Grandad Isaacs

Tommy lived in a house filled to the brim with books. Every room, even the bath-room, was cram-packed with them, on every subject under the sun (there was even a few books about the sun where Tommy learned some amazing facts – did you know that one million earths could fit inside the sun?). He lived in the house with his mother and father, his big sister Sally and his Grandad Isaacs who was born before a big war in the last century. Tommy loved to hear his Grandads stories about The Blitz and being evacuated to a castle.

Tommy was only eight years old and already he knew how the moon caused the tides of the sea; how American Presidents were elected; and whereabouts in Glasgow Third Lanark had played. And what he didn’t know, the many millions of things, he could somehow find out.

Tommy’s parents didn’t want him ‘googling’ for information as this was ‘too easy’ and restricted his use of the family computer to word processing and the basics of Windows Office. As a treat he got to play his ‘Beat the Badger’ game on his play-station a couple of times at weekends or when one of his friends visited after school.

One of those friends was a little girl called Lizzie who lived further up the street in the house under ‘the giant beech tree’. It wasn’t really such a giant tree, but to Tommy, Lizzie and their friends it was the hugest thing they would dare climb. Their parents would tell them not to climb too far up but, as they got older they got more daring and would reach for the thinnest branches on top which would sway quite violently when the winds picked up.

From way up there they could almost poke their heads out of the top of the tree, a position which offered a vast, panoramic view of the little town of East Kilbride where they lived. They could see the vast industrial estate to the east and the town centre to the south, and all the church spires and tower blocks round about. Nearer by they’d see the little burn that ran through the park and the dark ‘plantation’ of pine trees which ranged up on the hill.

They didn’t need eyes to hear ‘Twaddles’ the ice-cream van in the vicinity. The merry-sombre jangle of Greensleeves had all the children in the area asking ‘Mum! Can I get something from the van?’ If they were lucky and mum was flush they’d hear her reply ‘Aye, son! Take a pound from my purse’. They’d have 99s and joob-joobs, or ice poles and oysters; Fab ice-lollies or maybe a Cornetto or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s if it was a good week and dad had had a win on the horses.

Summer holidays from school were the most fabulous time in a child’s life; those six weeks seemed to offer endless possibilities for fun and adventure. Day-trips to the seaside – ‘who’s for a mystery tour to Gourock’ his dad would say every year that Tommy was aware of. This year it would be M&Ds Theme Park as a special treat where there are fast rides and The Giant Condor. Tommy’s family would be taking Lizzie and her wee brother, Donnie along with them for a whole day of scrumptious food and fun.

Summer holidays from school were about freedom - freedom and possibility. They offered opportunities for exploration (the woods behind the school where the giant lived) and endeavour (the quest for the almost mythical Auldhoose which, much like Brigadoon, appeared into existence as a possibility only every summer-time).

Tommy was encouraged to go outdoors and explore. He loved searching for golf balls in the rough grass of the local ‘posh’ golf course. Sometimes in the musk of a summer twilight, his father and he would head off with a club and a couple of balls and chip and putt onto one of the plush greens that weren’t pock-marked and scarred like the ones on the old ‘Corpy’ course they were used to. It was like eating forbidden fruit and they’d revel in the fun and daring of it. There was no feeling Tommy knew like finding a near-new snow white golf ball nestling in the rough. Maybe their owners were so rich they didn’t bother looking for them, Tommy thought. Yet to him they were a prize possession he’d never use: just keep in a drawer to take out and wonder at over and over again.

His dad would always say of the Corpy course where they played ‘They don’t use tees here, son. They hit the balls from beer cans’.

Summer mornings half past six and ‘right son, get up, we’re off’. Tea and toast then the long hike up through ‘the puggy’ and through past the factory where his dad works and finally. Deaconsbank Corporation Golf Course. They’re there so early so that Tommy’s dad can avoid paying the green fees. This is why they never play the eighteenth as it leads back down to the ‘clubhouse’ (a wee green shed with a man sitting in it). Tommy’s dad always says ‘just mark down a five for the last, son’. This is a remarkably optimistic prediction for his dad to make as they’d just completed the other seventeen holes in well over one hundred strokes.

They made their way home through the woods and stop to poke sticks into the tadpole ponds;

“What’s the capital of Canada?” his dad would ask out of the blue.

