Billy Connolly

It was the tradition in those times for girls who had left the family house to visit their mothers on Sundays. As far as rationing would allow, Flora would cook a Sunday dinner of stew and dumplings, or leftovers and ‘stovies’, a dish made with potatoes and onions. All the family gathered then. Hughie would help Mamie get the pram up and down the stairs and he soothed the little ones while Mamie chatted. But, apart from Sundays, Mamie had little of the social contact she craved. She rarely heard from her husband. His sisters Margaret and Mona would look in from time to time, but Mamie hated their nosiness and attempts to take control. She thought they came more to criticize than to help. ‘She’s just a daft wee girl,’ sneered Mona behind her back.

Overcrowding and poor maintenance always ensured that tenement life spilled out into the streets, the grimy domain of vendors and tramcars being an extension of the inhabitants’ living space. Socially, the tenement was a vertical village, and everyone knew everyone. A neighbour, Mattie Murphy, who was about the same age as Mamie, sometimes watched the infants when Mamie left the flat to do her washing in ‘the steamie’, as Glaswegian public laundries were called. She claims Billy was ‘a cheeky wee devil’. He was full of mischief and had no problem answering back. One teatime, Mattie was cutting up a sticky bun covered with pink icing when Billy spied the end piece that had the most icing. ‘I want that fucking piece!’ It was startling language for a three-year-old.

‘You’ll get none,’ threatened Mattie.

‘Then I’ll touch you with my chookie.’ The infant hard-man began to unbutton his flies but, after catching sight of Mattie’s horrified face, he ran around and pinched her bottom instead. He got no iced bun that day.

It was not the only preview of Billy’s renowned outrageousness. Mattie’s daughter, Roseanne, was sitting on the pavement with some other children one day after an exhausting game of ‘Peever’, a variation of hopscotch that was played with a can of shoe polish. Billy came sauntering along the road and decided that he needed to pee. In those days, little boys would just unbutton their flies and urinate into the gutter but, while he was doing so, Billy caught sight of the adjacent group of girls and just couldn’t resist turning sideways and spraying their backs. He was definitely a handful.

Mattie found Dover Street life in the 1940s more riveting than the music hall. A woman whose livelihood was prostitution resided on the ground floor of one of the buildings. The residents of Dover Street apparently conspired to help this woman rip off her customers by ganging up on the men after they had paid their shillings. ‘Bugger off.’ they would cry. ‘You’re giving the place a bad name!’

This conspiratorial behaviour, however, was sporadic. Quite often the temperamental sex-worker would go for an evening stroll in her underwear, challenging other women who lived in the street, whom she accused of gossiping about her, to come out and fight. It got to the point where residents would bring chairs out each night and sit waiting for the show to begin.

Tragically, Mattie lost her own son. He was home from school with a cold and, short of clean nightwear, his mother had insisted he put on his sister’s nightgown to keep warm. When both parents were out, Mattie’s boy leaned over too close to the fire and a spark sent his nightgown up in flames. His sister was powerless to save him. Before the boy was buried, the streetwalker amazed everyone by turning up and throwing herself on his boy-sized coffin in a great demonstration of wailing and sadness, shouting heavenward at the top of her voice. ‘Why couldn’t you have taken me instead of the wean? I’m bad! I’m bad!’

Billy and Florence played out on the street from a very early age. It was Mattie who searched high and low for them after they disappeared one evening. Their neighbour, Mr Cumberland, had come home from work, desperate to get to the pub. ‘You’d better get those bloody kids in first,’ said his long-suffering wife, who also liked a drink or six, which is a fact Billy omits when he tells a version of the story on stage.

Mr Cumberland had eight children, so, driven by his thirst, the wily man went out onto the street and got as many Cumberlands as he could find, then just made up the numbers with any other children he spied. Billy and Florence were scooped up with no questions asked and thrown into bed with the others. Later that night two Cumberlands were found roaming the street, which gave the search party a useful clue, and the exchange was eventually made.

If only Mattie had been asked to help out more in those first years, Billy and Florence might have had an easier time. Mamie was disintegrating, probably depressed and, unknown to her family, was abdicating responsibility for the children who were horribly neglected. Billy had pneumonia three times before he was four. Officers of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were called in when Mamie left them alone with an unguarded, blazing fire. At three years old, Florence was expected to care for Billy without an adult present. She was an anxious, often tearful child, with dark curls flopping over a high forehead and charming ‘sonsie’, or roundly appealing, face. She was always Billy’s ‘guardian angel’ as he calls her now, but she sorely needed one of her own. One evening when she was alone looking after Billy, she fell into some hot ashes. She screamed for help, but no one came. She never received medical attention at the time and as a result she lost the sight of an eye.

