Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, April 18^th.

I have been listening this week to the Audiobook of my memoir, The Locked Ward (available from all good emporia of such wares. And of course from Amazon, a snip on the old one-breasted website at £15, in all its eight-disc magnificence.) Like most people (I think) I dislike to hear my own voice as others hear it. To my ears, it lacks the fluting beauty of some, or the testosterone-drenched gravitas of others. Ideally, I’d hoped it would sound somewhere between Sean Connery and Morgan Freeman. It doesn’t. But, at least to my ears again, it doesn’t sound bad at all, to be honest. Pleasantly not bad. Maybe that’s because I was aware of the potential market being not specifically Scottish. Or maybe it’s because the audio boffins sprinkled some kind of electronic woofle dust over it. Whatever. Nobody hearing it will be confused for a moment over whether I’m a Scot or not. But most, including the most virulently anti-Caledonian knobhead (usually, I’m sorry to say, Southern English) will be able to follow it without having to say, “Oi kaynt mike out a wiiiid eez syeen’.” 

            It put me in mind of a time in my childhood, when I embarked on several months of quite the weirdest activity I ever took part in. I went, on Saturday mornings, for elocution lessons. Quite why, I never knew. Obviously Mum and Dad were of the opinion that a few weeks’ work on my guttural Bathgate scrape would have me as melodiously toned as Gielgud. Exactly why that would be a good idea, though, was a different matter. I know what would have happened to me if I’d gone into the playground, enunciating like Brian Sewell. I’d have been reduced to a soggy paste within minutes.

            Because, at that time, I was only ten or eleven years old. I was a clever kid but, to obviate any chance of being targeted as ‘the swot’, I played all the street games with the local tearaways: Jeff, Jock, Tam, and a boy called Haggy. His real name was McIlhagga. Far too long. So he got ‘Haggy’. And, like them, I misbehaved and spoke the way they did. So I was accepted as one of them. My survival skills were finely honed even then.

            We played around the streets, endless hours in summer of games like Hide and Seek, (‘Hingo Seek’, in the dialect), and Tig. At night, we played KDRF – Knock Door, Run Fast, later changing it to KDRLF - Kick Door, Run Like Fuck. Like many kids, we were pains in the arse, knocking folks’ doors and then scattering into the gloom between the lamp-posts.  An occasional refinement of the game - initiated I have to admit by me - was that you knocked the door and, on your run along the path to the gate and out into the street, lobbed into the air an empty milk bottle stolen from the doorstep. This broke with a pleasingly resounding smash. You could still hear it as you rounded the corner of the street on one squeaking plimsoll and picked up speed again in the straight. At Guy Fawkes time, we threw squibs at the doors instead of kicking them and running like fuck. And a banger detonated in the stairwell of a block of flats made the building sound like it was being targeted by the Luftwaffe. 

            On one occasion, though, I came close to being tobered. We had being KD-ing several streets away from mine, and we RLF-ed through the vennel into the swing-park in the purple twilight. Arriving before Tam’s door in the next street, we assumed we had got away scot-free and were dawdling in the lamplight when a man emerged from the lane out of the swing-park and accosted us.

            “You’re the wee bastards that chapped my door,” he growled. We were, of course, but he did not look too entertained by the jape.

            “Naw, mister,” we piped in unison. “It wisnae us.”

            “Aye, it was,” he rejoined. “I recognise you (me) wae the glesses.”

            Bang to rights. And with the distinct possibility of being having my arse toed for my efforts. I played the injured Specky Four-Eyes, always being teased for his goggles. Oh, I hammed it up. Robert Newton could not have played it hammier. Hamilton the butcher could have put me on the slicer and pared off a few portions for Tam McGinty’s piece.

            “Ah’m fed up wae it,” I sobbed. “It’s always me, intit? Jist cos I wear glasses. Specky, eh? I’m no the only one that wears glasses, ye know… But I jist get sick ae it.”

