The Flying Scotsman (eBook)

one: my early years

My childhood is far more influential in my present than a childhood ought to be, so that is where my story begins.

I was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire on September 11, 1965 and came to Scotland shortly afterwards. My parents, John and Marcie, came from Scotland – Ayrshire to be more accurate – and were in Warwickshire because of my father’s posting as a police officer. I was their second son and there were only 15 months between Gordon and me.

My father’s posting in Scotland was in Prestwick, Ayrshire and it is there that I have my earliest memories. We moved from Prestwick to Kilmarnock when I was four years old. It was there that I first felt different from the other children – we were police. I cannot remember very much because I was so young, but our bogie was set on fire and our tortoise got the chop too.

I have clear memories of Kilmarnock in incidents. My first introduction to the school system was in the form of punishment for a window broken by a stone which left my brother’s hand. It was not a deliberate act but an accident in the playground, which was just by our house. It annoyed me that the punishment could not be joint and my first impression of school was, for me, the correct one, as time would prove.

I also quite vividly remember the day my brother and I learned to ride our bikes at the same moment. It was Uncle Stuart who pushed us off at the top of the brae, side-by-side, with the prophetic words ‘Mind the corner at the bottom!’ It was white-knuckle stuff and we might have been scuffed a bit, but from that moment on we could ride.

We were not there long before we moved to Newmilns, which was a small town set in a valley, but there the story was no different. Newmilns was parochial enough to single you out, but large enough to be nasty with it, to compound matters we were not only ‘police’, we were also newcomers.

It was a terrible combination and from day one at school we were ‘the filth’. Part of the problem was the fact that my father’s posting was in the valley itself, so the enmity towards him was passed down to the local children from their parents and from them to us. We were outsiders the entire time we were there, which was eleven years.

The enmity towards us manifested itself in three ways – name calling, ostracism and violence. Even my sister Yvonne, five years my junior, was not excluded from the party but the violence was mainly reserved for Gordon and me. It seemed that rarely a week would go by without my being strapped for fights I never asked to be in. In fact I was doing my utmost to avoid them, but seeing as I was a common denominator, I was seen as a troublemaker by Mr Gillespie, the headmaster.

This set the pattern for my whole school life and clowning around became habitual as a means of trying to be accepted. When I think back on my school days I can only remember feeling sadness and loneliness. The violence does not stand out so much, although there was plenty of it and some of it quite extreme. Being head-butted from the crowd or roughed up was common enough to lose its shock factor and, apart from the worst incidents, I do not think that the violence itself left a large impression on me emotionally.

Avoiding violence, and the fear of violence, there were worse forms of victimisation: those that were intangible. When it came to physical violence though, I thought of it and perceived it as two different sensations after a while. Being kicked about the head was so different from being kicked about the body.

Ironic as it may seem, in the midst of it, violence has a beauty and excitement that nothing else can generate. Sometimes, even though it was nothing more than extreme physical harm, I could almost be disappointed when it ended. At times the most extreme violence, especially to the head, brought an orgasm of fear, excitement, panic and adrenaline.

Nonetheless, I always slipped back to my mode of violence avoidance.

For me there was also a much, much more hurtful thing called social exclusion. Because of being the ‘newcomer’ and ‘the filth’ as well as feeling I was the odd one out in the family, I was desperate to be accepted into the periphery of my peer group. I was the tag-along child on a good day, but when I was seven an event happened that mired what hope I had into the ground.

My memory of it starts at the point of arrival at school, where there were three double-decker buses decked with streamers and balloons sitting in the schoolyard on a beautiful, sunny, summer morning. The engines are turning over and all the children are getting on board – the whole of primary three are going to Millport, a small town on a small island a mile or two off the Ayrshire coast. It is a beautiful scene, except for one problem – I’m not going.

I cannot recall the given reason for my non-participation, but it made no difference to the material fact that I was there beside Mrs Jamieson and Mr Gillespie, waving goodbye to my peer group. It was the ‘belt first and ask questions later’ headmaster, Mr Gillespie, who cruelly made me stand and wave at the laughing and pointing classmates at the back windows of the departing buses.

Next I was escorted to another class by Mrs Jamieson, who only seemed to teach the three ‘D’s – Discipline, Discipline, Discipline. I was taken to a fourth-year class, where I was placed at the front of the class like a prize example of unworthiness. I don’t mean in the front row, but at the very front like a pulpit to a congregation. There I sat, in my own island of abject sorrow, staring at the blue sky through the side window. Every second of every minute I could feel the mockery of sixty eyes burn into the back of me as I shielded my face from its glare, and every second of every minute I felt the weight of tears bursting behind my eyes. I refused to cry – I could not cry – because I knew that the wolves behind me would devour my emotions and leave me as good as dead inside.

At the end of the next day I had to endure the sight of my tormentors’ return; I felt dead inside anyhow. At that point I felt like ‘the other boy’ at home, and at school as I was ‘the filth’, but now I knew I was worthless and detestable. It was not until the next morning, when my tormentors started teasing and laughing at me, that the full impact struck my seven-year-old head to such effect that it inspired my childhood dream that everything I knew would be annihilated by a nuclear holocaust. For others it was the great fear of the era, but for me it became a day-to-day hope to cling onto.

I can remember the exact spot where I stood when the blow came and at that moment the world ended for me. It was of my doing. I could not live and be part of the world around me any more – it was too sad and painful. From that moment I was no longer here, and I was no longer that little boy. No, I was merely an observer behind his eyes and anything that hurt the little boy did not hurt me, because I only witnessed what happened to the boy.

These are truly the saddest days of my life by a long way and I lived in my self-imposed protective prison for more or less most of my school life. Beyond that my childhood left me with an isolationist and insular personality as well as a real and subconscious fear of social situations.

One other incident that stands out, though, in my memory from childhood is my brother and me being taken at knife-point when we were nine and ten. We were walking down a backstreet in the town when we were set upon by three older boys and taken at knifepoint into a derelict house. There my brother was urinated on while I could do nothing to help. We were taken into the basement, where other things happened. One of those was being made to touch each other’s genitals at knifepoint while being threatened that they’d hurt the other brother if we refused to do it and vice versa.

The incident was taken to the authorities and when it came up in court I was too young to give evidence, and my brother fainted in the dock. In the end, it made no difference as the assailants were effectively let off.

What scant regard Gordon and I had for ‘justice’ was gone and nothing else of this kind in the future would ever be reported.

Gordon and I never spoke about the matter to other people or to each other from then on and it was consigned to history and our memories.

As far as my primary school years are concerned it was a teacher called Myrtle McKay who gave me a lifeline, by letting me be part of something. She taught music.

She ran a recorder class in her own time after school hours, and she encouraged me to get involved. I was interested in music, but at the start I was more interested in walking home on a near-deserted footpath after school time.

My initial motive never waned, but my interest in the recorder soon overcame it. After a while I had a small part in the band, but more importantly Mrs McKay took time – her own time – to speak to me like a person. I will always remember her as a kind and warm-hearted person who provided an oasis of hope in a desert of despair.

One incident I should mention, as I am famous for cycling, is my first serious bike accident when I was about nine or ten. Gordon and I were racing down the main street when we touched wheels. I went straight over the handlebars and ended up with my front tooth totally embedded in my bottom lip. The remaining stump had to be removed and now I only have one front tooth. Luckily, the other teeth moved round and closed the gap so that only the keenest of eye can spot the deficit. Strangely, the whole thing was remarkably painless, despite the broken tooth and copious amounts of...