by Alan Taylor
I accepted immediately; already telling my aunt the lie about the play. And I still didn’t know.
His flat was a rather poky room with a kitchenette in a high block over a tobacconist and sweet shop in Hope Street. It smelled of ether and stale cigarettes and was pretty untidy, for which he apologised, and pulling hurriedly at the unmade bed and taking some dirty plates and a bottle into the sink. There were books everywhere, a typewriter, old shirts, and a gas fire which plopped when he lit it. On the wall were pictures of Rothesay Castle and two men wrestling. He opened a thick book filled with diagrams of bandaging; people were swathed in them, heads, hips, legs, wrists, arms and everything else. It was very comprehensive.
Chattering happily, he pulled a large cardboard box from under the bed and spilled rolls and rolls of blue-wrapped bandages of every size all over the floor. These, he said, were just the trick to turn me into a splendid mummy and if I would just remove my jacket and shirt and vest and sit down in that chair he would turn me into Boris Karloff in the flick of a fly’s eyelid.
I dutifully, rather shyly, did as he suggested while he started to unroll yards and yards of filmy gauzes. It was not very long before I was strait-jacketed in strips of thin cotton bandages from the top of my head to my waist, arms securely folded, in the correct position of mummies, across my chest, a small slit left for each eye so that I could hazily see through a vague fringe of white blur, a small hole left for my nostrils so that I could breathe. Otherwise I was trussed like a fowl. Taking down the oval mirror from the mantelpiece he showed me the effect which I found impressive, uncomfortable, and very restricting. I could merely manage a vague motion with my head, which didn’t show, and roll my slitty eyes. I could neither see properly, nor even hear for that matter, and I was totally mute.
As he turned from replacing the mirror, and as I stood to indicate that he might unwrap me as soon as possible, I could see that he was speaking, but only a blurred mumble came to my bandaged ears and it was with some rising degree of alarm that I found myself clutched firmly in his arms and dumped on my back in the middle of the brass bed. I tried to struggle and yell out, at least to sit up, but I was totally rigid and the only sound I made was smothered in yards and yards of thick white gauze. Putting his beige face very close to my ear Mr Dodd said that it seemed a pity not to finished the job and make me a full mummy from head to foot, that would complete the Effect.
My shoes and socks were wrenched off and thrown under the bed, then my trousers and to my silent screams of protest, he ripped off my underpants and I was stark naked before his eager, now red-faced, gaze.
Swiftly and with the expert precision of a born embalmer, he rolled me about the bed in a flurry of bandage. I was wrapped like a parcel, rolled this way and that, on my back, on my side, every which way until I was reeling with giddiness and terror. I was wound tightly into a cocoon as a spider rolls a grasshopper. Helpless, inert, more a dummy even than a mummy, I lay rigid as Mr Dodd, his mouth stuck with safety pins, tucked in the loose ends; when this was done, and with great strength he manoeuvred me off the bed, stiff as a telegraph pole, and set me upright on cotton feet to see my reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door. Peering desperately through the eye slits I could see that he had made a complete and thorough job. Boris Karloff wasn’t half as convincing.
Unable to stand by myself I was forced to lean against the serge shoulder of my host whose face was bathed in pleasure. Surely my heart could not beat so quickly with terror and I should still live. It leapt from my chest and now pumped and throbbed in my throat. It stopped entirely when my horrified eyes saw, pathetically through the swaddling rags, my genitals, naked and pink and vulnerable as a sugar mouse.
Mr Dodd placed his mouth to my ear again and said that he thought he had made a very good job of things and hoped I was pleased too, and without waiting for any kind of reaction, which I would not have been able to make in any case, he swung me, like an immense skittle, into an arc of 180 degrees, so that the whole filthy room whirled round my head and I was back down on Mr Dodd’s bed; and in Mr Dodd’s hands, inches from my face, was a pair of scissors. I tried to faint. I heard him say that in Real Life They Cut That Off – and lay supine waiting for Death. Gently his hands caressed my helpless body, kindly he whispered that he had no intention of doing such a cruel thing for how else, otherwise, would a boy like me be able to masturbate? He said that all boys enjoyed masturbating and that he was much too good to deprive me of the rights. My mind had become a mass of solid jelly, Nothing flickered there apart from deadly terror, shame, and grief at my wickedness. I couldn’t rationalise. I closed my eyes and said three or four ‘Hail Mary’s’.
