Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes Read Free Book Online

went on for days. I hear the English girls seemed to look cuter when we won. But we never won too often. And there was no way any nice English girl would put up with a drunken Scottish soccer hooligan chasing after her in traditional dress, waving a Scotland scarf, shouting out obscenities and lifting up his kilt at passersby. So it mostly ended with packs of lonely, drunken Scotsmen crawling around the streets of London looking for unsuspecting victims to fight until they ran out of money for booze and got the train back to Scotland. If they felt really bad they could always start a fight with each other on the way home. This was the Scottish way. Always one more battle to be won before you got home and curled up with a good bottle.
    In 1977, my uncle went to England by train to see Scotland beat England at Wembley Stadium. It was such a rare victory that the Scots celebrated by taking the whole pitch home with them. My uncle tells me that on the train ride home, a particularly drunken Scotsman gave him the penalty spot from the field. They took the goalposts, the nets and most of the grass back toBonnie Scotland and, for a short time, drank and sang together as friends. Next day it was back to the hate and fighting.
    I know, like half of Glasgow, that a lot of my relatives’ ancestors came from Ireland, probably during the potato famine when thousands of half-starved, angry Irish folk fled Ireland by boat and landed in Glasgow and Liverpool and anywhere else that would have them. They brought their hatred of the English with them so they fitted right in when they landed in Scotland. As I said before, we both hated the English. It was a hate that dated back more than seven hundred years but for some reason it is still so real to this day that they can taste it. They sing about it and fight about it and cry in their drinks about it, not necessarily in that order. But it is the cause of much pain where I come from. Everyone seems to have some sort of scars; if they aren’t from fighting they are emotional.
    Not all my scars are emotional. I have a scar on my right wrist but not from fighting. I didn’t get any of those until much later. I got this one from go-carting. I can’t remember whose cart it was – we probably stole it – but I somehow ended up driving it at very high speed down a hill. It was only a small hill in a back court between a bunch of tenements. The back court was about the size of a small tennis court but we didn’t have tennis courts in Cowcaddens. This was just a place behind the buildings where families put their rubbish. The water drained off the roofs and flooded the back court. Whenever it rained it looked like a stormwater drain, so it was slippery and dangerous. Just how I managed to get up any speed in there is beyond me. Anyway, high speed for a four year old is not that fast. I wasn’t the best driver; I’m still not the best driver come to think of it. And I suddenly realised that I was about to hit a wall. So I jumped off while the cart seemed to be going at breakneckspeed. This is another one of those patterns that keeps recurring in my life.
    I didn’t break my neck, but someone had thrown away a rather large mirror and there it was, right where I was about to crash. I landed straight on it. I broke my fall and I broke the mirror with my hand, so my seven years’ bad luck started that day; in fact, maybe it was backdated a few years. I remember blood spurting like a fountain from my wrist as I ran home. By the time I reached my mum I had lost a lot of blood.
    There was a hospital nearby so I was rushed to casualty for eight or ten stitches. It seemed that the hospitals in Glasgow were specialists at stitching up gaping wounds. Who would have thought, eh? As luck would have it the cut had just missed the main artery in my wrist by a whisper, otherwise I might have bled to death. But I didn’t and I was tough, so everything was all right.

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