Ra Axeman Cometh!

Friday 12:20 a.m.
This post is for Ion. I'd put in a link, but something about this bloggy is totally funged up. You clicky the icon for links and you don't get what you used to. Ephemeral shit! That's why I should give up and write writing instead. Anyway...

I'm thirteen years old and I'm over at the swingpark with Boab and Walter Campbell. There was another joe there, but I cannot remember who he is. It might have been Jake Carlin. We're going to the woods. I didn't usually hang around with Boab or Walter, his big brother, but I was with them this day. They had an axe, or hatchet, or machete, a quite blunt one. There's two sets of swings. I'm swinging on one of the swings and footering as you do. I've got a loan of the axe and I'm sitting on the swing and the axe is hitting between my legs in a desultory fashion. Nothing much is happening. We've paused there. The Black Woods are across the road.

Then this old joe comes out of the hut. For some reason there's a hut there with an old joe sitting in it. God knows what for. He comes out and starts hustling the Campbells and telling them to go away. The Campbells start taking the piss. And running around the old joe, and Walter is the worst. The old joe is not too swift on his feet and Walter is really not too bright. So they're running circles round the old joe and I get off the swings and tell them to pack it in, so we can go to the woods.

Then the old joe, who is a bit doolally, runs into the Calder Road, which is between the swing park and the Black Woods, and waves down this cop car. What the fung that was doing there God knows! Before you can say, fung the Queen, the constabulary have us lined up. The old doolally joe wants them to do something and they ask who vandalised the swing? What? It was a very old swing, the seat decrepit, etc. I had chipped out a few bits and that was that. I knew the old guy wanted Walter hustled. Who did it? said the pig. (He was a pig! I saw him in the pub near there, when I was about 19, and what a nazi currant!)The Campbells are saying fung all, and I think we'll have to stay there forever, and say it was me. At least, the old guy looked surprised... since I was the joe who stopped the Campbells hustling him.

Sometime ages later the pigs come to the door and I answered it. Got my maw and the old man from the living room. They spoke to the pigs. What a laugh they were having as they came down the lobby afterwards! They were falling about. I was a wee bit distressed since I'd heard that I was going to have to go the juvenile court, and told them, bottom lip quivering, that I'd pay the fine.

My parents had a very good sense of humour.

So, I'm in first year at high school and have to take the day off to go to court at the Bellshill Police Station. I'm in the waiting room. Then there's only me and my maw and this other, much older joe, with one of his parents. The joe, obviously a habitual offender, tells me they'll let me off if I start to cry. I think, no way! I am not going to cry. My maw finds out who the magistrate is. A protestant. We're funged! It's a protestant. She'd have known the tim magistrates.

My maw is standing at my right. I can just about feel her bristling. I've got on my school uniform, which is the best clothes I have. Our Lady's High School. The protestant says why can't this boy join the Boy's Brigade if he wants to go to the woods with an axe? My auld maw says, we don't have the Boy's Brigade. We have the Boy's Guild. The magistrate says I have to pay costs of 15 shillings for the swing. Admonished. So I do not have a record for that. Malicious damage.

Fung off, you bourgeois basturns! Just fung off!

My uncle Donald was the same age abouts as my auld maw. After his old man died, he got done for stealing biscuits off a train, and my old man had to take him to the Police Station, the same one, I think, to get birched.

They're all in hell now, Jack. The basturns all go to hell! Allah Akbar!