Bob Servant

by Bob Servant

  I didn’t even have time to give Frank into trouble properly for arranging the recital because I had to get my hair looking nice (which it always did back then – it was black as coal and twice as shiny) and finish off the page. Because it wasn’t quite the full story I just made it end on a cliffhanger and then we headed to Stewpot’s while I at least managed to give Frank into some trouble on the way.

  There was a good crowd in Stewpot’s and I was certainly excited when I stood up on the chair and started reading. All the boys were shouting out things like ‘Here we go!’ and ‘It’s looking good for Lord Dundee!’ and ‘Not long now!’ But then I got to the cliffhanger, thanked them for their support and got down from the stool and I have to say the reaction was desperately disappointing. I wasn’t necessarily expecting a standing ovation, though it would have been nice to get one, but I certainly didn’t expect what happened. Crusher looked at me for a long time then left, and the rest of them lost the plot.34

  Stewpot smuggled me out the back door and it took a few weeks before people stopped giving me abuse in the street, mostly for being a ‘bottler’ and a ‘tease’ which was a lot of rubbish but it was enough to rob me of my confidence and force me to abandon Lord Dundee’s Lover with immediate effect. But the boo boys can get you, there’s no doubt about that. They get in your head and make you wonder who you really are. There’s many times in my life that I wish that I’d stood up to them and Lord Dundee’s Lover is very much one of them.35

  _________________________

  33 During the edit, Bob clarified that he had ordered The Big Book of British Birds from the Broughty Ferry library at the age of fifteen, only to be disappointed that the book arrived with no photos of females ‘British or otherwise’.

  34 See The Dundee Courier, 29 July 1967 – ‘Police Called To “Cliffhanger” Riot (Chaos reigned in a Broughty Ferry bar last night as a local man delivered an unexpected cliffhanger . . . “Totally out of order” . . . “Cheated” . . . “What gives him the right to play God?”)’.

  35 I found the incomplete Lord Dundee’s Lover and it is included opposite. I think, immodestly, that it is a great testament to my editing skills in this book, demonstrating as it does the raw material I have to work with.

  15

  Frank’s Mum Going to Live in the Nursing Home

  Frank’s mum going into the nursing home was a surprise to a lot of people but when people say, ‘Why did Frank’s mum go to live in a nursing home when she was 38?’ I’ve always said the same thing, ‘None of your business and don’t be a boo boy.’ The boo boys used to make jokes about it but that was one area I wouldn’t let them make jokes about in front of Frank and I still won’t. I don’t mind them making jokes about his clothes or hair or the way he walks or his smile (which makes you want to cry) or his reading problems or his troubles with his laces or his stupid jokes or the time he got lost in his own house or the time I put those rocks in his garden and told him there had been a meteor storm and he stayed indoors for a week.

  But I won’t have jokes about Frank’s mum and the fact she lives in a nursing home because she’s a decent woman and, I’ll tell you this for free, moving into the nursing home was the best thing she ever did. I know what the boo boys would say, that moving into a nursing home is hardly difficult if you’ve got the readies but they’re talking bollocks because moving into a nursing home when you’re 38 is a tough sell all round. Believe it or not it was all her idea.

  Frank’s mum always reminded me of an old-style football winger. She was funny-looking, had buckets of natural ability but was easily knocked off her game by the boo boys and when her confidence went she’d fold like a cheap suit. She was no Bobby Dazzler and the worse thing was that she knew it. She said she wasn’t interested in other men out of respect for Frank’s dad (I’m not sure if that was entirely her decision because, put it this way, Frank gets his looks from his mum but he looks like he should get his looks from his dad) but that didn’t stop her saying things like ‘Oh look at my silly hair’ or ‘Oh look at my daft clothes’ or ‘Oh look at my stupid son’, and I used to say, ‘Hey, come on, there’s nothing wrong with your hair or your clothes,’ but she wouldn’t listen and she’d mope about for days on end.

