Nipper (21 page)

Through the long night that follows I try a few times to escape but he’s slowed his drinking down to prove he’s still the boss. I think he’s clicked onto the fact that I will bob and weave out of the way when he’s really pissed.

My anger the next day is uncontrollable. I’m off school again with a note but when I meet up with my pals the next evening, I go on a one-man self-destruct mission.

All my friends that I hang around with at the time have seen the mess my face is in, but I don’t care, I’m not gonna hide it any more. I have to get some of this anger that had built up inside out, and I don’t care who or what I release it on.

I go out that night wrecking things, smashing windows, kicking cats, putting gas bottles in sheds and blowing them up, anything that I can destroy.

T
hat will be the last really bad beating Dad ever gives me. It’s certainly not the last time he beats me – he gives me loads more – but it’s the last serious one as I’m getting bigger and stronger between the ages of fourteen and fifteen.

For one thing, I’ve started going to kick-boxing classes. Something has switched in me. I’ve finally decided that I won’t be a punch bag ever again. If anyone’s going to do the punching, it will be me. I’ve come more under the influence of my big brother Tommy, too, who already at the age of fifteen has became a Scottish amateur boxing champion.

And I’ve started up a gang in St Mary’s with Calum. We call it The Rogues. It’s halfway between a club and a gang and you have to do loads of mad stuff to prove yourself and become a member. I’ve lost it at this point. All those years of built-up frustration, pain and suppressed anger have just
burst out of me. I’m thinking
fuck my dad, fuck the world and fuck anyone who crosses my path
.

Dad has succeeded. He’s turned me into a monster like him – only I would never pick on women or kids. I start on people’s property and later go on to fully grown men. The Rogues Club I start when I am fourteen involves a lot of different things. We’re a group of angry, alienated kids with bad attitudes – years later we’d have been called Asbo kids – looking for things to vent our anger on and destroy.

We start by wrecking cars and blowing sheds up with the gas bottles stored in them. Then smashing windows on a points system: the further away you are, or the bigger and stronger the item, the more points you get.

We have around twelve members from the St Mary’s area, with a name chart, with all of our names on it. That’s to keep a record of who’s the biggest rogue – who’s caused the most destruction basically. And as usual I’m at the top of the leader board.

One of the lads who’s close behind me puts a garden gate through someone’s front window and ends up on the front page of the
Telegraph
newspaper. Not to be outdone, as I hate getting beaten, I fill a container full of dog dirt and smash it through someone’s window. I know it’s disgusting, but the more beatings I get from Dad, the more angry I become and the more determined to heap misery on the rest of the world.

We make up descriptive slogans for everything we do. For instance, one of the other lads calls my dog-dirt grenade ‘A
Rather Large Stink Bomb’. Soon The Rogues start to get bigger with more and more people joining, so that more activities are added, like bouncing cars into the middle of the road and setting fire to things.

Then there’s bogus milk money collecting. As none of us has a penny we watch people doing a milk round in the morning and follow them, writing down the numbers of the doors that have a delivery. Then on a Friday, we go half an hour earlier than the real milk boy and collect his money with a bogus book. I’m getting worse and worse with each new scam I dream up, as I now realise that most of the kids I hang around with have smart clothes on. And as Dad never has money to buy me things, stealing is now my mission.

I’ll go into the local shop and get one of the lads to distract the shopkeeper, while I steal the milk tokens from behind the counter. These are worthless to most people, but I have a friend working for a dairy firm that thinks they’re gold dust, as he can cash them in. I’ll swap him the tokens for his old Pringle jumpers. And hey presto, I’m one of the lads without anyone knowing any better. Then I’ll come home from school some nights, and Dad will be sitting wearing them, covered in soot from sweeping chimneys. At times like this I walk along to the shops, kicking fences and punching cars in a rage, as I’m back to my old scruffy self again. I’m thinking of how I can get even with him and of the next scam to kit myself out.

