‘Stand up straight. Look at you. What is it? What’s wrong with you? Are you a hunchback or something? Come on. Stand up. Straighten your shoulders. Straighten your back. Look at yourself.’
On and on. I would be walking along the street and he would be there, behind me, picking away. ‘You walk like a girl. Look at you. Why can’t you stand up straight?’ He would ignore the people going by, focused entirely on me, watching my every move, ready to pounce. When I started to read, he would criticise the books I was reading. When I brought home a report card, he would take it silently, cast his eye over it then pick out the lowest grade.
‘What happened here?’ he would say pointing at the offending B. ‘Geography. What’s wrong, you can’t remember the capital of Bolivia?’
The next time I brought home a report card, I had an A in Geography. He studied the grades, took in the comments, sat quiet for a moment, considering before he spoke. ‘I see you’re falling behind in science,’ he said pointing to the A–. ‘What’s the minus for?’ He looked at me, knowing I wouldn’t dare to answer back. ‘It’s no good getting it right once, you know. You have to keep it up. Just because you did all right last time, it doesn’t mean you can just sit back and take it for granted. You have to keep at it.’ He set the card aside. ‘I didn’t get all the opportunities you’re getting,’ he said. ‘I’m working hard to give you a chance to do something with yourself. But it’s up to you. I can’t do it for you. All right?’ I nodded. He nodded in turn. ‘All right, then,’ he said, then went back to his paper.
At one level, I knew this was all happening for a reason – in his mind, at least. For my father, and for whole generations of working-class men, cruelty was an ideology. It was important, for the boy’s sake, to bring a son up tough: men had to be hard to get through life, there was no room for weakness or sentiment. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he didn’t want me to get hurt by looking for something I couldn’t have. What he wanted was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self. Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father’s circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. That my father was also a heavy drinker wasn’t a contradiction in this ideology: he drank hard, not for pleasure; he could hold his drink; alcohol, in its own way, was a drug of ascesis, as well as release. The hangovers were pure murder, but he still got up and went to work. He’d never missed a day’s work in his life through drink, he would say, and he never would. He didn’t seem to notice that, as soon as he was out of the company of his cronies from the Woodside or, later, the Hazel Tree, all that self-control withered away, and he became a monster – like the night he came home late from the Woodside and, while I lay sleeping in the next room, burned my favourite toy, a teddy bear called Sooty. It seems he’d come in and found it,
strewn across the floor
, as he put it, and he’d tossed it into the fire to teach me a lesson. If I couldn’t keep my things tidy, then I had to be prepared to lose them. The next morning, when I got up and went through to the living room, Sooty was gone. When I asked my mother if she’d seen him, she looked guilty, then she told me she hadn’t. I should go and look, he would turn up, I needed to take better care of my things. She never mentioned that she’d found what remained of Sooty smouldering away in the grate at five o’clock that morning. It was my father who told me what he’d done. ‘I put Sooty on the fire,’ he said. ‘You’re too big for a teddy now, anyway.’ I was six.
‘You did not,’ my mother protested. ‘Don’t say things like that,’ she said, ‘even as a joke.’ As soon as she spoke, I knew that she was covering up. I couldn’t believe it.
Sooty
. I’d had that bear for as long as I’d existed.
‘I burned him,’ my father insisted. ‘If you can promise to keep your things tidy, you can have something else,’ he said.
‘I don’t want something else,’ I said. ‘I want Sooty.’
My mother looked a little desperate. ‘You must have lost him,’ she said. ‘He’ll turn up.’ She shot my father a scary, warning look. ‘If he doesn’t, we’ll get you another teddy just like him.’
I didn’t say anything – but I swore I wouldn’t have another bear. I never did. A few weeks later, my father brought a rocket set home for me, one of the items he occasionally got from ‘a friend’. He brought it home in a plain cardboard box and opened it up, so I could see what it was. I didn’t refuse the gift; I didn’t reject him. I took the rocket set, but I didn’t play with it that night and, the next day, I gave it away to a boy called Alan Smith, who was playing outside Stewart Banks’ house.
