The Truth

I'll just have to be open with you. My last post, Crime Story, is not fiction. It actually happened. Not exactly as I portrayed it but essentially yes, two cops did apprehend me outside the Daily Record print works in Hope Street in...let's think...must have been 1967. And it was about one or two in the morning, but I wasn't thinking about getting a lift in the paper delivery van to take me back down the road; I didn't know you could do that at that time, I found out about that a year or two later, and her and me did get a lift from Glasgow to Greenock, after we'd hitched up from London, in the very van. But that's another story.

So there I was, gazing in the window at the old printing machinery when these two cops came up to me and said 'What were you doing in that doorway, son'? It was the night that I met Billy Connelly . Well I say I met him, a friend of mine was trying to persuade him to help him to set up a folk gig in Ardrossan. My friend knew him and was hoping that Billy's rising celebrity (this was long before he first appeared on Parkinson by the way) would be just the thing to give the project a boost. I was just kind of hanging around on the fringes of the group looking, I hoped, part of this cool scene.

We were in the Tunnel Bar which was built into the railway arches near to the old St. Enoch station, Howard Street or thereabouts if you know Glasgow. The place was mobbed with hippy, folky types who had all decanted from the regular folk-scene haunt of the Scotia Bar on Stockwell Street. There had been some kind of falling oot with the landlord of the Scotia and the folkies had all walked out in a huff and took over the Tunnel Bar. So there we were, guitars, banjoes, melodeons, penny whistles, all Aran jumpers and wispy beards, giving it laldy with our non-conformist "folksongs". It was all very progressive, and more than a touch precious.

Anyway the whole scene going, it seems, was not going down too well with some of the Tunnel Bar regulars because, as the night was drawing to a close with a final chorus of The Wild Rover or whatever and the barman was shouting last orders (this was the time by the way when the pubs in Scotland shut at ten o'clock so at ten to ten they would clatter a bell or flash the lights just to be sure you got the message), there was what I can only describe as carnage brought down on our hippy heads. The barman, who must have been in on the thing, flashed the lights but paused in the task and for a longish period - it was maybe only thirty seconds but it seemed like a fucking eternity - he kept the lights off and, while it was pitch dark, apart from the glow from the few illuminated beer signs, a hail of empty glass tumblers were flung across the room in our direction. It was fucking mayhem. Women were screaming, I was fucking screaming, glass was smashing off the walls behind us and it was total panic. I dived under a table and mercifully the lights came on and it stopped.

When I stood up there were these two guys, that it was only two came as a shock, but there they stood, between us and the door, a beer tumbler in each hand. 'C'mon ya bastards!' Fuck only knows what it was about us that annoyed them but they were determined to make their point. Maybe they just took exception to the long-haired flower children taking over their pub. I mean the place was the kind of tip that you almost had to be thrown into but it was their territory and here were these fuckers with mandolins cluttering up the place and singing depressing dirges about the highland clearances. Come to think of it they could have had a point.

I can't exactly recall how we got out of there, but we somehow ducked out past the nutters and found ourselves on the street, a rough dozen or so, and it seemed that miraculously nobody was seriously hurt. Some cuts and grazes and guitars rattling with broken glass inside them. Anyway there we were, timmed out into the street but relatively unscathed. This guy was waxing on about how this was just another manifestation of conformist society's inability to tolerate the new free-thinking, free-loving generation. 'They don't like our long hair, man' he said to me but, glancing at my prematurely thinning pate and short back and sides, he hesitated and said 'Or our clothes'. And then he said 'Are you going to the party?' Well I wasn't but I was now. I looked around but the friends I had come with had disappeared, maybe they were still in the pub.. ach, fuck it. So we dived in to the St. Enoch subway station and headed for the west end.

And that was how I ended up in a flat somewhere in Glasgow's west end, having blagged my way in to this party. It was great, I'd finally made it, in with the in-crowd. And the women! I was in heaven and the beer was free. I kind of lost touch with the people from the pub and was beginning to fear I was looking conspicuous when this girl grabbed - I mean it, she really grabbed - me and pulled me into a cupboard. Without preamble we were necking (you remember the term?) furiously. She was the loveliest creature and she had picked me! But before we could take things a stage further the door opened and this guy, who apparently owned the flat and who was getting a little pissed off about all these gate-crashers drinking his beer, told us to desist our filthy goings on and get out. It transpired that the girl was a gate-crasher too so we had to go.

