by Archie Hind
THE DEAR GREEN PLACE
&
FUR SADIE
THE DEAR GREEN PLACE
&
FUR SADIE
Archie Hind
Edited and Introduced by Alasdair Gray
This ebook edition published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
The Dear Green Place was first published in Great Britain in 1966 by New Authors Ltd
This edition published in 2008 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
Copyright © Archie Hind, 1966, 1973 and 2008
Introduction and Postscript copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-150-7
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
To Eleanor
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Dear Green Place
Fur Sadie
Editor’s Postscript
‘Men of the Clyde’
‘The Dear Green Place’
by Archie Hind and Peter Kelly
Introduction
In 1928 Archie Hind was born in Dalmarnock, an industrial part of east Glasgow. His father, a stoker on locomotive engines, worked for fifty-one years on the railways, with an interval as a soldier in World War One. Though liked by workmates and friends he was so bad a husband that when her son Archie was seven and older brother nine their mother left home with her two-year-old daughter. Ten years later the parents were reconciled; meanwhile the boys lived with their father and his widowed mother. The home Mrs Hind had abandoned, while decent and clean, was like most tenement homes in Glasgow between the wars, a room and kitchen with communal lavatory on an outside landing. Baths had to be taken in public bathhouses and Archie sometimes used these less than he wished, to stop people seeing bruises from his father’s beatings. These stopped when he and his brother grew strong enough to hit back.
The brutal part of his upbringing was not the most formative part and has no place in his novel The Dear Green Place, where the hero’s father is based on a more representative Glasgow dad, a tolerant, intelligent Marxist uncle. The mainstream of working-class thought and culture in Glasgow was the Socialism of the Independent Labour Party, the party George Orwell most favoured, and which returned seven Scottish MPs to Westminster before World War Two. After 1946 the best of these died or joined the Parliamentary Labour Party. Like most Socialists between the two great wars Archie’s people had been hopeful about the Russian Revolution and would have distrusted the U.S.S.R. more if the British government had not been so friendly to Fascist Italy, Germany and Spain.
Archie grew up with a love of literature and music – he and his brother both loved singing, and he learned piping in the Boys’ Brigade. Leaving school at fourteen he entered Beardmores, the largest engineering firm in Britain. It had built cars, planes, the first British airship, and still made great steam engines for ships and railway locomotives. By the late 1960s Scottish steam-powered industries were obsolete, but Archie joined the firm when World War Two was giving it a last profitable lease of life. For two years he was a messenger, reporting to Head Office on the progress of shafts and propellers shaped in the forges, turning sheds and workshops. He should have become an apprentice when sixteen, but his father wanted the higher wage Archie earned by shifting to a warehouse supplying local grocers. In 1945 or 6 he could have gone to university, since the last act of the government that brought Britain through the war had enabled any student to attend colleges of further education who passed the entrance exam. This would have been well within Archie’s power; but have meant even less money for his dad than an engineering apprenticeship. Archie only left home when eighteen and conscripted into the British Army. He served with the medical corps for two years in Singapore and Ceylon.
Which tells nothing about the birth and growth of his wide erudition and strong imagination through reading, close attention to recorded music and broadcasts, and intense discussion with those of similar interests. British professional folk often think creative imaginations unlikely outside their own social class – on first reading Ulysses Virginia Woolf thought James Joyce (despite his Jesuit and Dublin University education) had all the faults of a self-taught working man. Who in Glasgow could see the growth of an unusual mind in a twenty-year-old ex-Beardmores progress clerk, warehouseman and demobbed medical corps private? Jack Rillie could, the Glasgow University English lecturer who ran an extra-mural class in literature. Archie attended it and on Jack Rillie’s recommendation went to Newbattle Abbey, the Workers’ Further Education College in Midlothian. The Principal was the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir who, with his wife Willa, were the foremost translators of German language novels by Broch, Musil and Kafka. Archie became a friend of both.
By now he had decided to write a book that he knew would never sell enough to support him – a book that would leave him a failure in the eyes of all but those who liked unusually careful writing. Soon after Newbattle Archie married Eleanor, a girl he had met through the Tollcross Park tennis club. She accepted him and his strange ambition while foreseeing the consequences, perhaps because her Jewish mother and Irish father came from people who did not identify worldly success with great achievements. Her mother had been brought from the Crimea to Scotland by parents escaping from Czarist pogroms, and like many Jews in Glasgow she attended left-wing meetings. At one of these she had met John Slane, a coalminer who learned to make spectacles while studying at night classes. They married and he became an optician successful enough, and rich enough, to buy Eleanor a beautiful Steinway grand piano and give it house room. But he hated her marriage to a man who supported his growing family by working as a social security clerk, trolley-bus driver and labourer in the municipal slaughterhouse between writing a novel that would never earn a supportive income. Archie and Eleanor made friends with writers and artists met through a new Glasgow Arts Centre which met in premises leased by the painter J. D. Ferguson and his wife Margaret Morris, founder of the Celtic Dance Theatre.
