Poverty Safari, page 4
Not all adults in the school warranted this approach. Topical references to politics or current affairs were less appropriate if you found yourself shooting the breeze with a janitor or a dinner lady. Not because they weren’t interested in politics (maybe they were) but simply because they were not the type of people who discussed things of an intellectual nature – or so I gathered.
The janitor’s main area of expertise was janitoring. Unless you had a building-related query then there was little to discuss. In our school the janitor was a big man, or fat, as we called him behind his back, and he didn’t say very much. When he did it was usually to make you aware of something you were doing wrong. He leered over us and his presence was unpleasant because he seemed to be a deeply unhappy man. If he wasn’t scowling by the playground doors at interval, or moving through the school like a glacier, to board up a smashed window or bleed a radiator, he was sitting in his janitorial quarters at the front door, sipping a mug of tea, his long face buried in a tabloid newspaper. Who knows, maybe he was interested in politics? Perhaps he had a burning desire to run in the local council elections? Perhaps the newspaper was concealing a copy of National Geographic, to which he devotedly subscribed every month? But there was something about his demeanour, or at least my interpretation of it, that suggested he wasn’t up for talking to me about anything. Sometimes he wouldn’t even put the paper down to respond to you, he’d just grunt and gesture towards the keys to the toilet.
The dinner ladies were much more welcoming and good-humoured. They gave lunchtime a personal touch and as well as serving your food they would ask how you were getting on. But despite their social skills far exceeding those of the janitor, at no point did it seem appropriate to pick their brains on anything. I found it surreal to see them in some other capacity, like going to the shops or getting off a bus. In my head, they were just the dinner ladies. The idea you could learn anything from anyone but teachers, who possessed the only type of knowledge worth knowing, seemed absurd to me at that time.
If I was talking to a girl, which happened on many occasions, another realm of possibility would open because there would be less pressure to adopt a braggadocio persona. Girls, in most cases, were more mature than boys of a comparable age and I could sense that many of them were exhausted by the unending dither of the males. A conversation with a girl presented the chance to express another side of my personality, the opportunity to liberate myself briefly from the heavy social burdens of the male arena.
As for being trapped on a school bus full of hormonal boys on the way to football, well that was a different story.
Here I couldn’t be myself. Here I couldn’t be caught thinking about what being myself even meant. My simple desire to express appreciation of an attractive girl’s hairstyle was, in fact, not simple at all. Bizarrely, this matter required consideration of the most careful kind. It wouldn’t do to simply blurt out the word ‘beautiful’. Without some sort of linguistic diversion, or buffer, that would have been too jarring for these boys. New words and ideas filled them with alarm, provoking unpredictable reactions depending on your location and how many of them were present. I knew, intuitively, that using the word ‘beautiful’ was a risk. That’s why I deliberately foreshadowed it with a tougher, coarser word, to soften the blow.
‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’
Did I really expect my use of an unsanctioned term to go undetected? As soon as the word passed my lips, silence fell. The boys looked at one another baffled, like primates confronted, for the first time, by a flame. In situations like this no one knew how to respond. Everyone had a sense of how they should respond but no gumption to follow through in case they were rejected by the pack. Some likely agreed with my observation that Nicola’s hair was beautiful but were looking to the group for a sign that it was okay to feel this way. Others may have thought it a stupid thing to say, deserving of ridicule, but like the rest, needed reassurance before indicating their position. There may have been at least one who didn’t know what the word meant, either mishearing it or perhaps hadn’t heard it used by a male before. Despite their reactions being rooted in a desire to project a tough image, they were all terrified to reveal their true thoughts or feelings in that moment. They were anxious to be seen even pondering such things and this fear, which followed them everywhere, was the engine room of much of their behaviour in school – and out.
In absurd scenarios like these, which occurred at least once every day, you could be ‘accused’ of being gay – like it was a crime – for openly expressing an interest in the opposite sex. Not only that but you could become subject to such a spurious charge by a bunch of boys who weren’t happy unless they were writhing around a football field, a rugby scrum or whipping one another’s bare arses with towels in a communal shower. But this stupidity dominated the horizon of my every school day from 1996 until 2001. I cannot overstate how I’d dread and loathe those bus journeys, short as they were. Everything about them, much like school itself, was profoundly oppressive. Moment to moment, people were so inhibited by the social expectations of those around them that the simple act of acknowledging reality, in this case a girl’s pretty hair, became a radical political act.
‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’
‘Beautiful?’ one replied. ‘Ha, ha, ha. He just said “beautiful”. Ha, ha, ha, mate, you’re gay.’
