Don't bother to wash,
 It'll probably rain,
But bring your cosh
And bicycle-chain,
For that's the way
The Teddy-Boys like
Their picnic

(Children's Playground Song, Lanarkshire, ca l954)

The children behaved well when the Lanarkshire House man came to test their student teacher. Instinct told them the silent stranger held the same power over the slim girl at the blackboard as their headmaster or class mistress wielded over them. So there was little talk or fidgeting while Miss Gourlay enunciated various complex words, explaining their meanings in short ones. She was running late. The corridor clock, glimpsed briefly as the door swung to release an excused child, left no doubt of that.

Bells rang, followed by abrupt scuffling, as if sound-effects had suddenly been turned to full volume. Miss Gourlay paused in mid-sentence, eyes enquiringly on the inspector. 'Say no, no, please say no....' Sam urged silently. He desperately did not want the lesson to finish yet. The longer it went on and later he left, the less risk of encountering Bobby Weir and Bruce Lidgett on the way home. One day soon they would move up to the Academy on the far side of town, and he would be safe.

His journey home followed three possible routes, but it was never certain where they would waylay him. But usually it was by the thick leafy hedge bounding Forsyth's Field. Or at the stone gateway and overgrown garden of the big house where old Mrs Muir lived blind and alone, a prey to delusions and the cruel mischief of boys.

The encounter was always the same. One would step in front of Sam, blocking his path, the other would close in behind. Both were big lads of about twelve or thirteen, with deepening voices and hair starting to grow in queer places. It was only Bobby Weir who ever spoke.

'Where d'ye think ye're goin', son?’

'Hame.'

'No sae fast. How auld ur ye?'

'Seven’.'

'No sae fast, I said. D'ye want hit?'

‘No.'

'Then show us that wee thing in there.'

Sometimes they were content if he pulled up his shorts leg to show them. But at other times they made him drop his trousers completely, eyes tightly shut under threat of a bashing, while Bobby pushed something hard and wet between Sam's thighs and rubbed and shoved till he made a kind of mess there, and Sam felt breathless and peculiar as if he had just wet himself. At other times they knocked him to the ground and did the toilet all over him. Once, after they had done this, Bobby kept playing with his wee-wee thing till something nasty fell out of it, just like he'd blown his nose on to Sam.

'An' if ye tell onybody aboot this, son, we'll no' half smash ye, d'ye hear?'

Even if he took a long way home to let his urine-sodden clothes dry, the smell betrayed him. From his parents Sam received no sympathy. His mother raged at him for ungratefully and carelessly spoiling good clothes that had cost so much money she could ill-afford, and which would now have to be washed all over again. His father thrashed him for being a sissie and a sap, promising that if he would not stand up for himself, he could expect a worse hiding at home than anything another boy could give him.

So Sam lived in fear. Of his parents he felt ordinary terror. But with Bobby Weir and Bruce Lidgett the fear had a subtler flavour, a furtive guilty dread, tinged with strange excitement. How could they do these things to the thing on him that was so bad and secret it had no name, which you must keep your hands right away from (except to wee-wee,) never let anyone see (except Nurse or Doctor,) and never let anybody touch ever (except Mummy to feel if Black Satan had been finding work for Sam's idle hands.)

One day, Sam asked the class mistress to be excused. This was a last resort, for Miss Ballantyne was an exceptionally strict teacher who insisted that playtime was when you went to the toilet, and if you didn't, then it was Your Fault if you needed to go during the lesson, so you could just wait, or get strapped for asking. But when after two beltings the boy still asked to be excused, and Miss Ballantyne dragged Sam to the headmaster, and Mr Aird had demanded to know what Sam was playing at, he blurted out that he was frightened to go at playtime because Bobby Weir and Bruce Lidgett did dirty things that hurt him in the toilet. Then Mr Aird had taken Bobby and Bruce out of their class to his study, and asked them, in front of Sam, if what he had said was true. They denied it, but looked at Sam with such menace that the headmaster was convinced, and gave Bruce ten strokes with the tawse on his palms, but was so enraged with Bobby he bent him over a chair and tawsed his backside so hard that Mr Aird broke into a sweat, and Bobby, big and tough as he was, bubbled and bawled like a bairn while Sam stood watching. And Mr Aird called Bobby and Bruce 'perverts - a word Sam hadn't heard before - and promised to call the police if they ever did it again.

Sam took a long way home that night with a letter from Mr Aird to his parents in his satchel. But as he passed along the lane behind Forsyth's Field they were waiting for him.

