J.W. Wood
A Wild Horse on Leith Walk
I stopped for a drink on the way home from my father’s funeral. And that’s when I saw him – Scotland’s most famous man.
He looked older than in that last film he’d shot before retiring: timid somehow, meagre of face, hunched over the paperback he was reading. He wore half-moon glasses and an open-necked shirt. A pint of beer sat on the bar in front of him, flecks of foam down the half-drunk glass.
Despite his unkempt appearance, I knew it was him. And I doubted I had the strength, on that sad day, to tell him about our connection, a connection between him and my family that went back before his fame, before his money. Though I’d never met him, I knew about his life before he’d left Scotland to find his fortune – a life he’d shared, for a brief time, with my dead father.
I had to find my courage. I stepped up to the bar and ordered a double gin and tonic. The man didn’t look up from his book, the bald patch on his head larger than it appeared in photographs. I glanced briefly to my left, checking his scalp for the birthmark that would establish this man beyond doubt as Scotland’s most famous actor.
Once I’d spotted that birthmark and taken hold of my drink, all I had to do was speak. I smoothed down my skirt and made sure my necklace was straight. Then I took a pace towards him – and two bodyguards got up from a table by the window as I approached…
***
Edinburgh,1950. A city recovering from war. A city where rationing still ruled: the only hints of the indulgence that would explode ten years later found in the Balmoral Hotel or the Empire Ballroom on Lothian Road. The tram system, the original one, still operated between Haymarket and Princes’ Street – the second-richest street in the British Empire. The war was won, King George sat on the throne, and the air thrummed with optimism and the sleeves-rolled-up spirit of a nation being rebuilt.
Three miles away from the glamour of Jenners Department Store and the Café Royale lay the Britannia Dairies yard in Leith. You might not include horses and carts in your vision of the fifties, but they were still in use: great huge Shires and Clydesdales, pulling goods up and down Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, living reminders of a way of life disappearing fast.
Dad would tell me how you’d cross the dairy yard, preparing to take the milk dray out in the half-light of some freezing morning, when you’d hear a sound like cascading water. Only it wasn’t water – it was the sound of a horse voiding its bowels, pissing and shitting into the straw. He might not have had the best job back then, but at least he’d never had to muck out the stables.
After leaving school, Dad became a dray-boy at the Britannia Dairies. That meant riding on the back of the milk cart and picking orders as they were shouted out by the drayman, then running the deliveries to doorsteps on both sides of the street. He’d leave the orders outside in the chilly morning, waiting for the housewives to pick them up: milk, cream, eggs, yoghurt, orange juice. On Fridays, Dad would pick up the envelopes filled with the money owing and hand it to the drayman. At Christmas and Easter there were tips for them both.
My father was christened Thomas, known to all as Tommy. Although blessed with intellect, he never had a chance with formal education. His own father, a carriage-painter traumatised by his time in the infantry, made sure of that. When Dad came home from Leith Academy with the news he’d come top in Latin, my grandfather punched him in the face and told him not to get any ideas. Two weeks later, he’d signed on to work at the dairies.
His partnership with his drayman made life bearable. Six years older than Tommy, his drayman was another Thomas, nick-named “Big Tam” to distinguish him from “Wee Tommy.” Known around the milk yard by the epithet “Big Tam and Wee Tommy,” they made an unlikely pair: wee Tommy the eager school leaver of fourteen, and Big Tam, all of twenty but already famous in the streets and bars of Edinburgh and Leith.
Four years before, at sixteen, Big Tam passed a trial with Glasgow Rangers Football Club, then one of Europe’s finest, but turned them down in favour of two years’ National Service in the Navy. On his return to Edinburgh, Big Tam started lifting weights instead of playing football and that very year, 1950, had won the Central Scotland Prize for Physical Culture. The spiciest rumour about Big Tam, and the one that made wee Tommy look up to him more than anything, was the whisper that he’d beaten up a gangster and five of his men in the toilets of the Empire ballroom. Apparently the gangster’s girlfriend took a shine to Big Tam, and the gangster wanted him humiliated. Too bad for the gangster.
As a boy, my father was slight and studious. He’d been saved from tuberculosis by the generosity of a local doctor in the days before the NHS. He suffered at school, though he never told me about it. What a pair they must have been – Big Tam with the world at his feet, a muscular God whose thick black hair and dark complexion marked him as an icon about to rise; and my Dad by his side, wee Tommy: the most ordinary boy.
