A Giant in the Woods

This was a time when you could still buy five Park Drive. When men wore bum-freezer jackets and the young women all looked like the Queen. The air was different back then: it was redolent of grease and the smell of fish and chip shops, sour pale ale, and farts parped beside coal fires. My grandparents smelled of apples and Pledge and welcomed you at the door cheerily then were parsimonious within. Sex had only just been invented and, somewhere near Blantyre a man saw his wife naked for the first time after eight years of marriage and filed for divorce.

Chimneys were set alight on a regular basis by burning sheets of The Citizen, a paper which regularly published my father's socialism in letter form and his opinion on away grounds that he’d watched his beloved Celtic play at. For this reason, he was never again safe to visit Motherwell.

The weather was either gloomy or bright. When the wind blew it moved the slates on the roof. Public transport wasn’t necessary as one simply spread one’s coat like wings and hang-glided to nearby towns and back again.

Men seemed perpetually drunk and women became expert at concealing black eyes with subtle make-up. If a wife had a ‘good man’ it meant he gave her ‘house-keeping’ promptly on a Friday evening then stayed at home to watch Z-Cars.

Kids sought out scrambles at the weekend where substantial silver and copper was fought over then spent on gobstoppers and ice poles.

Auld Rosie from upstairs traded pans of soup and potato fritters and, being Jewish, matzoh bread in exchange for loans for bottles of sherry wine.

No-one seemed to be bored or depressed though there was talk that the women from the corner house had swallowed weed-killer and died a painful death. Everyone else made daisy-chains and got on with ‘things’.

Protestants joined The Boy’s Brigade, Catholics couldn’t, even if they'd wanted to.

Language, certainly in the male world, seemed to be at a premium, like too much was to be given away by the use of words, though the women chirruped away like startled budgies when their men-folk were not around. Rumours spread around small communities like oxygenated bush-fires “Her man’s been sacked for organising a strike” “She’s left him and gone to live with yon gym teacher from the school. It’s the weans teacher, I believe” “Aye, tinned mince she served up. I heard he flung it at the wall”.

An aeroplane in the sky still evoked ‘ooohs’ and ‘aahs’.

Dougie Somner who later played for Partick Thistle crashed his Da’s car into the wall across the street.

My own father chucked a blazing chip pan out the kitchen window onto the wee verandah. You could still see the dent in the tarmacadam many years later.

One of the kids at school, a posh kid whose father was a doctor, invited me to tea at his house up near Brouster Hill. His house seemed like a gothic manse with a football-field sized garden at the back. His mother served us egg and chips for tea. Surely not their usual fair (I envisaged an Elizabethan banquet with hog’s heads and quails eggs). Were they dumbing down on the food to accommodate the council house boy? Kindness or patronage? Even at a young age I was class conscious.

As a child, I lived in an invisible world among trees and burns and the far-away (which was in reality no further than a five-mile radius). My imaginary friends, Solly and Bobo, were sufficient company to me. Where their names came from I have no idea but I was to fall out with Solly who emigrated to become a successful bookmaker in Australia. Bobo seemed to dissipate from the arena of my consciousness over time and as I got older, but I know he waits for me in the ether and, now in my fifties it is maybe time for a re-acquaintance, though I will now be like a grandparent to him, frozen as he is in time and on my whim.

I lived among trees and yet never knew their names. To me, they were giant climbing frames. Even to this day, I can size up a tree for climbing possibilities: where to put my feet for successful elevation. Yes, I think I’ll take that up again before it’s too late. Such a secret world, the verdant world of trees, and it’s true that they speak to each other, though their voices are not for human ears.

I think I saw a giant in the woods next to Murray Primary. A huge, spindly man with sharp teeth. He may even have looked at me. I couldn’t say; I was running away.

All my life, I’ve yearned to believe in ghosts and giants in the woods…