The older lads are gang fighting with the Dales and Kirton at the time, and I really want a piece of it. I want to hit somebody, and not worry about being killed or kicked out, or whether I’ll be homeless or out in a home. The Rogue thing isn’t fuelling my anger – in the end it’s more of a laugh to me. But now I don’t want to laugh. I want to destroy. So I walk down towards the Dales past St Leonard’s Church.

The Dales are another gang – or scheme, as we call them – not far from St Mary’s. Both gangs will meet in the middle of a football pitch, while the girls sit on a massive stone teapot in the park to get a good view of the action. It really annoys me most of the time, as it’s a bit like cat and mouse at first – you chase us then we chase you. There are only a couple of people standing in the middle that are prepared to have a punch up.

I love it when nobody runs. We collide in the middle like a scene from
Braveheart
and every person running towards me looks like Evil Jock. Well, in my head they do. It’s mostly just hands and feet that are used, but there’s one bloke you have to watch out for. If you have someone on the ground giving them a hiding you always have to watch your back.

This bloke is nicknamed ‘Animal’. He’s about four foot high, really skinny with dark hair and a boxer’s face, like most of the kids have, as they’re all getting battered at home like I am. He’ll glide around the mass brawl looking for targets. His calling card is to stick a knife in people’s arse cheeks. If you hear a scream you know exactly where Animal is.
Later on I hear that he’s been killed in a knife attack. What goes around comes around I guess.

The fights are giving me a buzz and I don’t care if Dad batters me when I get home as I’m now finally learning to duck and dive his punches and kicks. I’m still not old enough or brave enough – or maybe stupid and reckless enough – to dare to lash out at him, as I’m still too frightened of him, but I’m getting much better at defending myself. You might call this long overdue, but I’m making him miss and he’s getting tired a lot quicker than normal. Plus, of course, we’re both getting older and time’s now definitely on my side, no problem. I used to just lie there and take the hours of torture, but now I’m getting quicker, and wiser to when he will attack.

The times I spend rolling around with people my own age are now getting more and more frequent. And weapons are being added. We will all break brush handles and wooden fences down to arm ourselves, then walk down to the football pitch like a mini drunken army, marching close together.

‘
Y-M-B, who are we? We are the boys who rule Dundee
.’ At the top of our lungs, so the other gang can hear us coming.

One night we’re running up the middle of the pitch, towards the Dales gang, when I see this silver thing flying through the air at the last minute, coming towards my face. There’s no time to get out of the way as it smashes me in the forehead.

I fall backwards onto the grass and can hear a hissing noise. I think for a moment it’s my brain making the noise, until I look beside me and see a can of Tennant’s lager with a pin-hole in it.

Yep, you guessed it. I’ve been hit with a full can of beer and yet again I have another egg sticking out of my forehead. But things like that don’t bother me now, as it’s a battle scar to prove you never ran. As long as it never hits the back of your head, you’re fine.

I sometimes take Bonnie to the gang fights with me. Even though Dad gets away with beating me, Bonnie never lets anyone else get away with it. There are never that many people hanging around if I have Bonnie with me. She’ll stand in front of me and show her teeth – not growling, just lifting her top lip to unveil her huge wolflike nashers.

A few of the lads say they’re thinking of joining the Cadets and ask me what I think. I’m up for anything by this stage – life is starting to get more interesting and exciting. Only a couple of years ago, I just wanted it all to end. When I saw the bodies of people who had thrown themselves off the multi-storey tenements I wanted to be one of them. But now I don’t want to die any more, as my fear has turned into hate and anger.

So we join the Blackwatch Cadets in St Mary’s. We’ve got army uniforms and we’re ready to fight for the country. Well, until they wake you up at five in the morning to go on a ten-mile jog. I’m up for the war side of it, but I don’t join it to run
after people. I thought that was what a gun was for, so you didn’t have to chase people.

I’m enjoying this period of my life, but Dad is drinking a lot more heavily and any money he has now seems to go on drink. I don’t need him any more though. I have petty crime to pay for my army uniform and boots, and I’m doing a paper round to save to go to England. It’s a two-week holiday with the Cadets to a place near Southport called Altcar which has a rifle range. Cadets from everywhere go there once a year to learn how to fire real guns, go sniping through the grass and go on five-mile runs at stupid o’clock in the morning.

