Steve and his Dad go
to Glasgow
Before we start, I need to apologise on two fronts: first,
that this month’s blog is around twice its usual length, commiserations to
those who lose the will to live in the middle of it; second, that it is
recycled.
I am now commuting to London again two to three days per
week. As mentioned in a previous blog, I sorely miss the lunchtime meetings in the
pub with my old and dear pal Kevin Connelly. He used to work only a mile away
from me, but now he is retired. On one of those lunchtimes in the pub, I was
lamenting my writer’s block and during the same lunchtime told him the story below,
which is completely true. Kevin said, You’ve got your next story ready made for
you. Stop trying to make something up. So I fictionalised the events following,
and have ‘defictionalised’ them for our present purposes.
********************************
‘There’s a Howard Hughes situation going on there,’ said my
dad, ‘And that Alfie is profiting from it.’
‘Are you not overdoing it, dad?’ I asked, ‘It all sounds a
bit too dramatic.’
‘We shall see,’ said dad, ominously, his voice lowering to
his thirty cigarettes a day growl.
The background to this was a long family story. We had a
rich relative, my dad’s Uncle Danny on his mother’s side of the family. Both
sides of my dad’s family had come to Scotland from the West of Ireland during
the famines of the 1840’s. They had proved to be considerable achievers and
Danny had been a very successful bookmaker, whose empire boasted numerous
betting shops across central Scotland. Now, in 1978, Danny was in his late
eighties, and leading a somewhat reclusive life. The business had shrunk,
although he was still as rich as creosote, and was now under the management of
somebody called Alfie, who my dad opined was lining his own pockets with
Danny’s fortune.
Danny had bought an enormous detached house in magnificent
grounds in St Andrew’s Drive in Glasgow. The upper floor of the house Danny
shared with his sister Winnie. Neither Danny nor Winnie had ever married. The
ground floor was occupied by another of Danny’s sisters, Josephine, and her
husband Frank, a Glasgow GP. The garden included a tennis court, and the ground
floor had a billiard room with a full size table, and a dining room with a
sideboard the length of a bus and a dining table around which you could seat
two dozen people. This room was all soft lighting and rosewood, and I had never
seen such opulence.
At Christmas Danny used to send us the most enormous box of
chocolates. My younger sister, aged four or five, would sit under the Christmas
tree taking out chocolate after chocolate. She would bite a corner off each one,
and if she liked the filling would eat the chocolate. If not, she would
carefully replace the chocolate, with the missing corner, in its place in the
box. Every so often, Danny would send us a generous cheque or some other
extravagant present. When we moved house in 1968, he bought us a piano. Around
once a year, we were all invited to St Andrew’s Drive for an afternoon and
evening (we never stayed overnight), and we loved it. When they opened the door
and you saw the well-appointed hall stretching sixty feet in front of you and
the staircase five feet wide on your left, you thought, I could get used to
this.
The hospitality always took place on the ground floor in Jo
and Frank’s half of the house. Danny and Winnie would come downstairs and join
us for dinner, and the atmosphere was always convivial. We were on good
behaviour, but not shy. We loved the luxuries they had and they realised it.
Uncle Frank was a lovely man, and had a natural understanding of what made
everyone tick. I remember when I was ten years old on one visit, he gave me a
fright by producing what seemed to be a live snake from his jacket pocket. After
I had jumped back he showed me that it was just a lifelike rubber effigy, and
said, ‘Keep it. You can try the same trick on your pals and your parents.’ I
recall him being a great raconteur at those dinners in the sumptuous dining
room, and generally keeping everyone at their ease.
Anyway, now in July 1978, I had just graduated and we hadn’t
visited St Andrew’s Drive for six or seven years. Winnie had died a few years
ago, and as I say, Danny had become less communicative. My dad’s motives for
worrying were not entirely selfish, but he clearly had hopes of some
inheritance from Danny and was concerned that this might be lost to the
sinister machinations of Alfie. He had gone to the extent of telephoning Aunt
Jo and arranging to visit the following Tuesday. I had a summer job in a bar in
Edinburgh, but Tuesday was my day off, and I agreed to go with him, as my mum
found the whole business, particularly my dad’s suspicions and his obvious
ulterior motive, unbearably embarrassing.
I wore a suit and tie, remembering how we had always dressed
up when we visited in my childhood. My dad drove us there in his tiny yellow Fiat,
through the typical afternoon drizzle of a Scottish summer. I enjoyed the
journey. It was not often that my dad and I spent any time together when we
were both sober. Dad told me a bit about his childhood, how close he was to his
mother’s side of the family as his father, Jack Duffy, had left his mother when
dad was an infant. He talked about his childhood friendship with his cousin
Bud, Jo and Frank’s daughter, to whom he was still very close, the raffish and
dangerous behaviour of his Uncle Jackie Flynn, Danny’s brother, who had
eventually been packed off to Australia to keep him out of trouble, the other
sister of Danny, Aunt Nellie, who taught ‘backward’ children and always wore a
man’s hat. Dad’s mum hadn’t seemed to bother too much what dad got up to as a
child, and some of his stories of adventures in ice rinks and billiard halls of
1930’s Glasgow gave me a new insight on the old man’s makeup. It explained a
lot of his shortcomings and left me with some admiration for his courage and
street wisdom.
As we drove through the Glasgow suburbs, dad remarked, ‘I’m
not so keen on driving in Glasgow. They all drive very gallous and aggressively
here.’
Coming from my dad, world champion speeding and drunk
driving offender, this was breathtaking. Anyway, the little Fiat managed to
negotiate the Glasgow roads and traffic very efficiently. At around four in the
afternoon, we turned into the drive of Danny’s house, between the two imposing
stone gate columns, now looking rather shabby. The garden was somewhat
overgrown, but because of the original neat layout, still impressive.
