Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  MY FATHER’S GRANDFATHER HAD been a shepherd on the Earl of Hume’s estate at Douglas Water. His father was a high class boot maker whose shop was in (now) London Road near Glasgow Cross. My father was the product of an age when children left school at 10 years and were sent to sea to learn the ways of the world. He served on two voyages, one when the crew were men released from Barlinnie prison to man the sailing vessel, while the second ship had to leave Cuba because of the war with the U.S.A. On reaching home he was made drunk by the crew (he being a popular cabin boy) and taken home where his Mother found him at the door, sitting on his box the crew members having knocked on the door and run off. That ended his seafaring education.

  By the age of 25 years Father must have become a blacksmith. He made two journeys from London to Glasgow, working his way from job to job, for walking was his passion and his recreation. He had married, had two sons, William and James, after which his wife died. He married again. By his second wife I was his third son and had a sister, Agnes. He died in 1921 aged 70. My mother came from a mining family at Wishaw. I had several uncles and aunts from both sides of the family and it was Sunday afternoon and evening visitations to them or from them that provided the changes in domestic routines, for all were within walking distance or short tram journey distances from home in Bridgeton.

  My early recollections are of our room and kitchen in a street off Main Street, Bridgeton, in a dirty grey tenement of three stories. Like most flats up east end Glasgow closes, ours was a two-room and kitchen. My step-brothers slept in the room while Father and Mother shared the bed recess in the kitchen, the biggest room. Agnes and I slept in the hurley bed, kept below the kitchen bed during the day and rolled out at night. The lighting was on a long piped bracket fixed to the mantlepiece, which could be angled to suit a reader. The light was poor, not white as was later the case when gas mantles were introduced, first with vertical mantles and later by the smaller mantles now used on Calor Gas lamps. The fireplace was black leaded with the door handles and fire-irons in polished steel, the polishing of them being my weekly job, together with the oval dish covers which hung on the kitchen wall below the shelves of crockery and other dishes. In front of the window in the kitchen was the jaw-box or sink with the brass water pipe which provided only cold water, and was another of my weekly polishing jobs.

  Father worked in a smiddy between the Clyde and French Street some ten minutes walk from home. These were the days when work started at 6am and breakfast was taken during a break about 8am. Midday dinner was around 1pm and work ended around 6pm. Father would have a cup of tea and some buttered bread before work and return for a breakfast of porridge, an egg or other “kitchen” – cooked food like bacon or sausage. Dinner consisted of soup or broth, meat, potatoes, veg, followed by a milk pudding or fruit. The evening meal we called tea would be plain bread, currant bread, scones, cheese and tea, while supper would be porridge or peas brose. During my school holidays Father would have his dinner at the smiddy to which I carried his soup in a can, his main course between plates tied in a towel. There I would pump the bellows so fast that the fire would blaze. Sometimes I would look over the wooden fence to Auld Shawfield, the football ground of Clyde before they moved to the present stadium between Glasgow and Rutherglen. I remember seeing players in red shirts running around, though don’t remember if they were training or playing a match.

  When the season for girds came round Father would make iron girds1 and cleeks for my friends and me and we would make the iron ring as we ran round the streets in Bridgeton or made expeditions to the Sauny Waste, the open ground in the loop of the Clyde upstream from Dalmarnock Bridge. From the short street which gave access to works and a piggery on the Rutherglen bank, an earth path followed the riverbank. It was uneven, with hills and dales which required skill with the gird to maintain an uninterrupted run. Hills and hollows of sand filled the rivers loop in the middle of which was a flat hollow in which we could play football.

  Often at the two ends of the loop a man would be on the lookout for the police, for in some hollow there would be a pitch-and-toss school of some two dozen men. In the centre a man would swing a leather belt to keep a ring clear while another would be laying bets with the surrounding crowd, yet another balancing two pennies on a sliver of wood or his fingers, preliminary to tossing them high in the air to descend as head or tail, or two heads or two tails. Heads and tails were a neutral toss and had to be repeated till they both came down the same side up. With tails the crowd was happy because it won, with heads it put up with the loss, hoping the tosser could not continue winning forever. Small boys were not welcomed in this game, but we crawled through the grass to the rim of the hollow and peeped down over the heads of the gamblers, running away when we were spotted, to return by the river bank or an adjoining street to our own street.

  Football of course was our favourite past-time. This was before the days of tarmac. The streets were cobbled, the ball did not run true but stotted in unexpected angles, except when the wall of the houses was used in passing an opponent and lamp-posts were goals. When each team was of two or three, the near posts on each side of the street would be used, but if more boys were available two near posts on the same side would be used thus providing a longer pitch. Such fun was not looked upon with pleasure by folk living on ground level flats and sometimes above, for windows were often broken. Sometimes a policeman would appear so the ball was snatched up and we all disappeared up various closes to cross the intervening walls of the back courts to adjoining streets and freedom. Leave-O or Kick-the-Can were alternatives to football, while the girls either had wooden hoops or peever and beds otherwise called Hop-Scotch. Sometimes selected girls would play with the boys at Hide and Seek, and the closes and dunnies2 provided scope for initiative in avoiding discovery.

