Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  There was silence in all the greenhouses, as the lamps began to swing on their hooks, the great crowd approaching, singing their song. The morning mist had swirled at the stanks, and then disappeared, clearing the streets, and the rumble of feet grew louder and louder. Up on the road they marched to a drum. The fences shook to the beat of them coming. A bad day for statues of Gladstone and St George, but not so bad for the women of Glasgow, who came in a tide …

  An anarchy of parasols, or faces free to the open air.

  They came in a tide. Elbow to elbow in their thousands.

  ‘I was there,’ said Hugh. ‘And I hear the noise.’

  Placards high for all to see, and down among the citadels of St Enoch’s the procession passes, the clamour rises, brushing the fronts of those ornate buildings with their clocks insensible, and into Buchanan Street. The thousands of women were shouting now, and all the tramcars stopped in their lines, to roar them on, and roar them on, the wind coming in from the Campsie Hills to choke the streets, and drunken men they laughed at the roadside, hollering out at the very display of these women.

  Yes and the housing managers hung from their high balconies on Royal Exchange Square thinking surely not. And surely not.

  The watchmakers and jewellers they pulled down their shutters for fear of a riot.

  The tops of buildings saw a snaking legion, saying no and no and no.

  Hugh remembered the fur collars and black gloves of the women in George Square, and the easy smiles of that day, a metallic gleam on top of the Post Office building. Effie held one side of a banner: WE ARE FIGHTING LANDLORD HUNS. There were many others, drawn in her own home paints, THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IS LAW. Mrs Ferguson’s crowd from Partick passed out button-badges and pamphlets.

  OUR HUSBANDS, SONS AND BROTHERS ARE FIGHTING THE PRUSSIANS OF GERMANY. WE ARE FIGHTING THE PRUSSIANS OF PARTICK. ONLY ALTERNATIVE – MUNICIPAL HOUSING.

  Netta Laurie was one of the characters of the time. She held up the other end of Effie’s banner. In those early days she smoked a pipe, she had bright orange hair, and deep in her frock there cowered a half quart of whisky. In years to come she would tour the temperance halls of the country. She would offer a personal tale of redemption, and include the news that Effie Bawn was the nicest person to live in Glasgow since St John Ogilvie. But before that day as a reformed woman, she would rinse her cloths in Barlinnie Prison, for other niceness, and other reform. She incited a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station.

  Netta held young Hugh in her arms. His mother climbed on a truck. She had words for the crowd, and was sure of them. But heaven knows she was shaking.

  ‘We know the laws of God well enough about here,’ she said, ‘and we know that justice will be ours, and is harmful only to them whose business it has been to profit by ignoring it.’ The women’s faces looked up at her.

  ‘My man is just now at the Belgian Front. God bless him. And bless them all, if we’re ever to see them again. But whatna country sends its men to war and throws their wives and weans out in the street? The soldier fights for his country and the broker calls for his furniture. Women of Glasgow, see it plain. We will not be paying these higher rents. We are not answering to hun landlords. We are not removing. We know that justice will be ours, and we will pay the cheaper rent, and we will work, and our men will work. These tenements are barely fit to live among, never mind to starve in, for want of the extra rent. We have people to be proud of, and one day we might have houses the same. Come the day we have a room to live in, and one to die in. But in the meantime, we are not removing. God bless.’

  The papers quoted her word for word. Effie on the back of that lorry. The crowd heard something of her Ayrshire vowels and saw the tears upon her. Some of them waved their good lace hankies then hushed to silence at the way she spoke. And they remembered her. A room to die in. Not many people had said that before. But our Famie’s words went out to their hearts, and when she stepped down a roar went up, a women’s roar to puzzle the sky. Hugh was oblivious to the meaning of words. But he said he noticed the Post Office roof. It shone for the world like a tray of diamonds.

