A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray
my dad was not permanent or essential. Every day but Sunday he left the house before I had breakfast, coming back in the early evening before teatime and my bedtime shortly after. I knew his absences were due to work because one evening he brought home geometrically-cut sheets of cardboard, and told me that during the day he had cut them out of bigger cardboard sheets. He showed how each sample could be bent and folded into a different size of cardboard box. It seemed a dull business – why should he or anyone make empty cardboard boxes? I might have been interested had he shown them with labels attached. I liked anything with small areas of bright colour that my small eyes could easily see – the game of Tiddlywinks with its celluloid discs of pure blue, green, yellow, red, played on a board of the same heraldic colours. When Dad came home for dinner on Saturday (a meal that richer people called lunch) he gave me and my sister a Saturday Penny which could then buy many sweets. The pennies he gave were always new enough for the copper to shine like gold. At Christmas our livingroom had bright blue, green, orange, yellow, red paper decorations; gold and silver tinsel; a frieze around the walls above the picture rail with a continuous view of snow-covered rooftops at night, with Santa Claus on every fourth roof putting a female doll into a chimney pot, while his sleigh and reindeers waited on a rooftop behind. Mum used spare moments to embroider, make rugs with strips of bright wool and patterned fabric, paint small flowers on glassware, attach blooms of coloured wax to dead twigs, but her biggest transformations were in cookery. I was fascinated by her way of turning grotesque things from butcher and grocer shops into food that was not soft and white, often by mixing powders and crystals with butter, eggs and fruit. Before washing the mixing bowls she let me scrape out with a wooden spoon and eat what had not gone into baking pans. The raw mixtures were so sweet that I wondered why she bothered baking them into biscuits and cakes. Other good times were when I sat near her playing with paper, scissors, pencil and crayons. On one such day I made my first book.
Spiral Tube Worms, Wills’s Cigarettes
The “Queen Mary”, Wills’s Cigarettes
Lady cyclist 1939, Player cigarettes
Marsh Mallow, Wills’s Cigarettes
At that time British postage stamps showed only the monarch’s head on a red, blue or green ground, according to price. With scissors from Mum’s sewing box I cut stamps off discarded envelopes and gummed them to pages in a small notebook – she must have given me notebook and gum and shown how to use them. I was happy with the result. Then Dad, pleased to find I had made myself a philatelist, bought me a packet of varied foreign stamps, one of transparent paper hinges, a big album with a different nation’s name heading each page, a magnifying glass and tweezers. I resented his intrusion into my dealings with the woman in my life, which were painless, apart from quarrels over food. Freud says formative early memories become subconscious because we find them too painful to remember clearly. Quarrels with Mum, the beatings by Dad they resulted in are described more fully in Lanark, my first novel, and may have been worse than I recall. A neighbour told me after Mum died that I sometimes ran to my granny’s house for comfort, and loved Granny so much that after her death I was found weeping at her door. How touching! I was about three when she died and hardly remember her, though she appears in family photos.
Though I resented Dad’s interference he kept giving me things: a desk like a small business executive’s which he had made (not bought) with a wide lid, drawers and bookshelf. I still own, dilapidated by use, his present of ten pale grey Wills’s Cigarette Picture-Card Albums, each 6 by 5½ inches. Dad smoked a pipe so must have bought the cards separately and slotted them onto the pages himself. These bright wee glossy pictures showed Wild Life of the Fields and Woods / Life of the Sea Shore / British Butterflies / Gardening Hints / Dogs / Railway Equipment et cetera. I felt I owned the world in these little albums where everything looked new, fresh, understandable.
I was learning that I could have what I wanted if it was in words, pictures or songs, which are the only dependable form of magic.
One: Family Photographs, 1915–52
Family Gray: Jeannie Stevenson, Alex Gray , his dad Alex & Agnes Gray, 1915
Standing, family Fleming: Minnie Needham, her husband Harry Fleming, their daughters Amy & Annie, circa 1930
A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH from 1914 or ’15 shows my father, Alex, in his Black Watch uniform, with khaki kilt standing beside his father and mother, who died long before I was born. At first a weigh-bridge clerk at the Glasgow docks, Dad was just 18, so old enough to join the army when war was declared – he bought his first pipe and tobacco with his first pay. His dour, hard-faced father was a kind man and industrial blacksmith in Bridgeton, then Glasgow’s east manufacturing quarter. Also an elder of a Congregationalist church, he taught Sunday schools and was a friend of Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP to enter Westminster. His sweet, plump, motherly wife had been a power-loom weaver before marriage, an excellent housewife after. Also in the group is a sturdy young girl, my Aunt Agnes, who worked all her life behind the counter of a bakery on London Road and never married.
In the 1914–18 war my dad lost faith in his parents’ God but they never quarrelled about that loss. His father had admired Gladstone and Keir Hardy – was both a Liberal and Labour Party supporter. In post-war Glasgow my dad naturally became a Socialist and the works of George Bernard Shaw converted him to Fabian, non-revolutionary Socialism. After a spell in Stobhill Hospital he received a small government pension for a shrapnel wound in the stomach, and held a job in Laird’s box-making factory until the Second World War. He joined the Ramblers’ Federation, Holiday Fellowship and other non-profit-making societies formed by people of many social classes who liked the inexpensive pleasures of walking, cycling and climbing. He was a founder member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association, did unpaid work as a hill guide and secretary for the Camping Club of Great Britain’s Scottish Branch. When climbing Sgurr Alasdair in Skye he was told the mountain’s name was Gaelic for Alexander, so it was given to me.
He met his wife in a small Holiday Fellowship group climbing Ben Lomond. Her name was Amy Fleming and a photograph shows her with her mother and father, Minnie Needham Fleming and Harry Fleming on the left, and on the right her younger sister, Annie. Minnie and Harry came from Northampton, where he had been a foreman boot-maker. He had also been an active trade unionist, and was sacked for it and put on the English employers’ blacklist. He found work by coming with his wife to Scotland, where their daughters were born. The photograph shows all four with two Holiday Fellowshippers, probably in the hills near Carbeth that overlook the Blane Valley. The sturdy man squatting in the heather is Bill Ferris, Dad’s philatelist friend, who had a weekend hut at Carbeth. My father is not in the picture but may have held the camera because he was a keen photographer and filled albums with photographs he took when hillwalking and climbing.
My mother Amy was a shop assistant in Campbell, Stuart and MacDonald’s clothing warehouse before marriage, becoming a housewife afterward for reasons already given. She loved music and when the opera came to Glasgow astonished her less daring younger sister (my Aunt Annie) by having a different boyfriend take her to it several nights in one week. She sang in Hugh Robertson’s Orpheus Choir and I am still haunted by the words and tunes of the songs she sang at home. Her wide circle of women friends contained most neighbouring houses, for she had a pleasant discretion that never passed on malicious gossip, so was trusted