'Whit did I tell ye? Whit did I say I'd dae tae ye if ye opened yer gab, ye fuckin' wee shite?'

They punched and kicked and spat on him. He tried to struggle, but half-heartedly, for he knew he had no chance.

'Tak' doon yer troosers.'

He hesitated. They kicked and punched him again.

'Tak yer troosers doon an' lie on the grun'. He did so and lay down on his back.

'Ither wey, ye wee fucker.'

He turned face-down to the gravel. More blows bruised his back, buttocks, and legs.

Then Bobby Weir was on top of him. The boy recoiled as something hard and horrible was pushed into the place you do a number-two. He cried out, but the toe of Bruce Lidgett's boot was in his mouth in an instant.

'You make yin sound,' said a voice, 'an' I'll smash every tooth in yer kisser.'

Of what followed, Sam was aware only of Bobby's violent thrusts, and his own humiliation and pain; of the boot in his face, and Bobby Weir's sudden gasping. Then a feeling like doing a number-two, and a smell like it as well, and Bobby Weir's sudden snarl:

'The wee cunt's done a shite on my wullie.'

'I couldnae help it,' Sam pled vainly.

'Get his face here, Bruce, an I'll put this back where it cam' frae.'

Finally they let him go, the fading light mercifully hiding his torn clothes and soiled face and hair. He felt sick, guilty, and sad; his skin hung slimy and cold like a too-long-cooked chicken's. His parents were out when he reached home, but next door, Miss Cairns was in her garden - kind Miss Cairns who kept the grocer's shop at the town head, and who gave him sweets while listening to the poems he made up, with which his parents had no patience.

She was kneeling by a border, doing something with a trowel, when the boy staggered through the twilight and stood sobbing before her. Her kindly face registered alarm and appalled concern as she took in the details of his condition.

'Oh Sam, son,' she said at length, 'whatever's happened to you?’

By the time Sam's parents returned she had bathed and cleaned him as best she could, putting his fouled clothing in the big Bendix washing machine that Sam's mother envied so bitterly, and comforted him with tea and caresses. For fear of what she might tell his parents he had given a severely edited account of the incident, claiming merely to have been jostled and tripped where a dog had messed. After much pleading, and with many misgivings and the utmost reluctance, she finally promised to give his parents no details. When she went to the kitchen with the tea-things, he seized the chance to throw the headmaster's letter on to the fire.

His mother's face was scowling and suspicious as Miss Cairns took him next door. 'Where have you been? Why didn't you get back in time and go bothering Miss Cairns?'

'Sam's had a very dreadful experience,' said Miss Cairns, 'Two older lads have abused him very badly.' She picked her words with care.

'Serves him right,' snapped Sam's mother, 'he's a sissie, a cowardy-custard - just won't stand up for himself, whatever we say. If he wasn't such a jessie-punch these things would never happen.' She turned furiously on her son. 'Let me see that new shirt! If you've spoiled just one of your good clothes.......’

She stooped to inspect the suspect garment. Sam snatched a sideways glance at Miss Cairns, but she was looking, not at him, but at his mother.

Sam was to remember that look of Miss Cairns's for the rest of his life. Had looks the power of actions, the annihilating utterness of its contempt would have made Sam a free child. He would recall it years later at his parents' funeral (they died together in a coach collision;) it would return to him with affection and gratitude when, glancing through the Glasgow Herald's 'Deaths' column he learned of Miss Cairns's own passing. He hoarded that look in his mind like secret treasure to be relished and savoured, a hidden weapon against sadness, an amulet against further betrayal.

* * * * * * * * * * 

Weeks passed, and months, and years. Sam's primary schooldays had long since come to an end. Clad in smart blue blazer and grey flannels, he joined the crowds at the great Academy, whose domed assembly hall dominated the town's northern skyline. His voice too had deepened, and luxuriant hair sprouted where before he had seen it grow only only Bobby Weir, and he took up cycling seriously, receiving for his fifteenth birthday a splendid ten-speed racer. Bruce Lidgett had moved to Nottinghamshire some time ago when his father got a job in a pit there, and Bobby's unwanted interest in Sam waned. Now apprenticed at the ironworks, he had lapsed into the traditional local pursuits of football, booze, and 'winchin'. Rumour was he had taken up with Norma McGuinness.

