He was afraid of something. We didn’t know it then, but like all of us he was afraid of everything. The fighting in the house, and God knows what else, was systematically shutting all of us down. I think that was Alan’s way of escaping into his own head, where he couldn’t be hurt. He was four years younger than me and had no other way of dealing with life.
Because he was that little bit younger than us he had no voice at all; he was invisible. We could at least escape or rebel. Not that anyone really cared. While all the mayhem was going on around him no one stopped for a minute to really look after him. Mum and Dad should have done that, but they were too self-absorbed. Too trapped in their own shit to think about us. He was a good boy and deserved a better childhood, as did all of us.
By this time Dorothy, my sister, had taken over the role of mum to all of us, including Lisa, the youngest. Dot tried to feed us and wash the little ones. It was all too much for her and for us. I don’t know how we survived.
Dad worked at the British Tube Mills factory during the day and drank most nights at the pub. Mum worked nights as a nurse’s aide in Hillcrest Mental Hospital and was tired most days. She told us stories of the cruelty and pain that she saw at the hospital. She had taken a shine to a kid they called the spider. Apparently this kid was always naked and climbed the walls, hence the name. She cried when she spoke about him. She said that she was reaching out to him and he was warming to her. Until one day she came home with a busted arm and a black eye. Old spider wasn’t that keen on her after all it seemed. He had reached out to her and eventually he caught her. Threw her across the room a few times and bashed her off the walls.
When Dad found out he said that he’d always liked spiders. Most of the time now, Mum and Dad tried to avoid each other and so we were left pretty well alone.
One night, Dad was in the pub and he had John with him. John was only young and shouldn’t have been in there in the first place, but that’s another story. So he was sitting drinking lemonade in the corner, when in walks a guy who goes up to the bar and has a few drinks.
Well, the booze must have made him talk a little too much and he started saying or slurring to the barman, ‘I’m a black belt in judo and I reckon I could beat up any bloke in this pub.’
If you hadn’t noticed, this seems to be a common form of entertainment in the pubs we go to.
The barman turned to my dad and said, ‘This is Jim Swan, he’s a boxer and I reckon he could take you.’
The guy jumped up and said, ‘I’ll put you down before you can even get your hands up.’
Dad got up slowly, put out his cigarette, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked at him. When my dad did this he meant business and someone was going to get hurt. I saw my dad push his glasses up the bridge of his nose many times and normally that was enough to make me do whatever I was supposed to be doing.
Anyway, Dad says to him, ‘Leave ten quid behind the bar and we’ll go outside. The first man back takes the money.’
The guy quickly agrees and leaves his money with the barman next to Dad’s. He does a quick stretch and heads to the door where Dad is waiting patiently, wanting to get back to his drink. Dad was always a gentleman and he opened the door for him.
‘After you,’ he said and let the guy walk through.
As the judo expert got halfway through the door my dad slammed the door really hard on the back of his head and knocked him out cold.
Dad shuffled back to the bar, hardly lifting his feet off the ground; it’s safer to walk that way when you drink as much as he did. Then he lit up a cigarette, smiled to himself and picked up the money. Dad didn’t like to gloat but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He then bought drinks for his friends as if nothing had happened.
That was my dad – always calm, but always dangerous.
When the guy came around he left the bar embarrassed, with his tail between his legs and a very sore head.
Dad used to spend a lot of time with some mates of his across the paddock in Broadmeadows. Shuggy was a skinny Glaswegian, a pool hustler who drank way too much, and he was married to Betty who also drank way too much. Dad got on very well with them, as he also drank way too much.
Like our family, this family had major issues. They might have had even worse problems than we had, who knows. They had a lot of kids – I never really counted them – but those poor kids looked skinnier than us. Their house looked like ours: holes in the doors, with the flyscreens lying on the ground from where people had jumped in and out of the windows, and there always seemed to be rubbish lying everywhere. The front door was always wide open with anybody who wanted to walking in and out of the place, day and night. I look back now and can see that our place was the same, only then I thought it was better.
Their kids were in constant danger, just like us, and like us they spent a lot of time running around the streets getting into trouble. I often saw the boys hiding in the paddock the same as I did. They looked like they were escaping from something. These kids were escaping from reality. From life. From pain. From the past. From the future. Everything. I could tell because that’s what I was doing too.
They lived in a house that had revolving doors. Anyone who wanted to could walk straight in and walk straight out without anyone checking on them. The doors that weren’t ripped off their hinges had holes punched in them. The damage mostly looked like it was done by someone trying to get away from the house; the sort of place you would break out of, not into.
Kids like them and us were just scared. Scared of what might happen or scared that the same shit might happen again. It was like being in a loop. You’d think things were getting better then they’d fall apart and get worse.
