Isobel Buchanan Reilly 1954—2023 (RIP).

Brian Reilly came to the door on Saturday to tell us his mum, Bel, had died. He likes to call Mary, Auntie Mary. She’s not really his aunt. But Mary’s son Alan and Robert washed through their house in Trafalgar Street, when the world was young, much the same as they washed through this house. Bel wasn’t their Auntie either. Mums knew better than God these things didn’t matter. The more Auntie Mary persisted in asking if he wanted anything, the more he resisted and says he’s alright. He was just letting us know.

Bel was the same age as Annie Lennox. The Biblical three-score years and ten (almost). But no bell tolling. No Bible. No talk of love and Bel being up there and looking down at us.  Life everlasting. No funeral service. No massive debt for the family to squabble over and divvy up for funeral directors’ payday. No set day for others to honour the dead and trade stories that can help with a sense of closure.

Brian was nipping down to Mac’s for the karaoke in the bar. I told him he was a pretty good singer. He’s also a pretty good storyteller. Just don’t jump in and piss him off with the punchline, ‘Lulu’ before he gets to it.

His mum’s cousin had toured with the Beatles in America. Using Scooby-Doo logic, if it wasn’t for that damned Lulu, Bel could have been another lulu, like every other lulu in  Glasgow.

Bel left school at fourteen or fifteen. A working-class wee girl from Partick, with no O’Levels. It would have been equally impossible to imagine anyone other than non-lulus from places other than Bearsden getting a university degree. But there Bel is in the picture with her gown and scroll. Three adult sons looking proudly on.  

I’m not sure if I heard her husband Jimmy Reilly singing around the closes for pennies. I am sure I hadn’t heard Bel’s voice. They used to nip in for a drink into The Drop Inn, Trafalgar Street’s gang hut on Dumbarton Road. They had two grown-up sons then, Terry and Brian. Seven or eight years before they had another, James Thomas, the baby of the family. Her other boys away creating their own Reilly dynasties, falling out and falling in.

Everybody in the Drop Inn dressed in cowboy blue denim. Had a smoker’s cough that struck suddenly like a rattlesnake so they had something to wake up for in the morning. But Jimmy Reilly went further than most. He’d go somewhere like the Town Hall and pull out his six-gun. No survivors left with their dignity intact.

Bel dressed as an American Indian. Put on some beads. Tied her hair like Hiawatha and kept her head down. Either that or dressing like a big boobed, Dolly Parton Christmas tree, with too much tinsel. Lots of belting out Stand By Your Man or the stabbing pains of full stops and D.I.V.O.R.C.E today. No decent women in Dalmuir liked anything other than a maudlin ending to greet over on a night out tippling vodka with their pals. Always keep your tomahawk sharpened and under the pillow. Widow’s Allowance was around a tenner and that was enough for a good woman to get on with when he asked what was for tea.      

After the Second World War, post-war baby-boom, legally there was only two ways of dying. A sudden jolt and dropping dead of a heart attack, if you knew what was good for you. The longer square-go. Relatives took your arm and whispered about the BIG C as if it was cholera or contagious as tuberculosis. Whisper it, Bel had the Big C, but she’d had it before. She beat it up but it claimed her again as if often does.

She knew the score. Hard choices.  The blood nurse leaves with no blood in your arms or legs. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy.  A mixed bag of pain and pain relief. None of them therapeutic. Your body falls apart. Your hair falls out. Mouth ulcers. Food becomes tasteless. Anorexia. Gut rot. Incontinence. Nausea. Sickness and being unable to sleep.  Your getting better when you’re able to stop hugging the toilet pan. You will rise from the dead is the cry of no surrender.   

Isobel Buchanan was born in Glasgow the same year Colville’s Steel works in Motherwell became Ravenscraig, a nationalised industry. A steel plant that employed thousands and tens of thousands indirectly. Full employment. Nationalised B.O.A.C’s four-engine plane crashed at Prestwick Airport. Celtic were Scottish League and Scottish Cup winner. But the Buchanan family were Protestants and loyalists to the Rangers cause.

No blacks, no Catholics and no dogs were scrawled signs in rented accommodation. A no wogs sign for domestic dogs that roamed the streets unchallenged shitting on pavements, front greens and football pitches. Dyslexia didn’t exist. An unwritten law. Catholics were regarded as a different ginger breed. Dyslexic dogs couldn’t ask them what the sign meant. No Iftie’s shop for bread and milk. No Paki shops for fags. No Ramjams for Space Invaders and cans of Kestrel. No Chinkies. Unrationed prejudices fed to us as British nostalgia by our so-called betters and comedians plying the working-men’s clubs that came on after the strippers.   

Old Mother Riley a fictional and feckless Irish washerwoman and charlady played by an Irish male actor, like Mrs Brown’s Boys today was an overnight success jumping from stage to radio plays to the big screen and meant to mirror reality. 1954 was the last year of its incarnation. The first year of Bel’s life.

James Terence Reilly was no mug. An older man, he was 23. Isobel Buchanan was 16 going on 17 when they were married in 1971, the year of the Ibrox Disaster and Decimalisation. A Sunday Mail cost 9d.

A Daily Record cost 3p, when Rangers won the Cup Winners Cup in Barcelona. The Spanish police beat the shit out of them when in their V-necks and flared denim they invaded the pitch thinking it was all over. The shame in Spain didn’t register because Terence James Reilly was born. He attended Protestant schools, and grew up to support Celtic.

Brian Reilly asked me to write about his mum. I said I couldn’t because I didn’t know her. He said it didn’t matter. It does. Funeral or no funeral. Not just a ritual. Honour your mother. It’s in the Bible. Inscribed on all our hearts. To sons in her family it matters most of all. Amen.