  Lloyd George got the message of that day. And the Rent Restrictions Bill was not long in marking the books. Famie liked to say they had given Lloyd George something to talk about. They gave him a subject: Housing. But Famie was like Lloyd George in that way. She had needed something too. The women of Govan gave her a subject, a reason beyond her own scarred mind. She always laughed at Lloyd George. But she carried in her purse a snip from a London newspaper. They quoted a speech in Wolverhampton.

  ‘What is our task?’ he said. ‘To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in. That is the first problem. One of the ways of dealing with that is, of course, to deal with the housing conditions. Slums are not fit homes for the men who have won this war, or for their children.’

  Famie became a Glasgow councillor. After 1918 it was her own speeches she read in the papers. She was a builder of the Labour Party. She didn’t want to go with her friends, the Independents, and she chose not to call herself a Communist. ‘The Labour Party will show the way,’ she said. ‘We live in a socialist country, and that will never change.’ And from this time on Effie worked all the hours; her days, and many of her nights, were given over to Health and Housing.

  ‘Give the people fresh air …’

  That was what she said.

  ‘Fresh Air. Windows. Gardens. Clean bedding.’

  Famie was the Emmeline Pankhurst of Fumigation: ‘Lady Panshine’ herself. The new Corporation houses would be a part of heaven. Lightsome, immaculate, free of corruption. Fields of whiteness, boxes of air.

  She made them believe it.

  Boxes of air. The only movement: our own clean thoughts and limbs. And the breath of God, a sterile hush, that drops from the clouds, and winnows through trees, a rush of coolness over the lochs, and up from the Clyde, that comes to caress the souls, the lungs, of her people sleeping.

  Thomas died at Ypres, that was all. They said he expired in a gas attack. To Famie he died on St Finbar’s Day. A letter came from an Englishman. It said that Tommy had worked with the pigeons. Tommy got done for running away. They gave him the ‘D’ on the back. It was a liberty. Tommy was a good sort. One of the last men …

  ‘You sounded so nice, what he said about you. We played at cards. I thought you would want these things. Some folk prefer the truth as well.’

  They branded the ‘D’ on his back. All the men were sick. Tommy was a good sort. He needed a drink. Poor Tommy Bawn. They took away his pigeons.

  Thomas had written a note to Famie. He never got it sent. But the man from England sent it to Govan, inside a bag, inside an army envelope.

  A pencil stub, a St Christopher medal. Thomas’s note was folded to nothing; the size of a penny black postage stamp.

  My Dearest Famie Semple,

  I’ll tell you this is not the cow market in Dalry in this place. I shouldn’t joke this paper is too wee. I fair miss you and the bairn. I hope you’re taking your time and keeping all right Famie. You know I love you. The nights here I just think about us. Some day it will be just us. I bet you Glasgow has the good weather. Think about me. There are pipers here going up and down. A terrible din. Worse than shells.

  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear.

  Love Tam.

  From the age of four my granda Hugh would visit the socialist Sunday school. He loved it there. That was the place he learned all the songs. In a dusty room in the Pearce Institute the children sat round in a circle. They drew on slates. Young men in caps would come to talk about life in Russia, or show them the drawings of old men in beards.

  Sunlight spread on the floorboards. An old piano was cracked in the corner. There was warm lemonade.

  The weavers and martyrs were hung on plates. The past was held in evidence. But the world Hugh loved was a future world. A Scotland of turbines and giant engines. I asked him years later,
a beard himself, to name what his favourite sound was. It wasn’t a speech or a poem of Shelley’s. It wasn’t the sound of his wife doing Burns. That is not what he said that time. The sound that he liked was of metal on metal.

  That’s what he said: the hammering sound.

  I’m sure Hugh got that from his earliest days. He would hear it going to sleep at night, and hear it again in the morning. His boyhood was filled with a study of progress. He needed to know how things could work.

  He warmed to the empire of sugar and tea.

  ‘How much can they store in the hold?’ he’d ask.

  He made a study, at eleven years old, of the watering system in Bellahouston Park. He followed the gardeners in the hours before school. He wrote it all down. He worked out the water; he looked at the times. He sent them a letter to tell them the system was slow.

