The Hanging Shed
Gordon Ferris
The Hanging Shed
Gordon Ferris
ONE
There are no windows in a hanging shed. Only a sadistic architect would provide a last glimpse of the fair green hills. The same goes for paintings or potted plants. You’re unlikely to divert the condemned man from the business in hand with a nice framed ‘Monarch of the Glen’ or a genteel aspidistra. Besides, he’ll only visit once. Wearing a hood.
Before the war I was taken to the hanging shed of His Majesty’s Prison Barlinnie. Years after, I can close my eyes and recite every dismal detail and dimension as though they were tattooed on my eyelids.
Think of a clutch of grey monoliths scarring the countryside on the outskirts of Glasgow. Each solid rectangle studded with tiny barred windows, the roofs festooned with Victorian chimneys. Like houses drawn by an obsessive child. The whole ugly mass surrounded by a tall grey wall. Focus in on the central courtyard and the building known as D Hall. Inside is a standard prison set up: a high vaulted chamber with galleries facing each other across a gulf. Cells stud the walls on each level. Metal decks bridge the galleries. Metal staircases connect the levels.
There is one special cell on the third floor. Its occupant has nowhere to go except across the short bridge and through the plain wooden door on the other side. Take the walk. Go through the door. Eyes open.
Inside, the air is inert and the white walls press inwards. In the centre, set in the floor, is a trapdoor. Alongside, and surely connected, stands a lever. There are three square holes in the ceiling directly above the trap door. You can see the long retaining beam in the room above. A noosed rope dangles from the beam through the central hole. The two other holes gape invitingly, ready for rush hour in the hanging shed, three at once. Jostling for position on the trap door.
Today a lone figure stands on a chalked T in the centre of the trap. A broad leather strap binds the upper body. A hood covers the head. The noose is draped over the hood and round the neck. Soft leather coats the noose. No abrasions here for a tender neck. The noose is held in place by a brass slip to make sure it tightens quickly and efficiently. To snap rather than throttle. The mark of a civilised society.
A man in a blue uniform walks across the echoing floorboards. He grips the lever and grins. There is a shocking clang and thud and the trapdoor falls open. The joist in the room above gives out a tortured creak as it takes the weight. The figure plunges into the void of the floor below where a slab waits. The rope hardens and trembles like a plucked guitar string. The guard sneers at the white faces of the four new constables being shown round for their edification. He signals to the guard below to take down the dummy.
I can conjure it now, lying on my back, rocking in the top bunk of the overnight train to Glasgow. But this time the dummy has a face. Beneath me and all around me I feel the Royal Scot hurtling through the night, steel wheels clacking remorselessly on the rails. Occasionally the great beast splits the tomb-black landscape with a midnight shriek and I listen for an answering call that never comes. I’m going home for the first time in two and half years, and the thought of what I have to face there fills me with a hot mix of anger and dread. I take another pull at my cigarette and watch the tip glow and die, and the smoke drift and swirl away.
Four carefree days ago I was sitting in my wee attic room in South London. I was having a good spell. Almost a week of sleeping better and drinking less. Maybe the two were connected. My newly polished shoes – army indoctrination – were sitting by the door ready for their sprint to Fleet Street. The spring sun was already banking through the skylight window. I was hunched over the table nursing a second mug of tea while reading yesterday’s Times and my own paper the London Bugle . Know your enemy, my old drill sergeant used to say. Besides, I enjoy the adverts on the front of the Times. In their way they give as clear a picture of Britain as the inside news pages. Stories of a hard-up country where gentlemen were selling their fine leather gloves , or where an ex-officer, RAF, DFC would make excellent private secretary. Where trained mechanics were searching for work as drivers, and war heroes were on the lookout for gardening jobs or other manual exercise. The fruits of victory were bitter enough for some.
