One MEAN City

Jack McLean is a controversialist, an award-winning and much-loved Herald columnist noted for the outrageous pungency of his opinions and the warm humour of his writing. But behind the public figure there is a very private man - private till now, that is. In his autobiography, published later this week, McLean writes with almost unbearable honesty about aspects of his life which he has never revealed before. The humour and the warmth remain, but there is hurt and anger here too. Our exclusive serialisation of this unusually candid book starts today with McLean describing the pain of his childhood in Townhead, Glasgow.

MY FATHER had a suit of course. He always had a dark blue suit on, for he was a school janitor. Back in the early fifties a school janitor was invariably an ex-soldier: he was certainly an ex-tradesman. With a trade. The Jannie was not a kick in the arse off the Beadle of a previous century, and in working-class communities very important indeed. So important that the Jannie's children were regarded rather as those of a local Nazi Party official.

It was rotten for Jannies' children. ``Jannie's Boy! Jannie's Boy!'' they used to shout. If they'd had the sense they would have pelted Jannies' boys with mud. The Jannie was respected, perhaps feared, because the Jannie was more often than not an ex-NCO, and even the local hardmen knew the force of an NCO. And back in the days before my father became a blue-uniformed school jannie he was a blue-uniformed soldier.

He spent nearly 20 years as a regular soldier, in the Royal Corps of Signals. Mercury was the symbol of the regiment; fleet of foot. All I can tell you is that he was bloody fleet of hand as well, because it was hardly ever off my arse. He had left home at 16 to join the Army and by 17 was a blue-patrolled dressed squaddie in China. We used to pore over the two albums of fascinating snaps of himself as a youngster in China. I have the albums yet, crumbling a little they are. My father with a hank of hair falling over his eyes, bare chested khaki-shorted. Christmas 1931. Photographs of Christmas Day in long tents, Chinese servants in starched blousons. Jock Penny, buttoned to the neck, a fellow squaddie who eventually rose through the ranks to become a celebrated Brigadier General in the Second World War.

As a child I was brought up on those photograph albums a bit, but never did I manage to get the story out of my father, or very little until he got older and I could put a drink or two in him, about what had happened in his colonial career. A lot must have occurred. Later, as I saw him down the pub, I managed a little more, but it wasn't much. I had to do a sort of research of my own.

My father was born plain David McLean. His own father was David also. His father had come from Mull, where the McLeans came from. I had been there myself. It is a whore of a place: all you could grow there would be stones. Indeed, today it is widely known in the rest of the Western Isles as ``the Officers' Mess'', because of the many English white settlers who have decided to retire there. Perfect peace and quiet. Not a breath of work or energy. No wonder the youngsters leave in their droves. When my grandfather left Mull and met the dark slums of Glasgow's Gorbals he must have thought it was bloody luxury.

He didn't have much time to enjoy the Gorbals thou

My father told me about the last time he saw his father. He was five and his father was going off that day. His father, whose image I have never myself seen, took him down the stairs of the close, round to a nearby newsagent's and bought him a bar of Fry's chocolate and a tin replica of a pillar box with a slot to put money in and slid a sixpence into it. And then my grandfather went off in his kilt, looking heroic. And then my grandma, who died before I was born, got a telegram telling her about how her husband had died for honour and freedom. She also received all his medals and I have the big one framed in glory and on the wall in my living room. It's got his name on it. I'll bet not one bloody officer had the slightest clue what his first name was at all.

But this was the romance I was brought up with, even if my father didn't know it, and it had the effect on me that it had on many of my own generation. From martyrs to mavericks was a long but inexorable process. The martyrdom of my father's father was eventually to lead to a new world. Where another sort of martyrdom was waiting. There is little point in me telling you

of my father's family. My Auntie Lizzie died before I was born. She's married a feckless Irishman and brought her daughter up in her new faith; sent her to Our Lady and St Frances' school, a highly selective school in the heartland of what was becoming a slum area of Glasgow. My father agreed to bring the little girl up as a Catholic, though we were United Free and my father was energetically agnostic, but the feckless Irish bastard saw that there was money in it, took a payment of fifty quid from my father to look after the child, and then noted that the girl could earn a living if she left her rather august school and keep him in drink, so he did all that. It was an old era and a harsh one. My father might have softened a little if a girl had been introduced into the family: who knows?

He wasn't for softening at all. I know he meant well. He did well too. His three sons have gone on to be successful in a variety of professions and were possibl

My father had spent most of his life as a professional soldier. He'd married late in life. Was away much of the time in his children's early years. Thus he took it into his head to be what he liked to call ``a disciplinarian''. Thus it was when my elder brother didn't get a bursary to Hutcheson's Grammar School, then, as now, an elite institution of learning, my father took to ranting for days, exclaiming to us all that my brother was an idiot. ``The boy's an idiot: I knew it all along!'' he declared, and plunged the household into despair. (He did the same for all of us, in an exotic variety of ways.) He was very proud of us children and we were always congratulated by other adults on how terribly well-behaved we were. And we were terribly well-behaved. Children in the late forties and early fifties were generally so, which is perhaps why we turned out to be such turds when we came into adult estate.