“Ottawa, dad”. Tommy said this as if such simple questions were below him.

Grandad Isaacs was more than eighty years old and now that Grandma Isaacs had passed away there was no-one outside bureaucracy that could be more specific than that: least of all the man himself who though he could tell you the number on his Enfield Rifle from his army days, he couldn’t rightly tell you his date of birth (was it 9 something?) or whether he’d phoned his friend Ina just five minutes before let alone what he’d said to her (she’d hear it again five minutes later, much to her annoyance).

In his mind he belonged to a different world; to a past world that seemed to exist in monochrome. Men wore raincoats and women all looked like the Queen, especially the Queen. Cars were bulbous and bulky and it seemed to be raining continually into huge puddles on bomb sites. It was a world of dancehalls and low shadowy street lighting; trolley buses and steam trains; mangles and clothes lines; tenements and squalor. It was a dark world with summer days you could count on the fingers of both hands.

The therapist had told the family (and Ina) that it was important that they communicate with their elderly relative and friend at a level that he recognised; otherwise he was ‘in there all on his own’, roaming the solitary streets of his remembrances. That’s why they spoke to him of his days as a dancehall singer; of how he’d met his wife, Grandma Isaacs, the same night that he was singing in a talent competition at The Barrowland (he won it, of course. Grandma Isaacs used to always say ‘if your Granda had been a rotten singer, none of you would have existed, cos I was off my mark!’). 

That’s why they asked him about his time as an evacuee at Airthrey Castle, Bridge of Allan. They hooked up with the man in his past.

He often couldn’t remember who they were!

Yet he could remember his boyhood in Giffnock. He could remember the rhododendron bushes in Rouken Glen. He remembered his Bah Mitzvah at the old synagogue on May Road. He remembered playing for and supporting Third Lanark Football Club - the ‘HI-HI’’. His grandson kept telling him the ground was still there which confused him. He’d thought the club went out of business a long time ago. He remembered the buses, he remembered the streets – he remembered his first ever kiss and the colour of the dress she was wearing. He could smell her scent. The only thing he couldn’t remember was where she was now..

Tommy and Lizzie had been discussing a special adventure for Grandad Isaacs. The idea was to take him to Cathkin Park, ex-home of Third Lanark Athletic Club, the football team that he’d supported as a child in Giffnock and later played right-half for. The team had gone out of business in 1967 but, unbelievably if you think about it, the shape of the ground was still there; terraces surrounded what was, discernibly, once the football pitch. To an ex-fan and player, maybe also an atmosphere of the ground still existed. His grandfather now lived in the past so, thought Tommy, why not take him there too. The past existed at Cathkin Park and it was just waiting there for the return of a favourite son.

“Yer Granda mibbe no’ remember too much, son. I mean, I know he often says the words ‘Third Lanark’ but I’m no’ so sure it goes much further than that”

Tommy noticed that his dad had left the knife in the jam after spreading his toast with it. He was always doing that.

“But, it can’t do any harm dad, d’ye no’ think?”

“Guess not, son. As long as you prepare yourself to witness an old and befuddled man walking about Cathkin Park looking just that – auld and befuddled”

“We’ll be there with him to look after him”

“We will son, we will”

“By the way” his dad stopped in his tracks before taking his tea and toast in to watch the news “the symbols Mn, what’s the element?”

“Manganese, Da”

“It is, son, it is…”

A young boy in an old man’s bunnet stands on the grass mound outside the left stand. His job is to retrieve any balls that are thumped over; maybe by some ferocious half back eager to stop the enterprises of some nippy wee inside forward or winger. When this happens, maybe once or twice in a match, the young lad with perfect technique and  powerful thighs, kicks the ball back over the high walls. This elicits cheers from sections of the fans in the ground. Third Lanark are at home to local rivals Clyde in a Saturday afternoon Glasgow Cup heat. It’s a cold day in September and the young lad blows visible breath into his cupped hands.

This is part of his duty as junior ground-staff, the proudest title of his yet young life. ‘Sammy Isaacs, Third Lanark AC’. His dream is coming true. He’d followed the club since his boyhood ‘through thin and thinner’ as his father had quipped. One of the oldest and proudest football clubs in Scotland, formed by members of the 3^rd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, Third Lanark generally claimed top-flight status but hadn’t had big success since a Scottish Cup win in 1905. The Thirds were Sammy’s local team being just over 3 miles from Giffnock. ‘We could have taken you to Hampden to see Queen’s Park but, they’re a snobby wee club who play in a huge mausoleum’ was how his Uncle Adam had put it before taking wee Sammy to his first game at Cathkin, a thrilling four-one home win against Hamilton Academicals. From then on he was hooked.