            By now I was greitin’ sair. The man must have been a decent sort, because he instantly sought to assuage my grief. I had probably succeeded in making him feel like an utter heel. In all likelihood, he was a square guy just pissed off with kids making nuisances of themselves. I know I would have been, in his place.

            “That’s no what I meant, son…” he said and backed down, then backed off. Back to his own back green.

            “Well done, Denny!” said my pals, who had also been streaking their St. Michael’s at the very real possibility of having their arses toed.

            I felt like Laurence Olivier.

They were building houses in the streets behind us. There is nothing more magnetic to small boys than a building site. It’s the perfect adventure playground. There are piles of sand, drums of water, standpipes, heaps of bricks, cement-mixers and other pieces of machinery that can be commandeered for playing purposes, and of course shells of houses.  The whole area was like a war zone. And that’s what we played in it. But you had keep your wits about you. You could not play there during the day, when men were working there. But, in the evening, when work had stopped – that was our time. We would materialise out of the evening air like phantoms; emerge from doorframes and behind cement-mixers, straggling the length of the halfbuilt streets as if summoned by the Pied Piper. And then – what larks! 

            We tunneled through the sandheaps like escapees from Stalag Luft 12, made forts and redouts of bricks and blocks, guddled in the water until we grew gills. We tore from house to house and hung out of windows, lobbed bricks at each other, hid below floors and in cupboard spaces. It was sheer elation.

            The only thing that could have ruined our enjoyment was the watchman – the ‘watchie’. Whatever game we were playing, wherever on the site we were, we always had to have somebody keeping a lookout for the watchie. If the cry, “The Watchie!” went up, we took to our fleet young heels and fled. I don’t know why. I can’t imagine what we feared. The watchie was an elderly bloke in a bunnet, blue jacket, waistcoat and old grey trousers. He wore eye-glasses that looked, in my mother’s suggestive phrase, as if they were fashioned from milk-bottle bottoms. He limped. He walked with a stick. He wheezed. He might have been convalescing from being gassed on the Western Front. What was this old timer going to do to us? He couldn’t have caught us with beaters and a net. But we were terrified of him. We shunned his presence as if the watchie had all the terrible powers of an adversary from Greek legend. But these were the days when kids feared authority, no matter how feeble the body in which it appeared.

Anyway, in the midst of this juvenile delinquency, I was sent to elocution lessons. To the daughter of a local businessman, in their home above the shop in Hopetoun Street. Here, every Saturday, I attempted to lengthen my vowels and eliminate my glottal stop. I practised enunciating ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry…’ and ‘Hoaw naow braown caow’. I practised breathing from my diaphragm. 

            I hated it, of course. It was soppy stuff, and I was the only boy who attended. What did Dad have in mind for me? Politics? RADA? I felt like Horace Broon. I told none of the boys about it, and chafed my way through every session, waiting for release and the chance to get back on the streets and wreak mayhem. I whined and mumped every Saturday when Dad drove me into Bathgate for my session. “Everybody will think I’m a toffee-nosed jessie.” Eventually, I was allowed to quit. Presumably because Dad was fed up dragging me there, with my heels gouging furrows in the pavement. I can’t think my diction had improved any, or that my tones had been impressively modulated. I did not now hold conversations with Mum like this: “Eh seh, maytah, Ehm orff out naow to play Kick Doh Run Laike Fack with Haeggy and the cheps. Beck in tehm foh tea. Toodlepip.” It was just one of those strange interludes which seemed to occur throughout my childhood on a regular basis.

            But maybe the Architect of Days had a hidden purpose, all those years ago. I may not sound like Sean Connery or Morgan Freeman on the Audiobook. But if I’d voiced it in the accent of my childhood, sales would have been restricted to certain streets in Bathgate, and the 60-somethings who may or may not still live there.

            Bi sein yeez.

Obiter Dicta

Sunday April 8th.

I watched an interview on TV this morning with the actor Liam Neeson who described a boyhood memory of seeing the Reverend Ian Paisley preach. He described him as a ‘firebrand’. It put me in mind of the time I went with my flatmates to see him preach in 1969.

