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