Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

      MY FATHER’S GRANDFATHER HAD been a shepherd on the Earl of Hume’s estate at Douglas Water. His father was a high class boot maker whose shop was in (now) London Road near Glasgow Cross. My father was the product of an age when children left school at 10 years and were sent to sea to learn the ways of the world. He served on two voyages, one when the crew were men released from Barlinnie prison to man the sailing vessel, while the second ship had to leave Cuba because of the war with the U.S.A. On reaching home he was made drunk by the crew (he being a popular cabin boy) and taken home where his Mother found him at the door, sitting on his box the crew members having knocked on the door and run off. That ended his seafaring education.

      By the age of 25 years Father must have become a blacksmith. He made two journeys from London to Glasgow, working his way from job to job, for walking was his passion and his recreation. He had married, had two sons, William and James, after which his wife died. He married again. By his second wife I was his third son and had a sister, Agnes. He died in 1921 aged 70. My mother came from a mining family at Wishaw. I had several uncles and aunts from both sides of the family and it was Sunday afternoon and evening visitations to them or from them that provided the changes in domestic routines, for all were within walking distance or short tram journey distances from home in Bridgeton.

      My early recollections are of our room and kitchen in a street off Main Street, Bridgeton, in a dirty grey tenement of three stories. Like most flats up east end Glasgow closes, ours was a two-room and kitchen. My step-brothers slept in the room while Father and Mother shared the bed recess in the kitchen, the biggest room. Agnes and I slept in the hurley bed, kept below the kitchen bed during the day and rolled out at night. The lighting was on a long piped bracket fixed to the mantlepiece, which could be angled to suit a reader. The light was poor, not white as was later the case when gas mantles were introduced, first with vertical mantles and later by the smaller mantles now used on Calor Gas lamps. The fireplace was black leaded with the door handles and fire-irons in polished steel, the polishing of them being my weekly job, together with the oval dish covers which hung on the kitchen wall below the shelves of crockery and other dishes. In front of the window in the kitchen was the jaw-box or sink with the brass water pipe which provided only cold water, and was another of my weekly polishing jobs.

      Father worked in a smiddy between the Clyde and French Street some ten minutes walk from home. These were the days when work started at 6am and breakfast was taken during a break about 8am. Midday dinner was around 1pm and work ended around 6pm. Father would have a cup of tea and some buttered bread before work and return for a breakfast of porridge, an egg or other “kitchen” – cooked food like bacon or sausage. Dinner consisted of soup or broth, meat, potatoes, veg, followed by a milk pudding or fruit. The evening meal we called tea would be plain bread, currant bread, scones, cheese and tea, while supper would be porridge or peas brose. During my school holidays Father would have his dinner at the smiddy to which I carried his soup in a can, his main course between plates tied in a towel. There I would pump the bellows so fast that the fire would blaze. Sometimes I would look over the wooden fence to Auld Shawfield, the football ground of Clyde before they moved to the present stadium between Glasgow and Rutherglen. I remember seeing players in red shirts running around, though don’t remember if they were training or playing a match.

      When the season for girds came round Father would make iron girds¹ and cleeks for my friends and me and we would make the iron ring as we ran round the streets in Bridgeton or made expeditions to the Sauny Waste, the open ground in the loop of the Clyde upstream from Dalmarnock Bridge. From the short street which gave access to works and a piggery on the Rutherglen bank, an earth path followed the riverbank. It was uneven, with hills and dales which required skill with the gird to maintain an uninterrupted run. Hills and hollows of sand filled the rivers loop in the middle of which was a flat hollow in which we could play football.

      Often at the two ends of the loop a man would be on the lookout for the police, for in some hollow there would be a pitch-and-toss school of some two dozen men. In the centre a man would swing a leather belt to keep a ring clear while another would be laying bets with the surrounding crowd, yet another balancing two pennies on a sliver of wood or his fingers, preliminary to tossing them high in the air to descend as head or tail, or two heads or two tails. Heads and tails were a neutral toss and had to be repeated till they both came down the same side up. With tails the crowd was happy because it won, with heads it put up with the loss, hoping the tosser could not continue winning forever. Small boys were not welcomed in this game, but we crawled through the grass to the rim of the hollow and peeped down over the heads of the gamblers, running away when we were spotted, to return by the river bank or an adjoining street to our own street.

      Football of course was our favourite past-time. This was before the days of tarmac. The streets were cobbled, the ball did not run true but stotted in unexpected angles, except when the wall of the houses was used in passing an opponent and lamp-posts were goals. When each team was of two or three, the near posts on each side of the street would be used, but if more boys were available two near posts on the same side would be used thus providing a longer pitch. Such fun was not looked upon with pleasure by folk living on ground level flats and sometimes above, for windows were often broken. Sometimes a policeman would appear so the ball was snatched up and we all disappeared up various closes to cross the intervening walls of the back courts to adjoining streets and freedom. Leave-O or Kick-the-Can were alternatives to football, while the girls either had wooden hoops or peever and beds otherwise called Hop-Scotch. Sometimes selected girls would play with the boys at Hide and Seek, and the closes and dunnies² provided scope for initiative in avoiding discovery.

      Father and Mother were deeply religious. Father was involved in the creation of the Congregational Union, i.e. the Union of Congregational Churches³. He sometimes took the pulpit when the Minister was ill, was superintendent of the Sunday School, an elder, and when a new church was created, Dalmarnock Road Congregational Church, gave some seven years service as church officer or cleaner as his donation to the new building. The Minister’s wife was an invalid so Mother was President of the Mothers Meetings. Both were to my mind examples of Christian living for they not only observed the conventional daily or weekly forms of worship, but in their treatment of people of all religions or none, were helpful and kind and tolerant. We had grace at all meals, and each night before retiring to bed, Father would read the daily lesson from the Bible and Mother would say a prayer, or the roles would be reversed and sometimes I or Agnes would be asked to take the little service.

      Father and Mother were both mild of temper. I never heard them raise their voices in discussion or argument between themselves or with others. The first years of this century had no social security or health insurance,⁴ and doctor’s bills were to be avoided. I remember Father coming home with his face and hands bandaged after he had been splattered with molten lead at work. He came from hospital where he had the pieces of lead picked from