george devine

George Devine died before lockdown. He wouldn’t have known what it meant, or recognised it as a historical event of before and—I hadn’t seen him in decades and bumped into him standing in his garden in Cedar Avenue, beside the ‘Reckie’ football pitches, where we used to play football. Where I used to play football. We were much the same age as Ally McCoist, but as Catholics we kicked with the wrong foot. The same foot as Charlie Nicholas.  I’d a theory, at one time, that all the best players were alkies. George disproved it. He was one of the wee wiry guys that wouldn’t have been able to get into any team. His blond hair had melted away like the snow on a sauna roof. He was dressed in the kind of stuff I got every Christmas: nylon jacket to keep out the rain, sweatshirt and grey joggies.  But he looked and sounded much the same as when we went to St. Stephen’s Primary school and St. Andrew’s Secondary.

 He was considering cutting the front lawn. ‘That fat cow’s in there sleeping,’ he said. ‘She’s a lazy bastard.’

I hadn’t met his beloved, so we went through the usual ‘what you being doing with yourself’ routine.

I’m sure George had a brother or two, but he didn’t mention them, maybe even a sister. We’d a commonwealth of shared experiences. Back then our expectant mothers were taken away to Braeholm in Helensburgh. That would be logged on our birth lines for the rest of our lives. I wasn’t expected to live. Then again with the Cuban Missile Crisis our world’s survival was put on standby. And we’d one of the coldest winters on record. Around half our bird population fell from the sky and died, and sparrows turned cannibal. But we weren’t so sentimental about animals. All the cats and dogs were shot after the Clydebank blitz. Major cities, including London, had a policy of killing pets. But I battled back to become a smiling, cheery, baby.

 That ended, of course, when we started school at the age of five. Our mums would have taken us along Dumbarton Road. Mum would have held my hand as she bumped the Silvercross pram with my baby brother in it, the big wheels at the back like wagon wheels, up the Cressie stairs and up round past the railway and the new St Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church on Park Road. The old church had been destroyed in the Clydebank Blitz and parishioners had used the church hall for services.  A wall had been built at the back of the church to separate it from the school, but, of course, there was a gate.

Mass was no longer celebrated in Tridentine Latin. That ended the year we were born, but the priests were old school. As a Catholic school access was a given. God loved us and our sole purpose was to worship him. Since He was invisible, his priests were a visible manifestation of His holy terror. Many of the pupils were of Irish Catholic stock and our parents or grandparents had come to Clydebank to find manual work in the yards or factories. The headmaster of the school had the same name as our family: Mr O’Donnell.

His office was next to the back gate of the church. He was around five-foot tall and wore the obligatory dark suit and shirt and tie of management, but in shades of green. He sported a soft Panama hat, which he took off his bald head and doffed in the presence of ladies. One former woman teacher, later to become a headmistress, told me he only spoke to her three times when she taught in St. Stephens. Once was to stick his head in the door and to tell her she had a phone call, which was frowned upon. St. Stephen’s was Mr O’Donnell’s fiefdom.

Katherine Hone, who was in the same class as George and me, said she was told to report to his office, and she’d been terrified. Pupils going to Mr O’Donnell were most likely to be punished by him with six of the belt for serious misdemeanours. I got sent to his office in Primary Seven, for example, for dogging it. But Mr O’Donnell didn’t give girls the belt. He’d noticed her in the playground in her green dress and gold blouse. He’d thought her the perfect candidate to take a note around each classroom telling the teacher the school was closing early. When Celtic won the European Cup in 1967, our first year at Primary school, he shut the school the next day giving teachers and pupils the day off in celebration. The school team played in the green and white hoops. And when Celtic won on a Saturday, as they usually did, we could expect to get home early, or a half day knocked off the week.

Male teachers couldn’t be expected to teach in infant school. Mrs Boyle was our first teacher. She wore blouse and skirt and her long black hair made her seem taller. Fifty-two of us in the old building, where you had to open the windows at the top with a brass fitting attached to a long pole.  Our class included three sets of twins. The Hone’s, Martin and Katherine; Deeney’s, Rosemary and Isabel; and McKenna’s, Jim and George.  The bell rung at 9.15a.m and we had to get into our lines and march into our classroom in twos. Prefects kept order on the corridor and stairs. A statue of the Virgin Mary, her heel crushing a snake, was on a plinth on the first floor. When she wasn’t gazing up at heaven, she also kept an eye on you to see if you spent a penny on sweets, or gave it to the teacher for the black babies. When we got into the class we had to salute the teacher. Girls bowed their head or curtsied.

‘Good Morning, Mrs Boyle,’ we’d cry in the kind of sing-song voice we’d rattle though the times tables.

Our mum had dropped off a sobbing wreck on that first day, never to return. For seven years, we were a small army of occupation, prone to indiscipline, nits and peeing ourselves. Noel Behan shat himself, but that was an accident. But there was no child obesity because in the same way you never got fat locusts, with big families there was enough food—if it wasn’t a potato, it wasn’t dinner—or sweets to go around. A packet of biscuits would be thrown in the air and empty by the time the wrapper reached the ground.

Our teacher’s job was to keep us occupied until we went to Secondary School. Report cards all had the same things on them, you generally were doing well, but fidgeted, didn’t pay enough attention…

I was paying as much attention to what George was telling me as my mum had to report cards. He told me he couldn’t work anymore, because his memory was jiggered, he kept falling over and having epileptic fits. But he had to go up the town and do one of those ‘fitness for work’ things.

It was too late to tell him that during lockdown all those medics employed by a private company, but working for the government, became temporarily unemployed themselves. George wasn’t very good at tests. He failed it be dying. RIP.