Joe fell victim to our girl cousins’ trendiness by agreeing to let them practise applying a false tan on him. It was somewhat less than successful

Joe had had a pretty good fourth year as well, winning the prize for English, his story called Teatime under the Yellow August Moon getting rave reviews in the school magazine and becoming a bit of a hit with the girls. I put that down to his good fortune in having long, blond, wavy hair, which the fairer sex seemed to find attractive.

I, of course, couldn’t really see why this should set him apart from his peers when his pal Albin was much more exciting and had very long ginger hair but there was no denying that these days, dear brother Joe was spending a lot of his time in female company. He was also grinning a good deal more. I was aware that going out with a girl included kissing and cuddling and holding hands, for which pleasures boys, like Joe, would “pay her in” to the cinema, the dancing, the ice rink with its cool music or even the theatre.

Being a lover of language and all things literary, as well as of females, Joe had started to attend shows at Dundee Repertory Theatre, especially when there was a Shakespearean drama on offer.

It appeared that girls really liked that sort of thing too.

Alcohol

On the verge of 16, Joe had also been initiated long since to the wonders of drinking alcohol.

I had observed at first hand on more than one occasion how this substance affected my brother’s ability to talk and walk.

He tried very hard to disguise these effects when he first got home on weekend evenings and had to spend an outrageously long two minutes telling Mum where and with whom he’d been spending time.

I’m sure the ridiculous slurring of his words was a dead giveaway but Mum seemed to be happy that he had come home safely in one piece, especially if he’d chosen for company a good Catholic girl.

But good Catholic girlfriends tended to have high standards and one such lass promptly ended her liaison with him when he rather impolitely vomited all over her feet as they snuggled up in the bus on a school trip to the Wallace Monument in Stirling.

Clearly that hadn’t been purely orange squash in the bottle he’d been sipping from. He had also taken to smoking cigarettes. This was no surprise as Mum smoked a pack of Wills’ Woodbine a day and our house was permanently filled with a pall of tobacco smoke.

So were most of the homes in the family and in those of my friends.

Cousin Peter, the budding pop star, didn’t smoke but he didn’t need to enhance his image with a fag when he was already a singer and lead guitarist.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that almost all the other people I knew in Dundee smoked cigarettes, yet there was talk of it being very bad for your health and the Government had even banned the advertising of cigarettes on TV in the previous year.

I hadn’t moved on from puffing cinnamon sticks at that point so I’d never really smoked, although I’d come close, especially on dark nights out in the back green of 44 Prince’s Croft with my “decadent” Coupar Angus cousins Wee Mary and Renée.

They both smoked like chimneys, as did most of the girls of their age.

When these two sat down with Auntie Mary their mother to play knock-out whist with my Mum Peggy and Auntie Katie, the five of them would create a cloud of smoke worthy of a factory chimney.

I would sit in the midst of this fug and not even notice.

False tan

Joe fell victim to our girl cousins’ trendiness by agreeing to let them practise applying a false tan on him.

It was somewhat less than successful but Joe made it a lot worse by trying to bluff everyone at school that he’d just been to Majorca. I don’t think many people believed him. In 1966 the first three weeks of the summer holidays were spent, as usual, at the berry-picking.

We were all pretty good pickers by then but unfortunately, the weather was fairly rainy that year and our bonus income was somewhat stop-start.

My pals and I found ourselves passing more and more time down in the city centre looking for ways to spend what berry money we had.

Each time we’d go to the Central Baths we were greeted by spectacular changes to Dundee’s waterfront.

In the course of three years, three of the docks through which Joe and I had walked so many weekends to go swimming or fishing had been filled in.

This transformation meant they even had to move the famous warship HMS Unicorn to a more eastern dock and almost out of sight.

For me, the most drastic change to that part of the city had been the demolition of the massive Victoria Arch, which had dominated the waterfront opposite Shore Terrace bus station since Queen Victoria had visited Dundee.

The removal of this iconic gateway had raised controversy all around Dundee but the city planners got their way and the huge blackened gate disappeared when I was still in Primary 7.

Now, at 13, I hardly recalled this irreplaceable landmark or the three once-thriving docks.

Progress and the modernisation of our city were inevitable and Dundee would soon be looking magnificently modern.

New towns

The whole country was expanding.

There were New Towns which had sprung up all over the place, built to modern designs.

East Kilbride was the first near us and it was vaunted in the press as a shining example of post-war progress.

The little town of Linwood in Renfrewshire boasted a car assembly line, producing the Hillman Imp.

Glenrothes was also expected to change the image of the Kingdom of Fife forever.

Cousin Pat, younger brother of Joe Casciani, had moved to Glenrothes shortly after his wedding to Marion and they had even bought their own house in Sinclair Avenue. This had sent ripples of envy through the family. There was only one other person I knew who lived in a house that wasn’t rented from the Council. Times were indeed changing fast. How strange that on July 30 of that year I found myself in that very house in Glenrothes for possibly the only time in my life.

Mum, Dad, Joe and I had crossed the Tay on the Scotscraig “Fifie”, one of the River Tay ferry-boats and had gone by Bluebird bus to Glenrothes to visit Pat and Marion.

However, once we got there we spent most of the afternoon in front of the TV.

My Dad had insisted that we tune in to the BBC but then so did 30 million others. The football World Cup Final was being televised from Wembley.

(More on Monday)