be more oppressive, more moving, than
the story of The Little Match Girl, who freezes to death out in the cold, afraid to go
back home as she hadn’t sold any matches, so she strikes them to keep herself
‘warm.’ What Anderson’s stories had was a sense of the transcendent, that worked on
many levels, as in The Angel, about a dying boy, confined to his room who is taken
on a kind magical mystery tour by an angel. I had never read anything so moving.
He was expert at pushing all the right buttons. My life might seem bad at times, but I
was neither starving nor dying. And even if it ever came to that I was being told,
there were visions of loved ones and heaven along the way as well as at the end. Too
‘mawkish’ to share with my good buds’ of course – any of them – but I would get my
Granddad’s new wife to read them to me when they came over. I think the content of
the stories was as lost on her as they would’ve been to my mother. They were of
different worlds – and ways of being. In contrast, there was the Victorian time-
traveller, Adam Adamant, then The Champions; a trio of secret agents who had
gained their psychic powers after crashing in the Himalayas and meeting a strange
and wise old man. Lucky them. And two of them were stupendously good-looking,
as well as being the coolest people in the world, though Robert Wagner in It Takes A
Thief did it for me for a while; I even tried to talk as he did.
Theme tunes.
I liked to read smaller format comics called Creepy Tales, and Astounding
Stories. They were very cheaply produced in plain black and white, but with a colour
cover. There’s probably no describing the effect the simple colour covers of comics
can have. The promised a world of adventure, of almost limitless possibilities, as
exciting as any movie; more so in a way, as it was twenty years before videos of films
became available to the public. You saw a film and it was over; it was gone, until it
came on TV years later – unless one went to see it again, but that could prove too
expensive and anyway, there were always more films to see – or comics to buy, for
that matter, and at least with those, one could read them again and even if you didn’t,
you had them for adding to ones coveted collection. With a film, all you had were
your patchy memories of them. Movies were something that stayed with the cinemas
and the distributors. The next best thing would be posters, but I didn't bother with
them until Bowie and Slade came on the scene in my early teens. Later, I would
occasionally stumble upon a more X-rated style creepy/horror comic in a large
format. One story as I recall, as I walked along the old railway line on Loons Road,
was about a deranged teen or young man who chops up someone, possibly his family
with an axe and dumps them in the woodshed; just the kind of thing I should be
reading in my disgruntled and resentful formative years, detesting school and home
and wishing the whole damn lot would just go away and leave me alone to enjoy my
psycho-comics along with my more wholesome reading. I don’t know who published
this comic as some of them didn’t stay around for very long, by which I mean they
were either nicked or my mother threw out whatever happened to be lying around if it
wasn’t with the rest in a neat pile. I’m guessing. Whatever the case, most of the
comics I accumulated before my teens and some thereafter as I say, would vanish as
mysteriously as in some of the events of those tales; you know what I mean. I
suppose the creepy comic could’ve been a reprint of the old William M. Gaines’ Tales
of Terror and the like; before my time – I wasn’t very au fait with the history of
comics and their trials and tribulations a decade before, when I was born. But as with
the Hans Anderson stories, it was edifying to read something grimmer than my actual
life, however over the top. In fact it was that aspect that was a kind of odd catharsis,
a strange and ‘warped’ perspective, by reminding me that no matter how bad it got or
browbeaten I might feel, it would never be this bad. Either that or it raised the
possibility there could be more inventive ways of dealing with it and them if it ever
did. Not really. I was already too aware of a future as a writer of some kind, to throw
away my possibilities and waste my life on revenge over the terminally uncreative.
Or so I hoped. Persistent memories of a future life.
Meanwhile back in the real world, life went on in its usual hectically
unpredictable – or unpredictably hectic way, one incident following the other as I
played the fool surrounded by apparent lunatics (or acted like a lunatic surrounded by
fools), every other occurrence a potential catastrophe, or if that’s mere hyperbole or
exaggeration at best, consider the possibilities inherent in having free reign to
virtually run amuck, having the whole town at our and my disposal, so to say. The
same was true for William and his merry band of Outlaws of course, but perhaps
what these children’s novels and others should have had was a disclaimer along the
lines of ‘Your experience may differ (even radically) from the events as described in
these pages/stories.’ (Which was where movies and Marvel comics and the rest could
be so instructive, because as with Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in Spider-man (POW!
