Stephen O’Donnell 1959—1995 [1]

I was living in the studio flat on Castle Street, when I heard the knock on the door. My eldest sister, Josephine, or Jo as we called her, was standing with her back to the railings. My flat was a bit of a dump and she never visited—nor would have I expected her to.

‘Is it mum?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

My Auntie Phyllis was Stephen’s godmother. That was in the unlikely event of my mum or da’s death she agreed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith. They took those kinds of things more seriously in those days, because most of the men like my da, had fought in the second world war. And events like 46 coal miners killed at a pit disaster in Lanarkshire in the year he was born was front-page news, but not unexpected. Britain was an island of coal floating in the North Atlantic, and it was the coal from miners that drove the industrial revolution. George Orwell wrote that it was one of the few occupations that  managers handed workers a brass tag, much like a soldier’s, in case they didn’t make it back to the surface, and they could easily identify them with it. They still made boats on the Clyde and my da worked in the yards.  In the same year, Dave Mackay, the Hearts and Scotland skipper was transferred to Spurs for a record fee of £30 000. A postage stamp was 2d. A Daily Record was much the same price, and Ken Dodd was on the telly. He was still on the telly the year my brother died in 1995, but Thatcherism had destroyed the coal industry, and used tax revenues from the North Sea to pay for the increasing numbers of unemployed, including my da.

Stephen wasn’t the first-born son, my mum suffered a miscarriage a boy, (Michael) but he’d an older sister to order him about, Josephine. He was, by default, the firstborn son and inherited everything da owned. Which wasn’t very much, he’d put down a £50 deposit on a tenement flat, 726 Dumbarton Road, coal fire in the grate, and a double sink for washings and a mangle, and they filled it with things bought cheap.  A wooden table and chairs. A couch that sagged in the middle, with cotton material chewed and spat out by in increasing number of passing O’Donnell children, apart from myself who was a contented baby that sat and smiled. They made things to last in those day’s cry can still be heard, but even if it didn’t, we took that couch with us when we flitted to a bigger and colder prefabricated council house—with a bathroom—ten years later, but it was more a spineless ghost couch, but all we could afford.  

The legacy of being a first-born son was also a rule book of the way boys should behave. We didn’t see our da’s until night time and were mummy’s boys and girls. But when Stephen came up the stairs in his short trouser and blurted out, crying, that a bigger boy had hit him, my da grabbed him his anorak hood picked him up and carried him to the door and flung him out into the close.

‘Don’t come back here until you’ve battered him,’ he was warned.

Boys didn’t cry. Outside the tenement closes and backcourts were our playgrounds, with the old wash houses filled with dust and junk and falling into disrepair. Bins lining the lanes where rats fed.  It was a naturally dim, grey square where I was blooded. Fighting with my cousin, Charlie Porter, with my brother and Jim McFadden standing over me until I’d given him a proper doing, pinned him down by the arms and punched him. His thick, Joe-90 type glasses fell off his face as he squirmed to get away and cried.

I fought with my sister Phyllis, who was almost two years older than me, even though you weren’t supposed to hit girls. My mum warned me if I punched a girl in the stomach she could die. Next time we fought, I slapped her and punched her in the stomach—and waited—but she didn’t die. She punched me back and gave me a doing.

My brother Bod was too wee to fight. Stephen was too big and mean. He’d gotten himself a bit of a reputation as a hardman, and a nickname SEV. He wrote in school jotters and daubed it on walls with paint, the S like an SS Germanic insignia code. It found its way onto the back covers of his Mud albums. I wasn’t to touch them, or his record player, or anything else that he hadn’t thought of. I definitely wasn’t to touch them—or he’d know.  Quick to punch and kick and ask questions later.

As a childish dare he climbed up the drainpipe and sat on our windowsill, three-storeys high. My Uncle John was in the house at the time and tiptoed to the window, opened it slowly and wrestled him inside.

He’d cut open his foot when trying to kick away a bottle he’d put a banger inside and hadn’t waited for it to explode. Only his shoe saved him from serious injury. But while our mum threatened to hit us with her slipper, which as we got older we used to laugh at, our da, didn’t threaten, he hit out—but only if you deserved it. And Stephen, as oldest boy, that should have known better, always seemed to get the worst of it.

He took my sister’s Phyllis hand and took her downstairs and on to an Auchenshuggle bus. They were half way to Glasgow before the conductor worked out there wasn’t an adult with them and they couldn’t pay their fare. He was the eldest son and should have known better. He got a beating for that.

Josephine, or Jo, our eldest sister, like many other first-born daughters was mother surrogates. Little mothers that dressed us, took us out in our Silvercross pram with the big front wheel at the back that allowed her to pull it up the three flight of stairs. Jo took us up to school on the first day and took us home. She’d threaten us:

‘Stop picking your nose.

‘Stop biting your nails.

‘Stop making that noise.

‘Stop breathing in that funny way.

‘Wash your hands.’  

A litany of things we had to abide by. Stephen didn’t. They fought too. When we moved up to the new house in Dickens Avenue, they’d be teenagers, and when mum and da was out, she was in charge. Their fight started with the usual,

‘I’m no daeing that.’

‘Aye, you ur,’

‘No, I’m no.’

A bit of shoving each other in front of the telly (obviously, Stephen didn’t know if he punched her in the stomach that would kill her). He slapped her face. And she pushed him hard and he fell through the living-room window and into the garden. Jo won that fight.

And when I was in Primary 1 or 2 and an older boy took the ball of us in the playground near the locked toilets, and wouldn’t give it back, I attacked him, but he punched me in the face. I’d the broad O’Donnell nose that always bleeds. I knew it wouldn’t be long until Stephen hunted him down and battered him. But just before Stephen left school, when he was sixteen, he got into a fight with Gary Parks up the street, and he lost. It was like my favourite team had been beaten.  I didn’t see it, and refused to believe it.