One winter morning in 1945, three-year-old Billy woke up wanting his mother. Wearing only a tiny vest, he went toddling along the freezing hallway to her bedroom. He hesitated just inside the door to her darkened room, surprised to see a stranger sitting on his mother’s bed. The man was brown-haired and bare-chested, and stared at Billy as he finished putting on a sock. As Billy tottered closer, the stranger shoved his bare foot up against his forehead and gently pushed him backwards until he was out in the hallway again, then closed the door with the same foot. It was Willie Adams, his mother’s lover.

Billy and Florence were alone and frightened when their mother left. She just closed the door and never came back. Eventually there was a lot of wailing and shouting, and then they were cared for by nuns in a place of polished wooden benches, stained glass and whispering. There was disagreement in the two families about who should bring up the children. Flora wanted them, but William’s sisters, Margaret and Mona, stepped in and took over. It was Mona who, responding to a neighbour’s concern about the constant crying resounding throughout the tenement, had gone along to the flat with her brother James and found Florence and Billy crouching together in the alcove bed, freezing, hungry and pitifully unkempt. She and Margaret eventually took young Billy and Florence to live in the Stewartville Street tenement in Partick that they shared with James, who was recently back from the war.

The children never saw their mother again when they were growing up. She came once to see them when they were still very young, but the aunts chased her off like a whore. Later she turned up with one of her brothers, but again, she was refused entry. That’s when Mamie punched Mona. Flattened her right in the doorway.

Margaret and Mona were an odd pair. Mona was born in 1908 and was thirteen years older than her flightier sister. Like all unmarried women getting on for forty in those days, Mona was terrified of being stigmatized as an ‘old maid’; by contrast, Margaret had a twinkle in her eye and no shortage of dancing partners. Billy found both sisters rather forbidding at the outset, although they tried to be kind and welcoming.

Margaret still wore her Wrens’ uniform, a stiff navy suit with brass buttons and a collar and tie. She’d had the time of her life when she was based in Portsmouth but, after the war, she settled down to life as a civil servant, writing up pension claims by coal miners who were suffering from pneumoconiosis, the black lung scourge. Margaret had wonderful red hair. Some evenings Billy and Florence would watch her flounce off to the dance hall in a cloud of ‘4711’ toilet water, stylishly draped in kingfisher-blue taffeta.

Mona was a dour and dominant force in the household. She was a registered nurse, working at night in a crowded ward for patients with chest complaints such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. On occasion, she did some private nursing so there were syringes lying around the place and strange rubber hoses in a drawer. The children could never work out what they were for. Mona dyed her curly brown hair a bright blonde, and was definitely no fashion plate.

Billy thought his Uncle James, on the other hand, was very glamorous indeed. He had been caught in a booby trap in France when he was with the Cameron Highlanders, so he now had only two fingers on his left hand. He modelled standards of grooming and hygiene that had previously been missing from the children’s lives, always polishing his shoes, ironing his shirts, and inspecting Billy’s teeth for adequate brushing. Both children had needed delousing when they arrived at Stewartville Street. Standing up naked in the sink, they were scrubbed vigorously with scabies lotion, a cold, viscous substance that left a milky residue on their skin. Their hair was deloused in an agonizing process involving an ultra-fine comb and a newspaper placed on the floor so they could see the lice when they landed.

Billy was grateful for the new and unfamiliar air of brusque kindness all around him. The four-year-old slept in a cot in the aunts’ bedroom, and felt happy to be tucked into a clean bed, even if he was chastised horribly for peeing in it with great frequency. He could not understand their problem with that; in the past he’d always done it with impunity. Many things changed in the children’s lives. They were given new clothing, sent to them from New York by their Uncle Charlie, William’s elder brother, who had emigrated to America. Florence was over the moon with her new stickyouty dress of pale lavender watersilk, while Billy became the proud owner of a pair of beige overalls. Nowadays, Billy has a pathological aversion to beige apparel, and especially attacks the wearers of beige cardigans, but back then he thought he was the kipper’s knickers.

