Tam McSwiggan

Tam McSwiggan 1961-2001 R.I.P.

When Tam was born Rangers’s supporters in the enclosure rioted and tore down the green, red, and white flag at Ibrox. They didn’t object to the red bit of the Italian flag, although they suspected it was indications of a Papist plot, but during the game against Fiorentina, which they lost 2-0, their team got a late penalty. They rioted after Rangers’s skipper Eric Caldow missed it, flinging wine bottle and cans at the Italian players, and demanding a retaken penalty, because that’s what usually happened when the Scottish champions played.

Prince Philp and the Queen visited the Gorbals. Elizabeth II was taken aback by living conditions when shown around a tenement single-end.

‘Is this all you have?’ our glorious Majesty was heard to have asked.

She was surprised by a voice coming from drawer, which was used as cot. Tam McSwiggan was our grizzled, cut-down John Wayne, and he always shot from his curled lip.

‘I left my horses and carriage in the coal cellar with the hunting dogs. Noo, fuck off.’

Anyone that knew Tam McSwiggan know that he was never young. He was born as a forty-year-old and he died as a forty-year-old in 2001. Sure he wore short trousers and walked through the tunnel at the end of Trafalgar Street to go to St. Stephen’s school. He’d play tig, and kick-the-can and hide-and-seek—with Jim Smart and Bobby Jack and John Cosgrove and Geachy and Wolfman Logie and Eon Brennan—and any number of other boys that lived near him.

He played football in the bays and across the road at the back of the old Cinema and up at Singers’ Park.

 But they always knew where to find him. He’d sloped off to the pub, and would be sitting on a barstool in The Lerags, later the Drop Inn, smoking a fag.

Every day was Saturday for Tam. He’d jump the hedges with everyone else. Red Rum won the Grand National almost every, winning 1973 and 1974. And if you backed it each-way, you couldn’t lose (it came second 1975 and 1976 and retired with a victory rollover in 1977).  Bookies complained that Red Rum spelled backwards was MURDER. Even my da, who didn’t back horses won money regularly with Red Rum, but there wasn’t that big a queue of bookies to pay the toll and jump off the swanky new Erskine Bridge. The toll fee must have put them off.

But a run of hedges one after the other was, invariably, called The Grand National. There was always that hedge which you jumped over and there was a drop of three or four feet. We had that when jumped the hedges up Barrie Quad. Or some would-be gardener set traps and you’d jump a hedge and nearly lose your balls on a bamboo rod acting as a support to some plant we didn’t know the name of.

There was competition between different areas to see who could have the best bonfire. Tam was the guy for that, because he smoked while in his pram, and he always had matches.  Every kid got involved dragging out old mattresses from the backs of houses, picking up chairs and nicking bits of wood from nearby building sites. Scaffolding would mysteriously disappear from the around the new-build housing on Second Avenue, across from Singers Park.

You had to keep an eye out for the watchie on site, but you also had to keep an eye out that other boys didn’t come into your area and stick a match under the stuff you’d collected before Bonfire night.  He’d never catch you, because he was an old guy.

Tam was an old guy, but he’d already set himself up in the snooker club beside The Lerags as a second home. You could play all night, after you’d rigged the meter. And when somebody else was hitting the balls about, there was always a card game going. Tam wasn’t a gambler, but he kept his hand in.

‘Fucking, try a shot,’ Tam would tell you when he played pool next door.

Tam was a man for the lock-ins. He told me one night, ‘All they barmaids want to shag me—and I’m gonnae let them’.

I had to laugh. Tam could fling an arm around you and be your brother or your da. If he thought you’d done something wrong he’d put that Swiggie glower on and pull you up. ‘You’re just a wank,’ he’d say, and tell you why you’d never be good looking as him.

 He’d a sense of outrage and moral code from which you could take a bearing. He was a big man in a small body.  A man you could trust.

When his mum died, he said he wanted to be with her. Every day was no longer Saturday. No fuss. No Thatcherite tears of goodbye at the changing of the guards. Tam’s bar stool empty. The little-big man had left the building.