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The Early Life of David Petrie

If you want to survive in politics, you need to have deep roots. And if you don’t, you have to pretend to.

The Master

For a small country, Scotland is geographically complicated. Parts of Ayrshire, for instance, look like the Highlands, particularly when the cloud is low. Shaggy, dun-coloured moorlands are populated by shaggy, shitty-bottomed sheep, crowding across roads that weren’t resurfaced during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth. Just as in the Highlands you drive past grey, harled, barrack-like settlements of 1960s council housing, their desolate gardens fenced in with wire, and defeated Co-op stores, and scowling public houses with wired windows. But when the clouds lift, the absence of soaring mountains becomes apparent. Instead, weak riffs of sunlight show giant A’s of steel and collections of industrial buildings. For this was once mining country, with conical bings like the burial mounds of ancient Strathclyde kings – and even now, years after Margaret Thatcher’s death, the rusting steel sheds and the pervasive layer of coal dust haven’t gone.

So this is a country where it’s easy to answer the question: why do folk get involved in politics? If you relied on the papers, you’d think it was pure greed, with a pinch of vanity; and you’d be wrong. In David Petrie’s Ayrshire, being Labour was like going to Mass, like learning to drink half-and-halfs, like supporting Kilmarnock, and like not hitting your women. It was what a proper, decent, grown man did. The folk memory of the miners’ strike, the poll tax, the closure of Ravenscraig, was transmitted almost wordlessly, father to son, mother to daughter. And if a man needed any more explanation, the pudgy, braying faces on television – though Blair, mind you, was as bad as a Tory – rammed the lesson home. There were sides. Us, and them. Them, us. Chrissakes, pal, what more did you need to know?

It wasn’t like that now, though. The Labour folk had been split and scattered by the 2014 independence referendum. These days, the Nats were better organised, strutting through the streets, ‘Yes’ badges all over the place, cocky as you like. A Saltire flew over the council chambers. But it wasn’t always so. Back then, being Labour was bleeding obvious. The system, the whole bloody world, was set up to screw the working classes. The working classes had no choice but to fight back. Only the odd funny-looking Tory, in tartan trews maybe, or Presbyterian minister, or some kind of Orangeman, didn’t get it. Davie Petrie had known this all his life.

Later on, when he was famous, everybody got Petrie’s story subtly wrong. Wikipedia, the BBC website, profiles in both the Spectator and the New Statesman and a hurriedly-written biography by a rising young journalist, all missed what really mattered. Yet nobody would ever be able to say that Davie himself had lied about his own background. The public story, the official story, was all boot-strappy and hard graft: David Petrie had grown up in a working-class family in a village south of Glasgow, joining the trade union movement early and working his way up through scholarships to create his own building company, paying top-dollar wages to his boys, handing over chunks of his profits to local causes. It was a story of Catholic self-improvement, of the importance of family, the story of a clean-limbed hero. No university drinking clubs; no wealthy, behind-the-scenes patrons; just a simple, passionate, moderate, justice-loving man of the streets.

And a lot of that was true; but it was a sunny painting without shadows or dark corners – so much so, that the truth was a lie. There had been little that was decent or working-class about David Petrie’s early life. He had been born in a privately owned bungalow in an Ayrshire village to an alcoholic local builder, a formidable bully, and his long-suffering, though in fact highly intelligent, wife.

Later on, David Petrie would be famous as a kind of survivor, like the sole cavalryman making it back from the Khyber Pass, all his comrades lying slaughtered in pools of their own blood. That is, he was a rare Scottish Labour MP after the Nationalists had poured down the mountainsides in 2015. Somehow, like a burr, he’d clung on. As Scottish voices had begun to disappear from London public life, Petrie’s Ayrshire tones were still being heard in Parliament and on the BBC, an almost reassuring reminder of times that had gone. ‘I feel like a dinosaur, to be honest, woken up to find the mammals have taken over,’ he’d once said on Breakfast News. But like the dinosaurs, there was something unshakeably tough, almost stony, about the man.

David’s first memories were of fear and pain. His father’s head was out of focus, a blur of grey and red; but his hands and feet were close. Knuckles, the signet ring, the smell of shoe polish, a boot in the arse, a giant hand scrunching his jumper and lifting him up. Bellow, skelp. Sometimes, when the gate slammed and he heard Da’s feet come up the steps, he filled his pants and trousers with hot pee. Then he was disgusted with himself, and almost welcomed the belting. It was an old, weathered black belt with a metal buckle. The boy David was also smacked, punched, left out in the garden in all weathers, and subject as he grew up to all the torments a self-pitying builder could devise. A Christmas holiday full of unlikely winks and vague, enticing promises would be followed by a Christmas morning, silent and present-less – Da oot, Maw locked in her bedroom.

Da oot, mind you, was a damn sight better than Da in.

‘Come awa, son. It’s time you came down to the fitba. Dinnae look so bloody scared. We’re going to have a good time, you and me.’ And sometimes, good things followed. A chip butty, a can of icy Irn Bru; being taught how to take a drag, deep and fragrant and blue.

