Billy Connolly

Michael’s arrival at Stewartville Street was, in many ways, received as a great blessing to the Connollys. The group of uncomfortably related individuals that made up their family were able to focus their love and attention onto the tiny, innocent being who was unconnected to Mamie and provided biological motherhood for Mona. He was an angelic baby, doted on by his mother. Billy was enchanted by him too and would heave him around in a ‘circus-carry’. Even William could love him, without interference from the past; when he looked at his own children he saw Mamie, but that thorn was absent in his relationship with Michael.

‘I think we were a normal family,’ Michael maintains. ‘I had a great childhood.’ In contrast to the experience of Florence and Billy, Michael received plenty of positive attention, gifts and special treatment. Looking back now, Michael believes he was spoiled, but I think he just received what children rightfully deserve, a sense of being loved and appreciated.

Everything Michael did was magical to the adults in the household. ‘Listen to him sing!’ they would chime. ‘Look at the way he eats!’ As a toddler, Michael did have one interesting talent. There was a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records in the flat and people would say to him. ‘Fetch me the record of Mario Lanza singing “O Sole Mio’” and Michael could always select the correct one, even though he couldn’t read.

Michael was unaware of his mother’s treatment of Billy, for Mona was very secretive about it, and, understandably, he still finds it difficult to accept. Billy is convinced that his father also did not know about all the beating and neglect that was going on at home. William was absent most of the time, for he worked long hours at the Singer sewing-machine parts factory and was then out most evenings. Florence experienced William as a shadowy figure, coming and going with irregularity. ‘He just thought home life was boring, I think, and pissed off,’ is how Billy explains it now. ‘Fuck knows where he was going … I have no idea.’

When he wasn’t working. William was usually off playing billiards and having a great time with his mates. This was fairly typical for men in those days. It was the job of women to raise children and, besides, who wouldn’t have wanted to escape that household? William was a member of a club of men who’d been friends since childhood. The ‘Partick Corner Boys’ rented a room behind the cinema. On the bottom floor was the meeting room of a secret society called the ‘Buffs’, the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, and upstairs was William’s club, which was always jam-packed with drinking men playing billiards. William would take the children up there after twelve o’clock Mass on a Sunday so Florence could practise on the piano. Billy would roll the balls around the billiard table and William would chat with his friends.

This relaxed atmosphere was a stark contrast to life at home. There, the normal misunderstandings of childhood were tolerated in Michael, but not in Billy or Florence. One day, Jesus had come into conversation at home and Billy referred to Jesus as having been a Catholic, which was his seven-year-old misunderstanding. Aunt Margaret corrected him. ‘Jesus wasn’t a Catholic, Jesus was a Jew.’

‘Oh,’ he said with innocent surprise, ‘does that mean we’re Jews?’

‘Where did you come up with that one?’ she sneered, and continued to ridicule him about that until he was in his teens. ‘Does that mean we’re Jewish?’ she would mimic him.

Even Billy’s friends who were much poorer seemed at least to have love in their houses. Frankie McBride had a mother and granddad who loved him; the McGregors down the road were a wild bunch, but their parents adored them and their house was fun. They were always shouting and laughing, and they were rejoiced in for things Billy and Florence were being pilloried for. Of an evening, the oldest girl would be going out with her boyfriend and her younger siblings would be teasing her:

‘Your boyfriend’s skelly [cross-eyed]!’

‘No he’s not!’

Their mother would intervene: ‘He’s a lovely boy. Don’t you say that!’

Then the father would stir: ‘He’s a big bloody Jessie!’

‘No he’s not!’

In the Connolly household, the children daren’t say ‘boyfriend’: there would have been an explosion. It would definitely have been unwise for Billy to have mentioned the kiss he got from pretty blonde Gracie McClintock. It happened in Plantation Park, known to Billy and his pals as ‘Planting Park’, in front of the Queen Mother maternity hospital. The Cleansing Department had a dump there where the boys would find all kinds of interesting rubbish, bits of bikes, old rags and even machine parts. One day, when he was foraging there, some friends called to him: ‘Billy! Grade’s in the bushes! If you come down here, you can get a kiss!’