I supped my tea and counted my blessings. In the last month I’d started to get a steady trickle of freelance assignments from the Bugle and there was a chance of a full-time job. I was making enough money to afford food, fags and Scotch, not necessarily in that order. But at least I would no longer simply be drinking away the last of my demob money. Two weeks ago I’d dragged my flabby body round to Les’s Boxing Academy on the Old Kent Road and – aching limbs apart – I was already getting back a sense of physical well-being. Something I hadn’t felt since the build-up and hard training for D Day. After a few days of the glums last week I was daring to hope that I was nearing the end of the tunnel. Sunshine on my face would be good. Such was my upbeat mood that I’d been crooning along with Lena Horne and whistling a tuneless descant to Artie Shaw on the Light Programme. Even my first fag tasted sweet instead of just satisfying a craving.
Then the phone rang down in the shared entry.
I glanced at my watch. It was just after seven fifteen. Someone was starting early. I knew Mrs Jackson wouldn’t answer it unless she’d cranked up her hearing aid; I wondered why her daughters had bothered getting the phone installed. Her voice was so loud it made the device redundant. The other three households in our entry rarely got calls, but we were all happy to chip in to pay for the rental. I sprang to my door, still in my slippers and collarless. I could have done with another fifteen minutes of paper-reading and crossword-filling, but maybe the Bugle was calling. I dived down the three flights of stairs and grabbed the shiny black set.
‘Yes, hello? Brodie here,’ I gasped.
‘Is that Mr Douglas Brodie?’ A posh voice. A professional voice. An operator’s voice.
I got my breath back. ‘Yes, that’s me. Doug Brodie.’
‘Please hold the line, I have a call for you. Go ahead, caller, please put your money in now.’
I heard the clank and rattle of coins going in. Several. At least a bob’s worth, which meant long distance. My mother using her neighbour’s phone? An accident? Bad news comes early. A man’s voice started up. Scottish accent, West of Scotland. Like mine. Like mine used to be.
‘Is that you, Dougie boy?’
A bucket of ice splashed down my neck. No one called me Dougie now. It had been Brodie for a decade. The voice scratched at my memory, but I couldn’t put a face to. Wouldn’t. My mind simply rejected the likelihood. For it was an impossible voice from the days of bows and arrows, spots and whispering girls. Of fist fights that ended in bloody lips and trembling anger. Of a great betrayal that gnawed at me still.
‘Who’s this? What’s happened?’ I pressed my palm against the wall for support, feeling the cool plaster suck at the heat of my hand.
‘That’s a big question,’ said the voice.
My mind was fumbling with memories. The timbre and cadence were heavier and slower, but oh so disturbingly familiar. I knew who this was, but didn’t, couldn’t believe it. How could it be him?
‘Let’s keep it simple then. Who… are… you?’
With new strength: ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know me, ya Proddy sod?’
That did it. The mocking West of Scotland greeting. I saw his face, a wee boy’s face. Pawky, we called it, cheeky, with his big silly grin and his fringe of black hair. We played soldiers back then, erupting from our trenches against the machine guns of the Boches. Seeing who could die on the barbed wire with the greatest panache. Shug Donovan – or Hugh, when we started going out with girls – beat us all. He’d fall in a cartwheel of melodram
a, great anguished cries and flailing arms. He grew tall and handsome, black hair and blue eyes, like an advert for a Celtic bard. The girls loved him and his easy smile. I hated him for the same reasons, especially for the one girl that fell for him.
I hadn’t seen him since I left Kilmarnock for Glasgow University back in ‘29. I heard odd snatches about him from my mother down the years, though she knew I hated every mention. He was a journeyman cooper at Johnnie Walker’s at the same time I was making my way in the Glasgow police force. In ’39 I went into the army, the Seaforth Highlanders, my dad’s old regiment, though I was a lowlander. Donovan ended up in the RAF, Bomber Command. A tail gunner. A guaranteed way of getting yourself killed for real. Which is exactly what happened.
In a letter from my mother in 1943 I was told that Hugh Donovan had died in his bomber in the flames of Dresden. My first ungracious thought was: Serves you right, you sod. Then remorse made my cheeks burn. It prompted me to write to his mother saying how sorry I was to hear the news. But the guilt of that instant wasn’t so easily erased.