But Da’s moods were as changeable as scudding clouds. One can too many. A missed scoring opportunity. Cheek from the visitors’ terrace. Then he’d feel a sudden poke on the nape of his neck.

‘See ma boy? A wee Jessie I’ve got, is all. Doesn’t understand a bloody thing about the game. Don’t know why I bother bringing you, do I, Dolores?’

Even Da’s mates thought he went too far. ‘Dolores, big man? Where the fuck’s that come from?’

‘Well, look at the wee girl, with her big dark eyes. Disnae need mascara. Did you ever see sic a sight?’

And his Da was always right, of course; the tears stung their way down the side of his nose, and mixed with snot, and hung on his lip. He’d have his grey woollen jersey on, bought from the Co-op, and he’d wipe himself with the sleeve. And then his Da would whack him across the side of his face, and his Da’s friends would go Chrissake, Boabie, but mebbe laugh. And the boys on the field would win or lose, but it didn’t matter much. He wasn’t a great boy for the football.

And then back at home, the belt. Thick, black leather, with wee yellow lines where it was cracking and with the metal thistle buckle at the business end. Beer and the belt. They went together like love and marriage.

Many years later, the adult David Petrie was told while being examined after a skiing accident that he had broken no fewer than four ribs as a child. He remembered the sleepless nights, all right. At the time there was no question of hospital. But a few deep white scars, like chalk marks, still remained on his back and legs.

The adult David Petrie was known as a snappy dresser – flash suits. The truth was, he bought suits with braces. He never wore belts. The adult Davie Petrie enjoyed a drink – a beer, a glass of wine, a gin and tonic. But the very faintest smell of Scotland’s national drink, the sick-sweet scent from his father’s open mouth, brought an instant queasiness. He simply couldn’t stand the stuff.

His dad, Bob Petrie, was a very popular man. David only realised this much later: Da was liked. Other men wanted Da to be their friend. Out of the house, he told jokes. People laughed at them. Big Bob was a good workman and a relaxed boss. He liked a drink, everyone knew that, and where’s the harm there? The bungalow was on the very outskirts of the village, surrounded by its own hedge. In space, enough space, a wee bit lawn around a wee bit house, no one can hear you scream.

Big Bob’s big laugh, though, was well known in the pub. A low staccato series of growly grunts – heuch, heuch, heuch – building up to a full-throated har, har, har. There was a lot of laughing. His business grew fast, swollen by contracts from the local council. This was Labour territory, Labour people, Labour laughing. Bob was friends with the councillors, and actually a Labour Party member himself, although he never turned up at ward meetings – ‘Nae time for blethering, no offence boys, I got a business to run.’

Only later on would Davie understand the kickbacks, the backhanders, the no-nothing-for-nothing; those raucous sessions in the bar were always about business first. Heuch, heuch; har, har. Big Bob sweated easily as he grew ever larger, but he was not a man to waste energy or time.

Neither David nor his mother Eileen were seen much in the village. They felt as they looked – at the edge of things. Sunday school, the Scouts, even lining up to jeer the idiot Orangemen, all passed them by. Bob was careful not to hit his wife on the face or arms – one of those tricks of civilised life passed down from some fathers to some sons. As David grew older and bigger, Bob’s weekly beltings were replaced by the more painful methods of verbal terrorism. Jibes about his voice, mockery of his changing body. A hot, moist, whiskery, whiskied mouth at a bright red ear, a finger and thumb pulling him up by his sideburn. Big girl’s blouse, ya. Once, just once, when he was changing for football at school, a teacher, Miss Leckie, had seen fresh welts on his legs. A social worker had come round to the house. David could still remember the tense little quartet of them sitting in the best room, his father forcing smiles and ‘joshing’. Heuch, heuch, har, har. Like one of those plays from the telly. There was never the slightest chance of David being taken into care. Nobody wanted that. Bob’s connections made it completely impossible; anyway, Davie would have hated leaving his mother alone in that overheated but cheerless house.

Mere misery doesn’t kill you, not in Scotland. Davie grew up to be a silent, handsome, self-possessed young man. Layer over layer. Skin on thickening skin. And life got better. He found schoolwork ridiculously easy. The school library was small enough, but he read his way through it, the whole damned room. Maths, encyclopaedias, cowboy stories, it didn’t matter. His second great escape as a teenager was discovering a natural talent for, of all things, football. He made the school team a year early. Bob, the big man, found this very hard to deal with: for years it had been an important part of his story that his son was a ‘Jessie’. Yet here he was, big long legs, scoring goals and coming home covered in mud and bruises week after week. Grudgingly, Bob made his way to the touchline once or twice. Laddie worth something after all? Maybe he and David would finally have a real conversation – a Scottish one, of course, elliptical and self-mocking, more silence than words, but ending in grunts of assent and a feeling not unlike warmth.