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