comic), people died and tragedies happened. I was horrified in a way at the murder
of the beautiful blonde in the film, when James Bond discovers her painted in gold by
the ‘evil’ Goldfinger; her death had seemed so arbitrary and unexpected). It was
almost natural to assume life should be as fundamentally safe, if decidedly quirky, as
portrayed in some of these novels. Now I’m tempted to see them as either naive or
irresponsible in a sense (I could have done with warnings about attempted
brainwashing in the guise of abusive criticism and haranguing, for example; in a
nutshell I wanted to know how to conduct myself in the face of dangerous lunatics –
because that’s what they were, and emotionally sophisticated writers would know that
– even if I didn’t know that at the time). No responsible parent or parental surrogate
lets their kids run around willy-nilly now, unsupervised. And for me, these authors
were parental surrogates. Neither school nor my guardians told me about or gave me
any advice on how to deal with bullies or bullying teachers for that matter (or lesser
‘misunderstandings,’ etc.), or, come to that, bullying mothers and bo’s – or how
romantic or even sexual inclinations and attractions were supposed to fit into all this,
or for that matter, if any adult ever showed a sexual interest in me – not a possibility
that ever passed through my mind, I might add. Comics dealt with many of these
themes – Peter Parker was always being ‘ribbed’ by Flash, then there was the sadistic
bully, Flashman, of Tom Brown’s Schooldays – that I tried reading at my gran’s but
never stuck to it. There were probably every permutation of situations in the Billy
Bunter novels; there were even the girls comics, such as Mandy, and Judy, and others
I read at my cousins, Mandy and Sharon, when my mother was ill in Hammersmith
Hospital. I don’t mean I think children’s comics and novels should be a catalogue of
horrors – twenty years later, there were the interesting and uplifting combination of
realism and the transcendental in Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman as well as the
catalogue of horrors inherent in the children’s books of Roald Dahl – clearly a step in
the right direction to my mind – but one – I – have to wonder if the censorship of the
fifties, and the evangelic fervour with which it was pursued by the latest self-
appointed moral guardians over what might corrupt the delicate sensibilities of the
time were nothing more than a form of denial of what really went on in the world –
their world, as well as being a denial of their own unconscious violent impulses and
aggression as well of course, as their sexuality. Children should be seen and not
wholly educated and if that unconscious aggression rears its ugly head in further
dehumanisation in the blandness of everyday lack of consideration, to torture, rape,
and murder, well so be it. I suppose what I’m saying is that as I couldn’t count on
anything truly resembling sense and sanity from the likes of my mother or to a lesser
extent, teachers such as McDonald, or Ramsden – who, when not throwing my
property in the bin, were terrorising us in other ways, I looked on writers – authors, in
comparison, as more genuinely educated, wise individuals. Only if they were so
wise, it’s a pity they didn’t warm me just how unpredictable and nasty the more
unimaginative and obtuse individuals in my immediate orbit could be. These authors
were of course, hindered as much by their own forms of censorship of the day. Now
all a kid need do is find the graphic novels section in any bookshop – or library, and
explore any scenario under the sun, I think – which is no bad thing. And before that
as I say, the realism of Anderson and the mind-boggling horror of Grimms Hansel
and Gretel, the kids about to be cannibalised in the candy cottage. Now there’s Frank
Moore and From Hell, and old classics like Will Eisner’s New York. I only wish I’d
had access to the old E.C./William M. Gaines’ comics when I was a kid. Now I can
see their modern day equivalents on cable, played by famous actors – as well as the
remakes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (As Stephen King pointed out
his study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre back in the 80’s, a broadcast of the
original Outer Limits series is a rare bird indeed; but I wouldn’t have thought it’s too
disturbing or unsettling even for commercially oriented TV schedules now. I missed
it when it was shown here again, back in 1981-2. But that’s the way the cookie
crumbles. I just wish someone would show it again, I really do. I’ve had the Sci-Fi
Channel for years now and still no sign of it. Then again, I’ve rarely seen any novels
by the prolific SF writer, Harlan Ellison, one of the original writers on the series).
A film I didn’t see when it was released in ’68, nor later in my teens, was
Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If….’ centred in a public school as with Flashman in Tom
Brown – not literally – and featuring the casual bullying and jibes of masters and
pupils alike, along with what one might term the more methodical and organised
sadistic bullying and punishments of the prefects. The film ends in a hail of bullets.
Which might explain why I never saw uit at primary school and the effect on
secondary/high school kids is anyopne’s guess. There were also the brilliant
paperbacks on maverick schoolboy, nigel molesworth, by Geoffrey Willans,
illustrated by Ronald Searle, though I was in secondary school before I came across
any. They were the funniest books I had ever read – on par with the Monty Python
annuals of the time, though Willans and Searle’s books were published in the ‘50’s.
They presented the masters as villains, opportunists, and sadists.
At some point I read some stories in volumes of the Pan Book of Horror Stories.
The horror here wasn’t metaphysical in any way, but centred around what could be
done in all sadistic ingenuity to another person or persons bodies. I couldn’t see the
point of them or whom they were supposed to appeal to, but clearly they did; there
were a whole series of them. I had a sense of ‘you’ve read one, you’ve read them
all.’ Another way to say it is I found them pointlessly sadistic. In that sense they
were certainly horrific and if the definition of horror is to limit the imagination to the
confines of inventing as many sadistic scenarios as possible to produce a sense of
claustrophobia and nausea in the reader, then they achieved their purpose; which for
me was no purpose at all as they had no redeeming qualities that I could see except to
titillate the sadistic impulse, so I felt for that reason there was something unhealthy
and life-negating about them – that the mind and imagination could be put to far more
instructive use. Such as seeking the causes of human destructiveness, not wallowing
in it as these stories seemed to do. I had felt perhaps something of the same in the
story of the murderous woodsman I had read in creepy tales comic, but there was
something self-consciously Gothic about it – it was part of a tradition – and the
drawings were quite fascinating in their macabre way. That, and that if I were in the
bus or on the train, I’d rather be an adult faced with my former self in the guise of
any school-kid reading such a comic, than be me as a kid sitting opposite some well-
off looking gent or a builder or painter-and-decorator – or an innocuous looking old
bint, like Ramsden from school, come to that, eyeing me while reading horseshit like
the Pan Book of Horror. But I’ve got ahead of myself – no pun intended.

