Runaway

I

It’s hard to remember now all the various things that came together to make me want to run away. But the tipping point was my expulsion from school. And, of course, I was always blamed for leading the others astray. But it really wasn’t like that.

I was born just after the war, into what they later called the ‘baby boomer’ generation. And I grew up in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties, two decades that morphed from sepia to psychedelic before my very eyes as I segued from childhood to adolescence.

We lived in the south-side suburb of Clarkston, once a village in the Eastwood district of East Renfrewshire, but subsumed already into the creeping urban sprawl of Scotland’s industrial heartland. I remember the trams, and the cranes on the Clyde when they still built ships there. I remember the smoke-blackened sandstone tenements that they knocked down in the post-war years before discovering sandblasting, and the marvellous red and honeyed stone that lay beneath the grime. Flats that, once renovated, are still lived in today, while those they built to replace them have long since been demolished.

I sometimes wish I could get hold of those planners and architects and wring them by the neck.

My father taught English and maths at a school in the east end. He was raised in tenement flats on the south side, opposite Queen’s Park. His father had been a street artist before the First World War, but joined the Royal Flying Corps during the war years and trained as a photographer. Somewhere I still have an album of his photographs, taken while lying along the length of some flimsy fuselage and pointing a clumsy camera at the trenches below. Early aerial surveillance. The trenches just looked like cracks in dried mud. Hard to believe there were people in them. After the war he opened his own photographic studio in Great Western Road.

I suppose my dad must have got his religion and his politics from his dad. My father was an atheist, and a socialist in a constituency that was then a Conservative stronghold. By a process of osmosis, I guess I must have acquired both from him.

My mother, by contrast, was devout Church of Scotland. And although she never admitted it, I always suspected she was a closet Tory. Her favourite rag was the Scottish Daily Express, so I suppose it was only to be expected.

I always felt sorry for my mum, though. She had a marvellous talent for drawing and painting. But her father refused to let her go to art school, despite the impassioned pleas of her art teacher. It simply wasn’t the done thing in those days for a woman to pursue a career in art.

So she applied instead to join the civil service. In the entry examination she came out top for the whole of Glasgow. But naturally, since she was a woman, was rewarded with a job as a telephonist. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough for her, when she married my dad she was handed her jotters. Married women were not allowed to work in the civil service.

She continued to draw and paint, of course, wonderful shaded portraits and watercolour landscapes. But less and less as the years went by. I always perceived in her a feeling that life had somehow passed her by. And while much was passed on to me by my father, perhaps a sense of failure was the one thing I inherited from her. If she had hoped for success vicariously, through me, then I must have been a source of further disappointment.

In 1965, of course, there was no hint of any of that. I was just exploring my talents and, like my contemporaries, being swept along by the sea of change that was washing over the whole country. And music was what drove it, like the moon and the tides. The Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks. Exciting, violent, romantic, ground-breaking music that fired the imagination and made everything seem possible.

All remnants of the war were swept away by it, too. Rationing, national service (although the draft was still in force across the Atlantic), the stuffy old BBC Light Programme, short hair, collars and ties. There were pirates out in the North Sea playing rock and roll. Anyone with any spark of musical talent wanted to pick up a guitar and play.

I was desperate to be in a group. To stand up onstage and play guitar and sing about love and loss, and this world that shifted beneath my feet. I had music in my head all the time, and it wasn’t long before I found like minds and like talents among my peers.

But I hadn’t always been in love with music. When I was six my parents sent me to piano lessons, taught by a spinster lady called Miss Hale who lived in a semi near Tinker’s Field, just five minutes from our house. I hated it. I remember sitting in her semi-darkened front room, playing scales on an upright piano, the sound of kids on the swings coming from across the road. C, D, E, F. And now chromatics. And if I made a mistake, having my knuckles rapped with a twelve-inch ruler, even as I was still playing.

I didn’t last long there.

Next, I was sent to the Ommer School of Music in Dixon Avenue, which was a good twenty-five-minute bus ride into town. Such was my parents’ determination that I should play. I spent four years travelling back and forth every Tuesday night for lessons. In the dark, in all weathers, and on my own. Kids would never be allowed to do that, these days. I remember very clearly sitting in a café in Victoria Road waiting for my bus home one winter’s night, drinking an American Cream Soda ice-cream float and watching Mr Magoo on a black and white TV set high up on the wall. A man came to sit beside me, and when I told him my bus wasn’t due for a while he suggested that he might give me a lift home. But I had been well warned. So I told the owner of the café, an Italian gentleman, who informed the man in no uncertain terms that he should sling his hook. And that Italian stood at the door of his café and watched me on to the bus that night, and every Tuesday night from then on.

But years of Saturday morning theory classes, of practising in winter-cold rooms, or on warm summer nights when other kids in the street were out playing rounders, eventually took their toll. I hated music, I told my folks. I was stopping lessons and never going back.

Then came the Beatles. I remember that first hit single. ‘Love Me Do’. It got to Number 17 in the chart in October 1962, and it changed my life. I can only imagine my parents’ consternation when, six months after giving up the piano, I sold my kilt and my train set to buy a guitar, and was playing it till my fingers bled.