  Then one day Frank’s mum came home and she was absolutely cock-a-hoop, singing to herself and giggling like a maniac over the mashed potato. She was like that again the next day and the next again day so Frank I asked what was up and she cracked and spilled the beans.

  She’d gone to visit her aunt at the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home up in Stobswell. She reckoned it had been the best afternoon of her life. She said she might not have been the biggest cracker in the room but she was definitely in the top three, and that everyone there had listened to all her stories and jokes without a word of complaint. She said when she was leaving a couple of them clapped. Since then she’d gone up every day and she said that when she walked in they looked at her like she was Liz Taylor and Tommy Cooper rolled into one.

  Frank and I were pleased to see her happy and it got her out the house but we didn’t think much more of it until a couple of weeks later when she sat us down and said she wanted to move out the house and into the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home on a residential basis. She had Frank’s dad pension to cover it and she said that the Nursing Home was her Everest as well as the only place she’d ever been where she felt that she was the bell36 of the ball.

  The next morning Frank’s mum packed up her stuff and the three of us got a taxi to Stobswell. Frank was acting a bit strangely and his mum was nervous so I calmed everyone down with a few jokes and my Terry Thomas impression which they both lapped up and it wasn’t exactly lost on the driver who nearly took out a cyclist he was laughing so much.

  When we got there I sent Frank’s mum to go and talk to her pals so the staff could see there wouldn’t be any bust-ups and told Frank to wait outside. I asked for the matron and gave her the old big eyes and said I needed Frank’s mum to move in. The matron was a tough nut to crack. She said Frank’s mum was far too young and the other women would get jealous of her teeth and how quick she was on her feet. I pointed out that she’d be great advertising for the Nursing Home because people would see her and think there must be something in the water and stick their grannies in there as well.

  She said that Frank’s mum would likely be staying for a good while unlike the others and what if she was a disrupting influence and I said, ‘Well would you call that a disrupting influence?’ and pointed over and Frank’s mum had told the other women in the Nursing Home a joke and they were all laughing like it was a belter (which to be fair it probably wasn’t but that’s not vital to the narrative).

  The matron looked unsure and said that they couldn’t really accept someone who was completely on the ball and I said that Frank’s mum was a bit soft in the head and then, like a gift from God, Frank ran past the window doing an aeroplane impression. ‘That’s her son there,’ I told her and did one of those faces that muggers use which says, ‘I think you know what I’m saying and I would just leave it there with the questions if I was you.’

  That was that. Frank’s mum was into the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home. On the way back I asked Frank how he knew to do the aeroplane stuff at the window and he went all red and said he didn’t know what I was talking about and to my immense credit I just left it there.

  To this day, Frank’s mum lives at the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home. Frank and I visit on alternate weeks and it’s good having a wee chat with her and telling her what I’ve been up to. She’s a wee bit doolally right enough but she’s happy with it. Frank and I were talking about that the other day there and he said that he looks at her and he sometimes wishes that he was mad as well. To my immense credit I just left it there.

  _________________________

  36 Belle, presumably.

  16

  Having a Girlfriend

  In 1969 The Great Skirt Hunt came to
an end when I got myself a girlfriend. Her name was Daphne but she should have been called Catastrophe and not because that sounds a bit like Daphne but because that’s what she was. She was a girl-next-door type. If you happen to live next door to a fucking idiot.

  Believe it or not things started not too bad between me and Daphne before they got bad and then really bad with the hiding but it all looked so different that night I walked into the Limbo Dancing Club with Frank and said, ‘Stop the bus, Frank, look at that one.’ The Limbo Dancing Club was always a good way to meet skirt who were fun and fairly flexible and Daphne ticked both boxes. She was one of the best limbo dancers in Dundee at the time and when we started chatting it was like someone had taken magic dust and rubbed it into my mouth and her ears because everything I said she just cracked up and hung on my words like a puppy. ‘This is looking good, Bob,’ said Frank, before I told him to go and stand a bit further away.

