Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, May 30^th.

Back again. After about a month – and with no real reason for the absence, other than being away in Oxford for the first week and then having tons of writing to do when I got back. But it’s no like real work, as the guys in the pub never fail to remind me.

            I went to Oxford at the beginning of May, at the invitation of the University Union’s ‘Mind Your Head’ campaign, which aims to get people talking and thinking about mental health issues. Their website acknowledges that, even in a place so devoted to the mind and its potential, mental illness is poorly understood. I support their campaign wholeheartedly. Mental illness is still, today, too little discussed, and too often hidden away as a sorry secret that people would rather no-one knew about.

            It was my first time in the city where spires dream and cars are not welcome. Oh, are they ever not welcome! There are huge signs as you approach the place recommending you to Park and Ride. Well, more than recommending, actually. Exhorting you. Urging you. I wouldn’t be surprised if I go back next year and find there’s a checkpoint Charlie with soldiers and a spike strip, and some CSM type roaring into your rolled down window, “Right, you horrible little man! Park the car and get on the bus from here.”

            They don’t quite do that at the moment but it can’t be far off. As it was, I drove into the city centre, among the ancient colleges and historic architecture and parked in an underground car park that only (only!) cost me £13 for five hours parking. A snip, man; a snip.

            But the city was worth the money. You can’t get into the colleges too readily these days unless you pay, or are there at the invitation of a don or something, so I didn’t see the rooms or dine in hall. Still, the place is beautiful; of that there is no doubt.

            I was speaking in Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, a grand shop with some rooms that stretch back under the grounds of Trinity College. Obviously, I referred at several places in my talk to ‘The Locked Ward’, reading some passages that illustrated my points.

            In my childhood, there were two respectable families in my home town with members who suffered from psychiatric illness. But it was rarely mentioned outside of the family. Young as I was, it seemed to me that there was something shameful about this, not to say something sinister. It is just a fact that, no matter how intelligent or enlightened the family, in the 1950s and 60s,  mental illness was considered a stigma, a blot on the family escutcheon, a sorrow they had been given to bear.

 For example, a prominent figure in the town had four children: two daughters and two sons. The daughters went to university and became teachers. The second son, John, studied Law at Glasgow. The older son, James, was immured in the asylum for many years. I realise now, looking back, that he suffered from schizophrenia, and would be in a secure ward very like the one I describe in my memoir. When people met the family on the street, they would ask after the children. “Is John doing well at Glasgow? Very good. And the girls? You must be so proud of them.” But no-one enquired after James, and the family never referred to him in conversation with outsiders. I have no doubt they loved him and visited him. But, on the outside, it was as though John had died. He was a non-person.

            But mental illness is like anything else we hide away in the darkness and never discuss. If we lock something away from sight, in the attic or the cupboard under the stairs, the inevitable happens. In time, it grows horns. Then a spiky tail. Then it begins to breathe sulphur and scratch at the door. It becomes a demon and a bogeyman that we are then too terrified to contemplate. But we need to be open about these things. Demons and bogeymen are figments of the imagination. Reality is much more prosaic and less terrifying to deal with.

            I firmly believe that we must bring mental illness into the light. Let people see that it is an illness; not a spell or a curse. Psychiatric conditions, like physical ailments, can vary in severity, duration and frequency of occurrence. And they can be treated. As I have argued elsewhere, despite the many impressive advances in psychotropic medication over the years, the most effective resource in treating mental illness is the human touch: the caring, dedicated men and women who nurse us back to health. And that means family members and friends, as well as professionals. But we cannot fully utilise this resource so long as we hide mental illness away as something separate, or something to be ashamed of.

            Which is why I was delighted to participate in Oxford University’s ‘Mind Your Head’ campaign at the start of the merry month of May. The team are doing a sterling job of keeping mental health issues to the fore in a city where so many young people are working hard, with some degree of pressure, often far from home for the first time. I salute them.

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.