And it’s amazing how like minds are drawn to one another. By midway through 1963 I was playing in a group. All of us at the same secondary school, and just fifteen years old. A couple of the boys I had known from primary school, completely unaware of their musical talents. The others were friends of Maurie.

Maurie was one of those two childhood friends. Luke Sharp was the other (I know! I don’t know what his parents were thinking).

They could hardly have come from more different backgrounds. Maurie’s father was a successful businessman. His great-grandfather had arrived in Glasgow at the turn of the century in a wave of Jewish immigration from the continent. His family settled in the Gorbals, establishing a thriving business in the rag trade, and within two generations had gone from running barefoot in the street to buying a detached home in the wealthy south-side suburb of Williamwood.

Luke’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when I think back on it now it seems a miracle to me that he was ever able to join the group. He was one of those individuals blessed with an extraordinary ear for music. He could listen to anything once, then just sit down at the piano and play it. He had been sent to piano lessons so that he could play the Kingdom songs sung by the Jehovah’s Witnesses at their meetings. Although, in truth, he didn’t need lessons. And when he wasn’t playing or practising, most evenings and weekends he would be dragged round the doors by his parents. Something, I was to learn, that he hated with a vengeance.

It was only at school that he could play the music he liked. And he haunted the music department, playing jazz and blues, and astounding the head of music by being able to perform some of Bach’s most complex fugues by ear.

It is also worth mentioning that Luke was little short of a genius. He had been top of his year three years running and, had he completed his final year, would certainly have been Dux. Today they would probably claim he was autistic.

I first heard him playing one lunch hour. A Scott Joplin ragtime piece. I’d never heard anything like it. An amazing left-hand rhythm punctuated by a complex, jangling, right-hand melody. It drew me along the corridor to the practice room at the end, where he sat playing. I watched, mesmerized by his fingers dancing across the keys. When he had finished, he turned, startled, to see me standing in the doorway.

‘I never knew you played the piano,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘You’ve never been to the Kingdom Hall.’

I had no idea what he meant then, but on an impulse I said, ‘Want to be in a group?’

I’ve heard it said that a face can light up. Well, Luke’s positively shone.

‘Yes.’ He had no hesitation. Then, ‘What do you play?’

‘Guitar.’

‘Sing?’

I pulled a face. ‘Not very well.’

He laughed. ‘Me neither. Why don’t we ask Maurie?’

‘Maurie? Maurie Cohen?’ I couldn’t believe he meant the plump Jewish boy who’d been in our class all through primary.

‘He’s got an amazing voice,’ Luke said. ‘He just auditioned for Scottish Opera, and they want him to train with them.’

‘Then he won’t want to sing with us.’

‘He might. His parents won’t let him do the Scottish Opera thing. They think it’ll distract him from his studies. And they have plans for him, you know?’

Maurie just about bit our hands off when we asked him. And he was much more interested in singing pop than opera, anyway. He thought his parents would be more inclined to indulge him if they saw it as a hobby rather than a career path. And in the end, it was his father who bought most of our equipment.

Our first practice was scheduled a week later in one of the music department rehearsal rooms after school. Me on acoustic guitar, Luke on piano, and Maurie on vocal. We had a list of songs that we’d been learning. Maurie had all the words scribbled down in a notepad. But he turned up with a boy I didn’t know, though I’d seen him around the playground and the corridors. A lad from the downmarket end of Thornliebank. He was kind of tall, and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair.

‘This is Dave Jackson,’ Maurie said. ‘Good guitarist, but he wants to play bass.’ He turned to the boy, who stood sheepishly clutching his guitar in its soft carry-case. ‘Tell them why, Dave.’ He grinned. ‘Go on.’

Dave looked embarrassed. He said, ‘I read somewhere that it’s the low frequency of the bass guitar that makes the girls scream.’

We all burst out laughing.

Except for Luke, who said, ‘Well, no, it’s entirely possible that the speed and pressure of a low frequency could have that kind of effect. Although it’s not the sound that has the frequency, it’s the means of making it that does. Sound is a pressure wave through the air—’

And we all threw things at him. A duster, bits of chalk, Maurie’s notepad.

Our laughter was interrupted by the arrival of a good-looking boy with thick, dark hair that tumbled over his forehead, like he was a Beatle himself. Even in his school uniform you could tell that he was powerfully built. And you knew at a glance that he was the kind of boy that the girls would just follow around like little puppy dogs. He was hefting a bass drum, and he set it down in the middle of the room.

‘I’ve got a snare drum, hi-hat, stands and pedals at the end of the hall if you want to come and give me a hand.’

I didn’t know him at all. But Maurie said, ‘This is Jeff.’

Jeff, it turned out, had never played the drums in his life, but had borrowed a basic kit so that he could be in the band with Maurie. Jeff had come from a different feeder primary, but the south-side Jewish community was a small one, and it turned out that he and Maurie had been best friends all through childhood, gone to shul together and even shared their bar mitzvah.

After he had figured out how to put all the bits and pieces of the skeleton drum kit together, Jeff sat down and gave it a thrashing while we stood and watched. Impressive for a first go.