If I prayed surely, this time, God would hear? The anxious, firm, slippery fingers, caressing and anointing me splintered my whole being into a billion jagged fragments. I was only aware that if they didn’t stop something terrible and horrifying would happen.
Which it did. And I knew.
COUPLING, c. 1936
Ralph Glasser
The son of immigrant Jews from Russia, Ralph Glasser (1916–2002) grew up in the Gorbals in the years between the two world wars. Taken from school at fourteen he became a barber’s soap boy and a presser in a garment factory. After years of night study he won a scholarship to Oxford to which he travelled by bike. ‘In pre-war days,’ he wrote in Gorbals Boy at Oxford (1988), ‘for a Gorbals man to come up to Oxford was as unthinkable as to meet a raw bushman in a St James’s Club – something for which there were no stock responses. In any case, for a member of the boss class, someone from the Gorbals was in effect a bushman, the Gorbals itself as distant, as unknowable, as the Kalahari.’ It was a member of the ‘boss-class’, John Betjeman, who encouraged Glasser to write about his life and upbringing, which he did, beginning with Growing up in the Gorbals (1986). Here Glasser describes the effect of living in such close and dense proximity had on people’s sex lives.
Parental approval of ‘walking out’ seldom extended to canoodling, petting, at home. In theory, canoodling did not take place. Apart from moral prohibitions, most houses, as tenement flats were called, were full to bursting, and privacy was out of the question. A spare room was a rare luxury, possessed by a few better-off families, better off by Gorbals standards – clergymen, skilled artisans – who might live behind Renaissance facades in the tenements in Abbotsford Place on the southern edge of the Gorbals near Eglinton Toll, where Victoria Road and Pollokshaws Road took you to the lower middle class districts of Langside, Shawlands, and on to Newton Mearns.
In most of the houses we knew every space was taken up by beds, mattresses on the floor, a few bare wooden chairs, a battered kitchen table. One or even two of the younger children commonly shared the parental bed, usually a mattress on planks resting on trestles in a curtained alcove in the kitchen.
To enable a coupling to take place in a semblance of privacy behind the curtain, the woman would step out in her shift, snatch a blanket off the bed and wrap the child in it on the floor boards near enough to the cooking range for him to get some radiated warmth from its banked-up fire. Afterwards she parted the curtains and came out naked to lift the unsleeping, finely aware child back into bed, to lie between her and the man lying open-mouthed in post-coital sleep.
For an unmarried girl to live away from home on her own was unthinkable. Even if special circumstances, such as the death of parents, led to her living under someone else’s roof as a lodger, she would not be allowed men visitors in her room. As for the few unmarried men who could afford to live on their own in single-ends, one-room tenement flats, no respectable girl, or married woman for that matter, would want to be seen visiting one of them unchaperoned.
That corner of a close beside the ash-pits was a place outside time. Because the celebration did not take place under anyone’s roof, moral responsibility could be kept at a distance if need be. The place of that shrine of Venus in the life of the locality was understood by everyone. Fathers knew where to look for the
ir daughters out too late.
A girl impatient to escape from home might go there with her ‘feller’ and let him ‘stamp her card’ – get her with child. And then, with luck, persuade him to accept paternity and marry her: a common enough route to matrimony.
No one approved. Few openly disapproved. Fatalistically, all connived.
Residents making their way back through the close to the ash-pits or the clothes line in the back yard, sensing a couple’s presence, retreated discreetly and returned later. Lovers seeking a vacant shrine wandered on to the next close, and the next. Some, driven and impatient, gave up the search and stood together in the lavatory on one of the half-landings. But that infringed the code and nearly always led to trouble. In theory each lavatory was shared by people from two floors, about six flats, but in practice by many more. Almost invariably the other lavatory in the close, or some in closes nearby, would be out of action because of blocked pipes or damaged cisterns or flush mechanisms, so there was seldom a moment when every functioning lavatory in a tenement was not in heavy demand, often with a queue stamping their feet waiting to get in. If a couple were making love in one, the anxious souls waiting on the cold stone steps made their feelings plain, firmly but usually not unkindly: ‘Och come on! Go an’ find yersels a place o’ yer ain doon the stairs tae do yer canoodlin’ in! Ah’m tellin’ ye, if ah don’t ge’ in there in a minute ah’m gonae shi’ ma troosers!’
