by Rikki Brown
After that double period, it was playtime and it was during playtime that we met a couple of kids called Winker and Jim who’d come from the other primary school in the area, Blairtummock. Winker told us that his brother had been at the school a few years beforehand and had warned him about McConnell. So that playtime we learned that our first impression of McConnell being a psycho was correct and we also learned that Jim had a very unusual nickname. Central heating didn’t exist in Easterhouse council homes and as the houses were cold and especially freezing in the winter, most families had an upright paraffin heater, about three feet tall and with a grill at the top to let out the heat. At bath times it was taken into the bathroom to take the chill out of leaving the bath. Unfortunately, Jim had come out of the bath and leant up to get something off the shelf of the bathroom cabinet and his willie made contact with the grill. This had taken the skin off his boyhood and left it with the grill marks you see on a sausage. Once it was noticed in the showers by a genius of nicknaming, Jim was forever after known as Rumpel’dforeskin. Forever after, but not happily ever after.
Winker, on the other hand, was known as Winker simply because his surname was Watson and there was a Winker Watson in The Beano or The Dandy or some other such DC Thomson comic. He was only eleven but his IQ was almost off the chart and he’d been moved to the big school a year early because he was too smart to waste his time at primary. We spent the first few weeks getting to know the teachers, i.e. which ones we could wind up and which ones we couldn’t. The easiest to wind up was Mr McLellan or Nutty as has was nicknamed. Nicknaming was big in those days, obviously, and the Nutty moniker came from his quick temper and the speed he could run down the class foaming at the mouth, hauling out miscreants. October and November were his least favourite months because that’s when bangers were readily available in the shops and at the crucial parts of his chemistry experiments someone would let off a banger and he’d jump, drop his experiment and belt the whole class. This wasn’t really much of a deterrent because he was right-handed and he had a shoulder problem, which meant he had to wield the belt with his left hand. Half the time he missed and half the time he made so little contact it felt as though he was hitting you with a woollen scarf. Having said that, chemistry was fun, fun in the sense of stealing strips of magnesium to throw into the urinals when someone was having a pee. If you remember your chemistry, magnesium reacts with water to produce a few seconds of a blinding white light, and many panicked pupils ended up sitting in classrooms with pish all down the front of their trousers. The comment to that was always, ‘Moved up to the big boy pants a bit too early did we?’
In December that year we had a visit from a theatre group and we were taken down to the assembly hall where the chairs had been arranged in a huge semicircle. It soon became apparent why. It was audience participation theatre. Always the worst kind. At least this was free – I always get pissed off when you’ve paid for a theatre ticket and then you’re expected to be part of the show you’ve paid for. This production, which was being toured round the schools, was about the Vietnam War. Still a big issue even though Easterhouse was about as far away as you could get from the Mekon Delta or the Perfume River. The show began when the ‘actors’ (I say actors, but you know …) ran on in American combat fatigues carrying plastic machine guns shouting, ‘Body count, body count,’ and dragging some of us off our seats and indicating that we were to lie on the floor kidding on we were dead. Once they were satisfied the body count was high enough they started shouting, ‘Count the gooks, count the gooks.’ Their words, not mine. What the message was still isn’t clear but I’m sure it was an anti-war message of some sort. It was completely lost on us because it was delivered in subliminal performance art actor-y bullshit. If they simply said, ‘War, what is it good for, absolutely nothing,’ then we’d have got it. But they didn’t, probably something to do with the Arts Council only funding theatre that people don’t understand, a tradition that hasn’t changed.
We left the auditorium with a pretty united feeling of ‘what the fuck was that all about?’ The actors had that smug actor thing about them too, as if they genuinely thought acting was a real and important job. To this day when I see most actors, not all I hasten to add, because I have to work with a lot of them, I think to myself, ‘Away and get a real job.’ This lot were particularly actor-y because after their ‘show’ a couple of us were told to help them load up their van and while doing so we heard them gushing all over each other on their performance. It was that exact moment when I decided that whichever professional career path I chose it definitely wouldn’t be acting. Okay, I did marry a girl who spent three years at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama training to be an actress, but only because she’d never been in anything funded by the Arts Council.