When he finished, he looked at us with gleaming eyes. ‘My dad says if I’m any good, he’ll buy me a kit.’

And so we had our first rehearsal that day. ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ by the Four Seasons; ‘Crying in the Rain’ by the Everly Brothers; Del Shannon’s ‘Hey Little Girl’; ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis Presley; and a whole bunch of songs from the Beatles’ Please Please Me album that had been released in March that year.

I wish I had a tape of that first session, to hear what we sounded like. We must have been pretty awful. But it seemed great to us at the time. I was John Lennon, and Maurie definitely fancied himself as Elvis. We discovered very quickly that you don’t have to have a great voice to sing harmonies, and right from that first day we established ourselves as a vocal group, more than anything else. Serendipity, I suppose, but our voices just blended.

As for Jeff, we had to keep telling him to play more quietly. A waste of breath, as we discovered during the next year and a half, as he regularly broke drumsticks. But by the end of that first practice he had decided that a drummer he was going to be. And a full kit wasn’t long in coming thereafter.

II

Within eighteen months we were fully electric, with individual amps and a PA system, and performing a lot of Tamla Motown stuff for dancing. I had a Fender, and Dave was playing a Höfner violin bass, just like McCartney’s. The music department loaned Luke their Farfisa organ. We were gigging at dances all over the city, and had grown a reputation for being the best group on the south side. We called ourselves The Shuffle, after the Bob & Earl song ‘Harlem Shuffle’.

I had no idea, then, that 1965 was going to be our seminal year, although not in a good way.

It was a year that began with the death of Winston Churchill in January. I have to confess that his passing meant very little to me but, having lived through the war, my mum and dad were glued to his funeral on TV. My mum was in tears. ‘You have no idea what those speeches meant to us in 1940,’ she said, ‘when we half expected to see German tanks rolling down our street at any moment.’

And she was right. I had no idea then. It was only listening to that voice in later years, and hearing the gravelly determination that we would fight them on the beaches, that I realized just how influential those speeches must have been.

But I was preoccupied with other things. The Beatles for Sale album had come out the previous month. We knew there was a new single due out that spring, and there were rumours that they were making another film.

And in February I met the girl I would marry five years later.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were setting up and rehearsing for a dance that night in the Clarkston tennis club. Jeff had gone through a string of girlfriends, attracted by his looks and his entirely unconscious wit. But they never lasted long once they got to know him. Until Veronica.

Veronica was a tall, classy-looking girl with long, straight, dark hair, and legs in knee-high boots and a miniskirt that just drew your eye. And held it. It was clear that she saw something in Jeff that the other girls hadn’t, but what amazed the rest of us was just how she dominated him. Jeff was a happy-go-lucky, simple sort of lad, but he had a stubborn streak in him like marbled gneiss. With Veronica, though, he was pure putty. She moulded him any way she wanted, and he followed her around like the little lapdog that she made of him. She was smarter than him, too. When Jeff made us laugh, he rarely knew why. Veronica made us laugh because she was clever and knew how to.

That afternoon, she brought a friend along to rehearsal. Jenny Macfarlane. The minute I set eyes on her I knew I wanted her to be my girl. I had been out with quite a few lassies in my time, adolescent fumblings in darkened cinemas, or in the back of the van after a gig. But none had set my pulse racing like Jenny Macfarlane. She was a pretty girl. Petite. With short-cut dark hair, wearing jeans and boots and a jacket she’d got out of the Army & Navy Store. Almost butch, except that there was nothing remotely masculine about her. She had full, ruby lips that needed no lipstick, and just a hint of brown eyeshadow on lids above striking blue eyes.

I’d have sat her down, right there and then, taken my guitar and played her ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’. Except it wasn’t released until later that year. But I might have written it myself, just for her.

Instead I spent most of the afternoon chatting her up. To the irritation of the rest of the group, who wanted to get on with rehearsals. But I was already a lost cause. And she was in awe that the guitarist of The Shuffle was so clearly besotted by her.

That night she stood at the front of the stage just watching me through the entire gig. And for my part, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, or the smile from my face. I could take any amount of this kind of adoration.

At the break we all piled into the back room and drank illicit beer, and I sat on the floor next to Jenny, ignoring the grumblings of the group that I was less than focused, and enjoying the warmth of her body next to me.

We were halfway through the second set when the first brick came through the window. Screams cut above the sound of the music, and a wave of bodies rippled back from the front of the hall. We stopped playing and heard someone shout, ‘It’s the Cumbie!’

Glasgow had a fearsome reputation in the sixties for gangs and gang warfare. There were gangs with names like the Tongs and the Bundy, the Toon, and the Toi, and CODY, which was an acronym for Come on Die Young. I remember once seeing graffiti on a wall: Even the deaf have heard of the Bundy. The affluent suburbs, too, had their gangs. And we possessed our very own Busby Cumbie.

We all rushed to pull back the curtains and look out. And there they were, twenty or more of them, running amok on the pristine grass of the bowling green, hacking at its manicured surface with axes and knives, hurling rocks and bricks at the clubhouse. Blood-curdling screams and laughter filled the air.

