Ra Rebel!

My brother Grizzly liked dogs and poaching with tinkers. I think we had a succession of 15 lurchers in my house when I was a kid, but the first one and the last one was called Rebel.


The last Rebel stayed with us from the time it was bought from an advert in The Exchange and Mart until I buried it with my wee brother down the back garden one wet and stormy night about 12 or 13 years later. When the dog was still young, my brother went off to Birmingham to work for a while on the building sites and stopped running around with the tinkers then.


We had a big back garden. Right at the bottom of it, my brother had built a huge kennel, like one you could stand up straight in until you were a teenager. There was a mattress inside it. Tarpaulin lined the outside walls and the inside walls and the roof. When my brother went to Birmingham, the place became completely infested with fleas.


We knew there was a lot of fleas on the dog at this time. My wee brother and me used to get stopped by dog fanciers wherever we went, and they would sometimes pat the dog, and we would try not to snigger.


It was thought that the fleas might have come from hares and rabbits the dog had once caught. But they loved the mattress and the hut must have been some kind of flea heaven because you could see them jumping all over the shop just by peeking in.


The dog didn't scratch much, so I thought the fleas might not have been bothering it too much. Then one day when I went down to the kennel, the dog stepped out of the hut and said: Hotboy, you are going to have to do something about the fleas!


I must have been about nine or ten, or maybe a little older. My wee brother was nearly three years younger than me, but it was us who went down the back garden one dark night and dragged the mattress out of the hut and onto the grass in front of it. We set the mattress on fire. What a sight! Millions of fleas leaping everywhere.


When we got back to the kitchen, my maw told us to get into the bathroom and get stripped off and into the bath. So I'm sitting in the bath with my wee brother and we're watching the fleas pinging here and there all over the bathroom, hundreds of them peppering the walls.


The auld maw didn't bat an eyelid about the state we were in. Boys among the heroic working class of Bonnie Scotland were expected to get covered in muck and scabs and fall out of trees. This is in marked contrast to the progeny of the evil bourgeois who were always polishing their shoes and marching up and down.... by the left ... def dight, def dight, def dight! And wasn't it always thus!