Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray
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Название: Of Me and Others
Автор: Alasdair Gray
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781786895219
isbn:
At present I do not know. Until a few years ago I wanted to make stories and pictures. While writing or painting I forgot myself so completely that I did not want to be any different. I felt I was death’s equal. We live and have lived, die and will die in this place and millions have been and will be forgotten with hearts and faces we struggle to keep until folded in sleep or gone rotten, and most, before dying, give blood to son or daughter and when the bones of these children crumble, remain not even memories – names cut on stones, perhaps: otherwise we are a procession as featureless as water unless we get into a lasting image or repeatable pattern of words. But the most necessary and typical people are seldom commemorated in art and history which whore after the rich, the disastrous, the eccentric and love, above all, monstrous folk with one ability, one appetite so magnified that they seem mere embodiments of it – that is how our heroes and gods get made. I tried to tell convincing stories by copying into them pieces of myself and people I knew, cutting, warping and joining the pieces in ways suggested by imagination and the example of other story-makers, for I wanted to amuse, so my stories contain monsters. I do not decry them for that, but I have no new ideas for more. Can I entertain with some of the undistorted facts which generated them?
Early last century a Scottish shepherd whose first name is now unknown fathered William Gray, a shoemaker who fathered Alexander Gray, a blacksmith in Bridgeton, east Glasgow, a district then brisk with foundries, potteries and weaving sheds. And Alexander married Jeanie Stevenson, powerloom weaver and daughter of a coalminer. She became his housewife and bore another Alexander, who became a clerk on a weighbridge on a Glasgow dock, then a private in the Black Watch regiment in France, then a quartermaster sergeant there, then worked a machine which cut cardboard boxes in a Bridgeton factory until another world war began.
While some of this was happening Hannah, wife of a Northampton hairdresser called William Fleming bore Henry Fleming who became a foreman in a boot-making factory, and married Emma Minnie Needham. Henry, nicknamed Harry, also became a trade-unionist, and his bosses put his name on a list of men not to be employed in English factories. He and Minnie came to Glasgow where she bore Amy Fleming who first became a shop assistant in a clothing warehouse, then married Alex Gray the folding box maker, thus becoming a housewife.
She and Alex lived in Riddrie, a Glasgow corporation housing scheme where she bore Alasdair James Gray who became a maker of imagined objects, and Mora Jean Gray who became a physical exercise and dance teacher in Aberdeen, and married Bert Rolley from Portsmouth, a chemist who analysed polluted water. Alasdair Gray married Inge Sorenson, a nurse in an Edinburgh hospital, thus making her a housewife in Glasgow, though only for 9 years; and she bore Andrew Gray who became a supplies private in a Royal Air Force base near Inverness. But long before Mora and Alasdair got married all their working ancestors in this crowded little tale were dead, except for their father Alexander Gray. After cutting cardboard for 21 years he became manager of a hostel for munition workers, builder’s labourer, wages clerk, persuader of hoteliers to subscribe to the Scottish Tourist Board, a remover of damaged chocolate biscuits from a conveyor belt, wages clerk again, warden for the Scottish Youth Hostel Association, hill guide in mountainous parts of Britain for the Holiday Fellowship, and lastly house-husband in the polite little town in Cheshire on which Mrs. Gaskill based her novel, Cranford. He died a month before his 76th year on the fourth of March 1973.
Here follows some of his early memories typed at my request in 1970 or 71. I have rearranged sentences in the first two paragraphs, cut out five conjunctions, replaced two pronouns by nouns, and added three commas and a period.
NOTES ON EARLY LIFE IN GLASGOW
BY ALEXANDER 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.
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