There we were out on the street with libidos on the boil and nowhere to go. She (I don't remember her name, I don't even know if I asked what it was) was a nurse and she shared a flat with another nurse who was at home and that, apparently, put the flat out of bounds. Maybe her flatmate wasn't the free-thinker my companion was, anyway look here; we're in the region of Kelvingrove and here's a gap in the fence which leads us to a dark path down through the trees beside the River Kelvin. It was a fairly mild and dry night and.. ach we were young and randy, even if it had really been a night of smirr and freezing cold I still think we'd have given it a go. Anyway not much later we re-emerged, her with grass on her arse and me with grass on my knees and elbows.

She gave me her phone number and I gave her mine and we promised to keep in touch, and I bummed the cost of a taxi from her to get back to Central Station and she told me sweetly how she knew what it was like to be financially embarrassed. That was the first time I had ever heard that euphemism and it would forever remind me of that moment, long after I had forgotten almost everything about the girl who said it. We kissed goodbye and I rode the taxi back to the Central Station.

I stood looking up at the destination board and I could see that the last train to Gourock had left twenty minutes ago. Well you know the rest. Oh aye, the body. When the polis man gave it a shove with his boot an old drunk woman emerged from under the pile of rags that was covering her and mumbled 'Fuck ye waant? Lay's alane'.
'Right, son. Make yerself scarce' said the cop. So I did.

Crime Story

I stood looking up at the destination board and I could see that the last train to Gourock had left twenty minutes ago. I tried looking at my watch again and then looking up again at the board but the facts refused to change. The train was still gone and I was still stuck in Glasgow Central with an expired day-return ticket and no money in my wallet.

I looked around me at the other people on the station concourse. Some lucky ones had grabbed a seat on one of the few benches that British Rail had deigned to provide. They obviously didn’t want to encourage the dossers. I leaned against a pillar and waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting on, inspiration maybe. What the hell was I going to do all night? Where would I go? And how was I going to get home in the morning with only a dud ticket to my name? I waited patiently but answer came there none.

The platform information above me was gradually petering out. A few last minute lucky travellers rushed past to board the final trains out of the station. The concourse was virtually empty now and the floor sweeping machines were out brushing up the days detritus. The transport police were now beginning to appear in numbers for the final clearout of the drunks and dossers. I thought I’d better make a move before I was lifted and headed out of the station towards Hope Street. As I passed the Central Hotel the revolving door threw out a group of young people, three couples, about my age, affluent and handsome, laughing and kissing as they fell into taxis, oblivious of the rest of the world, insulated from the cold. I hated them.

I crossed Gordon Street and walked up Hope Street with no plan of where to go, just knowing that I had to keep walking to keep warm. By this time it was about one o’clock, the streets were quiet and the rain began to fall. When I say it began to fall that would suggest it was subject to gravity. That would be normal rain. This wasn’t normal rain, it was smirr. People who are not from Scotland would perhaps call it Scotch Mist but people from this part of Scotland anyway call it by the name that describes both how it looks and how it feels, smirr. Rather than just fall to the ground and get out of your way, smirr hangs around and tries its best to be friends with you. No matter that you hurry on past to get out of its damp grip it just won’t take the hint. It persists, enveloping, infiltrating your clothing until you’re just a heap of wet rags with water running off your nose. But I wasn’t that wet yet although I soon would be if I didn’t find somewhere to go, out of the smirr.

I crossed Hope Street and wandered back down towards the station. A drunk man was leaning against a building, his body at and angle of forty five degrees, his chin slumped on his chest as he contemplated the colourful circle of vomit he had just created on the pavement. He looked up at me as I passed as if he wanted to share the wonder of the moment with me. I hurried on before we had the opportunity to become acquainted. A little bit lower down Hope Street I came to the offices of the Daily Record and Sunday Mail. I paused in front of one of the large plate glass windows, gazing hypnotically at the printing machinery churning out the early edition of the Mail. As I paused there it suddenly stuck me. What an idiot! The newspaper van. I remembered some guys at work telling how they skived a lift off the paper van after they’d missed the last train home. It would be leaving in an hour or so, dropping off the papers in Greenock by about five o’clock. Maybe I’d get lucky.