Out playing, I focus my inherent creative abilities on my surroundings like a


laser-beam (ha!), naturally take control, elevating passing the time to a level of
inventive sophistication more in keeping with making works of art. Or so I like to
think. When we weren’t getting laid into one of the old concrete air-raid shelters –
the smaller one conveniently situated in a slightly more secluded spot in one of the
corners of the ‘squarey,’ made up of the surrounding council houses – I liked to
instigate a bit of den-making, utilising whatever happened to be lying around,
including what we could drag out of the old flats just opposite (and surely a break-in
hazard to the folks who lived in the adjoining tenement just through the walls). One
day I found a 1957 Beano in the bottom drawer of a wardrobe, then forgot all about it
when it went missing. Out of sight, out of mind, probably nicked right out from
under my nose. Perhaps my mother came across it and showed it to the bo, our
resident Bill Sykes, and he thought it might be worth something too and he got a
couple of pints for himself on the proceeds of giving it to a buddy, or said he did.
Just another of life’s small and niggling mysteries in nowheresville, where your
friends or significant others stole from you without a moments thought.
I made all manner of constructions, some sitting on their own on the grass,
another one against the side wall of the council block where Tam McD lived. It was
always better to make or build these with younger kids as well as my bro if he was
around, as they were more likely to get caught up in the excitement of watching it
take shape, as we shared ideas in how to construct it so it would all hold together –
through the power of gravity alone, whereas I may have thought that my peers would
feel patronised and uncomfortable and spoil the mood for me, which was to create my
own alternative world of sorts, though I wasn’t conscious of that at the time of
course. In the top corner of the square, itself making a sharp rectangle as it was also
closed off from the main street – Gardner Street – by railings, I made an odd waste-
high structure over the earth; there was no grass as it probably used for a plot before.
It was more interesting to figure out how to put it together than do anything else with
it. I also had a recurring image of having my very own coffin-like space to live in,
complete with lightswitch and books. Oddly enough, I came across pretty much the
very same idea many later in Colin Wilson’s autobiography, Voyage To A Beginning
(though published in 1968. Interestingly, this could easily be the same year I was
thinking of the same while making my den’s, over the age of nine and ten and older).
The one we made before against the wall was like a half-tepee and enjoyable to
sit in. They could even double as a shelter from the rain as long as they lasted, but
after a day or two – and I’d go by to see if it/they were still there, when I
remembered, they’d invariably be knocked down. Talking about the possibility of
feeling I might be patronising my peers and how they might react to such minor
enterprise, we once built a very robust den down in the basement-like small area at
the foot of the empty tenement nearby. We hadn’t lonmg finished it – probably
Graham and Andy and I, when a couple,of older kids we knew locally, John Hedridge
and Martin Mulholland, came though the close, immediately clocking the effort we
had put into our mini-masterpiece – a largish square effort, spacious enough to sit in –
and began kicking and pulling at it, then finding it – something like myself – more
robust than expected, got on top and jumped up and down to loosen it up – like a
Nazi or capo jumping on some poor Jew or trashing their synagogue (and to me my
makeshift dens were like churches of a kind as they represented a world within a
world), as we watched in hopeless frustration. A humiliating experience; I was
almost hoping that our den might hold, by some miracle. This kind of thing aroused
such intense anger in me at the blind arrogance and stupidity of it I would feel a kind
of disbelieve that it was happening at all or should be allowed to happen. It was so
pointlessly destructive, I couldn’t get into their heads at all. If Tam had been
involved in the making of it it just might have been okay as he had the older bro and
cousin and buddies connection. A variation, of they’d chosen it, would be to just be
me up as the oldest, but they knew me as I knew Tam as we knew their buddies and
that wouldn’t go down well with them, especially Mike Gillan, a tough but very
humorous kid, who seemed to like me. In fact these two blokes – the homewreckers
– were the mediocrities, the runts of the bunch. Arguably, I could’ve beaten either
one in a fight. Together, they gravitated to their naturally cowardly, liberty-taking
level, disliking me instinctively. The same youths that had put the boot into the
pigeons and smashed the eggs on the top floor of the deserted tenement at the foot of
Cobden Street, they seemed to me to be ‘ante-life.’ The same thing I felt when I
watched, with my granddad, those soldiers on TV throwing babies out of the
windows of the tenement block or over the railings.
Another image; of Mark Bulle, blonde and my age, standing on the air-raid
shelter with his elbows out and hands resting on his waste like Errol Flynn as a pirate,
acting as oddly arrogant as his pose, which made me do a double-take to figure out
what was going on before he stepped aside and the older Sandy Lawson was right
behind in the same pose before dropping his arms and saying something smart; this
while I’m still half in other world mode, working on shaping lifeless pieces of wood
and stone into something resembling the sacred, if only in my own mind, however
vaguely. Going out of the house to escape and explore I’m as surrounded by toadies
and sycophants as ever. The body switch/double trick was pretty slick though – a
clever idea, which gave me even more of a double-take for a moment, more in the
vein of my earlier Twilight Zone/Outer Limits reality dislocation moments, because
for a moment I couldn’t believe my eyes as it was as if Sandy Lawson had appeared
out of nowhere - in that I found it almost as hard to believe I hadn’t seen him behind
Mark Bulle. My imaginative outlook was as inclined to make a metaphysical
mystery out of it if only for a second or two; I was probably as struck by the
dramatic, film-like possibilities. I’d never read or seen such a thing in a movie yet.
Now we have people morphing into other people/aliens etc., all the time.