The organizers of the dance turned out the lights and locked the doors, which seemed to me like madness. If the Cumbie had torched the place we’d all have been trapped inside. I fought my way through the crowd to find Jenny and put protective arms around her. I could feel her trembling against me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘The cops’ll be here any minute.’

But all she said was, ‘I’m going to be late.’

In fact it was nearly fifteen minutes before we heard the sirens, and the boys out on the bowling green melted away, dark shadow clouds vaporizing in the night.

Everyone was reluctant to leave after that, including Jenny. She told me she was scared to walk home alone. And even more scared of what her father was going to say when she got there. So I left the boys to pack up the gear and told her I would walk her home.

She lived in Stamperland, which was just over a mile away, and we set off in the dark, keeping a wary eye on the empty streets around us, frost sparkling on the tarmac in intermittent moonlight. Up through Clarkston Toll, and over the railway bridge where I remembered an ice-cream van once crashing through the barrier and careening down the embankment on to the line. We were scavenging for sweeties for days afterwards.

The road was better lit here, but there was little traffic around, and nobody on foot. I put my arm around her, our breath billowing together in the freezing night air, and asked her what school she went to. I was astonished to learn we both went to Eastwood Secondary.

‘Amazing I’ve never seen you before,’ I said. ‘I’d have remembered if I had.’

She smiled coyly. ‘Well, I’ve seen you. Often. Passed you in the corridor loads of times, but you never noticed.’

‘Well, I will now.’

‘Of course, I’m a year behind you.’

Which meant that she was only sixteen. She looked older. But I think girls at that age are older than boys, anyway. Mentally. So maybe the age gap kind of evened us up.

We were approaching the bend in the road at Stamperland Church when we saw them. Five or six boys heading our way, their collective breath gathering ominously around their heads like a storm warning. There were still a couple of hundred yards between us, so I took Jenny’s hand and casually led her across the road. Williamwood Golf Course lay brooding in darkness beyond the fence. The boys crossed to the same side, and the gap between us narrowed. I could hear their voices. Swearing and laughing. They sounded drunk. Jenny’s hand tightened around mine.

‘Come on,’ I said, and I led her across the road again.

Once more the group crossed to our side. I was beginning to panic when I glanced back and saw the last red bus from Mearnskirk coming from the Clarkston direction and heading into town on the other side of the road. Belisha beacons spilled their orange light across the painted stripes of the zebra crossing at the shops on the corner. Pulling Jenny along behind me, I ran out across it, in front of the bus. I heard a squeal of brakes in the night, and the shouts of the boys just twenty yards away.

We ran around the far side of the bus, out of sight of the youths, and jumped on board as it began to gather speed again, swinging ourselves up and on to the platform by the pole. I heard the conductor shouting, ‘Hoy! You can’t get on the bus while it’s moving.’ But I didn’t care.

The boys came into view again as we passed them running into the middle of the road. They gave up the chase almost as soon as it had started, realizing they would never catch us. I waved two fingers at them from the safety of the platform and shouted, ‘Fuck you!’

And then the bus suddenly started slowing, and my heart speeded up.

Jenny swung out from the platform to see why we were stopping. ‘Roadworks,’ she said. ‘The road’s down to one lane.’

‘Shit!’

The gang realized at the same moment as we did that the bus was going to stop, and they began sprinting down the road towards us.

‘Come on!’ I grabbed Jenny by the arm, pulling her off the bus, and we ran across the street into Randolph Drive, pell-mell down the hill, arms windmilling as we tried to keep our balance on the frosted pavement and still maintain our speed. I knew they were after us, but I daren’t even look behind. It was enough to hear the menace in their voices ringing out in the night. But there was no way we were going to outrun them.

We turned the bend in the road and Jenny gasped, ‘In here!’ She pushed open a wooden gate in the high wall that ran all along one side of the street, and we ducked into the densely shadowed foliage of a garden that fell away almost beneath our feet to a house in the street below.

I pushed the gate shut, and we moved down through the garden, following the line of a weed-covered path that dog-legged between overgrown flower beds. And there we took cover behind a length of frosted laurel hedge.

I could see in fleeting glimpses of moonlight that the gardens of all the houses below us rose steeply to the walled side of Randolph Drive, and that each one had a gate leading out into the street. Our pursuers, when they came round the bend and saw the empty street, would realize that we had gone into one of the gardens. But not which one.

We held our breath and listened as the chasing footfalls came to a stop and gasping voices consulted. Querulous voices raised in disagreement. Should they continue the chase or give up? And what were they going to do if they didn’t? Search every garden?

I turned to find Jenny looking at me, and to my amazement she was fighting a smile. Which brought a smile to my face. And led to both of us trying to stifle a sudden desire to laugh. Hands over our mouths. Nerves, I suppose.

At any event, the decision of the Cumbie boys was to give up. But their parting shot wiped the smile from my face.

A raised voice, ugly in its timbre and intent, rang out in the dark. ‘We know who you are, ya smart bastard. Yer fuckin’ deid!’

Good enough reason on its own, I suppose, to get out of town, though that wouldn’t happen for another six weeks or so.