Christmas was fast approaching and the corridors were festooned with crepe paper decorations and the practically remedial class of 1F’s drawings of Santa. A feature of the end of term was the Christmas school dance and all through December we’d be dragged kicking and screaming into the assembly hall to be taught ballroom and Scottish country dancing. In 1969, it was Come Dancing, not the Strictly Come Dancing that it was relaunched as by the BBC. Somehow, and I have no idea how, the BBC have managed to make ballroom dancing ‘marginally trendy’ and I’m using the term ‘marginally trendy’ sarcastically here. In the less enlightened times, any boy who did ballroom dancing would get chased home every day by someone with a stick with a dollop of dog poo on the end of it. Sadly, that doesn’t happen anymore and the males who do ballroom dancing today don’t get stick-pooed for being tubes. This is despite them dancing with their noses so far in the air they look as though they are trying to smell shite on the back of their necks.
In 1969, no boy wanted to do ballroom dancing, nor Scottish country dancing for that matter, so we had to be forced. The boys would be lined up on one side of the hall and the girls on the side opposite. The teacher would say, ‘Pick a partner,’ and that would be met with the deafening silence of ‘no chance’. It was only after many threats of the belt and then the use of the belt that we complied and shuffled across the hall and asked a girl to dance with a charming ‘you’. We had to learn the lot, from the St Bernard Waltz to the Dashing White Sergeant and on to the Gay Gordons, which was, of course, long before Gordon came out of the closet. We never picked any girl we actually fancied because that would have led to embarrassing accusations of ‘hey, you fancy her’. The fact that you took a beamer when you denied it with a ‘naw I don’t, I think she’s a dog’ just gave the game away that you did. The thinking, therefore, was that in picking a girl you didn’t fancy, your denial would be beamerless and therefore true.
If you did have a girlfriend it wasn’t called dating it was called ‘going with’ and it’s estimated that 95% of schoolboy/ schoolgirl relationships only ever began because a mate had broken the ice for them by informing one or the other that ‘ma pal wants tae go wae you’. Not that you ever did really want to go with someone because it was all a bit embarrassing, what with the completely ignoring each other if your mates were with you, except for the times the ignoring didn’t work because your mates thought it hilarious to push you into each other in the corridor. Dating at thirteen was pointless anyway in so many ways because we were an utterly different generation. In the five years I spent at Westwood, there was never a single instance of a confirmed teenage pregnancy. No one had sex; we weren’t even sure what sex was.
That didn’t stop the questions though, the main après date one being, ‘Did you feel her?’ and the reply was always the same, a quizzical, ‘Feel her what?’ There were rumours that a couple of fourth-year boys had in fact had ‘a feel’, but it was over the top of a Gloverall dufflecoat so I’m not sure that it really actually counted. If someone had said, ‘She had some nipples on her,’ it wouldn’t have been nipples, it would have been the toggles on her dufflecoat. People did have a winch, in fact they winched so hard they ended up with frayed lips, and I�
�m pretty sure a lot of people passed out through lack of oxygen because they hadn’t quite mastered breathing and kissing at the same time.
So, armed with dancing lessons, the night of the first-year school dance arrived. Although it was called the first-year school dance the more appropriate term should really have been the First-Year Shuffling-Self-Consciously-About-In-Front-Of-A-Girl Dance. We were all really shiny and stinking of Old Spice. Being pre-Denim, Brut and Hai Karate days, Old Spice was the only choice of aftershave there was. We hadn’t had a shave but obviously we just wanted to smell nice. Well nice-ish, it was Old Spice after all. We’d also shared a whole can of lager that someone had stolen from his Dad’s lager safe and we all thought we were steaming. After about half an hour, the dance was in full swing, as full as the swing was going to get anyway. Three or four couples were sharing the floor and Mr Murray, our registration and history teacher was walking amongst them separating anyone who was getting too close. An hour into it and we’d progressed to making eyes at the talent who were studiously ignoring us. Eventually, halfway through the night, the headmaster came on and gave the same sort of patronising speech we were to hear from him at every single school dance.
