Working Class Boy (7 page)

Dad, who had not had the chance to fight anyone or anything in days, leaped to her defence. Poor coo didn't know what was going on. I'm talking about my mum here. She wasn't used to Dad leaping to her defence for anything. He wasn't a leaper really. Dad had seen red and was swinging at the beast like some kind of drunken Celtic toreador. I think he was winning when the locals broke them up. He had the coo on the ropes, giving it a terrible beating. The locals, it seemed, didn't like people having fist fights with their cows at all and soon enough we were rushed back to the ship, before Dad was locked up in a Bombay jail. Someone had to save those poor incarcerated Indian criminals from my dad. He would surely have started trouble in there. I think Mum might have been a bit taken by Dad's acts of chivalry so the sea cruise romance looked like it was on again. So it was on with the journey to strange new lands and strange new people or animals to punch in the name of love.

Somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean I was up on deck when I noticed something coming out of the water. It started out as just a flash of light in the corner of my eye. Then I saw one or two fish jumping. Soon there were huge schools of flying fish leaping up into the air, flying just above the waves, like they were trying to escape a predator. Maybe they just liked to fly, who knows, but they looked great to a kid from Glasgow seeing the world for the first time. The sun would hit their scales and flash back at me like something magic out in the water. I'd never seen anything like it and I started going up to look for them every chance I got.

The flashing, flying fish were soon joined by schools of dolphins surfing on the white waves the ship was making as it cut through the dark blue waters of the ocean. They would swim alongside the ship for hours and I got the impression that they
were trying to entertain us as much as they were entertaining themselves. It looked like they were showing off in front of me, riding high on the waves then diving off to the side and circling back around, before darting up at high speed alongside us again, ready for another ride. They were taking turns, one after another, just like the surfers I saw much later at the beaches in Australia. Some nights when we were up on deck I was sure I could see them night surfing next to the ship but that could have been my imagination.

The ocean seemed to pull me in and I would sit and look out to sea for hours. I liked the feeling I got when I was on deck at night, looking out into the pitch-black nothingness that seemed to go on forever. I would sit, not thinking about anything. There was nothing out there. No light, no land, not another soul; it was endless and frightening like a dream but for some strange reason I liked it. I still do; I just seem to get lost.

Even as a child there was something about staring into nothing that appealed to me. We lived in very small houses. We bathed in the lounge room. We all shared the same bedroom. So the idea of seeing nothing or no one on the horizon was beautiful but frightening because we were all used to having someone close all the time.

Then the voice of my mum would pull me back to reality. ‘Hey Jim, what are you doin', son?' And I would run off to play with the other kids.

W
e got to sunny South Australia on 21 January 1962. It was pouring with rain and it was stinking hot. Coming from Scotland, the last thing we wanted to see was rain and what we thought was hot was never higher than seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. If the temperature in Scotland got over seventy-five it was a heatwave. It was well over a hundred and Mum thought we'd landed in hell or back in Bombay, which was the same thing to her. Anywhere outside Glasgow was all wrong to Mum, I don't know why she left really.

We arrived at Outer Harbour and waved farewell to the
Strathnaver
. By then the stench of sewerage had disappeared and we were beginning to really like it on board. I think that ours might have been the poor old tug's last journey. I felt sorry for the ship knowing it was its final voyage. It had carried us out of Britain to this new land that was going to be our dream home. I heard she was sold to the Shun Fung Ironworks of Hong Kong and was broken up and made into razor blades. I'm sure it was not the first time that ship was involved in a close shave. In fact,
it might have even ended up as open razors on the streets of Glasgow, but that would have been too poetic.

We were taken by a luxury coach – well, it had a roof – to the Finsbury Hostel, our deluxe accommodation, and after a delicious meal of powdered eggs and toast we were shown to our suites. Finsbury housed about 2300 people in small cramped conditions. We shared toilets, bathrooms and washhouses. It was not good. We had paid, not a lot mind you, to travel 1200 miles to still be scared to go out to the toilet at night for fear of some drunken bloke staggering towards us with his pants down. We could have got this every night in Glasgow for free.

Our palace was what they called a Nissen hut – a curved piece of corrugated iron with a door in it. There was no insulation at all from the heat or cold. We wouldn't have minded the cold because we were used to it but the heat was a whole new experience. The inside of the hut looked a lot like the outside – dull, grey and not very homely. Even the tenements of Scotland had personality when you got inside. Sometimes that personality wasn't good but it was there; with wallpaper and little things that each family had collected like treasure as they moved from place to place. But these Nissen huts had curved tin walls so unless you had curved paintings they wouldn't have hung very well. If I'd been a little sharper I would have started painting landscapes on curved surfaces. I would have cleaned up. The furniture was the same in every hut: uncomfortable and sterile-looking couches with bad prints that smelled of disinfectant from where they'd had everything from beer to vomit wiped from them. The toilets were as bad as the old toilets in the back courts of Glasgow. The washhouse had big industrial-looking boilers so that everything that was washed was boiled too. Probably a good thing, when I think about it. I remember that when anything got loud, as Mum and Dad's voices often did, they sounded twice as loud as usual because of the tin.