  His head was filled with abandoned canals and new reservoirs. He would try to work out the space they took up. He dreamed of ballbearings by the thousands of tons. And he went to John Brown’s to ask them for samples.

  ‘How many do you use in a week?’ he’d ask. And then he’d take out his pad and pencil.

  They gave him a handful and said goodbye.

  He carried his steel in a football sock. But he wouldn’t play with other kids, not at marbles or anything else. He’d carry his sock to a room of books. And he’d sit in the corner and learn about bridges.

  Hugh’s Glasgow was a paradise of train stations and carpet factories. The risen smoke. The people under glass. And the doors of trains and the gates of factories swang on hinges new-made in the workshops of Possil. People about their business, looking for groceries up the High Street, the pawn shops full of other people’s watches, his best Sunday suit, and next door a pyramid of pies, bridies, eggs. The years would speed past those glass-fronted shops. Boys grew up. The fashions changed. But some things were ever the same in Glasgow: in front of the shop, some man would lean, breathing sourly on the glass, his eyes gone to heaven in a pea-green boat.

  Hugh and his mother spent many weeks roaming the banks of Loch Lomond, enjoying her sufficiency of God’s clean air, and listening to the temperance speakers of the day. He remembered the tang of socialist lemonade, the wisdom of tea above all else. The children would raise their songs, playing their fingers over water and rocks at the loch’s edge, the sound of bullfinches, the ripple of fish, and the long grass so good to play and lie down in. The pictures stayed in his mind.

  A man scything brown bracken by the shallows of Dunoon. All the light at his back. The waves slapping up to his waders. The children singing. The man blacked out against the yellow of the sun with his bottle.

  ‘Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging!’

  The silver buttons of the well-doing children glinting across the loch.

  ‘Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging!’

  Famie said to the mothers in their braw bonnets, ‘Let us not forget our duty to the working people. Teetotallers of the world, run to their aid. There is nothing but glory and honour in the pledge. Children! You remember: “What may not a night bring forth?”’

  And Hugh’s gang would sing for the love of it, seeking glorification among the knotted whelks on the shore front. And sometimes a man with a bottle not far would see them and wonder, putting down his scythe, his hand over his eyes. The glinting buttons.

  Hugh always made time for himself growing up. Days on which he would climb alone to the high graveyards. Among the baroque tombs of the Necropolis he made his way with Lenin and Marx. A bagful of books, the sun not far up the horizon of Dennistoun, the young Hugh would sit, alone with his futures. He’d laugh at the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, gawp at the swish of Jack London.

  From here Hugh could see what the dead merchants at his back had made of the world. He could look down at the streets and buildings. He could think of the river; the ships preparing for India or New York.

  My granda found his voice among the living. His all-time hero was John Wheatley, the health and housing minister. Hugh had cut out a picture of Wheatley, sitting at a broad desk, his hair slick, his hands clasped. He pasted it into his socialist scrapbook. There was nothing so beautiful as Mr Wheatley’s plans for the new Glasgow cottage houses. Hugh had a picture of them in his mind. Glasgow cottages. Where other kids lighted their imaginations with Buck Rogers and Outer Space, Hugh’s was taken up with pictures of his own back yard, a place of well-oiled engines, and green belts, with rows of sharp modern houses, white sheets blowing on the line.

  This was the future. Mr Wheatley had plans for humanity. He knew how people might live. He was one of Famie’s tribe, Scottish, Catholic, and filled with the sense of improvement, a sense that grew out of his knowledge of woe, a story of hunger, and dirt, and loss. Hugh went up to St Mungo’s Academy. And Wheatley’s new housing schemes rose in the north of the city.