We rang the doorbell and after around twenty seconds Aunt
Jo, seeming much smaller than I remembered her, opened the door. She was still
the same size in spirit.
‘Tony!’ she embraced first my dad, then me, ‘How are you
honey?’
We declared ourselves just fine, and Jo led us into the
front room, which seemed barer than I remembered, despite still containing a
sofa and armchairs which looked as if they had been made for giants, and a
grand piano. It was certainly dustier than it had been in the 1960’s. However,
Jo made us welcome and a domestic, another elderly lady called Jeannie, brought
in tea and scones. I got the impression that although Jeannie did all the work
about the place, she bossed Frank and Jo around, rather than the reverse.
Frank then joined us and I found this a bit of a shock. I remembered him as an energetic late
middle-aged chap, a jolly and energetic Scottish doctor, a bit like you might
imagine Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Now he was old, smaller than me (and I am not
tall). He walked slowly and carefully, and wore some sort of supportive garment
on his torso.
‘Got your surgical jaicket on, Frank?’ said my dad.
I thought this was rather bad taste, but Frank chuckled and
I recognised the uncle of old.
‘Aye,’ he said, sitting down slowly and deliberately,
‘Reminds me of once in my working days, I got a call from a woman in Bellshill.
She said, Doctor, can you come out, my man’s got a terrible pain in his side.
So I said, Which side is it? She said, The side nearest the dresser.’
In a few minutes the years had rolled away and further
anecdotes flowed between dad and Frank. Jo and I played the part of the chorus
to this conversation. After I had refused a refill of tea, Jo said, ‘Are you
finding our old stories a bit boring, honey?’
‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘But I wouldn’t mind if you’d let me
look around the garden where Marian and I used to play with Janey.’ Janey was
Bud’s daughter, Jo and Frank’s granddaughter.
‘Sure,’ said Jo, ‘Just go out the back kitchen door, you can
walk round the house and come in again the same door, or ring the front bell
and I’ll let you in again.’
I walked further down the main hall, turned left through the
kitchen and out into the garden. This was a bit of a shock. It was considerably
more overgrown at the back than at the front. I waded through the weeds, burrs
sticking to my suit trousers. Round on the west side of the big square house I
saw what was left of the tennis court. The grass was long but sufficiently even
to see what the area had once been. The two posts which had once supported the
net were covered in ivy. I stood in the light rain and thought how lonely this
place was under a heavy grey sky. Perhaps Nellie, the other sister, had the
best of it, growing old in a tenement block, cheek-by-jowl with noisy and
cheerful neighbours. I carried on round the front of the house, the drive and
front lawn slightly better kept than the garden at the back and sides of the
house.
I re-entered by the kitchen door, but instead of going
straight back to the front room, I looked in on the billiard room and dining
room. The billiard room had clearly not been used for years. The heavy cloth
dust cover lived up to its name, having accumulated plenty of dust. The last
time I had been here, my elder brother and I had purloined a few bottles of
McEwan’s export and had got drunk and giggly while playing a chaotic frame of
snooker which had lasted an hour, due to our inept play and intoxicated state.
Now it was dark and abandoned.
The dining room was still impressive and luxurious. Again,
however, it was disused and dusty. The impressive table and sideboard were
still there. I pulled out a chair and sat at the big table, thinking of times
when a dozen of us had sat round it, in warm orange light, eating steak and
drinking some sort of fizzy wine. Uncle Frank telling funny stories. The window looked out on the overgrown tennis
court. Got to get out of here before I start hearing voices, I thought. I
rejoined dad, Frank and Jo in the front room.
‘Shall we go upstairs and see Dinny?’ said Jo. I’d forgotten
that she always pronounced his name Dinny. As we proceeded up the broad and
elegant staircase, it occurred to me that I had never been up the stairs in
this house before. All the entertaining had been done by Jo and Frank.
Danny seemed to live in two rooms of the first floor, a
cluttered and comfortable living room and a rather spartan bedroom which I
glimpsed through the half-open door. Heaven knows what the other rooms were
like. Danny himself held court in the living room and certainly didn’t seem at
all like a mad millionaire recluse. He wore rather dapper flannels and an
expensive shirt with a paisley-pattern cravat. He was cheerful and talkative,
full of stories of his younger days as a bookie on the track. The only strange
note, which did speak for a slight loss of faculty on Danny’s part, was the fact
that he addressed me as Tony, my dad’s name, and my dad as Jack, his dad’s name.
After an hour or so, dad and I took our leave. I looked
sadly over my shoulder to a waving Josephine at the front door, as my dad sped
out of the drive. This would almost certainly be my last visit to this house,
once so full of laughter and luxury.
On the way home, dad talked some more. It was clear that
Danny was not the mad millionaire, taken advantage of by an unscrupulous manager.
Danny, Frank and Jo were just three old people rattling around a rather lonely
house that was too large for them, looked after by the faithful Jeannie. Dad
opened up, telling me about the rather shambolic lifestyle of himself and his
mother when he was a child and a teenager.
He told me about how he and his mother had an agreement from his father
that a cheque for thirty shillings a week would be sent to them for
maintenance, and how if on a Saturday morning the cheque did not arrive in the
post, my dad would be sent round to the post office to make a fuss. He
concluded, ‘That made me hate my father.’ How at the age of fourteen he left
school but didn’t tell his mother, going ice skating every day instead of to
school.
Within three years, Danny, Frank and Jo were dead. Danny’s
estate went entirely to another relative. Dad didn’t get his inheritance, but
apart from momentarily hurt feelings, he didn’t miss it.
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