From Carman I could see the Leven flooding out of the Loch at Balloch Pier and snaking its way to the Clyde. It is only five miles from Balloch to Dumbarton as the crow flies, but the Leven takes seven serpentine miles to get there. Just down there, due east of Carman, it twisted completely back on itself at Cordale Point and again at Dalquhurn Point. And it was swift. We were told that only the Spey was faster, so we should respect our river. The Leven was swift not only because of the colossal force of the water that poured into it from Loch Lomond, the largest lake in Britain, but also because it flowed down, descending twenty-six feet from its source at Balloch to its exit into the Clyde at Dumbarton. All five towns along the river were obvious to me from up here. On the east side, going south from the loch, Balloch – really only a village – was clear; then came the small towns of Jamestown and Bonhill. Coming back west over the river, I could make out the Victorian hump of Bonhill Bridge, the link to Alexandria, the newest and biggest of the five towns of the Vale, a creature of the bleaching and dyeing industries that had established themselves along the Leven early in the eighteenth century. On this side of the river, back up the way to the loch, was the factory where my father worked. It had a Gaelic name, Croftengea, after a mighty oak tree that was reputed to have been a gathering place for the local clan, but to everyone in the Vale it was known as the Craft, a rambling, dilapidated dye works owned by the United Turkey Red Company.
Up on my hill, I pictured my father in there, dyeing bales of cloth hour after hour; and I would wonder what colour he’d come home tonight. He’d strip to the waist and wash himself down at the kitchen sink, and I’d furtively examine his small, wiry body. Then he’d eat the meal my mother had cooked for him, and fall asleep in his chair by the fireside. Everyone called him Wee Arthur because he was only a couple of inches over five foot. He was admired by everyone. I admired him too; but I longed for a more heroic figure for a father, big and heavily muscled like our neighbour John McGlashan, a physical training instructor in the army and a champion welterweight boxer. Mammy had told me that Daddy had been a long-distance runner when he was young, and that he would walk twenty miles a day without noticing it when he was looking for work before the war. I liked to hear that, but I wanted him to be bigger. He was back in the factory in which he had served his time as a block-printer when he was a boy – but not now as a tradesman. They no longer printed cloth by hand the way he had been taught. Though his trade was obsolete, he’d held on to the short lead mallets that were the tools of his craft. They were kept under the bed in the kitchen recess, wrapped in a bit of cloth. Why did he hold onto them? I wondered. He was a labourer now, maybe what they called a skilled labourer, but he did not complain. Actually, he didn’t say much at all, except when he had a drink in him; then he could be talkative and amusing. I liked him, knew he was a good father. He worked hard for us. It was only that I wanted a more heroic figure, larger in scale. But Wee Arthur he was, working all the hours there were, down there in the Craft or Croftengea.
Alexandria was not a Gaelic name like Croftengea, nor was Renton, down the road from it on the west side of the Leven, the fifth of the towns along the river. The dominant family in the area in the eighteenth century were the Smolletts, the most famous of them being Tobias, the novelist. We were told that our street was named after his most famous novel, Roderick Random – whether true or not, it was certainly true that our town got its name from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Smollett, Member of Parliament for Dunbartonshire in the late eighteenth century, and the son of Alexander Smollett and Celia Renton, after whom Renton was named.
It was easy to make out Random Street from Carman Hill. All I had to do was find Alexandria Station, which was at the foot of the street, and trace it back up to where it met Mitchell Street, the crescent that linked Main Street with Bank Street. Random Street was one of the oldest streets in Alexandria. Bits of it went back to the early 1800s, and we lived in one of those bits, a row of red sandstone cottages, each habitation a room and kitchen, a ‘but-and-ben’ in local parlance. They went back to the days when farming was the only industry in the Vale. There was no lighting in the room at the back where the three of us children usually slept, apart from the window onto the back, but we had a gas light in the kitchen, above the fireplace. You turned the gas on with a wee tap at the side, applied a match flame to the white mantle in the lamp, and a quiet light suffused the room. That room was the scene of many singsongs after the war. Uncle Harry, my father’s favourite brother, was back from North Africa and working beside him in the Craft. They spent Saturday evenings together in the pub at the bottom of the street and brought a carry-out back to the house when the pub closed. The family told me I had a good voice, and I was urged to go through the repertoire of songs I had memorised from the wireless.
Yours till the stars lose their glory
Yours till the birds cease to sing
Yours till the end of life’s story
This pledge to you, dear, I bring.
Then there was, ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and ‘Bless This House O Lord We Pray’. As an encore, and without embarrassment, I’d sing:
My mother’s name was Mary
She was so good and true
Because her name was Mary
She called me Mary too.
