I played centre-forward for my primary school team, not because I was quick, but because I was strong and could kick the ball with both feet. I scored loads and loads of goals and played there until I was ten. Then they put me back in the middle of the park, again because I was so strong.
Football was our lives although we did occasionally play rounders or cricket, with the stumps marked in chalk against a wall in the street. The tenement building would stretch for 150 yards and there would be five or six football matches going on in front of it at a time. Nobody owned a car in the Gorbals and we only saw cars on the main roads, so they weren’t a distraction.
We used lampposts as goalposts, only stopping when the man came to light them. Nobody wanted to play in goal – that’s probably why Scotland is not renowned for its goalkeepers. If you went in net you were allowed to come out after letting two goals in, so that’s why there were high scoring games. Because we were playing ten-a-side in a very enclosed area, players became very skilful.
If we weren’t playing sports, we’d have a look around the middens – the place where the rubbish was kept. Rats were plentiful there. We’d search through the rubbish for ‘lucks’ – something which someone had thrown out that might be worth something.
A big day in my life came when I had my first holy communion aged seven. I was nervous and excited. People made a sandwich and wrapped it in paper. They would also slip some money between the paper and the sandwich which was a local tradition. I was given three or four pence and thought I was rolling in it.
It was at primary school that I learned the facts of Gorbals life, namely that there were two kinds of people in the world – Catholics and Protestants. You were either one or the other. There was no such thing as a neutral. That’s what we were taught, but it wasn’t totally true. The Gorbals had a significant Jewish population and I used to go to the houses of some Jewish families on a Saturday and offer to light their fires for a few coins, because they were forbidden from doing so. The Jews were kind to me and I liked them.
I am a Catholic, of course, one of many children from Irish families who settled in the Gorbals, partly because it was the cheapest place in Glasgow to rent a room and partly because they were likely to know people who had already moved there.
Poverty and other social problems like alcohol meant the Catholics fought a lot among each other. There were public houses on every corner and when men came out of these at night they stood around, argued and they fought. Not that they needed an excuse. They probably reckoned any kind of exercise was better than going back to houses that were darker and more overcrowded than the pubs they had left. They fought with fists, or bottles, hatchets, or knives. And this wasn’t just in the evenings. I can vividly remember watching a hatchet fight at three o’clock on a midweek afternoon.
Since the adults spent so much time fighting it was only natural that the kids followed their example. We used to have mass battles twice a week with the boys at Adelphi Street, a Protestant primary school, over the road. It was harmless stuff – nobody really got hurt – but it seemed the proper thing to do. Benny Lynch, later a world champion boxer, was a Catholic who lived on Adelphi Street.
On the street, the rules were simple. If someone didn’t like you then he hit you. And you hit him back whether he was bigger than you or not, because if you didn’t hit back then the word went round that you were a sissy … and then everyone in the neighbourhood had a belt at you. As you grew up you learned more about fighting – and I can assure you that nobody ever mentioned the Marquis of Queensberry. Punching, kicking, and spitting were all in the game and you had to give as much you got.
There were many wonderful people in the Gorbals, people who would give you their last penny and do anything for anyone in trouble, but there were some bad characters. The adults used to say that if someone asked you for a match in the street when it was dark, you didn’t stop – you ran. Because that was a common trick of stopping people to slash them, and there were probably another couple of toughs hiding nearby in case you resisted.
There was an old Polish cobbler who had a shop in our street. We always played football near his shop because he didn’t chase us away and we liked him. There was a spell when we didn’t see him for weeks. I never forget how I felt when I saw him again. He had a scar which ran from his right ear to the side of his mouth and another from his mouth to his other ear. Someone had stopped him at night and taken the few shillings he had with him, and he needed eighty-five stitches.
The dark streets and even darker closes and stairways were made for crime. My mum was strict and wouldn’t allow us out at night, but I still got into lots of fights as a kid. A lad called John Ferguson battered lumps out of me and bullied me a little bit. I knew that I had to have a go at him again and I did. I beat him; I knocked the daylights out of him in fact, but he became my pal then. There was another lad that I beat up who kept turning up at my door every five minutes to ask for another fight. I could have beaten him, but he would have kept coming back for more. I gave up in the end and said, ‘You’re too good for me.’ He accepted that, because he had shown his courage. I was ten.
It didn’t matter how big the fella was who hit you, you had to hit him back. If you didn’t then your life was a misery. You got little fellas who would fight people ten times bigger than them just to show that they were not cowards.
It wasn’t long before I discovered the library. It was an escape, a world away from the fighting and football, the only place I went to which was quiet. I had been a good reader at school and I would read through the newspapers a few times a week. I developed a love for books and although I was never really a fan of fiction, I loved Treasure Island. I would read about Ché Guevara in later years and be fascinated to learn that he had family connections with the west of Ireland. His real name was Ernesto Guevara Lynch De La Serna.
The Catholic Church kept a lot of people out of trouble. They paid for a Boys’ Guild which had a gym where you could play crab football – where you sit on the floor and kick out with your legs – or snooker. They organized a football team and I used to play for them on Saturday, as well as my school team. Two games on a Saturday were normal for me and on Sunday I went to church partly through fear; it was a mortal sin if you didn’t attend.
There were loads of lads who were better footballers than me in the Gorbals but they were distracted by drink and drugs in later years. They are the sort that sit at the bar telling everyone how good they could have been. My mother kept me away from all that. I’d get a belt from her across the back of my hand if I misbehaved.
Being Catholics, we always had fish on a Friday. A man used to come round with a barrow laden with every type you could imagine. You would pay a fortune for it today, but it couldn’t be anything but cheap in the Gorbals because nobody had any money. For Christmas I’d get a bag of sweets, which was a big thing for me. They were wrapped in curly paper which made them more important.
It’s funny how your memory works. I can’t remember what I did yesterday and yet I have vivid recollections from childhood, like watching the communist marches each May Day. They were led by a fella called Andy Smith who lived on Thistle Street. He was a mad Celtic supporter who had a big poster of Stalin in his flat. Stalin was still alive and I was led to believe that he was a good person by Smith, who believed that we should all look after one another. Most people in the Gorbals agreed with the philosophy, even if they didn’t see themselves as communists. People helped their neighbours out and always supported them. Maybe they could only offer milk and sugar, but they supported each other emotionally too.
For as long as I can remember, I have supported Celtic. If you were a Catholic and Irish then you supported Celtic. I can’t even begin to explain why my brother John supported Rangers. Maybe it’s because they were a better team or maybe it was because he wanted to be different and, if so, he certainly achieved that. I can remember him getting his Rangers scarf and going off to Ibrox by himself, which was a very brave thing to do if you lived in the Gorbals. I admired him