Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 smoke. 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 СКАЧАТЬ