A year or three later, Mark and me would have an argument that swifty
developed into an intense flurry of blows, ending abruptly when one of mine caught
him on the nose. It happened so quickly I was about as surprised as he was when he
wailed and ran upstairs to his mum. After that I would feel like a vicious thug
whenever she set eyes on me.
Another Project I instigated – or brainwave I had was to corral some of the
others in to cutting a rectangle space into the long grass in the centre of the
backgreen. The already cut areas were all around the perimeter where mums and
other women put out the washing. That meant those area were out of bounds for
playing football, as were our sections as often as not, due to over-bearing and
territorial ‘neighbours,’ such as the humourless and tedious couple on the bottom
floor of our close or Billy’s dad next door. When one banged on the wondow –
furiously in his case, we would move along until the other did the same, then it was
the same story further along on every section. In retrospect, an absurdity, especially
to be expected to move along from where I lived. The munsters on the bottom floor
had no more right to the section of green there than anyone else in the close, nor
could it really be any bother to them as our sitting room were at the front of the
building. At worst they would hear and see us from the kitchen; but that was the
attitude. It didn’t matter where we went or what we did – as long as it was
somewhere else. Later, when there were at least a half-dozen of us out and well
wrapped up in football, meaning tempers were getting frayed – mine - and liberty’s
taken, we wouldn’t be moved on if we were on Billy’s section as he was there too,
and a good buddy. One rule for their own, one rule for us, or me. His dad didn’t like
me. Possibly because his sons did and I wasn’t ‘respectable’ in the way they were.
There was only my frail-looking mother and semi-drunk of a bo. They’d likely seen
them often enough on the way out or back on the weekend, turned out and tarted up.
Maybe he assumed I was like them, a chip on the shoulder of the old block, whatever
the story was with my absent father. All of which made me all the conveniently
easier to pick on if the opportunity arose.
I’d been designated the bad kid next door. Maybe he’d bumped into Mrs Bulle.
It was all politics behind the scenes. That I didn’t start fights was neither here nor
there. And anyway, Mark and Paul were in exactly the same boat as us, only his
mother was relatively stable and her live on bo wasn’t an increasingly violent drunk
and always friendly. Maybe he appeared on the scene earlier when Mark and me
became fast friends. One afternoon Tam McD and me were out farting around in the
sunshine, then, having been warned off the green green grass of home next door, I
launched into a rendering of Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String,’ to the amusement of
Tam – Tommy to his mum, sister, and teachers – and his further amusement when
Billy’s dad grabbed me by the scruff of the collar and pulled me back. I’d seen the
expression of alarmed amusement just before the act, only the little shit didn’t warn
me even when he’d seen it coming. I didn’t register this at the time, or I didn’t
challenge him over it as I didn’t recognise what it said about him. Another memory
of Billy senior at the bottom of the few stairs at the back door of our close this time to
take me by surprise and give me a message in quiet menace, that he’ll take me into
the close and give me a good hiding, beat the crap our out of me – one of those.
Another time we’re standing by bin recess next to the back door and passing the
time, amusing ourselves after just having been given a mouthful from some old bint
on the top floor for being on her territory as she saw it, and this bloke, a man, lunges
into our space and conversation. He’s livid. Which one of us just gave the woman a
mouthful? Was it you? Everything about him says he’s on the cusp of getting laid
into me. He persists and we look suitably baffled and cowed and off he goes, pleased
to have made an impression throwing his puny ego around. The bloke doesn’t even
live here. John Reilly from class mentioned one of his aunties lives next to me in
number 40, and this is some relative visiting. No doubt a wildly inaccurate
observation, but this is the thought that came to me and typical of the arrogance of his
Linlathen relatives and cronies as he described them. There’s only one solution to the
puzzle of this man’s self-righteous fury though. She, whatever the relation between
them, and not one to waste an opportunity, must have told him we had ‘cheeked her’
when she had shouted at us to bugger off and move on. A barefaced, malicious-
minded lie. And so it went. These screwballs in grown-up clothing, as immature as
some bratty seven-year old. Only it took me years to pick up on the obvious. In
short, they accused you of what they did themselves. Our local friendly
neighbourhood Inquisition. Even if I had been inclined to never leave the area, there
was, quite simply, nowhere to be left alone in peace to just congregate and talk as we
liked to do as much as play football or whatever, nor was the problem ever addressed
as most of them couldn’t care less – single women and childless old couples and
bitter old men; and neither would my mother have said anything on the subject. So
predictably, we would spend as much time getting into mischief in peace and quiet,
such as demolishing a good part of the old washhouse – literally a threat to life and
limb as Billy stood on one section of a wall while I was at the bottom as we both
hacked away at it with the heavy shell-like (or shaped) pieces of iron we had found
and used to partly demolish the smaller air-raid shelter (and alarming and frightening
my younger bro brother as the wall collapsed and we got out of the way with perfect
timing.
It was due only to our finely honed judgement and natural intelligence that there
were no tragedies, and so no questions were ever asked). No neighbours had come ut
to complain there, even though we were at the side of the tenement as I said. I was
always puzzled by that, waiting for someone to come out and ask what the hell was
going on but it never happened. Yet we couldn’t play on their grassy area either. I
tried a few times. Andy – or someone, came out one day with a kids Badminton
racket set. This was good fun for as long as it lasted, bothering no one, before the
usual council house boors and spoilsports were knocking at their measly little
windows, the small-minded, mean-spirited old shits (if I had been as in touch with
my current sarcasm and anger then, I might have had something to say about it; and
Penguins might fly). I probably knew on some level it was BS and that was what
spurred me on to come up with cutting a big chunk out of the centre of the long grass.
