by Archie Hind
In one of these council houses late on a September night there was a light still burning. It shone faintly on the windows, a dim amber light which had taken its colour from the room and from the old parchment coloured lampshade. Within the circle of light which the lamp cast on the surface of a table a man sat in the room, trying to write.
He was a short, dark, stocky man, with coarse black hair, a shadow on his unshaven cheeks. His rolled up shirt sleeves showed muscular forearms covered in dark hair which stopped sharply at the wrists. His small hands looked pale against the darkness of his arms. He was crouched over the paper on the table holding the pen in his hand tightly; his left arm was circled around the paper giving him the cramped appearance of a dull and unwilling schoolboy at his desk. For a couple of hours – ever since the other people in the house had gone to bed – he had been sitting writing.
Mat Craig looked up from his work towards the mantelpiece. The clock showed the time as ten past one. As it was usually about quarter of an hour fast then the right time would be five to one. He yawned and bowed his head over the papers again. All over the table within the circle of light shed by the lamp there were papers spread. He was sitting at the dining-table on one of the old mahogany chairs, its back shaped like a horse-collar. On the wall the miniature grandfather clock ticked slowly. The fire had stopped flickering and was now a dull glow, but he could still make out the individual books which were stuffed in the bookcases on either side of the mantelpiece – volumes of Marx, Lenin, Jack London, Daniel De Leon, translations of Anatole France, Eugene Sue, Zola. The books belonged to Mat’s father but he had read them himself with enthusiasm as a young man and in some way, although his interests had undergone a considerable shift – his own collection of books represented a different milieu – he still felt a loyalty to the ideas in these books and to the ardent idealism which had made him plough his way through their dusty leaves.
On one wall of the room was a sepia-coloured photograph of a locomotive, taken about the time of the First World War, with his paternal grandfather standing in front of it, leaning on a shunting pole, with a big black moustache like a raven’s wings stuck across his face. He had been a good Labour man in his day. At the side of the mantelpiece above one of the bookcases was a framed reproduction of one of Millet’s toilers.
Mat was ‘burning the midnight oil’. Perhaps there was a time when this act had for him the traditional connection with ideas of self-education and improvement which accompanies working-class political aspirations. But his sitting up writing now had nothing very much to do with these former hopes. Now his interests were nearer to the kind of thing represented by those names which spring to mind when we think of modern writing. But these interests, too, were apart from his need to write.
He was sitting crouched over the table and under the circle of light because he remembered something which had happened to him as a boy. He was sitting trying to recapture an experience which had happened to him a long time ago. This event, which he often recalled and which drove him to cover sheets of paper with his small cramped handwriting, was nothing more than his having once been overcome by a mood. He had been about ten at the time. The thing had happened after he had been playing football all afternoon and he had been walking home across a patch of waste ground. The late afternoon sun had burned through the dust and smoke which hung in the upper air and slanted down its inflamed pink light on to the hard packed ground round about him. His diffuse elongated shadow went before him as he walked. For no reason at all he had felt happy. A calm unaccountable feeling of pleasure.
Now, years later, he thought that he had gone through a type of mystic experience, although his happiness had in no way been ecstatic. it had been more of a commonplace satisfactory happiness unheightened by euphoria or anything in the nature of the occult. He often thought, too, that before this time, in his very early childhood, he must have gone through days of feeling like that. But by the time he was ten years old the experience must have been unusual to have retained itself on his memory. Since then he had almost repeated the experience but these repetitions were mere glimmerings, tenuous and fleeting, mere shades . . .
Now as he sat writing he was remembering how he had recently felt again one of those vague repetitions. Early in the evening he had come home from work just as dusk was falling over the city. A calm September evening with the dust and grime high in the air, the street lamps just lit, and women’s voices calling their children. As he walked up the road from the tram stop he could see the sky far away to the west, bright pink and blue like the illustrations in a child’s book, while towards him the light changed to a light sepia. Round the street lamps there hung a soft amber fuzz of light. Away far down the road into the grey east everything was black and smudged like a graphite drawing. There was a general hum of traffic and the sound of voices. Every now and then a window in one of the tenements would light up. Mat had felt moved and happy. He walked under some trees overhanging the pavement and a cobweb touched his face which had made him remember walking through a wood as a child. The familiar sensation of warmth and excitement came over him. The feeling he always had before he would start to write.
