Frankie Vaughan Ate My Hamster

by Rikki Brown

  Business was always brisk for the Knifeman as the company JML didn’t exist in the sixties. Therefore, no one had their own knife sharpener, unlike today when for a mere £5.99 you can pop into Tesco, Asda, Focus or many other leading stores and buy a JML knife sharpener. I’m quoting the adverts here, which are always, ‘New from JML, a thing that does stuff.’ Sadly for the Knifeman, he wasn’t very tall and stood about four foot eleven, and he looked even smaller compared to the big Easterhouse women. I’m talking big women who all had their hair in a beehive. To this day every time I see Big Kim from C4’s How Clean Is Your House I think of the queue of big Easterhouse women waiting to have their knives sharpened by the Knifeman.

  Mr McFarlane was a nice man, but he persisted with the downtrodden working class thing. He wrongly assumed that our parents never took us anywhere educational and this just wasn’t true. Me, I practically lived in the Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery. To show us how right he always was and how wrong our parents always were he arranged a school trip to Glasgow Cathedral. We all boarded a bus and headed for the Cathedral. Now I don’t know what route he thought the bus was taking but he must have decided we were on Duke Street because he pointed up a hill and said, ‘There’s Glasgow Cathedral up there.’ The bus was actually on Alexandra Parade and he was pointing at some random church and I told him, ‘No sir, Glasgow Cathedral is down there.’ I knew exactly where it was because my Mother, thanks to various female problems, was in the Royal Infirmary more times than most of the staff. He wasn’t pleased at all about being shown up by a mere member of the lower working classes who weren’t supposed to know anything that he hadn’t taught them.

  As my mother was in and out of the Royal so much, it fell to me, as an eleven-year-old, to prepare the family dinner when she was in for one of her many operations. There were no worries in those pre-wrapping-kids-in-cotton-wool days about an eleven-year-old being left in charge of a chip pan. Although in retrospect there should have been because I put the chip pan on to prepare the dinner and thanks to a particularly interesting segment on Blue Peter about the new Churchill tank I completely forgot about it. When I eventually smelt the smoke I had the presence of mind to get my brother, who was six by this time, out onto the veranda along with the family budgie in his cage. My thinking being that budgies and small brothers are especially prone to the effects of smoke inhalation. This done, I went to deal with the fire and, not wanting to burn the kitchen down, I stupidly carried the burning chip pan through to the living room and put it in the fireplace. I was just in the middle of wetting a towel to extinguish the flames when my Dad burst through the door. He’d been coming along the road from work and saw my brother and the budgie on the veranda and whiffs of smoke coming out through the door. All was well though as I’d saved the house from burning down in a fire that was almost nearly about 10% my fault. The other 90% was surely the fault of parents who leave their eleven-year-old kid to fry chips. I didn’t get much of a telling off because a) the house didn’t burn down and b) I think my Dad did realise that perhaps I was indeed a bit too young to have that much responsibility thrust upon me.

  When I told Mr MacFarlane what had happened he was incredulous, not at an eleven-year-old having the savoir faire to deal with a chip pan fire, but at an eleven-year-old being left alone in the house to cook dinner. To him it justified all the things he said about the people who lived in Easterhouse. But give him his due because he did devote almost a whole afternoon to fire prevention so that everyone else in the class would know how to put out a chip pan fire. At the beginning of the lesson he didn’t say, ‘In the extremely unlikely event of,’ he said, ‘In the extremely likely event.’ I don’t know if he was being sarcastic or he genuinely now thought everyone in his class made chips.

  The headmaster at Easthall was a Mr McDonald who hailed from the Isle of Lewis. He was a Gael and most of the teachers at the school were Gaels too who he’d persuaded to join him. I think they all saw themselves at Gaelic Sidney Poitiers in their own personal To Sir, with Love. They wanted to bask in the warm glow of self-satisfaction they thought they’d get by teaching in a deprived area. Despite them all being Gaelic, they didn’t teach us the language. I wish they had because I’d be driving around in a Ferrari thanks to an overpaid job at BBC Scotland or a seat on the board of the completely over-funded Gaelic language quango Bord Na Gaidhlig. In the sixties, the Gaelic language was considered quaint, today, though, being able to speak the language is a ticket for the Gaelic gravy train. I could learn the language now I suppose but you’re not allowed to unless your name is Farquhar, you have a beard, an extensive collection of knitwear and live in the West End of Glasgow. And the rules for men are just as strict.

