April 2011

he death of my brother Ed has led to me thinking about the past in ways that I want to, but also in unbidden ways. I’ve been engulfed by kind of filmic snapshots of early days in Scotland – intensely hot childhood summers in the town of Leslie, Fife, Scotland, but also winters of deep snow, especially still winter nights with spangling stars and snow piled high on the branches of yew trees outside out house. Ed doesn’t feature at all in these memories, in fact nobody much does; they seem to be a template against which to judge weather and feelings about weather through other times in my life, right up to the present, in fact right up to ten minutes ago whilst walking by the river Hamble looking at first snowdrops and flowering currant. Snowdrops will always make me think of Ed now....

My very first memory of Ed (at the moment – I sense this is going to change) is of when we were all very young. My sister had fallen off a tricycle and may even have broken her arm – she was certainly crying and in a lot of pain. In these days there were no telephones, never mind mobile phones, so whoever lived in the house in which we were when all this happened had gone out to walk to the doctors to explain the situation, and we were to remain in the house until they returned. Wendy was finding the pain relentless, so in order to take her mind of this, I found some Lego style little wooden bricks and started throwing them at Ed’s head. Ed in turn started crying and this momentarily made Wendy laugh, though not for long – after that they were both crying – my debut as a therapist had not really gone that well.

After that, I remember battering some kid in the next street who had upset Ed. Ed came to watch justice being done and seemed really pleased by this turn of events. But my big memories are all from adulthood. Ed came to stay with me in Poole when he was still in his late teens. It was his first venture out of Scotland and he was stunned by how different things were on the south coast of Dorset. The first thing he asked for was a list of the numbers of buses which were unsafe to travel on at night, on a sliding scale of ‘fatal’ to ‘worrying’ as I remember him putting it. I explained to him that it just wasn’t like that round these parts, and that the buses were uniformly okay to travel on, even late at night-ish. This cut no ice with him at all, and he declared that I was ‘being naive’ and he would find out for himself about the buses, then give ME a list so I didn’t get in ‘future bus trouble’.

I decided to take him to a brilliant cider pub just down the road called The Bricklayers. I still have a melancholy visit to that pub when I play a good venue in Poole, called Mr Kyps once a year – it’s gonna be a lot more melancholic now. Ed came downstairs from the room he was staying in and I couldn’t help noticing that he had a large butcher’s meat hook hanging from the belt of his jeans.

‘Er, what’s with the meat hook Ed?’ I asked carefully.

‘Just in case thurr’s trouble in the pub’ he explained. I tried to tell him that there simply wasn’t going to be trouble in the pub – at least not the sort that might call for the services of a swiping meat hook, but he wasn’t having it – ‘so naive’....

We got to the Brickies and started drinking strong scrumpy – possibly a mistake in itself – you’ve either got your head round scrumpy or it’s got you by the head, and I’d failed to remember that there was simply no equivalent in Scotland – in fact if I may say so, Scottish beer, although undoubtedly improved since the Sixties, is nearly all complete shite and not worth drinking.

‘Man, this is great, and so easy to drink!’ averred my brother as he started on his third pint, which he was drinking in tandem with cowslip country wine – another dastardly drink for those unfamiliar...

‘You need to cool it a bit pal – it’s a lot lot stronger than you think’ I advised.

‘Ah KEN whit ahm dae’in’ he retorted. I started to worry and bought him some smoky bacon crisps – ‘man, these are GREAT!’ he said...

Suddenly, to my consternation, the back door to the beer garden opened and about ten members of the Wessex chapter of the Hell’s Angels appeared, including their notorious leader whose name now escapes me. At this moment in their history this particular chapter was considered to be a very serious proposition. A couple of weeks earlier, they had been involved in a war in the New Forest with the Windsor chapter of the Hell’s Angels in which one of them got shot dead, although I now can’t remember from which chapter. At any time, these were not geezers to fuck with – at least they appeared to be leaving the pub, and mercifully Ed had his back turned inwards towards the bar as he looked for another ‘GREAT!’ flavour of crisps to select.

Just as the leader walked past Ed, he gave a shrill cry of pain and stopped dead in his tracks. I turned carefully to work out the source of the problem. The leader was gingerly removing one end of Ed’s meat hook from his (the leader’s) buttock. Ed had turned and was watching this dispassionately. All the other Angels had stopped in a single file to give me and Ed very very heavy meaningful looks.

After the leader had looked into Ed’s eyes for a long moment and seen nothing resembling fear, he said to him ‘Ere mate – you wanna watch what you’re doing with that meat hook.’ A really mild rebuke in the circumstances.

Ed was unmoved – ‘you wanna watch what you’re doin’ wi’ yer arse’. My whole life was flashing past me now as I prepared for the very worst. All the Angels were standing rock still, waiting for the ‘signal’. The leader was giving the situation an astonishing amount of thought as it seemed to me – for my part, I was having to line up with Ed in looking blankly Scottish and psychopathic - was there an alternative, other than running like bloody fuck and leaving Ed to his considerable fate? The rest of the pub was on highest alert, waiting for the crash. To my eternal amazement, the leader’s face softened into a near smile and he said ‘you might be all right – I’m beginning to like you – do you understand who we are?’ – this last bit was said with a head gesture to the rest of the Angels who remained rock still.

‘Yeah, I know who you are’ replied Ed – ‘yer a bastard wi’ a meat hook in yer arse - if yer that fuckin’ hard how come there’s none of ye in Scotland?’

The leader smiled broadly, then laughed and shaped to leave the pub. He gave Ed one last look and said ‘Good night mate – and watch what you’re doin’ with that meat hook’. The other bastards filed out behind him, all giving me and Ed ‘if it was up to us we’d turn you into a puddle of haggis curry, but it’s NOT!’ looks.

The pub began to relax into shocked disbelief with men AND WOMEN giving Ed open looks of head-shaking admiration. I said quietly to Ed, who had returned to staring at the crisps ‘You took a hell of a chance there brother’.

Ed said ‘aye, I didnae mean tae – ah’m a bit blootered (drunk) on these drinks and just started afore I really understood the situation’.

(More Ed memories next time...)