Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ it uncaptured through the Hyndland Bar, he was a leader of men; he was Cochise, the heroic Apache chief from Billy’s Saturday afternoon cowboy movies.

      Billy was always gashed, scarred and full of stitches from his attempts at such glory. Once he got caught in the cobbler’s dunny by the man himself, and was heaved into his house. ‘You crowd of bastards, I’m fed up with you. I’m telling your father.’ That was the moment when Cochise shit his pants.

      ‘Now I’m gonna tell you all something that will probably prove very useful in your lives,’ Billy announces to a Scottish crowd. ‘I’m going to tell you what to do if you get caught masturbating …’ I had been sitting in the audience wondering when would be the most appropriate time to allow our three youngest children to come to see their father in concert. As I watch him play proficiently and enthusiastically with his caged penis in front of three thousand hysterical people, the words thirty years old flash into my mind.

      ‘The opening line is all-important,’ explains Billy. ‘Say “Thank God you’re here! I was just walking across the room, when the biggest hairy spider came crashing out from behind the sideboard there and shot up the leg of my trousers. The bugger was poised to sink its fangs into my poor willie …”’ The activity in question is, of course, a healthy one if privately or consensually performed; however, Billy’s outrageous and frantic self-pleasuring pantomime, as well as that thing he does about having sex with sheep, were giving me substantial pause for thought.

      Billy’s battle with the morality of masturbation, indeed of sex in general, began when he started to go to confession. At first his confessed sins were pretty tame, such as telling a fib or stealing a biscuit, not enough to shift the padre’s gaze from the football results. On Saturdays the Glasgow Evening Times sports edition was a pink paper, and was clearly visible through the grille. One evening, however, Billy scored heavily: ‘I’ve had impure thoughts, Father.’ His confessor had been checking to see how Partick Thistle was doing, but the nine-year-old’s precocious words got his attention.

      ‘Oh, and what were these thoughts?’

      ‘I was thinking about women, naked women … Father … Frankie McBride’s got a book with naked women in it.’

      Frankie McBride was a little pal who lived around the corner from Billy.

      ‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Three “Hail Marys” and count yourself a lucky boy. That could lead to terrible things. You know, son, these books aren’t in themselves sinful, but what they’re known as is “an occasion of sin”. Do you know what an occasion of sin is?’

      ‘No, Father.’ Billy knew fine well.

      ‘An occasion of sin is something or someone that leads you into sin.’

      ‘Oh yes, Father.’

      ‘You beware when you’re around those books. There are many books like that. Any impure acts?’

      ‘Yes, Father.”

      ‘With yourself, or with another?’

      ‘With myself, Father.’

      ‘You should stop doing that immediately.’

      ‘Yes, Father.’

      He never told Billy he’d go blind: that was a school-playground tale. The school playground was an excellent place to obtain misinformation about sex, a new anti-Protestant joke or a drag on a scavenged cigarette-butt. There was entertainment there as well, in the form of regular executions. Mr Elliot used to chase chickens with an axe in the school’s kitchen garden and he would chop off their heads right there in the playground.

      Despite his doubts about the clergy, Billy longed to be an altar boy. He helped out in St Peter’s Church, doing chores right next to the sacristy, where the priest emerged, and where the vestments and Communion wine were stored. Billy was fascinated with the vestments and was captivated by the gorgeous colours and embroidery. Priests would often come to school during the week and quiz the boys about the colour of the vestments, in order to check if they had been to Mass the previous Sunday. Billy was a regular Mass-goer at that point, but sometimes he couldn’t remember the visual details and he would be beaten.

      Billy never dared to steal the wine like some of his pals. The sacristy was full of surprises. Someone discovered that Communion came in a tin, and had even been brave enough to try some, but in those days Billy was shocked: ‘That’s Jesus,’ he thought, ‘you can’t go eating Jesus, stealing him out of a tin.’

      His bid to be an altar boy was thwarted when he and some other boys, who were all the same height, were chosen by a priest to help at Benediction. In that service, most of them would be lined up along the altar railings holding candles. The envied, glorious one, however, was the boy who stood up higher than everyone else with the golden thurible, proudly dangling the vessel so it puffed out incense at the end of every swing. Everyone wanted to be that exalted creature, so when Billy and his same-height friends filed into the sacristy and saw the thurible hanging there on its special hook, each and every one of them made a dive for it.

      ‘I saw it first!’

      ‘No you didn’t!’ There was a loud and furious scuffle that ended when the priest stormed in and grabbed them all by the jerseys.

      ‘Out! Out! And don’t you darken this door again!’

      Billy continues to love incense, although the last time that sweet and heavy smoke drifted towards him was years ago at Bob Geldof’s wedding, when the late Paula Yates glided down the aisle in a scarlet ball dress. It’s really a good thing he doesn’t go to church any more, because if he saw a thurible nowadays he might loudly interject, ‘I don’t like to spoil the party, but your handbag’s on fire.’

      Despite his early horror at the graphic gruesomeness of Catholic statues, Billy grew to like the ritualistic aspects of the religion and he was grateful for the safety and comfort it provided. He loved the hymns, and today laments that many of the old tunes have changed. ‘Now the Catholic Church sounds like the fucking Bethany Hall,’ he moans.

      At school, he had religion every day, just before lunch. It included music taken from books of folk songs, which delighted Billy, and launched his interest in folk music. They used to sing ‘Lilliburlero’ (now the signature tune for Billy’s favourite radio station, the BBC World Service) and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, and ‘Glorious Devon’. ‘Heart of Oak’ was a great favourite, too, and Billy would give strong voice to the rousing chorus:

      ‘Steady boys, steady.

      We’ll fight and we’ll conquer, again and again!’

      With the exception of the folk singing, Billy was frustrated at the dullness of religious studies at school. What really piqued his interest was the stuff no one would cover, such as ‘Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?’ The teachers seemed to dodge such subjects, and were not open to questions. Billy certainly had a great deal of curiosity about many things. For example, on the back of his classroom jotter was a table of weights and measures. It was headed Avoirdupois’, which he pronounced ‘avoid dupoy’, and he longed to know what it was all about, but no one even mentioned it. There were so many intriguing mysteries. He was madly interested in geisha girls but, when he asked a teacher what they were, he was beaten for ‘being immoral’.

      Billy’s cousin John, a very thin boy, also attended St Peter’s. Billy largely ignored him, since ‘Skin’, as they called him, was in a lower class, but reports of John’s СКАЧАТЬ