This hopeless, helpless, useless obsession with Roberta lasted through primary school. At secondary school she was replaced by someone it is pointless to name. These fascinating girls changed as we advanced from one year to the next, but among boys in my class there was a general agreement about which one she was. I sometimes heard bolder, coarser ones discuss her and speculate on who might “get her for a lumber”.31 By that time a new sexual distraction had entered my life: American comics.
Throughout Scotland and (I suspect) Britain most children’s leisure reading was printed by D. C. Thomson Ltd of Dundee. Each week before the age of ten we took The Dandy and Beano, jocular cartoon magazines with characters like Freddie the Fearless Fly, Lord Snooty and his Pals, an ostrich called Big Eggo and a kindly cowboy of immense strength called Desperate Dan, who lived in a land that was partly American West and partly a British suburb. These comics had a minimum of words, speech being printed in bubbles coming from people’s mouths. At secondary school age these were replaced by The Rover and Hotspur whose every double page had a serial adventure story in printed columns, with a single quarter-page illustration in black and white under the title. No girls, no women were in these stories which were about ordinary, believable boys like ourselves assisting detectives, explorers, athletes, soldiers or scientists. The aunts ordered these comics for me from Barretts, the Byres Road newsagent. I first saw American comics at school in the days following examinations, when our teachers were busy marking the papers and let us read anything we liked. Some students brought in these astonishing novelties: magazines with brightly-coloured pictures on every page, showing the adventures of super-heroic adults and villains with amazing powers and no children at all. Women among them had faces and figures like Hollywood movie stars but often wore less clothes. About sex the American comic publishers were as puritan as Thomsons of Dundee. They evaded it by showing violence instead. Fantastic punch-ups and explosive shooting matches were continuous, with much capture, bondage and torture. I had never before seen anything so exciting, except in Tarzan films. I instinctively knew my aunts would dislike these comics and that I should never bring them to the house, but fellow pupils had more than they could read at one time so I borrowed a few, after which Wonder Woman and Sheena the Jungle Girl drove Roberta Piper’s successors out of my head. With real girls I could only imagine chivalrous courtships leading to marriage, but there was no limit to what I could imagine doing to Sheena. I was entering the state described by a character in Albee’s Zoo Story, who says American men start using pictures of women as substitutes for reality, then use women as substitutes for the pictures. I only reached the second half of that state after the death of my aunts.
When exam papers had been marked my chances of borrowing these comics ended, for outside the classroom I was ashamed to look at them when others could see me. My pocket money would have let me buy many but I was appalled by the thought of a shopkeeper recognizing my vicious depravity as I pointed to an American comic or nudist health magazine and said, “That one please!”. I sometimes wished an atomic war would kill everyone in the world but me so that I could enter any of these shops and shamelessly gloat over all that excited me.
But drunk with sherry on this special Saturday afternoon I did the deed without an atomic war. In part of the Cowcaddens that was demolished in the 1970s I stopped before the right sort of shop and, with a thrumming excitement in my lower stomach, stared shamelessly at the covers of paperback books in the window. One called Love for Sale showed (from behind) a line of chained-together blondes wearing only knickers and high-heeled shoes, being urged across sand dunes by a man with a whip. Beyond the display I saw the back of a customer buying something. When he left the shop I hurried in, laid my briefcase on the counter and, looking away from the shopkeeper, pointed to Love for Sale and said, “That one please and. . yes, and also that. . and er, hm hm hm. .” (I pointed to American comics on racks along the walls) “. . I’ll take that and that and that and that too. I’m buying for a few friends.”
“It’s nice to have friends,” said the shopkeeper pleasantly. I was horrified to suddenly see she was a small woman a bit like Aunt Nell. With a face that felt red hot I flung down some pound notes, muttered “Keep the change”, zipped books and comics into my briefcase, rushed out and hurried home.
I found the aunts having afternoon tea with a friend of their own age and sex.
“How was Stewart and his mother?” said Nan as I looked round the door. Nell asked, “You look flushed, have you been running?” “Things went quite well,” I said, “In fact too well, that’s why I’m flushed. Mrs Doig insisted on pouring me a glass of that sherry you gave her and I’m not used to it. I’m going to lie down in the study for an hour or two. Please don’t bring me anything. See you later.”
In the study I turned (for the first but not last time) the door key that locked me in, then spread my purchases on the desktop and doted over them, masturbating three times in succession. After that, sick with self-disgust, I would have burned them in the study fire had the season been cold enough for one. Instead I locked them in a desk drawer and afterwards kept the key in my trouser pocket.
Perhaps a fortnight passed before an appetite for new pornography drove me out in search of another dirty bookshop, because I never bought from the same shop twice. After drinking all the sherry left in Grandpa Tunnock’s three-quarters full decanter I set out with my usual excuse of going for a walk with Stoory Doig, astonished that my aunts did not see how drunk I was. Before every full bottle of sherry had been drunk my pornography was nearly too many for the desk drawers. One wet Sunday I locked the study door, spread my furtive library on the hearthrug and went carefully through it, scissors in hand, cutting out pictures that most excited me and burning the rest — which reminds me what a strangely different world I and everyone else then inhabited, a world as different from 2005 Glasgow as 1954 was from the world of mid-Victorian encyclopaedias.
The rooms in nearly every British house were heated by an open fire burning in a grate inside a fireplace, a cavity in the thickness of the wall. The fire was fed with lumps of coal from a big brass jug called a scuttle on a tiled section of floor in front of the grate. In terrace houses the scuttle was filled from a small basement room called the coal-cellar; and in tenements from a stoutly made box called the bunker on the stair landing. Coal-cellars and bunkers were filled by men who carried the coal in on their backs in huge sacks from an open lorry that usually called once a month. Did each sack contain a hundredweight? Half a hundredweight? A quarter? I only know that twenty hundredweights made a ton and once, when older, I tried to lift a full coal sack and failed. The sacks came from a great heap of coal in a yard called a ree in Scotland. Everywhere people lived had a coal ree a few miles away except in parts of the Highlands and Islands where folk burned peat. The coal rees were on branch railway lines along which coal-burning steam locomotives brought trucks of coals from the mines, the last of which closed in Scotland four or five years back why am I going into all this? Before the 1960s almost any photograph of an inhabited British landscape showed a trail of steam drifting across. They were so common we did not notice them, did not even notice them vanish with the coming of electric trains. Glasgow made coal fires illegal around 1970 when it began losing its heavy industries. This put an end to amazingly thick winter fogs that had been killing folk with poor lungs for more than a century. This information is necessary to explain how I managed to burn so much paper without my aunts noticing. Even so, they would have smelled it had I not spread the job over two weekends. From then on I kept my special selection of cut-out heroines and suggestive pictures between the pages of Cruden’s massive Concordance of the Holy Scriptures.