THE ART OF TAPPING LIFTS, 1939
Alastair Borthwick
For a generation of mainly working-class Glaswegians the city’s proximity to countryside and the hills was the perfect way to escape urban tedium and the daily grind. Indeed, many of those who found solace in the mountains were unemployed and had little – if any – money to spare for recreation. On a Friday evening the sight of men laden with rucksacks heading north for the weekend in hope of a lift was common. Once beyond the municipal boundaries the whole of Scotland seemed to open up and there was freedom to roam. In his classic memoir, Always a Little Further (1939), Alastair Borthwick (1913–2003), who was born in Rutherglen but raised and educated in Glasgow, evokes an era when climbing mountains, which had previously been the preserve of the well off, became a popular pastime with those who hitherto had not had access to them. When Borthwick first happened upon ‘the cave’ he found three young men in situ, ‘squatting round a fire, frying kippers and dangling on a wire over the flames a large black pudding’.
Thanks to the cave, I came much in contact during the months which followed with the members of that small but persevering class known as the hitch-hikers. Their chief interest, in some cases approaching the proportions of a religion, was climbing; and hitch-hiking, or the art of tapping lifts, was their method of bringing good mountains within reach of the city.
There are those who take an uncharitable view of the activity, claiming that the man who begs for lifts is no better than the man who begs for pennies, but I prefer to think of the hitch-hiker as the twentieth-century troubadour. Once the troubadour was welcome at any castle, for he earned his keep by song, and song was thought good value for money. So it is with hitch-hiking in its higher forms, as it is practised on the Loch Lomond road today. Words, and not song, are the hitch-hiker’s capital. I have met them silent; but as a class they can give the Irish points in dialectic, and they turn a story well. Driving is a boring task. Many a good tale has been told, and many a dull journey enlivened between the Arrochar road-end and Anniesland Cross.
Some of the tales smack of the epic, and not in construction alone, for some hitch-hiking feats verge on the fabulous. For years the record was held by a lad who left Glasgow with half a crown in his pocket and intent to camp in Skye, and tapped a lift on the outskirts of the city which took him to Sligachan Inn, two hundred miles away and not two hundred yards from the spot where he had intended camping; but recently this feat has dwindled into insignificance as the brotherhood has realised the full possibilities of the thumb as mode of transport. In 1936 one Glasgow lad travelled to Paris for three shillings, tapping lifts on both sides of the Channel and making a charming smile bridge the gap created by his ignorance of the French language. His only extra was his cross-Channel fare. And in 1937 two of the Creag Dhu [mountaineer club], finding themselves idle and with time heavily on their hands, tapped lifts to Switzerland and back. The tale goes, too, that they even hitch-hiked up the Matterhorn behind a guide party.
The best story I have heard about this peculiar mode of travelling was told to me one November night at Arrochar by a gentleman rejoicing in the name Choocter. What far-fetched process of corruption and illusion created this nickname I do not know; but Choocter he was, and I never knew him by any other name. He was tall and thin, with a slight stoop. A lock of hair hung down almost over one eye, and his climbing jacket and breeches were patched after the homely manner of all climbing jackets and breeches. His accent was such that any one born beyond the bounds of Glasgow would have found much in his conversation that was obscure. He was as companionable a lad as one would care to meet; and I first fell in with him while he was buying a half a pound of sausages in the butcher’s shop at Arrochar. He had travelled up from Glasgow free, of course. I bought what I wanted; and it was while we walked down the road to the Youth Hostel that he told me the story of himself, Wullie, Ginger, and Wee Jock.
