The Serial: Wee Georgie Day 39

“Fearless, strong and nimble, he reached the height of our living-room window and let go with one hand to knock for my attention

Finally, once Katie had succeeded in turning away, ordering me to get right out and not look at her, I was treated, if that could possibly be the right word, to a view of the biggest bum I had ever seen.

I only saw that image for about two seconds, but it‘s still with me.

It hadn’t occurred to me to knock before entering our own living room, though Katie insisted I ought to have.

I surely wouldn’t have had such an early anatomy lesson had it not been for our new gas fire.

A couple of weeks later Katie won the pools. At quarter to five most Saturdays my job was to lie in front of the television and check Katie’s Littlewoods football coupon as the results came through on the BBC’s teleprinter.

Dad insisted on checking his own, reserving the right to curse fate as all the teams beginning with the letter B failed to draw at home, a tactic he assured us would eventually win him thousands.

That Saturday Katie’s coupon was the standard “8 from 10” meaning that if any eight of the ten matches she picked ended in a draw, then she’d have 24 points and would at least share the jackpot.

Home wins

The first two that came through were home wins so I lost hope of presiding over a fabled eight draws.

But then slowly, one after another, her next selections resulted in draws.

She had seven in a row and now it only required Third Lanark to draw with Motherwell for her to be rich.

When the team names came up in the classified results, I could tell it was a draw before the score was actually given, just by the way the announcer spoke.

I knew that if he raised his voice when naming the away team then it was an away win, if he lowered it then it was a home win, but if he said it with an up-then-down inflection you could be sure it was a draw.

‘Nil-nil’ in an up-then-down voice changed Katie’s life for the next few years.

As there were 12 draws in total that week, the jackpot wasn’t enormous but Katie certainly didn’t turn her nose up at the £3,000 she won that day.

I was warned not to tell anyone about the win in case she got begging letters, and I was sworn to secrecy when it came to Katie’s address.

Although I recall her giving me some money as a reward for being her “lucky checker,” only her new three-piece suite bore witness to her new-found wealth.

Like all of her sisters, Katie had lived through some hard times and had no extravagance or desire to show-off.

I think the cash bought my cousin Tony’s new guitar but I’m fairly sure a lot of the winnings went straight down Big Jim’s throat.

Katie once brought Tony with her on her Saturday visit when he was about seventeen and a bit of a tearaway.

His new girlfriend Sandra was with him and I inspected her platinum beehive hairdo and unusually curvy body with some interest.

Tony shared the interest but I doubt if it was as innocent as mine. He was always a wild man.

Fearless

I’ll never forget him knocking on our front window and asking me to open it and let him in, because we lived on the top floor of a three-storey tenement!

His mother had started to plod up the many stairs from the close.

However, Tony, having decided that that was too boring, slipped into Mrs Martin’s front garden and climbed up the drainpipe.

Fearless, strong and nimble, he reached the height of our living-room window and let go with one hand to knock for my attention.

Once I’d opened the window wide and stood back in awe and admiration, he swung himself into the room, arriving before his mother who had just rung the doorbell.

No wonder Katie frequently complained of frazzled nerves.

One day Mum and I met Auntie Katie off her local bus and we walked down to Lochee to catch a different bus to our house.

This involved going down a fairly steep, narrow road called Bright Street.

Mum and Katie were walking in front of me when my aunt suddenly gave an agonised cry, swerved off the pavement on to the road and set off down the street at full pelt.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. My fifty-something auntie was sprinting down Bright Street as fast as her legs would carry her.

She was calling on the Blessed Saints for protection and rescue, her arms rotating like windmills. Both shoes came off her feet as she rushed headlong down the hill.

This might have turned out to be a dash to her death if she’d reached Lochee High Street, but, by good fortune there was an illegally-parked Hillman Minx facing downhill on that side of the street.

Luckily, though admittedly it had its negative side, Katie ran smack into the back of the car and crashed to the tarmac, completely knocked out.

Mayhem

In the mayhem that followed, several people came to Katie’s aid and also made attempts at consoling my mother.

Someone called an ambulance from the telephone box just outside Woolworth’s and the owner of the Hillman Minx returned to find an unconscious woman halfway under the rear of his vehicle.

Meanwhile all I remember doing was standing uphill of the scene, laughing till my ribs hurt.

It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen, one of the funniest, and one of the most inexplicable.

Despite constant questioning, Mum refused to discuss why Katie had taken up sprinting, so the closest I ever got to an explanation was many years later at Katie’s funeral.

I brought up the subject after a few beers and Auntie Cissie used that phrase that was always accompanied by a pursing of the lips, a shaking of the head and a surreptitious glance downwards. She mimed that it had to do with “the change”.

(More tomorrow.)

By George Burton