Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘… And it will establish democracy on the sound foundation of social enlightenment and individual freedom,’ he said.

  The committee room was thirsty. Hugh Bawn got to his feet. He took out a small piece of paper from his glasses case. He spoke very clearly. He was furious.

  ‘Thank you for that interesting peroration, Mr Argyll. We might come to thank you for your efforts to restrain Mr Hitler, and will trust to your information that Mr Stalin is no better. It might do us well to admire a man so discriminating as yourself, and one, into the bargain, who upholds the highest standards of democracy. So all of this being the case, I wonder if I might ask you one or two questions related to your recent travelling expenses claim …’

  *

  Hugh met Margaret on the boat to Rothesay. It was a works outing. They sailed into the Clyde Firth on the Glen Sannox; they saw a dolphin in the water. The wind out there had a life of its own. But softly, softly it blew.

  Rothesay had a salt-water swimming pool.

  The crowd went there. All arms and legs and laughing faces, a flotsam of glee in the holiday soup. Margaret wore the most elegant costume: pink and blue, a short frilly skirt, a flower, a posy, sewn around her waist. Fats Waller called from the corner tannoys. At the shallow end, with their hair in caps, the girls from Typing did the jitterbug in twos.

  It was 1939.

  Hugh sat in the spectators’ row reading a newspaper. Margaret says she saw him first. His nice clean hair over the paper. The whole crowd later went to a variety show at the Winter Gardens. Old Glasgow songs. Gangs of tartan clowns. Men dressed as women, and women dressed as Germans.

  Margaret came and sat beside Hugh. A shy smile, she said later. A lovely smile, he said. Brilliant eyes and a talker to match, she said. A funny girl, he said, and the loveliest teeth he’d ever seen on anybody. And pure, he thought. And smells nice, she thought. They sneaked outside, and went for a walk along the promenade. Ice-creams. Lovely here, she said. Light going over the water. Down that day from a croft near the town of Muir of Ord, she said. A Highlander, he thought. She had come on the outing with a friend from the typing pool.

  ‘What is your surname, Margaret?’

  ‘Dargan,’ she said, ‘like the town of Ballydargan. But my folk have always lived in the Highlands.’

  A Catholic, he thought.

  ‘Did you go to school in Glasgow?’ she said.

  ‘St Mungo’s,’ he said.

  She smiled at the water, green turning brown. He loved the way she spoke. It was singing. She was bold. He put his mouth in her hair and they leaned on the railings. He could see a light giving out on the mainland.

  A nice kisser, she said. Noise coming down from the hotels. Let’s go back to the boat early, he said, and sit up there on the deck, he said, and talk, he said, for a while.

  And that was that.

  Margaret told her mother she would marry a brilliant man. After Rothesay Hugh bombarded her with letters. He thought of her every day. She chewed her nails in Muir of Ord. But then one day she decided. She took her pictures down from the wall. She packed a suitcase. She came on the train to Glasgow. Her friend from the Corporation gave her a key.

  Famie liked her. She helped her to a job at the Singer factory. And in six months’ time Margaret and Hugh were married in St Andrew’s Cathedral.

  Rapid clouds of starlings flew over the seven bridges.

  Margaret was different. Her family were gentle people. They liked to put pictures around their house, and the flowers of the field on the kitchen table. Her father read from novels when the plates were cleared. They had doctors in the family, and crofters; the sort of people, she said, who had followed Charles Edward Stuart to the water’s edge. And she knew all the songs. She knew the songs like she knew herself.

  Margaret told me once of her last days at Muir of Ord. She would go down the glen with her drawing book and her colours, beyond the fir trees and the water over stones, to the open spaces, with bell heather thick on the ground. And there she would bend and put an ear to the earth. She would listen, she said. She would listen for ages. And then she would try to paint what she heard. Rabbits and eagles and salmon and wind: the sound of her own blood turning.

  She would paint the weather. She would paint other worlds, shoes.

  The thought of the city.

  She loved the women in Bunty Cadell’s pictures: white-faced, harrowing. Their black hats. She had seen those pictures in postcards and prints. The women with shoes and low hats and necks, the women with pearls that go on for miles.