  The language we were taught was French and we were taught through what Mr McDonald referred to as the medium of the electric television. Electric? That made us wonder what exactly powered the TVs on Lewis. Peat powered TVs? Who knows? It probably wasn’t peat because it gives off the same heat as a damp piece of cardboard.

  The school’s electric television was, for the times, enormous. It was a giant, twenty-two-inch, black and white job encased in a wooden cabinet on long metal legs with wheels that was wheeled into the classroom by the headie. He didn’t trust the jannie with his new piece of state-of-the-art, high-tech kit so he took the telly everywhere himself. He plugged it in, positioned it in front of the class and left Mr McFarlane to supervise the class learning French.

  The problem with the French language programme was the presenter Madame Anne Slack and her puppets Clicko and Patapoof. Her surname alone was enough to produce sniggers, but every time she said the name Patapoof, that was it. Howls of derision filled the classroom. This led to Mr McFarlane running round the room smashing his belt off desks and threatening to belt us if we didn’t calm down. His threats went unheeded because we were way past reason. Come on, Patapoof? It didn’t end well as Madame Anne Slack’s plea to repeat after me ‘Je m’appelle Patapoof’ was met with a united chorus of ‘piss off’. The whole class got belted for that. My classmate Eddie Beattie got a double dose because he also shouted that Madame Anne Slack should ‘show us yer tits’. We were eleven, what purpose would that serve? But he must have been taking the lessons in because he shouted, ‘Montrer nous votre mamelles,’ which, apart from probably at least four wrong tenses, is indeed almost perfect French for apprentice pervert Eddie’s request.

  Use of the belt was prevalent in those days and was used for every minor infringement of school rules, of which there were many. When the teacher was taking the register one morning, one of my classmates, who’d been watching the US cavalry sergeant taking roll call on the TV show Boots and Saddles, shouted ‘yo’, US cavalry style, instead of saying ‘present’ when his name was called out, and was belted for something that was really quite innocuous. Me, I was once given the belt for being in possession of an American Civil War card, which the school had banned due to the graphic nature. Looking back, the cards, which came in a pack of bubble gum, were pretty graphic and the particular card I was caught with showed Confederate soldiers impaled on large wooden stakes during an attack on a Union gun emplacement. I did give up collecting them after that and moved on to collecting Vietnam War cards. No Pannini footballer cards for us, we much preferred the gory depictions of war.

  While the belt worked, getting lines did not strike the same fear into us. Plus, where was the glory in lines? After we’d been summoned to the headies office, the question asked was, ‘How many did you get?’

  ‘Nane, I got lines.’

  ‘Lines, ya poof!’

  The word poof wasn’t used in any homophobic sense, it was just the general term used in every derogatory situation. A sort of utility word that covered every conceivable occasion. Even when the occasion made absolutely no sense, as in, ‘What you daeing talking to burds … ya poof.’ Yes, it was the Mr Kipling cake of abuse.

  We all fancied the girls, but at ten the only way to show any affection was to steal their skipp
ing ropes, their scrapbooks, which only contained fat cherubs, or punch them on the arm. The girls never understood our pre-pubescent chest beating and the recipient of our adoration would go and get their screaming banshee of a mother who’d threaten to ‘tan oor arses fur us’. The mothers always appeared wearing curlers under a headscarf, slippers and a housecoat that flapped open to reveal tartan legs. That was the daytime look for an Easterhouse woman; it was their nighttime look too.

  Relatives were used a lot in threats and we’d hear, ‘I’m getting ma Mammie to you,’ or, ‘I’m getting ma Da to you,’ and one threat I heard was: ‘Ma brother’s no all there by the way.’ I think this was probably a certified medical statement on their kin’s state of mind so it did pay to read between the lines. There was one particular mother who was never away from people’s doors lodging complaints about the treatment of her son by the householder’s offspring. She was known as Effie. Her real name was Mary but they called her Effie because she swore a lot.

