Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson

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       2 ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’

      It is late fall in Philadelphia, 24 November 2000. An eclectic crowd is jammed into an arts-district theatre. Few people are still hugging their weatherproof outerwear, so under the seats are strewn woollen, nylon, or leather garments that have slid silently downwards as bodies began to relax and shake with hysteria.

      Election time in the United States is a comedian’s gift of a social climate. ‘If you don’t make up your mind about your president pretty quick, the country’s going to revert to us British,’ threatens the shaggy, non-voting Glaswegian with the radio microphone, ‘and look at the choice you’ve got! Gore – what a big fucking Jessie he is … and George W. Bush – God almighty!’ A rant against politicians follows, and so do cheers and applause from this thoroughly fed-up bunch of voters. ‘I’ve been saying all along: don’t vote! It only encourages the bastards!’

      The harangue eventually switches to introspection, and soon the theme is the march of time, probably inspired by the fact that this is the night of his fifty-eighth birthday. He bashfully announces this to the throng, which prompts a rowdy bunch on the right-hand side to instigate a swell, until the entire audience is singing happy birthday to Billy.

      ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he wails at them. ‘Behave yourselves!’ Every single detail of his highly embarrassing prostate exam has just been shared with all these strangers, yet the intimacy of a birthday celebration is making him very uncomfortable.

      Later on, in the dressing room, there is a tiny cake from his promoter. Billy has just moaned to his audience that his birthday cake now holds nearly three boxes of candles, but the promoter’s sponge-and-frosting round has only four snuff-resistant flames dancing above a chocolate greeting. As always, Billy is shattered, sweaty, and still in a fragile trance from the show. I shower him with kisses and praise for a brilliant performance, but he slumps glumly in the couch, staring fixedly at the cake.

      He is transported to the circus in Glasgow more than fifty years ago. Among the most terrifying characters from his six-year-old experience were, ironically, clowns, and one of these scary, painted monsters is riding a unicycle while balancing a birthday cake on his shoulder. Unaccustomed to being celebrated for being alive, wee Billy has never seen a birthday cake before that moment. ‘Look!’ he cries, to the amusement of his sister and aunts. ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’

      Nowadays, I like to order an extravagant loaf of breadshaped chocolate birthday cake with candles for Billy, which he always hugely enjoys, but back then, at St Peter’s School for Boys, special treats were unheard of. Absolutely everything seemed threatening. A boy was to march in file and remember his arithmetic tables or else. The punishment for noncompliance involved several excruciatingly painful whacks with a tawse, an instrument of torture made in Lochgelly in Fife. It was a leather strap about a quarter of an inch thick, with one pointed end, and three tails at the other. The teacher’s individual preference dictated which end Billy and the other boys would receive. Most liked to hold the three tails and wallop the culprit with the thick end. When a boy was considered a candidate for receiving this abuse, he was forced to hold one hand underneath the other, with arms outstretched. The tawse was supposed to find its target somewhere on the hand, but Billy noticed that teachers seemed to take great delight in hitting that very tender bit on his wrist, and making a nasty weal. Most of the boys, however, were quite keen on having battle scars.

      Rosie McDonald, the worst teacher of the bunch, whom Billy describes as ‘the sadist’, would make her victim stand with hands, palms up, about an inch above her desk. When she wielded her tawse, the back of his hands would come crashing down painfully on top of pencils she’d placed underneath. That was her special treat in winter, when the chilly air made even youthful joints stiffer and more sensitive. Among her pupils, Rosie had favourites, but Billy was definitely not one of them. Scholastically, he did not seem to be grasping things nor keeping up with his homework, so Rosie assumed that he was lazy and stupid and punished him viciously.

      Everyone who knows Billy today is aware of his considerable, albeit unusual, intelligence. However, he does not process information the same way that many others do. Psychologists currently ascribe diagnoses such as ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or ‘Learning Disability’ to such a way of thinking and, in the more enlightened educational environments, there is understanding and help for such children. In addition to having a learning difference, however, Billy is and was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a person suffering from past and present trauma, and these factors all conspired to make concentration and left-brain activity extremely challenging for him. Rosie thrashed him for many things that were unavoidable, considering his organic make-up: for looking out the window, for breaking a pencil, for scruffy writing or untidy paper, or for looking away when she was talking. He used to stand outside her classroom because he was too scared to go in. Eventually, someone would either push or pull him inside, and Rosie would start on him for his tardiness. ‘Well look who’s here! Well, well, well! Slept in, did you? Well, maybe we should wake you up.’

      Once she got her favourites, James Boyd and Peter Langan, to run him up and down the classroom holding an arm each. The most humiliating part for Billy was seeing his play-piece, a little butter sandwich that he carried up his jersey, come jumping out in the process, and being trampled on by all.

      Rosie was always furious and suspicious with the class. When she strapped people, she did it so violently that she invariably back-heeled her leg and kicked her desk at the same time, so eventually it featured a massive crater of cracked wood. Other teachers would pop into her classroom from time to time for various reasons and Billy would be amazed to see them occasionally having a laugh with her. They think she’s normal.’ he would marvel, ‘a normal human being. Probably if you asked them what she was like, they’d even say she was nice, this horrible, terrifying beast.’

      Billy still believes the bravest thing in his whole life was the day he decided to stop doing homework. Just never did it any more. The first morning after this epiphany, he awaited the inevitable with a new-found, insolent calm.

      ‘Have you done your homework?’ demanded Rosie.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Out here.’

      Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

      ‘Sit down.’

      The next day it was the same thing, and the next, and the next. Reflecting on it now, Billy recognizes that he probably wouldn’t have been able to do Rosie’s maths homework anyway, and was too intimidated to ask for help. In common with most people who have a learning disability, he is afraid of many tasks and procrastinates as a way of trying to deal with that fear.

      Rosie was not the only tyrant in Billy’s six-year-old life, for Mona had started taking her frustration out on Billy, and he was experiencing her, too, as a vicious bully. Mona was exactly like Rosie: suspicious, paranoid, and sadistic. She had started picking on him fairly soon after they had settled into Stewartville Street. At first it was verbal abuse. She called him a ‘lazy good-for-nothing’, pronounced that he would ‘come to nothing’, and that it was ‘a sad day’ СКАЧАТЬ