  A Shambellie pug, a bather, a negro – a potted plant.

  Cadell had shown her a world that was new. A new Scotland. She wanted those colours. As much as to say …

  Change. She wanted to know about change.

  Her father kept a scrapbook. He filled it up with the current day: Glasgow boxers, London princesses. Maggie looked at the pages with a kind of yearning. One of the scraps was a letter cut from a newspaper. The writer was a woman, Lady Constance Emmott; she hated all the recent Scottish painters. She called it the ‘New Bolshevism in Colour’. She said they were not fit for public view. ‘Screaming farces in scarlet, bismuth pink, Reckitt’s blue …’

  Maggie loved those paintings. They were everything to her. I can see my grandmother with those clippings, as me with mine. She wanted to know that world. She wanted to live in those colours.

  When she met Hugh Bawn she was ready for life. Margaret looked for the place the world turned. She knew very little about her new husband. But she knew about herself. She wanted to be modern.

  Hugh failed to get into the army. Something to do with his ears. He just made plans for after the war was over. And he spent his nights doing sums in the blackout. His cupboard in Shettleston; his collection of metal bells.

  The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour he was called to Grace Drive. Famie was dying.

  ‘What are the planes doing?’ she asked as Hugh came into her room. She was in the bed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ma. There’s planes in every country now. You’ll hear the siren.’

  ‘Stupid pigs and bastards,’ she said. Her eye was wild.

  ‘Just settle, Ma,’ Hugh said. ‘You’re going to be all right.’ He tucked the blanket in around her. She opened and closed her mouth. Her hair was grey and loose on the pillow.

  ‘We’re in a guddle now,’ she said. said. ‘Time’s it? Well and good, young man.’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Hugh.

  ‘We marched to a drum and brought the wind into the street. Did I tell ye, son? We know the laws of God, we know … we …’

  ‘Take your time,’ said Hugh. ‘You’re all right.’ Famie wasn’t old. Hugh couldn’t believe she was as bad as she seemed. The doctor said she’d a fever. You felt her just slipping out to another place. Everything was jumbled.

  ‘I can sew a curtain up the best you’ll see,’ she said. ‘I ken the whitework, and the clean up your houses will you not? Now mind me. You can never expect the weans to breathe a clean them to the good soap and

  Her eye was gone.

  ‘… next to God the only scunner when the new windows in and … every man’s the drinks the last to spend a good for Leuchars Station … better … and if your good houses for people … the trouble to a hundred thousand more in all St Michael and St Mungo rage and all the time … just us … just us … just us.’

  She held Hugh’s hand, he said, tight. She wouldn’t let it go. There was a panic on Famie’s face at the end no doubt. She had speeches, but they wouldn’t come, and those who gathered heard only fragments. She repeated things. And then in the night she mumbled for God; she mumbled for God and the girl she once was. Famie’s last voice was a voice going quickly. The words piled up to the ceiling at Grace Drive. And St Mungo looked down from the wall, a salmon bent across his hands.

  ‘Who are as we forgive those in our day our day Our Father our day from every evil our bread on earth as hallowed be Father Our Father who in our d
ay our daily bread in heaven our art our is in heaven our as it is in heaven.’

  Hugh was beside her. He held up a blue bowl for her sickness. She let out a kind of sigh and then her breathing ended. And that was her gone. Hugh sat with his head on her hand for an hour. There was a spit of rain outside; the waters of May.

  Hugh asked the Society of St Vincent de Paul to take everything from Govan. They upped the clothes one day after the funeral, and the sticks of furniture. Hugh took away the tins of papers and all the photographs. They gave the map of Cork to an old woman on the next stair whose son played for Celtic. Margaret took two things to the Shettleston house: the washboard and a wicker carpet beater. ‘If Effie had a coat of arms, these would be on it,’ Margaret said.

  Hugh gave no answer. For him the sight of the empty flat in Grace Drive was a vision of evermore. He felt like someone alone in the world. So much of their lives had taken place in these two rooms. He knew the very shadows on the walls like brothers. The talk of the waterpipes, the squeak of the boards, all his young years.