            One autumn evening, Dave and I were travelling down George IV Bridge from the university, rolling home to the flat on the top deck of a cosmic number 27, full of groovy people, stardust, and golden billion-year-old carbon. Dave  nudged me and pointed to a notice in the Evening News.

            “Ian Paisley is talking at Leith Town Hall tonight.”

            “Yeah? Far out.”

            “Yeah! Let’s go and suss it out.”

            Suddenly, the evening had a focus. And foci were not that common in our evenings. Our flatmates were as enthused as we were. What a gas! Man, what a blast this would be! Yeah! Right on! This would be a night to remember, a night to live in the annals! What could compare? A night at the theatre, a night at the cinema? Amusements for milktoasts. A concert in The Place? Ten a penny. Only the ubercool would dig an audience with Ian Paisley.

            Out from the flat we emerged and made our way, as a soft evening fluttered down over Edinburgh like a hankie, along Eyre Place and Broughton Road, up McDonald Road and on to Leith Walk. Blithe as babes, naïve as simpletons, we headed down Constitution Street to Queen Charlotte Street and the imposing edifice of Leith Town Hall. What did we think was going to happen there?

            Leith Town Hall was a square stone building: arcaded, pilastered and columned, with tall and slender windows, then shedding weak light in a vaguely ecclesiastical way onto the darkening street. The sky was brimstone and copper. There was a noticeable police presence around the hall, and a disconcerting number of young and middle-aged straights, none of whom seemed to be too full of peace, love or understanding. Buttoned-up people in dark, kirky clothes kept arriving, carrying Bibles and such, and disappearing into the maw of the building. What there weren’t, were too many young men dressed in combat jackets, fur coats, RAF greatcoats, scarlet military jackets or grubby corduroy strides, and certainly no other males coifed and bearded like Charles II and his courtiers

            “Do we genuflect when we go in?” I said to John.

            “What we don’t do, is sing “I’m no a Billy, I’m a Tim” – that’s for sure,” Dave joked. We had all been pupils at a Catholic secondary in West Lothian, but now were completely irreligious. We had come for no reason related to religion in any way. We’d just thought it would be a gas.

            But the gas wore off right sudden. The urge for drollery and sportive pranks had gone from us with surpassing speed and unanimity. Glumly, we entered, through black arches, under the baleful gaze of the unsmiling straights who, we now realised, constituted a kind of Protestant Praetorian Guard, and made our way into the body of the hall. The polis had thrown us one or two quizzical looks and then smirked and turned away.

            “Oh man,” I moaned softly, “this is iffy karma. Iffy karma.”

            “Cool it man,” growled Eddie. “Stay mellow.”

            With a rapid and tacit understanding, born of growing alarm, we filed along a row of seats near the back and tried to remain unobtrusive. Unfortunately, we were as unobtrusive as an emerald unicorn. In the midst of all the dour and godly Proddies and their stone-faced janissaries, who evidently regarded us as terminally suspect, we might as well have been dressed as Charlie Cairoli, Carmen Miranda and Screaming Lord Sutch. The only thing that gave me a ray of hope was that they had not instantly ushered us into a side room and battered the living excrement out of us. But there was a pillared gallery all around the seating area and a detachment of the Loyalist Light Infantry now took up positions of vantage there and kept a watchful eye on us. It was evident that they were unsure whether we constituted an actual threat to the proceedings or not, but equally evident that they were going to take no chances.

            To make things worse, just as the man himself took the stage to a thunderous applause, five or six heavies filed along our row at both ends, thereby effectively cutting off any exit we might have had. We looked at each other whitely and gulped.

            Ian Paisley talked about apostasy – or, as he pronounced it, “Uppawsstissy” – in ringing and strident tones that bounded off the walls of the hall. He was a big, barrel-chested man, six feet four, with black horn-rimmed glasses and greying hair. He was a powerful orator. The audience, or perhaps it was a congregation, listened attentively. I caught Henry’s glance unobtrusively and made a wide-mouthed expression of terror. Then a hymn was announced. The organ struck up, the congregation stood up, we stood up as well and the singing started.

