was born exactly five months after Mamie’s wedding day, on 25 April 1941. She, William and Mamie moved into the grubby apartment in Dover Street, and attempted to have a life together. It was a boring one for the seventeen-year-old, who was simply not ready for marriage, let alone motherhood. She tried to cope with the baby most of the day, expecting some amusement in the evening, but when William came home, he had a face like a wet Monday and buried himself in his newspaper. Her second pregnancy must have been as unwelcome as the first, but Billy arrived nineteen months after Florence.
Billy’s current nickname, ‘The Big Yin’, does not refer to his birth weight, but it would have fitted. He was an absolutely enormous newborn: eleven pounds, four ounces, to be exact. Mamie endured her labour alone, first in the freezing alcove, then finally squatting on the kitchen floor, no doubt fully regretting the day she had first met the co-perpetrator of her agony, who was by now busy planning his own escape. William’s engineering skills were demanded by the Royal Air Force, so he flew far away to tend the engines of Lancaster bombers in India, Burma and Africa. Like thousands of other wartime brides, Mamie wondered if he would ever return.
It was the tradition in those times for girls who had left the family house to visit their mothers on Sundays. As far as rationing would allow, Flora would cook a Sunday dinner of stew and dumplings, or leftovers and ‘stovies’, a dish made with potatoes and onions. All the family gathered then. Hughie would help Mamie get the pram up and down the stairs and he soothed the little ones while Mamie chatted. But, apart from Sundays, Mamie had little of the social contact she craved. She rarely heard from her husband. His sisters Margaret and Mona would look in from time to time, but Mamie hated their nosiness and attempts to take control. She thought they came more to criticize than to help. ‘She’s just a daft wee girl,’ sneered Mona behind her back.
Overcrowding and poor maintenance always ensured that tenement life spilled out into the streets, the grimy domain of vendors and tramcars being an extension of the inhabitants’ living space. Socially, the tenement was a vertical village, and everyone knew everyone. A neighbour, Mattie Murphy, who was about the same age as Mamie, sometimes watched the infants when Mamie left the flat to do her washing in ‘the steamie’, as Glaswegian public laundries were called. She claims Billy was ‘a cheeky wee devil’. He was full of mischief and had no problem answering back. One teatime, Mattie was cutting up a sticky bun covered with pink icing when Billy spied the end piece that had the most icing. ‘I want that fucking piece!’ It was startling language for a three-year-old.
‘You’ll get none,’ threatened Mattie.
‘Then I’ll touch you with my chookie.’ The infant hard-man began to unbutton his flies but, after catching sight of Mattie’s horrified face, he ran around and pinched her bottom instead. He got no iced bun that day.
It was not the only preview of Billy’s renowned outrageousness. Mattie’s daughter, Roseanne, was sitting on the pavement with some other children one day after an exhausting game of ‘Peever’, a variation of hopscotch that was played with a can of shoe polish. Billy came sauntering along the road and decided that he needed to pee. In those days, little boys would just unbutton their flies and urinate into the gutter but, while he was doing so, Billy caught sight of the adjacent group of girls and just couldn’t resist turning sideways and spraying their backs. He was definitely a handful.
Mattie found Dover Street life in the 1940s more riveting than the music hall. A woman whose livelihood was prostitution resided on the ground floor of one of the buildings. The residents of Dover Street apparently conspired to help this woman rip off her customers by ganging up on the men after they had paid their shillings. ‘Bugger off.’ they would cry. ‘You’re giving the place a bad name!’
This conspiratorial behaviour, however, was sporadic. Quite often the temperamental sex-worker would go for an evening stroll in her underwear, challenging other women who lived in the street, whom she accused of gossiping about her, to come out and fight. It got to the point where residents would bring chairs out each night and sit waiting for the show to begin.
Tragically, Mattie lost her own son. He was home from school with a cold and, short of clean nightwear, his mother had insisted he put on his sister’s nightgown to keep warm. When both parents were out, Mattie’s boy leaned over too close to the fire and a spark sent his nightgown up in flames. His sister was powerless to save him. Before the boy was buried, the streetwalker amazed everyone by turning up and throwing herself on his boy-sized coffin in a great demonstration of wailing and sadness, shouting heavenward at the top of her voice. ‘Why couldn’t you have taken me instead of the wean? I’m bad! I’m bad!’
Billy and Florence played out on the street from a very early age. It was Mattie who searched high and low for them after they disappeared one evening. Their neighbour, Mr Cumberland, had come home from work, desperate to get to the pub. ‘You’d better get those bloody kids in first,’ said his long-suffering wife, who also liked a drink or six, which is a fact Billy omits when he tells a version of the story on stage.
Mr Cumberland had eight children, so, driven by his thirst, the wily man went out onto the street and got as many Cumberlands as he could find, then just made up the numbers with any other children he spied. Billy and Florence were scooped up with no questions asked and thrown into bed with the others. Later that night two Cumberlands were found roaming the street, which gave the search party a useful clue, and the exchange was eventually made.
If only Mattie had been asked to help out more in those first years, Billy and Florence might have had an easier time. Mamie was disintegrating, probably depressed and, unknown to her family, was abdicating responsibility for the children who were horribly neglected. Billy had pneumonia three times before he was four. Officers of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were called in when Mamie left them alone with an unguarded, blazing fire. At three years old, Florence was expected to care for Billy without an adult present. She was an anxious, often tearful child, with dark curls flopping over a high forehead and charming ‘sonsie’, or roundly appealing, face. She was always Billy’s ‘guardian angel’ as he calls her now, but she sorely needed one of her own. One evening when she was alone looking after Billy, she fell into some hot ashes. She screamed for help, but no one came. She never received medical attention at the time and as a result she lost the sight of an eye.
One winter morning in 1945, three-year-old Billy woke up wanting his mother. Wearing only a tiny vest, he went toddling along the freezing hallway to her bedroom. He hesitated just inside the door to her darkened room, surprised to see a stranger sitting on his mother’s bed. The man was brown-haired and bare-chested, and stared at Billy as he finished putting on a sock. As Billy tottered closer, the stranger shoved his bare foot up against his forehead and gently pushed him backwards until he was out in the hallway again, then closed the door with the same foot. It was Willie Adams, his mother’s lover.
Billy and Florence were alone and frightened when their mother left. She just closed the door and never came back. Eventually there was a lot of wailing and shouting, and then they were cared for by nuns in a place of polished wooden benches, stained glass and whispering. There was disagreement in the two families about who should bring up the children. Flora wanted them, but William’s sisters, Margaret and Mona, stepped in and took over. It was Mona who, responding to a neighbour’s concern about the constant crying resounding throughout the tenement, had gone along to the flat with her brother James and found Florence and Billy crouching together in the alcove bed, freezing, hungry and pitifully unkempt. She and Margaret eventually took young Billy and Florence to live in the Stewartville Street tenement in Partick that they shared with James, who was recently back from the war.
The children never saw their mother again when they were growing up. She came once to see them when they were still very young, but the aunts chased her off like a whore. Later she turned up with one of her brothers, but again, she was refused entry. That’s when Mamie punched Mona. Flattened her right