‘Shug? Is it you?’
‘Aye, Dougie, it is.’
‘But how, what the hell? I thought you were dead!’ My voice cracked and echoed round the empty entry.
‘So did I, old pal. So did I.’
‘But this is great! Just fantastic!’ I could stop feeling bad about him, about how we’d left things. Time to move on.
He cut in. ‘Dougie. It’s no… It’s no great at all…’
TWO
T he train roared through a station, lights flickering briefly before we plunged back into the dark. The sour scent of cheap Scotch tinged the air. The bloke in the bunk below had sucked patiently on a half-bottle to get to sleep. Mother’s milk where he came from; we came from, I reminded myself. I’d resolutely declined when he’d passed the bottle up to me. To prove I could. Now I wish I’d taken a slug or two. My brain was fidgeting. I lay in the dark and lit another fag and thought about going home, and what I meant by that.
There was Kilmarnock, the place where I was born and grew up. And there was Glasgow, where I’d gone to university, studied languages and in a fit of rebellion, joined the police. A town and a city a mere twenty miles apart, but they might as well have been on different continents. It wasn’t just that I left my boyhood behind on the short train journey from Kilmarnock. It was as though someone had carelessly spliced two strips of films together from entirely different movies. The lead character had changed, as had the supporting cast and the entire plot and arc of the film. The one connecting thread between the two places was the language of the script and the sharp-edged humour and brashness of the West Central Lowlands. Where no German spy could mimic the tortured accents. His request for a pie and a pint in any of the hard pubs that littered the slummy landscape would have earned him a good kicking before being handed over to the comparative safety of the polis.
I’d last been in Kilmarnock in late ’43, on leave from my regiment, proud to bursting of the 2nd lieutenant’s pips on my epaulettes and the North Africa ribbon on my chest. The dull khaki of my battledress tunic was outshone by the strong blues and greens of the MacKenzie tartan in my Seaforth kilt. I rolled off the train with my kit bag over my shoulder and my Tam o’ Shanter pitched at a suitably jaunty angle on my head. I was the picture of health. My leg had healed. Army training and the residue of the desert sun had honed me into a lean brown warrior. I bounded down the steps of the station and out into Kilmarnock’s high street. The heavy swing of the kilt made me lift up my head and push out my chest as if I was on parade. I marched down King Street with its stout Victorian facade, and strolled nonchalantly one full time round the cross – the town centre, with its statue of James Shaw in the middle of it.
I caught the smiles on girls’ faces: See you at the Palais on Saturday, then? And the nods of welcome from the old men: You’ve done your time now, laddie, just like us in the last one. When I thought I’d earned enough silent plaudits, I sauntered back up the Foregate and up the Gas Brae. I was held up briefly at Barclay’s yard as they trundled a new locomotive across the main street and on into the run of rail tracks that would channel it into service. The driver nodded and winked at me and I was eight again and enthralled by the giant metal wheels and the massive boiler.
I was marching into my own past, shedding the years with every step, casting off the veneer of learning, city airs and cynicism, and three years of hard fighting. On up to Bonnyton. On the left, climbing up the hill, smart rows of smoke-black sandstone terraces. Opposite, on the right, a clutch of older, sorrier tenements where the mining community clustered and from where, each day, the buses picked up the lines of men and ferried them off to dig the black seams below the fertile Ayrshire hills. I turned right and marched through the rows of grey tenements and across the drying greens. Washing flapped on the lines strung between the communal poles. The smell of washed linen anywhere in the world would take me back to that spot in a heartbeat.
She was there behind the net curtains looking for me. I saw the twitch. Sure enough she was out in a moment, her tiny frame all mobile and flapping, and her white hair shining and lifting in the warm breeze. A lifetime ago it had been red as rowan berries. For a while it seemed I’d inherited her wild colour. But as I grew my father’s black bristles counter attacked and turned mine to a compromise shade of dried blood. Only my morning stubble held the memory of her oriflamme. And his dark eyes, his height and miner’s shoulders won out against her grey eyes and elfin figure.