The hostel made the Scottish tenements look luxurious. Every family had the same as us and none of them were happy about it. There were open drains that smelled of sewerage, just like the ship, and the food in general turned out to be as good as the first day – terrible. Everyone was complaining but no one was listening it seemed. I think this is how the myth of the whinging Pom started, with the shocking conditions when they first arrived in their new home. But the Poms do like a good whinge, and so do the Scots, so maybe not.

The rain came down on the roof, so loud it almost drowned out the sound of my mum crying. I like the sound of rain beating on a corrugated iron roof; it covers any other sound you don't want to hear. She didn't stop crying for a long time – years, when I think about it. She was just miserable. I don't remember a day going by without my mum saying, ‘I hate this fuckin' place, I want tae go back hame tae Scotland.'

She would sob to herself, ‘It's too hot, the food's nae good and I don't like these people. We're too different to live here wi' them.'

Nothing was what my mum and dad had hoped for. I doubt it was ever going to be what they had hoped for, no matter how good it was. We could have been put up at the Hilton and my mum would have complained.

But besides the huts, for us kids it was heaven. We would be outside running around all day. I'd never seen so many trees in my life and there were animals running around too – the only animals I'd seen before drank with my dad. I don't think I'd ever kicked a football on grass before then. It felt completely different. We could play without ripping our knees to bits and go home without gravel rash all over us. This was great. I'd get up before Mum and Dad and wake my sisters and say, ‘Let's go kick the
football or chase the birds. Come on, before Mum makes us do something else.'

We wanted to be outside all day, doing nothing and everything.

It wasn't long before we were running around barefoot and getting swooped by magpies just like the Australian kids. At first the magpies terrified me. In Glasgow if something came flying at your head it was normally attached to someone's hand. But after a short time I would be running and laughing at the same time, which was hard to do, and I would end up falling over as they swooped over my head like dive bombers. It became a game to try to get from one shelter to the next without being attacked, a good test of my speed and ability to change direction. I don't think I ever really got it over the magpies, they were always the winners. I realised then that I didn't have a good turn of speed or a side step but I was still convinced I would be the greatest football player ever. As long as I could run in a straight line, very slowly, that is.

Another thing I liked was that kids in Australia could get their gear off and run through a sprinkler any time they wanted. In fact, as a child I spent a lot of time chasing mates through the water as it sprayed up into the air making rainbows for us to crash through. There were colours everywhere; it wasn't dull and grey like the Glasgow I remembered. It was a new world and we loved it. The dirty stone walls of the tenements seemed like they were from another lifetime. I almost forgot about them completely although they popped up in the odd nightmare. I was too busy climbing trees and running on the soft green grass, never having to worry if someone was going to hurt me. This was the lucky country and we were the lucky kids.

All the parents just seemed miserable. Just like they did at home really. Nothing was ever right for any of them. The same old problems seemed to raise their ugly heads only now in a
different location. All the shit that was happening in Scotland was going on in Australia, only my mum had no one to run to for help. She was alone. There was only my dad, who was always drunk or gone, the other kids or me. Us kids were the only ones in the world who could see what was left of that burning light in her heart I told you about earlier. The light that was being dimmed by all the shit that life threw at her.

My clearest memories are of being out all day playing football. That game saved my life I think. I'd be away from the house all day and I'd get home at night, too tired to hear the folks fighting. Because I was not home for most of the day I didn't see first-hand how unhappy my mum was. And sometimes Dad didn't come home until we were either in bed or getting ready to go to bed. He was often tired and all he wanted to do was drink and not hear any nagging. So he didn't really speak to any of us unless he was drunk. Then he was happy and made jokes at Mum's expense, telling us, ‘You know yer mother's a pain in the arse – no all the time, but definitely when she's awake.'

She wasn't a pain in the arse as far as we could see, but we would laugh along with him, pretending we knew what he was talking about. The only time Mum was a pain in the arse was when she wouldn't let us do what we wanted to do, which was probably the same for him when I think about it.

There always seemed to be someone in the house, friends of Dad's or friends of Mum's. We never had a good time together with just the family. I think Mum and Dad were avoiding each other and maybe they were both avoiding us. It wasn't long until we were avoiding them too. This arrangement seemed to work for us all.

By this time Dad was working for an Italian builder somewhere nearby. He seemed to like his job and got on well
with his boss although that would change later on. Both Mum and Dad always told me how hard he worked. The story was different depending who was speaking.