Consistency became part of the children’s lives for the very first time. Every morning, right after their porridge, the children would be given a delicious spoonful of sickly-sweet molasses, followed by a vomit-making dollop of cod-liver oil. Billy begged to be given the oil first. ‘Why, oh why,’ he wondered, ‘can’t I have the nice stuff last to take away the nasty taste?’ But he was always given the molasses first.

His aunts were not the only ones who believed the hard way was the best way, and that safety resided in suffering. Billy says that many a Glaswegian has cast his troubled eyes on a brilliant, sunshine day and muttered, ‘Och, we’ll pay for this!’

Every evening after supper, Uncle James knelt down beside his kitchen alcove bed to say his prayers. The notion of communicating with an unseen entity was new to Billy, but he happily went along to Mass and quite enjoyed watching the whole colourful spectacle and singing loudly along with the congregation.

Then, as now, he enjoyed the pageant of life swirling around him, and the bustle of Stewartville Street was particularly appealing. Most days he played with marbles and little tin cars in the gutter outside his close. It was a perfect vantage point from which to study the activities of the milkman, the coalman, the ragman and the chimney sweeps. If he played his cards right, he could be heaved high up onto the horse-drawn cart of one of those workers for a ‘wee hurl’ to the top of the street.

One day, while Florence played ‘chases’ and ‘hide-and-seek’ with other neighbourhood children, Billy began drawing on the pavement with a piece of chalk. He was soon apprehended by an angry policeman who tried to march him indoors. The officer was barely inside the close when he was stopped short by old Mrs Magee, a tiny Belfast woman, who gave him a terrible time: ‘Away and catch a murderer, you big pain in the arse! Leave the child alone!’

There was an evangelical establishment in the street at number twelve, called Abingdon Hall. It’s still there today, a red-painted gospel hall run by the Christian Brethren that boasts regular social events such as ‘Ladies Leisure Hour’ and ‘Missionary Meeting’. Back then, Protestant children could attend meetings of a youth club called ‘Band of Hope’. Billy and Florence began to find creative ways to sneak in for the exotic experience of a slide show of the Holy Land, a cup of tea and a bun. Billy decided that the appeal of the Protestant faith was the absence of kneeling. Never one to shy away from a good sing-song, he joined in with the best of them:

‘There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide

Hallelujah!’

When their visits to that Protestant stronghold were discovered. Florence got the blame and was given a terrible row by Mona: ‘You’re the oldest! You should have known better!’ It was as if they’d sneaked into a peep-show.

By now, Billy was becoming aware of the stigma that was attached to his assigned faith. One day he was with a little pal, happily shooting marbles into a drain, when he heard an upstairs window being hurriedly thrust open. Her grandfather leaned out, pipe in hand: ‘Marie Grant! What have I told you about playing with Catholics!’

After a few months of living with the aunts, Billy began settling into their routine. He wondered where his mother had gone, but no one seemed willing to discuss that with him. He overheard adults around him gossiping about her in scathing terms, which further confused and saddened him.

Although Mamie had been banned from the house, her mother Flora visited the children from time to time and brought them sweeties and chocolate. There had been no sweets for them during the war so anything sugary was quite a treat. Grandma wore a fur coat, dangly earrings and lots of perfume, and looked exactly like a Christmas tree. The aunts disapproved, but Billy thought the sun shone out of her behind.

She was fond of boxing, and would sneak them pictures of her idol Joe Louis and talk about all sorts of interesting things. She always knew when Billy was talking rubbish. ‘Your head’s full of dabbities,’ she would cluck – a dabbity was one of those cheap transfers children licked then stuck on their arms. Flora became known for her trenchant sayings. She had left school at thirteen to go to work, but always had a ready answer for anyone who tried to outsmart her. ‘Well, if we were all wise, there’d be no room for fools!’ she’d jibe, or, ‘Perhaps I didn’t go to school, but I met the scholars coming out.’

All too soon, Uncle James had a bride-to-be. Her name was Aunt Peggy, and she was delightful, fresh off the boat from Ireland. She was entirely comfortable with her country ways and resisted changing them her whole life. Billy was fascinated by her style of speaking. She addressed everybody as ‘pal’ and referred to boys as ‘gossoons’. The newlyweds eventually moved to the nearby district of Whiteinch and were sorely missed by the children.