‘Boys and girls, or should I say little ladies and little gentlemen, you are all looking splendid tonight, a credit to your parents, yes indeed. Now we have had the traditional music and now as a special treat we are to hear a couple of popular songs from the Westwood School group The Conspiracy. But before that I’d like you to give a big hand to Mr Murray and Miss McDowall who have given their time to chaperone tonight’s event. Hip hip …’
All they got was two unenthusiastic handclaps, both coming from Murray and McDowall. ‘Given their time’, that was a joke. The minute the event was over they’d be in the back of his Triumph Herald in the school car park doing whatever it is grown-ups do to each other. It was the only reason they’d volunteered. I should add that it was generally agreed that Miss McDowall was the best looking teacher in the school and she must have been given just how many second year boys were crying themselves to sleep at night over her.
The Westwood School group came on, a sorry bunch of fourth-year terminal acne cases. You could see the pus seeping from fifty yards away. They subjected us to murderous renditions of the latest chart numbers. Their first was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ followed by the Beatles ‘Get Back’. I only knew what the songs were because they announced what they were before they played them. They had to because they were so bad we’d never have known otherwise. They were truly awful, and not just bad musically, the singer sounded like a bluebottle trapped in the curtains. Their set finished to no applause whatsoever, yet they still stood there waiting for it. Winker, who saw himself as an authority on music, summed them up best by shouting, ‘What a load of absolute shite.’ Now that did get applause.
Mr Murray made no effort to chastise Winker for swearing, more than likely because he agreed with him. Their drummer, who must have been fantasising that he was elsewhere with another group, got off his drum stool and with a flourish threw his drumsticks into the audience. No one made any attempt to catch them. Everyone stepped aside and they landed with a clatter on the dance floor. He walked off the stage to a well-deserved comment of ‘ya fanny’.
Truth be told, the first-year school dance was terrible. Who in their right mind would force twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to dance to Jimmy Shand, the Joe Loss Orchestra or the Clyde Valley Stompers’ ‘There’s A Moose Loose Aboot This Hoose’. We were young, not deaf. The next day was 24 December, the day we broke up for the holidays, and the day of the school’s en masse annual pilgrimage to church for the Christmas service. The teachers looked upon this as the last battle of wits of the term as their job was to get 800 pupils to church and our job was to try to escape en route. They lined us up in the playground and we set off in a four-in-a-row line, which stretched about 400 yards with a teacher positioned at intervals of about twenty yards for the forced march. To onlookers we must have resembled a group of prisoners being escorted to a POW camp in Nazi Germany.
Most of us didn’t fancy the prospect of spending two hours in a church and each year had its own escape committee. Our plan was to wait for someone to make a break for it and in the confusion we’d sneak away. We’d gone about 200 yards when two third years darted up a close. Murray spotted them and unwisely gave chase. This was our chance and Winker, Wilco, Rumpel’dforeskin and I ran up another close and onto the first floor landing. After five minutes, as we heard no footsteps in the close or the sound of a siren or barking Alsatian, we thought we were safe. So we came out of the close and walked straight into the headmaster who was bringing up the rear. Our name ended up in what he called his January Book, a book that contained a list of all the names of escapees he was to belt on the first day of the new term. We just hoped that it wasn’t cold on the first day back and if it was, that he’d wait a couple of hours before summoning us for our punishment. At least then our hands might have warmed up because being belted with cold hands intensifies the pain tenfold.