With the voices of the gang boys receding into the night, Jenny turned to me and surprised me by touching my face with tender fingers. And on an impulse I kissed her. Just a brief, sweet kiss on the lips, but it cemented something between us.

We made our way, then, down through the garden in the darkness, creeping around the side of the bungalow at street level, and out through the front gate into Nethervale Avenue. It was another ten minutes before I got Jenny home. Or almost. We met her father striding down the street in his coat and hat, intent on walking all the way to Clarkston if he had to, to find his little girl.

‘My dad,’ she whispered when we first saw him approaching, and I dropped her hand fast.

His face looked as if it had been chiselled out of ice straight from the deep freeze. He glared at me and took Jenny’s hand.

‘The dance got broken up by a gang, and Jack brought me home,’ she said.

But he didn’t seem grateful. ‘There’ll be no more dances,’ he said. His eyes fell on me once more. ‘And you’ll not be seeing Jack again, either.’

The way he said my name, it was almost like he’d spat away a bad taste from his mouth. He turned and pulled her with him back along the street. She cast an apologetic glance over her shoulder, and I turned wearily to make the perilous journey home, sticking to the darker side streets, and hiding in gardens if I saw anyone or heard voices. I wouldn’t have survived a second encounter with the Busby Cumbie.

III

There is nothing more desirous, somehow, than the forbidden fruit. It always tastes so much sweeter. And so Jenny and I became secretly inseparable. Secret, that is, from her folks. She came to all our gigs, or at least the ones from which she could get home at the time appointed by her father.

When the group wasn’t playing we would go to the pictures, usually the Toledo at Muirend, a faux-Moorish palace in the suburban heartland of industrial Glasgow. It’s not there any more. Demolished, apart from the Moorish facade, and turned into flats. We saw the Cliff Richard film Summer Holiday, and maybe that’s something else that put the idea of running away into my head. Then the John Wayne movie Hatari. I was almost glad it was so bad. It was a good excuse to spend most of it necking in the back row.

I guess we were both still virgins then, although I was desperate to remedy that situation as soon as possible. But I wasn’t welcome at Jenny’s house, and there was no chance of it happening at mine. I didn’t have a car, and the back of the group van was not a very appealing prospect, especially on a cold winter’s night. And besides, I wasn’t sure how far Jenny would go, and I wasn’t confident enough to push it. Until the night of the school dance.

The Shuffle was booked to play that night, and it was exciting for us — the first time we had played at a school dance for an audience of our peers. The hall was huge. Used for assemblies and indoor games, and school plays performed at regular intervals by a particularly active drama club. And, of course, school dances, which were usually old-fashioned affairs with the ‘Dashing White Sergeant’ and ‘Drops of Brandy’.

Jeff had already left school by then. Failing all but one of his ‘O’ Grades, he had quit at the end of the fourth year and got himself a job as a trainee car salesman with Anderson’s of Newton Mearns, a big sprawling Rootes dealership that sat on the south-west corner of Mearns Cross. It was Jeff who owned the group van, a beat-up old Commer, and drove us to all our gigs. By way of compensation he did none of the gear humping, and before and after bookings he sat up in the front of the van, smoking, while we loaded and unloaded.

The rest of us had gone back for a fifth year to sit our Highers, but the fact that Jeff was out there working made him seem older than us, more mature. Although nothing could have been further from the truth.

But Jeff enjoyed coming back to the school. Lording it over us. We were mere schoolkids, and he adopted a worldly air of superiority. We all smoked in those days, except for Luke. The new Player’s No. 6, small and rough and cheap in their blue and white striped packs. But Jeff had arrived that night with something a little different. Pot. Or marijuana, to give it its proper name. Or dope, as it’s known these days. Jeff called it ‘grass’ because that’s what the American kids called it. But it wasn’t. It was cannabis resin. A little chunk of it wrapped in silver paper, dark and pungent.

It was the first time any of us had taken anything stronger than beer. We went round to the sheds at the back of the school before the dance and gathered in a huddle as Jeff ‘cooked’ the resin in its silver paper, held over the flame of a match. Then he crumbled it into some loose tobacco in a cigarette paper and rolled it into a joint. You heard all sorts of things in those days about how ‘reefers’ could make you lose your mind, and we were all a bit nervous. Jeff said he’d smoked it often, and I thought that wasn’t a particularly great recommendation.

Luke declined, and watched in consternation as the rest of us passed the joint around, and were reduced within minutes to helpless giggling idiots. I can’t ever remember having been so hopelessly amused by nothing at all.

Fortunately, the worst effects had worn off by the time we took to the stage, and we were just feeling mellow and relaxed.

We had a forty-five-minute break at the interval, and I begged Jeff to give me a piece of resin. I wanted to smoke with Jenny. And I suppose that somewhere in the back of my mind was the thought that the pot might lead us to more than the heavy petting that we’d indulged in up until then.

There were lots of kids milling around outside, so we went to the boiler room where I knew we wouldn’t be disturbed. I had a big furry coat in those days, which my mother had bought me in Copeland’s department store in Sauchiehall Street. It wasn’t real fur, of course, just some kind of coarse, shredded polyester that melted if you burned it with your cigarette. But it went down to my knees, had a big collar, and was as warm as anything in the winter.

