Jobby Done!
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: Some mild ones.
Description: School pals – there's nothing like them!
Swearwords: Some mild ones.
Description: School pals – there's nothing like them!
It was no surprise to me when I heard that Kenny was at the bottom of the great Clynder jobby mystery. In fact, his was the bottom at the bottom of the scandal.
He and I were in the same class at school and he was just the same in those days. Things were always going wrong when Kenny was about but the innocent amazement on his face was always totally disarming – you were often mad at Kenny but you couldn’t stay mad at him for long.
As soon as the Second World War ended there were real efforts to get things back to normal. Petrol was still rationed and in short supply but an allowance was made at once so that inter-school football matches could begin again. Our first game was to be against Garelochhead; they would bring two teams but I was only interested in the fixture involving the nine year olds in my class.
The only time I remember any form of physical education was on wet lunch breaks when we couldn’t get out to play in the fields. The staff tried hard to keep us amused, teaching us Scottish Country dances or netball. There was one temporary woman teacher who had us swinging our arms and touching our toes.
Most days the boys went into the fields although the Jannie could keep us in the back playground if it was too muddy outside the fence. The girls played in the front playground except in the skipping season. The only level ground inside the school grounds was the strip between the two playgrounds. Normally it was no person’s land but it was the only place where you could caw a rope.
There were negotiations every year but eventually a truce would be agreed and the boys would promise not to spoil the fun. In return we were allowed to jump in and out of the rope.
Down in the meadow where the green grass grows,
There Sally Osborne bleaches all her clothes.
The girl named had to run in to skip. Of course, we thought they sang ‘breeches’ and we fantasised that that meant something dirty.
She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet,
That she sang Al McPherson across the street.
When your name was called, you were required to show decent reluctance but you had to be careful; if you protested for too long you could miss-time your jump into the swinging rope and bring everything to a halt. You could be ostracised for days if you broke the rhythm.
Kenny’s name was never called. He was short and fat with defective coordination and no sense of timing. He was more likely to blunder into the rope when he crossed the skipping area on an urgent trip to the toilet. All his trips to the toilet were urgent and there was often proof of that staining the front of his shorts.
As the day of the inaugural football match approached there was growing excitement and endless speculation about which of us would be selected to play. No nambi-pambi substitutes in those days; you couldn’t come off the bench to put away the winner with the last kick of the match. Eleven lads started the game and you played until the end or you were stretchered off.
There were only two adult men on the staff and the Headie delegated team selection to the Jannie while reserving his right to make any changes he chose to, of course. It made sense since the only time I had seen the head teacher in the playground was when he came out to stop a fight between me and Billy Ross. We had still been exchanging insults when the noise of our supporters alerted the Head to the situation.
Billy was an evacuee. He and his mum had been sent from Glasgow for the duration of the war. He had the instincts of a knight of King Arthur – he was easily offended and willing to fight to the death over any slight, real or imagined. He was also the best footballer in the school by a substantial margin. His mum made a dress from a Union Jack for the VE night celebrations, two decades before they did the same thing in Carnaby Street.
The Jannie spent days writing things in a wee black book as he followed us around watching us kick a ball about. We were all showing off to get into the team, fouling each other to cripple the opposition. Diving may be new to the game since these days but clogging was in its heyday.
Off the field, the dirty tricks continued. Most of our pupils lived in Cove and Kilcreggan but there were four kids in our class who travelled from Rosneath. There was a move to exclude these incomers from the team but even the most partisan had to concede that leaving them out would have ruined our chances of winning.
My best pal at school, Francis Nolan, lived in Rosneath and he travelled the six or seven miles each way because he was a Roman Catholic. I’m sure we had no idea of the religious significance but every Thursday morning the Catholics went to the Primary One classroom while the rest of us went to the school hall.
The priest lived in Cove two doors from the Burgh Hall where he presided over Sunday Mass. The Church of Scotland manse was the first house in Kilcreggan. I don’t know whether the men were particularly tolerant or if a truce had been declared for the duration of the hostilities against Hitler, but the minister and the priest were great buddies and arrived together to instruct us in the peculiarities of their particular brand of Christianity.