I never liked these kids much, probably because of their parents. Mum hated them and instilled the same sort of hate in us. To us, they looked feral. Snotty noses and bad clothes and worse habits. Looking back, they probably had the same problem with us. We didn’t look any better.
Mum had a problem with the parents; she thought they encouraged my dad to drink more. Believe me, Dad didn’t need any encouragement; he was doing just fine by himself. But if he went missing she started to work out where to find him – he would be with Shuggy at the pub or with Betty at their house. Either way he was up to no good. I used to see her looking out across the paddock swearing to herself and calling Betty every bad name under the sun.
‘That Shuggy is a drunken pig and don’t get me started on that fuckin’ hoor wife o’ his.’ The words spat from her mouth like venom. It might have been true but it was cruel to talk like that in front of us. ‘If your father likes her so much he can fuckin’ have her. I don’t want him here. He’s nothing but a drunken bastard.’
I guess if Dad was spending that much time with her, they both deserved all they got. But it only added to our misery.
Dad would come home with his tail between his legs. ‘Sorry, Dot, I must’ve drank too much. You know I love you.’
He had no money left, nothing to give to Mum so she could feed us. His only solution was to send one of the kids down the street to borrow money for food.
For some reason, I was normally chosen. I would walk down the street to these other friends of my parents and knock at the door. I would ask as quietly as possible so no one else could hear me. ‘Can my dad borrow some money from you until payday because we have nothing to eat and we’re starving? He said he’ll pay you back on Thursday when he gets his pay.’
The woman who lived there always wanted to give it to me but I could hear the voice of her husband yelling and swearing at her. ‘Tell those bastard kids to fuck off away from our house and don’t come back. And if I see their father around here I’ll kill him.’
There was no chance he could have hurt my dad but I do think something was going on between my dad and his wife. Her husband had every right to be mad but he hated us because of it. We had nothing to do with anything; all we were trying to do was not be hungry.
She always found some
thing to give me and would say, ‘Tell your father it’s from me, not him,’ pointing towards her husband, ‘and he can pay me back the usual way any time he wants.’
Then she would kiss me on the cheek with her red lipstick and cigarette and whisky breath and send me on my way.
It was a downhill slide from there on in: more drinking, fighting and gambling. That was just the kids. No really, I shouldn’t joke but laughing is the only way I have got through most of my life.
Dad was more out of control and that meant Mum had to work harder to make ends meet so therefore we were left alone much more often. Mum seemed to work a lot at night. She said that she always took the night shift because the pay was much better and it wasn’t as busy at work, so she could get a wee lie-down sometimes. But when she got home in the morning she was exhausted and had no time for any of us.
When our parents weren’t there we ran riot. There were also more and more dodgy people hanging around the house. I’ve learned from being an addict myself that when you’re caught up in the middle of your addiction you hang around with people who you wouldn’t normally spit on if they were on fire. Well, Mum and Dad were the same. There were people, so-called friends of theirs, who were allowed to get close to us. People who should have been locked up, never mind hanging around young children.
CHAPTER TEN
messing with the kids
Near the school there was an old train; the council had put it there for the local kids to play on and we all loved it. We would climb all over it, pretending we were driving it at high speed.
The train sat next to the shops. A road through the car park ran right next to it. Cars would snake their way through there, avoiding kids as they ran from the train to the grass verge where we played football. It seemed that everyone knew the kids played there and seemed to drive a little slower. Occasionally the football would crash into the windscreen of a passing car and someone would roll down a window and hurl abuse at us but we didn’t care.
‘You shouldn’t be playing there. Someone will get killed if you’re not careful. You stupid kids. Where are your parents? Don’t you have homes to go to?’
‘Fuck off, you whining old bastard, and leave us alone.’
If they wanted to get to us they had to park their car and come after us and by then we would have grabbed our shirts from the grass and be gone down the street or up into the train, hiding.
On the other side of the train were the shops. They weren’t that big or nice to look at and from the top of the train you could look down into the area behind the shops where the shopkeepers put their rubbish. I used to see the guy from the hamburger place smoking cigarettes and picking his nose back there. I never wanted to eat his hamburgers, no matter how hungry I felt.
Every day after school we would all rush to the train and play. But if someone arrived with a football we would jump off the train and take off our shirts and use them as goalposts and start a match. These games were very serious. Every night we played our own version of the World Cup finals right there at the shops. The idea was to pick the best team you could before the other guy got all the good players. But you had to pick your mates too or they would be upset with you and go home. Slowly the squads would be put together. The last two or three picks were always made out of desperation. There were some people no one wanted but we had to make up the numbers.
‘Okay, I’ll take Stevie.’
‘Yes. Woo!’
Stevie was the worst player of all the boys and was always happy that anyone picked him. I always seemed to get stuck with him.
‘But you better do what I tell you. I’m the captain and I tell people what position to play.’
‘I want to be centre forward.’