Every winter my mother would knit me a new balaclava. This was what she did to keep me safe: the wool was the same colour every time – dark blue, though she never called it that, she always had a new name for it, Navy, or Midnight, or something. The new balaclava would appear at around the same time every year, a few days into November, when the first frosts came. The only thing she ever changed was the pattern: sometimes it looked rounded, like Norman armour, a helmet of woollen chain mail to cover the skull in a tight, meshed fit; sometimes it was almost square on top, with a thick seam that made the corners into pointed, lynx-like ears, but no matter what shape it was, it concealed a little more of my face each year, as if she were trying to cover me so well that I would become invisible. Maybe she thought that, this way, whatever terrible fall I had coming would let me pass unnoticed.
Meanwhile, I had started attending a primary school for the children of the poor, one of those institutions where to turn up at all and stay awake till the end of the day was an achievement. In that community, Catholics had to be very careful: their children should not stray, their schoolteachers should be seen to be diligent and strong on discipline. To encourage near-perfect attendance, the work was carefully designed so that it was not too difficult, while being mildly rewarding. At least, that was how it seemed to me. I was bored in school, most of the time; the only exception was in Scripture class, when we studied the life of Jesus and looked at beautiful, ancient-looking maps of Palestine and Judaea. I liked the teachers well enough. They lent me books and gave me special problems to solve.
At five, however, I didn’t much like the children. I imagine this is something many children discover, on their first day of school, but there is so much pressure to socialise, at school and beyond, that they learn to adapt. I didn’t have that pressure, however: my mother’s efforts to improve me at home meant that I was – and stayed – at least a year ahead of my classmates. This meant I received special treatment, sitting off by myself with a book of my own, or more advanced sums to work out, while the others practised their pencraft, or plasticine-doggy-making. At the time, this was considered an enlightened view, though there was no mistaking the look in the eyes of my teachers, a look that suggested they thought of me as a freak, not of nature, so much as of abnormal nurture. Looking back, I realise that the smartest of my primary schoolteachers, Miss Conway, recognised in me a boy made clever, but not particularly intelligent, by an ambitious, or rather, desperate, mother. It would take me another ten years to stop admiring that cleverness. Nevertheless, I was an anomaly in that little coal-town classroom: hypersensitive, overly polite, occasionally cruel, I thought other boys were the strangest little animals and avoided them as much as I could. Unlike the stereotypical ‘sensitive’ child, however, the one who likes books and nice pictures, I was big and ready to defend myself if the need arose. I also had the distinct advantage of being related to the hardest, leanest, most uncompromising older boy in town, my bright, funny and utterly merciless cousin, Kenneth. Kenneth was a boy’s boy, an outdoors type who knew every bird in the woods and every fish in the loch. I admired him from afar; but then, he seemed like an adult to me, the way he knew everything you couldn’t learn from a book. Even then, I saw that there was more to life than my mother had taught me: all I had was words and diagrams, Kenneth had life itself. To me, he was more grown up than most grown-ups, and more alive than anybody I had ever met.
He was the exception, however. The other children at school, especially the boys, bored and annoyed me and, by the time I was eight, I liked them even less than I had at five. Truth to tell, though I didn’t realise it at the time, they reminded me of my father. They lived in the same world of minor grudges and willed confusion, and I felt fortunate to inhabit my own little universe of books for older children and logic problems, the scriptures and Church Latin. At the time, all Catholic children were supposed to acquire a smattering of medieval Latin, so they could follow the Mass, and I loved it. The words were so beautiful: strange in the mouth, tasting of unleavened bread and church incense, they carried an incontrovertible authority, the authority, not only of the divine, but also – as I had just begun to realise from my extracurricular studies in zoology – of the scientific. I had no words to articulate the feeling but, for me, the fact that Latin was the language of both priests and biologists was a source of excitement, even inspiration, and I was sure there was some great secret out there, waiting to be discovered, a private, arcane knowledge that only the privileged were allowed to share.