Kids today might wonder why we accepted the belt. We did so because we thought that it was a lot better than the alternative in English schools, which was the cane, sometimes across the hands but more often than not across the buttocks. I mean, the buttocks, that’s just barbaric. Not wanting to sound old and crusty but the belt did work as a method of discipline and I can’t really envisage what my school would have been like without it. Probably ablaze. Actually it wouldn’t have been ablaze since long after I left, the school had to be demolished because it was discovered that the material used to build the school was primarily asbestos. That certainly explained a lot, especially the many failures by arsonists to turn it into a pile of smouldering ashes.
During Christmas of 1969 the telly was the usual festive fare. There was the Christmas Morning Service, a Save the Children appeal from Barbara Mullen (I have no idea who Barbara Mullen is), A Very Merry Morning billed as ‘Leslie Crowther joins the kids in Seacroft Children’s Hospital Leeds’. In other words, the usual sentimental mince, but there was always two Christmas highlights in the shape of The Morecambe and Wise Show and the Christmas Top of the Pops. Good though Morecambe and Wise were, the highlight of every teenager’s Christmas Day was Top of the Pops because it featured every number one that year. And 1969 was a particularly good year for music because Cliff Richard didn’t have a number one hit single. Although to hear the great number ones we had to sit through some garbage in the process. For instance the great number ones that year were the Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ and ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, The Moves’ ‘Blackberry Way’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, but there was also the crap of Marmalade’s ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, The Archies’ ‘Sugar Sugar’ and Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’. And this was when Rolf wasn’t considered ironic.
The BBC had a problem that year because Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had reached number one with ‘Je t’aime … Moi Non Plus’, which the Beeb had banned because they thought it was full of disgusting, dirty sex noise from a filthy, manky jezebel. They handled the controversy by completely ignoring that it had topped charts. In the sixties, seventies and eighties, achieving a number one hit single was a big deal but then the nineties came along and the rules changed – after which to reach number one, a record had to only sell something like seven copies. Look, when Michelle McManus has a number one single you know the music industry has a serious problem with credibility. A new number one each week meant far too many number ones and that in turn meant that the Christmas Top of the Pops would have to start on December 10 and run through until February to fit them all in. To hear your favourite group when you wanted, you actually had to buy the record because there was no illegal downloading. Admittedly some people did have cassette tape recorders and could tape the song off the radio by positioning a small micropho
ne in front of the speaker but the quality was atrocious and the overall sound wasn’t helped by the sound of your mother hoovering in the background and the voice of the sound engineer saying, ‘Aw come on Maw I’m trying to record this.’
Mothers always hoovered at the most inopportune times, i.e. when you were trying to record a song off the radio, or in front of the telly at the exact same time a goal is scored when you were watching the football. Generally speaking, we didn’t actually watch TV that much because there wasn’t that much to watch. What there was mostly seemed to come from Europe and was dubbed. I did like The Flashing Blade, the adventures of the Chevalier de Recci who every week managed to outdo his arch-rival Cardinal Richelieu. It also had a catchy theme tune called ‘Fight’ by The Musketeers. Being pedantic, the Chevalier de Recci didn’t really have a blade as such; he had a rapier, which isn’t really a proper sword, it’s just a long, thin, pointy, sharp thing. Having said that, I don’t think calling the programme The Flashing Long, Thin, Pointy, Sharp Thing would have enticed that many viewers.
Another dubbed favourite was The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe starring Robert Hoffman, which also had a catchy theme. This leads me to believe that they came up with a catchy tune first, then wrote a TV series based on it. There was also The White Horses, Belle and Sebastian and The Singing Ringing Tree, which scared the crap out everyone because it had an evil dwarf and a weird talking bear who was actually some sort of Prince thing. On the home-grown telly front there was Follyfoot, which was pants. It featured Gillian Blake, who had the worst feather cut in the history of terrible feather cuts, as Dora Maddocks and she was constantly worried about people killing horses. Every script started the same way with her in tears telling her co-star Steve, ‘Oh Steve they are going to kill a horse, we must save it.’ Which they did, roll the credits.