Something any one of them could have done for us themselves. So it was as much a
case of ‘lets see them complain about this.’ I never had any tools, but Billy or
Graham – probably – borrowed the garden shears from their shed and we set about
hacking out a roughly rectangular shape out of the centre of the grass and reeds or
whatever it was the pigeons survived on when I wasn’t stuffing them with half-loafs
from the window. After cutting the grass it was obvious the ground was too lumpy
but we’d come this far and were reluctant to admit we felt less enthusiastic now
because of that and carried on with a lawnmower, probably Billy’s, to give it a
semblance of a real pitch area, then we had a few games on our loony competition
pitch – it wasn’t even level – then lost interest as all we could do was play Badminton
on it. A pity we couldn't have pitched a tent. Or sacrificed one of the neighbours.
Mark’s mum and one or two others were full of praise over our enterprise and
application, watching from the window. Some months or a year or two later, we
cleared out a small section nearer to his side and donned boxing gloves he and his bro
had been given by some enterprising relative. I was all set to take it easy, then
slightly taken aback as they say, when he came at me full tilt with them as he knew he
had less chance of getting hurt this time and perhaps he’d been putting in some
practice. I took it easier with Pat, who was of slighter build – it was generally
acknowledged I was the strongest and fastest, making me the best fighter, while the
two of them got laid into each other when it was their turn – it was all calibrated on a
merits system and I think I mysteriously lost on points in one fight – and an epic
battle it was too, though I still couldn’t see why it was all so earnest and humourless,
and why we couldn’t have some practice sessions first, sparring and pulling punches,
comparing style and technique. The answer to this probably lay in the Billy wasn’t
around to take part in these distinctly amateur bouts. He was about as capable of
play-fighting as a fully grown Lynx.. They were already showing the competitive
streak of typical males. Even Tam McD got tore in. Maybe that was the epic battle
with Pat. ‘My memory is going, Dave.’
Standing there, wrapped up in controlled seriousness of it all, looking down in
earnest, beaded with sweat and restrained excitement, as someone tied the lace in a
loose glove.

The old railway running parallel with Loons Road could be a potential hazard
to life and limb. Divided from the main street and roads by a high wall, it’s relative
seclusion either brought out the loonies or brought out the loony, the sadism, the
bullying impulse, the latent fascism, the unconscious hatred and destructiveness in
many who passed through. Most of the tine it was as deserted as when the trains
went out of commission. You rarely saw a woman on her own or a girl, but it
happened, and baffled me when it did. Usually older girls, not primary school-age
like us. They might look in passing but never speak and I was far too shy to. Some
working bloke might come by – or unemployed busybody slob with an inferiority
complex for all I know – and tell me to fuck off back on to the street when it was
perfectly obvious the railway was open to anyone, at your own risk. I suppose they
saw themselves as a part of that risk, whatever that meant. ‘Civic-minded,’ territorial
do-gooders; nobodies looking for any excuse to feel important – over an area they
had no say or stake in. Kids served no other purpose than to lay down the law and
show who was in charge. They were always up to no good anyway.

Beeching cancelled the local lines back in the early 60’s and that was that for the
most part. Not that I knew anything about why they had come to an end, nor did I
ever see them running. Now it was all rail tracks partly covered with grass and weeds
left to grow as they pleased, though the earth between the big wooden slats was
spattered with deep and large grit the whole length. The old depot office still there at
the entrance – a wide gap between the walls on either side. We would walk along
the wall that led off Loons Road to try and get to the nests in the wall, but the
sparrows had chosen spaces between the bricks too narrow for even our grasping
little hands, thankfully. And anyway, I recall hearing the chicks once, so that saved
the effort of trying. There was a large building on the other side of the ticket office,
some yards along, and naturally Alex or Jimmy and me or both, but never the three of
us, did our damnedest to find a way in. We did it through traversing a series of
interconnected lightly serrated metal gratings of varying lengths, some long and wide.
The experience was so novel it was as if we were making our way through the bowls
of some deserted spaceship. All this corrugated mesh was in the inside, away from
the curious – like us – or interfering – like us. Much of the mesh was a mess of
pigeon droppings which spurred us on all the more and when we did get in to the
main building from some side entrance there was evidence of some nests bit not
much. It was all pretty dull and dank and dark, and the memory blurs with others
such as doing the same thing with classmates, traversing the rafters of the local
deserted tenements, chasing and terrifying the pigeons in the lofts – they flew out of
the open or windowless skylights.
Later there were rumours of Heron and his local buddies squirting lighter fluid
on pigeons and setting them alight. Before that, we’d done a kind of Boys Own
thing, probably at my suggestion, and put some money in a tin which we hid there; it
was to be money for a rainy day of sorts, such as when we went to the 'Swanney'
Ponds where they had the rowing boats. I couldn’t resist the temptation of dipping
into it, genuinely intending to put the money back, only we were back there again
before I’d done it and I was too ashamed to admit it and Heron, ever tuned to guilt
and accusation, like a heat-seeking radar, knew it was me. But none of the others
said anything about it directly. We had a brief period of traipsing over most of the old
coffin mill down in Polepark, and directly next to where Jimmy Byres mother worked
or used to in the wallpaper factory, part of the same big block. Jimmy mysteriously
vanished, so perhaps his mother killed him for stealing from her. Not really. They’ll
have relocated, he to anther school – from the old tenements flat they lived in. It was
the kind with the outside platforms – pletties – and toilets.

