An Old Pub Near the Angel (19 page)

And then the racing news. The Grand National approached! My god. Dunky Keith rode two winners for Walter Nightingall at Kempton Park. I might have known. They’d always done well at Kempton. And had Arkle beaten Mill House for the Gold Cup? And what about the two- and four-dog combination at the White City? Or the three- and five-dogs at Shawfield. I would have kicked myself if that forecast had entered a winning run.

What about the mighty Dons? Had maestro Charlie Cooke left Dundee yet? Oh man! And how was Jim Baxter playing?
Was Denis Law in Torino? All this and more. I was gloating in anticipation of the response my ‘Pink’
Times
would get from my father and brothers. Maybe I could charge them a dollar for every result I told them. All of these hot topics from 6,000 miles away.

Except the road went on forever and I was still trudging and my fucking feet man, these shoes I had, fucking chisel-toed winkle-picking bastards or some such nonsense, where had I bought them? Gordon’s Shoe Shop in Partick, if I remember rightly, they were fucking killing me and I still had not reached the downtown area.

A couple of months on and my parents called it quits. My mother had never enjoyed the experience and my father just worked, slept, ate and travelled on buses. In many ways it was a typical immigrant experience. For my parents it was a case of cutting the losses, getting home as soon as possible. At least we had a country to go to. But they did not have enough money for everybody’s fares. My elder brother decided he could stay, look after himself and our younger brother Alan who was 15 years old and attending school. He would save to pay Alan’s flight home. It was a burden for a 21-year-old but he managed it fine. Alan returned home a few months later, but Ronnie stayed and has been there ever since, now with his wife and four grown-up children.

I had no option but to return to Scotland. The decision was a family one. I was doing nothing anyway. Back in Glasgow I could work and contribute to the family purse. There was the possibility of returning to the States later.

The printer’s factory over in Partick could not take me back. The firm was agreeable but it was a union shop; I had severed my apprenticeship and that was that. But really, I had
no complaints. The S.O.G.A.T. secretary had warned me months ago.

I stayed with my grandparents in Govan, my mother’s parents, and got a job on the line at the Cooperative shoe factory in Shieldhall, earning a man’s wage on piecework. Then a letter arrived from Pasadena weeks after my eighteenth birthday. The printers on Colorado Boulevard were holding the job open for me. I did consider it but decided against.

This was the period when I knew I was never going to be a painter. I still fancied the art business. I had discovered, perhaps through my father, that a college existed in Europe that specialised in a course for art dealers. I had discussed it with my elder brother for a time, and my father. If I completed the course in art dealing, Ronnie would save dough in the States and send money home, and I could make use of that to buy and sell art. By this time he was in the U.S. Army. We were serious about it. But life was getting on top of me at that time and I needed away.

The immigrant experience left an obvious mark on our family, as it does on every immigrant family. We were never together again as a unit. My younger brother Alan found life unsettling. In 1971 he crossed to New York City to be best man at our brother Ronnie’s wedding. He did not come home for eight years; he travelled south to work for a time in the Pennsylvania hills, then Florida, Texas, Death Valley, Nevada and other places in between. He has his own stories. Before then, in Glasgow, when he turned 16 he discovered the music clubs in the city: the Electric Garden, the Lindella Club, Bruce’s Cave and the rest. He worked on the door at the Picasso Club, and occasionally borrowed 45 RPM EPs from the D.J. The first time I heard the name James Brown was from Alan. He was clutching that very early EP,
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
, from 1965.

My head was not in music so much. I had discovered other
clubs around Glasgow, with names like the Raven, the Hanover, the Coronet, the Starlight Rooms, the Blue Dolphin, the 44 Club, the Establishment, the Cigar Club, the White Elephant and the New Businessman’s Club. The latter was known locally as ‘the Busy’, a play on words; the police also were known locally as ‘the busies’. I was 18 at that time.

These were gambling clubs of one kind or another;
cheminde-fer
– chemmy – the most popular game; and five-card stud poker for afters, for those left with money. I preferred the atmosphere in gambling clubs but it was a tougher world than that of Damon Runyon, though I was fond of ‘Big Nig’ and ‘The Lemondrop Kid’. The guy on the door on these clubs stared at ye, looked left and right, then nodded ye in. Occasionally I brought along guests, my pals. They were very impressed. I whispered, Mind now, ye have to be quiet, and for fuck sake do not chat up the lasses, they are all on the game.