  Hugh had become a powerful man. He was a councillor now, yet he stood alone in the kitchen on that last day, and he felt like nothing. He felt like nobody now that Famie had gone. Past conversations and laughter and radio noise burned through the air. The flowers on the wallpaper were fresh as today’s. The taps dripped. Hugh switched off the light and stood there black. With both hands against the wall, he leaned in and kissed the plaster. He kissed it cold. He felt the years against his cheek. He turned to the door. Early in the new year half the street was bombed to the ground.

  The war years made a tough politician of Hugh. The great housing speeches of his youth were now hardened with personal expertise. He wore rosettes for the Labour Party. He doted on National Health.

  My father Robert was born in 1943. There are schools of thought (my granny’s, my mother’s) that say Hugh never liked his son from the word go. The only thing the boy cared for was football. He had no interest in politics. He hated all talk of buildings and housing; he once said that the only house he’d like to live in was the one that overlooked Celtic Park. Hugh hated that talk, and held it against Robert for years. ‘That boy has no vision,’ he’d say. ‘Maybe if we could roll up the future, make it into something he could kick, well maybe then …’

  Labour was made from men like Hugh. They came into their own after the war. My granda used his connections to attract thousands of new workers to the building industry. The time had come. Glasgow would build. Hugh’s plans seemed to embody all the lessons of the past: the gains of three decades, the losses of the war. He invented a motto for the City Housing Department: ‘The maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time.’

  As the great housing evangelist – the captain of modern living – Hugh became even more rigorous about his own person. He hardly ate. He lived off squares of luncheon meat and swills of tea. He swallowed sugar lumps. His mother’s high standards in cleanliness and domestic order were often spoken of. Hugh came into his stride; he worked out costings and measurements on the reverse of every document in the house. On old bills, sweet wrappers. My father hardly saw him. Hugh came home late and worked in his cupboard for hours. He would often get up in the middle of the night. He’d stare out the window.

  Hugh spent the 1950s clearing space for prefabs. For years the city vibrated to the sound of diggers and pneumatic drills. Old powdery tenements fell to the ground. Whole townships cleared away. It became part of the noise of Glasgow. To some folk the new music coming out of the wireless sounded like Hugh Bawn’s drills. There were half-chewed buildings on every street. Dangling floorboards.

  People would think: Jesus Christ.

  Burst walls, the marks of picture frames, the shadow of a crucifix. Decades of wallpaper peeling under clouds of dust. An open fireplace mouth. You could see suddenly how close people’s rooms had been, how thin were the floors and partitions. A sliver of wall. A bandage of plaster. You could see the remnants of hours now gone. The broken glass, the light-leavened panes. The shards of mirror: each one containing a memory of eyes.

  Hugh finally found his machines for living in.

  High-rises. Multi-storeys. Tower blocks.

  Boyhood drawings of Wheatley’s Scotland came back to his mind. Perfect streets, but up in the sky. For years he’d been trying to bring a clean breeze to the people of Glasgow. Now he had it. He’d bring them up to the breeze itself. The 1960s found Hugh at his clearest (and highest) aspiration. All his modern training, all his modern thought, had readied him for this: tower blocks.

  For our nature must change, said Hugh to himself. That was his great feeling. He had grasped the politics, grasped the materials, but only now, with his advocacy of the high flats, did he come to grasp the central thing.

  ‘We must make ourselves all over again.’

  Rub out the past.

  ‘And what are we here for if not for progress? If not for change!’

  Join the air. High over Glasgow we can look down on who we were before. Who our people were. And by climbing high we escape our troubles. We leave the past and its rubble below.

  Open space. We need those houses. Thousands of them. Closer the moon, closer the warming sun.

  ‘You can see the sea from Roystonhill.’

  Closer to heaven, closer to God and his big blue hand. Tower blocks: nearer the saints who know our failings.

