Sir Sean Connery's football, jammy pieces and that milk round

IT was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives but the wedding day of Joe Connery and Euphamia Maclean almost ended in a brawl.

No doubt the large amount of alcohol that was consumed didn't help matters but after Sir Sean Connery's parents were married at Tynecastle Parish Church the talk among their relations became heated.

Things came to a head after Sean's two grandfathers – Neil Maclean from Scotland and Tommy Connery from Ireland – began to needle one other.

"Neil began to dress Tommy down in Gaelic which he knew Tommy couldn't understand," Sir Sean recalls in his newly- published memoirs. "Then Tommy told Neil to 'shut his face' or he was going to have to sort him out. It was that kind of evening."

The night did not end in blows, but only just.

The tale is one of many about life in Edinburgh, especially his native Fountainbridge, before and during the Second World War which appear in Being A Scot.

Most of the first chapter is devoted to his reflections on his upbringing in the 1930s, living in what would now be considered poverty.

The Hollywood star fondly remembers his other grandfather, Tommy, driving a horse and cart around the Capital's most deprived areas, collecting old clothes and buying items the poor would sell in desperation. He'd then visit a well-known figure around Edinburgh, rag-and-bone man Asa Was, so-called because of the songs children would sing in the streets about him.

Sean remembers that Asa Was would retort "if only I was" if he was accused of being rich. In response, local kids would chant: "Is he as he always is? Or is he as he was."

In those days, with no television, the Connery family's Fountainbridge neighbours would entertain themselves by hanging out of their windows watching the comings and goings in the streets below.

It was also a time when making ends meet was tough and Sir Sean recalls seeing little of his father Joe as he worked 12-hour days in the rubber mill near their Fountainbridge home.

When Joe came home at 10pm, he would hand over the money to his wife Euphamia who made all the household decisions.

Euphamia, who was known as Effie to her husband's family and Phemie by her own, was also no stranger to hard work.

During the war she spent long hours cleaning for Polish army officers billeted in some of Edinburgh's grandest houses.

Tight budgets and a wartime necessity to "grow your own" also led to a crime wave, with thieves plundering allotments for fruit and veg.

It was a problem that would not trouble Sir Sean's grandfather Neil because he surrounded his Stewart Terrace allotment with old electric cables and claimed his "alarm system" would alert police if anyone went near. "Nobody ever touched his vegetables," writes the actor.

Growing up, Sir Sean recalls being "soccer crazy" and playing football on the concrete area behind his home, with goalposts chalked on the tenement walls.

When he was hungry the young Sir Sean, or Tam as he was then known, would shout for his mum to throw him a "jammy piece".

"The trick was to catch the sticky sandwich before it splattered on the ground," he remembers.

Such was Sean's love of football, he even turned down a place at Boroughmuir High as it only played rugby. Instead, he went to the far less academic Darroch Secondary on Upper Gilmore Street, where he played football for the school team.

With the onset of war, his school was closed and the pupils were told to turn up for classes at a manor house in Morningside.

It was teaching that Sir Sean was never to receive because, recognising him as her milk boy, the upper-class lady of the house barred him from entering.

"It really didn't bother me that much at the time," he says. "I never grasped that it was arrant snobbery. For me it just meant more time off for soccer."

There was less time for games, however, after Sir Sean left school in August 1943, just before he turned 13, and secured his first job at the St Cuthbert's, a dairy affiliated to the Co-operative Wholesale Society.

Later, Sir Sean was promoted and given a Highland pony called Tich to make deliveries, which he recalls pushing up the icy slopes of Dean Bridge.

After work there was football on Saughton Park and at the Fet-Lor Club, an institution founded by Fettes and Loretto schools that offered poor boys a bite to eat and a chance to play sport, as well as the "rare luxury of a hot bath".

Sir Sean also writes about working as a French polisher for a Haddington-based cabinet- making firm that specialised in providing coffins, following his discharge from the Navy after developing ulcers.

The business was run by a kindly man called Mr Stark and the work inspired a macabre habit which Sir Sean entered into to save him money.

"In really busy times, I'd bring in a flask of tea and save myself the fare home by kipping overnight in one of the coffins," he recalls.

In his spare time, Sir Sean took up bodybuilding with the Dunedin Amateur Weight Lifting Club – a hobby that led to the enterprising young man posing as a model at Edinburgh College of Art.

However, he soon discovered that posing for hours on end for aspiring artists didn't earn him the "easy money" he expected and so he took up a far better paid job installing the printing plates on to the presses of the Edinburgh Evening News.

He also has vivid memories working as a lifeguard at the Portobello outdoor swimming pool.

It was there that he and two other tall lifeguards were given the opportunity to dress up for walk-on parts at the Empire Theatre.

The show was Anna Neagle's Glorious Days and it was here, dressed in a guard's uniform and a busby, that Sir Sean first discovered the joys of being paid as an actor.