shitehouse to shitehawk: a user's guide

I jot things down. Sometimes I order them later, or they order me. Usually, I don’t. That’s called the first draft. It’s full of grammatical mistakes and meaning that falls off the edge of a cliff with no way back, loosely called open to interpretation, but really just bad writing. I plan to come back and fix it later. I guess it’s a bit like that book you meant to read, but never do. But the subconscious is always working away, plotting ahead of you, so that when you get to the stage where you say that’s what you meant, that’s not what you mean at all. I was always that way in terms of fashion. Just when something was on the cusp of being the in-thing to being so naff your granny’s sister wouldn’t wear it, then I was always the poor bugger that nipped into to get ripped off by Dee’s on Dumbarton Road and bought it. Think long black Crombie coats, thick Donkey jackets for donkeys, or one of my better one’s a black velvet jacket that cost a week’s wages. Fifty-odd quid.  You could plot the rise and fall of fashion just when I bought those threads. Incidentally, my da, Dessy, took a shine to the black velvet jacket and he wore it more than me. That’s so how out of touch I was.  Dessy would lump on anything that came to hand. He also wore my mum’s quilted, pinkish, nylon anorak, but never with the hood up, because hats made you bald. He was precious about his hair.  No, if you’re asking, I didn’t wear a hat when I was younger. But the words fine-tooth comb jump into my head. Dandruff. Nits. Black and white fine-tooth combs. Silver for nits. Sore on the heid.  I was trying to get some notion of how Dessy had went from describing people he wasn’t enamoured with, which was just about everybody outside his close coterie of pals, as a shitehouse and later a shitehawk. I tried to be methodical, starting with the letter A and working my way to Z.

            So I got arcade. Then I got boggin. Noted down water – tap. Velvet jacket. Hughie Greene. Opportunity Knocks. Jimmy Mac. Potatoes. Black babies. Doll. Mouching. Sweets. Aunty Phyllis. Cock. Catholic. Dick. Blower. Piano. Darkie. Charlie. Sugar. I’ll zone these off and mark them property of the subconscious. Use them later as evidence.  

            Mum used to take us on the train for day’s out during the summer holidays when we were wee. Sometimes we went from Dalmuir train station to Helensburgh. Helensburgh was the kind of place that in winter had ghostly women wearing cloche hats on main-street parade, and in the summer it had the Clyde commoners and the shitty promenade, seagulls square-going over the delicacy of jobbies from the jobby boat and used condoms that trawled that stretch of choppy water. Arcades and places that sold cones to weary travellers and dark spaces that lay in wait for the weary. I liked the arcades because for two pence you could pick a horse and, if you stood on tiptoes, it would gallop round the track, in front of your eyes, and just when blue looked like winning red would jerk forward and overtake it. Once I backed an outsider, a yellow horse, at eight to one and won sixteen pence. That was me addicted. Every penny I never had went in those machines, until Mum called a halt and said I couldn’t have another ten pence. Five kids, ten pence each, if I had my way I could have won enough to buy a new car and we could have drove home.  Moping, is a good Scottish word. I could make my lip tremble like Elvis and go up and down and look as if I was just about to cry and sometimes I did, just for devilment. Possessed by a non-winning streak.

 Once or twice we even went as far as Rothesay. Usually it was Mum, Auntie Phyllis, women’s work, and the tribe of McFaddens and O’Donnells. That’s about twelve bodies. But when Dad did travel he would make us run ahead on him and onto the boat so he wouldn’t have to pay for us. I was told this by my older sister Jo. I can’t remember it. But I do remember her hitting us for biting our nails or worse, picking our nose, and I recall the boat and the smell of the sea that wasn’t a sea. You could see the other side, through the swarm of swooping seagulls, the hard seats like life rafts you clung to, the wind and rain battering you. Everything battered you, brothers, sisters, cousins, pals, teachers, even the elements.  You could see the Isle of Bute from Weymss Bay, but what you wanted to see, to feel, was dry land. That sense of stability.  And I remember the same Dessy trick on the trains, public transport we learned at an early age, was a matter of keeping your head down. Dessy also worked his magic on the half-penny covered in silver paper so that it looked like two bob, and there was the old fall-back position of passing off someone else’s discarded ticket to the guard on the brush past. Mix ups do happen. Or at least they did when Dessie was about. In one of the stories I wrote I described how Dessy used to go into Maisie Friel’s shop, which was below our top-floor, tenement flat, and he’d smack the stoor covered empty lemonade bottles that were held on a shelf and say: ‘That’s three bottles Maisie’ and he’d get sweets for us from the penny tray with that ploy. It was a choice between Highland toffee or chocolate. An easy choice. You could spin toffee out, but you just ate chocolate and then it was gone.  Brought up in the hungry thirties, shopkeepers for Dessy were fair game. Maisie, in her dingy wee paper shop, was half blind and never questioned him because he was a gentleman. Not a gentleman in terms of class, he worked in the yards, but in terms of temperament. He always kept himself spick and span. Not one of those bogging buggers you’d see walking about, with clatty houses and a clatty wife and children that didn’t do what they were telt and were the ruin of the world. Inevitably, they were Protestant or Orange bastards. That wasn’t swearing. That was just a simple truth. Booze was never to blame.  Dessy never swore in front of women.

            One of his best pals, Jimmy Mac and his wife came back to our house early with my mum and dad one Saturday night because Dessy had punched one of Jimmy’s mates. Dessy had been on the blower all week arranging the meeting, but Da had put one on him for swearing in front of  the women and wives. That showed him. It wasn’t Da’s fault because not only was he an orange bastard, but he was a masonic orange bastard, which was even worse. The problem with that was Jimmy Mac was Catholic and he too was in the Masons. It fell between the great unknown of the Virgin Birth, transubstantiation of the Host and the great unknowable of why people laughed at Benny Hill. In later years Jimmy greeting into his rum told my Da in confidence that his son Brian liked men more than woman.

            ‘Look Jimmy, you just cannae have that,’ was my Da’s advice. ‘You’ll need to have a word with him.’

            Having a word with someone usually meant punching them in the face, but there was a nuance in the language. Big Rab that worked in Clydebank Municipal Pool was a shitehouse because he was big, fat, harmless, with a ba face, and he was an orange bastard. But the contempt was also for the job he did – working for the council, flinging wee kids like me, and my pals, out of the pool when the whistle blew. He was a bully. Da didn’t like that. Maybe he would have had a word with him, but he never did.

            By the time my brother Stephen had died the municipal baths had closed. Big Rab worked in Dalnottor, leaning on a shovel, squaring up the graves. Da spotted Rab right away. Nudge of his arm, nod of the head, ‘shitehawk’, in the interim years, the shitehouse had flown.