Looking back, I see that I disliked the Catholic children more than the Protestants I knew. This made for difficulties, because Catholics and Protestants, in our little Scottish town, were supposed to be enemies, either politely skirting one another, as adults, or waiting outside the rival school, as children, to administer a mild beating. The local Protestant school – the state school – came out five minutes before St Bride’s, time enough for a gaggle of the bigger, and obviously stupider, Prod boys to gather around the school gates, leering and dangerous, ready to catch any stragglers who happened their way. They never caught me. I was the fastest runner in my class, and I would rather have died than be humiliated by a gang of my obvious inferiors. Yet even then, in the midst of this community of visible, though fairly vague, discrimination, I knew there were Protestant kids on the other side who felt exactly as I did. One of these was Stewart Banks, who was nowhere near as good as me at book learning but, like my cousin Kenneth, knew a thing or two about the wider world.
Stewart was a neighbour. All our neighbours, on Blackburn Drive and the streets around, were Protestants, whether by accident or some unlikely demographic, I do not know. Stewart’s parents were, by far, the most easygoing, tolerant and disorganised people I had ever encountered. They were the very opposite of my mother, with her obsessive neatness, and her almost desperate desire to get out of the prefabs and live a better life, but they got on with her very well – and they were the only neighbours who did not make it obvious, one way or another, that they disapproved of my father’s goings-on. At the time, even though I had just begun to disapprove of him myself, that mattered a great deal to me. Like most children, I wanted my home life to be just like everybody else’s: in spite of the fact that I
knew
I was not like other people in that little town, I wanted to appear normal.
Normal was a big word, back then. If anybody did anything even remotely interesting, they were considered abnormal. Abnormal children were taken off to special places, never to be heard of again. Abnormal men posed a terrifying, though undefined, danger to children. The most abnormal people I knew were the Mormon family who lived a few streets away from us. It was said that Mormon men had several wives, and that Mormon boys could make babies with their sisters. Though I had no clear idea how babies were made – Elizabeth Banks told me, once, that men and women did it by sticking their bottoms together and taking deep breaths – I was certain that brothers and sisters couldn’t do it. It had to be a man and a woman who were married to each other. That much I knew from Scripture class.
Stewart was normal; I was not. Stewart had a normal family: his father went to work in the morning and came home at the end of the day, even on the weekends. His job had something to do with the distribution of D.C. Thomson products, which meant that he was allowed to bring home as many magazines and comics as he liked. My mother would not allow me to have comics, partly because of money, but mostly because she didn’t approve of them. Now and again, I got a copy of
Look and Learn
, which she considered mind-improving, but to have seen me reading the
Beano
would have broken her heart.
In Stewart’s house, on the other hand, every available surface was piled high with comics, newspapers, magazines. His mother read all the women’s magazines,
The People’s Friend
, anything to do with knitting and jam recipes, anything with those ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, true-life stories that were all the rage. Stewart liked strip cartoons of the
Eagle, Roy of the Rovers, Boy’s Own
variety. I liked the funny stuff. Every Saturday, I rose early and hopped over the fence to the Banks’. Stewart and his family would stay in bed till late – ten thirty, eleven, even, which I assumed was one of the bad habits of Protestants – but the back door was never locked, and I was welcome to come in any time, Mrs Banks said, even if nobody was about. This meant that I usually had an hour or two to study the
Dandy
and the
Beano
, or whatever else Mr Banks had brought home that week. It was the first of many forbidden pleasures.
Stewart was my only friend. In the summer, we went bird-nesting together, or we filched pieces of linoleum and tobogganed down the slag heaps that surrounded the town, tumbling off when we reached the bottom and making delicious red scrapes on our hands and knees, those red scrapes with hard little pieces of coal and slag buried just under the skin. In winter, if it snowed, we climbed trees in the woods – it was more fun to climb trees in the winter, when the leaves had fallen; we could see so much further, out and away from the town, to the fields and the graveyard beyond – or we made our own sleds from oddments of timber and careered down the little hill opposite Stewart’s house. Together, we were the best bottle collectors in town, traipsing along the rims of ditches and foraging in the mouse-scented undergrowth for anything we could take to the shops and redeem. Most weeks, we made enough money that way to get us into the matinée at the Picture House.