  Mind you, half the people in Easterhouse had some sort of mental issue. Our school maddie was a big guy called Hatchford who was indeed nicknamed Maddie and never was a nickname better earned. The best that could be said of Hatchford was: ‘See him, he’s no right.’ He’d take scary brainstorms at the slightest provocation and Maddie-baiting became a pastime in our gang.

  Not gang in the ‘violent running around with open razors’ sense, more along the lines of a Famous Five-ish sort of gang. The rules were simple. You had to stand and repeat loudly over and over that Maddie was ‘it’. Although for some reason we pronounced it ‘het’. Maddie took being ‘it’ as some sort of personal slight and would chase the person heckling him to the ends of the earth, through walls, under oceans, across international datelines, with the single purpose of relieving himself of being ‘it’. My mate Eddie and I were in the back court one day and we saw Maddie grunting by, on the way no doubt to pull the legs off a daddy longlegs or a dog or somebody who’d crossed him. And being a bit bored we started chanting, ‘Maddie’s it, Maddie’s it.’ He stopped and looked at us. Obviously he had heard the noise but it was taking time to get through his ears and along the ear canal, past the thoughts of evil and into his brain. Once he twigged, he lumbered into action and started towards us with a menacing look on his face. We read the signals and got off our marks. He chased us from the back court, through the park, across playing fields, over hills and dales and in the general direction of Edinburgh. His pace never changed, it was a slow steady ‘youse are pure dead’ accompanied by the solid thump of his feet, which seemed to be keeping in time with our beating hearts.

  The pursuit had been going on for half an hour and our legs were starting to tire but we daren’t stop. Eventually we reached a metal railing, which wasn’t high but I just couldn’t get over it. Eddie managed it with one bound and ran off until he was a speck in the distance. Me, I just collapsed on the wrong side of it and Maddie stood over me blotting out the sun. I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable kicking, but he just tigged me and walked off. I thought, ‘Well he’s obviously even more mental than we thought he was.’ Twenty minutes later Eddie, stricken by guilt over abandoning me, came back to mop up the blood, but there seemed a lot more mileage in telling him that I’d seen Maddie off than admitting that Maddie just tigged me and left. So I went with the former story, which became more exaggerated every time I told it, and by about the twentieth telling it had become so exaggerated that people stopped believing that I’d stood up to Maddie because by this time I had him armed with a bazooka.

  Many years later, Maddie proved the farsighted nickname we’d given him correct by ringing someone’s bell and shooting the man through the letterbox when he was on the way to answer the door. The man survived and Maddie ended up in Barlinnie where the nickname Maddie was replaced by ‘The Postman’.

  There was one other slightly lesser Maddie at the school whose name was Grant. The G was silent because rant he did. He ranted about absolutely everything. The teachers, the school dinner menu and, as he was pretty intelligent, like way beyond his years, he ranted about America’s policy of napalming Vietnam. It was the late-ish sixties and the hippy peace and love thing was just kicking in and both his parents could, I suppose, have been called hippies. What I didn’t get was that, despite being eleven by this time, he wore a combat jacket and an American flag t-shirt to school, which begged the question, ‘If you hate America so much, explain the t-shirt.’ He was forever being sent home for breaching school uniform guidelines but neither he nor his parents cared.

  He was such a child of hippy parents that he had a poster of Che Guevara on his bedroom wall. I had no idea who Che Guevara was and I thought the poster was of the bass player from the band Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. gRant also had quite long hair when no one else at the school did. No boy at the school had anything even near approaching long hair. This was because there was only one barber in Easterhouse and he operated from a converted single decker bus. No matter the style you asked for, Barber Sam gave you a short back and sides, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he would put what he called ‘cream’ on it. Today it would be called styling mousse, not that it really was because this cream, whatever it was, was more like a jelly cement. When this stuff solidified on your head you could only comb your hair with the aid of a hammer and chisel.