My mother, whose name was Mary, would watch me fiercely, drawing deeply on her Woodbine, eyes brimming. But she was the real singer. Though untrained, she had a true and powerful soprano voice that years of heavy smoking never diminished. She came into her own on Hogmanay, when we gathered round the fire in the kitchen to bring in the New Year. When midnight came and our first-foot had sunk his dram, someone would say, ‘Mary, gie us a song’ and all eyes would turn to her. She’d stub out her cigarette and start, and it was always the same song she’d start with:
Bonny Scotland I adore thee
tho’ I’m far across the sea
and when loneliness creeps o’er me
my thoughts fly back tae thee
and in fancy I can see ye yet
your lovely heather braes
reminds me o’ departed joys
brings back sweet memories
Scotland, Scotland,
Scotland aye sae braw
my hairt is aye in Scotland
tho’ I’m sae far awa
take me back amang the wildwood
and roon the rowan tree
oh take me tae my ain wee hoose
that’s aye sae dear tae me
sae dear tae me, sae dear tae me
that’s aye sae dear tae me.
And there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the room. It was a strange thing, missing Scotland when we were right there in the middle of it, being overwhelmed with homesickness when we were sitting in our own kitchen before a blazing fire. Wherever it came from, this sadness is rooted in the Scottish soul:
how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing . . . the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years . . . it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs.11
The wee house my mother seemed to be mourning even as we lived there was 31 Random Street, and it became legendary in our memories. I have an old photograph of it, and am surprised to see that the pavement outside the cottage is not made up. Kerbstones separate it from the roadway, certainly, but the sidewalk is made of packed earth and crushed stones. On the opposite side of the street from us there was a terrace of two-storied tenements, with outside stairs round the back to the flats on the upper floor. They were characteristic of the town as a whole, and reflected its industrial growth. There were some handsome public buildings in the Vale, but most of the houses were in two-storied terraces like the ones in Random Street. Better-off people had bigger houses up the hill above Main Street – on Middleton Street and Smollett Street – but even here there wasn’t much that was really grand or pretentious. And everything was near everything else. On a winter morning I went up Mit
chell Street and across Main Street to Rennie’s Bakery to buy rolls. The shop wouldn’t be open, so I’d go to the bakehouse round the back, where I’d stand in the warmth and watch them pulling the trays of hot rolls out of the ovens with long wooden poles. There was a Co-op store in Mitchell Street, and a fishmonger’s and butcher’s on Main Street. We bought sweeties at Goodwin’s corner shop at the top of the street, where you could pay into a club for presents at Christmas. There was a greengrocer’s in Bank Street, and other shops at the Fountain, a memorial to Alexander Smollett, which sat in the middle of the road between Main Street and Bank Street. But I haven’t yet mentioned the buildings that were of particular interest to my mother and me, the picture houses.
My mother was addicted to the pictures, a habit I inherited. She usually took me with her twice a week, and Helen sometimes came too. Gertie was now a working woman with a boyfriend serving his time as a joiner, and they were both keen dancers, so the movie habit never hit my big sister. I got it badly and it stuck. Mammy and I would check the Lennox Herald, the local weekly paper, for the listings, but I don’t think we were very discriminating and would sit through just about anything. It was an escape into romance and fantasy for me; but what was it for my mother? I suspect now it was the same for her. There was always something eager and unsatisfied about her, as if she was trying to compensate for a great loss somewhere and was filling her pockets before the sweetie shop closed for ever. An attractive, volatile, charismatic woman, she was the emotional centre of my life and I can still recall her most frequent endearment. She told me repeatedly that I was her wee ton of bricks. I loved her and hated to be separated from her. I knew the outline of her history, of course, but it was only after her death that I was able to fill in the detail.
At ten she had been orphaned and sent to Quarriers Home in Bridge of Weir, south-west of Glasgow. I have a copy of the page from the ledger of admissions that recorded her entry to the orphanage on 4 September 1917.
Mary Johnston Luke born 7th April 1907 at 12 Vernon Street, Glasgow & Violet Vallance born 30th January 1910 at 124 High Craighead Road. Presently in care of Mrs Docherty, 220 Possil Road, Glasgow. They were in contact with Whooping Cough and are just discharged from the Observation House, South York Street. Mary is by a former marriage but known as Vallance.
Father of Mary is James Luke, Iron Moulder, deceased. Father of Violet, William Vallance, No 8254 Pte. 46th Infantry Brigade B.E.F. France; presently in Stobhill Hospital.
Mother Christina Vallance, formerly Luke, M.S. Johnston, 37 years, died at 202 Possil Road on 6th Aug 1917 of Heart Failure. She had been drinking and pawned the children’s clothing.
George, 3 years, is in Ruchill Hospital with Whooping Cough. He is to be cared for by Mrs John Kyle, 214 Possil Road by the father’s arrangement.
The ledger states that there were no relatives willing to care for the three children, though the entry names an aunt and an uncle. The records at Quarriers note that Mr and Mrs Vallance had taken out an insurance policy against being unable to care for their children. Mr John Gray of the Hand in Hand Insurance Society, 150 Hope Street, Glasgow, made the arrangements for the children’s admission and for the appropriate allowance to be paid to Quarriers, then known as The Orphan Homes of Scotland. They also record that before his return to France, Private Vallance arranged for George’s admission to the orphanage. Violet is noted as having ‘Hip Joint Disease’, for which she was wearing a plaster cast and using crutches to walk.