Once Sam, biking to school through Whinbush housing scheme, spied him leaning from the window of 76 Bannockburn Street. Everyone in town knew that address, which appeared regularly in the Express and Advertiser, for the McGuinnesses were disreputable. The auld man, it was asserted, was a drunken ne'er-dae-weel who never did an honest hand's turn in his life; the mither was glakit; baith sons were violent drunken teddy-boys reputed to be queer, and Norma, the youngest, nae mair than a common whure, despite her youth. Moreover, the McGuinness family were Papes, and Papes, Sam's mother explained, were not Christians at all, but Heathen Pagans like the Ignorant Savages in Africa we sent missionaries to Civilise. And where the apostles' Creed talks about the Holy Catholic church it really means the Protestant church because, of course, the Papish church is not a church at all, but a Satanic Conspiracy to bring the whole world under the rule of Antichrist just like it says in Revelations, Antichrist being the Pope.

So Bobby joined in repute the cheerful human motorway slanderously alleged to pass through Norma McGuinness's thighs. Her brothers, meanwhile, defended her name and honour with fists and cycle-chains in every pub in town, and since none could match Brendan and Joe when it came to fighting, few said openly what all thought and said in private.

'I see they've caught yon Brendan McGuinness again,' Sam's mother observed over the Express and Advertiser. 'Committing and indecent act with a man in the toilets up at Monkburn.'

'The whole town's known for years those two were perverts,' her husband remarked. 'What can you expect from that family?'

'Aye, they're Left-Footers of course.' Sam's mother suddenly raised her voice. 'That's what happens tae sissie saps that won't defend themselves - they turn intae queers.' Sam, crouched over his homework, said nothing.

'I hardly think Joe and Brendan McGuinness are saps or sissies, whatever else they may be,' Sam's father observed drily.

‘And yon lassie's naething but a town whure.' Sam's mother spat out the word as she rustled the paper. 'Effie Neish heard she was carrying on with Peg Weir's laddie behind his mother's back.'

'Better no' let her brithers hear ye say that,' her husband warned. 'Tae listen to them, you'd think she was a nun.'

'Same difference,' Sam's mother retorted, 'Aebody kens nuns are juist whures for Papish priests.'

She shoved the newspaper into a magazine rack, whence Sam later retrieved it. He knew all about Monkburn Park. with its graffiti-scrawled facility in the shrubs by the football pitch, and the muscled young athletes - many tattooed on limbs and bodies far hairier than his own - who sought furtive sexual relief there; relief which Sam was eager to supply. For he now gave joyfully what Bobby Weir and Bruce Lidgett had once taken by force, neither forgiven nor forgotten. Afternoons were for footballers, but he began purposefully to haunt the place on warm evenings, when old men and Teds outnumbered the players. And in time, his patience was rewarded, when a tall Teddy-Boy loomed in the twilit entrance, and Sam's love-starved body yielded at last to the groping clutch of Brendan McGuinness.

So Sam became Brendan's lover, and since the brothers seemed hold all things in common, soon Joe's as well, then all the the members of their gang. They shared him, mounting him in turn in the seedy bedroom at Bannockburn Street, like off-duty delinquents queuing for donkey-rides. Sam thus took up in reality the role public gossip ascribed to Norma McGuinness, she meanwhile having become and remained faithful to Sam's erstwhile defiler Bobby Weir. He was never to be seen on these occasions, Norma never daring to bring a man back if her brothers were home, so loyally and fiercely did they defend what they still called her honour.

'You ken yon Norma McGuinness?' Sam's mother asked Miss Cairns over the garden fence one Sunday morning.

Miss Cairns was dressed for church and in a hurry, indisposed to gossip. 'She's expecting,' Sam's mother went on, oblivious. 'Effie Neish told me last night. Peg Weir's boy, Effie says.'

'Really,' said Miss Cairns coolly. She clasped a bible in her gloved hand. The bell of Chalmers' Kirk began to ding. 'I really must fly,' said Miss Cairns.

'Yon Maisie Cairns, wi' her Free Kirk airs!' Sam's mother snorted once back indoors. ’Of course the plain ordinary Church of Scotland would never be holy enough for her and her ilk.’

'Aye,' her husband observed from behind his newspaper,' The Cairnses were aye great Free Kirk folk.'

'Well the kirk's the only thing free about them,' retorted his wife, 'High principles gang ill wi' high prices. Have you seen what her shop charges compared wi' the Store?' Sam's mother always referred to the Co-operative Society as 'The Store.'

Sam heard all this as he wheeled his racer from the shed for his Sunday morning ride to Bannockburn Street. At this time the elder McGuinnesses were at Mass, and their daughter with Bobby Weir at a trusty pal's house, whose across-the-street neighbour was, however, the sharp and watchful Effie Neish.