Strangely, the chorus of laughter was, for me, a welcome relief. It’s never fun to be laughed at when you don’t intend to be funny but my pride was not the only ball in play here. The boys’ collective laughter, while humiliating, also signalled they were back to being as they had been before I disorientated them with a foreign idea. An idea which, while simple to me, seemed to threaten them in some way. Instances such as this would happen frequently and produce different results: sometimes you’d get kudos for appearing smart or witty or for dispatching an adversary’s attempt to belittle you by retorting with a devastating one-liner. Or you could end up in a heated confrontation simply because an unsanctioned word or reference sparked an escalating tit-for-tat from which nobody could back down from without inviting more aggression. In this kind of community people can turn extremely hostile – and dangerous – if they feel put down or threatened.
Was it the word ‘beautiful’ itself, or what the word ‘beautiful’ might have implied that created the tension? Perhaps it was the expectation they felt the word placed on them? An expectation to respond in some way and pressure at not knowing how to, or fear of giving a response which was socially unacceptable? An expectation to either disagree or concur and what either response may have revealed about them? What if an accidental smirk or involuntary nod betrayed some secret passion, goofy eccentricity or deep vulnerability they weren’t comfortable with other people knowing about? I can only speculate. All I remember is that Nicola’s hair was so beautiful I couldn’t stop myself saying as much, irrespective of the grief I’d receive. Then again, with a mother like mine, my emotional threshold for feelings of shock, offence and abuse was already painfully high.
4
Gentlemen of the West
MY MUM LEFT the family home when I was about ten years old. I remember coming home one day to find her standing outside the house with my sister, having been gone for a couple of weeks. They came into the house for a while and I recall an argument between her and my dad. Then she went away with my sister and never came back. It wasn’t the first time they had broken up. It’s funny how you blame yourself for these things even at this young age. It’s probably a mixture of wishful thinking and childlike egotism to think that if only you were somehow better, your parents would be able to work out their differences. From then on, we didn’t see my mum with any reliability. When we did, the quality of our time with her was patchy. This was mainly due to her drunkenness or preoccupation with obtaining booze. But things quickly brush over you at this age, either because you are too aloof or because it makes it easier to cope. I remember a brief honeymoon period after she left when life felt much more peaceful. My relationship with my little brother, thanks to football and wrestling, really began to blossom. It wasn’t until I started attending secondary school a few years later that I began to feel the impact of the abandonment. It led to a deep insecurity.
This manifest in many ways and, at its worst, was physically unbearable to experience. It began with fear that people did not like me or that I was in imminent danger. I also longed for a connection, because it seemed to soothe the symptoms of the insecurity, and I would form deep emotional attachments to people – especially girls – who paid me the slightest bit of attention. But because I was so used to being let down and rejected by my mother, I was always on high alert that the people I felt attached to were going to hurt, betray or leave me. Abandonment was such a strong theme at this point in my life that I actively sought this pattern out in all my relationships, without even realising it, and began to confuse deep feelings of emotional insecurity with being in love.
These niggling psychological difficulties, coupled with the generally aggressive social environment, made it hard for me to concentrate on schoolwork. My head was always racing with internal dialogue about the various fears and anxieties I had. I was always rehearsing conversations I might have or replaying old ones over again. It seemed fear was the only thing capable of concentrating my mind. This made learning difficult, especially when it came to subjects I struggled with. Another thing that made this school such a challenging place to learn was that so many other pupils had similar problems.
Crookston Castle Secondary School was built in the early 1950s. It was designed to be repurposed into a military hospital, should the need arise. Back then, at the dawn of the Cold War, who’d have thought it would be the school itself that turned into a war zone? The school took its name from the medieval castle grounds in which it was set. Crookston Castle stood 500 yards from the edge of the playground, encircled by a deep moat at the highest point in Pollok. However, despite being a very well preserved historical monument, nobody seemed to go there very much. I always felt this was a shame because the summit offered a stunning panoramic view of the area which, despite its glaring flaws, was quite a sight to behold – provided, of course, that it was viewed from a safe enough distance.
Right in the centre of Pollok stood a modest shopping precinct, opened in 1979, called the Pollok Centre. It was about half a mile in length and home to a variety of high street stores and supermarket chains. The centrepiece of the Pollok Centre was a large cuckoo clock, which transfixed successive generations of children with a display of music and robotics every quarter of an hour. Beneath the clock, there was a seating area for people to catch their breath, have something to eat or smoke.
The Pollok Centre stood about half a mile from another place of interest, on the outskirts of the scheme called Pollok Park. This was a sprawling country pile, gifted to the people of Glasgow by the Maxwell family in the early 20th century. From the top of the castle, it was evident that the area had, essentially, been carved out of the countryside. Over the decades, the urban areas of Glasgow expanded and joined up, but Pollok existed on the edge of this and was still very much connected to its more rural past – at least aesthetically. Despite lots of trees, football fields and leisure spaces, the disparity in the quality of housing on either side of the river was obvious: one side was far more run-down than the other. But this was not, as you might assume, a mark of class, but rather, luck of the draw in terms of what sort of home you were given by the council. New homes were always being built and old ones were always being modernised while other parts were being ‘regenerated’.