One night I returned to a club from a greyhound track with money burning its way through both trouser pockets. People were around but it was quiet, a man had been stabbed to death at the door. Guys were coming in to play cards and saying, That’s bad news about the bloke on the door . . . Then they coughed quietly, So, what, is there nay cards later on or what?

In another club there was a £1,500 bank for afternoon sessions at faro. I was a busconductor out at Gavinburn Depot, Old Kilpatrick. One day I had a ‘spare’ duty. But it was payday. Everybody goes to work on payday. I was hanging about the garage doing nothing. We could not even watch television in the garage bothy. One of the conductresses had switched it on but nothing happened. Eventually we looked round the back of it to check the electrics. There was nothing there. It was a shell. Some dirty bastard stole the tube and all the inner workings. That was typical at Gavinburn Depot – the garage was
fucking notorious; after forty years I still remember the name of the garage superintendent – wee Dunbar!

To pass the time I skipped down to the village bookie and bet a double at Cheltenham; Ken Oliver’s brilliant novice, Arctic Sunset, and Jimmy Scot, trained by Fulke Walwyn. They fucking bolted home. I lifted the dough and went back to the Depot, but couldnay stand it, signed off sick and went straight to the Hanover club for a game of faro. The guy on the door looked at me. I was still in the busconductor uniform. Jesus Christ, son, he said.

When I walked into the card room there was guffaws: Aw look, the buses is here.

The gambling clubs in
A Chancer
are based on those named above. And the snooker hall Tammas frequents is the old Imperial, Mitchell Street. He lives with his sister and brother-in-law on the Anderston side of St Vincent Street, prior to the M8 upheaval and the demolition of the tenements from Elliot Street.

But oh that gambling. Life is a complication. I forgot about art dealing in Paris, card dealing in Glasgow, I needed away, fast. I went to Manchester with a pal, Colin Hendry from Partick who died a few years ago. His elder brother Ian was a plumber to trade; he died some years before Colin. We played football and cards together, gin rummy for the entire trip down by train. Colin could lose patience. When our train pulled into Victoria Station, Manchester that Friday afternoon in the spring of 1965 I had to make a confession: Colin, I said, I only have twelve and a tanner (63 pence in new money).

Aw for fucksake Jimmy, how did ye no tell me?

Because ye wouldnay have come.

Aye, ye are fucking right I wouldnay.

We bought two bags of chips and went to find the nearest Department of Social Security.

Eventually we got a start at a Salford copper mill producing coils of copper wire. We left the down-and-outs’ hostel, found a room at a place doing dinner, bed and breakfast. Huge meals.

It was heavy, difficult work, semi-skilled. For Colin it was temporary; I was enquiring about pension schemes. A week into the job and they tried us on a section where we had to grab white-hot lengths of copper bar with a pair of extreme clamps. We had thick gloves to protect our hands. Often the material had worn away; you had to be careful the clamps did not connect with your skin. The first time Colin was given the clamps, he managed to get them round the white-hot copper bar but was unable to connect in a move, thus he took the full weight of the copper length, could not hold it, it rolled off the bogey onto the floor. Being a decent football player Colin did the instinctive thing, he ‘trapped’ the white-hot bar, and his shoe burst into flames. He threw his clamps to one side, threw me a look and off he went. The gaffer came to find out the problem. Colin threw him a look as well, and continued walking, shoe smouldering. A few days later he got a proper job as an electrician. He was 21 and had only finished his apprenticeship weeks previously. I used that incident in a story.

A while later I lifted my insurance cards and P45, collected the week’s lying time, and went home for a holiday. I had some dirty laundry my mother insisted on washing. They were still living in a two-room flat down a dunny in Gibson Street, my mother and father in the kitchen, the four of us in two double beds. I stayed in my Govan grannie’s some of the time. My mother showed me the dirty-washing water left by my jeans and working clothes. It was full of a thick green dye. Aye, right enough, I remembered also when ye smoked a fag it always tasted sweet, and every hour or so the gaffer told ye to swallow some green solution that tasted like concentrated lime.