  Father and Mother were deeply religious. Father was involved in the creation of the Congregational Union, i.e. the Union of Congregational Churches3. He sometimes took the pulpit when the Minister was ill, was superintendent of the Sunday School, an elder, and when a new church was created, Dalmarnock Road Congregational Church, gave some seven years service as church officer or cleaner as his donation to the new building. The Minister’s wife was an invalid so Mother was President of the Mothers Meetings. Both were to my mind examples of Christian living for they not only observed the conventional daily or weekly forms of worship, but in their treatment of people of all religions or none, were helpful and kind and tolerant. We had grace at all meals, and each night before retiring to bed, Father would read the daily lesson from the Bible and Mother would say a prayer, or the roles would be reversed and sometimes I or Agnes would be asked to take the little service.

  Father and Mother were both mild of temper. I never heard them raise their voices in discussion or argument between themselves or with others. The first years of this century had no social security or health insurance,4 and doctor’s bills were to be avoided. I remember Father coming home with his face and hands bandaged after he had been splattered with molten lead at work. He came from hospital where he had the pieces of lead picked from his skin, had his mid-day dinner and went back to work. On another occasion when our home had been burgled and drawers and cupboards ransacked and clothing etc. taken, he returned home to learn of the theft. His first thought was for his working clothes and all he said was, “Well, they left me the best suit, the one I need for my work.” After 40 years with the same firm he reached the age of 65 and was told he was getting too old for his work as a blacksmith. Without warning he was handed his weekly wage, which I don’t think ever exceeded 30 shillings, was thanked for his long and useful service and given the advice to look for a lighter job. His hand was shaken by the owner and he left, knowing that at his age he would not be able to get a tradesmen’s job. In his last five years of labour he was a hammer-man to blacksmiths at Stewart & Lloyds at Rutherglen, much heavier work than that done by the men he was assisting. I never heard him complain. He was a teetotaller and did not smo
ke. His weekly spending was for butterscotch, the odd tram fare when on his Saturday afternoon walk. Often he would rise on Sunday morning and walk up to ten miles before going to church at 11am. On Saturday afternoons he would take me on walks along the paths round and over the hills which surround Glasgow, the paths which Alexander McDonald wrote about in Rambles Round Glasgow. When Mother, after an illness, spent a week at Strathaven, Father and I walked there and back5 each Saturday having taken the tram to Cambuslang.

  One of my treats was to be taken to Celtic Park by Uncle John, who was Mother’s brother and manager of the newside at Beardmore’s6 furnaces. The oldside was hand-fed furnaces where Uncle Tom was the leading hand. Both lived at Parkhead. I can still hear the hush of the thousands on the terraces as Jimmy Quinn barged his way toward the goal with his opponents floored by his strong shoulders, to be followed by the roar which exploded when he cannoned the ball into the net.

  Mother was good with her hands. She knitted, crocheted, made jam and baked and had time for church work. Her contribution to the family purse always ensured that at Glasgow Fair the Grays had a week’s holiday. Never once did we stay at home in that time. Occasionally we also had a day Doon the Watter7 on other holidays.

  In politics my father was a radical liberal, though he never was active as a political worker. He knew Keir Hardie and was instrumental in getting K.H. to speak at Dalmarnock Congregational Church where at that time the minister was the Rev. Forson. Incidentally Father had a Bible class at the Sunday School and from his class came the two Graingers who later were medical doctors in Bridgeton and three Forsons, all of whom became Congregational Ministers, one of whom succeeded his father in my father’s own church church. I went to John Street School as an infant and later into the Higher Grade School, where I was a mediocre scholar, being better with my feet and hands than with my head. I remember the celebration when George the VII8 became King. We each received a small box with the heads of the King and Queen on the lid. We were marched from school to Glasgow Green for fun, games and sport, but what I did is now beyond me. Glasgow Green was not only where football was played. Part was the bleaching field and the nearby folk after the weekly washing would spread out or hand their clothes and water them for the sun to make them white. It was nearby what was to become the Greenhead Baths. It was also here where we school children were taken for swimming lessons. We would line up outside, having raced from school for first place in the queue where we prepared by partially undressing so that no time would be lost in the boxes beside the pool.

  Every New Year all of the Stevenson family (my mother was a Stevenson) visited Granny who lived above a wide pend just beyond the present Tramway garage at Parkhead. All the Uncles and Aunts and their children were present, four families in all. The youngsters sat down first and had steak pie followed by plum pudding in large helpings, then were sent out to play while the parents had their dinner. Through the pend9 there was a large gable end where we played hand ball. We picked sides and each side in turn had to hit the ball against the gable end, the ball being hit after it stotted once on the ground. The side which failed to return the ball to the wall after one stot lost a point, and the first side reaching perhaps 10 points lost the game. When the elders finished washing up after the meal we all returned to the house and games and song passed the afternoon, each person reciting or singing his or her party piece.