‘Yer father never misses a day's work. No matter what he's been doin', he gets up and goes tae work. If the bastard would just bring the money hame, we'd be aw right.'

‘I work like a dog all day and I get home and your mother nags me to death. “I need mair money, I want ye tae get a better job.” This goes on aw night, so I cannae wait tae get up and get oot in the mornin', just to get her oot of ma sight.'

Dad seemed to avoid us most on Thursdays, when, coincidentally, he got paid. He never missed work; I've got to say he had a good work ethic. But come Thursday he would finish work, pick up his pay packet and then none of us would see him until it was all gone. He had a bad pay packet ethic. We'd be hungry and Mum would be crying a lot and telling us, ‘Yer father's a pig, always was, always will be.'

That seemed to be the pattern when we were kids. In the meantime, Mum tried her best to feed us on next to nothing.

There were a number of big events in the first few years in Australia. We moved from Finsbury Hostel to Seaton Park for a short while. Dad was still working for the builder and we got to stay in one of his houses. When I say ‘his houses' I mean something he was probably going to get my dad to help him knock down as soon as he could. It wasn't great. We had moved from a tin shed to a hovel but Mum seemed happier and that made it easier for Dad.

My memory of that time isn't very clear but I do remember the builder had a watch dog that he kept on a chain. It was a huge Alsatian and not even the bloke who owned it could get near it. I think he must have thrown food to it because this dog would run
at anyone who came near him. He kept it there so no one would go near his building site or his tools but the dog was going crazy from being tied up all day and all night. The poor thing had no contact with anyone who cared about it.

My dad loved animals, dogs in particular. And they loved him. He walked straight up to this dog, looked it in the eye and sat down next to it and said, ‘You'll be alright wee pal. Don't worry, I'm here tae look after ye.'

I'm sure he said the same thing to me but I could be wrong.

He then proceeded to show the poor beast some love. The dog didn't know how to react and just dropped its guard and fell in love with him immediately. As I said before, my dad was a charmer. Dogs weren't the only things that fell under his spell. People were the same. Everybody liked him. And he had time for everyone – everyone except Mum and us kids. I could never work out why he was like that. We idolised him. We sat around and waited for any attention he was willing to show us. A lot like that dog actually, only our chains weren't quite as obvious.

Dad always moved close, said things softly and looked you in the eyes when he spoke to you. His eyes were deep, dark and soft. His voice was slightly husky, maybe from fighting or more likely from smoking so many cigarettes. But it had a warmth that people found attractive. There was a sense of him being wounded that seemed to come out whenever he wanted to move someone. He could turn it on and off like a tap. Those same eyes looked cold and menacing when he needed them to. I've seen him look at someone and say nothing and have them cowering like a scared dog. It would happen in a second. He used to do that to Mum early on but she became more defiant over the years. I'm sure that when his mannerisms didn't scare her anymore he turned to more violent methods. He had a way with words too. He could make you feel like you were the only person in the room but that too could change in a second. Even when he lost his temper he
never raised his voice that much. The tone hardened and then it felt like you didn't exist.

Anyway, the dog became really attached to Dad and every day Dad spent time with that dog. He fed him and brushed him and for a little while I think the dog thought his life had finally turned a corner. Things were looking up for him. They were as good as they could get for an Alsatian on a chain at a building site. But it didn't last. I'd seen this happen before; in fact, it happened to us all the time. Dad got caught up in some other stuff with the builder and stopped spending time with the dog and within a few days it turned back into the Hound of the Baskervilles. The poor guy. Dogs don't understand why people change.

One day the dog got off the chain and terrorised the neighbourhood. I think he might have bitten a few people. He chased us down the road, through the house and over the fences until finally someone got hold of him. They took him away and we never saw him again. I think we were told he'd gone on holidays to a nice farm where dogs ran free and had fun with other lost dogs.

We then moved to Tea Tree Gully for a while but our stay there didn't last long. We never stayed anywhere for very long, I don't know why. Mum and Dad were fighting again, we were all on edge and as usual things were going from bad to unbearable. This time we were off to Gepps Cross.

Gepps Cross hostel was about five miles down the road from our first hostel and it looked very similar. Same corrugated iron huts, same sort of people living in them. Basically we moved from one tin shed to another tin shed. But our new shed came with a lot of fringe benefits, at least for the kids.

This hostel was also surrounded by trees, and in one corner there was a pine forest, which meant there were a lot of animals
and birds living there. Well, it really wasn't a forest, more a grove of pine trees, but after Cowcaddens, where there were no trees at all, this place could have been the Black Forest of Bavaria for all we knew. We used to climb trees and look for old birds' nests and of course we hid from each other out in the trees. It was great fun. Last time I drove out that way, the forest was still where we left it, and it doesn't look very big at all. But I remember it being huge and dark and if I was alone it could be very scary. Then again, any time I was alone was scary.