‘Hello, Mum,’ I called and waved. I dropped my bag and held out my arms.
She scooted towards me, not sure where to put her hands, on her face, outstretched in front of her, or clasped in some inner prayer. The hero’s return.
‘Oh Douglas, Douglas. Look at you! Ma wee boy!’
The tears were already coursing on her cheeks. And my eyes were wet by the time she clasped me to her. She felt like a bird, so light and bony. She smelt as she always did, a mix of coal-tar soap that she scrubbed her face with, and lavender from the sachets she hung on her handful of clothes. The very essence of home. I breathed it in, and was a child again. Some of the neighbour women poked their heads out, just by accident of course. But they were all beaming, glad to see one of their sons returned in one piece. Though most of their men-folk had been in reserved service down the pits, there were enough that hadn’t come back or had come back maimed.
The one black mark on the day, on all my days now, was the absence of the big man with the coal dust stamped in his hands and on his forehead in a line below his helmet. My father. Three years after his death her red had turned to snow as though she had no further need of it. My mother and I would visit his grave in the afternoon with flowers. Me in my uniform still, to show him what I’d become. What he’d made me. But unable now to delight in the banter over our shared uniform. No chance now of him saluting me with an insolent grin to show that a sergeant could honour a son even though he was now a bloody officer.
This homecoming would be different. I’d lost that bounce and sense of invulnerability that had swept me home two and a half long years ago. My skin had a London pallor and my shock of mud-red hair bore stubs of grey on my sideburns. Only thirty four, one year short of the biblical half way mark, and already on the downward slope.
This summons was too soon. It felt like I was rushing pell-mell towards a nexus in my life of dark threads spewing from my past. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the conductor had appeared with red-hot coals for eyes and an announcement that the next stop was purgatory.
Hugh Donovan had survived the war and was calling from a pay phone in the visitor section of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow. The Bar-L, the Big Mansion House, as we used to call it. Thanks to my own problems I’d missed all the furore north of the border. Certainly missed the trial and the verdict. Hugh wanted to see me, to convince me of his innocence. But why me? Why call the man he shafted, the man who still nursed rancour for what he’d taken from me? Why the hell
would he think I’d care whether he was guilty or not? Just when I was getting my life back in some sort of order, he kicks up the pieces and I lose the pattern again. And by the sound of it, and from the inquiries I made later that day, he was guilty as sin. It had taken just four months from his arrest in November 1945 to conviction and sentencing.
The judge at Glasgow’s High Court had donned the black cap. In just over four short weeks, on the spring morning of 30 April, they would hang Hugh Donovan by the neck until he was dead.
Good riddance.
THREE
I must have dozed. The rhythm of the train had finally pushed me into a deep sleep studded with crazed dreams of riding in a landing craft, slap, slap, slapping through the waves towards the roar of a mighty waterfall. Now the change in rhythm brought me back to the surface; the train slowed, the wheels clacking at walking pace. I peeled back the curtain in the carriage and saw a grey dawn over a brown cityscape. A sluggard river stretched away through the girders of a bridge. I knew exactly where we were. Soon enough the pillars of the station were flicking past the window. As I struggled from my cot and dropped to the floor, the brakes were applied and we ground and huffed to a stop in St Enoch’s station, Glasgow.
I quickly soaped my face and skimmed my razor over my chin. I dressed, put on my hat, grabbed my little case and left my travelling companion to groan his way out of his stupor. I wasn’t smug. It could have been me last week. I walked past the towering wheels of the Royal Scot and resisted giving her steaming flanks a pat for getting us safely here on time. All around the familiar accents of home burst on my ears like rain after a long drought.
Two young men slouching by: ‘Ma heid’s gowpin’, so it is.’
‘Nae wunner. Ye were stocious last nicht.’
The Hanging Shed Page 1