Tenements

As a young lad I remember having to share a stairwell toilet with neighbours. How many neighbours I’m not quite sure: maybe one toilet between four households. Just a wee skinny room with a toilet bowl and a chain-pull, one had to provide one’s own toilet paper and was one’s hands in one’s own kitchen sink.

Our neighbours consisted of parents, children, elderly widows and the odd widower. Auld Tam, who lived downstairs until he died a few years ago, certainly used our toilet. One could tell this by the sweet, almost acrid, smell of his expelled effluence. It hung in the air for ages and one would avoid using said facility for a good while after him if you could. God knows what his diet consisted of.

This was 1970s Glasgow when you ate what was put in front of you. An old man on his own would have nothing approaching sophistication at meal times. It would be a tin of spam and maybe a boiled tottie or two. From the smell of his shite he’d been eating mouldy seaweed and some form of animal vomit. 

(My own Grandfather I’m told, for I never knew him, would make a pot of mince and chop hot dog sausages into it. Similarly, tinned soup would be bulked out with a tin of butter beans which, now that I’ve thought of it, I may try the latter myself).

Maybe he’d get himself an ashet pie supper from the local chippy. There was no shortage of chippies in Glasgow at that time (or, indeed, now). There were two at the bottom of Whitehill Street and many more on Duke Street itself. Suppers were wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers through which the vinegar and grease oozed and if you weren’t careful you’d stain your Harrington jacket or Ben Sherman shirt. If you were posh you’d transfer the food directly onto a plate, if not you’d plonk the supper still in the paper onto a plate on your lap before wolfing it joyously. Pickled onions were an extra particularly to be enjoyed.

Then, I guess, all that was consumed ended up being flushed down the communal toilet.

Ours was a ‘tiled’ close: emerald green with pink rose motif. Quite posh I guess! Certainly not like the tenements where the poorest of the poor lived in The Gorbals: they were pulling these down to be replaced with eerie tombstones that cast a fevered light on the Clyde. These were the days before tenements had security doors, meaning anyone who was able was free to enter and chap at your door. For some reason this entitlement was rarely abused. Certainly, no-one would come in to use the communal ablution facilities: such an act would be an unthinkable violation on a par with pissing through your letter box. Such subtle social sensibilities.

My Da tried to burn down the wee Masonic Hall on the other side of our back dyke. The sound of their songs and drunken banter got on his nerves so much that he felt impelled to this act of arson as he set alight the scraggy grass around the base of this building used for sectarian purposes. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the divide you stand) this merely had the effect of charring the lower brickwork before the services managed to extinguish the, ironically, orange blaze. Derry’s Walls were maintained once more.

Mr Griffen who lived on the ground floor was a keen Mason and I’m sure he suspected my old man to be the fire-lighter. It was around this time that he’d taken up playing the flute, probably to further taunt my father. Luckily, he was a heavy smoker and unable to generate sufficient puff to even get half way through The Sash before spluttering and retching to a quite un-Protestant halt. The funny thing was my Da wasn’t even a Catholic. He was a Celtic-supporting hun which, to many, made it even worse.

Mr Griffin’s neighbour was an old Jewess named Rosie Cohen (“Jews and tims aw up ma close” was how Mr G would complain about it at the bar of the local bowls club which was, as every local knew, an unofficial Orange Lodge where the snooker table didn’t accommodate a green ball). Auld Rosie, as she was not always affectionately known, was a bit of a lush and over-fond of the ‘Coatbridge table wine’ or Buckfast to you and I. To procure this sainted liquor she would attempt to borrow money when she was skint from her more soft-hearted neighbours (Mr G was never one of these). 

My Ma was a popular target, and as well as always being paid back, Rosie’s gratitude was expressed by the pan of soup left outside our door along with Matzoh bread wrapped in tin-foil and sometimes a plate of potato fritters.

There were rumours that Auld Rosie had lost family in the holocaust but details of this were never enquired about or offered.

Mrs Petrie lived on the middle floor alone. Her lift had known tragedy too. Her twin boys had drowned simultaneously, the one trying desperately to save the other, while on a family holiday on the Ayrshire coast. The poor woman had never recovered from the death of her only children and her husband perished miserably two years later a broken, alcoholic man.

She lived her days in solitary silence, attending church on Sunday and shopping once a week at the local Galbraith’s. She offered a polite ‘I’m fine thank you’ when the till-girl asked after her welfare. In this way she very nobly and with great dignity prevented the tremendous grief in her heart from infecting those around her. We in the close were aware of its existence but were allowed not to have to dwell on it.

The McGoldrick’s shared a landing with Mrs Petrie in the house where Auld Tam had died, not utterly surprisingly, from stomach cancer. Maw, Paw and two weans just like us, wee Fraser and his younger sister, Dottie, seven and four and scatty as kittens. Mr McGoldrick worked at the local Tennant’s brewery as a mechanic. Every Friday night he’d bring a big ‘carry-out’ of stolen Super lager and proceed to get pished as a Glesga Green hoor and, often as not, start slapping his wife about. 

Nowadays, action would likely be taken by concerned neighbours. There would be a hot-line to phone and report this sort of thing anonymously. In 70s Glasgow, the term ‘a discreet veil’ was code for ‘mind ye rain fuckin’ business’. It was ‘a domestic’ and not for nosey-parkers. Mrs McGoldrick would be seen maybe a couple of days later hanging out her washing in the back green sporting a bruised lip and a black eye, trying desperately to hide her angry, lonely tears from her tearaway children who’d be climbing the dyke or playing chasies in the midden.

The neighbours from my floor? Well, they were the Thompson family. He, Ted Thompson, was well known as a local gangster and hard-man, believed to be a cousin of the more notorious, Arthur Thompson, a much feared ‘Godfather’ of the Glasgow criminal world. The wife, Agnes, was a right hard-ticket too. Fur coat and she had the knickers too, painted fingernails and coiffured bee-hive, she’d scratch your eyes out if you looked even half-squinty at her. To me, she was the sexiest thing on earth. 

At fourteen, I’d just begun what was to become a prolific masturbatory career and it didn’t take much to get my fist in pumping mode. (Suzie Quatro should be made aware of the literally gallons of fluid spurted on her account. Every time she was on Top of The Pops, and Can the Can was number one for some weeks, I’d be trotting off to the communal toilet where screams of ecstasy and ‘O Suzie’s’ were surely disturbing to the neighbours, particularly the McGoldrick kids). 

Mrs Thompson had a cleavage like the Campsie Hills which reduced me to stuttering paroxysms every time I confronted it. Her scent was overpowering like she’d bathed in the stuff. But, you couldn’t mess with Ted Thompson’s wife. You’d as well just fling yourself on the tracks at Belgrove Station; that’s probably where you’d end up anyway.

The Thompson’s were childless. My Da reckoned, strictly within the confines of his own four walls, that Ted Thompson was too mean to have children. Despite his obvious affluence -Jaguar parked at the front of the close, expensive suits and all the other gangster trimmings –his front door wouldn’t even be approached for a treat at Halloween by the local kids and he was well known for ‘collecting his copper’ and cashing it in for notes at the local Clydesdale’s.

Every tenement was full of stories and Glasgow – Scotland – was cram packed with tenements.