Whatever the intention, I left primary unable to work up even a modest dislike of Catholics. I sat beside Francis for six years and spent every playtime with him so I found it hard to accept some of the generalisations older pupils attempted to force on me when I got to my Proddie Secondary.
Francis and I both made the Jannie’s list for the big match, as he told us when he marched to the headmaster’s office with the team. At nine you’re old enough to know that adults are irrational so we hung around the door waiting for the final selection to be endorsed. There was a collective sigh of relief when the team sheet was posted with only one change from the Jannie’s list: Kenny was to play in goal.
Kenny’s mum directed all the family’s sweet coupons to Kenny and he repaid her by putting on weight. In an age of shortages where most of us were skinny, Kenny was obese. He wasn’t even one of those sprightly fat boys you sometimes get; there was no guarantee that he could remain upright throughout the match.
We were so concerned that Billy, who was captain, questioned the selection. It was, he was told, only a game and including Kenny would give us a chance to reassure the boy that he was our friend and comrade. It’s hard for a nine year old to explain that our feelings towards Kenny had nothing whatsoever to do with the dread of having him as the last line of defence in our football team.
Fortunately, Garelochhead were rubbish. We were all over them from the kick-off and we were six nil up at half-time. Kenny had worked up some excitement, cheering our goals, although he hadn’t touched the ball for the entire twenty-five minutes of the half. Billy’s talk at half-time was modest: all he wanted was another four measly goals to bring up double figures.
The second half was played entirely in the Garelochhhead half of the field for the first fifteen minutes during which we added another two goals. Eight nil up with ten minutes to go and, although we were tiring, our opponents were tiring faster. Kenny had lost interest and the headmaster had to yell at him to pay attention when he spotted the fat lump sitting on the ground with his back against the goalpost.
It was becoming a slog and Kenny wasn’t the only one who was longing for the full-time whistle. The leather ball was saturated and you could have got concussion from breasting it down. Their best player took a swing at the ball when one of our attacks broke down in their eighteen yard box and it soared over our heads to land on the centre circle. It rolled to a stop about half way to our penalty box. We all turned to look at the ball but no one moved towards it. Billy started shouting at Kenny to run out and kick it towards us but he continued to lean on the goalpost and look confused.
Then Francis took it upon himself to retrieve the ball. He had scored two goals and wanted a hat-trick so he trotted across the half way line without any opposition from friend or foe. At that point, the headmaster shouted at him to pass the ball back to our goalkeeper. Francis stopped in his tracks and looked at the Headie in total disbelief.
“That’s an order, Nolan. Pass the ball back to your goalkeeper or you’re in serious trouble. Do you hear me, boy?”
Francis heard him, and in a fit of temper, he ran the rest of the way and kicked the ball hard towards his own goal. He realised what he had done almost immediately and after a moment’s pause he chased after the ball now half way to the centre of the goal. It was obvious that Francis couldn’t intercept the ball before it reached our custodian. Our hearts lifted when Kenny responded to the situation by strolling across to the centre of his line where he faced the approaching ball.
It landed on the penalty spot and ran on towards Kenny perfectly positioned to collect it. The ball was moving slowly when it reached him and he bent over to catch it. To make it possible to bend so low, he had to spread his feet and we watched in horror as the ball edged past his clutching fingers, through his legs and crossed the line to lie like a reproach less than a foot behind the line.
So far as the game was concerned, that was the end. We played out the last ten minutes but we had lost heart and the score remained at eight goals to one. What made the occasion memorable was Kenny’s reaction to his disaster. His knowledge of football proved to be as sketchy as his understanding of atomic physics. To score a goal, the football must cross the goal line; the ball had crossed his line so a goal had been scored; the scoring of a goal is a cause for rejoicing.
So Kenny rejoiced. He gave a beaming smile, threw his hands in the air and did a little victory dance with his belly wobbling merrily in time. Even the Garelochhead players had been shouting abuse at him to begin with but as his celebrations continued there was a change. First we went quiet, puzzled at his reaction but as it dawned on us that he thought he had scored a brilliant goal we first began to smile and eventually to laugh with him.
