Nipper (7 page)

Granddad is quite reserved. He has funny one-liners but doesn’t really say much. He goes to the pub and plays dominos and bets on the horses. He has dark hair and dark skin, and is bow-legged from his football days. Nowadays he’s only five foot three.

All my uncles and aunts on my dad’s side come to these get-togethers – Dad’s three sisters and their husbands; his brother Danny with his girlfriend; and me and my eight
cousins (six boys and two girls). The parties start at seven and go on until midnight, though occasionally they last until four or five in the morning.

We watch
Scotch and Wry
on telly – it’s a comedy sketch show with characters like Supercop, a bungling traffic policeman who stops cars that turn out to be driven by people like Batman. But the character I like best is this minister who has his water spiked with gin just before he starts giving a sermon and then gets completely drunk. It really makes me laugh, but it’s a funny kind of laughter as it hurts, probably because it makes me think of Dad – and that makes it even funnier and more painful at the same time.

After that’s over we count down the bells to Hogmanay. As the clock hits twelve Scottish music comes blasting out of the speakers and everyone bursts into their rendition of the Highland Fling: ‘Da da da da da da da, di di di di di di di, na na na na na na na’. All us kids will be firing party poppers at each other in the kitchen.

The grown-ups’ll be singing Scottish songs, like ‘Flower of Scotland’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’, or ‘Mull of Kintyre’, or ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers?’ Then of course we all link arms and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and eat Scottish shortbread and dance, jiving to rock ’n’ roll and knocking everything over. The girls, my cousins, will be doing their own dance routines, and all the adults get drunk.

Dad tries not to overstep the mark in front of the rest of the family at Gran’s house. He’s lippy but not nasty. But
although he always starts the evening on his best behaviour, he’ll end up fighting with Uncle Grant, who’s a Protestant and a Mason. Dad hates Protestants nearly as much as he hates Masons.

Then someone will say, ‘Where’s Gran?’ and then we’ll wander around looking for her, although everyone knows where she is. She’s hiding in the airing cupboard, drunk every year, and we’ll find her sleeping in there after a few sherries.

We kill ourselves with laughter but when I think about it I realise that she probably hides in that cupboard a lot – she could even be doing it every night as she may be hiding from Granddad. Dad was the oldest of all his siblings. He’s told me that Granddad used to beat him and Gran up, and I’ve heard this from other members of the family. I’m fond of Granddad and don’t want to believe he could beat up Gran or Dad in the same way Dad beats me up, but that’s what Dad tells me.

I’ve also heard that Granddad used to take the fuse out of the electricity box so that Gran didn’t have any heating or light and then he’d lock Gran in all night and leave her without electricity while he went out to the pub. I find it almost impossible to believe, but he might be as clever and cunning as Dad.

There’s a small bar in the corner that Granddad will sit behind, ringing a gold bell and shouting ‘Last orders!’ every time he serves a drink. He’ll hit me on the back of the head with some peanuts and then look away smiling as if it isn’t him. I think it’s funny but it does make me wonder.

Sometimes when Dad’s drunk he’ll go on about how Granddad would take him out into the woods away from the rest of his family and then beat him up – but he also beat him up in the house as well – and finally threw Dad out of the house when he was twelve. Dad had to scavenge for food – he’s never tired of telling me that.

I suppose Dad may say this to make me think it’s normal – what he does to me – and when he’s sometimes very drunk and self-pitying, even to feel sorry for him. But although of course I have no way of judging whether it’s normal or not, there’s no way I’m going to feel sorry for him when he’s battering and torturing me every other night. But that doesn’t stop him from dishing out his hard luck story.

‘Yir grandfather, yi think he’s the bee’s knees, don’t yi, but yi don’t know what it was like. Yi’ve got an easy life. Yi’ve got a roof over your head.’

I think, yeah I wish I was out of the house at twelve.

But even so, I always get on well with Granddad. He tells me stories about when he played for Dundee United and I really look up to him.

Dad had a chance to go with Dundee United too, but because he was stubborn he said he didn’t want any help from my grandfather and didn’t want to be known as getting a game with the club because of his father, so at one point he went to England and had trials for a few English clubs. He tells me he even played some reserve matches for West Brom,
but I don’t know what to believe any more as my brain is controlled by his way of thinking.