  Sam had a creepy limp, due to a wound he received in the Korean War. The reason I thought it was a creepy limp was because it wasn’t your normal limp, it was the same dragging limp a Mummy has when it’s limping after someone to extract revenge for disturbing his 3,000-year-old tomb. Sadly for Sam, he short-back-and-sided and creamed the wrong person and as a result, his bus was blown up by someone sticking a banger in its petrol tank. That boom led to a new era in tonsorial freedom in Easterhouse and slowly but surely our hair got longer and longer, not as long as gRant’s, though, because, if you’ll excuse the pun, he had a head start on us.

  Everyone’s long hair looked good from a distance but from close up it was frizzy, dull and lifeless because hair conditioners didn’t exist until the early seventies. I’m saying frizzy but it wasn’t always just frizzy as over-combing had left many people looking as though they had a full head of pubic hair. The only hair products available were shampoo and Brylcreem, although it was said if you washed your hair with beer or eggs they gave it a lovely shine.

  Actually there was another hair product available called Derbac soap. It was a brown bar of medicated soap used to fend off nits and head lice. If you were poor your hair was washed with this, but for the lucky ones whose family budget could stretch to it they had theirs washed with Vosene Medicated Shampoo. As they said in the famous Monty Python sketch it was luxury, bloody luxury. Vosene was quite strong stuff and it was easy to tell who was using it because if you passed their house on Sunday bath night you could hear screams of: ‘My eyes, my eyes, I’ve gone blind.’

  While we’re still on the tales of hair, I met gRant quite recently and ironically he is now totally baldy. I’m assuming he is because it looked like the shaved baldy thing and no one shaves their head unless they are baldy and doing that ‘I’m not baldy I like my head shaved’ thing that baldy men can get away with nowadays. In other words, shaving your head is the Bobby Charlton comb over for the new millennium. Head shaving hadn’t become the thing to do in the sixties, seventies or even the eighties, and baldy blokes had the small band of hair that ran around their heads. Some even tried to compensate by letting what they had grow long, but it just looked ridiculous and a bit sad.

  When the head shaving thing started it really infuriated my mate Jimmy the Saint because he reckoned that women never go out with baldy men, which meant there were more women for the follicley blessed. Now that there are all these shaven-headed blokes going about confusing women it lessened the field for him and, taking the moral high ground, he also thought it was incredibly dishonest of them.

  gRant informed me, upon our meeting, that he was a committed soci
alist. Why he had to tell me he was a committed socialist as opposed to just a socialist wasn’t exactly clear. But I had figured out his socialist leanings because he was still doing the Che Guevara thing and was wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Given that Guevara was a psychopathic murder, anything Guevara-related is an odd thing for a socialist to wear. Personally, I don’t think anyone should wear a Che Guevara t-shirt unless they are trying to be ironic. He was also still ranting but oddly, despite his committed socialism, his rants weren’t political. His ire now, and I have no reason why, was directed towards the TV chef James Martin. gRant ranted over Martin having a motoring column in the Mail On Sunday’s magazine Live and although I can’t remember the rant verbatim, the gist of it was, ‘Aye he’s got a motoring column wae him stauning there in front of fancy motors wae a smug look on his face, he’s a fucking chef, what does a fucking chef know about motors, I mean if ye wanted to know about food man, ye wouldnae go tae a fucking mechanic would ye?’ He has a point, but what the point of that point is …

  Anyway, what is a committed socialist doing reading the Mail on Sunday? If there’s a newspaper that’s the polar opposite of socialism it’s the Mail on Sunday. Plus, what is the point of socialism? Socialism never works because people like owning stuff. Apart from that, socialist parties always spectacularly implode in on themselves, but on the upside, their implosion is a hilarious thing to watch.

  I have two rules that I live by and they’ve served me well in life. The first is, never get a credit card from a woman at the airport who approaches you with credit card application forms attached to a clipboard, and the second is, never trust anyone who calls you brother. That, of course, doesn’t apply if it’s your brother who is calling you brother. If the person calling you brother isn’t a very close blood relative the chance is that he is a fud with an over-inflated opinion of himself. When I say ‘the chance is’, I mean the chance is 100%.