For Big Tam, this job as a drayman was about getting more money in: when he wasn’t working at the yards, he’d be lifting weights, posing for Art Students at the Edinburgh College of Art, or reading. Dad said that was what he remembered most about Big Tam, apart from his smile and good looks: he was always reading.
They say that when Big Tam was world-famous, he came back to Edinburgh to accept an award. Before the ceremony, he asked his limousine driver for a tour of Leith Walk. Big Tam stunned the driver by reciting every street name from top to bottom as they drove down – then did the same thing on the other side as they drove back up the Walk. After sixty years, he still remembered every detail of his milk-round. And no wonder, given what happened next.
***
As usual, Dad must have risen at around four o’clock in the morning, washed his hands and face, got dressed, and walked the half-mile to the Britannia yards. It was an autumn morning like any other in Edinburgh, then or now: grey and drizzly, no sunrise as such, just a gradual lifting of the gloom until the different shades of grey outside announced themselves as streets and buildings.
When he got to the dairy yard, he met Big Tam outside, smoking a cigarette and reading a book under the streetlight outside the entrance to the yards. They knocked up the night watchman to let them in, then the boys who were readying the dray handed the order sheet to Big Tam. Big Tam stepped up to the buggy-chair at the front of the dray, looking behind him to make sure the order had finished loading and wee Tommy was on the back. Then he shook the reins and coaxed the horse out of the yard on to Constitution Street, ready to start their shift with a delivery to the British Railways’ staff room at the station at the lower end of Leith Walk.
Dad said he was never sure if Big Tam had been drinking or in a fight, but he seemed sluggish that morning. Maybe he’d spent the night with that gangster’s girlfriend. Whatever the case, Dad remembered Big Tam wasn’t himself, forgetting orders and snapping at him where normally he was the model of kindness.
Halfway through their shift, as they reached the corner of Smith’s Close, Big Tam cursed.
“Tommy! We’ll be late if we keep so fuckin’ slow an’ they’ll dock our wages. And the last thing I want is docked wages.”
“Right Tam.”
“Listen son. I’ll give ye three orders for the shops on the Walk. I’ll do the orders on Smith’s Close myself. Here’s the order sheet. And look sharp, all right? If you’re quick, I’ll tell ye what I got up to last night.”
Then he winked, one thick comma of eyebrow rising into his forehead. I can imagine Dad giggling, wanting to please his hero, a man who would become hero to hundreds of thousands less than ten years later.
Big Tam got off the buggy and came to the back of the dray. He doled out three orders from the crates and put them on one side of the dray’s back shelf for Dad to deliver.
“Number 294 for that first one; 297 for the second; and the eggs and juice for that Eyetie Restaurant across the street at 300. Got it?”
Dad remembered Big Tam taking five orders out of the crates and gathering them in his arms, ready to head further up the Walk to deliver them and save some time. Dad wasn’t sure if it was the irregularity of Big Tam getting off the buggy and doing the orders, or the weather, or the fact that Tam had been shouting – anyway, their horse, a huge Shire called Bluebell, turned skittish.
Like all drays, Bluebell wore blinkers to stop her getting frightened by the cars and buses they encountered on Leith Walk. Blinkers work fine – as long as you’re guiding the horse and looking after it. The moment the horse thinks it’s going to be left like that, it panics.
And that’s exactly what happened. To the last day of his life, Dad remembered the sight of that huge horse, nineteen hands if she was an inch, rearing into the sunlight that rose above the top of Leith Walk. Dad had walked halfway up the side of the dray-horse when it reared, about to cross the Walk to deliver juice and eggs to the Italian restaurant. Meanwhile Big Tam was closer – he’d been running to and fro, picking out fresh orders and delivering them at a sprint along Leith Walk.
Dad would always tell me there was no way Big Tam could have seen it coming. He was running too fast. Bluebell had just reached the top of her rear, legs flailing, the whites of her eyes showing, nostrils flaring. Anything in Bluebell’s way when those hooves came down stood no chance. And Big Tam was in the way.
With no time to think, Dad dived to the front of the dray and pulled down on the wooden coupling that bound Bluebell’s harness to the cart. As Bluebell’s huge body dropped downwards, she lurched forward and the unhitched cart rolled backwards down Leith Walk, eggs, milk and orange juice smashing and crashing off the cobbles, rivers of white and orange and yellow streaming into the gutters.
“You daft wee bugger!” Big Tam shouted. “Ye’ll get us sacked!”
