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.