Read Online Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes - Free Book Online

rolled a lot. If any of the kids woke up the whole family woke with them.
    â€˜Get oot yer bed and help me, would ye?’
    â€˜What? What? What happened?’
    â€˜Wake up and hold one of these weans. They’re no well; can ye no hear them cryin’?’
    â€˜I was sleepin’. I couldnae hear a thing. I must be gettin’ deif or somethin’.’
    â€˜Drunk. Dead drunk, that’s what ye are. I’d be better off if ye were deid, ya lazy pig.’
    â€˜Shut it woman, a man’s got tae sleep, ye know.’
    â€˜That’s all ye do. Sleep and drink. You’re nae use tae anybody.’
    It wasn’t long before at least us kids got our sea legs and made it out of the coffin we called home. I’m glad we got out, because very soon after that the sewerage backed up. I don’t know if it was just our deck or the whole ship, but it smelled like shit and there was foul-smelling water all over the floors on our deck.
    â€˜We didn’t have to come on a fucking cruise ship to live like this. We could get this at home,’ I heard one of the other parents saying as he walked to the bar.
    But it was great to be on board the ship for us kids. The good news was there was a swimming pool. The bad news was no one could swim. You couldn’t walk through the pool with your pants rolled up, so that counted out most of the adults. Most of the passengers hadn’t been in a real bath never mind a pool. I think one or two people might have drowned, or come close to it, on the trip. But not us, no thanks to my dad, who decided that the best way to teach us to swim was to throw us into the deep end of the pool.
    John was first, he was Dad’s boy. ‘Stop kicking me son. You’ll thank me for this later,’ said my dad as he grabbed John by the back of his trunks and hoisted him into the deep end.
    â€˜Don’t do it, Dad . . . Blub blub blub blub ,’ was the last thing John said until he surfaced screaming for his life.
    â€˜Aye, there you go son, you’ve got a lovely stroke,’ said Dad as John clawed his way back onto the deck.
    â€˜Thanks Dad, I’ll just take a wee rest while you pass on your wisdom tae the other kids.’
    Meanwhile one of Dad’s mates walked past. ‘I tried that with the wife, she kept making it to the side too. Ha, ha! Fancy a drink, Jim? Ye cannae train the kids aw day.’
    When I got older I used to get that same feeling – that I was in the deep end and couldn’t swim – only I wasn’t in the pool, this was life. I called it the salmon syndrome. Always swimming upstream only to get there and die. Cheerful, don’t you think? Nowadays I’m much more positive. I know how lucky I am.
    Anyway, I’m not sure he’d get away with it today but it worked, and before you could say Dawn Fraser we were paddlingour way across the snotty surface of the pool with equally snotty noses, impressing all the young girls on the ship. Well, I exaggerate a bit; none of the young girls even cared if we swam or drowned and we didn’t care about the young girls. That would be something that would confuse us much later on.
    I remember it was a big deal for Dad when our ship went through the Suez Canal. He was excited about travelling, I think he really wanted to get out of Scotland and see the world, or maybe just get out of Scotland. He dragged us up on deck to see the canal. Sand, sand, and oh yes, did I mention the sand? That wasn’t the most exciting thing for a five-year-old but it stuck in my mind. Looking back, I can’t help think that he was just trying to find an excuse to get away from my mum.
    â€˜Aye, I think I’ll take the kids up tae see the sand . . . They’ll love it, all kids love sand.’
    We probably ended up at the bar. By the way, there were lots of times I thought were special one-on-one times with Dad, that in reality were times when Mum forced him to take me