That was Kenny! I lost touch with him when we left primary school and after university, I left the district for fifteen years. When I came back there was a mystery filling the front page of the local newspaper. I read the story without understanding a word of it. Objects had been discovered at a certain spot in the boatyard at Clynder. What the objects were and what the mystery was, the paper didn’t actually say.
It wasn’t until I went to the Linga Longa lounge bar that I heard the version that had been withheld by the newspaper in the interests of public mystification. Several lumps of shit had been found buried around the worker’s toilet. Unless there was an undetected elephant or rhinoceros in the district, the faeces were human – or rather super-human. The ordure had been buried close to the toilet and the evidence was irrefutable that it had been placed there over a period of several months.
The first evidence of a problem was the smell when you approached the toilet. A dinghy was sent to the outflow of the sewer about a yard beyond the low-water mark. The company purchased a toilet roll in powder blue and this was flushed down the toilet one sheet at a time. When the men in the dinghy spotted the blue paper they concluded that there was no serious rupture in the main sewer.
The next suggestion was that the junction of the toilet with the sewer was damaged so two men were provided with masks and directed to dig around the area. They soon began to find turds occupying shallow graves all around. The smell varied with the age of the deposit but was never less than choking. It appeared that decay had continued during the frost that had previously prevented the smell escaping.
The turds varied in length from six inches to fourteen inches but they were all as thick as a man’s wrist. It was clear why these monstrosities wouldn’t flush but the company hired a chartered sanitary engineer who calculated that the greatest length that would go round the U-bend was 5.17cm.
It was the unnatural girth that led to the unmasking of the culprit. One or two of the better preserved specimens had been retained and were lying in an unused corner of the yard covered by a cloche. Kenny’s dad, who is on semi-permanent disability leave from permanent unemployment, came to see the phenomenon and in the pub later that night admitted that the only person he knew that could shit to that diameter was his first born.
Kenny confessed at once. Repeated flushing failed to deal with his daily dump and he hadn’t wanted to leave it smiling up at the next user so he had lifted out the shit by carefully wrapping it in toilet paper and burying it next to the little hut housing the convenience.
“When the weather got warmer, I began to notice the smell so these last few weeks I’ve been bringing in a paper bag and taking the turds home in my lunch box.”
He and I were in the same class at school and he was just the same in those days. Things were always going wrong when Kenny was about but the innocent amazement on his face was always totally disarming – you were often mad at Kenny but you couldn’t stay mad at him for long.
As soon as the Second World War ended there were real efforts to get things back to normal. Petrol was still rationed and in short supply but an allowance was made at once so that inter-school football matches could begin again. Our first game was to be against Garelochhead; they would bring two teams but I was only interested in the fixture involving the nine year olds in my class.
The only time I remember any form of physical education was on wet lunch breaks when we couldn’t get out to play in the fields. The staff tried hard to keep us amused, teaching us Scottish Country dances or netball. There was one temporary woman teacher who had us swinging our arms and touching our toes.
Most days the boys went into the fields although the Jannie could keep us in the back playground if it was too muddy outside the fence. The girls played in the front playground except in the skipping season. The only level ground inside the school grounds was the strip between the two playgrounds. Normally it was no person’s land but it was the only place where you could caw a rope.
There were negotiations every year but eventually a truce would be agreed and the boys would promise not to spoil the fun. In return we were allowed to jump in and out of the rope.
Down in the meadow where the green grass grows,
There Sally Osborne bleaches all her clothes.
The girl named had to run in to skip. Of course, we thought they sang ‘breeches’ and we fantasised that that meant something dirty.
She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet,
That she sang Al McPherson across the street.
When your name was called, you were required to show decent reluctance but you had to be careful; if you protested for too long you could miss-time your jump into the swinging rope and bring everything to a halt. You could be ostracised for days if you broke the rhythm.
Kenny’s name was never called. He was short and fat with defective coordination and no sense of timing. He was more likely to blunder into the rope when he crossed the skipping area on an urgent trip to the toilet. All his trips to the toilet were urgent and there was often proof of that staining the front of his shorts.
As the day of the inaugural football match approached there was growing excitement and endless speculation about which of us would be selected to play. No nambi-pambi substitutes in those days; you couldn’t come off the bench to put away the winner with the last kick of the match. Eleven lads started the game and you played until the end or you were stretchered off.
