Gandhi on the Tube. But I don’t remember his saying, ‘There’s a body on the line at Marble Arch’ in the film. They are using other famous quotes too, but the one from the Koran emptied the train.
I was quite into socialism and read stuff like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and George Orwell. I was quite an idealistic wee boy and I’d read quite a lot of political stuff by the time I was about 14. By 16 I joined the Labour Party. That didn’t seem like such a great place for an idealist. Or anyone with a low boredom threshold. It’s a rarely mentioned fact that politicians rise through the ranks by being able to sit through endless grim meetings. This inevitably means that we are governed by monsters. A few months of screaming inwardly during speeches about council business and I drifted off. It’s not like our political system even gets stuff done. Motorists now have to dodge a pothole for every 120 yards of road in Britain. It’s estimated it will take 13 years and cost £1 billion before council workers will finish standing around staring at all of them.
Politicians are just innately ridiculous and their lives can’t really bear the weight of much scrutiny. As a teenager I campaigned for Labour in a Glasgow by-election. The candidate was Mike Watson, who seemed like a reasonably genuine, socialist-minded character. He was elected, forgot about the socialism and later became Lord Watson. When I heard that he’d tried to burn down a hotel at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards I assumed that he’d had a change of heart. Mike must have had an epiphany, I reasoned, surrounded by these braying crooks at their annual backslapper. Realising what he had done with his life he must have tried to bring the whole place down about their heads like a modern-day Samson! I did a gig at that hotel recently and the staff told me that he’d started the fire because they’d stopped serving him at the bar. My dad always had a generally socialist outlook. His philosophy was a strange mixture of apathy and class war. He didn’t want to smash the state but he wished that someone would. The good thing was that he would talk to us about stuff like that and we had an idea that the world might be a bit different from what we saw on the news. Once, my headmistress held a discussion about nuclear war, a subject I had questioned people endlessly about due to fear.
‘Did you know that there are underground bunkers where key people will go when there’s a nuclear alert?’ she asked the generally baffled class.
‘Yes Miss! My dad says that all the top politicians will go there.’
‘That’s right Frankie, a lot of key people will be taken there, so that the country will be able to keep running.’
‘Dad said that if he knew where one was, he’d get a shotgun when the four-minute warning went off and shoot everybody as they went in!’
My music teacher stood in a Glasgow by-election. He was a foaming Nationalist and once demonstrated the battle tactics at Culloden to us using a clipboard (shield) and pen (sword). He got a party political broadcast, which he sung. We all rushed home to see it.
‘Oh, these are my mountains!’ he cried, gesturing at some tower blocks. ‘And this is my glen!’ He was pointing into a local canal, full of rubbish. It was fantastic.
There were pupils who struggled to get through life at school but it was the same for some of the teachers. There was a maths teacher called Mr Hughes: an unfortunately camp heterosexual who for some reason chose to wear shoes with little golden buckles. Everywhere he went kids sang ‘Mr Hughes, the Elephant Man’ to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He was a lightning rod for spitballs, paper aeroplanes and any kind of improvised missile.
There was a game where kids would inch their tables forward when the teacher turned to write something on the blackboard. Mr Hughes just didn’t have the personal confidence to address it, so we’d all end up crowded round his legs. Sometimes his face would be pressed up against the board. One time he made a joke.
‘What would you measure a waistline in, centimetres or metres or kilometres?’ he asked.
‘Metres’, said Harriet Adams, a reputedly slack lassie, being deliberately unhelpful.
‘I suppose it might be measured in metres if you were Cyril Smith,’ quipped Mr Hughes, chortling at his own joke.
We all laughed too, and kept laughing. There was an instant telepathic understanding that we were never going to stop. People outdid each other trying to laugh the loudest, the most gratingly, screaming like animals until it started to become genuinely hilarious. Tears were running down faces and people were gasping for air, shrieking. A boy clawed at his throat like he was going to suffocate. Mr Hughes stood entirely passive throughout, staring not at but through the back wall.
Mr Hughes decided that teaching was not for him and left to become a bus driver. Fate is cruel and his route took him directly by the school. People would run out in their lunchtime to the bus-stop and sing the ‘Elephant Man’ song at him when he opened the doors, waving their arms up against their faces like trunks.
Our science teacher was called Mr Clarkson. He was always drunk and would drop things on the floor so he could try to look up the girls’ skirts. Every week he gave a mumbling, incoherent lecture called ‘The Life of a Battery’. It didn’t appear anywhere on the syllabus and even with repetition nobody was ever able to piece together exactly what it was he was saying.
Remember that old joke about the Pope needing a heart transplant? He drops a feather from his balcony and whoever it lands on has to give the Pope his heart. When he looks down he sees thousands of people all blowing desperately. Well, Clarkson had a version of that. If the class grew restless while he rubbed out and redrew his battery diagram he would decide that somebody was getting a ‘punishment exercise’. He’d push a piece of paper down one of those big, long science tables and whoever it stopped at would take the punishment. Of course we all blew like fuck. I remember seeing a mum up at the school complaining about the number of undeserved punishments her son kept getting, not realising it was because he was an asthmatic.
PE was generally dreaded. The teachers seemed to occupy something of an educational hinterland. Nominally a teacher but actually just a guy who likes running and throwing stuff. They were obsessed with getting us to climb ropes and wall-bars, like they were preparing us for a career in the eighteenth-century merchant navy. Our main teacher was a fitness nut called Mr McKean. At our first lesson he gave us a long speech about how flexibility peaked at twelve and explained that we were all stiffening towards death. Then we played dodgeball.
We had an annual football event where everybody played a class that was a year older. It was notorious for its brutality and warming up there was the testosterone level of a botched prison break. I waited for the opening whistle and ran straight at the smallest guy on the other team and hoofed him right in the balls. I had to do laps for an hour but the scene I was running round looked like a kung fu tribute to Saving Private Ryan.
In second year there was a big formal run that everybody dreaded. Five miles round a big cinder-ash marsh. I came 123rd out of 132 boys. The fattest boy in the school was a guy called Chris Katos, whose dad ran a kebab shop. On the second lap I spotted him hiding under a bush at the side of the track, eating an enormous bag of pakora. It was like something from The Dandy.
Our drama class was taken by Miss Skillen – a little middle-aged woman with huge tits forming an obscene shelf at right angles to her body. Occasionally producers would come into the school and host auditions for parts in TV dramas. They can’t all have been like this, but the ones I went to always had English producers looking for people to play stereotypical heavy Glaswegians. I remember they were casting somebody to play a drug dealer and there was an audition piece where boys had to shake down a smaller boy for money. Everybody loved this guy called Gazza Greer, who delivered a performance of some gusto. The role wasn’t a huge stretch for him because he was an actual drug dealer. He came into