  Hugh Bawn was put in charge of the high-buildings programme in Glasgow. A small group of them, architects and planners, engineers and tradesmen, were to oversee it, with Hugh the guiding light, the president laird. They met in yellow offices, behind blinds, and spoke of the coming wars. They knew a thing about leverage and bolts, but Hugh gave them philosophy. He gave them reason. Some of that group would laugh, years later, looking back: Hugh Bawn thought he was Napoleon.

  The people called him Mr Housing. The paper called them skyscrapers.

  Skyscrapers. Even the word made you feel part of a bigger universe. In the yellow room the Bawn group talked of Le Corbusier. ‘We’ve been slow to catch on,’ said Hugh. ‘We’ve been working up to this.’

  He would thrill the councillors with talk of Berlin and Chicago and Copenhagen.

  ‘In Glasgow we have made a promise,’ he said. Public housing. Made by the people for the people. The maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time! Let us move quickly in these months and years ahead. This modern housing will not only change the way we live; it will change who we are. Let us reach upward.’

  And that was that. Glasgow was remade. A city of modern dreaming; Hugh Bawn’s high-tech castles in the air.

  *

  The flat-roofed pub at the corner; all that was left of many a tenement street. Robert, my father, drank in them from a young age. He liked the company of older men. He hated all that roaring business of New. Margaret worked in a Candleriggs flower shop; she was proud of her famous husband. She worried though; he was so often lost in his plans. He was such a bad eater. She always worried about these things, even at the start of his high-rise crusade. But she loved him fair arid square. They’d a secret world: history, flowers, meadows, streams. Surely one day their son would come round. Poor Robert. He was just silly for himself.

  My father met my mother in a queue at the post office. She was looking for someone to be saved by. Hugh only met her a handful of times. Robert hated his father. He thought he was a dictator. ‘A selfish, crazy bastard,’ he said. When my parents got married they didn’t even speak to Hugh. He was banned from the wedding. ‘Fuck him,’ said Robert. ‘Fuck him to hell, the bastarding pest.’

  My father found it easy to hate his own father; he had much more ease, in that sorry business, than his own son ever would have. But Robert and Hugh were a thing in themselves: they’d carry their angers into the grave.

  They say it was quiet, my parents’ wedding. Ten minutes in Martha Street, a drink in a hotel, and then they sloped off on a train down south. They never wanted to come back at all. A
nd for years and years they never came near. They found a house by a Berwick pub. And two years on, the trouble: me.

  In the rivermouth of Berwick he tumbled down, drinking the waves. Northumberland’s disputed waters. Thirteen times the town had changed hands: England, Scotland, England again. My voice cried out in the local hospice; a loud breach-baby in the English morning.

  *

  My granda used to pin his favourite tenant’s letters to the wall of his cupboard. I have one of them here.

  Dear Councillor Bawn,

  You should go walking around the city more often and see the space that is being wasted on God knows. People have prefabs with big gardens. No need for big gardens with people desperate for new houses, and all with kids as well. You say you have looked high and low for new building sites but let me tell you there are some. Do we need the car parks? Bad planning is behind all the misery. Demolish all the prefabs and get on with the high flats. To hell with the gardens. Homes are all that matters here. Let us see action in 1968 and for God’s sake let the mothers have peace of mind with a decent home. There would be less deaths and murders and mental patients.

  Yours faithfully,

  Mary McCandlish,

  Castlemilk.

  That was one of the first letters I ever saw. I remember reading it over and over. It was up on Hugh’s wall when I first came to his house in Shettleston. I was little more than five. Hugh let me play with his rulers.

  ‘There’s a boy,’ he said to Margaret.

  I came from England on the train; my mother was keen for me to know my grandparents. She was smart that way. But she and Robert would never come along. Of course not. It was the middle of the dark ages. I would be put on the train at one end. Passing over the fields, fields like the ones I saw with Mrs Drake. I changed in Edinburgh to a slower train. Hugh and Margaret would be standing on the platform when the train drew into Glasgow. The Central Station smelled of diesel and teas. The noise was exciting. A man’s voice, like someone good and easy, the man’s voice, coming out of the air saying places, the names of the places in Scotland.