billiard table and William would chat with his friends.
This relaxed atmosphere was a stark contrast to life at home. There, the normal misunderstandings of childhood were tolerated in Michael, but not in Billy or Florence. One day, Jesus had come into conversation at home and Billy referred to Jesus as having been a Catholic, which was his seven-year-old misunderstanding. Aunt Margaret corrected him. ‘Jesus wasn’t a Catholic, Jesus was a Jew.’
‘Oh,’ he said with innocent surprise, ‘does that mean we’re Jews?’
‘Where did you come up with that one?’ she sneered, and continued to ridicule him about that until he was in his teens. ‘Does that mean we’re Jewish?’ she would mimic him.
Even Billy’s friends who were much poorer seemed at least to have love in their houses. Frankie McBride had a mother and granddad who loved him; the McGregors down the road were a wild bunch, but their parents adored them and their house was fun. They were always shouting and laughing, and they were rejoiced in for things Billy and Florence were being pilloried for. Of an evening, the oldest girl would be going out with her boyfriend and her younger siblings would be teasing her:
‘Your boyfriend’s skelly [cross-eyed]!’
‘No he’s not!’
Their mother would intervene: ‘He’s a lovely boy. Don’t you say that!’
Then the father would stir: ‘He’s a big bloody Jessie!’
‘No he’s not!’
In the Connolly household, the children daren’t say ‘boyfriend’: there would have been an explosion. It would definitely have been unwise for Billy to have mentioned the kiss he got from pretty blonde Gracie McClintock. It happened in Plantation Park, known to Billy and his pals as ‘Planting Park’, in front of the Queen Mother maternity hospital. The Cleansing Department had a dump there where the boys would find all kinds of interesting rubbish, bits of bikes, old rags and even machine parts. One day, when he was foraging there, some friends called to him: ‘Billy! Grade’s in the bushes! If you come down here, you can get a kiss!’
So Billy joined the line of five or six youngsters and eventually it was his turn to have a totally new experience. ‘It was the nicest thing I remember from my childhood.’ he says now. ‘It was like a bird landing on my mouth. Nobody had ever kissed me before: adults, children, anyone. I used to hear boys at school complaining about their mothers kissing them, and I remember thinking, “That must be amazing! No one ever kisses me …”’
As Billy sat in his school classroom, doing battle with Rosie, he could see the windows of his home across the street, and the prospect of returning there in the evening was far from appealing. He loved having school dinners because it meant he didn’t have to go home. Mona couldn’t cook to save her life, and Margaret was worse. Billy and Florence ate mostly fried foods and foul stews, and pudding would usually be a piece of dried-up cake smothered in Bird’s Custard. Mona specialized in repulsive sprouts, and Billy was beaten in the face until he ate them. ‘Billy tried Mother’s patience,’ reports Michael. ‘She wanted things organized and she was loud about it. She would say, “It’s Billy’s turn to do the dishes” and he would say “No!” and run out.’
No doubt Billy was viewed as an ornery child. He is still disorganized and oppositional, the former being a wired-in state and the latter a coping style. Typical early difficulties for people with learning differences include tying shoes and telling the time. Billy could do neither of those things until he was around twelve years old, and he was absolutely pounded for it. Everybody tried to teach him to tie his shoes, but they all eventually lost patience. One fateful summer day, he was with his father on holiday in Rothesay. On the pier there was a clock next to a garish light display of a juggling giraffe. William was peering at it. ‘Eh, Billy, what’s the time on the clock over there?’
Billy began to reply, but never finished the sentence. ‘The big hand is on the …’
WHACK! ‘That’s not the time! What’s the time?’
‘I don’t know.’ Billy can still remember the very spot on the pavement.
‘You don’t know?’ William exploded. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How old are you?’
William’s remoteness and constant absence from home meant he knew little about his children. His role became pretty much reduced to that of ‘Special Executioner’, administering extra-harsh beatings for especially vile sins. ‘Sometimes.’ recollects Billy, ‘when father hit me, I flew over the settee backwards, in a sitting position. It was fabulous. Just like real flying, except you didn’t get a cup of tea or a safety belt or anything.’
Billy was aware that his father was thrilled with Florence’s excellent scholastic progress, although William never once told her this. Billy himself was a great disappointment, since he did not seem bright, and was rotten at football. He dreamed of having a son like Billy’s friend and hero, Vinny Maron – a football genius, even at eleven years old. When Billy and Vinny practised heading the ball against the wall, Billy barely managed to get to ten. Vinny, however, could do four hundred. Grown men would gather to watch him playing in the street. Eventually, Celtic Football Club tried to sign him up as a professional player, but he went away to become a priest and ended up drowning in a swimming accident during his time at Sacred Heart College in Spain.
There was a very insistent priesthood recruitment process at Billy’s school. A stern man in a soutane would sweep into the classroom. ‘Who doesn’t want to become a priest?’ So, of course, everyone had to want to be a priest and was required to sign a piece of paper verifying that fact.
Then the recruiter would try a new tack: ‘Does anyone want to be a Pioneer?’ This meant swearing off drink for life and, to prove it, a Pioneer wore a white enamel badge displaying a red sacred heart, with tiny gold rays emanating from it. You can still see Pioneer pins around Glasgow, sported by men in their sixties or so, who are very proud of them.
Therefore, at seven years old, Billy and his pals all swore off the drink as nasty bad stuff, even though Billy had peeked inside pubs and really looked forward to being a man and doing ‘manly’ things like getting pissed. The pub seemed to him like a fabulous place to be. A peculiarly appealing smell of sawdust, beer and smoke came wafting out of the door, and he could see all the men roaring and shouting and having a great time.
His local pub, the Hyndland Bar, was on a corner, and boasted one door in Fordyce Street, and the other in Hyndland Street. One of the coming-of-age challenges among Billy’s peers was to avoid being apprehended while running deftly in through one door of this adults-only establishment, past all the customers, and out of the other door. It was considered very heroic to have achieved this several times.
Another great challenge was the terror of the cobbler’s dunny, or dungeon. There was a cobbler’s shop nearby, owned by an unfriendly little man with a moustache. This cobbler was always repairing his shoes, mouth full of nails, facing the window of the store so he could keep an eye on passers-by. Like all tenement dunnies, his was very dark, made so deliberately because these were places where lovers would go when they came home from the movies or dances. There were few cars for courting, or ‘winching’ as it’s called in Glasgow. Johnny Beattie, another Glasgow comedian, says you can still see the mark of his Brylcreem on a dunny wall in Partickhill Road.
The goal for Billy and his seven-year-old pals was to run the gauntlet of this long, murky, subterranean corridor. It had offshoots where all sorts of weird and wild things dwelled – everybody knew that – things gruesome and dreadful, with terrible intent. At