There was a large window space minus a window, this as I say, right next door to
the wallpaper factory. We could jump up and look inside and did and the space inside
was pretty vast, the ceiling preposterously high, the whole thing looking like nothing
so much as a part of an deserted old Gothic Castle or section of old mansion house.
Around the corner, the main mill itself was closed off by a large wall and sealed
entrance. Somehow, we found a way inside, perhaps by a side way by mooching
around having got in by the big window gap on the street. The ground area of the
room was all weird shapes and mounds and porticoes and twists and turns. Getting
into the main grounds of the mill proper was like exploring some weird dreamscape
at will while wide awake. The floor of one building consisted of a series of round
ceilinged entrances through to the other side, sometimes blocked partway by huge
wooden spools and assorted rubbish, brick-a-brak, empty crates; a raging inferno just
waiting to happen.
Waking through one of these tunnels – tunnels to us – led us to what I can only
describe as a main courtyard. And at one point we were walking along what I can
only picture as long descending platforms or fire-escapes attached to the side of
buildings but the image of it is so unlikely I think I must be getting confused with an
actual dream. Years later and not so long ago, I dreamed I was back there, though
typically it was only a part of a larger weird-out dream scenario I’ve long forgotten,
and I’m bounding along the roofs in great leaps as when I was a kid and thought that
by ‘leaping’ as I ran, it increased my speed by er, leaps and bounds. More attics to
explore and other dark spaces. Some one said they thought they saw someone, which
freaked us out for a little while until the danger had passed, real or imagines, or is it
only the memory in retrospect of the fact we were being watched and had felt
watched if briefly, because of that? Another smallish building to check out, with a
flight of stairs leading downwards into darkness, but we were bolstered by each
others presence and walked slowly down the steps in single file, holding on to the
banister as we went, and it was literally pitch black, which made it all the more
intriguing, as did, incredibly, unbelievably, the sudden and iron like grip on the back
of my jacket and scruff of my nape as I was dragged down the rest of the stairs,
utterly confused, surreally afraid, yet still holding it together until the forced parade
came to its inevitable end. My confusion further lay in that I couldn’t be sure
whether I was alone, perish the thought, or the others were in the same boat as I so
fervently assumed. We/I came to a stop at the bottom, still in the seemingly vice-like
grip of our unknown assailant. I hadn’t struggled because I was sure I wouldn’t get
away and that it might only make he or It furious, the suddenly enclosing blackness
only lending itself to that perception. Then a door at the bottom was pushed or
kicked open and I was pushed, pulled or dragged out into the light along with the
others, and the formless predator -like entity had taken the shape of some late-thirties
bozo who'd decided that someone else's deserted property that was none of his
concern was now his business after all in the process of taking it upon himself to do
the civic thing and assault us for being where we shouldn't as he'd decided – him too,
and give each of us a boot in the arse as he let us go. Once John Reilly was safely at
the top of the street he launched into a foul tirade, vowing vengeance and painting a
pretty lurid picture of what would happen to this loser once his uncles got his hands
on him.

Back in our neighbourhood, at the back of Campbell Street and along past all the
waste ground and long grass – and the big wall at the back of Gardner street that was
the boundary of the gardens at the back, where the House Martin's and the rest would
nest – was the back of the Logie Street flats, many of which were empty. It was quite
bizarre to see closes next to them occupied, though I don't think I ever saw any lone
occupied flats in an otherwise block. I couldn't imagine how anyone would live like
that anyway. It would give me the jitters. The windows of some of the flats were
boarded up, especially on the bottom floor. The closes at the back where we were
lead straight through and out into the street. We could explore them at leisure, though
there was little of interest to be found. One of the closes was blocked off by more
boards. This piqued our interest, naturally.
A number of well-placed kicks loosened what looked like the weakest area along
with some energetic jiggling and wrenching by hand and we'd made a gap large
enough to pass through easily. As I was with Graham, the ginger, along with my
younger bro, both about the same age, I took the lead and went through first. The
first door on the left, the one closest to us, was closed; a panel at the bottom had been
nailed over with more boards. There was a space where a spyhole had been. I looked
in but couldn't see anything of interest inside, but I was curious. The door opposite
wa firmly closed too but I got the impression no one was living there either. We went
upstairs but there was nothing much to see, though it was always interesting walking
into empty rooms, knowing people had once had lives there another world unknown
to me. The sounds of traffic going by on the main road outside. The was no point
opening the windows as that might only attract attention to us. The floors upstarts
were equally uneventful except for a dead pigeon writhing with maggots on the floor,
the sight of which always disgusted me, but I examined it with the same morbid
curiosity as I did most dead things. What was so creepy about maggots was they
weren't even insects, but helpless, like babies. Even the thought of killing was
pointless and disgusting. Generally I didn't kill insects anyway if I could avoid it...