            But not all of us stood up. With us that night, purely by chance, was Chas, a guy who had once shared the front room with Dave, before being hurled from heaven. He was different in outlook from the rest of and now, in a typical moment of thrawn obtuseness or psychotic contempt, had remained seated.  Dave nudged me. I looked along the row as four of the bouncers filed into the one behind, leaned over and plucked Chas out of the seat as easily as if he’d been a handbag. Then they frogmarched him straight out into the gallery and away. Panic surged through me – surged through the rest of us. We sang like bastards.

            When we sat down again, I was shaking like a dog having a shit. I whispered to Henry: “They’ll kill him.”

            “They might just let him go.”

            “Naw, man. They’ll give him a tanking. Heavy, man.”

            The rest of the evening slithered by like a serpent, full of glaring eyes and significant silences. Towards the end, after we’d sung another hymn, a collection was taken up. Little collecting pouches, with a handle at either end, were passed round. We put a copper or two in and passed it on. John had no money on him, so just passed it on. Unfortunately, he was now the end hippy, so he passed it on to one of Paisley’s roughnecks. For a second or two, the ape stood and stared at John, as if he’d turned him up on the sole of his shoe.

            “Some folk are just lookin’ for trouble,” he said.

            “Haven’t a bean, man,” said John. “Remember the widow’s mite.”

            The gorilla snarled, dropped in a handful of silver, and passed the collection on.

At last, the service was over and we dispersed. Out through the vestibule and into the street. There were people here, there was traffic, there was Leith and normality. The goons had not followed us. The police were nowhere to be seen.

            “Fucksake, man!” wheezed Eddie. “That was a bum trip.”

            “What a scene, man!”

            “I wonder what they did to Chas.”

            Chas now materialised by the wall at the street. He was smoking and had a grin as wide as the street.

            “Hey.”

            “What did they do to you, man?”

            “Did they kick lumps out of you?”

            “No. They just horsed me out of the hall, called me a hippy bastard and told me if I tried to get back in, they’d bludgeon me to death. In the circumstances, I thought it wiser to stay out here until you cats had finished worshipping.”

            “Heavy scene, man. Totally plastic. Whose idea was this?”

             “What I find even more depressing,” I said, “is that, hard though it is to believe, there are people out here who don’t dig hippies.”

            “Yeah,” said John. “How unlikely is that?”

            There are indeed some strange people in the world.

Here’s to the next time, and, as a totally different Irishman used to say, May your God go with you till then.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday April 4^th.

The word ‘cunt’ is an interesting one. I am writing about that this week because at least one reader has objected to my use of it in The Locked Ward. And I have to concede that it is still the one sweary word in English that writers, broadcasters and even standups – okay, most standups - think very seriously about before using . It still shocks. It even shocks a foul-mouthed old sod like me, if I read it or hear it in a context where I would not have expected to find it. (There is some truth in the recent argument that offensive racist words like ‘nigger’ shock more nowadays, but that’s an argument for another blog.)

            Yet why does the C word retain this power? It is, after all, only a word. Four letters. Rhymes with ‘hunt’. The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines it thus:

            cunt > noun vulgar slang a woman’s genitals

            □ an unpleasant or stupid person.

- ORIGIN Middle English: of Germanic origin; related to Norwegian and Swedish dialect kunta, and Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, and Danish dialect kunte.

Kunta kunte. My old Chambers Twentierth century simply defines it as ‘the female genitalia: a term of abuse (vulg.)’ and traces it to Middle English cunte, saying further etymology is dubious. The ‘big’ OED dates the usage of the word as a term of abuse to 1929. Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang records that ‘since c. 1700, it has, except in the reprinting of old classics, been held to be obscene, i.e., a legal offence, to print it in full. It records the Penguin English Dictionary of 1965 to be the first to have ‘the courage to include it’.