Certainly my father did not spare the rod. But then adults in those days were keen on not spoiling you. Spoiled child? It was impossible then. The food was dreadful. Apart from the deleterious effects of rationing, and no sweeties, and very little by way of healthy food, there was also the factor that few women had the slightest idea of how to cook. My mother was a sweet little lady who as a small girl had been taught Domestic Science. Domestic Science had got her confused between laundry and cookery, with disastrous results. One of the disastrous results was that I could rarely eat the food put in front of me and was ritually beaten for this failure to stagger down my throat the meagre and unpalatable repasts provided. My father was a grand man for the discipline.

I have never been quite able to understand why he chose me for the discipline. In his own way he was generally fair. He never (until I got older, that is) hit me unduly, and when younger it was generally deserved. He didn't use belts or sticks. He smacked you until you cried. My elder brother rarely did anything wrong anyway, and my younger brother cried before he was smacked. I wish I'd learned my lesson. He hit me until it was too sore. A silly bastard myself. I should have gret early days.

But I don't remember a single occasion when my father lifted me up or cuddled me or kissed me, or muttered any ende

Anyway, this woman wasn't my teacher for long. Long enough though to traumatise me. I had asked to go to the lavatory. She had refused to permit me. In fact, I needed a crap, but didn't like doing a shite in the school lavvies because there were no doors and I was, after all, brought up in the most anal-retentive per

My father of course went to the school to complain, the young teacher told a lie but one which she could edge out of (she had let me go to the lavvy eventually after all), and my father, black-ashamed, waited till after tea, when the other children were sent to bed, to administer a thrashing which, in the time-honoured phrase of ``disciplinarians'', I would remember all my life. And I have. I was very small for my age, and he must have smacked my bare bottom for over 10 minutes, as hard as he could. Eventually my mother had to intervene. I hope Miss Pollock is still alive and reads this. And all the rest of the curious adults who frightened me and my generation.

I don't know why I told you that: I don't know why it seems important, but it is. Or why it has come back to me. Perhaps something to do with the sheer bloody awfulness of childhood; most of it. My father threatened me and scared me and often bullied me. Oddly, what I hated more than anything else, more than the frequent spankings, were the ravings of the man, the shouting at me, the terrible silence in the house for days when his disapproval pervaded every room. The reprisals after some discovered misdemeanour (this included my mother, for she was subject too to his extraordinary fits of temper) were never quite as bad really, but the sureness of the reprisal was truly frightening. He could be very cruel too. I was painfully thin; embarrassed my father it did. Embarrassed me too, if it comes to that. He called me ``Skinny''. He liked that. Barrack-room taunting. ``Tell Skinny he's wanted in here.'' He'd aye say things like that. Another time he refused to take me to

the art galleries in Glasgow because, dressed in my khaki shorts and ankle socks and sandals, my legs were too thin for himself to be seen out with me. ``I'm not going out with that,'' he said. I was made to put on long socks. A monster was the daddy. But not all the time, just the bad bits of it.

For there were things in the man's favour at that. Quite a lot really. He took it into his head to go in one generation from the children of squaddies and peasants to High Court judges. That's why he sent us to the selective schools. He was horribly proud of us and always supported us from outside criticism. He was loyal and brought all of us up with an exemplary morality. We were well-clothed, in a rather bourgeois way (all those years in the Army had taught him how the middle classes lived), were well spoken, we were fed on nourishing and sometimes rather exotic food, the result of his many years abroad. We used to go off to the expensive licensed grocers and the better stores, like Ferguson's or Massies, or Coopers, where hams hung high and the shops were permeated with the aroma of ground coffee and there were bottles of Chianti in straw coverings. This was the late forties, early fifties: then it was stewed sausages, and tinned cream with p

I do not blame my father too much: I have forgiven him and not forgotten him. He did his best. Like every father it was simply not good enough. It would have been a bloody sight better if he had been able to earn a decent living; enough to keep children at fee-paying schools. Enough to keep us in the prefab in Cathcart, among the trees and the big houses up the road, the park across the way. Holmlea School. The pretensions of the middle class. He could have done that if he had continued to work as a highly-paid cable-jointer who had to travel all over Britain. But he had decided - years of jaunting about the world on army service had taken its toll - that he wanted to see more of his family. He decided to see more of his family with a vengeance.

Have you any idea what it is like with your father never away from you? Around every d

The house was in the building itself, part of the school. At

the bottom of it. It had a part basement but the front door looked out on to the infants'

playground. Playground, for heaven's sake. Holmlea had trees in the playground, and the teachers came out and played with you, the River Cart passed just by us and there were elderberry bushes wafting their

bitter, juniper-sweet scent across. Mums and old grandpas waited at the gates for you. Townhead Primary School was black, bleak, bloody. Therein should be a gallows, as prisons had. The house itself creaked all night; the first night it had banshees in. There was a long hall and then a living room. It possessed a rudimentary bathroom and lavatory. The bath was iron and had ball-claw feet, the lavatory had a wide wooden seat which little ones like myself were worried about falling through. There were two bedrooms and a ``glory-hole'' bigger than any other room, paved with stone and brick-clad on the walls.

This became a haven for me, where I read books and thought up ideas and wept when I was unhappy, and got away from everybody when I needed that old loneliness which children sometimes need - not just being alone, but needing the catharsis of being without anybody in the whole wide, wide, world, just utterly bereft of people, and sad.

n Extracted from Hopeless But Not Serious - The Autobiography Of Jack McLean (to be published by Mainstream on Thursday at #14.99).