  Hugh made a father of John MacLean. Agitator, prisoner, the first Scottish consul to the new Soviet Union, MacLean gave classes in economics. Hugh was thinking about his father’s death, and every day he had wanted a father to talk to, but the German war had robbed them all. Hugh went to some of those lectures. He would sit near the front, with his scrapbook, his pencils, his copies of Forward! and The Builder, and he’d look at his father, John MacLean, and wish he could help him off with his coat. The ‘rightful hands’, the ‘means of production’: MacLean let his finger dangle in the air. Hugh was only yards away. He could smell the soap off John MacLean. Hugh sat with his papers and his baffled eyes. He was only ten.

  ‘The Irish are now part of what we are as a people. And here we must disagree with Mr Engels, and even further with Mr Carlyle. They wrote before the forces of history were ripe. Listen to the words of the former.’

  Mr MacLean would open a book. His face would be gaunt. And starting to read he would point at the crowd in the hall. ‘“These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend on drink. What does such a race want with high wages?”’

  MacLean would look up,

  ‘But this is not true of our people now. The Irish are among the strongest arms in our struggle. Their children are our best counsel. They will bring about a change in the economic system that subjugates their class.’

  Famie might not have liked that. She drifted in time from everything Irish. But Hugh listened to John MacLean that day. He was yards away. Hugh could smell the soap. He could smell the soap off John MacLean. And he wished he had John McLean for a father.

  *

  By the late 1920s Hugh was reaching beyond his political heroes, moving beyond his mother and his father. He’d had enough of most books. He wanted to build cities: monuments to what he already knew.

  He spoke about bricks and concrete, steel frames, ceiling tiles. And even then he had contacts. People knew him as a fine young man – a person who came from good people. But he didn’t want a job in an office. He didn’t want elections and speeches. Not then. He wanted to know the trades; he wanted a hand in the building revolution. His early career he spent making a wage on the building sites. He took labouring jobs, as the bricklayer’s boy, the plumber’s mate, writing secret notes on the tram back home, about problems, and prices, and waste.

  He described his young self in the fading hours.

  He saw himself as a pioneering doctor, a hero of the age, who had dwelt with the poor, and drunk the bad water, and tried for cures on his own sick body. Like a brilliant explorer, he pored over charts, and stresses and levels, in the twilight hours. And one fine morning he would roll from his bed. He would put on his boots. He’d find the North Pole. Ten years he worked as a dreaming spy. He seemed like a failure to those who had thought him
bright. But he mostly stayed quiet. He knew what he was doing.

  He spoke of aluminium and plywood, asbestos, plastics.

  He became a site foreman, a negotiator.

  Tradesmen always liked Hugh. But he never drank. He absorbed everything, he forgot nothing, and he studied hard at the kitchen table. He was odd, and he never said anything about himself, but he asked questions, and made the men feel their answers would go towards some larger project, some unstated business, drawn from their honest principles. On a Friday night he would drink a pint of lemonade at the bar. He would buy a round of beers for the men, and then he would leave, and go back to Govan, to brew the tea and drink it with his mother. He would show her his plans. One day he emerged as the person in charge of everything. And by then there was no one surprised.

  Hugh’s enemies (and even his friends) would often laugh at the way he spoke. He would harp on certain words. And some of these words turned up in his many nicknames. Condemned Bawn. Hughie Decay. The Developer. Shug the Scheme. Mr Housing.

  The Glasgow children in their classrooms would come to know these nicknames. Hugh Bawn of Govan. Mr Housing. The man who was building the city from scratch.

  In 1938 Hugh became the Corporation Advisor on Building Contracts and Materials. He sat on the committees, a quiet king of the memorandum. And he kept a keen eye on the housing department’s invoices. A professor of small details, and high ideals. He wanted the houses that money could buy.

  More and more for less and less. And all was to come from the public purse. He impressed the Director of Housing with his youthful disdain. Young Hughie Bawn, just before the War, handsome and fast in his tartan tie.

  There was one councillor, a moderate or a conservative, who was keen on the new private housing scheme at Garrowhill. This man believed that privately owned houses would, as he said …

  ‘… counteract the spread of Communistm and Fascism.’

  He read these concluding words from a pamphlet. It was an airless day at the Trongate Rooms.