Dad looked up and down Leith Walk. He later told me he had wanted to cry so much he couldn’t find the tears. Then Big Tam calmed down a little. I imagine Dad’s face turned red, his slender hands gripping the sides of his leather work apron with nerves. Big Tam breathed in, then smiled.
“It’s all right, son. I know why you did it. I’d have been crushed if Bluebell landed on me.”
Then Big Tam held out his hand for my Dad to shake with a smile.
“I owe you my life, Tommy. Now, I know what to tell the bosses.”
Then Big Tam explained where he’d been the night before – at an audition in York, for a part in the chorus-line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s South Pacific. The production was going to tour provincial theatres in Britain. Big Tam found out straight away that he’d got the job, and took a few drinks on the train back up to Edinburgh the night before by way of celebration.
“So that’s why I’m a bit the worse for wear the day”, Tam concluded. “But I’d have been buggered if that bastard horse had fallen on me – and you stopped her. So listen – we’ll go back to the Yard, I’ll take the blame, then hand in my notice. I don’t need their stinking job anyway.”
Then Big Tam picked Dad up like a baby and hugged him. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget this, son. If you ever need anything from me, just get in touch, right? You’ll know where to find me.”
My father, ecstatic as only small boys can be at a moment of communion with their hero, nodded in agreement – even though he’d no idea where Big Tam lived, or how to get in touch. The fact that the man he worshipped was in his debt was enough for him.
***
Sixty-five years passed. Sixty-five years that saw Big Tam change his name and become one of the world’s greatest movie stars. Dad went on to live a life of quiet dignity, giving up his work in the drinks business to help Mum set up a care home. If Big Tam lived his dreams – and everyone else’s besides – my Dad never got to become the pilot he’d dreamed of becoming. Even if he’d lived a love story few could dream of with my mother, lived to see his only child grown up, and married, and become a mother herself – his own ambitions remained unrealised.
And now he was dead, and I stood before the world-famous man Dad saved from certain death six decades before.
I took a step towards Big Tam (as I knew him), coughed politely, and spoke:
“Excuse me. My father was your dray-boy at Britannia Dairies in 1950.”
The two bodyguards were on me in an instant.
“I’m sorry madam. No personal contact or photographs. Would you please come this –”
“Just a minute.”
That voice from behind the bodyguards. The voice known to tens of millions around the world from the films, the books, the talk shows, the exposés. The voice that made men envious and women tremble.
“It’s all right. Step back, the pair of you.”
With that, the bodyguards retreated to their table by the window and I was left face to face with him.
“So you’re Tommy Smith’s daughter.”
I nodded, and he put his book down.
“He was a good man. A hard worker. How is he now?”
I told him Dad died the week before, and he glanced at his drink.
“I’m sorry for your loss. I always remembered him.”
He paused, then smiled. The smile that had captivated millions, that eyebrow, now flecked with grey, still cutting into the lines on his forehead.
“May I buy you a drink?”
I was being offered a drink by the man women of my generation grew up dreaming about. A man from the same streets as my Dad, the same working-class background, the same blind alley of zero opportunity and Scottish hard-man tradition. Of beaten faces and hands broken in the punch. And Dad’s bravery had enabled this man to live a life no one I knew would dare to dream of living.
I noticed the bodyguards were getting more twitchy the longer I stayed in his presence. Not to mention the other bar patrons, who by now realised the true identity of the grizzled old man reading quietly at the bar. I felt my eyes prick with tears.
“Thank you for your kind offer. My father always remembered working with you and how kind you were to him. But I have to go now, I’m afraid. My children are waiting.”
He smiled and shook my hand, then bid me farewell. I left the bar and went to my car outside the hotel. And I cried – for my father, for what might have been, and for fate, that lifts some of us up only to leave others stranded in worlds they never dreamed of and cannot understand, like a horse rearing in sunlight that longs to hit the ground.
~
In memory of Thomas James Smith (1936-2016) and Jean "Sheena" Smith (1937-2020)
J.W. Wood's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Cat Mystery Magazine (US), Idle Ink (UK), God's Cruel Joke (US), and Ars Humanita (UK). Last year, stories were anthologised in the US, UK and Canada. Wood is the author of five books of poems and a novel, all published in the UK between 2006 and 2019; and the forthcoming novella, By Any Other Name (Terror House Press, US, 2023). He is the recipient of awards from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. For more, please visit www.jwwoodwriter.com