Gran was a professional dancer in the Pally in Dundee years ago. She was Irish and Granddad met her in Ireland when he was playing football for Glentoran Football Club in East Belfast in the 1950s. Granddad was a Glaswegian. Then later he signed for United. After he had finished as a professional footballer he worked as a hospital porter but he was still involved in Dundee United, and the players used to come to his house for dinner sometimes – John Clark, Kevin Gallacher and many more.

As Dad now manages the Dundee West Under-14s football team, we go up to Glenshee in the mountains every year with my cousin Shane and stay at the Spittal of Glenshee Hotel. Shane is six months younger than me and absolutely bonkers and hilarious at the same time. He has the kind of personality that means he has to say exactly what’s on his mind – he can’t hold things in for more than ten seconds at a time, and his laugh is infectious. When he starts, everyone does too. Such a likeable person.

There’s loads to do apart from playing football – hillwalking, golfing, horseriding, shooting, mountain biking and even hang-gliding, but Shane and I just enjoy larking around.

There’s also this little goalkeeper in our team called Willy. He wears old, worn but ironed pyjamas with creases in them and National Health glasses with Sellotape in the middle –
he’s a right little geek and he’s useless in goal into the bargain. He must have let in about 15 goals a game – he’s a crap goalie, but at the same time a dead nice wee lad. A bit like Walter the Softie out of the
Beano
but harmless. In any case Dad doesn’t care how good his team is, he’s more interested in where they live as he has to pick them up or drop them off after a game.

I’m seven on this particular occasion when we go to Glenshee and the news has filtered out of the radio on the way up here that there’s a murderer loose in the mountains who has been going around killing people. It must be about half nine at night and there’s a man sitting at the bar with a mack on and a big handlebar moustache and hat, and Shane and I whisper to Willy ‘That’s that murderer!’

Willy’s shitting himself. ‘No, it’s not?’ he says, alarmed.

‘Yeah, that’s him. We’ve just seen his picture on the news.’

Another guy sitting near us hears what we’re saying and knows we’re winding Willy up, and says, ‘Cut it out, lads.’

But we ignore him and go on saying to Willy, ‘No, seriously, that guy – he’s definitely the murderer. Look at that moustache. I’ll bet he’s got an axe under that coat!’

Just then the guy turns and looks at us and takes off out of the front door of bar. Even though I know it isn’t him, the man scares me. He couldn’t have timed it any better as he stares back towards us as he leaves.

Meanwhile Willy’s in a blue funk. He tears off petrified in his PJs, while the barman looks on in shock at this skinny
little ankle-biter whizzing past him like a skeleton on Pro-Plus. Willy’s eyes are even bigger than normal as a combination of pure blind panic and his thick milk-bottle glasses make him look completely demented.

The bunkhouse we’re all sleeping in has a room on each side of a corridor with bunk beds in every room, so Willy crawls in there with sheets over him as he’s now terrified. But we crawl along the floor in the dark towards his bed saying, ‘The murderer’s gonna get you! The murderer’s gonna get you!’

Shane’s one of those people who after you stop he’ll keep it going. He wound up this little lad Willy for hours and hours. Maybe it’s something in the family genes. Shane just enjoys spinning out a joke, while Dad enjoys spinning out the torture.

Anyway, Willy’s in his bunk bed and Shane goes up and sticks a football sock over his arm and puts it over the top bunk of the bed and grabs Willy’s mouth with it.

‘Ahhhhhhhhhh!’ Willy screams. He’s only wearing his Y-fronts and terry towelling socks, and he goes sprinting through the corridor past a shocked barman for a second time.

‘
There’s a murderer! Phone the police!’
Willy screams frantically at the women in reception. ‘
He’s in my room. Phone the police!
’

At that moment we stumble in after him, laughing our heads off, and give Willy the good news – it wasn’t the
murderer after all but his twin brother. Willy stares from one to the other of us in disbelief and then finally realises we’ve been winding him up all along.

The next day, we go mountain climbing – well, it’s really hillwalking as given the size of us anything bigger than a molehill looks like a mountain. They always have to entice Shane to climb up the mountains because he’s overweight, and I won’t say no to a bit of enticement myself, so they bribe us with Mars bars. But me and Shane end up getting lost and bored after the box of Mars bars runs out, so we try to take a short cut back to the hotel. They have the mountain rescue team out searching for us for six hours and when they get back we’re playing pool in the poolroom.