So Billy joined the line of five or six youngsters and eventually it was his turn to have a totally new experience. ‘It was the nicest thing I remember from my childhood.’ he says now. ‘It was like a bird landing on my mouth. Nobody had ever kissed me before: adults, children, anyone. I used to hear boys at school complaining about their mothers kissing them, and I remember thinking, “That must be amazing! No one ever kisses me …”’

As Billy sat in his school classroom, doing battle with Rosie, he could see the windows of his home across the street, and the prospect of returning there in the evening was far from appealing. He loved having school dinners because it meant he didn’t have to go home. Mona couldn’t cook to save her life, and Margaret was worse. Billy and Florence ate mostly fried foods and foul stews, and pudding would usually be a piece of dried-up cake smothered in Bird’s Custard. Mona specialized in repulsive sprouts, and Billy was beaten in the face until he ate them. ‘Billy tried Mother’s patience,’ reports Michael. ‘She wanted things organized and she was loud about it. She would say, “It’s Billy’s turn to do the dishes” and he would say “No!” and run out.’

No doubt Billy was viewed as an ornery child. He is still disorganized and oppositional, the former being a wired-in state and the latter a coping style. Typical early difficulties for people with learning differences include tying shoes and telling the time. Billy could do neither of those things until he was around twelve years old, and he was absolutely pounded for it. Everybody tried to teach him to tie his shoes, but they all eventually lost patience. One fateful summer day, he was with his father on holiday in Rothesay. On the pier there was a clock next to a garish light display of a juggling giraffe. William was peering at it. ‘Eh, Billy, what’s the time on the clock over there?’

Billy began to reply, but never finished the sentence. ‘The big hand is on the …’

WHACK! ‘That’s not the time! What’s the time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Billy can still remember the very spot on the pavement.

‘You don’t know?’ William exploded. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How old are you?’

William’s remoteness and constant absence from home meant he knew little about his children. His role became pretty much reduced to that of ‘Special Executioner’, administering extra-harsh beatings for especially vile sins. ‘Sometimes.’ recollects Billy, ‘when father hit me, I flew over the settee backwards, in a sitting position. It was fabulous. Just like real flying, except you didn’t get a cup of tea or a safety belt or anything.’

Billy was aware that his father was thrilled with Florence’s excellent scholastic progress, although William never once told her this. Billy himself was a great disappointment, since he did not seem bright, and was rotten at football. He dreamed of having a son like Billy’s friend and hero, Vinny Maron – a football genius, even at eleven years old. When Billy and Vinny practised heading the ball against the wall, Billy barely managed to get to ten. Vinny, however, could do four hundred. Grown men would gather to watch him playing in the street. Eventually, Celtic Football Club tried to sign him up as a professional player, but he went away to become a priest and ended up drowning in a swimming accident during his time at Sacred Heart College in Spain.

There was a very insistent priesthood recruitment process at Billy’s school. A stern man in a soutane would sweep into the classroom. ‘Who doesn’t want to become a priest?’ So, of course, everyone had to want to be a priest and was required to sign a piece of paper verifying that fact.

Then the recruiter would try a new tack: ‘Does anyone want to be a Pioneer?’ This meant swearing off drink for life and, to prove it, a Pioneer wore a white enamel badge displaying a red sacred heart, with tiny gold rays emanating from it. You can still see Pioneer pins around Glasgow, sported by men in their sixties or so, who are very proud of them.

Therefore, at seven years old, Billy and his pals all swore off the drink as nasty bad stuff, even though Billy had peeked inside pubs and really looked forward to being a man and doing ‘manly’ things like getting pissed. The pub seemed to him like a fabulous place to be. A peculiarly appealing smell of sawdust, beer and smoke came wafting out of the door, and he could see all the men roaring and shouting and having a great time.

His local pub, the Hyndland Bar, was on a corner, and boasted one door in Fordyce Street, and the other in Hyndland Street. One of the coming-of-age challenges among Billy’s peers was to avoid being apprehended while running deftly in through one door of this adults-only establishment, past all the customers, and out of the other door. It was considered very heroic to have achieved this several times.

Another great challenge was the terror of the cobbler’s dunny, or dungeon. There was a cobbler’s shop nearby, owned by an unfriendly little man with a moustache. This cobbler was always repairing his shoes, mouth full of nails, facing the window of the store so he could keep an eye on passers-by. Like all tenement dunnies, his was very dark, made so deliberately because these were places where lovers would go when they came home from the movies or dances. There were few cars for courting, or ‘winching’ as it’s called in Glasgow. Johnny Beattie, another Glasgow comedian, says you can still see the mark of his Brylcreem on a dunny wall in Partickhill Road.