            After that, it goes on to list derivatives such as ‘cunt, drunk as a’; ‘cunt, a silly’; ‘cunt face’; ‘cunt-itch’; ‘cunt-struck’ and ‘cunting’, an adjective expressive of disgust, reprobation or violence. Most of which expressions are not unknown to me. I’ve been at least one, and described as at least two.

            I well remember the first time I heard the word. It was used in combination with that other taboo, or ex-taboo, the F word. Playing in the swing park near my grandparents’ house in the late 50s, I saw a boy – a rough, vulgar, working-class boy, certainly – fall off the ‘birler’ (merry go round) and heard him yell aloud his pain. ‘Ya fuckin’  cunter!’ he called. I’d never heard the words and knew nothing of what they meant. But I was strangely attracted to their vicious euphony. I can’t remember what was the immediate cause of my later using  the expression in my father’s company – maybe because there was a power cut in the middle of the TV broadcast of Flash Gordon.  I was inordinately fond of that show. Anyway, I recited my party piece. ‘Ya fuckin’ cunter,’ I said thoughtfully. I woke up ten minutes later on my side on the floor, with a strange ringing sound in my ears.

            Actually, it wasn’t a word I ever used a great deal. Occasionally, in student days. Not much after. Till I went to work in the locked ward. The guys in there used it non-stop. Almost as a synonym for ‘man’ or ‘fellow’.  Three examples:

1) “Aye, I was walking down the street and this old cunt sez to me…”

2) “What do you call the cunt that played the organ in Procul Harum?” 

3)“Tam? Ach, aye, he’s a decent enough cunt.”

            And I have noticed that, in the less salubrious areas of my frequenting, the word has a similar usage. It still can be used in an aggressive or abusive way, of course. But I generally come across it meaning ‘geezer’ or ‘chap’. I’ve even been greeted with it. “Aw right, ya cunt? How ye doin’?”

            Of course, the original meaning is the female genitals. And it has a long literary history. Chaucer uses it in the Miller’s Tale – ‘he caughte hir by the queynte’.  He also has the Wife of Bath use the term. Shakespeare puns on it in Hamlet – ‘Think you I meant country matters?’ and  in Henry V where the French princess confuses the French ‘con’ for the word ‘gown’.

            The feminist movement of the early 70s took strong exception to it, especially as a disparaging generative term for ‘women’. ( I have never used it like that. In fact, no-one of my acquaintance has, either). But you can see what is grossly offensive about it. I had a discussion about calling someone you dislike intensely a ‘cunt’ with a female pal at uni. She, in common with many women, found it offensive that the worst term of abuse one could throw at someone in English was a word for the female genitalia. I said I didn’t like being called ‘a prick’ either, so what was the difference? But she, rightly, pointed out that ‘a prick’ has more overtones of stupidity or silliness than downright hatred. The term ‘cunt’, she said, is one of loathing. By extension, that’s how a man who used that term thought of women. I saw the force of her argument. And I understand why many women still detest the word.

            Latterly, some feminists have sought to reclaim  it. In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler has a section entitled ‘Reclaiming Cunt’. The one and only wonderful Germaine Greer did something similar in an article called ‘Lady, Love Your Cunt’ and in an insert into the BBC programme about words, ‘Balderdash and Piffle’.

Interestingly, the vulgar usage does have regional variations. I stayed in Canada for a month in 1989 and used the word in a bar. My buddy was quite taken aback. I explained to him what I’ve said a few paragraphs above: that it is in common usage in  my part of the world, both as an abusive term and as aweird filler-word for ‘person’. He looked dubious.

“Don’t you guys use it here like that?” I said.

“No,” he said slowly. “We do use it, but only very rarely. If, for example, your buddy drinks your liquor  when you’re away from home; screws your wife while he’s drinking your liquor; steals your car when he’s drunk on your liquor, and then crashes the car into a tree because he’s drunk on your liquor … That guy’s a cunt.”

            I use it in The Locked Ward whenI quote someone else (not me) swearing.

            Still. At least one reader didn’t like it. But, like Shakey says: ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’