I laid it down on the concrete floor and we squatted on it, and I fumbled my way through the cooking ritual, then managed to spill both the crumbled resin and the loose tobacco into the lining.

Which was when the door burst open, and the janitor stood there in his dark blue uniform, glaring at us in the light of the single yellow bulb that lit the room, and foiling my plans to lose my virginity.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’

We both scrambled to our feet.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

But he sniffed the air, and there was a knowing look on his face. ‘You kids have been smoking pot, haven’t you?’

‘No, sir,’ Jenny said truthfully.

He nodded towards my coat on the floor, the contents of the joint along with a cigarette paper and a piece of silver foil scattered over the lining. ‘What’s that, then?’

‘Just a cigarette,’ I said, stooping to pick up the coat.

But the edge in his raised voice stopped me short. ‘Leave it!’ He made us stand back as he crouched down to fold the coat carefully over on itself, so that the remains of the unsmoked joint were gathered inside. He stood up again, holding the coat to his chest. ‘I know you two,’ he said. ‘You’ll be hearing about this in the morning.’ He jerked his thumb towards the door. ‘Out!’

‘What about my coat?’

He gave me a dangerous look. ‘You’ll get it back tomorrow, son.’

I don’t remember much about the second half of the dance, and I know I never slept a wink that night. And it was with a sick feeling in my gut that I walked to school the next day. A dull, cold day with a low, pewtery sky drizzling on a colourless world.

The summons to the headmaster’s room came before ten o’clock. I walked the length of the lower-ground corridor with legs like jelly, only to find a pale Jenny sitting in the outer office. I sat beside her without a word, ignoring the frequent, curious glances of the school secretary, and we waited for what seemed like an eternity but was probably just a few minutes. Jenny’s hand reached for mine in the gap between the chairs, unseen by the gimlet-eyed secretary. And when she found it, she gave it the smallest of squeezes. I felt an almost disabling wave of gratitude and affection for that tiny gesture of support, and it steeled me to face the dark moments to come.

And come they did.

The door to the headmaster’s room opened and he stood glaring at us for a moment. He was a thickset man with thinning grey hair oiled back over a broad skull. He had a grey overtrimmed moustache that was almost Hitleresque, and wore a grey tweed suit. In fact, everything about him was grey, even his complexion and his colourless, washed-out eyes. The sole exception was the nicotine that stained the fingers of his right hand. He was known by everyone at the school, teachers and pupils alike, simply as Willie.

He flicked his head back towards his room. ‘In here. Both of you.’ He closed the door behind us and left us standing as he went to his desk. He turned, holding up a white envelope. ‘I imagine if I handed this over to the police, they’d find that it contained grains of an illegal Class B drug called cannabis.’ He looked at me. ‘Collected from the lining of your coat, Mackay. A very serious offence, possession of cannabis.’

‘It was entirely my fault, sir. Jenny had no idea what was in the cigarette.’

His eyes flickered towards her and back again. ‘Is that the truth, Mackay?’

‘Yes, sir. It was all my idea.’

‘Not sure I believe you, sonny.’ He swivelled his eyes back to Jenny and he sighed deeply. ‘On the other hand, Miss Macfarlane here has an exemplary record. Academically bright. Destined for university. It would be a shame to spoil her future because of a moment of stupidity.’ Eyes back on me. ‘And bad judgement in her choice of boyfriend.’ He turned again to Jenny. ‘So you can go, young lady. But I want you back here in the morning with a letter from your father explaining the circumstances in which you were found in the boiler room with Jack Mackay.’

I glanced at Jenny, and saw that she had turned a ghostly shade of pale.

‘Go!’

As she turned, she caught my eye for a fleeting moment, then was gone, leaving me standing to face Willie alone. If he was going to take the tawse to me, I was determined to refuse it. He tilted his head, and the slightest of smiles crept over his lips. ‘Jack Mackay. Jack the Lad. Ye of the unexplained absences and the poor exam results. Ye of the big coat and the long hair, guitar player in a trashy pop group. Setter of such a bad example to the whole school. You think I haven’t seen you in the corridor, sonny? Doing your cock o’ the walk. Well, you cocked it up royally this time, boy.’ He paused to let that sink in for a moment. Then he waved the envelope at me. ‘If I were to report this to the police, it would be a stain on the rest of your life.’ He dropped the envelope on the desk. ‘So be grateful I’m not that vindictive.’ He let that hang for a very long moment. ‘Have you anything to say for yourself?’

I shrugged. ‘I didn’t think my hair was that long, sir.’

I saw his expression harden, like setting concrete. He strode across his room to a coat stand, where I noticed my coat hanging for the first time. He grabbed it and threw it at me. ‘Take your big furry coat, and your long hair, and go home, Mackay. And don’t come back. Ever.’

I found Luke in the art department. He was sitting on a stool at one of the high wooden benches reading the latest copy of Mad magazine. The place was deserted. He looked up and cocked an eyebrow at my big furry coat.

‘Willie’ll go ape if he sees you wearing that,’ he said.

