allowed to share.
Looking back, I see that I disliked the Catholic children more than the Protestants I knew. This made for difficulties, because Catholics and Protestants, in our little Scottish town, were supposed to be enemies, either politely skirting one another, as adults, or waiting outside the rival school, as children, to administer a mild beating. The local Protestant school – the state school – came out five minutes before St Bride’s, time enough for a gaggle of the bigger, and obviously stupider, Prod boys to gather around the school gates, leering and dangerous, ready to catch any stragglers who happened their way. They never caught me. I was the fastest runner in my class, and I would rather have died than be humiliated by a gang of my obvious inferiors. Yet even then, in the midst of this community of visible, though fairly vague, discrimination, I knew there were Protestant kids on the other side who felt exactly as I did. One of these was Stewart Banks, who was nowhere near as good as me at book learning but, like my cousin Kenneth, knew a thing or two about the wider world.
Stewart was a neighbour. All our neighbours, on Blackburn Drive and the streets around, were Protestants, whether by accident or some unlikely demographic, I do not know. Stewart’s parents were, by far, the most easygoing, tolerant and disorganised people I had ever encountered. They were the very opposite of my mother, with her obsessive neatness, and her almost desperate desire to get out of the prefabs and live a better life, but they got on with her very well – and they were the only neighbours who did not make it obvious, one way or another, that they disapproved of my father’s goings-on. At the time, even though I had just begun to disapprove of him myself, that mattered a great deal to me. Like most children, I wanted my home life to be just like everybody else’s: in spite of the fact that I knew I was not like other people in that little town, I wanted to appear normal.
Normal was a big word, back then. If anybody did anything even remotely interesting, they were considered abnormal. Abnormal children were taken off to special places, never to be heard of again. Abnormal men posed a terrifying, though undefined, danger to children. The most abnormal people I knew were the Mormon family who lived a few streets away from us. It was said that Mormon men had several wives, and that Mormon boys could make babies with their sisters. Though I had no clear idea how babies were made – Elizabeth Banks told me, once, that men and women did it by sticking their bottoms together and taking deep breaths – I was certain that brothers and sisters couldn’t do it. It had to be a man and a woman who were married to each other. That much I knew from Scripture class.
Stewart was normal; I was not. Stewart had a normal family: his father went to work in the morning and came home at the end of the day, even on the weekends. His job had something to do with the distribution of D.C. Thomson products, which meant that he was allowed to bring home as many magazines and comics as he liked. My mother would not allow me to have comics, partly because of money, but mostly because she didn’t approve of them. Now and again, I got a copy of Look and Learn , which she considered mind-improving, but to have seen me reading the Beano would have broken her heart.
In Stewart’s house, on the other hand, every available surface was piled high with comics, newspapers, magazines. His mother read all the women’s magazines, The People’s Friend , anything to do with knitting and jam recipes, anything with those ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, true-life stories that were all the rage. Stewart liked strip cartoons of the Eagle, Roy of the Rovers, Boy’s Own variety. I liked the funny stuff. Every Saturday, I rose early and hopped over the fence to the Banks’. Stewart and his family would stay in bed till late – ten thirty, eleven, even, which I
Looking back, I see that I disliked the Catholic children more than the Protestants I knew. This made for difficulties, because Catholics and Protestants, in our little Scottish town, were supposed to be enemies, either politely skirting one another, as adults, or waiting outside the rival school, as children, to administer a mild beating. The local Protestant school – the state school – came out five minutes before St Bride’s, time enough for a gaggle of the bigger, and obviously stupider, Prod boys to gather around the school gates, leering and dangerous, ready to catch any stragglers who happened their way. They never caught me. I was the fastest runner in my class, and I would rather have died than be humiliated by a gang of my obvious inferiors. Yet even then, in the midst of this community of visible, though fairly vague, discrimination, I knew there were Protestant kids on the other side who felt exactly as I did. One of these was Stewart Banks, who was nowhere near as good as me at book learning but, like my cousin Kenneth, knew a thing or two about the wider world.
Stewart was a neighbour. All our neighbours, on Blackburn Drive and the streets around, were Protestants, whether by accident or some unlikely demographic, I do not know. Stewart’s parents were, by far, the most easygoing, tolerant and disorganised people I had ever encountered. They were the very opposite of my mother, with her obsessive neatness, and her almost desperate desire to get out of the prefabs and live a better life, but they got on with her very well – and they were the only neighbours who did not make it obvious, one way or another, that they disapproved of my father’s goings-on. At the time, even though I had just begun to disapprove of him myself, that mattered a great deal to me. Like most children, I wanted my home life to be just like everybody else’s: in spite of the fact that I knew I was not like other people in that little town, I wanted to appear normal.
Normal was a big word, back then. If anybody did anything even remotely interesting, they were considered abnormal. Abnormal children were taken off to special places, never to be heard of again. Abnormal men posed a terrifying, though undefined, danger to children. The most abnormal people I knew were the Mormon family who lived a few streets away from us. It was said that Mormon men had several wives, and that Mormon boys could make babies with their sisters. Though I had no clear idea how babies were made – Elizabeth Banks told me, once, that men and women did it by sticking their bottoms together and taking deep breaths – I was certain that brothers and sisters couldn’t do it. It had to be a man and a woman who were married to each other. That much I knew from Scripture class.
Stewart was normal; I was not. Stewart had a normal family: his father went to work in the morning and came home at the end of the day, even on the weekends. His job had something to do with the distribution of D.C. Thomson products, which meant that he was allowed to bring home as many magazines and comics as he liked. My mother would not allow me to have comics, partly because of money, but mostly because she didn’t approve of them. Now and again, I got a copy of Look and Learn , which she considered mind-improving, but to have seen me reading the Beano would have broken her heart.
In Stewart’s house, on the other hand, every available surface was piled high with comics, newspapers, magazines. His mother read all the women’s magazines, The People’s Friend , anything to do with knitting and jam recipes, anything with those ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, true-life stories that were all the rage. Stewart liked strip cartoons of the Eagle, Roy of the Rovers, Boy’s Own variety. I liked the funny stuff. Every Saturday, I rose early and hopped over the fence to the Banks’. Stewart and his family would stay in bed till late – ten thirty, eleven, even, which I
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