When he arrived, Brendan and Joe were pacing the sitting-room, smoking and drinking beer from bottles.

'Have you heard?' they said.

'Heard what?' asked Sam innocently.

'What folks are saying,' said Brendan.

'Aboot oor Norma,' put in Joe.

'I heard Mammy saying something tae a neighbour,' said Sam, 'But I didnae listen - ye ken how folk blether.'

'Folk say she's expectin' a wean,' said Brendan. 'If it's true, I'll kill whoever done it, once I catch them.'

'Naebody touches oor wee sister and gets away wi' it,' added Joe with menace, 'Not oor wee Norma.'

'Let's go upstairs,' said Sam, who was getting a hard-on.

Afterwards, bedroom conversation reverted to Norma's alleged seduction.

'I mean it, I'll kill the bastard when I find oot who it is,' Brendan stubbed his Capstan out with prophetic violence.

'My Mammy's friend,' said Sam carefully, 'thought she heard it might be Mrs Weir's boy. You know - Bobby.'

'Where's the paper?' Joe's voice rose from downstairs.

'I'd better go,' said Sam, 'before your folks get back.'

'If this is true aboot Bobby Weir, he's a deid man,' Brendan said as Sam dressed.

'Don't take my word for it,' Sam tied his laces to hide his delight. 'It's just something Mammy thinks she heard, about Bobby Weir raping your Norma.' He picked the Sunday Post off the floor.'I'll give Joe this on the way out.'

'Did you say 'rape', son?' Brendan's voice was suddenly hard and hostile. A shiver of fear thrilled through Sam. He adjusted his laces, playing for time.

'Ah said - did ye say 'rape'?'.

'I have to go now,' said Sam, straightening up and heading for the door. But Brendan had leapt in front of him and, with quick thrust on Sam's chest, shoved him back on to the floor.

'Ye're no' goin' till ye tell me a' ye ken. Dinnae think I wouldnae smash ye, son,' said Brendan very quietly.

Sam gazed up at Brendan's naked body, looming not in lust but menace. Fearful memories shot through him, mingled with triumph and desire. Automatically his eyes sought the heavy penis swinging from its thick bed of hair, but there was no sign of arousal. His own member throbbed uncontrollably in time with his heart's thumping. Then Brendan was on him, knees on his chest, fingers fastened round his throat.

'Noo, yince mair son, is this true that Bobby Weir raped oor Norma?'

Sam struggled for breath. Terror still fought lust, but the certain coming of victory conquered both.

'I cannae mind who said it, or where I heard it, honest.' Sam gasped. Brendan relaxed his grip a fraction. 'It was just something someone said to my Mammy, and Bobby Weir's name was mentioned. Like I said, don't take my word for it.'

But the brothers did take his word for it. 'We'll get him,' they said, 'Nae witnesses,' and shook hands to seal the pact. So next week, they lay in wait outside Bobby's mother's house, and followed him to the flat of Aileen Kinnaird, the friend with whom Norma had said she was going to the pictures, but who in fact had gone to the Rialto alone. They knocked, and when their sister opened the door, charged upstairs and found Bobby Weir in the bedroom naked. They forced him to dress and frog-marched him down the stairs, and Norma started to scream and yell and pound her fists on Joe's back, but when her brothers said whit they wad dae tae her whure's kisser unless she SHUT IT there and then, she subsided to a snuffling whimpering.

They took Bobby Weir to the old railway sidings by the ironworks, where they made him strip. Then they set to work. They punched and kicked him in the face, stomach, and between his legs. They smashed his head hard against the rails, battering it with a cosh of lead pipe Brendan had brought, and slashed his body with their bike-chains, till blood sputtered from his gashed mouth, and weals and bruises covered him from scalp to foot. There were points where two sidings joined, and Brendan forced Bobby Weir, who was now too dazed to resist, to lie face-down on the rails so his private parts hung between the points blades, and while Joe held him with a boot on the small of his back, Brendan, yelling and exultant, hurled himself on the lever, and the points closed, crushing to a formless mess those parts that had violated Sam and their sister. Then Brendan shoved the length of piping into Bobby Weir's backside, and rammed it in hard with his foot, and the brothers leapt over the fence and down the embankment, leaving Bobby Weir to die bleeding in the darkness alone.