I planned to return to England. I took a job on the buses to
save enough money for the fare and the settling-in period. Thoughts of industrial disease or injury were not to the fore; I returned to the same factory.

One time I was showing a new guy how we coiled the copper wire. This was the end of the wire-making process. The wire would have been between a half and three quarters of an inch in diameter. I do not know what length it was, maybe 50 or 60 yards. The big coiling machine was shaped like a ship’s steering wheel. Once the wire coiled onto it one man got a pair of heavy-duty clamps and gripped the end of the wire to keep it secure, otherwise the coil sprung. He kept one foot on the bottom of the wheel to stop it spinning. The man needs to use his wrist and arm muscles, at the same time concentrate on gripping the end. At this stage the wire is not yet trained into its coil, and is very powerful, fighting to spring. If it does the wire is ruined, no longer malleable and cannot be recoiled. Of course that spring is also dangerous, its whiplash is unpredictable.

While the one man grips tightly the end of the wire his mate has another pair of clamps which he uses to twist the wire some ten inches or so from the end. He inserts this twisted end into the coil so that it cannot spring. The first man continues gripping the end until certain that his mate has made the twist and can take the strain.

I was showing the new guy how this was to be done when he lost concentration, and thus control, and the coil sprung, the end lashed me across the cheek and eye. It was my cheekbone saved me from losing the eye. My face was cut open across there and my eyebrow. The new man was crestfallen. Nay fucking wonder. I did not have much sympathy for him. He was a strong cunt as well, it was his concentration that faltered.

I sat in the doctor’s waiting room holding a rag to my eye to stop it landing on the floor. In this factory they used dropped eyes as ball bearings. I was offered a job in the boiler room
after that; twelve-hour shifts, alternate nightshift, dayshift. They also had a snooker table in their welfare club. And a works football team that played on grass pitches. And down the road was Salford Greyhound Track, with a casino at the first bend.

I was still there when Germany were denied the World Cup. Denis Law spent the afternoon playing golf; we went for a game of snooker. A guy called Charlie had moved into the rooming house. He wanted to play on a regular basis and, next to myself, was the finest loser I ever met. I made a story out of it, ‘Charlie’.

Next time in Manchester four friends came along, one has been a friend since boyhood, Ian Lithgow, another great reader. Two of us got a start in a Trafford Park factory with the cleanest working conditions I ever encountered. This was a huge asbestos company.

Our workmates in the asbestos plant were mainly Jamaicans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians. I learned not to assume a person’s politics because of their background. You never knew people’s lives, what their families had experienced. They were generous men and shared their grub and tobacco, but discussions could veer off track. The East Europeans did not say much in English, just looked and smiled. An older Hungarian was respected by the other men. He spoke better English and had a certain mildness of manner, indicating one used to authority. Ian Lithgow worked with him. On one occasion he was close to losing his temper with me over politics. I had referred to communism in a positive way. It was my own naïvety. I wanted to know why they were here. I wanted to talk about life in a ‘socialist country’.

Of course they had not come from any socialist country, they had come from Stalin’s brand of so-called communism. I was 19 and probably had not connected that there was a link between a real live Hungarian person and the actual events that
had occurred ten years earlier in Hungary. His and Ian’s job was weighing out the white asbestos fibre and cement in tubs. Ian had red hair. Half an hour into the shift and the pair were like snowmen, fibre clinging to their eyebrows, in their ears and up their nose.

The wee guy who taught me my job was Polish and spoke no English. He shared everything. Rye bread and thick salami, hot sweet tea and roll-ups thicker than a cigar, and loaned me dough if I was skint. He was very patient, and showed me how not to clean the chute and asbestos mixer by hand. But he occasionally did it himself and if he caught me looking just grinned and shrugged, cigarette dowt hanging from his mouth. Eventually I took over the mixing operation at that machine, and he moved to a different shift.

The biggest man on the floor was a Ukrainian who moved with the slow precision of a weightlifter. He rarely spoke but laughed a lot. In Anglo-American litrachuhh the narrator would describe him as ‘a hulking brute’, unless the upper-class hero was not intimidated by his physicality in which case he would be described as ‘a great oaf’ or ‘a lumbering jackass’, and be felled by the hero ‘with one mighty swoop to the jaw’. My grannie would have called him ‘a big handsome man’.