  It was on Sunday that the black morning coats were worn for church. Father, Bill who was church organist and choirmaster, and Jim who sang in the choir (he also sang in the Orpheus Choir) also wore their tall hats. When Father died in 1921 I was an outpatient at Bellahoustoun hospital, a military hospital, being given treatment following a war wound. In order to maintain the dignity of the family at the funeral I also had to get a morning coat and tall hat.

  END OF ALEXANDER GRAY’S NARRATIVE

  YOU STARTED READING THIS because you are more interested in me than my father. This essay has become a preface to an autobiography instead of the sketch for one I intended, yet Dad’s self-negating account of his first family – even the style of his language – tells a lot about the characters of working people who shaped mine, though the gentle radical blacksmith who taught the Bible to three Bridgeton doctors and a clergyman died 13 years before I was born, and I don’t know when his wife died. My Dad only spoke of his life before marriage when I asked about it, which was hardly ever. This reticence included his experiences of fighting in France between 1914 and 18. There was an exception to this in my late teens when I had bouts of asthma. These sometimes made me feel all life and history was a bad disease, a disease which could only be cured by a God of Love in whom I had no faith despite all Christian churches praying to Him. A Socialist and Agnostic, my dad believed with Marx that humanity would one day solve every problem it had the sense to recognise. As he could not persuade me of this he tried to help by introducing me to his parents’ God in ways which respected their faith and his own. I made a note of these words, which told some things his written account does not, and eventually I paraphrased them in the 26th chapter of my first novel.

  “My father was elder in a Congregational church in Bridegton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money. But there was something wrong with me. Then the 1914 war started and I joined the army and heard a different kind of prayer. The clergy on all sides were praying for victory. They told us God wanted our government to win and was right there behind us, with the generals, shoving us forward. A lot of us in the trenches let God go at that time with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed Duncan, all these airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notions are nothing but aids to doing what we want anyway. My parents used Christianity to help them behave decently in a difficult life. Other folk used it to justify war and property. But Duncan, what men believe isn’t important – it’s our actions which make us right or wrong. So if a God can comfort you, adopt one. He won’t hurt you.”

  This speech – or, to be accurate, the words it paraphrases – did not help me at the time, for words cannot cure a physical pain unless they are a sort of hypnotism. But when my health mended it helped me believe what I still mainly believe: that original decency is as old as original sin and essentially stronger: that those who pray are consciously strengthening wishes which (whether selfish or not) are already very strong in them, and which decide the nature of the god they invoke.

  I swear that extract contains no invention, just two bits of condensing and an exaggeration – 10 years of voluntary service are made out of what was less. It also contains an image I used in another piece of writing: the image of a small boy at family prayers who suspects he is at fault because he feels God is not with him. This became part of a play I wrote in 1964 called The Fall of Kelvin Walker. It was televised by the BBC in 1968 and published as a novel in 1985, and is a fable about a monstrously pushy young Scot getting rich quickly in London. He is buoyant with energies released by his escape from a nastily religious father who has used the god of Calvin like a rubber truncheon to batter his children into submission. Neither father nor son in that fable much resemble my father, or his father, or
me, and none of the incidents in it befell any of us. When copying a thing from experiences of myself or acquaintances I sometimes gave it a context like that where it happened, sometimes did not. My most densely and deliberately autobiographical writing is in books 1 and 2 of Lanark. Apart from the encounter with the Highland minister, the encounter with the prostitute, the fit of insanity and suicide, nearly every thought and incident is copied from something real in context where it happened, but so much of my life was not copied that Lanark tells the story of a youngster estranged by a creative imagination from family, friends, teachers and city.

  I hope this is a convincing tragedy. It was not mine. My family and half my teachers did not stunt my imagination. They encouraged it Scottishly, by allowing me materials and time to paint and write, not praising me to my face but talking about the results of my work when they thought I could not hear. My family and schooling made art seem the only way to join mental adventure, physical safety and social approval. They pressed upon my bundle of traits in a way which made anything but art and writing seem dull or threatening.

  The foregoing paragraph is written to indicate both connections and divergences between life and art. The following questions were asked by Christopher Swan and Frank Delaney in August 1982 when preparing a BBC broadcast interview, and may illuminate the same subject.

  Question. What is your background?

  Answer. If background means surroundings: the first 25 years were lived in Riddrie, east Glasgow, a well maintained district of stone-fronted corporation tenements and semi-detached villas. Our neighbours were a nurse, postman, printer and tobacconist, so I was a bit of a snob. I took it for granted that Britain was mainly owned and ruled by Riddrie people – people like my father.

  If background means family: it was hardworking, well-educated and very sober. My English grandad was a Northampton foreman shoemaker who came north because the southern employers blacklisted him for trade-union activities. My Scottish grandad was an industrial blacksmith and congregational kirk-elder. In the 30s, when my father married, he worked a box-making machine in a factory, hiked and climbed mountains for a hobby, and did voluntary secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain and the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. My mother was a good housewife who never grumbled, but I now know wanted more from life than it gave – my father had several ways of enjoying himself. She had very few. They were, from that point of view, a typical married couple. I had a younger sister I bullied and fought with, until we started living in separate houses. Then she became one of my best friends.