Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ A vaguely familiar head topped with an air-force ‘chip poke’ hat (the shape of the paper packets in which chips were sold in Glasgow) appeared under the table. It scrutinized him for a few seconds, and then a meaty hand proffered a shiny gift to coax him out. It was a wonderful toy yacht, with its hull painted green below the waterline and red above. Billy loved that boat. It had real ropes that actually worked, and he sailed it many times on Bingham’s Pond just off the Great Western Road.

      It was odd having their father back. As was so often the case when men returned from the war, he was a stranger to his children and had been robbed of the chance to establish an early bond with them. William never spoke to Billy and Florence about their mother’s departure. He simply settled into the Stewartville Street house, stashing his massive metal air-force trunk under the bed. His name and service numbers were painted on its side, along with the words: ‘NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE’. That sign always troubled Billy. Why, he wondered, didn’t they want my father on the voyage? What did they have against him that meant they wouldn’t let him go with the rest of the men? Florence and Billy used to heave out the trunk and inspect its mysterious contents. They thought it was brilliant. They found bits of engineering equipment, their father’s wire air-force spectacles, and photos of him in India standing around with five other men, all in outlandish leopard coats, grinning and posing for the picture.

      On Sundays, William occasionally took the children to the Barrowland market, known to all Glaswegians as ‘The Barras’. It is a bustling place for street vending, which used to be as much a market of human variety as of inanimate goods. Billy and Florence were amazed to see grown men eating fire and selling devilish cure-alls.

      Billy was astounded to see men allowing themselves to be chained inside sacks, and women throwing knives at them until they miraculously escaped. Mr Waugh, a circus ‘strong man’, actually bent six-inch nails with his teeth before Billy’s very eyes.

      ‘Stop Barking!’ boomed John Bull, a balding man in a double-breasted suit who stood in Gibson Street hawking his Lung and Chest Elixir. ‘Asthma! Bronchitis! Whooping Cough! Croup! Difficulty breathing and all chest troubles! Absolutely safe for all ages!’

      Billy eagerly sought out ‘The Snakeman’, known as Chief Abadu from Nigeria, who claimed his snake oil cured everything from hair loss to a stuffy nose. He acted out crude impersonations of a woman gripping her chest in pain or all blocked up with catarrh, offering to rub samples on selected folk’s hands. To Billy’s disappointment, no child ever got a whiff.

      ‘He was way ahead of his time,’ observes Billy, who is currently fascinated by the ‘faith-healing’ evangelists who use similar, charisma-reliant methods to sell God and health on the born-again Christian television channel in California. ‘Look at those pricks,’ Billy winces, ‘they must think people zip up at the back.’

      One of the best parts of any Sunday outing was the journey, for they took the tramcar. Glasgow had an excellent system of tramcars, known in the dialect as ‘the caurs’. They had a peculiar electric smell, and shook from side to side so many passengers turned green after a very short while, but everybody loved them. Conductors, who were usually female, collected the fares on board: ‘Come on, get aff!’ they would shout, rudely shoving people. ‘Move up! move up!’

      These cheeky women were both the scourge and the sweethearts of Glasgow, and they were immortalized in the music hall:

      ‘Mary McDougal

      From Auchenshuggle The caur conductoress, Fares please, fares please …’

      One conductor’s smart-arse retort reverberated around the city:

      ‘Does this tram stop at the Renfrew Ferry?’

      ‘I hope so. It cannae swim.’

      In 1947, Billy’s Uncle Charlie came back from America to visit them with his young son, Jack, in tow. Dolly, his daughter who had Down’s Syndrome, had stayed at home with her mother. Everybody loved Charlie: he was the family love story. He had fallen for Nellie, a charming Glaswegian lassie whose family emigrated to the United States. Charlie saved up enough money to follow her to Far Rockaway, Long Island, where they married and settled down in that beach-side town. Far Rockaway is the closest point to Scotland in the whole American continent and Charlie lived there his whole life, never travelling further than Philadelphia.

      Charlie was a hoot. Out of his grinning, ‘smart-ass’ mouth came some great sassy American expressions, such as ‘Hey buster, how’d you like your eye done – black or blue?’ He would sit in the tenement window three floors up with one leg dangling. ‘Hey guys, you wanna drink?’ He would squirt them with a water pistol.

      Even Margaret and Mona loosened up when Charlie was around, and they all went to the variety theatre together. Billy used to tell people they were all going to America to live on his Uncle Charlie’s ranch and they were going to get a car each.

      There is a hefty, red sandstone Victorian apartment building in Stewartville Street that was originally St Peter’s School for Boys. The sunken car park was once a playground full of youngsters careering pell-mell from corner to corner and Billy loved to sit with his legs dangling through the railings, watching them with envy. Sometimes he even caught some of the older students hurrying out at lunchtime, heading for a nearby shop where they could buy a single cigarette for a penny, and a slice of raw turnip for a half-penny. Billy thought they were gods. He simply could not wait to be a schoolboy, and imagined himself smoking cigarettes, eating turnips, and wearing fight-smart, studded boots that made sparks in the street. He soon got part of his wish, for the aunts decreed that it was time for both him and Florence to attend school.

      Very young Catholic boys attended St Peter’s Girls’ School, and then moved on to the boys’ school once they turned six. Billy’s first teacher at kindergarten was Miss O’Halloran and, at five years old, he doted on her. In her classroom it was all Plasticine and lacing wool through holes in cards. Miss O’Halloran was amazed he could already write (Florence had taught him) and Billy was paraded round the school as a great example. He even went to Florence’s class where to everyone’s amazement he formed the letter ‘J’ on the board. But, despite his early star pupil status, Billy was terrified of the nuns, and was especially wary of Sister Philomena who had pictures of hell on her wall that looked like travel brochures. Billy assumed she’d been there.

      When he moved up to the boys’ school at six years old, there was a harshness he’d not experienced in kindergarten. In the main hallway there was a massive crucifix, a bleeding, life-sized Christ that thoroughly spooked him. Billy had not yet been fully indoctrinated into the faith, but once he was at the boys’ school that occurred as swiftly and as subtly as a fishhook in the nostril: on his first day at the new school his teacher Miss Wilson informed him that Jesus was dead and that he, Billy, was personally responsible. And that wasn’t the only bad news. From now on, he was to be addressed as ‘Connolly’ instead of ‘Billy’.

      Things were changing at home as well. William, who was probably traumatized by his wartime experiences, seemed remote and gruff to his children. He was generous as far as his means would allow and Florence and Billy looked forward to Fridays when he would come home from his job in a machine parts factory, bearing comic books, Eagle for Billy and Girl for Florence. But, although he could be quite flush with a full pay packet, he generally proved to be an inconsistent and absent parent.

      As time went on and the children became less of a novelty, the aunts began to fully comprehend the sacrifices they would have to make in order to bring them up. It gradually dawned on Mona and Margaret that their single lives were now over, for dating and marriage would henceforth be difficult at best. Consequently, they began to sour, and the atmosphere at home changed drastically for the worse. There was a hymn at the time, a favourite of Billy’s. СКАЧАТЬ