Other Writing

Happy New Year

ARE ye winchin' yet?" my granny says. She cackles away to herself as she pinches and pulls at my ear lobe, her face as pink as her fluffy bathroom slippers from that one additional vodka and orange that her economical Glaswegian frame probably didn't need. Still, it's New Year's Eve, 1969, and if your granny can't get pissed then, when can she?

I look up at her, a forced smile camouflaging my true feelings of embarrassment and uncertainty. Turning 12, and wearing long trousers on a regular basis, appeared to be the trigger that elicited frequent inquires from the adults in my extended family about the state of my sex life, particularly as to whether I was "winchin' " - courting any of the local girls, perhaps even kissing them up the back of a dark close.

This always struck me as strange, given that I was Catholic for a start, and at that innocent and prayer-filled stage of my life, all I really knew about sex was what I'd seen Mrs Henderson's dribbling Alsatian doing to Fay Begg's cocker spaniel outside the butcher shop near our east-end housing scheme home.

That was before Archie McGonigle the butcher emerged apocalyptic from a blizzard of bad language to throw a bucket of water on the two fused family pets, after which the giggling women shoppers buttoned up their cardigans, bundled up their weans, their prams and their smallgoods, and trundled off home.

For some years, I assumed sexual congress involved several gallons of cold water and a pound of Cumberland sausages.

I take a long slug of my raspberry cordial and play for time, trying not to give anything away, which is difficult given that every fluid ounce of blood in my body has rushed to my face and I look like a freshly dug beetroot from my Uncle Tommy's garden plot.

In the Glasgow working-class calendar of the late '60s, Hogmanay was the most important social and family event of the year. It had everything: Auld Lang Syne, steak pie and peas, first footing and lumps of coal, laughter and tears when past grievances were forgotten, promises made to keep in touch more often. And in some ways the celebration still retained many characteristics of its pagan origins, especially after the family had got stuck into copious amounts of vodka, gin, whisky, rum, beer and Babycham.

Everybody is here in my Aunty Eileen's living room. All the aunties and uncles, grannies and cousins.

My parents and their brothers and sisters are in their prime, still young and luminous, their heads still filled with hopes and dreams for their kids and themselves. They are labourers, coal miners, factory workers, housewives, welders, fitters and turners. They do overtime once or twice a week and on Saturday to help pay for the Christmas presents and a few days by the sea in July.

My mum looks good in her miniskirt and her ruffled blouse, and my dad is handsome with his Brylcreemed hair and tailored trousers. My Aunty Eileen is belting out Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa, her head back and her arms spread wide, her heart bursting. My Uncle James, already pie-eyed, is doing a dance of his own invention.

I gaze up at my granny through a haze of cigarette smoke and mortification. "Naw, no yet granny," I mumble. "I'm no winchin' yet."

"Och well," she says, stroking my cheek. She smiles sympathetically, turns to everybody in the room, and in her loudest Shirley Bassey voice booms out: "Graham's no winchin' yet!" The crowd roars as I melt into the carpet.

In 1969, my granny was about the same age as I am now, just as my father was around New Year 1982 when he rang and told me that the pain in his guts had turned out to be cancer. The doctor had told him that morning and he was already in hospital and would be operated on the next day.

How could this happen to a man who, at what turned out to be our last Hogmanay in Glasgow, looked so invincible with his bright eyes and head full of hair and who could sing The Green Green Grass of Home almost as well as Tom Jones?

When his dreams for himself and his children had faded in Scotland, he and my mother had brought the family to Australia to find new ones, and after a few tough years and too many Chiko Rolls, they had indeed been found.

Now here he is in his hospital bed, uncomfortable in his new pyjamas from Forges in Footscray, disbelieving and frightened.

Nonetheless, he puts on a brave face and explains the mechanics of the surgery, like a handyman would a few repairs around the house. A big cut here, a wee cut there, and then this bit gets joined to that bit, and everything should be back in working order in no time.

We speculate about the causes of the bowel cancer. Did it have anything to do with the fact that he really only ate food composed predominantly of fat, which he usually fried in lard and showered with salt and HP sauce?

After some vigorous discussion, and a momentary digression as to who scored the first goal in Celtic's 1967 European Cup final win over Inter Milan, we agree that a plate of bacon, eggs, tomato, fried bread, black pudding, baked beans and fried Scottish square-slice sausage never did anybody any harm. That settled, I tell him I'll see him after the surgery.

A few days later he's still alive. I get a call from the intensive care nurse saying he wants me to come in and put on a few bets for him at the TAB.

When I arrive he's still hooked up to a disturbing confusion of monitors, pumps and drips. I hand him the form guide and with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, he licks the end of his pencil and starts circling some horses on the page.

But he's so full of drugs that he keeps nodding off, and it takes nearly six hours to complete his list of singles, doubles and trifectas, by which time the last horse has bolted at Moonee Valley.

When he gets out of hospital, cut, stitched, stapled and mended, he has no memory of the afternoon we spent together in intensive care looking for a sure thing or how some of the nurses were keen to have a bet as well. But I tell him he picked a couple of winners and hand over 25 bucks. He's happy and promises to eat more vegetables.

On Saturday night, after our short holiday in Melbourne, my family and I will be flying back to our home in New Delhi. We will have said our goodbyes to my father and mother, our friends and family, the Christmas leftovers and the clean blue air.

My youngest daughter is now the same age as I was at that New Year's Eve party in Glasgow in 1969. "Are ye winchin' yet?" I might ask her, as the car speeds down the freeway to Tullamarine. But then again, I might not.