RUNNING AWAY AND THE FACTS OF LIFE

Cathcart Road

The first time I ran away from home was when I was four years old.  Holding hands with some other kid we ventured up Cathcart Road and into a new territory.  One shop I vaguely recognised was a newsagents which sold toys and a vast amount of sugary sweets.  In those days white Scottish shop owners ran the newsagents mostly, but this shopkeeper seemed Asian.

He was a squat man with a serious purple burn down the left hand side of his face.  His bottom lip had become a swollen, violet appendage which constricted his speech.  -'an a 'elp oo? he would ask a customer out of the good side of his mouth.  They would enter deliberately averting their eyes from his face as if they were looking over his shoulder at the back wall containing a cornucopia of yachts, Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders boxes, jars of sherbet lemons, Edinburgh Rock (a sickly soft candy in different colours), wax lips, sweetie tobacco, chocolate mice and an array of cigarette cartons.  

As four year olds sometimes are, we were attracted to this shop not only because of the fascination of seeing this grotesquely disfigured man but of the thrill in looking at the toys in the window.  

The shop was just past the junction of Cathcart Road and Calder Street, for those who know Glasgow.  We had no idea about traffic lights and and both of us stepped on to the road.  The image of a chrome radiator rushing towards my face and stopping about a foot away is still vivid in my memory.

A policeman who happened to be standing on the junction came towards us and pulled us off of the road and on to the pavement.  The rest is a blur.  I can only remember arriving at the door of my house in tow behind the policeman and the horrified look on my mother's face as she realised how near we had come to death.

Of course, this was not the last time a policeman came to our house.  I was wild when I was young and there was always some kind of trouble with the law.

The second time I ran away was a rather silly affair.  I must have been about ten or eleven years old and I stole ten shillings (50 pence) from my mother’s purse.  Stealing was an activity that became a habit for the rest of my youth.  I had seen my sister, Connie, do this and get away with it.  Once she had taken money from my mother's purse lying on the arm of a settee while I was in the room and I grassed on her to my mother who immediately opened her purse and realised that money was missing.  Connie denied it, of course, and the situation left me with the impression that it was ok to steal and let the conscience deal with it some time in the future. 

I wandered for miles and eventually came to some path when out bounded two enormous red setters, almost as tall as me.   The fear I felt must have been palpable to these beautiful beasts.  But I beat a hasty retreat and decided that, as I’d been away for about twelve hours, to return home to my fate ... and with my life.

As I reached my house, my mother, father, Uncle Bill and Aunt Mildred were there in the street.  They had arranged to go and see a movie.  This was cancelled, I guess, and I admitted all.  There were no repercussions about the theft and I suppose they were just relieved that I had returned.  Now I know that I should have been made aware that what I did was wrong.  There was no lesson in this for me.

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Favourite weapons in those days were catapults and BB air guns.  From somewhere I had acquired a German Luger air pistol and bought pellets from an unlikely store, Babyland in Victoria Road, a shop that sold prams, baby walkers ... and lead pellets for air guns.

My cousin Michael and I once turned out the lights in my bedroom and fired shots at a window across the way.  About an hour later, a young couple arrived at my house and of course we denied any wrongdoing.  But the look on everyone’s face told us that they knew we were the culprits.

Another time, in the backcourts of Annette Street, Michael and I found frogs entwined and he knowledgeably informed me that frogs could mate for three days.  We subsequently learned the facts of life from a heavy volume of Gray’s Anatomy in his father’s bookcase.  There was a sketch, very lifelike, of an open vagina with all the parts on display.  Up till that time I wasn't sure about the configuration of the female genitals.

Once, for absolutely no reason at all, in the darkness of winter, I lifted a brick and threw it crashing through a kitchen window.  We scampered away.  What was it with me?  Because of my home life, I was searching for some kind of reality, something real other than the nightmare of what was happening at home with my family, my sister's craziness and my parents' despair and being unable to control her.

I was first made aware of antisemitism.  Riding through he streets on bicycles, racing past crowds of boys, they threw stones at us shouting, -Dirty Jews!  You killed Jesus Christ.

On the street we played traditional Scottish games like peever and peerie although they were considered to be girls’ games; but we tried them anyway.  Peeries were available for a few pennies and were small wooden tops with various bands of colour and started by winding a string several times around a groove then whipping into action.  The skill was to keep it spinning as long as possible when the natural process of friction and gravity slowed it sown.  Peever was played on a series of nine boxes and was known as hopscotch.  A weighted shoe polish time was slid onto a number and the person had to hop to the square and pick it up without standing on any of the lines and hop back to the beginning.  Number one was easy, but then you had to ascend to number nine.