The image of a beetle under my new magnifying glass I'd picked up somewhere. I'd
had it in mind to get one for so long. Everything had to be explored. My cousin
Jimmy even had microscope. It had seemed an impossible expensive and eclectic
thing to have. Microscopes were the province of chemistry teachers and mad
scientists in films. He even showed me how to use it. The simplest thing, such as a
strand of carpet became a fascinating object. The adults and their tedious
preoccupations, whatever they were, faded in to the background, as now, the poor
small beetle pinned under deadly focused light of the sun. More of a spotless
Ladybird, it had scuttled for a bit as I followed it with the lethal beam then stopped;
nothing seemed to be happening, until I heard a distinct pop. Later, I would feel a
mild but unsettling guilt, thinking about it, imaging the distress of a creature that
couldn't communicate its agony and the thought it was only because it couldn't I had
went on so long... I'd probably stolen the magnifying glass from Woolies or a
MaColl's.
There were some boxes of eggs lying on the stairs near the bottom as we passed
just before. I wondered how long they had been there. I couldn't imagine hay had sat
there untouched for years. I tried pricking one with a stick, and it exploded, it's
putrid smell suddenly everywhere. I wasn't sure if I'd got any on my clothes. The
thought was too disgusting. But we threw the rest on the stairways anyway, at a
distance. It was too much fun to forego. A thought had come to mind earlier, about
the boarded up door on the ground floor. That perhaps it was a shop. It would be too
risky if it was, though the thought of unknown freebies was exciting. But that would
be an out and out crime. I would be compromising Graham, as well with my brother,
and that would complicate things exponentially.
But all we needed to do was to go out the gap to the back again and around to
one of the open closes and out to the front and into the street again, then walk along a
bit instil we came to boarded close we'd just been in then see what the shop was next
to it. It Garland's, the bookshop and newsagents. It had been closed for longer than I
could recall. I'd thought it might be Garland's earlier, but had been sure it was further
along. I sometimes passed it on the way back from school or on the way to town. I
had once glanced in the window in passing and saw a paperback emblazoned with the
title, The Boston Strangler. Clearly their was weirder and nastier shit going on in the
big wide world than in my little backwater. Or so I assumed. Yet one day in class,
whether morning or afternoon, I can't recall, the student teacher we had temporarily,
told us that a class had been held hostage by a gunman who had went on to shoot
their teacher, like her, a woman. I could still recall her anxious-looking earnestness,
the slight perspiration on her face – making her look oddly attractive to me – as if she
had just narrowly escaped. I suppose there was a smattering of truth in that as St
John's was only ten minutes or so on the other direction from where I lived in
Gardner Street. I was sitting at the front of the class. Murder was all very serious of
course – a serious business, yet impossible to grasp. That such an event could happen
seemed somehow unreal. I'd even forgotten that my rather mediocre buddy Tam –
Tommy to the mums, mine included – went to the school; but it hadn't been his class.
Being the central and most important figure in the drama of my own life, I
certainly remembered Garland, not that I'd ever called him by name. A tall, acerbic
man. My granddad had once sent me down there for a Sunday Post when he was
staying with us for a while. I was happy to do an errand for him. But this bad-
tempered boor of a man had contrived to make me feel bad about buying a single
Post, that one of his customer's would likely have to do without a Sunday Mail, now
that I had upset the delicate balance – as if none of 'his' customers ever bought only a
single Mail or Post. Maybe he was right. But kids read comics for the most part if
they read anything at all, not the Sunday Post. I did; some of it. But it would be
ludicrous to assume it was my money I was spending on it, or I even had it to spend
on it (Would I be popping by most days to pick up the Sun on the way to work, aged
eleven or so?). Simpler to take it out on me anyway. Some time later, I heard he'd
given Tommy a hard time for something or other but had even come to his 'house' to
apologise. It's probably that he'd decided this was a wise course of action as he had
an older brother along with his mates and cousin who stayed over, not to mention his
dad on the scene. They'd been drinking when he came up, let him say his bit then one
of them slowly poured a beer over his head. I'd felt sorry for him in that moment,
hearing about that. But I would. They probably picked up on him for the sycophant
he was.
We went around to the back again. I'd been quite casual, but watchful. There
was nothing unusual about some kids walking out of a close and into the street but
some busybody could notice we weren't from around here. Once we were through
the gap at the back and standing outside the blocked off door that would lead us
inside, it was a reasonably simple task to get a hold and rip off the bards that covered
the panel at the bottom, though I was worried about the noise it made, so it was
simpler to do it in as efficiently violent or energetic pulls and wrenches as possible;
based on the idea that the less noisy outburst we did the less likely it was to coincide
with anyone going by out on the street. The alternative was have Graham or Steve
stand watch outside, as casually as possible of course, so as not to attract attention to
themselves. But it seemed to me that their very presence might and it felt safer to
stay out of sight and concealed in the shadows, and feeling somewhat protected
through knowing the close was blocked off. An irrational and illogical line of
reasoning, as all it meant was that of anyone had heard us and investigated we would
be hemmed in their like sitting ducks. Fortunately nothing untoward happened; this
first time.
But time was getting on and we'd left it all a bit late, or I had. I edged through
the opening we'd made and they came in after me. There was light enough from the
window, the panes covered in dust and dirt as it was. A smattering of furniture, and
up-ended chair, a rickety looking table by the wall that I had seen partly from outside;
assorted rubbish and odds and ends on the floor, nothing of interest. There was still
the street side, and that was shrouded in partial darkness as the binds were down, and
we wouldn't be putting them up. But the light from the window in the back room was
enough to see by. And it was fascinating, or it was to me, as there were boxes of all
shapes and sizes filling most of the available space. For a moment I pondered the
possibility I was going to be disappointed, disillusioned. That even though we were
in a bookshop, there might prove to be nothing at all in those boxes; and the place
was closed, had ceased trading after all... But as our eyes grew more accustomed to
the slight gloom, semi-amorphous shapes took on the form of books; there were piles
of books everywhere. The boxes were full of books too. This was too exciting.
