Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ the back of his neck and rubbing his soiled underpants in his face. She increased her repertoire to whacking his legs, hitting him with wet cloths, kicking him, and pounding him on the head with high-heeled shoes. She would usually wait until they were alone, then corner and thrash him four or five times a week for years on end.

      Billy, however, had been in a few scraps in the school playground and had decided that a smack in the mouth wasn’t all that painful. The more experience he had of physical pain, the more he felt he could tolerate it. ‘What’s the worst she could do to me?’ he would ask himself. ‘She could descend on me and beat the shit out of me … but a couple of guys have done that to me already and it wasn’t that bad … I didn’t die or anything.’

      In fact, the more physical, emotional and verbal abuse he received, the more he expected it, eventually believing what they were telling him: that he was useless and worthless and stupid, a fear he keeps in a dark place even today. As a comedian whose brilliance now emanates largely from his extraordinarily accurate observation of humanity, he has gloriously defied Mona’s favourite put-down: ‘Your powers of observation are nil.’ She was the only person Billy ever knew who said the word ‘nil’ when it wasn’t about a football result.

      Florence was sometimes physically present when Mona mercilessly scorned and beat her brother. She would stand there frozen and helpless, immobilized by fear and horror. The mind, however, has a marvellous capacity to escape when the body can’t. Psychologists call it ‘dissociation’ and view it as a survival mechanism. Florence mentally flew to a far corner of the ceiling and watched the hideous abuse from ‘safety’. ‘I was there, but I wasn’t there,’ she explains now. ‘I was outside, looking in.’ It was very traumatic for her too, and very dangerous, for dissociation can leave an indelible mark on the psyche.

      Billy, on the other hand, put his energy into trying to defend himself from Mona’s blows by shielding his face and body with his arms. His adrenaline would surge and, although he was no match for her, at least he managed to avoid getting broken teeth. He remembers the blood from his nose dripping onto his feet. Billy is a survivor: in common with many traumatized children, he adopted a pretty good coping strategy. If you ask him about it now, he says, ‘It sounds hellish, but it was quite bearable once you got your mind right. It doesn’t kill you.’ But his scars ran deeper than flesh wounds, especially those from the humiliating words that accompanied his beatings. Being too young to come up with a rational, adult explanation for it, he could only make sense of Mona’s sadistic treatment by fully accepting what she said, that he was indeed a sub-standard child. ‘I must deserve this,’ he decided.

      Mona’s paranoia and suspiciousness were relentless, pathological and extremely alarming. An older boy at school gave Billy a small model boat that he had made in woodwork class.

      ‘Where did you get that?’ Mona asked him accusingly.

      ‘A big boy gave it to me.’

      ‘Don’t tell lies. Why would anyone give you a boat for nothing? Come on! Tell me! Where did you really get it?’

      There was no other answer, so she pounded him until he bled.

      Margaret wasn’t as manic a bully as Mona but she was on her side. She had been very beautiful when she was younger, a hair-dresser’s model at Eddy Graham’s. Eddy’s shop smelled of rotten eggs, and Billy always wondered how she could sit through such a terrible smell. Billy admired Margaret’s sense of style, but thought Mona looked an absolute mess most of the time. For a start, she never put her teeth in unless she went out. This wasn’t all that unusual, for at that time in Glasgow there was a fashion for having no teeth. When National Health false teeth became available, people of all ages thought it was an excellent idea to replace their existing teeth with those new, shiny, perfect ones. Some would actually have their teeth taken out for their twenty-first birthday, as a pragmatic choice, since they were eventually going to fall out anyway.

      Whenever the auburn roots of Mona’s dyed blonde hair began to grow out, she would send Billy down to Boots to buy her peroxide.

      ‘A bottle of peroxide, please, twenty volumes.’

      He would carry home the little brown bottle and be swept in by a vision in slippers, a pale cardigan and a skirt and apron. Hoping to catch some young man’s eye, Mona and Margaret both dolled themselves up whenever they ventured out. When nylons were in short supply, the sisters would get creative with Bisto, plastering the gravy all over their bare legs and wandering around the city stinking like a Sunday dinner.

      On 8 May 1949, when Billy was six and a half, Mona mysteriously produced a baby son whom she named Michael. Her paramour was a local man who had no inclination to marry Mona; his identity remained a puzzle to his own son until adulthood. No one ever explained the situation to the growing Michael at all; as a matter of fact, he was presented to the world as a brother to Billy and Florence and nobody seemed to question it. In those postwar years, there were many similar situations and, curiously enough, the otherwise judgemental society seemed to tolerate it.

      Today, having a famous ‘brother’ has hardly helped Michael to ward off speculation about his birth circumstances. At first he thoroughly resented those who drew attention to his situation. ‘But I’ve learned to just shrug it off,’ he says now, with questionable insistence. ‘Whatever people say about me, Billy or the family … I don’t care.’

      Michael’s arrival at Stewartville Street was, in many ways, received as a great blessing to the Connollys. The group of uncomfortably related individuals that made up their family were able to focus their love and attention onto the tiny, innocent being who was unconnected to Mamie and provided biological motherhood for Mona. He was an angelic baby, doted on by his mother. Billy was enchanted by him too and would heave him around in a ‘circus-carry’. Even William could love him, without interference from the past; when he looked at his own children he saw Mamie, but that thorn was absent in his relationship with Michael.

      ‘I think we were a normal family,’ Michael maintains. ‘I had a great childhood.’ In contrast to the experience of Florence and Billy, Michael received plenty of positive attention, gifts and special treatment. Looking back now, Michael believes he was spoiled, but I think he just received what children rightfully deserve, a sense of being loved and appreciated.

      Everything Michael did was magical to the adults in the household. ‘Listen to him sing!’ they would chime. ‘Look at the way he eats!’ As a toddler, Michael did have one interesting talent. There was a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records in the flat and people would say to him. ‘Fetch me the record of Mario Lanza singing “O Sole Mio’” and Michael could always select the correct one, even though he couldn’t read.

      Michael was unaware of his mother’s treatment of Billy, for Mona was very secretive about it, and, understandably, he still finds it difficult to accept. Billy is convinced that his father also did not know about all the beating and neglect that was going on at home. William was absent most of the time, for he worked long hours at the Singer sewing-machine parts factory and was then out most evenings. Florence experienced William as a shadowy figure, coming and going with irregularity. ‘He just thought home life was boring, I think, and pissed off,’ is how Billy explains it now. ‘Fuck knows where he was going … I have no idea.’

      When he wasn’t working. William was usually off playing billiards and having a great time with his mates. This was fairly typical for men in those days. It was the job of women to raise children and, besides, who wouldn’t have wanted to escape that household? William was a member of a club of men who’d been friends since childhood. The ‘Partick Corner Boys’ rented a room behind the cinema. On the bottom floor was the meeting room of a secret society called the ‘Buffs’, the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, and upstairs was William’s club, which was СКАЧАТЬ