  From then on I was up at the Limbo Dancing Club most nights winding up my relationship with Daphne like a coiled spring. She would do a bit of limbo dancing with the other girls then come over and I’d make the same joke and she’d always laugh even though it was the same joke. It wasn’t even a proper joke I’d just say that I thought she must be made of rubber. This was before I realised that she was mostly made of anger and, in the case of her heart, bricks.

  The first few months having a girlfriend were fine. We’d spend time together and have a laugh and there was a fair amount of the good stuff and things were ticking along when she said that her mum was selling her house to move closer to Tom Jones and could she maybe stay with me for a bit? She knew that it was just me and Frank in the house and it kind of made sense so I said, ‘Aye, why not?’ without really thinking about the consequences.

  The first one of the consequences that I didn’t think about was Frank. He’d always been relatively polite to Daphne but he went ballistic about her moving in, saying it was supposed to be just the two of us and how we were supposed to be like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all this. I said that I had never agreed that the two of us would be like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but I apologised for not checking in advance and asked him to just give Daphne a couple of weeks to see how it goes, which he reluctantly agreed to.

  So in she came and oh dear right from the start it was hard work. Any time Daphne started speaking Frank would groan and say, ‘Oh God, here she goes again.’ Daphne kept asking if I was going to do anything and I could see her point, Frank was really annoying me and she could obviously see that, so one day I went up to Turnbull’s Timber in Wellbank and bought a load of plywood.

  I got it delivered when Frank was out at his cycling lesson and went straight to work. It only took me a couple of hours to halve the entire house, with a few problems. I thought it was only fair to give Frank half the living room and because my side of the house included the downstairs toilet I had to give Frank half the upstairs bathroom so he could have a toilet as well. The other issue was the plywood was only six feet high so didn’t quite reach the ceiling and noise carried badly.

  The next few days were hard work. I had Daphne in one ear asking why I didn’t do a better job with halving the house like I’m a Champion Builder or something and in the other I had Frank. Every time he knew we were in the living room he’d be at the other side pretending to be having a party. He’d run around the room talking in different voices, chinking glasses and opening and closing the door and saying things like ‘Oh, oh, here’s trouble’ and ‘Yes, room for a small one’ and ‘Good afternoon your Honour’. I had that nonsense and Daphne’s moaning and I’d sit there wishing the floor would open up and swallow me and then spit me out in Stewpot’s.

  Then there was the bathroom. Frank would hear me having a bath and nip into his half of the bathroom and get on the job. To this day I don’t know how he did this, and I don’t have any great wish to learn,but Frank seemed to be able to produce the most appalling results through there almost at will. I’d nearly pass out in the bath which could have been lethal (and hopefully brought a murder charge for him) and in the end had to have secret baths in the middle of the night which weren’t as much fun as they sound.

  In the end though Daphne became such a nightmare that Frank was irrelevant. I don’t know what happened to her, it was the strangest thing. At first everything was all nice and relaxed and we just sort of mucked about but then she started behaving really oddly. She had this thing she would do when she’d insist I join in with stuff she did. If she went for a walk along the beach at sunset, or to the cinema on a Friday night, or to a restaurant on her birthday, then she’d really forcibly insist that I went with her. I presumed she’d read some scare stories about local crime rates and told her that she’d be safe enough doing these things by herself but she completely missed my point and started with the shouting and bawling.

  That kind of behaviour started to creep into the house as well. If I was sitting in the lounge having a wee think then she’d come and sit beside me. Then I’d go outside and sit on the bench and have a wee think and she’d come and sit beside me. So I’d go into the kitchen and have a cup of tea and Lo And Behold she’d pop up there as well and, oh what a surprise, she’d like a cup of tea as well! I presumed that someone, probably Frank, had told her that the house was haunted so I sat her down and said that she didn’t always have to be in the same part of the house as me because there weren’t any ghosts. Again, I thought I was helping her out but the result was another Hiroshima of an argument.

  After that, things got worse.