Of course I end up getting battered for it. Shane’s fine though; he only gets a mouthful from Dad, but if you shout at Shane he just looks at you as though you’re daft, so there isn’t much point.

Y
ou can only compare Dundee in November to the Arctic or maybe Siberia – the wind is enough to take you off your feet as Dundee is built on a hill (the Law Hill). It rains ten months of the year and snows five months – yes, you do get them both together.

Dundee is made up of around fifteen different areas called schemes, and every scheme has a gang, each of which is known by a set of initials – you have YMB (Young Mary Boys), YKH (Young Kirkton Huns), YLF (Young Lochee Fleet), YHH (Young Hilltown Huns), FS (Fintry Shams), WS (Whitfield Shams), AP (Ardler Pirates) and many, many more. At the back of Dundee is St Mary’s and Kirkton leading on to the bottom of the Sidlaw Hills. It’s probably one of the most picturesque places, leading up to Coupar Angus, Dunkeld, Clunie Loch and the rest of
Perthshire – all up to the mountains that spread across the north of Scotland.

It’s a beautiful place, but throughout my childhood in the 1980s all I seem to be aware of is the pain, misery, violence and drink-fuelled torture that are rife around me. Every third kid I know is part of a single-parent family who are being abused or neglected by their parents, keepers or guardians and no one bats an eyelid about what’s really going on.

It’s November 1983 and a really bad winter has started early. The roads are covered in snow and ice and it’s freezing. We have mastered a fast way of getting to the shops from the Closies or tenements. It takes about five minutes to walk there, but in the winter we wait for the cars coming round the corner to hitch a ride. It gets dark really early as well, so no one can see us kids hiding behind the hedge. We’ll wait until the cars slow down as they turn the corner, then run out and grab onto the bumpers and hitch a free slide in a sitting position down to the local shops, then let go and slide for about twenty yards until it stops.

On this particular night, Dad has asked me to go to the shops and get him some fags and milk. He hands me a twenty pound note and tells me to hurry back.

‘
And don’t piss around wi yir daft mates – come right back
.’

So I set off on my mission – every time I do something for Dad it’s a mission, not an errand. When I get outside all the lads – my gang, shall we say – are all out chucking snowballs
at each other and waiting for cars to come around the corner so they can take a trip on them.

Stevie G is a year younger than me. He’s a bit of a snot nose kid but he’s always up for anything – you can tell him to do something and he’ll do it, no questions. He’s the first one I see when I come out the close and I ask him if he can come to the shops with me and hang on a bumper. He jumps at the chance and we both take off on my mission – it’s a bit like a James Bond mission – which has now become his mission, to return with the goods. We get to the shops, get the things my dad wants, and head back homewards, Mission Accomplished, with the goods in the bag, looking for a car to hang onto.

We hang onto a car going up towards the tenements, but it speeds up a bit too fast and I’m finding it hard to hang on and when we fly past the tenement I have to let go or who knows where I might end up. Then Stevie follows suit and we both roll about twenty yards up the road like a couple of bundles of tumbleweed. Luckily neither of us are injured so we brush all the snow off and head back down to the close, laughing about our close encounter.

I tell Stevie I’ll be back in five minutes, as I have to give Dad his things – oh yeah and thank God I never burst the milk or that would really be a disaster. I run upstairs to the front door, open it and take the long, slow walk up the hall and into the living room where Dad’s watching football.

‘Did yi get the fags and milk?’

‘Yep,’ I say, all proud of myself. ‘There you go, Dad.’

‘Put the milk in the fridge and stick the kettle on, will yi.’

‘Alright, Dad.’ I run into the kitchen and boil the kettle, make a cup of tea and take it to him. ‘There you go, Dad. Can I go back out to play now?’

‘Yeah, on you go.’ He looks up at me. ‘Just one more thing, have yi put the change on the kitchen table?’

My heart goes
bang
. Wait a minute. I am frantically searching my pockets for the £17 change. I had it in my hand when I came out the shop and after that I grabbed the car bumper and then fell off the car up the road.