A man walking his dog found him, mangled parts still trapped in the rails. Sam read about it in the Express and Advertiser with quiet delight. Murder it certainly was, but there were no witnesses. However, the McGuinness brothers joined the army shortly afterwards just to be sure, whilst Norma got religion properly and became a nun. A priest's whure, Sam's mother assured his father; thae Papes deceived naebody, least of all her.

'What do you make of this awful business with the Weir laddie?' she asked Miss Cairns over the garden fence.

'I'm sure I have no opinion,' said Miss Cairns in her best Sabbath voice.

'Everyone thinks thae McGuinnesses had something tae dae wi' it,' Sam's mother continued. 'They're capable enough.' She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper, 'Papes, ye ken.'

Miss Cairns appeared to ignore this. She then said, as if reflecting on the earlier question, 'Perhaps it was a judgment. God punishes the wicked in His own good time.'

She spoke with such force that Sam's mother opened her mouth to ask whatever did she mean. But something in Miss Cairns's expression, a look which Sam, were he present, would have recognised from many years back with proud joy, warned Sam's mother to enquire no further.

They burned what was left of Bobby Weir at Daldowie Crematorium. Sam cut out the press reports of this, and of the killing, and kept them. His schooldays ended in triumph with a scholarship to Oxford. His father praised him, while regretting he wasn't up to a real man's job in the pits. His mother was proud enough - at last she could now counter yon Chrissie Methven's forever bragging about her Davie being picked for Motherwell Juniors FC. She did however demand why a Scottish university wasn't good enough for the likes of Sam, adding that the English kirk was just Papists without the Pope, and its vicars bent queers.

And it was in an Oxford 'Gents' that Sam encountered a Welsh paratrooper of about his own age. That meeting led to others. The soldier was drawn to the student's gentleness and cleverness, flattered by the attention of one so clearly his intellectual better. The student coveted the trooper's fit hard body and uncomplex masculinity, amazed to be desired by one so physically superior. Lust hardened to love, and after Sam's graduation they went to live together near Glyn's family outside Crickhowell. On long afternoons they strolled hand-in-hand by the canal, rippling its surface with plucked reeds to mingle their reflections, or lolled with limbs-entwined in the bracken while cattle grazed the rounded hills. On these occasions, Sam would sometimes sink into recollection, but Glyn, whose childhood had been very happy, and whose parents, though chapel-going, had always loved and accepted him without condition, and whom he loved in return, was perturbed, and asked Sam not to hate so much, and made love to Sam to show he was truly, safely loved now.

Sam wrote a poem at around this time. He simply called it Sam’s Poem and dedicated it To Glyn. But he never showed it to anyone, not even its dedicatee, but stored it with his collection of newspaper cuttings.

In dark night
I touched deformity's wet womb,
Was probed by squirming hatred's sullen blight,
A living corpse trapped in a leering tomb.

My smashed heart
Defiled, requited the accursed deeds,
Yet mewls and bleeds still from the unhealed smart
Which hatred, even avenged, sustains and feeds.

Then you came
With patient love, and tender calm,
To master, penetrate, and cherish me,
Freed become be the man I really am.

Eight years later, just before setting out to revisit Scotland, Sam retrieved his newspaper cuttings and, after reading them one last time, set fire to and burnt both them and his poem. He took the ashes to his parents' grave by the Firth of Clyde, where, having borrowed a trowel from the gardener, and pretending to tend the primulas by the headstone, he crumpled and scattered the charred paper roughly over where his mother's head lay.

This done, slowly and without premeditation, Sam began to dance, slowly at first, then faster and more wildly, till his feet seemed scarcely to touch the turf, and their thumping echoed down through the cold soil, mocking with happiness the corruption beneath.

A breeze swept in from the firth. The sun came out above the waves, its warmth freeing fragrance from the flowers on more cherished graves. He flung his arms wide to let the wind caress his body, feet light as air as if a lifelong burden had finally fallen from him, never to return.

He had done it. He was avenged. All scores were settled, he was free. Glyn, who loved him and whom he loved in return, was waiting for him in the car. The past could be chucked into history, its accounts closed for ever. Life for Sam could now really begin.

Copyright © James Scott 1989 and 2008

[Jim Scott] [A Boy A Book A Story] [Darkness] [Pat from Lancashire] [The Quaker Oats Man] [A Matter of Conscience] [Picnic] [Incident at a Railway Station] [Cauld Comfort Kail] [Moral Uplift] [The Soldier] [Madonna] [Hero of the Revolution] [The Messenger] [Tramlines] [Innocents] [Unlucky Dip]