Most of the people living in Pollok had a council house but this didn’t stop us from acting like we had more money than we did. I suspect the deep sense of shame many of us felt about our poverty – and an overwhelming desire to conceal it – was why the Pollok Centre was so popular. Here you could acquire everything you needed to appear better off than you really were; new trainers, tracksuits, chains, rings, football strips and boots. Such sought-after items and accessories were expensive but the price of looking poor was always far higher. Catalogues, like Littlewoods and Kay’s, and Provident agents or ‘provy-men’ (money lenders) came to the rescue of many a single parent throughout the course of the school term. Then there was always the shifty looking guy on the corner who had a few bob – as long as you paid him back on time.
There were pockets of affluence, but they existed in ‘outposts’ which usually adopted (or retained) a different name. In Pollok, for example, there is an area called ‘Old Pollok’ which is closer to Pollok Park and is a noticeably nicer place to live. People aren’t shy to remind you of the difference and make a social distinction between themselves and the area regarded as ‘deprived’.
To the south of the river stood a long line of flat-roofed tenements, encased in grey, roughcast concrete, complete with blue verandas which doubled up as viewing platforms, clothes-horses and ashtrays. You won’t be surprised to learn that dampness was an issue in the houses with flat roofs; rainfall, instead of trickling down a slope to a drainage system, would often just linger on the horizontal surface until it found a way into people’s homes. On the other side of the river, things appeared far less cluttered. There were wide open spaces, football fields, forests, parks and boulevards punctuated by neatly organised semi-detached, four-in-a-block housing which, when viewed from the castle top, seemed to coil up the hill like the swirl of an ice-cream cone.
From this vantage point you could see the different phases of development that had taken place; some ongoing, some complete and others abandoned as the area continued to expand to meet the demands of population growth. But with every shiny new-build thrown up there was always some other structure falling down – often with people still living in it. It gave Pollok a messy air of incompletion. It felt like a prototype of a real area and it was therefore hard to take much pride in it. Any efforts to keep the place clean and tidy were futile and it was more common to throw litter in the street than put it in a bin. Not many things around here were built to last and broad swathes of housing stock were already earmarked for demolition despite being relatively young in architectural terms. However, my school was an exception to this rule and seemed determined to outlive everything in its vicinity – including many of the children who attended it.
The school sat on the south bank of the Levern, which was less of a river and more a stream of consciousness that carried polythene bags to the Clyde – a real river. We just called it the ‘burn’. For us, its main function was to provide a clear territorial faultline over which running gang fights could take place. For generations, groups of young men – and sometimes women – gathered on either side of the various bridges laid down along the burn and provoked each other until a fight broke out. This was a tradition stretching back to the seventies. Most of the time it was harmless; people shouting insults or drunken threats, chasing each other before retreating to their own side. But sometimes it got serious and people got hurt. Other times they got killed.
School forced many of these violent tribal factions under one roof, along with the rest of us, for 35 hours a week. On a grey day, it looked more like a prison facility or a factory, complete with a jagged steel fence stalking the hilly perimeter. It was one of those trend-ridden designs which seem so futuristic and fashionable in their day. The school, like the tenements listed for demolition across the road, had a flat roof. It was so ugly that it became something we not only laughed about, but took a certain pride in. We regarded everything around us as either derelict, dirty or falling into a state of disrepair. Sometimes that was unfair and inaccurate but these tropes about the place being a ‘shite-hole’ ‘fulla junkies’ were invoked so regularly that their veracity was irrelevant.
I started secondary in 1996, the year Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was released. In four years, I didn’t venture too far from Pollok as it was a bit of a stoat into the city centre – around 40 minutes by bus – which was something politicians hoped to remedy by green-lighting a new motorway, much to the anger of many locals. Near the end of my school career, I was venturing beyond the borders of Pollok and across the Clyde to the fabled, almost mythical, West End, where I attended a weekly session with a child psychologist. The appointment was something to look forward to and, apart from breaking up the monotony of a regular school day, it also gave me a couple of hours off the leash to explore the city unsupervised. At lunchtime on Thursday I would leave school and take a short bus trip to Govan before jumping the underground to Hillhead.
The first thing I remember upon stepping off the escalator and onto the busy street was an odd feeling of relaxation. People here looked and sounded different in a way that was immediately apparent. Where I grew up it was unusual to see people of colour, unless they were behind a shop counter, but here it was very multi-cultural, like the world described in my modern studies class. Where I grew up it was unusual to see clean pavements, but here the streets were in pristine condition and nothing like the turd gauntlet I was accustomed to running every day. Here dogs were attached to leads and walked by their owners, as opposed to the collarless, feral hounds running around outside the shopfront along the road from my house.