But I suppose something in my face must have told him that all was not well.

He frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I just got expelled.’

It took him a moment to realize I wasn’t joking. Then his eyes opened wide. ‘Why?’

‘Long story.’

‘Bloody hell, Jack. What are you going to tell your folks?’

‘I’m not.’ In the time it had taken me to walk from Willie’s office to the pottery room I had already decided what I was going to do. And facing my parents with the news that I’d been expelled wasn’t on the agenda. ‘I’m going to London.’

‘What?’

‘There’s nothing for me here, Luke. Might as well go and see if I can’t make something of myself in the Big Smoke.’

Luke slipped off his stool and stood up, taking me by the shoulders. ‘You’re not thinking straight, man.’ He stared at me with those big, pale green eyes of his, fair locks tumbling in golden curls over the frown on his forehead.

‘I’m thinking as straight as I’ve ever done,’ I said. ‘I’m going. And I’m going tonight.’

He gazed at me for a moment longer, and I could see the workings of his mind behind troubled eyes.

Then he said, ‘Not without me, you’re not.’

I was totally taken aback. ‘Why? Why would you want to do that? You’re the smartest of all of us.’

He turned away, and I saw him clench his fists at his sides.

‘Because I’m sick of fighting with my folks. You’ve no idea how hard it’s been, Jack. Kicking against their disapproval. Every practice, every gig, is a fight. I leave the house in a rage. And when I get back, I never know if they’ll let me in or not.’

I looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you tell us?’

He turned, eyes full of rage. ‘Same reason I never told anyone about the misery of all those years being presented to strangers on doorsteps, so they wouldn’t slam the door in my parents’ face. Evenings and weekends, walking the streets in all weathers, getting laughed at, or abused, physically assaulted sometimes. All in the name of Jehovah. Clutching my little Bible and smiling for those poor people who hadn’t yet seen the light. No point in telling anyone, Jack. Because nothing I said or did was going to change it.’

His unexpected burst of emotion seemed suddenly to drain him, and I saw the slump of his shoulders and the pain behind his eyes, before he recovered his spirit and drew himself up to his full height again.

‘So if you’re really going. If you really are. Then I’m going with you.’

IV

What had started as a grain of an idea in my head as I made that long, depressing walk along the corridor and upstairs to the art department began to take on a momentum of its own. And when we met up with Maurie and Dave at lunchtime, it snowballed.

They listened in wide-eyed silence to me and Luke as we told them what it was we intended to do, and why.

Then Maurie said, ‘What about the group?’

I shrugged. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, you’re going to need a singer.’

Luke said, ‘Your parents’d kill you.’

‘My parents’ll kill me, anyway. They’ve got my whole life mapped out for me. Law degree, solicitor’s practice. Doesn’t matter what I want to do. I’m coming, too.’

Quite involuntarily we looked at Dave.

A big grin spread itself across his face. ‘You’re still gonnae need me tae make the girls scream.’

And no one questioned why he might want to run away from home. We’d all seen the bruises.

That was four out of five.

Luke said, ‘What about Jeff?’

And Maurie’s face set. ‘I’m not going without him.’

The new cars at Anderson’s were all kept indoors, in the big glass-walled showroom. The second-hand cars sat out front. Two rows of them, with big price stickers on the windows. Jeff had told us that it was his job first thing each winter’s morning to start every one of them.

‘Really teaches you how to start a car,’ he’d said. ‘Any car, in any temperature.’

He seemed proud of the achievement, and it was clear it meant more to him than passing any school exam.

We found Jeff in the cinder yard behind the workshops, doing a stocktake. He was amazed to see us, then listened in astonished silence as I told him what we were planning.

‘So what do you think?’ I asked him.

‘About what?’

‘Coming with us, of course.’

He thought for a long moment. ‘What about Veronica?’

A tiny gasp of irritation caught the back of my throat. ‘What about her?’

‘She’ll not come with us.’

‘No one expects the girls tae come,’ Dave said.

He and Luke were the only ones who didn’t have girlfriends.

‘I’ll be leaving Jenny behind,’ I said. And for the first time I pictured how that would be.

‘You don’t understand,’ Jeff said earnestly. ‘It’s different with me and Veronica.’

‘Look,’ I said, losing patience. ‘You don’t have to come. It’s your choice. But if you don’t, then Maurie won’t either.’

Jeff glanced at Maurie. ‘Really?’

Maurie shrugged, embarrassed now. Jeff seemed genuinely touched. Suddenly it had become a choice between Maurie and Veronica. And there was only ever going to be one outcome.

‘The Commer’ll not make it to London,’ he said. And immediately all our plans seemed to fall away like sand beneath our feet. But Jeff just grinned. ‘That’s all you wanted me for, wasn’t it? My van.’

I shifted a little uncomfortably. Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in that. But Jeff was oblivious.

‘It’s not a problem. I can get us something better.’

V

I left a note for my folks on my pillow. I can’t remember now exactly what it was I wrote. Something stupid, about going in search of fame and fortune, and that they shouldn’t worry. We were all going, so we’d be fine. Safety in numbers.