The goal for Billy and his seven-year-old pals was to run the gauntlet of this long, murky, subterranean corridor. It had offshoots where all sorts of weird and wild things dwelled – everybody knew that – things gruesome and dreadful, with terrible intent. At the end of the run there were stairs that curved sharply before eventually leading back to the close. Horrible murder and torture lay just around that bend, not to mention ghosts. If a boy had done the cobbler’s dunny, and had made it uncaptured through the Hyndland Bar, he was a leader of men; he was Cochise, the heroic Apache chief from Billy’s Saturday afternoon cowboy movies.

Billy was always gashed, scarred and full of stitches from his attempts at such glory. Once he got caught in the cobbler’s dunny by the man himself, and was heaved into his house. ‘You crowd of bastards, I’m fed up with you. I’m telling your father.’ That was the moment when Cochise shit his pants.

‘Now I’m gonna tell you all something that will probably prove very useful in your lives,’ Billy announces to a Scottish crowd. ‘I’m going to tell you what to do if you get caught masturbating …’ I had been sitting in the audience wondering when would be the most appropriate time to allow our three youngest children to come to see their father in concert. As I watch him play proficiently and enthusiastically with his caged penis in front of three thousand hysterical people, the words thirty years old flash into my mind.

‘The opening line is all-important,’ explains Billy. ‘Say “Thank God you’re here! I was just walking across the room, when the biggest hairy spider came crashing out from behind the sideboard there and shot up the leg of my trousers. The bugger was poised to sink its fangs into my poor willie …”’ The activity in question is, of course, a healthy one if privately or consensually performed; however, Billy’s outrageous and frantic self-pleasuring pantomime, as well as that thing he does about having sex with sheep, were giving me substantial pause for thought.

Billy’s battle with the morality of masturbation, indeed of sex in general, began when he started to go to confession. At first his confessed sins were pretty tame, such as telling a fib or stealing a biscuit, not enough to shift the padre’s gaze from the football results. On Saturdays the Glasgow Evening Times sports edition was a pink paper, and was clearly visible through the grille. One evening, however, Billy scored heavily: ‘I’ve had impure thoughts, Father.’ His confessor had been checking to see how Partick Thistle was doing, but the nine-year-old’s precocious words got his attention.

‘Oh, and what were these thoughts?’

‘I was thinking about women, naked women … Father … Frankie McBride’s got a book with naked women in it.’

Frankie McBride was a little pal who lived around the corner from Billy.

‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Three “Hail Marys” and count yourself a lucky boy. That could lead to terrible things. You know, son, these books aren’t in themselves sinful, but what they’re known as is “an occasion of sin”. Do you know what an occasion of sin is?’

‘No, Father.’ Billy knew fine well.

‘An occasion of sin is something or someone that leads you into sin.’

‘Oh yes, Father.’

‘You beware when you’re around those books. There are many books like that. Any impure acts?’

‘Yes, Father.”

‘With yourself, or with another?’

‘With myself, Father.’

‘You should stop doing that immediately.’

‘Yes, Father.’

He never told Billy he’d go blind: that was a school-playground tale. The school playground was an excellent place to obtain misinformation about sex, a new anti-Protestant joke or a drag on a scavenged cigarette-butt. There was entertainment there as well, in the form of regular executions. Mr Elliot used to chase chickens with an axe in the school’s kitchen garden and he would chop off their heads right there in the playground.

Despite his doubts about the clergy, Billy longed to be an altar boy. He helped out in St Peter’s Church, doing chores right next to the sacristy, where the priest emerged, and where the vestments and Communion wine were stored. Billy was fascinated with the vestments and was captivated by the gorgeous colours and embroidery. Priests would often come to school during the week and quiz the boys about the colour of the vestments, in order to check if they had been to Mass the previous Sunday. Billy was a regular Mass-goer at that point, but sometimes he couldn’t remember the visual details and he would be beaten.

Billy never dared to steal the wine like some of his pals. The sacristy was full of surprises. Someone discovered that Communion came in a tin, and had even been brave enough to try some, but in those days Billy was shocked: ‘That’s Jesus,’ he thought, ‘you can’t go eating Jesus, stealing him out of a tin.’