Although he felt tired he was quite peaceful. His fatigue helped him to write. Normally when he sat down under the lamplight he felt that his body was irksome to him, with its crude physical need for movement, its continual demands. He would want to scratch, or jump, or to fidget; his senses too would always be paying attention to other things; even his intellect, curious and avid, would be pulling him outwards, away from the paper. Not to mention worry, anxiety, duty. But now in the quietness, so that he could hear the coals crackling in the low fire, in the stillness of the room, with the enclosing lamplight shining just on the page, the things which he wrote about, and the words, took on a kind of reality.
After Mat had interrupted himself by looking towards the clock on the mantelpiece he couldn’t get started again. He felt sometimes that one of the disadvantages of writing out of his mood was that though he could pay attention to detail, to the sensuous surface of the writing, choosing the words carefully and, as it were, placing them on the page; although he could dream, feeling the words and the physical presences to which they referred, seeing every event, sensing their time and their rhythm, so that each sentence, each paragraph, had almost tactile existence for him, he found structure and invention impossible. Under the fatigue his mind simply refused to work so that he found his writing becoming a mere receptacle for memory and sense impressions. He had to go back reading over his work, reading through what he had written and then, following on the impetus, write another few sentences. He had to keep on doing this because of his inability to hold any general structure in his mind. As for invention, that was always done in the clear light of dawn when the mind was at its sharpest.
This time, instead of going on writing, he became caught up with some of his sentences. He usually reconstructed his sentences by an ingenious and wholly personal system of numbers, capital letters and various types of brackets, using this system to shift whole sentences back or forward in the paragraph or to adjust the position of a clause in the sentence. This created the difficulty that no one other than himself could have made a fair copy from the page, even if they could read the small cramped and practically illegible handwriting. Sometime, he thought, I’ll get some pens with different coloured inks.
He had stopped writing now and with his chin cupped in his hand he sat looking at the paper. He thought that perhaps the story he was working on was quite good, and not badly written. The trouble was that good writing was ten a penny and that the story was also a little diffuse – slight. It needed some plain numb words to make it active, to get the feeling of narrative into it. And when he thought of the slightness of the thing he felt himself give an internal blush. It was slight and had a little touch of Romantic Irony in it because he didn’t want to say too much, be too serious. He became so involved with everything he wrote that he was afraid of too mu
ch emotion. Rightly. On the other hand, the writers whom he admired, any real writer, knocked and slapped their material about in quite a cavalier fashion. I could do it in the morning, he thought, if only . . . Sometimes he saw himself quite clearly as an object and could feel a certain amount of pity for the poor character in a cleft stick. The writer who couldn’t really write.
‘Damn it.’ He almost spoke out loud and as he pushed the papers away from him, finishing with them, he felt suddenly a dry and brittle mood come over him. ‘When I get to bed I’ll do some grand writing in my head.’ He lifted his feet on to the table and started to smoke a cigarette. Immediately he felt a twinge of conscience. All the writers who ever got anything done insisted on discipline. All right – discipline, work. He put his cigarette into his left hand, swung his feet down and picked up his pen. As he started to coax himself back into the mood he was tempted by the thought that the difficulty was in his point of view, or that he needed to wait a bit until he had grown more. A complete change of style and attitude would make it all so much easier. It was true – but it would be better to think of that later – one couldn’t think and work at the same time. And work came first.
He gathered up the papers on which he had been working and clipped them together with a paper clip. Then as he put them aside he looked round the table at the bundles of manuscript. Jotters full of notes, dossiers full of bits of dog-eared paper and typescript, single scraps of paper with notes on them which he thought too valuable to throw away. He had a habit of keeping every single thing that he had written, all in a big cardboard box, and every time he sat down to write he’d spread them around him on the table for comfort. Faced with a single scrap of paper he found himself unable to write a word, but with his ‘bits and pieces’ about him he was able to write away quite happily. He took a bulky folder, the biggest of all his ‘bits and pieces’ and laid it in front of him on the table with a sigh of satisfaction. On the front of the folder, typed on a piece of white paper and stuck on, was the motto ‘Rutherglen’s wee roon red lums reek briskly’. Beneath that was a reproduction of the City of Glasgow’s coat-of-arms with its tree, its bird, its fish and its bell. Beneath that again was typed a little piece of doggerel verse which is known to all Glasgow school children.
