Little comic’s great escapes
In a 2001 biography of her husband, Billy’s wife Pamela Stevenson describes how he found escape at school from a home life scarred by abandonment and abuse.
Billy has found various ways to heal and make adult sense of all his early abuses, but back then, when there was little safety anywhere in his life, what saved him? Billy escaped through reading. Not school books – he thought they were very dull, although the class would sometimes be read to on a Friday, and that was quite soothing. White Fang and adventure stories from Canada and the Yukon were popular. Billy often imagined himself donning a huge woolly jacket and striding into the northern wildernesses to pan for gold, a perfect way to escape from Stewartville Street.
I’m a rarity, a guy from Glasgow who is an optimist
In a memoir, published last year, Billy remembers a harrowing childhood studded with some happy memories.
I’m an anthropological rarity – a Glaswegian who is a natural optimist. Even so, there is no denying that my early years were pretty grim.
I was a war baby, born on November 24, 1942, and everyday life pretty soon began feeling like a battlefield. My dad was away with the RAF in Burma so I began life with my mum and my 18-month-old sister, Florence, on the third floor of a tenement, in a tiny two-room apartment where Florence and I slept behind a curtain in an alcove in the kitchen.
We bathed in the kitchen sink, normally in cold water. My cot was a drawer from a sideboard.
We just accepted it. When you’re a child, what you know is all you know, and I have fond, faded memories of it all.