Someone must have told Billy that his father would be coming home soon, because every time an aeroplane went by he would gallop to the window and ask if it were he. Everyone knew it wouldn’t be long, as over a million men had been demobbed and returned to their homes after VE-Day had lured the citizens of Britain into the streets for dancing and endless celebratory parties in 1945. It was a time of great rejoicing when William finally walked in the door in March 1946. Billy hid under the table and watched huge, black Oxfords and stocky, navy trouser legs enter the room and march towards him. A vaguely familiar head topped with an air-force ‘chip poke’ hat (the shape of the paper packets in which chips were sold in Glasgow) appeared under the table. It scrutinized him for a few seconds, and then a meaty hand proffered a shiny gift to coax him out. It was a wonderful toy yacht, with its hull painted green below the waterline and red above. Billy loved that boat. It had real ropes that actually worked, and he sailed it many times on Bingham’s Pond just off the Great Western Road.

It was odd having their father back. As was so often the case when men returned from the war, he was a stranger to his children and had been robbed of the chance to establish an early bond with them. William never spoke to Billy and Florence about their mother’s departure. He simply settled into the Stewartville Street house, stashing his massive metal air-force trunk under the bed. His name and service numbers were painted on its side, along with the words: ‘NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE’. That sign always troubled Billy. Why, he wondered, didn’t they want my father on the voyage? What did they have against him that meant they wouldn’t let him go with the rest of the men? Florence and Billy used to heave out the trunk and inspect its mysterious contents. They thought it was brilliant. They found bits of engineering equipment, their father’s wire air-force spectacles, and photos of him in India standing around with five other men, all in outlandish leopard coats, grinning and posing for the picture.

On Sundays, William occasionally took the children to the Barrowland market, known to all Glaswegians as ‘The Barras’. It is a bustling place for street vending, which used to be as much a market of human variety as of inanimate goods. Billy and Florence were amazed to see grown men eating fire and selling devilish cure-alls.

Billy was astounded to see men allowing themselves to be chained inside sacks, and women throwing knives at them until they miraculously escaped. Mr Waugh, a circus ‘strong man’, actually bent six-inch nails with his teeth before Billy’s very eyes.

‘Stop Barking!’ boomed John Bull, a balding man in a double-breasted suit who stood in Gibson Street hawking his Lung and Chest Elixir. ‘Asthma! Bronchitis! Whooping Cough! Croup! Difficulty breathing and all chest troubles! Absolutely safe for all ages!’

Billy eagerly sought out ‘The Snakeman’, known as Chief Abadu from Nigeria, who claimed his snake oil cured everything from hair loss to a stuffy nose. He acted out crude impersonations of a woman gripping her chest in pain or all blocked up with catarrh, offering to rub samples on selected folk’s hands. To Billy’s disappointment, no child ever got a whiff.

‘He was way ahead of his time,’ observes Billy, who is currently fascinated by the ‘faith-healing’ evangelists who use similar, charisma-reliant methods to sell God and health on the born-again Christian television channel in California. ‘Look at those pricks,’ Billy winces, ‘they must think people zip up at the back.’

One of the best parts of any Sunday outing was the journey, for they took the tramcar. Glasgow had an excellent system of tramcars, known in the dialect as ‘the caurs’. They had a peculiar electric smell, and shook from side to side so many passengers turned green after a very short while, but everybody loved them. Conductors, who were usually female, collected the fares on board: ‘Come on, get aff!’ they would shout, rudely shoving people. ‘Move up! move up!’

These cheeky women were both the scourge and the sweethearts of Glasgow, and they were immortalized in the music hall:

‘Mary McDougal

From Auchenshuggle

The caur conductoress,

Fares please, fares please …’

One conductor’s smart-arse retort reverberated around the city:

‘Does this tram stop at the Renfrew Ferry?’

‘I hope so. It cannae swim.’

In 1947, Billy’s Uncle Charlie came back from America to visit them with his young son, Jack, in tow. Dolly, his daughter who had Down’s Syndrome, had stayed at home with her mother. Everybody loved Charlie: he was the family love story. He had fallen for Nellie, a charming Glaswegian lassie whose family emigrated to the United States. Charlie saved up enough money to follow her to Far Rockaway, Long Island, where they married and settled down in that beach-side town. Far Rockaway is the closest point to Scotland in the whole American continent and Charlie lived there his whole life, never travelling further than Philadelphia.