This is the tree that never grew,
This is the bird that never flew,
This is the fish that never swam,
This is the bell that never rang.
On the coat-of-arms there were printed the words Let Glasgow Flourish. Mat sat and looked at it for a while, then he printed the word Lord in front of it and the words by the preaching of the Word after it, and restored the modern truncated motto to its old length and meaning.
Lord, Let Glasgow Flourish by the Preaching of the Word.
As he made the addition he smiled wryly to himself as if at some private joke. Then he muttered to himself in supplication, with ironic fervency, ‘Lord, let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word,’ and opened the folder, exposing the first neatly typed page.
The manuscript began with the words ‘The Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde’. It had been some time since he had opened the folder, though he had thought of it often with a warm feeling. As he read what he had written he was rather surprised that he only remembered it slightly. The words came to him now as almost new and he read on, curious to know what he had written these years ago. The typescript continued: ‘For many centuries there were fishermen’s huts around the spot where the old Molendinar burn flowed into the Clyde, where the shallows of the Clyde occurred, where the travellers crossed who made their way from the North-west parts of Scotland down to the South. Some authorities have it that this place where St Mungo, or to give him his proper Celtic name St Kentigern, built his little church was given the Gaelic name Gles Chu, meaning “the dear green place”, and that the present name of Glasgow is a corruption of those two Gaelic words. The dear green place – as it must have been. Even late into the Eighteenth Century when the modern city that is Glasgow had begun to grow it was talked about as “the most beautiful little town in all Britain”. In the Sixth Century St Mungo had built a mission there, building it like any inn or hostelry at the most likely place to catch the customers, or converts, at the spot where the drovers or travellers would pause before crossing the ford. Being on the West coast of Scotland its connections were with the Celtic Christian culture in Ireland and so it became an ecclesiastical town. In the Fifteenth Century a University was built and Glasgow remained a religious centre until the European Reformation when it acquired with vengeance the Protestant ethic and its natives turned their hands with much zeal to worldly things. These same natives had always been pugnacious; the Romans in an earlier day had found them an intolerable nuisance; and in the Tenth Century they maintained their reputation for pugnacity by knocking spots off the Danes down on the Ayrshire coast. Thereafter they mixed almost solely with people of their own racial type. During The Industrial Revolution when Glasgow suffered a great influx of people it was from Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland that the people came so that even today the characteristic Glasgow type is short, stocky and dark like his very remote Celtic-Iberian forebears.
‘When St Mungo fished in the Clyde from his leaky coracle the source of the river was a different one from that of today. The old rhyme goes,
“The Tweed, the Annan, and the Clyde,
A’ rin oot o’ ae hillside,”
and this is not now the case. It is probable that, as some people claim, a farmer led the original Clyde burn, which rose away back in the hills, along a ditch and into the Elvan and thus on South into the Solway. This to prevent the burn from flooding his fields.’
Beside this sentence Mat marked the word ‘avulsion’. As he printed the word in the margin he felt a strange kind of satisfaction. Then he went on reading his manuscript.
‘It happened that about the same time the Glasgow merchants were howking at the river bed further downstream in order to make the deep channel which allowed Glasgow to become the great sea port which nature intended it to be.’
Again in the margin beside this sentence Mat printed another word, in alternative forms ‘alluvion’ and ‘alluvium’. Then he added the sentence: ‘And thus the wiseacres are confirmed in their saying that Glasgow and the Clyde were mutually responsible for one another’s being.’ He found the idea that the river had been tamed, or ‘domesticated’, for the sake of all this husbandry, that the big river had become something of a human artifact, he found this idea exciting and satisfying. The rest of the manuscript went on to describe the river itself.
