Billy Connolly

Billy Connolly Pamela Stephenson The inside story of the one of the most successful British stand-up comedians, as told by the person best qualified to reveal all about the man behind the comic, his wife of over 20 years – Pamela Stephenson.Once in a lifetime, there strides upon the stage someone who can truly be called a legend. Such a person is the inimitable, timeless genius who is Billy Connolly. His effortlessly wicked whimsy has entranced, enthralled – and split the sides of – thousands upon thousands of adoring audiences.And when he isn't doing that…he's turning in award-winning performances on film and television.He's the man who needs no introduction, and yet he is the ultimate enigma. From a troubled and desperately poor childhood in the docklands of Glasgow he is now the intimate of household names the world over.How did this happen, who is the real Billy Connolly? Only one person can answer that question: his wife, Pamela Stephenson. Pamela’s writing combines the very personal with a frank objectivity that makes for a compelling, moving and hugely entertaining biography. This is the real Billy Connolly.This genre-defining book is now released as an ebook for a new generation of comedy fans, with a new Foreword from the author. Pamela’s vision of Billy is as true now as it ever was – as groundbreaking, as moving and as laugh-out-loud funny – and here she brings the book fully into its context, as one of the most influential biographies ever written. Billy PAMELA STEPHENSON To the Connolly and McLean families,in the spirit of healing through understanding;and to all families who are divided by religious differences,or who struggle with poverty, abuse or addiction. ‘He must have chaos within him, who would give birth to a dancing star’ Nietzsche Contents Introduction (#u86dda0af-e3c3-5ed9-a943-b4d16308d3bf) 1 ‘Jesus is dead, and it’s your fault!’ (#uce2315ee-c452-5f78-8e6a-1f97451ad943) 2 ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’ (#u47bea32c-d43e-5800-bdf3-8adf53a98cc6) 3 In Search of a Duck’s Arse (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Oxyacetylene Antics (#litres_trial_promo) 5 Shaving Round the Acne (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Windswept and Interesting (#litres_trial_promo) 7 ‘I want to be a beatnik’ (#litres_trial_promo) 8 ‘See you, Judas, you’re getting on my tits!’ (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Big Banana Feet (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Stairway to Hell (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Captain Demento and the Barracuda (#litres_trial_promo) 12 ‘That Nikon’s going up your arse!’ (#litres_trial_promo) 13 Legless in Manhattan (#litres_trial_promo) 14 There’s Holes in Your Willie (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Pale Blue Scottish Person (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Nipple Rings and Fart Machines (#litres_trial_promo) EPILOGUE: Life, Death and the Teacup Theory (#litres_trial_promo) Plate Section (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_43d314f5-ae43-5c4c-b5f3-cb3d00d54994) Much has been written already about the chimerical joker known to the world as ‘Billy Connolly’. That creature, however, is a fictional one, a Bill-o’-the-wisp that dances from tabloid to tome with relentless inaccuracy. Nothing unusual about that: everyone who comes to public attention is reflected in fragments, half-truths and downright lies since every observer projects his own fantasy upon the famous person in an illusory folie ? deux. In any case, when it comes to chronicling a person’s life there is no such thing as absolute reality, even if the writer happens to be his wife and a ‘shrink’ to boot. I, for one, subscribe to the notion implied by the Heisenberg Principle, that nothing in the universe can ever be accurately observed because the act of observation always changes it. For every one life, there are a million observed realities, including several of the subject’s. ‘A stranger caught in a portrait of myself,’ as Nabokov described the phenomenon, is commonly reflected back to a bemused interviewee. ‘Who HE?’ Billy will shout, slapping down the latest visual or written appraisal he considers is a dark imitation of his former self. In my paradigm, every person holds the reality of his own experience either in his mind’s eye or just below the surface of consciousness, or even deeper in the unconscious mind; but in the latter level we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and the mysterious workings of our unfathomed parts are revealed only in our dreams. Even within families, shared times are experienced differently, coloured by the age, family role or state of mind of each member. Small wonder, then, that some of Billy’s relatives and friends have disparate impressions of the following events. For Billy, reading each chapter after completion has elicited the shock of self-confrontation, accompanied by frequent laughter, occasional fury and a few precious tears as he painfully re-experienced many traumatic events. Most rewardingly for the author, the process of drawing together the following occurrences and providing insights might well have been a catalyst for his further healing, although Billy will have none of that: ‘Pish!’ he cries. ‘As my old granny Flora used to say, “The more you know, the less the better.”’ Another gem of Flora’s was: ‘Never clothe your language in ragged attire.’ Billy obviously missed the word ‘never’ because, purely in an attempt to please his dear old gran, he continues to say the ‘f ’ word in every single sentence and double on Sundays. I actually wondered about Tourette’s syndrome when I first met him. People try to stop Billy’s profanity, but that only encourages him. I myself have found great utility in those special collars for large pet dogs, with the remote control device that administers savage electric shocks to the neck of any beast that gets too close to the mark. Undetectable beneath his polka-dot shirt collar, it came in very handy recently when Billy gave a graduation address at our children’s school. You know where this is leading … try to guess the number of ‘f ’ words in this book before you read it. Be creative: it’s just like guessing the number of marbles in a jar so run a sweep, raise money for charity or decide who buys the next round. The answer can be found later. (#litres_trial_promo) I’m just playing with you. When this book was first published, people were frantically turning pages to satisfy their mathematical sensibilities. This was a trap. If observed, one risked being accused of committing the appalling readers’ crime of turning to the last page for an unearned glimpse of the ending. But by now, almost everyone who picks up this book knows how Billy’s childhood story ends – with the triumph of a successful life as a beloved comedian. However, the paragraphs above were written ten years ago, when HarperCollins was just about to publish Billy for the first time. It was a nerve-wracking time. In the run-up to publication, both author and subject were mightily scared because this book is not what people might have been expecting – a frothy romp through the life and times of Billy Connolly, funny man and hilarious raconteur. Oh, one could write a facile account of him (the time that silly big man ran naked round Piccadilly Circus, got drunk with Elton, and danced with Parky) but, in my opinion, that would be dishonest. No, there’s much, much more to his story and, both as a psychologist and as Billy’s wife, I believed the truth was begging to be told. Billy’s real story is a dark and painful tale of a boy who was deprived of a sense of safety in the world. This early trauma had a massive influence on the man he became – a survivor of abuse whose psyche still bears the scars, and whose resultant, deep self-loathing prompted self-destructive tendencies. My many years working as a psychotherapist have taught me that it is usually healing to bring one’s dark secrets into the light and find that one is still accepted and loved. And ever since I caught my husband crying by the TV when psychologist John Bradshaw was helping a man come to terms with his childhood abuse, I wanted that for Billy. But he was afraid that, when readers discovered his ‘shameful’ secrets, they would turn their backs on him out of scorn, pity, or embarrassment. And I was concerned that, having convinced him to tell the world his extraordinary story – and being the architect of that decision – I bore considerable responsibility for the outcome. What if it went wrong? What if I had misjudged how people would react? What if Billy became retraumatized by it all? Public revelations cannot be retracted. And revisiting terrible events under the wrong circumstances can cause further harm. Fortunately, many of the millions of people who read Billy reached out to my husband in wonderfully positive ways. We were both unprepared – not only for the unprecedented success of the book, but for the massive and widespread outpouring of support and acceptance. Readers let Billy know how much they empathized with him, adored him and, in many cases, shared similar stories of violation, torture and humiliation. Far from being rejected, Billy became a poster child for those who seek to overcome the challenging legacy of a painful childhood, who hope eventually to find that the revenge of survival and future happiness – let alone success – is sweet. Billy and I received hundreds of letters from people who poured out their own, touching stories of childhood torment. Some even said this was the first time they had dared tell their own story, and that it was Billy who had finally given them the courage. It made Billy very happy to learn that others gleaned hope and healing from his story. And for me, it was particularly gratifying to learn that the book seemed to help depressed, abused, or hopeless people. There’s nothing like facing the demons from one’s past – wrenching them from the realm of the unconscious and talking about them with an empathic person – to lead one to a sense of peace and a healthy perspective. Nowadays, Billy speaks compassionately about his father, and says he has forgiven him. But that’s no easy task for any survivor of abuse; psychologists know that forgiveness and healing do not necessarily go hand in hand, and I am well aware Billy still harbours reserves of fury that may never, ever be assuaged. He continues to be a somewhat tortured soul, occasionally as insecure and frightened as he was as an abandoned four-year-old. And he still struggles with his attention disorder (which is only a problem offstage, since losing his way while telling a story has become an aspect of his stand-up concerts that audiences thoroughly enjoy). He also struggles with short-term memory, organization, gaining a gestalt perspective on anything, and anxiety; pitching himself on stage has not become any easier than it was when he first started. But no one calls Billy ‘stupid’ like they did when he was a schoolboy – least of all me. Billy is one of the brightest and best-read people I’ve ever met. However, like many others of his generation, he is challenged by the cyber world. He still thinks of the Internet as ‘The Great Anorak in the Sky’. ‘It’s getting worse and worse,’ he complains. ‘It’s made people fucking boring. It’s separating them. Now they’re all sitting in rooms typing to people they don’t know.’ In fact, Billy’s current enemies are inhuman ones: Internet access, passwords (the remembering of them), and ‘How do I get the Celtic scores on this raspberry … blueberry … or whatever the fuck it’s called?’ Yes, Billy is still an expert in the fine art of swearing. He is also the proud owner of a Glaswegian accent, which has mellowed only slightly over the years. In fact, when I first met the man I could barely understand a word he said, and sometimes I think that was a blessing. Now, I love the Scottish accent, but at home it can lead to the ‘Chinese Whispers’ kind of misunderstanding. Once, when Billy and I were watching the TV news with our adult children and some extended family, I commented that I adored the CNN reporter Anderson Cooper. ‘Grey-haired cunt!’ retorted my husband, in what seemed like jealous pique. Everybody looked at him in alarm. ‘Billy!’ I cried. ‘What’s that poor man ever done to you?’ Billy stared at me, mystified. It turned out he’d actually said ‘Great hair-cut!’ Over the years, Billy has gradually suffered a little hearing loss, which means he is even more likely to talk about someone in loud, disparaging terms, imagining they can’t hear. A few Christmases ago he fell asleep in the middle of a family outing to the seasonal Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall in New York – high-kicking glamour girls in furry bikinis, a ridiculously jovial Santa, and way too much fake snow. The kids and I took it in turns to try to keep him awake, or at least minimize his thunderous snoring, until we realized that this was a lost cause. Halfway through the show he suddenly woke up and, to our deep embarrassment, shouted above the orchestra: ‘For fuck’s sake, Pamela, how much more of this shite is left?’ After Billy I wrote a follow-up book about him – an account of his sixtieth year – called Bravemouth. Once that had been published I decided it would be remarkably unhealthy – not to mention annoying – to write a single word about him, ever again. Frankly, I was exhausted from focusing so unswervingly on my husband; that was well above the call of duty for any wife. ‘I’m sick of you,’ I announced at last. ‘In future, write your own stuff!’ I went on to have adventures in the South Seas and Indonesia, and also scribbled away on the subjects of psychology and sex. It was such a relief. But who exactly is our protagonist nowadays? Well, he’s much the same. We now live in New York, where Billy can be spotted tramping the downtown alleys in search of an elusive banjo music shop, a cigar den, or a purveyor of outrageous socks. His sock choices have changed a little over the years; he has gravitated from the luminous to the gaudy stripe. Now he prefers a horizontal red, turquoise, orange, brown, and white repeating stripe to those he was wearing on the original Billy cover: luminous pink, with pictures of Elvis on the ankle. ‘I still love those,’ says Billy, ‘but I find them awful hard to find.’ Billy claims to be part of an unofficial ‘inner circle’ of people who wear wild socks. ‘We like each other,’ he says. ‘We always give each other a nod in the cigar shop.’ Billy says he’s never met a cigar smoker or a fl y-fisher that he didn’t like. He seeks to land ‘a wee troutie’ in every brook he can find, from Canada to New Zealand, while New York cigar dens have replaced Glaswegian pubs as the haunts where Billy can enjoy largely male company. ‘My New York pals,’ he says, ‘are a great cross-section: Wall Street guys, New York cops, and Arthur who makes art from bashed-up cans that have been run over by cars.’ Nevertheless, Billy keeps close contact with his Glasgow chums. He frequently returns to his home town – where he was recently honoured by being presented with the Freedom of the City of Glasgow. ‘It’s fucking great,’ said Billy. ‘According to old by-laws I can now graze my cows on Glasgow Green, fish in the Clyde, and be present at all court hearings! And if they send me to jail I get my own cell; no bugger’s going to interfere with my jacksie.’ Billy definitely does not restrict his friends to other living national treasures, although he is beloved by many of that ilk. ‘He is inspirational and I absolutely adore him,’ said Dame Judi Dench. ‘One-off, unique, irreplaceable,’ echoed Sir Michael Parkinson. ‘The most frankly beautiful Scottish person with a shite beard I ever met,’ said Sir Bob Geldof. Billy is considered a ‘comedian’s comedian’, and he’s extraordinarily generous in his appreciation of others in his field. ‘He’s my inspiration,’ said Eddie Izzard. ‘He was doing alternative comedy fifteen years before anybody else.’ ‘He is the funniest man in the world,’ said Robbie Coltrane. But it was Billy’s close pal Robin Williams who summed it all up when he said: ‘I don’t have a clue who Billy is.’ Age has not slowed Billy down, and I suppose it’s remarkable that he continues to have a flourishing career, both in movies, television, and in his live performances. The run-up months to London’s Olympics alone have seen him undertake a major, sold-out UK tour of forty-two dates. And Billy still seems to hop from one movie to another. One of the highlights of his movie career in recent times was Quartet with Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Pauline Collins, and Tom Courtney, about four ageing opera singers who live together in a residential home. It was directed by his pal Dustin Hoffman, who once described Billy as ‘a big fart that carries no offensive odour’. A fantastically entertaining TV series about Billy’s trike ride from Chicago to Los Angeles, along the USA’s famous Route Sixty-Six, was broadcast on ITV in 2011 – although Billy was lucky to finish it. The day he neared Flagstaff, Arizona, I was doing something that hardly befits a psychologist – having my photograph taken for a newspaper. ‘What’s your husband up to?’ asked the photographer. ‘Oh, he’s riding his trike along Route Sixty-Six for a TV show,’ I replied. ‘Really?’ said the man. ‘I’m a Harley biker myself.’ ‘Oh, thank heavens I’ve persuaded him away from those things,’ I said. ‘Trikes seem to be a lot more stable.’ The photographer’s next words were portentous. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘They can tip if you turn them in too small an arc …’ I sighed and made a mental note to address that the next time I saw my husband. It could not have been more than five minutes later that Billy’s manager Steve called. ‘Billy didn’t want to worry you,’ he started. ‘He’s OK, but he came off his trike.’ I felt the sensations of shock flood into my body. ‘What happened?’ I asked Billy, when I finally managed to speak to him. ‘Oh, I tried to copy a manoeuvre of the camera van (which has four-wheel drive). See, Route Sixty-Six is shaped like a snake, and running through the snake is the interstate highway, so there’s a series of dead ends that means you often have to go back. Anyway, we came to a dead end where they’d bulldozed the dirt onto a hillock. The van managed to drive on top of this mound and turn round, but when I tried it I was going too fast and my trike fell on top of me.’ ‘What injuries do you have?’ I asked. ‘Och, I just broke a rib and skinned my knee cap very badly. It’s a very pretty shade of purpley red. My finger is all swollen and I had to get my wedding ring off. But I’m in very little pain. They had to hold me down – I didn’t think I was hurt so I wanted to get up.’ Before long, Billy was in a helicopter on his way to Flagstaff Hospital. A medic was kneeling by his stretcher. ‘What kind of pain are you in?’ he asked. ‘I’m OK,’ replied Billy. ‘If ten’s the worst pain you’ve ever felt, where are you now?’ asked the medic. ‘About one and a half,’ replied Billy, nonchalantly. ‘Are you sure?’ asked the medic, incredulously. ‘You’ve just broken a rib!’ But Billy stuck to his story. ‘Look, you can tell me,’ the medic said insistently, waving a morphine drip. ‘I’ve got the whole candy store here …’ But Billy eschewed the pharmaceuticals and entertained the medical flight team instead. It could have been a lot worse. By the time I spoke to him in Flagstaff he’d been X-rayed, stitched up, and released. His cheery voice and attitude betrayed his idiosyncratic and macabre view of the world, as well as his attention to curious detail. ‘The emergency doctors had to cut off my nice leather jacket,’ he said, ‘but they’d done that to bikers so many times before, they knew exactly how to cut the seams so it could be sewn back together again!’ Hardly what I wanted to hear. And hardly reassurance that he had learned any kind of lesson from his accident. ‘Billy, you seem to care more about your leathers than your own skin,’ I said. ‘From now on, do you think you could manage to stay off any kind of road vehicle that lacks a roof?’ ‘Pish bah pooh,’ was his predictable response. As you’ll discover in Chapter Two, Billy has been a risktaker from early childhood, and I’ve often wondered how he managed to make it to his teens. I now understand that his apparently reckless early stunts were instigated as much by despair as by dare-devilry (depressed, abused, misunderstood children often engage in activities that psychologists recognize as signs of passive suicidality). Hopefully, this most recent mishap may have curtailed Billy’s vroom-vroom craziness to some extent. Trying to be the voice of reason is exhausting for me, and anyway, he is understandably unwilling to accept warnings from a woman who delights in facing storms on the high seas, travelling in hostile environments, and scuba diving among sharks of every variety. As I write this, Billy is preparing to leave for New Zealand to start work on the latest Peter Jackson blockbuster movie, The Hobbit, in which he will play the King of the Dwarves. Aghhh! It’s so trying for me that he should have such a part. Not because he’ll be away from our New York home for three months – no, we’re used to long separations. It’s trying because Billy regards the legitimate use of the word ‘dwarves’ as a triumph over my long-standing protestations that it’s ‘not politically correct’. In my presence, he loves to tell a tale about a little person – whom he calls a ‘dwarf ’, just to see me squirm. The following is the tale, with ‘little person’ substituted for ‘dwarf ’: Apparently, a pal of Billy’s sister Florence was on a Glasgow bus when a woman who happened to be a little person got on. A schoolgirl stood up to offer her a seat, but the woman declined. ‘You’re just giving me your seat because I’m a little person,’ she said. ‘I can stand perfectly well.’ A bit later, another woman, who was about to get off, waved the little person towards her seat. Another sour ‘I don’t want it’ was the response, which geared the giver onto her high horse. ‘I’m not offering you this seat because you’re a little person,’ she shouted. ‘I’m offering it because you’re a woman. And by the way, I think you were very unfair to that young schoolgirl, who was just trying to be nice!’ At this point in the story, Billy always starts to giggle in anticipation of the punch line. ‘And what’s more,’ continued the woman with mounting fury, ‘when you get home, I hope Snow White kicks your arse!’ See, the story works just as well without the use of the word ‘dwarf ’, don’t you think? What? Well, whose side are you on anyway? It’s impossible to argue with Billy about such things, but I feel duty-bound to try. ‘I’m calling Peter Jackson,’ I announced. ‘I’m going to suggest he rename your role as “the King of the Little People”.’ Billy ignored this. ‘Did I ever tell you that my granny rescued a child whom she thought was too young to be crossing the road and discovered it was a wee man? Went and grabbed him – scooped him up from the middle of the traffic and gave him a good scolding: “I’ll tan your arse!” she said, before she realized it was a dwarf.’ ‘Billy!’ I cried. ‘LITTLE PERSON! That’s what they wish to be called and we should respect that!’ ‘Now stop it, Pamela,’ he insisted. ‘I’m talking about a dwarf, not a little person. You put a little person and a dwarf together in the same room – they both know which one’s the dwarf!’ I sincerely apologize to any little people who might be reading this. Neither Billy nor I mean to be offensive by the above discussion; it’s never easy trying to navigate the fine, snaky line between comedy and propriety. And, if it’s any consolation, Billy tends to be far more vicious about people his own height – and often for no good reason. I once heard him being ridiculously savage about a perfectly innocuous fellow traveller: ‘What’s he going to do for a face when King Kong wants his arse back?’ he ranted. The man’s crime? Having the temerity to be talking on his cell phone. To be honest, I have long since given up trying to tame my husband. And anyway, I secretly enjoy his oppositional style, and would probably be lost without the challenge. Yes, he’s wonderfully grumpy (if you like that kind of thing). In fact, he’s ornery about almost everything, including seeing the doctor, informing me of his schedule, or eating anything green with his fish pie. Having said that, he is an excellent cook, with specialities that include great curries, apple pie, and a killer macaroni cheese. He has not touched alcohol for around twenty-eight years, but loves to take a deep whiff of my dinnertime red wine. Billy remains a slim, fish-eating vegetarian with a full head of hair and, just like his grandfather, will probably live to be nearly a hundred. It’s a little scary, though, to imagine an age-indexed increase on the curmudgeonly scale; by his tenth decade his vocabulary of communication may well consist only of frowns, farts, and just one word (yes, that one). Ten years after this book was first published, the artist is in residence. The man swishing confidently around the bijou Birmingham art gallery – the new home of his latest creative efforts in the form of extraordinary pen drawings – is now formally known as Billy Connolly CBE, visual artist. It’s not exactly a career change, more a career addendum for the Artist Formerly Known only as Billy Connolly, King of Comedy. He’s now both – as well as Master of Mirth, Chancellor of Chortling, Baron of Banjoing and Specialist in the School of Hard Knocks. I confess I also think of him as Commander Curmudgeonly from time to time, as well as Archdeacon of Amnesia. Typically, he has forgotten to tell me about his important first art opening, where a selection of these drawings was to be shown in a small exhibition entitled Born in the Rain. When I finally do learn about this event – on the same day – I’m several hours away in London. I race to Euston for a fast train, and arrive at the gallery just fifteen minutes before the end of the show. I spy Billy just inside the door, a svelte, chic baron in a collarless tweed jacket and a silk scarf covered with butterflies. His hair is cropped shorter than usual for his latest movie. But he’s thrilled by this brand-new role. ‘I’ll be wearing an opera cape and cigarette holder next!’ he says. I watch Billy, surrounded by people who can’t believe their luck to be standing next to the man. Fortunately, many of them are also art lovers, eager to take home a slice of Billyness to hang in their living rooms. There’s a queue for his stunning drawings and prints, for which he has devised titles such as Extinct Scottish Amphibian, Pantomime Giraffe, Celtic Bling, Chookie Birdie, and A Load of Old Bollocks. He has been working on these for several years now, hunched over his drawing pad for many hours at a time. I especially love the darker, almost sinister ones, such as The Staff, which is a row of similar, expressionless people in gas masks, all facing the same way. Told you it was dark. But as Robert Stoller said, ‘Kitsch is the corpse that’s left when art has lost its anger.’ Throughout the afternoon, Billy tells me, a pointed question has been posed time and time again: ‘What does your psychologist wife think of your drawings?’ ‘Oh,’ replied Billy, ‘she just peers at them then walks away with a superior, shrinky look on her face.’ Rubbish. I take photos of this triumph and text them to our kids. ‘Your father is officially an artist!’ I crow, as if I had anything to do with it. Well, I probably did – especially those pieces that were born of fury or frustration. Is it ever easy to be with the same person for more than thirty years? Sometimes I think I was not the right wife for Billy. I’m too self-determining, career-oriented, eager for adventure, and busy. Billy might even add ‘bossy’. ‘If you hadn’t been married to me,’ I asked him recently, ‘whom would you have wanted to be your wife instead?’ ‘Sandra Bullock,’ he replied, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I think she’s lovely. There’s a wee promise in her face. Or maybe Sin?ad Cusack, ’cause she’s fanciable, too. And that blonde woman on CSI Miami who looks like you Pamela. Well, she’s OK …’ Billy must have caught my horrified micro-expression, ‘… but she’s not as nice as you …’ Good to know. Billy was wonderfully supportive when, against his advice, I took part in the BBC television show Strictly Come Dancing. He giggled uncontrollably at my first waltz, but was later caught looking misty-eyed when my dance partner James Jordan performed a routine that helped catapult us to the finals. I wondered if – even slightly hoped – Billy would be jealous of James, but my husband was far too self-assured for that. But he warned me: ‘I wouldn’t trust a man who wore such tight trousers.’ Billy now complains he’s a ‘tango widow’ because I take off after dinner to dance until midnight. ‘Why don’t you come along?’ I frequently ask. Billy has had one tango lesson, and there are black-and-white shoes in his wardrobe, so he is partly equipped for a milonga. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss,’ he says. ‘Watching snake-hipped foreigners molesting you on the dance floor has limited appeal.’ Would Billy have preferred a cosy, soup-maker type of wife? From time to time I’m quite sure he would, but that’s not me. Anyway, he’d hate to have a mate who intruded too much on his daily life. Yes, Billy has become more and more of a hermit. Sometimes I think he’s a budding Howard Hughes. If I visit him in a foreign city where he’s been working for a while I am usually appalled by the state of his hotel room; he just hates letting people in to tidy up. I dare not touch his stuff – his drawing materials carefully laid out, his crossword puzzle beside the bed awaiting inspiration about thirty-two down, his brightly coloured underpants hanging in the shower, his banjo leaning precariously against the bathroom door. I swear he’d let his fingernails and beard grow to disgusting lengths if the various make-up artists he works with did not intervene for professional reasons. He might as well buy some planes, design a bra, and be done with it. At least Billy and I don’t have a relationship like that of a friend’s grandfather who, when asked how many sugars he liked in his tea, replied irritably: ‘Och, I don’t know. Ask your granny.’ No, we spend too much time apart to become that enmeshed. But despite the travelling both our jobs require, we stay very much in touch. Yesterday afternoon, sitting in New York, I phoned Billy in Manchester. ‘I had the concert of my life tonight,’ he crowed. ‘What exactly made it so?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I just walked on, strode downstage, faced them, and just went for it.’ No one can analyse what Billy does, least of all him. Turned out the crowd at the Manchester Apollo had been treated to a favourite story of mine, about the time he went with a couple of mates to visit a friend in Glasgow. This no-frills bachelor cooked them breakfast, but there were no plates or eating utensils so he proffered food on a spatula. When one of them reacted uncomfortably to being expected to take a hot, dripping egg in his bare hand, he rebuked him with ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking bourgeois!’ Well, that’s the bare bones of the story, but Billy tells it in his idiosyncratic picturepainting style that brings the house down. ‘They loved it,’ he glowed. ‘Of course they did,’ I replied admiringly. ‘And how many times in your life have you felt you’d had the concert of your life?’ ‘About a dozen times,’ he replied. ‘Where?’ I asked, knowing full well I’d never get an exact answer. ‘Don’t know. It’s very difficult to tell. Tonight I was just in great shape with a great audience. Changing my mind. I suddenly thought to tell them about when you’re vomiting having had a curry, you find you’re an expert in African folk music. Then I did a thing about a drunk guy singing. He’s been thrown out of the pub and he’s standing on the street practising ordering drinks. But he gets fed up so he sings a song. Then I sang a new country song I wrote called “I’d Love to Kick the Shit Out of You”.’ See, it doesn’t sound funny when you put it like that, does it? Even Billy himself finds that a problem. He never writes down ‘material’ like most other comedians, but just before a show he tries to think of a list of things he might talk about. This only makes him more scared. ‘I think, “Fuck, I’ve got nothing!”’ he says. Billy continues to be as nervous and anxious about going on stage as he was when I first met him. But, as he counselled me years ago when I was doing something similar, ‘You need your nerves.’ Once he gets on stage it’s a different story. He is still at his happiest under the spotlight. I still marvel every time I see him perform, watching the delicacy and ease with which he struts the stage. It’s truly magnificent. He would hit you if you used the word ‘technique’ to describe his comedy style, but the fact is he has one, and it’s genius. Billy’s approach has altered little over the years, but there are some minor differences. Nowadays, he feels rather less tolerant of hecklers than he was when he first started. I believe this reflects the fact that he has matured as a performer to the point where he understands how annoying interruptions of any kind can be for other audience members – especially when they emanate from someone whose had a few too many. I remember when people used to stroll in and out of his show, to buy drinks or take a toilet break any time they felt like it, and it was enormously distracting for both Billy and audience alike. Fortunately, Billy has seen fit to slightly shorten the length of time he stands on stage – it used to be a marathon three and a half hours, so I suppose people needed to move around a bit. But even today, occasionally someone will start to shout incoherently. ‘Pick a window,’ Billy would say. ‘You’re leaving.’ Other deterrents included: ‘Keep talking so the bouncer can find you!’ or even ‘Does your mouth bleed every twenty-eight days?’ But backstage, Billy’s attitude is usually surprisingly benign. ‘Och,’ he shrugs. ‘They’ve heard CDs of my old shows. They think I like it.’ Over the years Billy’s performing style has become refined to the point where you think he’s simply talking to you in your living room, over a cup of tea, and making you howl. It’s effortless, seamless. He paints magical mind-pictures that force every last bit of air from your lungs leaving you gasping and sore of stomach. No one else in the world can do that. I’ve been watching him for thirty-odd years and I’m still a fan. Billy says the best thing about being nearly seventy is not thinking about it. ‘But there’s something good about it when you’re upright,’ he confessed, ‘and when you look like me rather than one of those guys who’ve gone for the saggyarsed trousers.’ An anti-beige campaigner for many years now, Billy is proud of not looking like his father’s idea of an old man. ‘It’s nice to have hair,’ he boasts. ‘I’ve been very lucky with my genetics.’ One of Billy’s life ambitions was never to act his age. ‘Acting your age is as sensible as acting your street number,’ he says. ‘Acting the goat is much better.’ ‘And another thing,’ says Billy, on a roll about the ageing process, ‘I seem to have gone off Indian a bit. Curry’s still my favourite food but I can’t eat it at night after a gig now.’ But he still keeps the toilet paper in the fridge just in case. Billy is also off Liquorice Allsorts. ‘I can’t stop until I’ve eaten the whole packet, so now I don’t start.’ He’s like that with Cadbury’s Chocolate ?clairs and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, too, while understandably, broccoli remains the b?te noir of his gastronomic realities. Oh, and he has never made friends with wobbly food. ‘Anything gelatinous is not to be trusted,’ he insists, ‘like aspic in pork pies. It’s a close cousin of snot. You shouldn’t be eating things you find in the wee corners of your body.’ For Billy, the worst thing about turning seventy is its transparency. ‘People feel duty-bound to remind you about it because your birthday is in the paper,’ he complains. ‘And my eyebrows seem to have taken on a life of their own.’ It’s true. Recently, Billy told me his spectacles were out of focus and that he thought he needed a new prescription for his lenses. Being a bit of a fashion maven, he has an impressive wardrobe of eyewear and he was exasperated at the thought of having to change all those glasses. Now, I’m no optometrist, but I did have the answer for this one. ‘Trim your eyebrows,’ I said. They were so unruly they were pushing his spectacles askew, thus blurring his vision. Billy has come to love crossword puzzles. ‘What do you get from them?’ I asked. ‘The fact that I’m not dead yet,’ he replied. ‘It’s proof that my brain’s still alive. When I get a clue I go, “Yes! I don’t have dementia!”’ Word games were not so appealing to him in his earlier years; he had more sanguine passions. ‘What was your favourite decade?’ I asked. ‘When I was a teenager they invented rock ’n’ roll, so the Fifties were very good. The music was unbelievable – Little Richard, Fats Domino, Lonnie Donegan, Jerry Lee Lewis. We knew something had happened, and it wasn’t for your parents. It was for you. So I was listening to all this brilliant stuff and fancying women – wonderful.’ ‘What was the most fun you ever had?’ I asked, in vain hoping for some warm and fuzzy anecdote about the children and I. ‘Scoring a goal for a team called St Benedict’s Boys’ Guild,’ he replied, unabashed. ‘It was the only goal I ever scored playing for a team. I was an outside right, against a team called Sacred Heart. It was a real fluke – I shot at the goal and would have missed but the ball hit one of the players, bounced off him and went into the net. But I got it; I don’t give a shit how.’ Our conversation turned to religion. In the Epilogue of this book, Billy expounds his theory of the universe, and I was wondering if he had revised it at all. ‘Does the teacup theory still hold up?’ I asked. ‘Yes, more so than ever as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I really think I’m on to something. After I’m dead they’ll discover I was a seer. It’s perfection. See, the earth’s a virus or a disease, a wee cell in the scheme of all the greatness that surrounds it. That’s why I don’t believe any other planets are inhabited.’ The theory seemed to have become so complex, only Billy’s very special brain could comprehend it. I decided not to ask him to expand. Better just suspend disbelief and move on. ‘What do you think heaven’s like?’ I asked. Billy smiled happily. ‘In my idea of heaven there would be great music playing all the time,’ he said, ‘and Sandra Bullock would be wandering around, showing great interest in me. And that wee newsreader who used to be on breakfast TV in New York – the one whose husband died – she’ll be there.’ ‘But, say you go to hell,’ I said sweetly, with only a soup?on of passive-aggression, ‘what would that be like?’ ‘Hmmm,’ he frowned. ‘A lot of my school teachers are there, and you have to do the nine times table every day.’ ‘And what would you do if you discovered the end of the world was in three days’ time?’ I asked. ‘Oh.’ Billy actually looked mildly excited about that possibility. ‘I would put on my favourite records – Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, John Prine, The Rolling Stones, and Loudon Wainwright – and have cups of tea and just … wait for the end. Now, if you were any kind of wife you’d realize that I’m horny and get your arse over here …’ Interview over. Although Billy has long since turned his back on organized religion, he recently had the most profound spiritual experience of his life in a ‘sweat lodge’ when he was filming in northern British Columbia among the Nisga’a tribe. ‘The lodge is igloo-shaped,’ explained Billy. ‘It’s many layers of leather and canvas, and there’s a hole inside where the fire goes. The fuel for the fire is lava rock, which you have to gather yourself along with the medicine man. They make a big fire outside the hut, then carry in the rocks when they’re red-hot and place them in a pit. The medicine man sprinkles water on them to make the steam. First, you smoke a pipe of some herbs and waft sage over yourself. Then you have to crawl inside the small door to the lodge on your hands and knees. The idea of this wee door is that when you leave you’re like a baby reborn. The sweat lodge is your mother. Then we all sat in a circle around the fire pit. You can’t see a single thing. There’s a faint glow in the pit of lava, but you can’t see the others. You can only hear them, like spirits. It’s a bit like confession. The medicine man plays the drum, sings, and chants, and one at a time people unload things that are bothering them, or things they think they’d be better off without. I joined in. I was talking about being ungrateful. I felt that amazing good fortune had come my way over a period of many years, but that I took it for granted. I was not suitably grateful. The whole thing took around three hours. I didn’t think I could stand it after the first fifteen minutes, the heat was so intense, but I managed to regulate my breathing, and got to like it. It was a truly deep emotional experience. Afterwards, I found that I cried more easily than before. Tears would easily run down my face and I felt closer to myself. I recognized myself. They made me a member of the tribe. My name is something that sounds like “hissacks”, with a bit before that that sounds like alphabet soup. It means “Prince of Comedy”. And I’m a member of the killer whales. In the tribe there are wolves, salmon, killer whales, and bears. I’m a killer whale, an orca.’ For the first edition of Billy I asked my husband for his bucket list of things he wants to do before he dies. It was a terrible mistake to ask him for an update this year, because unfortunately he’s now got it into his head that he’d like to do a free-fall parachute jump out of an airplane on his seventieth birthday. But I’m afraid that would probably make his Route Sixty-Six mishap a walk in the park, so I’m hoping to dissuade him. He is also threatening to reinstall his nipple rings, which were removed for a shirtless scene during the filming of Mrs Brown and never replaced. ‘I kinda miss them,’ he says, ‘and I’m tempted to put them back in. But then I might have to wheek them out again …’ In fact, nipple rings would have been perfectly appropriate for some of Billy’s movie roles, especially the ‘hard man’ characters. He does love playing violent scoundrels, and particularly enjoyed being the gun-toting Irish crime family patriarch in The Boondock Saints and its follow-up, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. He gave each one of our children the T-shirt of him with his bushy white beard, in his trench coat, cap, and shades, smiling wickedly with a smoking nine-millimetre Glock in each hand. The caption reads, ‘Daddy’s Working!’ Sick bastard. Aside from playing savage Antichrists (to the point where really weird people approach him in American shopping malls to offer him silver bullets and Doomsday packs), Billy’s life ambitions, as revealed in the Epilogue, are largely unfulfilled. For example, he says he ‘might be a bit pissed’ that he has not yet made it to Eric Clapton’s fridge door (see page 411). But Billy’s main fantasy-ambition in life was to be a tramp. ‘I still look with great fondness on the idea of becoming a kind of colourful, American, country and western kind of hobo,’ he explains. ‘Most of my musical heroes were like that: Derroll Adams, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Alex Campbell, and Utah Phillips – he’s the one who said America is a big melting pot, but like all melting pots, the scum tends to rise to the top.’ Billy is still desperately hoping to wake up one morning and discover he’s Keith Richards. When The Rolling Stones played Glasgow as part of their most recent world tour, Billy and I drove down from the Highlands to see them. Before the concert, we were ushered to a backstage room where most of the band was engaged in a lazy game of billiards. Billy and I chatted to Keith for a while, and I embarrassed myself by being the only person on the planet who had not known the man had fallen out of a palm tree on some exotic tropical island. ‘What, you fell out of a tree?’ I echoed, when Keith referred to it. ‘Well,’ he muttered sheepishly, ‘it was more of a … shrub.’ At this point Billy was giving me his Evil Eye, which is the no-contact version of a Glaswegian kiss. ‘Well, anyway,’ said Keith, ‘I better say goodbye. Gotta go to makeup.’ Billy and I looked at each other. ‘What the hell are they going to do to him?’ I wondered aloud on our way to our seats. ‘Lip gloss?’ ‘Dunno,’ said Billy. ‘Forty years of heroin use can’t be powdered over … Does something irreversible to your skin. But he looks brilliant, doesn’t he?’ Billy glowed like a seminary novice who’d just seen the Pope. He had taken care to wear his skull ring just like Keith’s and, the second they met, they clicked rings together. ‘He was the first to wear those rings,’ said Billy, ‘well before they were trendy. And he liked my python cowboy boots! When he said that, my heart danced a wee jig!’ Seriously? Regarding Billy’s fifth life’s ambition, to learn to sail, his manager Steve Brown presented him with a lovely boat called Big Jessie. Billy has had a few lessons but has yet to tame her. And as I discovered when I tried to engage Billy in my personal dream of spending the rest of our days aboard the sailboat Takapuna (on which I had many adventures from 2002–07, some of them shared by my husband), Billy is really not too fond of boats. ‘They’re like prison,’ he complains, ‘with the possibility of drowning.’ He recently learned to scuba dive, but considers being under the water with sharks (a favourite pastime of mine) ‘the best laxative known to man’. The final item on Billy’s list is a strange one, because I believe he fulfilled that ambition from the moment he walked out of the shipyards: to change his mind as often as he damn well pleases. Perhaps Billy is unaware how self-determining he really is, although his family and work-mates certainly know. There’s hardly a person on this planet who would dare try to stop him doing something he’d set his mind to. Perhaps this was really a way to articulate his essential single-mindedness in a user-friendly fashion, a kind of Glaswegian gauntlet-throwing couched as a plea from a helpless dreamer. I suppose it’s natural that, at this point in his life, Billy might reflect more and more on his time on earth. ‘What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t become a comedian?’ I once asked. ‘I think I would have been a welder,’ he replied. Then, as an after-thought, he said: ‘But I would have been a drunk one. And I would have been unhappy, because I always nurtured a wee dream I’d promised to myself.’ It is remarkable that Billy had a secret belief, even in his darkest days, that he would eventually find a way out and become successful. I suppose idiodynamism, the tendency of an idea to materialize into action, is what actually kept him going. Although Billy sometimes complains about being on the road too much, I can’t see him retiring. He once foresaw his final years as those in which he would ‘sit on a porch playing the banjo and telling lies to his grandchildren’, but he is not really the type to settle into his rocker. He adores both his grandchildren (Cara’s son Walter has been joined by Babs since Billy was written) but, rather than lying, prefers to tell them truths – including ones their mother would rather they didn’t hear just yet. His five thriving children – Daisy, Amy, Scarlett, and (my stepchildren) James and Cara – are all old enough to laugh at their parents and remind them how ridiculous they are. Since Billy was written, quite a few beloved pals have gone forever. The biggest loss for Billy was his long-term close friend Danny, whom he had known since their folk-singing days. ‘He was my best friend and I miss him,’ says Billy. ‘But he’s still in my show. I try to make a point of talking to the audience about travelling on the train with him, and playing practical jokes – like the time we started singing “Green Door” to a guy who was sleeping. We sang, “One more night without sleepin’ …” Danny was pretending to play the drums. “What’s that secret you’re keepin’ …” And when we got to “There’s an old piano, and they play it hot, behind the green door …” we screeched it at the top of our lungs, so the sleeping guy wakes up suddenly and takes off like a rocket, then collapses in a heap. “What’s going on?” he cried. We got uppity. “You gave us the fright of our lives! We were just about to summon a constable!”’ Several of Billy’s chums from his welding days are gone, too, including his pals Mick Quinn and Hughie Gilchrist. Billy’s long-term sound engineer Mal Kingsnorth died a few years back, and Billy sorely misses him. ‘I still wait for him to come to my dressing room after a show and give me a report.’ Billy’s Uncle Neil died in Scotland after a struggle with prostate cancer, while Billy’s former babysitter, Mattie Murphy, passed away a year or two ago in London, Ontario. Mattie had turned up to see Billy in concert in London several times over the years. He had always been so happy to see her sitting in the front row with her pal, all dressed up, smiling, and eager to see him. Billy’s ex-wife Iris died in Spain in 2010. Their children Cara and Jamie had been sporadically in touch with their mother over the years. Billy had felt great compassion for her struggle with alcoholism and, although he had not seen her for many years, he was greatly shocked and saddened by her passing. ‘It didn’t really strike me till this summer when I put her ashes in the River Don and little Walter saw me crying,’ he told me. ‘Iris’s father had given her a wee book about Russia called And Quiet Flows the Don so I thought it might be nice to actually fl oat her there.’ Personally, I had not understood that Iris had suffered from a serious ‘hoarding’ disorder (we all learned this after her death), and felt very sorry that she had struggled so much without receiving the kind of psychological treatment that might have greatly helped her. Billy’s former stage mate, the singer and songwriter Gerry Rafferty, passed away in 2011, after a long struggle with illness and alcoholism. Having been more or less alienated from each other for years, Billy was in touch with him throughout his final few months. He tried to help him in a number of ways, and felt enormously sad and helpless when Gerry’s decline proved inevitable. Those two were unstoppable in their day, a couple of highly talented pranksters with matching ambitions to make it as solo artists. According to Billy, they had enormous fun travelling around the country, womanizing, playing practical tricks on each other and navigating the unfamiliar landscape of show business. Gerry’s passing had a profound effect on Billy. ‘I loved him very much when he died,’ said Billy. ‘I was texting him, and the sicker he got the more deeply I loved him and realized all the good he’d done me in my life. He was so helpful for my head, and the way I thought about myself. It gave me great pleasure to make him laugh when he was sick. I reminded him of some of the funny things we had done when we were performing together, and he was laughing on his death bed. I’m very, very proud of that. I saw him off and said my goodbyes properly, laughing on the phone. I knew that he knew I loved him. And he told me he loved me. He said I was the funniest man in the world. It was Gerry who made me think like an artist. He said: “What you do is art. You’ve got to think of it like that. So when you apply Oscar Wilde’s ideas, it’s for you, and not necessarily for everyone else. If you do it for yourself, that’s where you hit the heights.” When I lose control on stage and start laughing I’m at my happiest as far as the art goes. If I think it’s funny, it fucking is. It’s very selfish; I’m doing it for me. That’s what Gerry taught me.’ But how on earth did Billy, a welder in the Clyde River shipyards, manage to break out of the life he was expected to follow, leap onto the folk scene as a banjo player and singer with Gerry in The Humblebums, then segue into a comical banjoist, before his metamorphosis into Billy Connolly the stand-up comedian? And on top of that, how did he then find his way to American television, thence to some of the top film jobs Hollywood had to offer? Marry the prettiest cast member of Not the Nine O’Clock News? And now a visual artist no less? Astounding. I can only reiterate what I penned to end the original Introduction: Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one. Not a day has passed since I met him thirty years ago without my shaking my head and marvelling at his miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma. His ability to sustain himself beyond those days is equally impressive, for once he was known to the world, another challenge presented itself: to survive the trauma of fame. Every person who comes to public attention experiences an alienation of self, the formation of a deeply unsettling chasm between his true inner self and his public persona. The danger lies not in the confusion of those two, as is commonly thought, but in the widening gulf between them. Fortunately, Billy’s survival skills ever sustain him. When I first asked the essential, penetrating question of how he always managed to summon the resources to turn trauma into triumph, I was hoping for insight and a lucid explanation. What I got was: ‘Well, I didn’t come down the Clyde on a water biscuit.’ The following is an attempt at a sensible answer. 1 ‘Jesus is dead, and it’s your fault!’ (#ulink_a1ab9c9d-b03e-5205-b36f-30ff9c556165) Billy Connolly, King of Comedy, Master of Mirth, Chancellor of Chortling, as his children have been instructed to address him, is quivering in the wings of the spectacularly cavernous Hammersmith Apollo theatre. ‘Pamela, what the hell am I going to say to these people?’ Horrified, I turn to face him .Oh God, here we go … he’s not bluffing. Now there are two of us heading for a full-blown fight-or-flight fit. Is it possible that this time, the first in history, he might actually freeze, forget, stammer, storm off stage or batter someone? I do not fancy witnessing his death by four thousand excitable Londoners. They begin to roar as his name is announced, clapping in unison and stamping their feet. It’s the start of tonight’s war, the one he always declares then dreads. ‘You’ll be OK …’ I watch him arm himself mentally with an opening shot. As usual, he’ll take no prisoners. I’m a white-knuckled wimp when the enemy’s battle cry reaches its pitch … then suddenly he’s off. A blinding circle of light assaults him and I see his face change to a fighting calm. ‘Scot of the Anarchic’ is stepping out fearlessly into the front line. He might be gone for quite some time. The bastard’s done it again. Frightened me to death, and he’s going to win after all. I peer out into the centre of the fray and witness a beautiful armistice, achieved in the first few disarming sentences from his scowling, apologetic mouth. There is always such a peace for him out there in that spotlight, probably the only place he’s truly happy. Each time, it seems he’s given another chance, a chance he’s driven endlessly to re-create; it’s a chance to gain mastery, to triumph over – he can almost see their faces out there in the audience – Mamie, William, Mona, Rosie. I notice that tonight it is especially Rosie who must be slain as he launches into hilariously savage tales of algebra and abject humiliation. He is strutting, striding, tilting at windmills. I’m thinking, how weird that he is so aroused, furious and vindictive, yet his face at times seems almost beatific. Swathed in disgustingly musty wing velvets, I peek out at the front row. As individuals, these are hardly soldiers: T-shirted people, they are settled in comfortably to be transported to places where petrol prices, the babysitter, the in-laws, are replaced by tyrants and tenement buildings, by little old ladies in fat, furry coats, and the ubiquitous, noisy farts. It will all end in tears and some very sore bellies. I can finally breathe. He is blessed; encircled most brightly not by forty thousand watts but by his own fiery, evangelical fuck-youness. Ironically, Billy’s very earliest memory is one of being terrified by a circle of light. Until he was three years old, he and his beloved sister Florence slept in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen. One evening she aimed a mirror reflection onto the wall, allowing it to pirouette and chase him until he screamed for mercy. He had been born right next to that alcove on the kitchen floor, all eleven pounds of him plopping out onto freezing linoleum. The rage that followed this unceremonious introduction to the world has never left him, although it was a serendipitous launching for a future enemy of the bourgeoisie. For eight months he nestled in a wooden drawer with not one Fisher-Price contraption in sight. His family’s living arrangements were similar to those of thousands of other inhabitants of Glasgow, a city that had come to be defined by row upon row of late-nineteenth-century apartment buildings known as ‘the tenements’. These fine architectural soldiers had originally been created by Glasgow’s Improvement Trust, as model housing for working-class families. But by the time the Connollys moved into half of the third floor of 65 Dover Street in Anderston, many of them had deteriorated into rotting slums that would need more than a spot of paint to ‘take the bad look off them’, as Billy would say. The classically derived elevations in red or yellow sandstone were usually pleasant enough, but the interiors were thoroughly depressing. A dingy central staircase, stinking of cabbage and cat piss, spiralled upwards to the flats. Two or more poky apartments were squeezed into each floor, usually with just two rooms apiece, and a communal lavatory out on the landing. Some families were lumbered with the ‘coffin end’, or corner apartment, which was even smaller than the rest. The buildings themselves butted right onto the street and were usually entered via an interior alleyway known as a close. The ‘Wally’ closes, as some were called, were beautifully tiled halfway up the wall, with a leafy motif running along the top. Such finery, however, ended abruptly at the threshold of a darker, often treacherous, tunnel known as the ‘dunny’ (short for dungeon), that dead-ended in an enclosed rear courtyard, itself a veritable assault-course of broken bicycles, flapping knickers, and reeking middens. Considering it now through a haze of nostalgia, Billy says the Glasgow tenement is a New York brownstone without a fire escape. Some of the buildings certainly had grandeur and, like their New York counterparts, are now sought after by the well-to-do. Billy’s first home was not one of those. The Dover Street flat had only two rooms: a kitchen-living room, with a niche where the children slept, and another room for their parents. The entire family bathed in the kitchen sink and there was no hot water at all. As an enduring legacy of his early cramped existence. Billy is now quite uncomfortable in large living spaces. He sighs over the phone to me from fabulous hotels all over the world: ‘They’ve gone and upgraded me again. Bloody Presidential Suite this time.’ I let him off lightly, because I know it’s a genuine problem for him. Others who achieve renown cannot wait to sprawl sideways on a California King four-poster with a big-screen TV in every corner and a whirlpool on the deck, but not Billy. He has never really liked our Los Angeles house because of its unfamiliar spaciousness, and prefers to hide out in his tiny study for hours on end, drinking gallons of tea and plunking on his banjo. It is 5.30 a.m. in wintertime Glasgow, 2001. On my way to the airport for a transatlantic flight, I ask Jim the taxi driver to make a detour. ‘You know Dover Street?’ I inquire. ‘It’s around here somewhere.’ The fact that the Hilton Hotel is now in Anderston speaks to the gentrification of the place. We cruise along Finnieston Street, now home of a Citro?n dealership, PC World and the golden arches. ‘It’s quite a decent area …’ Jim is eager to be informative. ‘Not as rough as it used to be.’ Argyle Street is now split in two by the motorway. As we approach Singh’s corner shop, on the ground floor of an original tenement building at one end of Dover Street, it becomes evident that all the houses on one side of the street have been pulled down. In their place is a small, grassy square that faces a fashionable business centre on the next parallel street. Several modern buildings have replaced tenements on the other side of Dover Street itself, pale-brick imitations of the sandstone originals. I search around in the drizzle and I am relieved to find that No. 3 and No. 5 Dover Street are still standing. The grimy, four-storeyed blocks of flats are graced with white lace curtains that deter me from peering into the street-level apartments. While Jim smokes patiently in the cab, I stand in the silent street trying to evoke the past. It’s easy to become fanciful in the early light, seeing the spectre of Billy’s mother, fast-wheeling the rain-soaked pram around Singh’s corner to get herself and the weans into the shelter of the close. When I arrive in Los Angeles, I describe the scene to Billy. He is unmoved. ‘Yeah, they pulled my first house down and I’m upset,’ he jokes. ‘Now where are they gonna put the plaque?’ As an infant, William Connolly junior was a blond, brown-eyed puddin’ with a face that would ‘get a piece at any windy’, as they say in Glasgow if you look pitiful enough to score free sandwiches. He was a war baby, born on 24 November 1942, just as his father was preparing to leave for Burma. At twenty-three years old, William Connolly senior had been conscripted into the Royal Air Force, a fate that interrupted his career as an optical instrument maker at Barr and Stroud’s. He always considered himself very lucky to have been accepted as an apprentice at that firm. If he had not been dux of St Peter’s School in Partick, he might have been one of the many jobless victims of the rampant anti-Irish feeling that existed all around Glasgow at the time. At twenty-three years old. William Connolly senior had been conscripted into the Royal Air Force, a fate that interrupted his career as an optical instrument maker at Barr and Stroud’s. He always considered himself very lucky to have been accepted as an apprentice at that firm. If he had not been dux of St Peter’s School in Partick, he might have been one of the many jobless victims of the rampant anti-Irish feeling that existed all around Glasgow at the time. His father, Jack, was an Irishman whose family members were among the seven million victims of the potato famine, grinding poverty and relentless discrimination, who had been emigrating from Ireland since the seventeenth century. Many had sailed to the United States and Canada, risking typhus and dysentery in the ‘coffin ships’ and New World quarantine camps, but Jack’s Connemara-born family had sailed to Scotland and settled in Glasgow in the 1920s. It was probably the better choice. The average length of life for Irish refugees who reached the Americas was six years after landing. The American streets were not paved with gold after all, but rather Irish immigrants were expected to pave the streets themselves and to do so for very low wages. Expectations of Scotland-bound Irish emigrants were not so fanciful, yet Glasgow society echoed the Yankees in being highly prejudiced against the Irish, due to religious, racial, cultural and economic differences. In Glasgow, there was also the fear that jobs would be lost to the incomers. In America, the ‘Know Nothing’ hate group murdered Irish immigrants and destroyed their property; in Glasgow there was a concerted effort to deny them jobs and lodgings. One of the most popular songs of the 1870s said it all: ‘I am a decent Irishman and I come from Ballyfad And I want a situation and I want it mighty bad. A position I saw advertised is a thing for me, says I, But the dirty spouting ended with “No Irish Need Apply”.’ Similar exclusionary signs were out in force in Glasgow in the 1930s when Billy’s father was looking for work, hung in places where jobs were available for Protestants only. The notice outside Barr and Stroud’s was only a little less overt than usual. ‘Apprentices wanted’ it read, ‘Boys’ Brigade Welcome’. Being Catholic and half-Irish, William had not been a candidate for membership of the staunchly Protestant Boys’ Brigade, an organization founded with evangelical zeal in the previous century by one William Smith who wished to promote health, constructive activity, and a moral soundness among Glaswegian youth. Jack Connolly had married Jane McLuskey, a Glaswegian lass from a devoutly Catholic family, who bore him seven children, six of whom survived. William, born in 1919, was the youngest child after Charlie. John. James. Mona and Margaret; while a younger sister named Mary died of tuberculosis when she was only eight. William himself was a sickly child, spoiled by his mother and bossed by his oldest sister, Mona. He had problems with his eyes, and needed several pairs of chunky, brown-framed spectacles. He was passionate about football, and insisted on the supremacy of the Celtic team until the day he died. Even though he had been promising at school, children of the depression had little opportunity for further education, so he taught himself logarithms, and how to speak Italian and German. William was a strict Catholic, but it is unlikely that his tortured aspect and taciturn nature were entirely due to religion. His father Jack may have passed on some of his formidable qualities to his son for he was the epitome of stoicism and pride, as illustrated by a family story that has been handed down from the 1920s. The tale is set just before the pubs closed one New Year’s Eve, or Hogmanay as they call it in Scotland, ‘the same as other people’s Christmas, but without God to knacker the proceedings’, as Billy puts it. Jack, who was extremely fond of a drink, bought a ‘Hogmanay carry-out’: a paper bag with a bottle of whisky and a few bottles of Guinness in it. On his way out of the pub, he made the mistake of putting his parcel on the beer-soaked floor. He strode home to see out the old year and welcome in the new with a skinful of Guinness, not realizing that the brown paper had become sodden and weak. A few streets from home, the bottom fell out of the bag and, to his horror, the contents smashed and spilled into the gutter. Jack returned home empty-handed and recounted the sad story to his wife. ‘What in heaven’s name did you do?’ she asked, appalled. Quite apart from the personal embarrassment, Hogmanay is the most important of all Scottish celebrations and there would have been no time or spare cash to replace his loss. The man stared into the middle distance, chin in the air. ‘Jack walked on,’ he declared. Jack was a slim, good-looking man with a handlebar moustache. He managed to support his wife and children by working as a labourer, a plater’s helper in the shipyards. The job required great strength so, despite his thin frame, he must have been quite wiry. His son William was also svelte as a youth, but he eventually tumesced into a bloated man with the biggest neck in the world. Nowadays, Billy always complains, ‘I don’t want to wear a tie. I’ll look like a man with a head transplant!’ He got that look from his father. At Barr and Stroud’s in 1940, William had not been fully focused on his work. At twenty years old he had met a teenager called Mamie McLean, of the McLean of Duart clan from the isle of Mull, who returned to her mother’s house every evening with hands covered in fine red dust from polishing the lenses of rangefinders. She was a handsome and volatile sixteen-year-old, with long, dark hair and a forthright expression. The only girl in the family, Mamie had developed a strong personality and a self-protective sense of humour. She had a fine ability to stand up for herself, although that may be an understatement; some say she was the type of woman who could start a fight in an empty house. She was fast on her feet, and would always streak out ahead of her brothers, Neil. John, Edward (Teddy) and Hugh, in their holiday seafront races. At the Protestant Kent Road School in Glasgow, Mamie had shown herself to be bright, but with a war on there was generally little emphasis on education, and so she went to work. Wartime Glasgow was a sinister place to ‘court a lassie’. As evening fell, a sickly, green light spread through the streets as people scurried to get home before the blackout. Bombers occasionally dumped their lethal loads on the city, the worst occasions being two nights of non-stop bombing on 13 and 14 March 1941. which were devastating for citizens from the industrial areas of the River Clyde. The ‘Clydebank Blitz’ left two-thirds of that town’s population homeless, and killed or wounded thousands, but the only casualty in the McLean household was their pet canary, who perished when a land mine blew open the shutters. Mamie’s father, Neil McLean, was an air-raid warden and, before a local air-raid shelter was built, everyone in the largely Irish Catholic neighbourhood would sprint to relative safety in the bottom floor of his tenement. Every time there was even a hint of a bang or whistle from the skies above, Mamie and her brothers would be deafened by exhortations from their fellow refugees. ‘Mary, mother of God, Jesus and Joseph and all the saints!’ They were nearly drowned in holy water. This must have been particularly irksome for Neil, a Protestant whose own father had been a Boys’ Brigade officer. A diminutive Highlander from the west of Scotland, Neil’s father looked out of place in Glasgow, still wearing his navy, deep-sea cap with a shiny peak. He had even hung fish to dry on a small rope outside his city tenement window. ‘Well, Mr McLean,’ the Catholic corner boys would bait Neil, imitating his ‘teuchter’, or country, accent, ‘did you find the Lord today?’ ‘I wasn’t aware I’d lost him.’ The ‘corner boys’ were the casualties of the jobless depression years. With no money and nowhere to go, men would stand around in clumps at every intersection of the city, just blethering and shooting the breeze. Neil McLean, however, was never one to be idle. He had been a warehouseman for McFarren, Smith and Glass, but when he lost his job he spent his time cycling and running a football team. They were hard times for him and the family, but unlike many of his contemporaries, Neil kept his standards and avoided strong drink. They were able to eat because his wife, Flora, managed to make a living cleaning houses and offices. One of her employers was a Highland woman, a Mrs Morrison. ‘And what does your husband do, Flora?’ she asked one day. ‘Well, Ma’am, he has no work.’ ‘Did he ever think of trying to get into the Corporation?’ ‘Och, no one gets into the Corporation today.’ ‘I’ll speak to Mr McKinnon.’ In those days, every bus and tramcar of the Glasgow Transport Corporation had ‘General Manager: L. McKinnon’ written on its side. Out of the gloom of the depression, Lachie McKinnon found Neil a job as a conductor. He was eventually promoted to an inspector and was with the company for forty years until he retired. Neil, or ‘Big Neilly’ as he became known, was a rigid man, a strict disciplinarian who frightened the life out of his subordinates and caused his children to wish he would take a drink from time to time. He stood straight, walked like a guardsman, and never left for work without a starched collar, black tie, and gleaming buttons. Despite all that, it was rumoured that he was secretly quite timid, ‘a big fearty’ as they say in Glasgow, and would send Flora to the door whenever he was called upon in his role as air-raid warden. Flora was a robust soul who did not agree with him in all things. She went to Mass on Sundays and made clandestine arrangements for the children to be baptized as Catholics, although at Big Neilly’s insistence they were formally raised as Protestants. Small wonder religion was never openly discussed at home, although Flora and her sisters had a few tricks up their sleeves. ‘Now remember, Mamie, which hand do you shake with?… The one you use to bless yourself.’ Flora loved to laugh and decorate herself with clothing and costume jewellery. She would get herself ‘all done up like a kitchen bed’, as they say in Glasgow – tenement alcove beds were always made up early and carefully, in case visitors arrived. When Flora went carousing with her girlfriends at a tea dance in town, she was definitely the best turned out cleaner in Glasgow. ‘There’s nae pockets in a shroud,’ she would say. Her husband was no fashion victim, but believed in the importance of having just one made-to-measure suit for special occasions. His was wrapped carefully in brown paper and placed inside a tin in the wardrobe. Fortunately, there were very few special occasions to attend, so Big Neilly had no idea how often his good suit was missing. Flora, who was kind-hearted to a fault, saved many a near-destitute family by allowing them to pawn it until their crisis was over. Thus was the measure of poverty. Mamie was their second-born. The McLeans, all seven of them, lived at first in a top-floor tenement flat with one room and a kitchen. Later, they flitted to a flat that seemed like a castle after the old one, for it had two rooms. Mamie’s brothers required a great deal of attention from their mother. Ted had two or three operations for ‘the mastoid’, John sat at home in disgrace because he played truant, and Hughie was weak with chronic bronchitis. When war broke out, Hughie, a sensitive nine-year-old, was sent to Dunoon to stay with an aunt. He was not treated kindly, and sorely missed his mother. It broke his heart to see her only on Sundays, for the short walk from the ferry to his aunt’s house and back again. Mamie was always up for an entertaining time. After Hughie returned to Glasgow, she occasionally took him to the Metropole Theatre. There was a flourishing music-hall tradition in Glasgow in those days, and the pair particularly enjoyed the performance of a tubby singer called Master Jo Peterson, a strange woman with a strong soprano voice who wore a choirboy’s uniform. It is hard to imagine exactly what Mamie saw in William. He took life far more seriously and is said to have ‘made stubbornness a virtue’. Later in life, he was known for the extroverted bear-hugs he forced on fellow punters at the Dowanhill Bar in Partick, but in the forties William was a somewhat morose and secretive figure who spent much of his life under the thumb of his sister Mona. At twenty-one he was ‘an older man’ to Mamie, who by contrast was talkative, histrionic, and was easily led into good times. As World War Two was just beginning, the pair would tramp to the York Caf? at the bottom of Hyndland Street. They ordered hot peas in vinegar followed by a ‘McCallum’, a vanilla ice-cream sundae with raspberry sauce and Empire biscuits (they had been called German biscuits before the war). William and Mamie would chat for hours about their newest co-worker at the factory, the price of a pair of nylons, and the doings of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps William offered Mamie an escape of sorts. One might speculate that, in the light of all the demands placed on Flora by her sons, her work, her neighbours, and her undoubtedly high-maintenance husband, she had little time to focus on Mamie. Certainly Big Neilly was no warm and fuzzy papa, so William may have been the first person to show a special interest in her. Whatever it was that connected her to him, in the space of a year or so she went from school to work to pregnancy to marriage, in that order, and almost entirely missed her adolescence. At least William made an honest woman of her. They were married on 25 November 1940 at St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, a fine, red sandstone, nineteenth-century building in William Street. The Glaswegian Irish never gained political power like their New World counterparts, who eventually dominated American politics, but they were similarly galvanized to establish their own churches, schools, hospitals and orphanages. There is no mistaking St Patrick’s Irish patronage, for in addition to its name, the interior boasts polished wooden pews adorned with carved shamrocks. The building is clearly visible from the lift lobbies high up in the Glasgow Hilton. ‘See that church?’ Billy always forgets he’s pointed it out a million times. ‘I was christened there.’ Florence was born exactly five months after Mamie’s wedding day, on 25 April 1941. She, William and Mamie moved into the grubby apartment in Dover Street, and attempted to have a life together. It was a boring one for the seventeen-year-old, who was simply not ready for marriage, let alone motherhood. She tried to cope with the baby most of the day, expecting some amusement in the evening, but when William came home, he had a face like a wet Monday and buried himself in his newspaper. Her second pregnancy must have been as unwelcome as the first, but Billy arrived nineteen months after Florence. Billy’s current nickname, ‘The Big Yin’, does not refer to his birth weight, but it would have fitted. He was an absolutely enormous newborn: eleven pounds, four ounces, to be exact. Mamie endured her labour alone, first in the freezing alcove, then finally squatting on the kitchen floor, no doubt fully regretting the day she had first met the co-perpetrator of her agony, who was by now busy planning his own escape. William’s engineering skills were demanded by the Royal Air Force, so he flew far away to tend the engines of Lancaster bombers in India, Burma and Africa. Like thousands of other wartime brides, Mamie wondered if he would ever return. It was the tradition in those times for girls who had left the family house to visit their mothers on Sundays. As far as rationing would allow, Flora would cook a Sunday dinner of stew and dumplings, or leftovers and ‘stovies’, a dish made with potatoes and onions. All the family gathered then. Hughie would help Mamie get the pram up and down the stairs and he soothed the little ones while Mamie chatted. But, apart from Sundays, Mamie had little of the social contact she craved. She rarely heard from her husband. His sisters Margaret and Mona would look in from time to time, but Mamie hated their nosiness and attempts to take control. She thought they came more to criticize than to help. ‘She’s just a daft wee girl,’ sneered Mona behind her back. Overcrowding and poor maintenance always ensured that tenement life spilled out into the streets, the grimy domain of vendors and tramcars being an extension of the inhabitants’ living space. Socially, the tenement was a vertical village, and everyone knew everyone. A neighbour, Mattie Murphy, who was about the same age as Mamie, sometimes watched the infants when Mamie left the flat to do her washing in ‘the steamie’, as Glaswegian public laundries were called. She claims Billy was ‘a cheeky wee devil’. He was full of mischief and had no problem answering back. One teatime, Mattie was cutting up a sticky bun covered with pink icing when Billy spied the end piece that had the most icing. ‘I want that fucking piece!’ It was startling language for a three-year-old. ‘You’ll get none,’ threatened Mattie. ‘Then I’ll touch you with my chookie.’ The infant hard-man began to unbutton his flies but, after catching sight of Mattie’s horrified face, he ran around and pinched her bottom instead. He got no iced bun that day. It was not the only preview of Billy’s renowned outrageousness. Mattie’s daughter, Roseanne, was sitting on the pavement with some other children one day after an exhausting game of ‘Peever’, a variation of hopscotch that was played with a can of shoe polish. Billy came sauntering along the road and decided that he needed to pee. In those days, little boys would just unbutton their flies and urinate into the gutter but, while he was doing so, Billy caught sight of the adjacent group of girls and just couldn’t resist turning sideways and spraying their backs. He was definitely a handful. Mattie found Dover Street life in the 1940s more riveting than the music hall. A woman whose livelihood was prostitution resided on the ground floor of one of the buildings. The residents of Dover Street apparently conspired to help this woman rip off her customers by ganging up on the men after they had paid their shillings. ‘Bugger off.’ they would cry. ‘You’re giving the place a bad name!’ This conspiratorial behaviour, however, was sporadic. Quite often the temperamental sex-worker would go for an evening stroll in her underwear, challenging other women who lived in the street, whom she accused of gossiping about her, to come out and fight. It got to the point where residents would bring chairs out each night and sit waiting for the show to begin. Tragically, Mattie lost her own son. He was home from school with a cold and, short of clean nightwear, his mother had insisted he put on his sister’s nightgown to keep warm. When both parents were out, Mattie’s boy leaned over too close to the fire and a spark sent his nightgown up in flames. His sister was powerless to save him. Before the boy was buried, the streetwalker amazed everyone by turning up and throwing herself on his boy-sized coffin in a great demonstration of wailing and sadness, shouting heavenward at the top of her voice. ‘Why couldn’t you have taken me instead of the wean? I’m bad! I’m bad!’ Billy and Florence played out on the street from a very early age. It was Mattie who searched high and low for them after they disappeared one evening. Their neighbour, Mr Cumberland, had come home from work, desperate to get to the pub. ‘You’d better get those bloody kids in first,’ said his long-suffering wife, who also liked a drink or six, which is a fact Billy omits when he tells a version of the story on stage. Mr Cumberland had eight children, so, driven by his thirst, the wily man went out onto the street and got as many Cumberlands as he could find, then just made up the numbers with any other children he spied. Billy and Florence were scooped up with no questions asked and thrown into bed with the others. Later that night two Cumberlands were found roaming the street, which gave the search party a useful clue, and the exchange was eventually made. If only Mattie had been asked to help out more in those first years, Billy and Florence might have had an easier time. Mamie was disintegrating, probably depressed and, unknown to her family, was abdicating responsibility for the children who were horribly neglected. Billy had pneumonia three times before he was four. Officers of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were called in when Mamie left them alone with an unguarded, blazing fire. At three years old, Florence was expected to care for Billy without an adult present. She was an anxious, often tearful child, with dark curls flopping over a high forehead and charming ‘sonsie’, or roundly appealing, face. She was always Billy’s ‘guardian angel’ as he calls her now, but she sorely needed one of her own. One evening when she was alone looking after Billy, she fell into some hot ashes. She screamed for help, but no one came. She never received medical attention at the time and as a result she lost the sight of an eye. One winter morning in 1945, three-year-old Billy woke up wanting his mother. Wearing only a tiny vest, he went toddling along the freezing hallway to her bedroom. He hesitated just inside the door to her darkened room, surprised to see a stranger sitting on his mother’s bed. The man was brown-haired and bare-chested, and stared at Billy as he finished putting on a sock. As Billy tottered closer, the stranger shoved his bare foot up against his forehead and gently pushed him backwards until he was out in the hallway again, then closed the door with the same foot. It was Willie Adams, his mother’s lover. Billy and Florence were alone and frightened when their mother left. She just closed the door and never came back. Eventually there was a lot of wailing and shouting, and then they were cared for by nuns in a place of polished wooden benches, stained glass and whispering. There was disagreement in the two families about who should bring up the children. Flora wanted them, but William’s sisters, Margaret and Mona, stepped in and took over. It was Mona who, responding to a neighbour’s concern about the constant crying resounding throughout the tenement, had gone along to the flat with her brother James and found Florence and Billy crouching together in the alcove bed, freezing, hungry and pitifully unkempt. She and Margaret eventually took young Billy and Florence to live in the Stewartville Street tenement in Partick that they shared with James, who was recently back from the war. The children never saw their mother again when they were growing up. She came once to see them when they were still very young, but the aunts chased her off like a whore. Later she turned up with one of her brothers, but again, she was refused entry. That’s when Mamie punched Mona. Flattened her right in the doorway. Margaret and Mona were an odd pair. Mona was born in 1908 and was thirteen years older than her flightier sister. Like all unmarried women getting on for forty in those days, Mona was terrified of being stigmatized as an ‘old maid’; by contrast, Margaret had a twinkle in her eye and no shortage of dancing partners. Billy found both sisters rather forbidding at the outset, although they tried to be kind and welcoming. Margaret still wore her Wrens’ uniform, a stiff navy suit with brass buttons and a collar and tie. She’d had the time of her life when she was based in Portsmouth but, after the war, she settled down to life as a civil servant, writing up pension claims by coal miners who were suffering from pneumoconiosis, the black lung scourge. Margaret had wonderful red hair. Some evenings Billy and Florence would watch her flounce off to the dance hall in a cloud of ‘4711’ toilet water, stylishly draped in kingfisher-blue taffeta. Mona was a dour and dominant force in the household. She was a registered nurse, working at night in a crowded ward for patients with chest complaints such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. On occasion, she did some private nursing so there were syringes lying around the place and strange rubber hoses in a drawer. The children could never work out what they were for. Mona dyed her curly brown hair a bright blonde, and was definitely no fashion plate. Billy thought his Uncle James, on the other hand, was very glamorous indeed. He had been caught in a booby trap in France when he was with the Cameron Highlanders, so he now had only two fingers on his left hand. He modelled standards of grooming and hygiene that had previously been missing from the children’s lives, always polishing his shoes, ironing his shirts, and inspecting Billy’s teeth for adequate brushing. Both children had needed delousing when they arrived at Stewartville Street. Standing up naked in the sink, they were scrubbed vigorously with scabies lotion, a cold, viscous substance that left a milky residue on their skin. Their hair was deloused in an agonizing process involving an ultra-fine comb and a newspaper placed on the floor so they could see the lice when they landed. Billy was grateful for the new and unfamiliar air of brusque kindness all around him. The four-year-old slept in a cot in the aunts’ bedroom, and felt happy to be tucked into a clean bed, even if he was chastised horribly for peeing in it with great frequency. He could not understand their problem with that; in the past he’d always done it with impunity. Many things changed in the children’s lives. They were given new clothing, sent to them from New York by their Uncle Charlie, William’s elder brother, who had emigrated to America. Florence was over the moon with her new stickyouty dress of pale lavender watersilk, while Billy became the proud owner of a pair of beige overalls. Nowadays, Billy has a pathological aversion to beige apparel, and especially attacks the wearers of beige cardigans, but back then he thought he was the kipper’s knickers. Consistency became part of the children’s lives for the very first time. Every morning, right after their porridge, the children would be given a delicious spoonful of sickly-sweet molasses, followed by a vomit-making dollop of cod-liver oil. Billy begged to be given the oil first. ‘Why, oh why,’ he wondered, ‘can’t I have the nice stuff last to take away the nasty taste?’ But he was always given the molasses first. His aunts were not the only ones who believed the hard way was the best way, and that safety resided in suffering. Billy says that many a Glaswegian has cast his troubled eyes on a brilliant, sunshine day and muttered, ‘Och, we’ll pay for this!’ Every evening after supper, Uncle James knelt down beside his kitchen alcove bed to say his prayers. The notion of communicating with an unseen entity was new to Billy, but he happily went along to Mass and quite enjoyed watching the whole colourful spectacle and singing loudly along with the congregation. Then, as now, he enjoyed the pageant of life swirling around him, and the bustle of Stewartville Street was particularly appealing. Most days he played with marbles and little tin cars in the gutter outside his close. It was a perfect vantage point from which to study the activities of the milkman, the coalman, the ragman and the chimney sweeps. If he played his cards right, he could be heaved high up onto the horse-drawn cart of one of those workers for a ‘wee hurl’ to the top of the street. One day, while Florence played ‘chases’ and ‘hide-and-seek’ with other neighbourhood children, Billy began drawing on the pavement with a piece of chalk. He was soon apprehended by an angry policeman who tried to march him indoors. The officer was barely inside the close when he was stopped short by old Mrs Magee, a tiny Belfast woman, who gave him a terrible time: ‘Away and catch a murderer, you big pain in the arse! Leave the child alone!’ There was an evangelical establishment in the street at number twelve, called Abingdon Hall. It’s still there today, a red-painted gospel hall run by the Christian Brethren that boasts regular social events such as ‘Ladies Leisure Hour’ and ‘Missionary Meeting’. Back then, Protestant children could attend meetings of a youth club called ‘Band of Hope’. Billy and Florence began to find creative ways to sneak in for the exotic experience of a slide show of the Holy Land, a cup of tea and a bun. Billy decided that the appeal of the Protestant faith was the absence of kneeling. Never one to shy away from a good sing-song, he joined in with the best of them: ‘There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide Hallelujah!’ When their visits to that Protestant stronghold were discovered. Florence got the blame and was given a terrible row by Mona: ‘You’re the oldest! You should have known better!’ It was as if they’d sneaked into a peep-show. By now, Billy was becoming aware of the stigma that was attached to his assigned faith. One day he was with a little pal, happily shooting marbles into a drain, when he heard an upstairs window being hurriedly thrust open. Her grandfather leaned out, pipe in hand: ‘Marie Grant! What have I told you about playing with Catholics!’ After a few months of living with the aunts, Billy began settling into their routine. He wondered where his mother had gone, but no one seemed willing to discuss that with him. He overheard adults around him gossiping about her in scathing terms, which further confused and saddened him. Although Mamie had been banned from the house, her mother Flora visited the children from time to time and brought them sweeties and chocolate. There had been no sweets for them during the war so anything sugary was quite a treat. Grandma wore a fur coat, dangly earrings and lots of perfume, and looked exactly like a Christmas tree. The aunts disapproved, but Billy thought the sun shone out of her behind. She was fond of boxing, and would sneak them pictures of her idol Joe Louis and talk about all sorts of interesting things. She always knew when Billy was talking rubbish. ‘Your head’s full of dabbities,’ she would cluck – a dabbity was one of those cheap transfers children licked then stuck on their arms. Flora became known for her trenchant sayings. She had left school at thirteen to go to work, but always had a ready answer for anyone who tried to outsmart her. ‘Well, if we were all wise, there’d be no room for fools!’ she’d jibe, or, ‘Perhaps I didn’t go to school, but I met the scholars coming out.’ All too soon, Uncle James had a bride-to-be. Her name was Aunt Peggy, and she was delightful, fresh off the boat from Ireland. She was entirely comfortable with her country ways and resisted changing them her whole life. Billy was fascinated by her style of speaking. She addressed everybody as ‘pal’ and referred to boys as ‘gossoons’. The newlyweds eventually moved to the nearby district of Whiteinch and were sorely missed by the children. Someone must have told Billy that his father would be coming home soon, because every time an aeroplane went by he would gallop to the window and ask if it were he. Everyone knew it wouldn’t be long, as over a million men had been demobbed and returned to their homes after VE-Day had lured the citizens of Britain into the streets for dancing and endless celebratory parties in 1945. It was a time of great rejoicing when William finally walked in the door in March 1946. Billy hid under the table and watched huge, black Oxfords and stocky, navy trouser legs enter the room and march towards him. A vaguely familiar head topped with an air-force ‘chip poke’ hat (the shape of the paper packets in which chips were sold in Glasgow) appeared under the table. It scrutinized him for a few seconds, and then a meaty hand proffered a shiny gift to coax him out. It was a wonderful toy yacht, with its hull painted green below the waterline and red above. Billy loved that boat. It had real ropes that actually worked, and he sailed it many times on Bingham’s Pond just off the Great Western Road. It was odd having their father back. As was so often the case when men returned from the war, he was a stranger to his children and had been robbed of the chance to establish an early bond with them. William never spoke to Billy and Florence about their mother’s departure. He simply settled into the Stewartville Street house, stashing his massive metal air-force trunk under the bed. His name and service numbers were painted on its side, along with the words: ‘NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE’. That sign always troubled Billy. Why, he wondered, didn’t they want my father on the voyage? What did they have against him that meant they wouldn’t let him go with the rest of the men? Florence and Billy used to heave out the trunk and inspect its mysterious contents. They thought it was brilliant. They found bits of engineering equipment, their father’s wire air-force spectacles, and photos of him in India standing around with five other men, all in outlandish leopard coats, grinning and posing for the picture. On Sundays, William occasionally took the children to the Barrowland market, known to all Glaswegians as ‘The Barras’. It is a bustling place for street vending, which used to be as much a market of human variety as of inanimate goods. Billy and Florence were amazed to see grown men eating fire and selling devilish cure-alls. Billy was astounded to see men allowing themselves to be chained inside sacks, and women throwing knives at them until they miraculously escaped. Mr Waugh, a circus ‘strong man’, actually bent six-inch nails with his teeth before Billy’s very eyes. ‘Stop Barking!’ boomed John Bull, a balding man in a double-breasted suit who stood in Gibson Street hawking his Lung and Chest Elixir. ‘Asthma! Bronchitis! Whooping Cough! Croup! Difficulty breathing and all chest troubles! Absolutely safe for all ages!’ Billy eagerly sought out ‘The Snakeman’, known as Chief Abadu from Nigeria, who claimed his snake oil cured everything from hair loss to a stuffy nose. He acted out crude impersonations of a woman gripping her chest in pain or all blocked up with catarrh, offering to rub samples on selected folk’s hands. To Billy’s disappointment, no child ever got a whiff. ‘He was way ahead of his time,’ observes Billy, who is currently fascinated by the ‘faith-healing’ evangelists who use similar, charisma-reliant methods to sell God and health on the born-again Christian television channel in California. ‘Look at those pricks,’ Billy winces, ‘they must think people zip up at the back.’ One of the best parts of any Sunday outing was the journey, for they took the tramcar. Glasgow had an excellent system of tramcars, known in the dialect as ‘the caurs’. They had a peculiar electric smell, and shook from side to side so many passengers turned green after a very short while, but everybody loved them. Conductors, who were usually female, collected the fares on board: ‘Come on, get aff!’ they would shout, rudely shoving people. ‘Move up! move up!’ These cheeky women were both the scourge and the sweethearts of Glasgow, and they were immortalized in the music hall: ‘Mary McDougal From Auchenshuggle The caur conductoress, Fares please, fares please …’ One conductor’s smart-arse retort reverberated around the city: ‘Does this tram stop at the Renfrew Ferry?’ ‘I hope so. It cannae swim.’ In 1947, Billy’s Uncle Charlie came back from America to visit them with his young son, Jack, in tow. Dolly, his daughter who had Down’s Syndrome, had stayed at home with her mother. Everybody loved Charlie: he was the family love story. He had fallen for Nellie, a charming Glaswegian lassie whose family emigrated to the United States. Charlie saved up enough money to follow her to Far Rockaway, Long Island, where they married and settled down in that beach-side town. Far Rockaway is the closest point to Scotland in the whole American continent and Charlie lived there his whole life, never travelling further than Philadelphia. Charlie was a hoot. Out of his grinning, ‘smart-ass’ mouth came some great sassy American expressions, such as ‘Hey buster, how’d you like your eye done – black or blue?’ He would sit in the tenement window three floors up with one leg dangling. ‘Hey guys, you wanna drink?’ He would squirt them with a water pistol. Even Margaret and Mona loosened up when Charlie was around, and they all went to the variety theatre together. Billy used to tell people they were all going to America to live on his Uncle Charlie’s ranch and they were going to get a car each. There is a hefty, red sandstone Victorian apartment building in Stewartville Street that was originally St Peter’s School for Boys. The sunken car park was once a playground full of youngsters careering pell-mell from corner to corner and Billy loved to sit with his legs dangling through the railings, watching them with envy. Sometimes he even caught some of the older students hurrying out at lunchtime, heading for a nearby shop where they could buy a single cigarette for a penny, and a slice of raw turnip for a half-penny. Billy thought they were gods. He simply could not wait to be a schoolboy, and imagined himself smoking cigarettes, eating turnips, and wearing fight-smart, studded boots that made sparks in the street. He soon got part of his wish, for the aunts decreed that it was time for both him and Florence to attend school. Very young Catholic boys attended St Peter’s Girls’ School, and then moved on to the boys’ school once they turned six. Billy’s first teacher at kindergarten was Miss O’Halloran and, at five years old, he doted on her. In her classroom it was all Plasticine and lacing wool through holes in cards. Miss O’Halloran was amazed he could already write (Florence had taught him) and Billy was paraded round the school as a great example. He even went to Florence’s class where to everyone’s amazement he formed the letter ‘J’ on the board. But, despite his early star pupil status, Billy was terrified of the nuns, and was especially wary of Sister Philomena who had pictures of hell on her wall that looked like travel brochures. Billy assumed she’d been there. When he moved up to the boys’ school at six years old, there was a harshness he’d not experienced in kindergarten. In the main hallway there was a massive crucifix, a bleeding, life-sized Christ that thoroughly spooked him. Billy had not yet been fully indoctrinated into the faith, but once he was at the boys’ school that occurred as swiftly and as subtly as a fishhook in the nostril: on his first day at the new school his teacher Miss Wilson informed him that Jesus was dead and that he, Billy, was personally responsible. And that wasn’t the only bad news. From now on, he was to be addressed as ‘Connolly’ instead of ‘Billy’. Things were changing at home as well. William, who was probably traumatized by his wartime experiences, seemed remote and gruff to his children. He was generous as far as his means would allow and Florence and Billy looked forward to Fridays when he would come home from his job in a machine parts factory, bearing comic books, Eagle for Billy and Girl for Florence. But, although he could be quite flush with a full pay packet, he generally proved to be an inconsistent and absent parent. As time went on and the children became less of a novelty, the aunts began to fully comprehend the sacrifices they would have to make in order to bring them up. It gradually dawned on Mona and Margaret that their single lives were now over, for dating and marriage would henceforth be difficult at best. Consequently, they began to sour, and the atmosphere at home changed drastically for the worse. There was a hymn at the time, a favourite of Billy’s. It was called ‘Star of the Sea’: ‘Dark night has come down on this heavenly world And the banners of darkness are slowly unfurled. Dark night has come down, dear mother and we Look out for thy shining, sweet star of the sea. Star of the sea, sweet star of the sea Look out for thy shining, sweet star of the sea.’ And that’s what he felt had happened. ‘This is definitely different,’ he thought to himself at six years old. ‘God’s dead, my first name’s gone, and the whole fucking thing’s my fault.’ 2 ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’ (#ulink_bae1fb2c-c505-57ab-9a02-6b877dceca63) It is late fall in Philadelphia, 24 November 2000. An eclectic crowd is jammed into an arts-district theatre. Few people are still hugging their weatherproof outerwear, so under the seats are strewn woollen, nylon, or leather garments that have slid silently downwards as bodies began to relax and shake with hysteria. Election time in the United States is a comedian’s gift of a social climate. ‘If you don’t make up your mind about your president pretty quick, the country’s going to revert to us British,’ threatens the shaggy, non-voting Glaswegian with the radio microphone, ‘and look at the choice you’ve got! Gore – what a big fucking Jessie he is … and George W. Bush – God almighty!’ A rant against politicians follows, and so do cheers and applause from this thoroughly fed-up bunch of voters. ‘I’ve been saying all along: don’t vote! It only encourages the bastards!’ The harangue eventually switches to introspection, and soon the theme is the march of time, probably inspired by the fact that this is the night of his fifty-eighth birthday. He bashfully announces this to the throng, which prompts a rowdy bunch on the right-hand side to instigate a swell, until the entire audience is singing happy birthday to Billy. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he wails at them. ‘Behave yourselves!’ Every single detail of his highly embarrassing prostate exam has just been shared with all these strangers, yet the intimacy of a birthday celebration is making him very uncomfortable. Later on, in the dressing room, there is a tiny cake from his promoter. Billy has just moaned to his audience that his birthday cake now holds nearly three boxes of candles, but the promoter’s sponge-and-frosting round has only four snuff-resistant flames dancing above a chocolate greeting. As always, Billy is shattered, sweaty, and still in a fragile trance from the show. I shower him with kisses and praise for a brilliant performance, but he slumps glumly in the couch, staring fixedly at the cake. He is transported to the circus in Glasgow more than fifty years ago. Among the most terrifying characters from his six-year-old experience were, ironically, clowns, and one of these scary, painted monsters is riding a unicycle while balancing a birthday cake on his shoulder. Unaccustomed to being celebrated for being alive, wee Billy has never seen a birthday cake before that moment. ‘Look!’ he cries, to the amusement of his sister and aunts. ‘He’s got candles in his loaf!’ Nowadays, I like to order an extravagant loaf of breadshaped chocolate birthday cake with candles for Billy, which he always hugely enjoys, but back then, at St Peter’s School for Boys, special treats were unheard of. Absolutely everything seemed threatening. A boy was to march in file and remember his arithmetic tables or else. The punishment for noncompliance involved several excruciatingly painful whacks with a tawse, an instrument of torture made in Lochgelly in Fife. It was a leather strap about a quarter of an inch thick, with one pointed end, and three tails at the other. The teacher’s individual preference dictated which end Billy and the other boys would receive. Most liked to hold the three tails and wallop the culprit with the thick end. When a boy was considered a candidate for receiving this abuse, he was forced to hold one hand underneath the other, with arms outstretched. The tawse was supposed to find its target somewhere on the hand, but Billy noticed that teachers seemed to take great delight in hitting that very tender bit on his wrist, and making a nasty weal. Most of the boys, however, were quite keen on having battle scars. Rosie McDonald, the worst teacher of the bunch, whom Billy describes as ‘the sadist’, would make her victim stand with hands, palms up, about an inch above her desk. When she wielded her tawse, the back of his hands would come crashing down painfully on top of pencils she’d placed underneath. That was her special treat in winter, when the chilly air made even youthful joints stiffer and more sensitive. Among her pupils, Rosie had favourites, but Billy was definitely not one of them. Scholastically, he did not seem to be grasping things nor keeping up with his homework, so Rosie assumed that he was lazy and stupid and punished him viciously. Everyone who knows Billy today is aware of his considerable, albeit unusual, intelligence. However, he does not process information the same way that many others do. Psychologists currently ascribe diagnoses such as ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or ‘Learning Disability’ to such a way of thinking and, in the more enlightened educational environments, there is understanding and help for such children. In addition to having a learning difference, however, Billy is and was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a person suffering from past and present trauma, and these factors all conspired to make concentration and left-brain activity extremely challenging for him. Rosie thrashed him for many things that were unavoidable, considering his organic make-up: for looking out the window, for breaking a pencil, for scruffy writing or untidy paper, or for looking away when she was talking. He used to stand outside her classroom because he was too scared to go in. Eventually, someone would either push or pull him inside, and Rosie would start on him for his tardiness. ‘Well look who’s here! Well, well, well! Slept in, did you? Well, maybe we should wake you up.’ Once she got her favourites, James Boyd and Peter Langan, to run him up and down the classroom holding an arm each. The most humiliating part for Billy was seeing his play-piece, a little butter sandwich that he carried up his jersey, come jumping out in the process, and being trampled on by all. Rosie was always furious and suspicious with the class. When she strapped people, she did it so violently that she invariably back-heeled her leg and kicked her desk at the same time, so eventually it featured a massive crater of cracked wood. Other teachers would pop into her classroom from time to time for various reasons and Billy would be amazed to see them occasionally having a laugh with her. They think she’s normal.’ he would marvel, ‘a normal human being. Probably if you asked them what she was like, they’d even say she was nice, this horrible, terrifying beast.’ Billy still believes the bravest thing in his whole life was the day he decided to stop doing homework. Just never did it any more. The first morning after this epiphany, he awaited the inevitable with a new-found, insolent calm. ‘Have you done your homework?’ demanded Rosie. ‘No.’ ‘Out here.’ Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! ‘Sit down.’ The next day it was the same thing, and the next, and the next. Reflecting on it now, Billy recognizes that he probably wouldn’t have been able to do Rosie’s maths homework anyway, and was too intimidated to ask for help. In common with most people who have a learning disability, he is afraid of many tasks and procrastinates as a way of trying to deal with that fear. Rosie was not the only tyrant in Billy’s six-year-old life, for Mona had started taking her frustration out on Billy, and he was experiencing her, too, as a vicious bully. Mona was exactly like Rosie: suspicious, paranoid, and sadistic. She had started picking on him fairly soon after they had settled into Stewartville Street. At first it was verbal abuse. She called him a ‘lazy good-for-nothing’, pronounced that he would ‘come to nothing’, and that it was ‘a sad day’ when she met him. She soon moved on to inflicting humiliation on Billy, her favourite method being grabbing him by the back of his neck and rubbing his soiled underpants in his face. She increased her repertoire to whacking his legs, hitting him with wet cloths, kicking him, and pounding him on the head with high-heeled shoes. She would usually wait until they were alone, then corner and thrash him four or five times a week for years on end. Billy, however, had been in a few scraps in the school playground and had decided that a smack in the mouth wasn’t all that painful. The more experience he had of physical pain, the more he felt he could tolerate it. ‘What’s the worst she could do to me?’ he would ask himself. ‘She could descend on me and beat the shit out of me … but a couple of guys have done that to me already and it wasn’t that bad … I didn’t die or anything.’ In fact, the more physical, emotional and verbal abuse he received, the more he expected it, eventually believing what they were telling him: that he was useless and worthless and stupid, a fear he keeps in a dark place even today. As a comedian whose brilliance now emanates largely from his extraordinarily accurate observation of humanity, he has gloriously defied Mona’s favourite put-down: ‘Your powers of observation are nil.’ She was the only person Billy ever knew who said the word ‘nil’ when it wasn’t about a football result. Florence was sometimes physically present when Mona mercilessly scorned and beat her brother. She would stand there frozen and helpless, immobilized by fear and horror. The mind, however, has a marvellous capacity to escape when the body can’t. Psychologists call it ‘dissociation’ and view it as a survival mechanism. Florence mentally flew to a far corner of the ceiling and watched the hideous abuse from ‘safety’. ‘I was there, but I wasn’t there,’ she explains now. ‘I was outside, looking in.’ It was very traumatic for her too, and very dangerous, for dissociation can leave an indelible mark on the psyche. Billy, on the other hand, put his energy into trying to defend himself from Mona’s blows by shielding his face and body with his arms. His adrenaline would surge and, although he was no match for her, at least he managed to avoid getting broken teeth. He remembers the blood from his nose dripping onto his feet. Billy is a survivor: in common with many traumatized children, he adopted a pretty good coping strategy. If you ask him about it now, he says, ‘It sounds hellish, but it was quite bearable once you got your mind right. It doesn’t kill you.’ But his scars ran deeper than flesh wounds, especially those from the humiliating words that accompanied his beatings. Being too young to come up with a rational, adult explanation for it, he could only make sense of Mona’s sadistic treatment by fully accepting what she said, that he was indeed a sub-standard child. ‘I must deserve this,’ he decided. Mona’s paranoia and suspiciousness were relentless, pathological and extremely alarming. An older boy at school gave Billy a small model boat that he had made in woodwork class. ‘Where did you get that?’ Mona asked him accusingly. ‘A big boy gave it to me.’ ‘Don’t tell lies. Why would anyone give you a boat for nothing? Come on! Tell me! Where did you really get it?’ There was no other answer, so she pounded him until he bled. Margaret wasn’t as manic a bully as Mona but she was on her side. She had been very beautiful when she was younger, a hair-dresser’s model at Eddy Graham’s. Eddy’s shop smelled of rotten eggs, and Billy always wondered how she could sit through such a terrible smell. Billy admired Margaret’s sense of style, but thought Mona looked an absolute mess most of the time. For a start, she never put her teeth in unless she went out. This wasn’t all that unusual, for at that time in Glasgow there was a fashion for having no teeth. When National Health false teeth became available, people of all ages thought it was an excellent idea to replace their existing teeth with those new, shiny, perfect ones. Some would actually have their teeth taken out for their twenty-first birthday, as a pragmatic choice, since they were eventually going to fall out anyway. Whenever the auburn roots of Mona’s dyed blonde hair began to grow out, she would send Billy down to Boots to buy her peroxide. ‘A bottle of peroxide, please, twenty volumes.’ He would carry home the little brown bottle and be swept in by a vision in slippers, a pale cardigan and a skirt and apron. Hoping to catch some young man’s eye, Mona and Margaret both dolled themselves up whenever they ventured out. When nylons were in short supply, the sisters would get creative with Bisto, plastering the gravy all over their bare legs and wandering around the city stinking like a Sunday dinner. On 8 May 1949, when Billy was six and a half, Mona mysteriously produced a baby son whom she named Michael. Her paramour was a local man who had no inclination to marry Mona; his identity remained a puzzle to his own son until adulthood. No one ever explained the situation to the growing Michael at all; as a matter of fact, he was presented to the world as a brother to Billy and Florence and nobody seemed to question it. In those postwar years, there were many similar situations and, curiously enough, the otherwise judgemental society seemed to tolerate it. Today, having a famous ‘brother’ has hardly helped Michael to ward off speculation about his birth circumstances. At first he thoroughly resented those who drew attention to his situation. ‘But I’ve learned to just shrug it off,’ he says now, with questionable insistence. ‘Whatever people say about me, Billy or the family … I don’t care.’ Michael’s arrival at Stewartville Street was, in many ways, received as a great blessing to the Connollys. The group of uncomfortably related individuals that made up their family were able to focus their love and attention onto the tiny, innocent being who was unconnected to Mamie and provided biological motherhood for Mona. He was an angelic baby, doted on by his mother. Billy was enchanted by him too and would heave him around in a ‘circus-carry’. Even William could love him, without interference from the past; when he looked at his own children he saw Mamie, but that thorn was absent in his relationship with Michael. ‘I think we were a normal family,’ Michael maintains. ‘I had a great childhood.’ In contrast to the experience of Florence and Billy, Michael received plenty of positive attention, gifts and special treatment. Looking back now, Michael believes he was spoiled, but I think he just received what children rightfully deserve, a sense of being loved and appreciated. Everything Michael did was magical to the adults in the household. ‘Listen to him sing!’ they would chime. ‘Look at the way he eats!’ As a toddler, Michael did have one interesting talent. There was a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records in the flat and people would say to him. ‘Fetch me the record of Mario Lanza singing “O Sole Mio’” and Michael could always select the correct one, even though he couldn’t read. Michael was unaware of his mother’s treatment of Billy, for Mona was very secretive about it, and, understandably, he still finds it difficult to accept. Billy is convinced that his father also did not know about all the beating and neglect that was going on at home. William was absent most of the time, for he worked long hours at the Singer sewing-machine parts factory and was then out most evenings. Florence experienced William as a shadowy figure, coming and going with irregularity. ‘He just thought home life was boring, I think, and pissed off,’ is how Billy explains it now. ‘Fuck knows where he was going … I have no idea.’ When he wasn’t working. William was usually off playing billiards and having a great time with his mates. This was fairly typical for men in those days. It was the job of women to raise children and, besides, who wouldn’t have wanted to escape that household? William was a member of a club of men who’d been friends since childhood. The ‘Partick Corner Boys’ rented a room behind the cinema. On the bottom floor was the meeting room of a secret society called the ‘Buffs’, the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, and upstairs was William’s club, which was always jam-packed with drinking men playing billiards. William would take the children up there after twelve o’clock Mass on a Sunday so Florence could practise on the piano. Billy would roll the balls around the billiard table and William would chat with his friends. This relaxed atmosphere was a stark contrast to life at home. There, the normal misunderstandings of childhood were tolerated in Michael, but not in Billy or Florence. One day, Jesus had come into conversation at home and Billy referred to Jesus as having been a Catholic, which was his seven-year-old misunderstanding. Aunt Margaret corrected him. ‘Jesus wasn’t a Catholic, Jesus was a Jew.’ ‘Oh,’ he said with innocent surprise, ‘does that mean we’re Jews?’ ‘Where did you come up with that one?’ she sneered, and continued to ridicule him about that until he was in his teens. ‘Does that mean we’re Jewish?’ she would mimic him. Even Billy’s friends who were much poorer seemed at least to have love in their houses. Frankie McBride had a mother and granddad who loved him; the McGregors down the road were a wild bunch, but their parents adored them and their house was fun. They were always shouting and laughing, and they were rejoiced in for things Billy and Florence were being pilloried for. Of an evening, the oldest girl would be going out with her boyfriend and her younger siblings would be teasing her: ‘Your boyfriend’s skelly [cross-eyed]!’ ‘No he’s not!’ Their mother would intervene: ‘He’s a lovely boy. Don’t you say that!’ Then the father would stir: ‘He’s a big bloody Jessie!’ ‘No he’s not!’ In the Connolly household, the children daren’t say ‘boyfriend’: there would have been an explosion. It would definitely have been unwise for Billy to have mentioned the kiss he got from pretty blonde Gracie McClintock. It happened in Plantation Park, known to Billy and his pals as ‘Planting Park’, in front of the Queen Mother maternity hospital. The Cleansing Department had a dump there where the boys would find all kinds of interesting rubbish, bits of bikes, old rags and even machine parts. One day, when he was foraging there, some friends called to him: ‘Billy! Grade’s in the bushes! If you come down here, you can get a kiss!’ So Billy joined the line of five or six youngsters and eventually it was his turn to have a totally new experience. ‘It was the nicest thing I remember from my childhood.’ he says now. ‘It was like a bird landing on my mouth. Nobody had ever kissed me before: adults, children, anyone. I used to hear boys at school complaining about their mothers kissing them, and I remember thinking, “That must be amazing! No one ever kisses me …”’ As Billy sat in his school classroom, doing battle with Rosie, he could see the windows of his home across the street, and the prospect of returning there in the evening was far from appealing. He loved having school dinners because it meant he didn’t have to go home. Mona couldn’t cook to save her life, and Margaret was worse. Billy and Florence ate mostly fried foods and foul stews, and pudding would usually be a piece of dried-up cake smothered in Bird’s Custard. Mona specialized in repulsive sprouts, and Billy was beaten in the face until he ate them. ‘Billy tried Mother’s patience,’ reports Michael. ‘She wanted things organized and she was loud about it. She would say, “It’s Billy’s turn to do the dishes” and he would say “No!” and run out.’ No doubt Billy was viewed as an ornery child. He is still disorganized and oppositional, the former being a wired-in state and the latter a coping style. Typical early difficulties for people with learning differences include tying shoes and telling the time. Billy could do neither of those things until he was around twelve years old, and he was absolutely pounded for it. Everybody tried to teach him to tie his shoes, but they all eventually lost patience. One fateful summer day, he was with his father on holiday in Rothesay. On the pier there was a clock next to a garish light display of a juggling giraffe. William was peering at it. ‘Eh, Billy, what’s the time on the clock over there?’ Billy began to reply, but never finished the sentence. ‘The big hand is on the …’ WHACK! ‘That’s not the time! What’s the time?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Billy can still remember the very spot on the pavement. ‘You don’t know?’ William exploded. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How old are you?’ William’s remoteness and constant absence from home meant he knew little about his children. His role became pretty much reduced to that of ‘Special Executioner’, administering extra-harsh beatings for especially vile sins. ‘Sometimes.’ recollects Billy, ‘when father hit me, I flew over the settee backwards, in a sitting position. It was fabulous. Just like real flying, except you didn’t get a cup of tea or a safety belt or anything.’ Billy was aware that his father was thrilled with Florence’s excellent scholastic progress, although William never once told her this. Billy himself was a great disappointment, since he did not seem bright, and was rotten at football. He dreamed of having a son like Billy’s friend and hero, Vinny Maron – a football genius, even at eleven years old. When Billy and Vinny practised heading the ball against the wall, Billy barely managed to get to ten. Vinny, however, could do four hundred. Grown men would gather to watch him playing in the street. Eventually, Celtic Football Club tried to sign him up as a professional player, but he went away to become a priest and ended up drowning in a swimming accident during his time at Sacred Heart College in Spain. There was a very insistent priesthood recruitment process at Billy’s school. A stern man in a soutane would sweep into the classroom. ‘Who doesn’t want to become a priest?’ So, of course, everyone had to want to be a priest and was required to sign a piece of paper verifying that fact. Then the recruiter would try a new tack: ‘Does anyone want to be a Pioneer?’ This meant swearing off drink for life and, to prove it, a Pioneer wore a white enamel badge displaying a red sacred heart, with tiny gold rays emanating from it. You can still see Pioneer pins around Glasgow, sported by men in their sixties or so, who are very proud of them. Therefore, at seven years old, Billy and his pals all swore off the drink as nasty bad stuff, even though Billy had peeked inside pubs and really looked forward to being a man and doing ‘manly’ things like getting pissed. The pub seemed to him like a fabulous place to be. A peculiarly appealing smell of sawdust, beer and smoke came wafting out of the door, and he could see all the men roaring and shouting and having a great time. His local pub, the Hyndland Bar, was on a corner, and boasted one door in Fordyce Street, and the other in Hyndland Street. One of the coming-of-age challenges among Billy’s peers was to avoid being apprehended while running deftly in through one door of this adults-only establishment, past all the customers, and out of the other door. It was considered very heroic to have achieved this several times. Another great challenge was the terror of the cobbler’s dunny, or dungeon. There was a cobbler’s shop nearby, owned by an unfriendly little man with a moustache. This cobbler was always repairing his shoes, mouth full of nails, facing the window of the store so he could keep an eye on passers-by. Like all tenement dunnies, his was very dark, made so deliberately because these were places where lovers would go when they came home from the movies or dances. There were few cars for courting, or ‘winching’ as it’s called in Glasgow. Johnny Beattie, another Glasgow comedian, says you can still see the mark of his Brylcreem on a dunny wall in Partickhill Road. The goal for Billy and his seven-year-old pals was to run the gauntlet of this long, murky, subterranean corridor. It had offshoots where all sorts of weird and wild things dwelled – everybody knew that – things gruesome and dreadful, with terrible intent. At the end of the run there were stairs that curved sharply before eventually leading back to the close. Horrible murder and torture lay just around that bend, not to mention ghosts. If a boy had done the cobbler’s dunny, and had made it uncaptured through the Hyndland Bar, he was a leader of men; he was Cochise, the heroic Apache chief from Billy’s Saturday afternoon cowboy movies. Billy was always gashed, scarred and full of stitches from his attempts at such glory. Once he got caught in the cobbler’s dunny by the man himself, and was heaved into his house. ‘You crowd of bastards, I’m fed up with you. I’m telling your father.’ That was the moment when Cochise shit his pants. ‘Now I’m gonna tell you all something that will probably prove very useful in your lives,’ Billy announces to a Scottish crowd. ‘I’m going to tell you what to do if you get caught masturbating …’ I had been sitting in the audience wondering when would be the most appropriate time to allow our three youngest children to come to see their father in concert. As I watch him play proficiently and enthusiastically with his caged penis in front of three thousand hysterical people, the words thirty years old flash into my mind. ‘The opening line is all-important,’ explains Billy. ‘Say “Thank God you’re here! I was just walking across the room, when the biggest hairy spider came crashing out from behind the sideboard there and shot up the leg of my trousers. The bugger was poised to sink its fangs into my poor willie …”’ The activity in question is, of course, a healthy one if privately or consensually performed; however, Billy’s outrageous and frantic self-pleasuring pantomime, as well as that thing he does about having sex with sheep, were giving me substantial pause for thought. Billy’s battle with the morality of masturbation, indeed of sex in general, began when he started to go to confession. At first his confessed sins were pretty tame, such as telling a fib or stealing a biscuit, not enough to shift the padre’s gaze from the football results. On Saturdays the Glasgow Evening Times sports edition was a pink paper, and was clearly visible through the grille. One evening, however, Billy scored heavily: ‘I’ve had impure thoughts, Father.’ His confessor had been checking to see how Partick Thistle was doing, but the nine-year-old’s precocious words got his attention. ‘Oh, and what were these thoughts?’ ‘I was thinking about women, naked women … Father … Frankie McBride’s got a book with naked women in it.’ Frankie McBride was a little pal who lived around the corner from Billy. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Three “Hail Marys” and count yourself a lucky boy. That could lead to terrible things. You know, son, these books aren’t in themselves sinful, but what they’re known as is “an occasion of sin”. Do you know what an occasion of sin is?’ ‘No, Father.’ Billy knew fine well. ‘An occasion of sin is something or someone that leads you into sin.’ ‘Oh yes, Father.’ ‘You beware when you’re around those books. There are many books like that. Any impure acts?’ ‘Yes, Father.” ‘With yourself, or with another?’ ‘With myself, Father.’ ‘You should stop doing that immediately.’ ‘Yes, Father.’ He never told Billy he’d go blind: that was a school-playground tale. The school playground was an excellent place to obtain misinformation about sex, a new anti-Protestant joke or a drag on a scavenged cigarette-butt. There was entertainment there as well, in the form of regular executions. Mr Elliot used to chase chickens with an axe in the school’s kitchen garden and he would chop off their heads right there in the playground. Despite his doubts about the clergy, Billy longed to be an altar boy. He helped out in St Peter’s Church, doing chores right next to the sacristy, where the priest emerged, and where the vestments and Communion wine were stored. Billy was fascinated with the vestments and was captivated by the gorgeous colours and embroidery. Priests would often come to school during the week and quiz the boys about the colour of the vestments, in order to check if they had been to Mass the previous Sunday. Billy was a regular Mass-goer at that point, but sometimes he couldn’t remember the visual details and he would be beaten. Billy never dared to steal the wine like some of his pals. The sacristy was full of surprises. Someone discovered that Communion came in a tin, and had even been brave enough to try some, but in those days Billy was shocked: ‘That’s Jesus,’ he thought, ‘you can’t go eating Jesus, stealing him out of a tin.’ His bid to be an altar boy was thwarted when he and some other boys, who were all the same height, were chosen by a priest to help at Benediction. In that service, most of them would be lined up along the altar railings holding candles. The envied, glorious one, however, was the boy who stood up higher than everyone else with the golden thurible, proudly dangling the vessel so it puffed out incense at the end of every swing. Everyone wanted to be that exalted creature, so when Billy and his same-height friends filed into the sacristy and saw the thurible hanging there on its special hook, each and every one of them made a dive for it. ‘I saw it first!’ ‘No you didn’t!’ There was a loud and furious scuffle that ended when the priest stormed in and grabbed them all by the jerseys. ‘Out! Out! And don’t you darken this door again!’ Billy continues to love incense, although the last time that sweet and heavy smoke drifted towards him was years ago at Bob Geldof’s wedding, when the late Paula Yates glided down the aisle in a scarlet ball dress. It’s really a good thing he doesn’t go to church any more, because if he saw a thurible nowadays he might loudly interject, ‘I don’t like to spoil the party, but your handbag’s on fire.’ Despite his early horror at the graphic gruesomeness of Catholic statues, Billy grew to like the ritualistic aspects of the religion and he was grateful for the safety and comfort it provided. He loved the hymns, and today laments that many of the old tunes have changed. ‘Now the Catholic Church sounds like the fucking Bethany Hall,’ he moans. At school, he had religion every day, just before lunch. It included music taken from books of folk songs, which delighted Billy, and launched his interest in folk music. They used to sing ‘Lilliburlero’ (now the signature tune for Billy’s favourite radio station, the BBC World Service) and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, and ‘Glorious Devon’. ‘Heart of Oak’ was a great favourite, too, and Billy would give strong voice to the rousing chorus: ‘Steady boys, steady. We’ll fight and we’ll conquer, again and again!’ With the exception of the folk singing, Billy was frustrated at the dullness of religious studies at school. What really piqued his interest was the stuff no one would cover, such as ‘Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?’ The teachers seemed to dodge such subjects, and were not open to questions. Billy certainly had a great deal of curiosity about many things. For example, on the back of his classroom jotter was a table of weights and measures. It was headed Avoirdupois’, which he pronounced ‘avoid dupoy’, and he longed to know what it was all about, but no one even mentioned it. There were so many intriguing mysteries. He was madly interested in geisha girls but, when he asked a teacher what they were, he was beaten for ‘being immoral’. Billy’s cousin John, a very thin boy, also attended St Peter’s. Billy largely ignored him, since ‘Skin’, as they called him, was in a lower class, but reports of John’s cleverness, elaborate practical jokes, and truant behaviour filtered through the school. John’s mother was at her wits’ end. She would watch her son being escorted into the classroom in the morning, but by the time she got home, John would already be sitting comfortably in their kitchen, warming his feet and drinking a mug of milk. Legend had it that when John’s father had returned from the war, three-year-old John had darted out from behind the door and savagely kicked him, in protest for having returned to spoil the cosy life he had with his mother. Apparently, this Oedipal rage never left him. Billy’s father advised his brother to take a very hard line with John. William’s thinking on many subjects was very black-and-white. After Michael’s arrival, the living space at home had become even more cramped. Mona and Margaret shared one room, with Michael in a cot. In the other room, which was a living room by day, Billy shared a sofa-bed with his father. Late one night, when Billy was ten, he woke to find his father ‘interfering’ with him, as he puts it. Then, and for the next four or five years, his father’s frequent sexual abuse was a mystery to him, like being in an accident. ‘The most awful thing,’ says Billy now, fully grasping the anatomy of shame, ‘was that it was kind of pleasant, physically, you know. That’s why nobody tells. I remember it happening a lot, not every night, but every night you were in a state thinking it was going to happen, that you’d be awakened by it. I would pray for the holidays. I couldn’t wait for us to go to the seaside because then we had separate beds.’ It’s hard to know exactly why William molested his own son. He had the appearance of being extremely religious and, since the Catholic Church was very strict about the sanctity of marriage, he saw no possibility of divorce from Mamie or remarriage at any point: however, that doesn’t really explain why he chose this particular form of sexual expression. It wouldn’t be the first time extreme sexual repression in an ostensibly religious person has led to ‘unspeakable’ acts. As Carl Jung explained, denial of our shadow side will often cause it to rise up against us. Perhaps William himself had been sexually abused in childhood, as is so often the case with perpetrators. In fact, historical accounts of that culture and time would suggest that, in those overcrowded conditions, incest was extremely common. At any rate, Billy kept the dark secret locked away until the early eighties, when he and I were sitting in our car outside the Glasgow hospital the night his father died. ‘That creep.’ I cried with him, and not because his father, in his scheme of things, was about to meet his maker. It was William’s hypocrisy that really got to both of us. He was always passing judgement on Billy for his ‘sinfulness’ and lack of conformity to the Catholic faith, while at the same time he was hurting him so profoundly … in so many ways. Since that moment, Billy has found various ways to heal and make adult sense of all his early abuses, but back then, when there was little safety anywhere in his life, what saved him? For one thing, he absolutely loved reading. Not his school-books – he thought they were very dull, although the class would sometimes be read to on a Friday, and that was quite soothing. White Fang and adventure stories from Canada and the Yukon were popular. Billy often imagined himself donning a huge, woolly jacket and striding into the northern wildernesses to pan for gold, a perfect way to escape from Stewartville Street. There was a comprehensive library system in Glasgow, and his local branch, a vast pseudo-classical building, was just across the tram-lines in Partick. It was wonderfully warm inside, and full of people of all ages, especially elderly folk. Every newspaper was there, mounted on a board with a special cord for turning the pages. Billy had worked through the infants’ section years ago, steamed right through the boys’ corner (Just William, Enid Blyton and all kinds of adventure stories), and when he became twelve he was finally able to swagger up the street with not one, but two books. That’s when he discovered Tibet. Once he came across Seven Years in Tibet he was completely hooked, fascinated by its isolation from the rest of the world. Billy devoured books that carried pictures and diagrams to help him spot different types of fighter aircraft by the colour and shape of the wings. He made models of some of them, and spotted a number of war planes that were still flying in the fifties, such as the Dakota, a massive transport plane, and a couple of fighter planes, the Gloster Meteor, which had tanks on its wings, and the two-tailed Vampire. In those days, all aeroplanes were very different and so were the cars. No one would ever mistake a Humber Hawk for a Standard Vanguard, or a Ford Prefect for an Austin Seven. Billy’s favourite was the sporty Sunbeam Alpine, though he was thrilled when he spotted an Armstrong Siddeley, with its badge shaped like a sphinx, or a Triumph Mayflower, like a petite limousine. Nowadays, Stewartville Street is accessible only to pedestrians, but at that time cars could drive in and park in the centre of his street. These beauties were never locked, so he would sneak inside to toot the horn and take in a deep whiff of leather seat. He thought all vehicles were wonderful things. Another saving grace in Billy’s life was his love of being a Wolf Cub. In his navy pullover, green cap with yellow piping, Wolf Cub badge and an orange-and-green ‘neckie’ with its leather woggle, Billy happily trotted to school after hours. ‘Dyb dyb dyb dyb.’ Their tribal leader. Akela, also known as Mrs Lamont, a posh woman from up the road, would stand in the centre of the ring of Cubs. ‘Akela, we’ll do our best!’ ‘Dyb dyb dyb dyb … Do your best.’ ‘We’ll dob dob dob dob … WOOF!’ Later on, when Billy graduated to becoming a Scout, he found the boys were divided into patrols that had animal names. He had fancied himself as a Cobra or a Buffalo and was embarrassed to be placed among the Peewits. However, being a Scout gave him a love of the outdoors that has never left him. Billy still jokes about the novelty of a country visit for Glasgow city children of the time: ‘They take you to the countryside once a year. It’s supposed to be good for you. The teachers say: “See that green stuff over there? Grass. See the brown things walking about on it? Cows. Don’t break them and be back here in half an hour.”’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/pamela-stephenson/billy-connolly/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.