I would sometimes have to revert to the tricks that my brother John had used on me.
‘Come here. I need to talk to you alone.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Listen, Stevie. The others don’t know it but you’re the best fullback out of all of these guys. I can’t win this game without you. Do you understand?’
‘If you really need me to be, I’ll be fullback.’
‘Great, Stevie. They don’t know how good you are.’
John had been using these tactics on me for years, to get me to do anything from making him toast to cleaning the mud off his soccer boots.
‘Listen, Jim, no one can clean a pair of boots like you. It’s a skill that very few people can master and you’re great at it. Please do it for me.’
‘Okay, John. Then can I play football with you?’
‘Not tonight, Jim, but you’re the best. When you finish just put them under my bed. I’m going out.’
I fell for it every time and now I was using the same tricks on my little mates.
We took football very seriously. Everyone I knew wanted to be Pelé or Eusébio or George Best. But we didn’t want to be famous just for the sake of it, we wanted to play football in the World Cup. That was it, that was what we were training for, to represent our country at the World Cup. I wanted to play for Scotland, like Denis Law. I imagined myself scoring the winning goal against England in the World Cup final at Wembley Stadium. I daydreamed about it all the time. I would be a Scottish hero, just like I thought my dad was. Even though I lived in Australia my folks never let me forget that I was Scottish. Dad would tell me how lucky I was to be from such a great country. I wondered why they left. But it was Scotland I wanted to play for.
We practised every day waiting for our big break to come along. How it was going to come along I’ll never know. We were in Elizabeth West playing football at the shops. I don’t think this was the number one place that big football club talent scouts headed for when looking for the next Bobby Charlton but stranger things have happened. We thought if we tried hard enough they would find us.
We weren’t the only ones who hung around the train. All sorts of things were going on there after dark too. And it wasn’t long before the train was covered in broken beer bottles and stank like piss. The smell of rotting garbage, wafting up from behind the shops, mixed with the smell of stale piss and spilled booze that oozed from every corner of the train. We didn’t even notice it after a while. The train was fine as long as you didn’t go into the driver’s compartment. There, the smell became overbearing and the floor was littered with all sorts of filth and blood. Who knows what went on in there when we weren’t around?
The council never cleaned it up so it just stayed that way, which was a shame for us kids. But even that never stopped us playing there. We just had to hold our breath in some parts of the train or until we got onto the top of it. Then we could breathe freely.
There were always shady characters hanging around the shops at night too. What they were after, I had no idea. Maybe they wanted to break into them or something. But if they did, they looked way too drunk to even think about it. I couldn’t work it out.
Often there was some bloke lying in the shadows, out cold, having pissed his pants, moaning and shouting obscenities at no one in particular. These were grown men. How could they be so disgusting? Didn’t they have homes to go to where they could piss their pants? Why did we have to put up with them? Why do people get so smashed? What are they thinking?
‘Oh, I got so hammered last night that I pissed my pants. What a great night. Did you see me? I can’t wait to do it again tonight.’
The older guys who hung around with us would sometimes kick them and tell them, ‘Fuck off, you dirty old bastard.’
But it never really did any good. There always seemed to be another one ready to take his place. Sometimes the bigger kids would give these guys a real beating just for fun. But that was only when they were really bored or things weren’t going well at home. We all had our own problems to deal with. Maybe they couldn’t go home either or didn’t have homes to go to.
If we knew the guy who was out cold, that was worse. It might have been a friend’s dad or one of the gang’s parents. Then we all just pretended we didn
’t see them.
I was out one night, I think that there was a fight going on at home, and I wanted to keep away from it. So I was wandering around the shops looking for something to do. I couldn’t find anyone to hang out with. It seemed I couldn’t even find trouble if I wanted to. So I went to sit on the train. From the front of the train on the smokestack I could see most of the front side of the shops. So I would see any of my friends if they walked past. I was just sitting there bored, doing nothing, looking at the moon.
Then I heard a noise coming from behind one of the shops. Sitting where I was, I had a view straight into the back, where they kept the rubbish bins. I could see something or someone moving back there in among the trash. So without thinking, I sat and stared. My eyes took a minute to focus in the bad light. But it didn’t take long to work out what was happening.
There in the shadows was a group of young guys, grabbing at a young girl who had no clothes on. They looked like animals to me, snarling and baring their teeth at one another and pushing each other out of the way to get at the girl. She wasn’t fighting them off. She just lay there saying nothing, staring straight up at the sky. I couldn’t work out if this was supposed to be fun or not but I knew I didn’t want to keep watching. And I definitely didn’t want to get spotted by the bigger boys. They would turn on me. So I ran away. But I had seen enough to make me question whether what was going on was right or wrong. It couldn’t have been right. She wasn’t fighting them or screaming or anything. She just lay there and looked sad. I was confused.
Working Class Boy Page 12