Suddenly it was Xmas again, only one hundred times over. A library to myself, to
explore at leisure. Only I got to keep whatever I wanted. They weren't doing any
good sitting there rotting anyway I could tell myself. The very fact of my being there
was the catalyst that brought them to life, and through them, me. It was a reciprocal
relationship, without the owners permission, needless to say. If he'd been a
reasonable, sane fellow, he'd have seen the logic in this reasoning, surely. Better to
have young mind's gain from them than that go to waste... But that wasn't how the
world worked as I knew as adults didn't think like that. It was all ownership,
proprietary considerations, judgements. Share and not share alike. It was all
personal. As always. None of them had any inkling of the true pleasure that could be
gained from books, from reading, from the sense of acquiring knowledge. Ot if they
did, I hadn't known many. There was my uncle Alec and auntie Doris of course, who
we stayed with when my mother had been in hospital in Hammersmith. He would
fold the pages of library books to keep his place, but didn't bother to read the rest of
that page, he said! But I liked the very fact that he read books, though my granddad,
his brother, read war-books, only I didn't have any interest in war, and WW11 yet.
That developed suddenly when I was nineteen, after I read a book by a Frenchman
about the Nazi concentration camp, Mauthausen. I came across it in the library in the
Wellgate.
We looked through the books in the boxes for a while, and they were remarkably
patient about it. It was obviously of a lot of interest to me. There was a major
drawback though, and that was that at the age of ten or eleven my knowledge of
books was severely limited. I didn't know what might be worth holding on to and
what was dross, especially where novels were concerned and they seemed to be
mostly novels. I could scour the covers for all I was worth and try and gain an
inkling from the title, but it was mostly pot-luck. There were some religious books
but anything that had the name Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit etc., was an immediate
turn-off. That was the idiot bullshit that some dumb grown-ups wasted their time on.
That they were covered in dust, along with book-lice probably, didn't concern me in
the least. I was as ignorant of them. Which is why we were often stricken with an
onslaught of head-lice, but of course no one talked about that as there was a huge
stigma.
One of us found boxes of records, the old 78's. My mother's cheap record player
even had a speed setting for it, along with 45 Rpm and 16 Rpm, though I'd never seen
a record that played at 16. Nor did they have any 78's. We called it an afternoon and
carried a few volumes of them outside. The records were in covers and the covers
were themselves contained been harder covers like a book. New to me, almost
wholly ignorant of classical music, and our plebeian elders and betters didn't listen to
any or if they did, they had kept it secret. Schubert, Beethoven, Puccini, piano
pieces, symphonies, quartets, operas, we had no idea. To us, they made the perfect
Frisbees, before they were invented. We watched them skim through the air as the
hard plastic shattered sacrilegiously against the big wall. An exhilarating experience.
Classical music was a blank to me, the names meant nothing. Something to explore
when I was older perhaps; the only thought that gave me a slight twinge of
conscience before we consigned them to their fate. Better to have some fun with
them than that they waste away where they'd been. Nor could we have have brought
them back as they were too conspicuous in their bulkiness; they'd have been
consigned to the bin. I did keep two though. A couple of Elvis'. Hound Dog and
Teddy Bear. Not because I thought they could be worth something but because I
wanted to keep them. But first I wanted to hear how they sounded – though I already
knew them of course. My mum liked him, and I envied his fame and success, as well
as his apparent ability to get up in restaurants and sing at the drop of a hat. In fact his
ability to sing anywhere at a moments notice, even if it was the movies. The man
seemed to have no sense of bashfulness at all. A singer, a performer may as well
have been a denizen from another planet their abilities seemed so remote to me; and a
part of me knew I wanted to do that most of all. When we got back I took the 78's
into the bedroom. And left them until everyone was out one day. I must have as we
never at any time had our own record-player that I can recall, yet I played them in the
bedroom, so I must've taken the record-player from the bedroom into our room. It
could be shut and carried like a small suitcase. But I still don't get why I would do
that. It would surely be simpler to play them in the sitting room. But then she would
hear them if she came home, whereas our room door would be closed... It's the only
explanation I can think off. A fair risk as the removal of her beloved property would
be the first thing she'd notice as always. But I digress. Sort off. I placed the 78 on
the turntable, or more accurately, I placed the hole in the centre on and and through
the metal holder thingummy in the centre of the turntable. It seemed to fit perfectly.
Push the switch to the side and off it went, dropping onto the turntable, and shattering
instantly, as soon as it hit the surface. I'd thought the rubber layer would be enough
protection. Stupidly I was so intensely curious to hear how they sounded, I lined u
the other one, thinking it might be a fluke. Hound Dog was gone. Surely the same
ignominious fate couldn't befall Teddy Bear? That it was just a fluke.... I set it up,
pushed the switch and watched the second disc drop and shatter. Elvis had left the
building. I never did find out if they'd been worth anything to collectors, but I
assume not, or not much. I hope I'm right. I mean I hope I didn't needlessly ruin
valuable artefacts. At the time, all I wanted was to hear them.

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