I made my debut speech at Elder Gate Toastmasters in Milton Keynes in October 2004. Although it is written as a speech, to be performed rather than read, I hope you enjoy reading it
BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!
That was my first word. Not Mum. Not Dad. And certainly not Mamma or Dadda. Anyone saying Mamma or Dadda round our way wouldn’t have lasted long. Infants were not exempt from the general law of the jungle.
BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!
Said just like that. It came from the name of a family who lived opposite us in Airdrie. Their name was Buckson, and even by the standards of a post-industrial town built on coal and iron and steel they were a bit below the salt. The corruption of their name had become a howl of derision.
I was about three before I spoke. At one point everyone thought I must be retarded. That boy’s no right, you could hear them say at Mum’s sewing classes. Or in the Italian café in town. I’m telling you, he’s no right. Never says a word.
Said just like that. It came from the name of a family who lived opposite us in Airdrie. Their name was Buckson, and even by the standards of a post-industrial town built on coal and iron and steel they were a bit below the salt. The corruption of their name had become a howl of derision.
I was about three before I spoke. At one point everyone thought I must be retarded. That boy’s no right, you could hear them say at Mum’s sewing classes. Or in the Italian café in town. I’m telling you, he’s no right. Never says a word.
Then out it came, some time in the middle of 1960.
BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!
After that, I started talking. Like a wee old man. In fully formed sentences, with proper words, and concepts, and asking awkward questions. Born to be a journalist, maybe, which is what I am today.
I frightened the life out of people. Including my Mum and Dad. I’m sure they had me exorcised at one point, but they’d deny it if you asked them.
I did jigsaws back to front, face down, because it was too easy the traditional way.
And I’ve always had an abnormal interest in finance, not just the acquiring of money (which would be nice) but how it functions. That’s partly why I became a banker when I left university, then five years later joined the Financial Times.
When I was about seven, I remember asking Mum to explain the inflationary impact of printing more money to solve a government’s fiscal problems. At that point she decided she could no longer be in the house alone with me, and went back to work.
Leaving me free to run riot. The despairing question ‘What’s he done now?’ became something of a leitmotif in my life.
I was lucky to survive childhood. Health and safety hadn’t been invented when WE were kids.
We used to start fires on a Monday, coming home after a hard day setting fields alight, a hellish band of miniature black and white minstrels. Faces blackened with soot, red-eyed, stinking of smoke, wondering how Mum and Dad could possibly know what we’d been up to.
They might have been driven to distraction by the problems created by having six kids, and not enough money, but they weren’t THAT stupid.
Then we’d play in the Bluebell Woods all day Tuesday, scaring each other witless with tales about the green man that lived there.
Wednesday it was a day’s fishing at one of the quarries that pockmarked Airdrie. We called it fishing, but I never knew anyone catch anything bigger than a stickleback. And they were all dead before we got back home from hunting for birds’ nests at the Old Piggery on Thursday. Along with the frogs and newts we had wrenched from their natural habitat and stuck in old jam jars. If any of us had had an aptitude for medicine, we’d have been more Dr Mengele than Dr Kildare.
Fridays were for climbing. I remember my best pal, John Mulholland. He played for Glasgow Celtic you know. This particular day he kept repeating the phrase: Better Safe Than Sorry. Better Safe Than Sorry. It seemed a funny thing to be saying halfway up a cliff. But there you are.
We were about eight.
When I was left on my own, I’d find myself crashing through windows, upside down, or backwards, head first, feet first. Backwards AND feet first on one memorable occasion. Or accidentally slicing into my Mum’s brand new three-piece leatherette suite with a razor blade. Or climbing to the top of an eight-storey high crane. Or running for my life after upsetting the school bully.
One of our favourite games was to go to a local accident blackspot. Fourteen or fifteen of us. Grubby, filthy, underfed, snot-nosed, raggedy-trousered urchins. Like Fagin’s gangin Oliver Twist.
When we got there, we had a whale of a time making the vilest rudest gestures we could think of at a line of lorry drivers as they hurtled past.
It was only the classic British v-sign. But we gave it everything we had. Jumping up and down. Shouting. Swearing. Howling. Ululating like a band of monkeys. The Banderlog in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book had nothing on us.
Imagine you’re a lorry driver screaming into a bad bend - hair standing on end despite half a tub of Brylcreem that morning - because you’re going too fast, and you know it, and your mate knows it, but you’re both far too macho to admit it.
The lorry’s rocking from side to side, the tyres are screaming for mercy, and you don’t dare brake. Even if you did, the brake linings are worn down to the metal because the lorry hasn’t been serviced since it was wheeled out of the factory three years earlier, and being British it’s already overdue for the scrapyard.
And of course in 1965 no-one has seatbelts. So staying in your seat is a feat in itself.
And suddenly there’s this sea of kids. They’re safely behind a wall, but as you come screeching round the corner they LOOK as if they’re standing in the middle of the road, giving you the fingers like there’s no tomorrow….
No wonder it was an accident black spot. We probably caused most of them!!!!!
We really did make our own entertainment in those days. We were poor, and dirty, but so was everyone else. And looking back, it was fantastic fun. Colourful people, colourful incidents, colourful language.
Speaking of which, what was YOUR first word, I wonder?
You all know what mine was:
BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!