‘A parochial historian refers to the “dim prophetic instinct in the country” which anticipates the wealth which was one day to come and speaks of one of the oldest traditions connected with the river, which tells of the three hundred Strathclyde chiefs who each wore a torque of pure gold “washed from the sands of Glengonar, or found in the mud of the Elvan”. They say that German and English prospectors came to look for gold in the Leadhills. Mines are mentioned in the very oldest records connected with the Clyde district. Gold, however, was never found in abundance and the country had to await the coming of the modern alchemists who could transmute the grey ores and black minerals which were found in abundance into a precious form. Certainly as we move among the soft greenery of that lovely strath, from its source past the grey mossy slopes and thymy banks, through the quiet hills, still, with no other sound but the cry of the curlew, the bleat of the lamb, the hum of the wandering bee, and the splash of water on stone, down to the broad valley of its middle waters with its rolling bare countryside, then the picturesque falls and rippling affluents, the pastoral delights and musing solitudes of its great Ducal estates with their fine old trees, broad pleached alleys, and far stretching vistas; down from the idyllic and uncertain past into the reaches of the Clyde where the air begins to darken, the horizon is smudged, and intermingled with grazing fields, trees, farms, and gardens are coal heaps, pi
t heads, corrugated iron sheds, foundries, machine shops, bings and mills; certainly we begin to see what the centuries had waited for with bated breath, what had been anticipated by that “dim prophetic instinct”. For here are the alembics, the retorts, and crucibles, funnels and furnaces, the apparatus and paraphernalia of the modern alchemists who transmute the grey ores and base metals of the district into glittering wealth.’
Mat smiled at this section. He remembered copying from a parochial historian the plummy bits of prose. He had enjoyed the plushy sounds of the words ‘rippling affluents’ and ‘pleached alleys’ – whatever ‘pleached’ meant. Looking up the dictionary which was lying on the floor beside his chair he read the words: ‘to intertwine the branches of; as a hedge’. Then he read on.
‘We move further along the loops which the river now takes round the towns of Hamilton, Bothwell, Blantyre, through Carmyle and into Glasgow. The mossy slopes harden into packed banks of black hardened mud, the soft greenery is a virid colour from the stretches of soda waste, the rippling affluents gush from cast iron pipes, an oily chemical sediment; we hear now the din of machinery, the thumping of hammers and the hiss and blast of steam and gas. Then the din dies down to a rattle and we come to the idyllic spot where the gentle oxen crossed and the little Molendinar burn flowed into the broad shallows of the river; the spot which the Gaels named Gles Chu, the spot where as legend had it St Mungo recovered his lost ring from the belly of a salmon. The little valley of the Molendinar is now stopped with two centuries of refuse – soap, tallow, cotton waste, slag, soda, bits of leather, broken pottery, tar and caoutchouc – the waste products of a dozen industries and a million lives, and it is built over with slums, yards, streets, and factories. A few hundred yards downstream from the broad shallows of the river there is now a deep artificial channel which will take ships of the deepest draught, great ocean-going liners. It is now spanned by bridges of steel and grey granite. We are now in the heart of the industrial world; not just the mercantile, commercial, industrial metropolis which is Glasgow, but at the heart of Industry itself, for in this spot was cradled the great movement, the Industrial Revolution, which transformed the face of the World. Take a map and a pair of compasses and insert the point of the compasses into the spot – tenderly! Gles Chu! – now transcribe a circle and you encompass the stamping grounds of many of the great men who made the Industrial Revolution possible. Adam Smith, the economist of Laisser-faire, who held the Chair of Logic and Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University. Watt, to whom we owe the steam engine; Murdoch – gas illumination; Neilson – the blast furnace; Symington and Bell – the steam ship; Rigby – the steam hammer; MacIntosh – the use of rubber; Tennent – industrial chemistry; Napier and Elder – the marine engine and screw propulsion; Paterson – the Bank of England. Here for the first time the Monteiths wove the muslin which clothed the Asiatic in his flowing robes and turbans; here were woven the zephyrs, inkles, and muslins which were to clothe the Americas: Dave Dale, before he married his daughter to Robert Owen, was carrying out experiments in industrial welfare; from here came MacAdam of the roadway and Telford of the bridges.’