There were only two adult men on the staff and the Headie delegated team selection to the Jannie while reserving his right to make any changes he chose to, of course. It made sense since the only time I had seen the head teacher in the playground was when he came out to stop a fight between me and Billy Ross. We had still been exchanging insults when the noise of our supporters alerted the Head to the situation.
Billy was an evacuee. He and his mum had been sent from Glasgow for the duration of the war. He had the instincts of a knight of King Arthur – he was easily offended and willing to fight to the death over any slight, real or imagined. He was also the best footballer in the school by a substantial margin. His mum made a dress from a Union Jack for the VE night celebrations, two decades before they did the same thing in Carnaby Street.
The Jannie spent days writing things in a wee black book as he followed us around watching us kick a ball about. We were all showing off to get into the team, fouling each other to cripple the opposition. Diving may be new to the game since these days but clogging was in its heyday.
Off the field, the dirty tricks continued. Most of our pupils lived in Cove and Kilcreggan but there were four kids in our class who travelled from Rosneath. There was a move to exclude these incomers from the team but even the most partisan had to concede that leaving them out would have ruined our chances of winning.
My best pal at school, Francis Nolan, lived in Rosneath and he travelled the six or seven miles each way because he was a Roman Catholic. I’m sure we had no idea of the religious significance but every Thursday morning the Catholics went to the Primary One classroom while the rest of us went to the school hall.
The priest lived in Cove two doors from the Burgh Hall where he presided over Sunday Mass. The Church of Scotland manse was the first house in Kilcreggan. I don’t know whether the men were particularly tolerant or if a truce had been declared for the duration of the hostilities against Hitler, but the minister and the priest were great buddies and arrived together to instruct us in the peculiarities of their particular brand of Christianity.
Whatever the intention, I left primary unable to work up even a modest dislike of Catholics. I sat beside Francis for six years and spent every playtime with him so I found it hard to accept some of the generalisations older pupils attempted to force on me when I got to my Proddie Secondary.
Francis and I both made the Jannie’s list for the big match, as he told us when he marched to the headmaster’s office with the team. At nine you’re old enough to know that adults are irrational so we hung around the door waiting for the final selection to be endorsed. There was a collective sigh of relief when the team sheet was posted with only one change from the Jannie’s list: Kenny was to play in goal.
Kenny’s mum directed all the family’s sweet coupons to Kenny and he repaid her by putting on weight. In an age of shortages where most of us were skinny, Kenny was obese. He wasn’t even one of those sprightly fat boys you sometimes get; there was no guarantee that he could remain upright throughout the match.
We were so concerned that Billy, who was captain, questioned the selection. It was, he was told, only a game and including Kenny would give us a chance to reassure the boy that he was our friend and comrade. It’s hard for a nine year old to explain that our feelings towards Kenny had nothing whatsoever to do with the dread of having him as the last line of defence in our football team.
Fortunately, Garelochhead were rubbish. We were all over them from the kick-off and we were six nil up at half-time. Kenny had worked up some excitement, cheering our goals, although he hadn’t touched the ball for the entire twenty-five minutes of the half. Billy’s talk at half-time was modest: all he wanted was another four measly goals to bring up double figures.
The second half was played entirely in the Garelochhhead half of the field for the first fifteen minutes during which we added another two goals. Eight nil up with ten minutes to go and, although we were tiring, our opponents were tiring faster. Kenny had lost interest and the headmaster had to yell at him to pay attention when he spotted the fat lump sitting on the ground with his back against the goalpost.
It was becoming a slog and Kenny wasn’t the only one who was longing for the full-time whistle. The leather ball was saturated and you could have got concussion from breasting it down. Their best player took a swing at the ball when one of our attacks broke down in their eighteen yard box and it soared over our heads to land on the centre circle. It rolled to a stop about half way to our penalty box. We all turned to look at the ball but no one moved towards it. Billy started shouting at Kenny to run out and kick it towards us but he continued to lean on the goalpost and look confused.