I met them in 1958 when they had three sons (Calum, Gavin, Martin) and young daughter Nellimeg, whose mental age was arrested at less than two years by minor epilepsy. Their last child Sheila was born five years later. I had recently left Glasgow Art School and the Hinds had the only welcoming home I knew where literature, painting and music were subjects of extended, enjoyable conversations. It was a room and kitchen flat like that where Archie had been born, but in Greenfield Street, Govan. The room held the children’s bunks so social life was always in the warm kitchen which, despite many evening visitors, never seemed overcrowded. These were years when London critics thought Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Amis’s Lucky Jim, Braine’s Room at the Top, were a new school of literature created through the agency of the welfare state. These three works described working-class lads acquiring middle-class women. Archie and I thought they described nothing profound when compared with the best writings of Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. We admired The Tin Drum, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse 5, and found we were both working on a novel about the only struggle we could take seriously – the struggle to make a work of art. This has been an important theme in poetry and fiction since Wordsworth’s Prelude. It inspired Archie most in the poetry of Yeats and fiction of Thomas Mann. He liked good jazz and American Blues, the songs of Edith Piaf and The Beatles, but thought most highly
celebrated contemporary work – Beckett’s dramas, John Cage’s music, abstract expressionist painting and Warhol’s Campbell’s soup icons – indicated a thinning in the rich intellectual texture of Western culture. I was not so sure, but agreed that as writers we should maintain that texture. Our novels were both about low-income Glasgow artists doomed to failure, this coincidence worried us slightly, but we had chosen that theme long before meeting each other, and had to put up with it.
In the middle 1960s the Hinds moved to Dalkeith where Archie worked with Ferranti’s Pegasus, an early computer filling nearly the whole floor of a building. He left that job to finally complete his novel, and having completed it, worked as copy-taker in the Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh, while awaiting publication. In Milne’s Bar he sometimes conversed amicably about sport and politics with Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1966 the novel was published in Hutchinson’s New Author series. Its title, The Dear Green Place, was Archie’s translation of glas-chu or gles-con, Gaelic words that became Glasgow. They had previously been translated green hollow, green churchyard, greyhounds ferry, dear stream, and (in imperial days when it was the second largest and smokiest city in Britain) the grey forge or smithy. Archie’s translation is now generally accepted.
All good novels are historical – describe living people in a definite place and time. The Dear Green Place shows a city that had grown between 1800 and 1960, becoming for almost a century the second biggest in Britain. The earliest paragraphs give the layout – a city completely unlike London, for in Glasgow the homes of labourers, tradesmen and professional folk were intermingled with parks, shops, thriving factories with smoking chimneys and districts of old industrial wasteland. The time is about the 1950s when unemployment hardly existed and most of the labour force, though poorly housed by later standards, had the better wages and working conditions promised to the trade unions by the wartime coalition government. This Scottish region of the newly established British Welfare State gives Mat Craig the chance to occasionally dodge the commercial forces that, before 1939, would have made him an industrial serf, or political activist, or even destitute. He has enough room to exercise, however painfully, what was once a bourgeois or aristocratic privilege – the free will needed to attempt a work of art. The only other twentieth-century novel I know that places a writer’s struggle in an equally well imagined city is Nabokov’s novel The Gift.
Published in 1966, The Dear Green Place won four prizes: The Guardian Fiction of the Year, The Yorkshire Post‘s Best First Work, the Frederick Niven and Scottish Arts Council Awards. The Hinds returned to Glasgow when, as foreseen, The Dear Green Place had not earned enough to support them. Archie wrote revues performed in the Close Theatre and a witty, precise political column for the Scottish International magazine. He worked for the Easterhouse Project, a privately funded meeting place started to reduce violent crime among the young when the Easterhouse housing scheme still had few shops, no cafés, no playing-fields or provision for games and entertainment. Soon after, he was appointed to the position of Aberdeen City’s first Writer-in-Residence, later becoming copy-taker for the Aberdeen Press and Journal.
By this time he was working on his second novel, Fur Sadie. Fur is how many Glaswegians pronounce for, and the title associates it with Beethoven’s piano piece, Für Elise, in a way that will make perfect sense when you read it. The Scottish International published a small part in 1973, but all that Archie wrote of it is published here for the first time, for I believe it an astonishing achievement, although unfinished.
It is sometimes said that Scottish fiction has a more masculine bias than that of other lands, and though generally untrue it is true of much writing by authors like Alexander Trocchi, William MacIlvanney, Alan Sharp, Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh. But The Dear Green Place makes it hard to include Archie Hind among these and Fur Sadie makes it impossible. Here he transposes (as musicians say) the theme of artistic struggle into the person of a small, ordinary-seeming, middle-aged yet very attractive working-class housewife and mother. In a few episodes her life between infancy and menopause is presented as richly detailed, generally admirable, stunted by too little money and leisure, yet capable of much more. Most British descriptions of working-class people suggest how horrid, or comic, or admirable that they live that way. The narrative voice of Fur Sadie is free of such condescension. He knows that better lives are possible, and shows Sadie working for one. Her portrait is deeply historical. Her childhood is in the pre-television age when city children still sang and played in streets where motorcars were seldom seen – even professional folk seldom owned one, while coal and milk were still brought to houses in horse-drawn carts. When a middle-aged housewife, Sadie has had an electric geyser wired above the kitchen sink and no longer needs to heat cold water in a kettle. This innovation allows her time for music. There is a television set in her front room, and she can buy a second-hand piano and pay a tuner out of her housekeeping money without the expense worrying her husband. A social revolution has happened through which we see the sexual growth of a woman and man from adolescence through early marriage to late, sad maturity. No other author I know has shown a sexual relationship over many years with such casual, unsensational delicacy and truth.