You don’t think at that age how devastating the discovery of such a note would be to your parents. You don’t have the experience, to put yourself in their shoes and imagine how it would feel. Only with time, and children of your own, does the full realization hit you. How thoughtless we were. So hopelessly self-obsessed.

Jeff and Maurie were waiting for me at the end of the road in a green Ford Thames 15cwt van. It looked a little smaller than the Commer, but apart from a few scrapes and bashes it appeared to be in good condition.

‘Where did you get it?’ I said as I climbed up on to the engine cowling between them.

Jeff grinned at me from behind the wheel. ‘Borrowed it. Purrs like a baby, doesn’t she?’ He flicked his head over his shoulder. ‘Maurie and me’ve loaded all the gear. And we stuck an old settee in the back. All the comforts of home.’

‘What did Veronica say?’

A shadow crossed his face, like a cloud blotting out the sun. ‘Don’t even ask.’

Maurie said, ‘She’ll get over it. And so will you.’

But Jeff’s head snapped round, and it was the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice to Maurie. ‘I told you! It’s different with me and Veronica.’

He crunched the column shift into gear, and we lurched off down the road. I barely had time to glance back at the pebble-harled suburban semi where I had spent my entire life up until that moment. And my stomach lurched as I thought about my folks finding my letter.

Luke was waiting for us at Clarkston Toll, a tall, languid, good-looking boy in jeans and a donkey jacket, a holdall at his feet. He threw it into the back of the van first, then climbed in after it.

‘Where’s the organ?’ Jeff called back at him.

‘It belongs to the school.’

‘You’d only have been borrowing it.’

‘I think they might have called it theft,’ Luke retorted before slamming the door shut.

Jeff glanced at Maurie and me. ‘Jobbies!’ he mouthed.

It was the word he always used for ‘shit’, straight from the primary-school playground. A euphemism he had never grown out of.

The problem came when we arrived outside Dave’s house in Crosslees Drive. The light was fading fast, and we were anxious to be away in case any of the notes we had left were found before we were gone. We sat for several minutes at the gate, engine idling impatiently, Jeff tapping nervously on the wheel.

‘Jobbies!’ he kept muttering. ‘Where the hell is he?’

The house was dilapidated from years of neglect in those days, like a bad tooth in an otherwise pleasant smile. The front garden was overgrown, and there was an old boat rotting on the path.

Honking the horn was out of the question, and no one was going to go to the door.

Luke glanced at his watch, and his voice came to us from the back of the van. ‘Don’t panic yet, he’s only a few minutes late.’

‘Is that earth minutes?’ Maurie said dryly.

Then suddenly Dave’s front door flew open and Dave appeared, wearing jeans and hiking boots, and a green waterproof army jacket. He had a rucksack on his back, full of God knew what, with tin mugs dangling from canvas ties. He pulled the door shut behind him and sprinted through the long grass of the front lawn, to vault over the wall, catching his trailing foot and going sprawling on the pavement.

‘Jesus!’ Maurie cursed under his breath, and he and Luke jumped out to pick Dave up and bundle him into the back of the van.

Jeff turned his head over his shoulder. ‘That’s what I call a quiet exit.’

‘Go! Just go!’ Dave shouted at him.

Jeff gunned the motor and we lurched off down the street.

There was one last stop before we finally got on the road. The boys just wanted to be gone, but I insisted. ‘If we don’t do it, you might as well stop the van and let me out right now,’ I said.

So we made the detour. Via Stamperland.

It was dark by the time we pulled up outside Jenny’s house and Jeff cut the engine. I had phoned her before I left the house and had heard her distress when I told her what we were planning. I’d promised to come and say goodbye. My heart was in my mouth as I hurried up the path.

She must have been watching for me, because the door opened before I got to the top of the steps, and she slipped out into the darkness of the porch, pulling the door to behind her.

‘Jack, this is madness!’ she whispered.

I just took her and held her, feeling the beat of her heart and the warmth of her body, and all the uncertainty of my life welling up inside me. But it was too late for second thoughts now.

‘I’ll send for you,’ I said, knowing that I wouldn’t. ‘Just as soon as we’re settled and we get things sorted.’

She untangled herself from my arms and stood back, looking at me. ‘Do you think I’m daft, Jack? If you go, you’re gone. I’ll never see you again.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why? Because you don’t want to hear the truth? Because you’re living out some fantasy and you don’t want to know that there’ll be consequences?’

I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard her so forthright before.

‘We’ll be fine,’ I said lamely.

‘No, you won’t. It’ll be a bloody disaster. You’re just kids. You haven’t thought this through.’

‘Sometimes you’ve just got to do stuff. You can overthink things.’

‘Says the voice of experience.’

I could hear the sarcasm in her voice.

From somewhere inside the house we heard her father calling, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Just a friend,’ she called back. Then she turned to me, her voice a whisper in the dark. ‘Call me, Jack, please. First stop on the road. Let me know you’re alright.’

I pulled her back into my arms and kissed her with a sort of passionate desperation. This was all so much harder than I had ever stopped to imagine. ‘I will,’ I said.

‘Promise!’

‘I promise.’

And I was gone.