Then Francis took it upon himself to retrieve the ball. He had scored two goals and wanted a hat-trick so he trotted across the half way line without any opposition from friend or foe. At that point, the headmaster shouted at him to pass the ball back to our goalkeeper. Francis stopped in his tracks and looked at the Headie in total disbelief.
“That’s an order, Nolan. Pass the ball back to your goalkeeper or you’re in serious trouble. Do you hear me, boy?”
Francis heard him, and in a fit of temper, he ran the rest of the way and kicked the ball hard towards his own goal. He realised what he had done almost immediately and after a moment’s pause he chased after the ball now half way to the centre of the goal. It was obvious that Francis couldn’t intercept the ball before it reached our custodian. Our hearts lifted when Kenny responded to the situation by strolling across to the centre of his line where he faced the approaching ball.
It landed on the penalty spot and ran on towards Kenny perfectly positioned to collect it. The ball was moving slowly when it reached him and he bent over to catch it. To make it possible to bend so low, he had to spread his feet and we watched in horror as the ball edged past his clutching fingers, through his legs and crossed the line to lie like a reproach less than a foot behind the line.
So far as the game was concerned, that was the end. We played out the last ten minutes but we had lost heart and the score remained at eight goals to one. What made the occasion memorable was Kenny’s reaction to his disaster. His knowledge of football proved to be as sketchy as his understanding of atomic physics. To score a goal, the football must cross the goal line; the ball had crossed his line so a goal had been scored; the scoring of a goal is a cause for rejoicing.
So Kenny rejoiced. He gave a beaming smile, threw his hands in the air and did a little victory dance with his belly wobbling merrily in time. Even the Garelochhead players had been shouting abuse at him to begin with but as his celebrations continued there was a change. First we went quiet, puzzled at his reaction but as it dawned on us that he thought he had scored a brilliant goal we first began to smile and eventually to laugh with him.
That was Kenny! I lost touch with him when we left primary school and after university, I left the district for fifteen years. When I came back there was a mystery filling the front page of the local newspaper. I read the story without understanding a word of it. Objects had been discovered at a certain spot in the boatyard at Clynder. What the objects were and what the mystery was, the paper didn’t actually say.
It wasn’t until I went to the Linga Longa lounge bar that I heard the version that had been withheld by the newspaper in the interests of public mystification. Several lumps of shit had been found buried around the worker’s toilet. Unless there was an undetected elephant or rhinoceros in the district, the faeces were human – or rather super-human. The ordure had been buried close to the toilet and the evidence was irrefutable that it had been placed there over a period of several months.
The first evidence of a problem was the smell when you approached the toilet. A dinghy was sent to the outflow of the sewer about a yard beyond the low-water mark. The company purchased a toilet roll in powder blue and this was flushed down the toilet one sheet at a time. When the men in the dinghy spotted the blue paper they concluded that there was no serious rupture in the main sewer.
The next suggestion was that the junction of the toilet with the sewer was damaged so two men were provided with masks and directed to dig around the area. They soon began to find turds occupying shallow graves all around. The smell varied with the age of the deposit but was never less than choking. It appeared that decay had continued during the frost that had previously prevented the smell escaping.
The turds varied in length from six inches to fourteen inches but they were all as thick as a man’s wrist. It was clear why these monstrosities wouldn’t flush but the company hired a chartered sanitary engineer who calculated that the greatest length that would go round the U-bend was 5.17cm.
It was the unnatural girth that led to the unmasking of the culprit. One or two of the better preserved specimens had been retained and were lying in an unused corner of the yard covered by a cloche. Kenny’s dad, who is on semi-permanent disability leave from permanent unemployment, came to see the phenomenon and in the pub later that night admitted that the only person he knew that could shit to that diameter was his first born.
Kenny confessed at once. Repeated flushing failed to deal with his daily dump and he hadn’t wanted to leave it smiling up at the next user so he had lifted out the shit by carefully wrapping it in toilet paper and burying it next to the little hut housing the convenience.
“When the weather got warmer, I began to notice the smell so these last few weeks I’ve been bringing in a paper bag and taking the turds home in my lunch box.”
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned eleven novels and many short stories. His eight latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins, Damaged Lives and Patriotism – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned eleven novels and many short stories. His eight latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins, Damaged Lives and Patriotism – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.