And all that is essential to the tale of how a childhood friendship, and inherent, long-buried talent, at last combine with a good music teacher to bring Beethoven (no less!) alive in the mind and fingers of an apparently ordinary woman. The curious reader will wonder why this great fragment was not completed and how it might have ended. I will give my thoughts on this matter at the end of Fur Sadie.
This book ends with an example of Archie’s journalism from 1973. I wish this book also contained a selection from his early short stories (all lost) and some playscripts from the ten commissioned and performed between 1973 and 1990. I especially remember The Sugarolly Story, a satirical view of Glasgow’s social history from the start of World War One to the creation of Easterhouse housing scheme. This was performed by the Easterhouse Players in the Easterhouse Social Centre after Glasgow City Council at last built one. There was also Shoulder to Shoulder, a dramatised documentary of John MacLean’s life. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, a Scottish dramatisation of Doonan’s building-trade novel, was the biggest and most successful, being the only one acted by a large professional company (7:84) in a well known theatre (The Citizens). The scripts of these have also been lost. This book must therefore be regarded as holding The Best Available Work of Archie Hind, and will deserve the attention of future lovers of Scottish literature.
The Dear Green Place and Fur Sadie have survived into a century where Archie’s forebodings about the thinning of the Western cultural tradition (now called dumbing-down), have come true. Intellectuals calling themselves Postmodern now say that objective truths do not exist, but are opinions in disguise. They can now lecture in universities upon anything they like because they can hold everything equally valuable, and declare many once valued things negligible. In a recent history of twentieth-century art international critics and dealers celebrate the triumph of Installation Art and announce that oil painting since Picasso is patriarchal and obsolete. Before that century ended a head of visual arts in Glasgow School of Art said no artist now needed to learn drawing. Glasgow University has a department of Creative Writing where the kind of novel Archie wrote is labelled literary fiction, and labelled as a genre along with crime, horror, science fiction and love stories of the sort publishers call chick lit. But when forthcoming catastrophes have moved the survivors back to serious agreement about what is important in Scottish life and art, The Dear Green Place and Fur Sadie will have survived also.
Alasdair Gray
January 2008
THE DEAR GREEN PLACE
1
IN EVERY CITY you find these neighbourhoods. They are defined by accident – by a railway yard, a factory, a main road, a park. This particular district was reached from the town by a main road. On your left as you approached it was a public park;
on your right, back from the road, was a railway embankment. Beyond the railway embankment lay stretches of derelict land of the kind seen on the edges of big cities. Broken down furnaces and kilns were still crumbling around where the claypits had once been worked. This derelict area was divided in part by brick walls, in part by some bits of drystane dyke, in part by some straggly hawthorn. Further on than this slag heaps and dumps for industrial refuse – here in Glasgow they are called coups – stretched down to the Clyde. The main road curved round the south end of the park, then entered abruptly into the neighbourhood. If you left the tram here and continued along the main road you pass the brownstone tenement, the ground floor of which contains the shops, the surgery, the pub. On the corner opposite the pub there is an old two-storey tenement, a newspaper shop, a telephone booth. Turning to the left here you come into a street with rows of council houses. Further down the road is the school. The streets traversing this are built up with red sandstone, three-storeyed tenements. Good houses. Beyond this street on the other side from the town were older tenements, few of them more than two storeys in height. Beyond these a golf course, then fields. Past the neighbourhood where the road led on out of the city it was bounded on one side by rows of houses, modern bungalows with raw-looking gardens, old square stone houses with dirty windows and untidy heaps of rhododendron encroaching on the shaggy lawns. On the other side of the road are sandpits dug down hundreds of feet into the earth.
But the street with the council houses. Stand there on a Saturday morning and you’ll see women coming back from the shops with their messages, their shopping baskets heavy laden, small tidy middle-aged women who clasp their purses as if they were weapons and can still tell a joint from a joint and stewing steak from brisket and make pots of broth from flank mutton. The children playing in the street are well clothed and reasonably polite. The young girl walking up towards the tram stop carries a long canvas case with a hockey stick in it and wears a fee-paying school blazer. The young men passing are mostly apprentices, the men mostly tradesmen. At eleven o’clock the group of men standing at the corner will disappear into the pub. These are the punters, the bookie and his runners. A quiet circumspect lot. You’ll see an occasional brief-case belonging to one or two young men who go to the University on a Glasgow Corporation grant. Later in the afternoon the men will appear wearing their blue scarves on their way to see the Rangers playing at home at Ibrox. If these middle-aged women have to scrape a bit at least they don’t have to pinch, the men can afford a pint and there are Christmas trees in the windows during the festive season. A quiet street. As these streets go a prosperous one.