A later entry in the ledger goes on to record that on 7 May 1919, Mary and George were discharged to Mr William Vallance, then living in a ‘damp’ basement room at 30 Kelvinside Avenue, Maryhill. His occupation was given as a Lead Works Labourer, but the recorder noted that he had been unemployed since coming back from the war and was receiving Unemployment Benefit. My mother can hardly have known her stepfather when she and George were released into his care a month after her twelfth birthday. He had been a regular soldier in the HLI or Highland Light Infantry, the famous Glasgow regiment of wee hard men, and he had fought in France throughout the war. She was never explicit about what life was like for her in the basement in Kelvinside Avenue, but we could tell it hadn’t been easy. By the time Violet was released to Bill Vallance on 26 September 1926 my mother was long gone. At eighteen she had already met and married my father. Violet and Granda went on living in the room on Kelvinside Avenue till his death in 1959, and Violet long after that. We visited them frequently on trips to Glasgow from the Vale. I remember going to the back of the close, then down a few steps to the basement room, which looked out onto the back court. Violet, who used crutches all her life, kept it ‘scruptiously clean’, as my mother put it. My memory of those Maryhill visits was of the heroic quantities of Scotch broth Violet made to celebrate our coming.
They were an unlikely couple, my parents, and not only because she was several inches taller. Where she was volatile, exciting, dangerous, Daddy was stoic, calm, uncomplaining, the steady parent. He was the third of eight children, five boys and three girls, born to Richard Holloway and Mary Buchanan, who had married in 1901. But there was a twist in his story, too. Sometime during the 1920s his father emigrated to New York, taking with him his son Dick and daughters Jessie and Beatty, leaving the other five – Tommy, Arthur, Joe, Gertie and Harry – in Scotland with my granny. There was a rumour that he had found another woman in America. Whatever the truth of it, he never came back, and for the rest of her life my granny was supported by the children who stayed in Scotland. Already intrigued by America from my movie habit, our own history made what lay on the other side of the Atlantic even more compelling. In fact, I sometimes felt I knew America better than Scotland.
What I knew, of course, was the America I saw on the screen at the Strand, the picture house in Bank Street to which I went too frequently, either on my own or with my mother. You could see what was presented on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then go again when they changed the show for Thursday, Friday, Saturday. There were two houses each night, between which they cleared the cinema, though I sometimes managed to hide in the lavatory during the interval and see the show all over again. Most of my continuous movie memories are from the Strand. It was there I saw the Bud Abbott and Lou Costello comedies during the war, as well as the road movies featuring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, whose very name triggered mysterious longings in me. And it was to the Strand we went for the Saturday morning matinees, whose audiences of children maintained a decibel level that drowned out the soundtrack.
There was another picture house in Alexandria, one that holds a particular memory. The Hall was down at the bottom of Bridge Street, directly opposite Bonhill Bridge. It was in the Hall that I remember clearly seeing The Jolson Story, because the event is attached to an electrifying memory. We were a group of twelve-year-old boys, but one of us was more developed than the rest of us and had a girlfriend, whom he brought with him to the Jolson film, and in whose hole, so he claimed later, he had kept his fingers throughout the film. You don’t forget a boast as unthinkable as that, one that served to confirm the erotic complexity of going to the pictures. In a society that afforded little privacy, the darkness of the cinema was a good place for sexual exploration. A rigid protocol covered the moves, all of them made by the male: the arm casually draped along the back of the girl’s seat; the dropping of the hand onto the girl’s shoulder; if this is not repulsed, the hand clasps the shoulder and gently pulls the girl closer (easier if you are in the two-seat divans in the back row unofficially designated for necking couples). If you got that far, kissing could start, though it was years before I knew what else might follow. But the darkness of the cinema also provided scouting opportunities for sexual predators.
We were well equipped with picture houses in the Vale. As well as the Strand and the Hall in Alexandria, there was the Roxy in Renton, a fleapit of last resort entered only if there was nothing worth seeing elsewhere. It was Dumbarton that had the really classy places. Opposite the b
ridge that brought you into town was the Picture House, high above a grand staircase. It was there I saw Blood and Sand in the early years of the war, featuring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, though it was Linda Darnell with whom I was smitten. At the other end of the town, in a vennel opposite the Burgh Hall, there was the Regent, which specialised in Westerns. In the middle of the town, in College Street, there was the Rialto, which I associated with sword and sandal epics, though it was there I saw The Outlaw, a Western whose main interest lay in shots of Jane Russell’s cantilevered breasts. Though I can’t remember the film I went to see on the occasion in question, it was in the Rialto I encountered the darker side of going to the movies.
Leaving Alexandria Page 3