East Kilbride to Cathkin Park was just less than eight miles and inside the family car as it shook along was Tommy, his friend Lizzie and Grandad Isaac’s on the back seat with Tommy’s mum and dad in the front. His dad was driving while singing ‘For we’re all off to Cathkin in the car, in the car..!’ The children laughed while his wife shushed him for his silliness. They passed through the town of Thorntonhall: deciduous and verdant, green in the unexpected mid-day sun. A burn runs through this wee South Lanarkshire town. It gurgles and sleeks and bobs its ducks gently amongst the gentility before wending its way gently down to proletarian Busby and the White Cart Water, which then meanders through to Paisley in its own sweet time. In a rumbustious world, these little towns glint quietly. They never change because they are never needed to; everything about them is as it was meant to be; every tree in place, every homestead sturdy and rainproof, the little village green pretty and convivial. The family car ambled in toward Glasgow, through Battlefield where Mary Queen of Scots lost to James VI.

Grandad Isaacs peered out of his back-seat window. Somewhere in the miasma of his memory he knew this place. They passed the clock tower on Grange Road, they passed the Battlefield Monument, and they weaved through the streets and streets of tenements. This is some place, he thought. In his mind he saw Italian Coffee Bars and ice-cream parlours. He saw glowering sodium streetlights and trams clanking and tinkling through the rain. He saw his Uncle Adam standing outside a synagogue waving at him as if beckoning him home. He saw the fevered lights of Victoria Infirmary and something connected within his mind. Great sorrow overcame him and silent tears ran down his cheeks.

Cathkin Park stadium, erstwhile home of Third Lanark AC – the Redcoats, the Warriors, the Thirds, the Hi-Hi – lay in a hollow surrounded on every side by beech trees and larch. The pitch itself had long been scrub-land; stanchions, barriers and railings were all a rusty red; the goal frames stood defiant, paint long flaked revealing a gritty wind-blown iron. The weeds on the terraces and in the rickety old stand grew high and durable like a replacement plantain crowd, the Glasgow wind whipping them into a whooshing frenzy of cheering applause. The same wind wound itself around the empty stand-shed, whining and wailing like a banshee with behavioural difficulties.

It was hard for the five onlookers to imagine that this was once a vibrant, welcoming sports stadium.

“Amazing it’s still here…” Tommy’s Dad articulated what many had thought over the years. Fifty years was a long time for this ghostly relic of the history of Scottish football to be left to slowly rot.

“Is it maybe because it’s part of a bigger park?” posited young Lizzie. It was true that Cathkin Park was more than just the football ground. Still it was odd that nothing else had been done with this large piece of land in all that time.

Tommy’s mum held on to Grandad Isaacs’ arm. The old man seemed to be in a daze and was mumbling something about ‘pie and peas, pie and peas’. She followed his gaze towards an old ramshackle construction that had once been a shed. It had been painted sometime in a very distant past in the club colours of red and white; it creaked and flaked in the wind, its door long since banished to the weeds and worms. Grandad Isaacs seemed fascinated by it.

They walked him through a gap on the side-rail and onto the pitch. Each of them could not help sneaking a wee peek at their elderly friend and relative to see if the detected any recognition on his aged face.

“Auld and befuddled” Tommy remembered his Dad’s warning.

The old man looked around the strewn field. He looked up at the terraces. He could hear the traffic from Cathcart and Aitkenhead roads, the low hum below and above; the House Sparrows and Jack Snipes trilled and whistled above him and a low wind tugged at his flannels.

“Look at the goalposts, Grandad..”

Grandad Isaacs obeyed the wish of his grandson and a flash of recognition shuttered through his mind like a photograph. He saw himself at speed attacking a ball just outside the penalty area on the left-hand side, then a thud of boot on heavy leather, then a roar from the giant crowd. He saw it as it was happening standing with his little group in the centre circle of an empty ground.

Then he turned towards the old run-down shed and uttered just one word…

“Betty…”

And then he smiled…