  17

  Hiding Not Being an Olympic Sport

  If hiding had been an Olympic sport in 1969 then I’d have been part of the Hiding Team for the 1972 Munich Olympics or the Hitler Olympics as they were commonly called.37 In fact I’d almost definitely have been the captain and you tell me if an Olympic team captain would not automatically become a local Hero. You just have a think and tell me that. Not that you should need to have a think about it because the answer is yes with a capital Y.

  I suppose I always knew I had a bit of a talent for hiding, you always do know these things I think, but it was Daphne that drove me into developing that ability into top, international-class performances. At first the hiding was pretty standard stuff. I’d tuck in behind doors, ‘accidentally’ lock myself out the house, take a ‘long time’ tying my laces and so on. Then I stepped things up a gear – under the bed, in the airing cupboard beneath a pile of towels, in a ball behind the couch. These moves (which I don’t for one minute claim to have invented) would usually buy me a few hours but then it would be sudden capture and the Earache.

  In the end I was coming up with some unbelievable stuff that took a fair bit of planning but the results speak for themselves. I hollowed out the inside of Frank’s mum’s grandfather clock and holed up in there for an entire Sunday. It must have been gone midnight when my tummy rumbled and she nabbed me. I told her I was checking the time but, oh no, it was all ‘inconsiderate’ this and ‘lunatic’ that.

  The final straw was probably the best hiding plan that I or anyone else from the Dundee area has ever come up with. Frank cocked it up for me, if I needed to tell you that. Up to this point he’d been pretty useful with the hiding which of course he supported because it annoyed Daphne who he had unfairly taken to calling Daftie. If I needed him to help then he was allowed to come round to my half of the house, help out and then slip away before Daftie, sorry Daphne, caught him.

  This particular plan was a cracker. There was an old armchair in the back room that no-one used so I took the cover off, brought it through to the lounge and got Frank to put it on top me. We worked out a way I could sit so that it looked like a normal chair but I was also facing the TV that I could see through peepholes and had a bit of a space on my lap for provisions. I made a big bag of sandwiches, got a bottle of whisky and got back into the chair. It was absolutely perfect and if it wasn’t for Frank I’d have spent days pretending to be a chair with Daph
ne none the wiser.

  Daphne was having a bath when we got set up and once I was in the chair I told Frank to go back to his side of the house. Now, I can’t remember exactly what words I used but I can tell you what I didn’t say. I didn’t say ‘improvise’ which is what Frank maintains to this day I said. The idea that under any circumstances whatsoever I would ever tell Frank to improvise is laughable. The idea that I would tell him to improvise while I was disguised as a chair is the stuff of nightmares.

  Frank went outside, waited five minutes while he ‘got into character’ and rang the bell. Daphne came downstairs and opened the door and Frank said that he’d forgotten his key and walked through to the living room. He pointed at the chair I was hidden inside and said, ‘That’s a lovely chair, Daphne.’ She said, ‘So it is, where’s that come from?’ Frank said, ‘I don’t know but it’s a lovely chair and that’s all it is it’s just a lovely chair, there’s nothing more to it than that.’ Daphne said, ‘Well why don’t you sit on it if you like it so much?’ and Frank said (I kid you fucking not), ‘I can’t sit on it because Bob’s inside it.’ There was this horrible silence and then I took a deep breath, threw off the chair cover, held up the sandwiches and the whisky and shouted, ‘It’s party time and I’m the Chairman!’

  Bearing in mind I had about five seconds to prepare I think I did remarkably well to come up with ‘It’s party time and I’m the Chairman’ but for Daphne it was not only not a good line it was also enough for her to pack her bags, say something about me and Frank’s state of minds that was completely out of order in my case, and leave the house forever.

  It was a shame for her sake that Daphne was such a tough person to live with because I’d be surprised if she ever got someone that could put up with her. But more to the point I’d become one of the best hiders around and it was just my luck that this one of the few sports that the Olympics has never recognised. It’s unbelievable – you get the people doing the funny walk and the bow and arrow and all that but when it comes to hiding it’s a complete no-no.