It seemed that Choocter and Ginger had been on the point of leaving the Vale of Leven for a few days’ climbing in Glencoe, sixty miles away, when they were smitten by a desire to eat chips; and, as all the world knows, there is a shop just before the start of the Loch Lomond road, which has something of a reputation for chips. There they had gone, and there had met the opposition, Wullie and Wee Jock.
‘In his kilt,’ Choocter added, as if that made it much worse.
‘Wullie was just gettin’ tore into a poke o’ chips,’ said Choocter, ‘so we pretended we was goin’ on ahead. O’ course we hid in ahint the first dyke we came to; and in a wee while, by goes Wullie and Wee Jock, in his kilt, stuffin’ themselves wi’ chips. We waits anither two-three minutes just for to gie them a start, and then sets aff, slow-like.’
For an hour they had walked on, leaving the houses behind them and dropping down the rolling countryside which falls to the south end of Loch Lomond, confidently expecting first rights on any car which passed. But as they approached the loch Choocter glanced behind him, stopped and swore. It was, he saw, going to be a hard night. The fight was on. Diamond was about to cut diamond. For Wee Jock (in his kilt) was a hundred yards behind, emerging cautiously, like a mouse from the wainscot, from behind a hedge. Choocter sighed, and cast about for cover.
The sides were fairly matched; and, an aptitude for guile being strongly developed in all concerned and the means of their journey appealing more to them than its end, compromise at this stage did not occur to them. From that point on, all thoughts of progress seem to have been abandoned, and the journey resolved itself into long waits behind walls and trees, grubbings about in bushes, occupations of darkened barns, and elaborate game of chess in which the only popular move was the knight’s. Tactics of a high order were employed. At one stage both parties were even travelling backwards.
The night grew darker, and traffic thinner. Despite piteous thumbings, no car stopped; and as eleven o’clock came and went their hopes dwindled. Even the chance of spending the night at Inverbeg Youth Hostel, a few miles ahead, had disappeared as time and energy were dissipated behind hedges.
‘It was cuttin’ wur ain throats, mister; it was cuttin’ wur ain throats,’ said Choocter solemnly.
Stalemate was reached shortly before midnight, when lack of traffic made further attempts useless. Choocter and Ginger gave up for the night somewhere near Luss, where they found a bell-tent left unoccupied at the side of the loch by some trusting soul, and crawled inside, working on the assumption that, as the tent was completely empty, no one would be likely to claim it at that hour of the night.
‘We woke early . . . six o’cl
ock,’ said Choocter. ‘We’d nae blankets, and I was sleeping in a Glasgow Herald and a sheet o’ broon paper. Ginger woke first. He was in an Express but the pages is far ower wee. He wallapped me in the ribs and pointed oot’ o’ the tent.
“‘Look at thon!” he says, fair wild.
‘I looks; and there lyin’ on the verandy o’ a house-boat at the loch-side was Wullie and Wee Jock, in his kilt.’
A nice question of tactics was involved. Wee Jock, having, as has been noted, a kilt as well as a Glasgow Herald to keep him warm, was still sound asleep and might be expected to remain so for at least an hour, leaving the road clear for Choocter and Ginger. But the traffic was scarce at that hour of the morning: there are few milk-producing farms north of Luss, and no milk-lorries run to and from the city. The most they could hope for was a stray carrier’s van, and even that hope was slender. Besides, if they should fail to tap a lift before Wee Jock awoke, they would leave him with first chance of all lifts for the rest of the day. They decided to lie in hiding until the other two should wake and move on.
The three hours which followed were, according to Choocter, desperate. During two of them, Wullie and Wee Jock slept, the dew of the morning wet on their raincoats, while the sun came up behind Ben Lomond and the island-shadows shortened on the Luss Narrows. The morning mist died in the treetops. And still they slept. It was bright, clear morning, and bitterly cold for those who had little but the daily press to shield them from the chill shadows of the tent. Most galling sight of all was breakfast on the houseboat, which started at eight-thirty. Wee Jock produced a folding stove from his rucksack, and Wullie cooked slowly and deliberately, an operation which nearly broke Choocter’s heart, for, as he so delicately put it, he and Ginger had ‘nae chuck’ and were exceedingly hungry. But in the end they packed and moved off, leaving the others lying on their empty stomachs, contemplating nature.