In the end before I go I have to call Mum to borrow some money as Dad’s found my stash, and spent it all on drink. I am in a quiet, controlled rage about this but it’s so much of a habit for me to keep my feelings about Dad bottled up that as usual I say nothing about it to Mum. I don’t need to tell her anyway, as she’s probably guessed already. It’s just one more thing that I log in the back of my brain for the day of reckoning. Besides, at this point I just want Dad to die, so I don’t want to tell anyone anything about me and him, especially Mum, as I don’t want to incriminate her or involve her in what I’m planning to do to him.

Mum’s always good with money and gifts. I love having Christmas presents from her – it’s always designer trainers and tops or something that you can never afford yourself. She isn’t loaded though, it’s through a catalogue. Dad buys me
things as well, but they’re normally accompanied by a black eye or burst nose a couple of hours later, if anything is marked or has a slight scrape. I think he’s forgotten that I’m a teenage lad, the way he goes on.

‘What the fuck is that on yir trainer?’

Grass, you wanker! You should go outside more if you’ve forgotten what it looks like
.

When I get back from Altcar I’m told to hand my kit back and I’m never allowed to go again. They’ve kicked me out of the Cadets. When I went there and joined no one told me some arsehole a couple of years older would decide to scream in my face from around an inch away while spitting all over me. What did he expect me to do, kiss him?

I did give him a kiss – it was of the Glasgow variety.

On my return I decide to look for something else to keep me occupied. Bonnie had got out one night alone and ended up pregnant to some other dog. So I can’t really take her up to Clatto or near anyone as she’s getting a bit temperamental. So I join back up with The Rogues again.

This time around we do things that are a little more weird and stupid, bordering on dangerous, like Shitealight! You pick up loads of dog dirt in a newspaper, put it on someone’s doorstep, set the paper on fire, and then knock on the door and hide behind the hedge watching through the gaps to see the outcome. People open the door, see the fire and try to stamp it out, covering their slippers in dog shit.

Another one is tying two doors together. In the Closies, the tenement blocks, the doors are opposite each other. We’ll get some washing line or rope and make it about five inches longer than door-to-door, then we’ll tie the ends to the handles and knock on both doors. After that we stand there and hurl insults at the people as they pull the rope back and forward, screaming that we’re dead when they get out.

I’ll be standing there in fits of laughter as Calum Patterson’s favourite trick is to push his privates between his legs to make him look like a women. Then he’ll turn his back to the door, bend over, and talk in a woman’s voice.

‘Has anyone seen my washing rope?’

I’m on the floor, as the men behind the doors are foaming at the mouth with anger, pulling each other’s doors back and forward.

‘You’re a dead man, dirty little bastard!’ Then the two house-owners will start getting frustrated with each other.

‘Stop pulling the fucking door, yi half-wit, I’m pulling mine.’

‘Wha are you calling a half-wit!’

We then take the rope off as both doors close, and walk downstairs as if we had left them tied. The men will come to the window when we’re outside.

‘You bastards, better take that rope aff, or yir gonna git it.’

Calum will open his jacket. ‘What, this rope?’

Then we run like the wind as they slam the windows to come after us.

Full Moon is another one. There’s a place called Brackens, at the back of St Mary’s, and the house windows are nearly down to the floor, so we’d round up six or seven of us and bare our backsides and press them against the window and knock.

As the curtains open we’d bust into a chorus of ‘Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone’.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to open your curtains and see seven bare arses staring back at you. I do apologise to anyone who’s had to endure that sight as I’m not sure whether Calum ever cleaned his.

I
’ve been playing football throughout my childhood and I’ve become quite a nifty player. Most people in Dundee are football mad, as there’s nothing else to do except have a punch-up or play football. My school team has even reached the Dundee Schoolboys’ Cup Final.