I turned away from the window to look for some access to the rear of the building, to where I guessed the loading dock would be, when suddenly my arms were pinned to my sides and I was pushed forcibly back against the plate glass.
‘What were you doing in that doorway, son?’
Two big guys in plain clothes, somehow it was obvious to me that they were policemen, held onto me.
‘What doorway?’ I said. ‘I wasn’t in any doorway.’ I stifled the instinct to cry out for my mammy.
‘Aye ye wirr! The other cop snarled into my face. ‘Let’s go and have a wee look.’

The two cops marched me back up the street, each keeping a firm grip of a wrist and an elbow. We came to a doorway. A less than salubrious old red sandstone office building. Above the arched entrance a faded gilt sign - Waterloo Chambers. The doors into the building were set back from the street inside a deep unlit entrance. In the gloom I could see, lying on the tiled floor, a body.

What An Accolade!

If you type "old shite" into Google, West Coast Ramblings comes second. How good is that!

A Star Called Henry - Roddy Doyle

I’ve just finished A Star Called Henry. What a cracking read; the narrative just fairly gallops along and the imagery is so clever and engaging. I felt as if I was being swept along in a torrent of language, imagery.. testosterone. The pace is tremendous.

Our hero, Henry, is the son of Melody and Henry Smart. Henry Sr. is a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and part-time assassin for one of Dublin’s power-mongers. Melody is a broken woman, laid low by the loss of too many babies and a life of grinding poverty. The life of grinding poverty is a little at odds with the fact that Henry Sr. is never out of work but we take it as read.

The story takes us from Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century and starts with young Henry’s imagined tale of his maternal grandmother’s early days in the city:-

She might have walked from Roscommon or Clare, pushed on by the stench of the blight, walked across the country till she saw the stone-eating smoke that lay over the piled, sagging fever-nests that made our beautiful city, walked in along the river, deeper and deeper, into the filth and shit, the noise and the money. A young country girl, never kissed, never touched, she was scared, she was thrilled. She turned around and back around and saw the four corners of hell. Her heart cried for Leitrim but her tits sang for Dublin. She got down on her back and yelled at the sailors to form a queue. Frenchmen, Danes, Chinamen, the Yanks. I don’t know. A young girl, a waif, just a child, aching for food. She’d left her family dead in a ditch, their chops green with grass juice, their bellies set to explode in the noonday sun. I don’t know any of this. She might have been…

Henry conspires to imagine the legend of his parents and grandparents backgrounds while, simultaneously constructing the legend of himself. His story sweeps through Ireland’s fight for independence, and crucially the events of the occupation of Dublin’s GPO during the 1916 Easter Uprising. Henry is “there” fighting alongside, and rutting lustily in the basement at the height of the battle, with his old schoolteacher, the feisty Miss O’Shea.

Doyle places Henry at the heart of these historical events and we can view them and the major players, Michael Collins, Joseph Plunkett, Patrick Pearse etc., through the prism of Henry’s “eye-witness”. This allows Doyle to impose his own interpretation on these historical events, the main players, and their consequences and this becomes especially important when the novels characters provide their own justification for engaging in some terrible and murderous acts. I was especially taken by Henry’s fellow rebel, Jack Dalton, when he and Henry were discussing the outcome of their “struggle”.

- It’ll soon be over, I said.
- I will in its hole, said Jack. – You don’t honestly think that, do you?
- It had crossed my mind, I said;.
- Uncross it then, he said. – We haven’t a hope, man. Am I depressing you at all?
- No.
- Good. We cannot win and winning is not our intention. What we have to do, all we can do, is keep them at it until it becomes unbearable. To provoke them and make them mad. We need reprisals and innocent victims and outrages, and we need them to give them to us. To keep at them until the costs are so heavy they’ll decide to go. But we’ll never beat them.

You'll note here that the innocent victims and the outrages are to be given to the rebels by the Brits and I wonder if Doyle has the airbrush out here. Otherwise that is as good a rationale for terrorism as you’re likely to come across anywhere and Doyle, through Henry, continues to make the point when Henry is engaged in training of his guerrilla fighters in Ireland’s far west.

This is a great book. A great read with everything you would want in a story - love, romance, sex, war, grief, and finally redemption. Doyle has a way with narrative, and this story, unlike some of his others, is mainly narrative with less dialogue than we expect of him. The novel is written in the first person with Henry Smart as the narrator. I like the style of Doyle’s books whereby he eschews quotation marks in dialogue in favour of just a simple – at the beginning of the line to show us the character is speaking. It makes the process simple and, I think, contributes to the pace of the story.