The Importance of Oral History

“Did you know that your Granda played the banjo?”

“Naw, I didn’t know that”

“Aye, he played it round the halls. Masonic Halls, those sort of places, you know he was a blue-nose. That’s what he used to call me. He used to kid on and dance with me saying ‘Come on, Jean, at least you’re a blue-nose’. You know, with your Da supporting Celtic and that. Ha ha. He could be a right laugh your Granda Wylie. Had to be, living wi’ that auld scunner. She wisnae right you know, in the head and that”

“So he played gigs and that…with his banjo?”

“I suppose so, aye. Yer Da told me he played for the neighbours in the air-raids during in the war. Would be playing his banjo in his Anderson shelter while the bombs dropped. But, you know what your Da was like with his stories. Couldn’t believe a word could you? But he’d sing at parties and that. Always ‘The Chocolate Coloured Coon”

“Christ! Ye couldnae sing that noo”

“Aye, but people wurnae aware like that in those days. That woman across the road that lives in the big house in the corner. She was in the Black and White Minstrels, I think I told you. Pour soul has dementia now. You see her sometimes just wandering about”

I imagine her in deep dementia, poor soul right enough, finding her old stage clothes and cavorting black-minstrel style on her front lawn. I picture the African family next looking down at her in perplexed wonder.

“Yer Granny was a mental case, though. A doctor even said she was, what did he say now, ah cannae mind, but it meant she wasn’t all there, you know, in the head. She used to call me all sorts of names, terrible she was. Could cause a war in an empty room”

I try to steer her back to less hurtful memories.

“She was a grafter though eh, very determined?”

“Oh aye, she polished coffins, you know. French polisher in a coffin manufactury at Parkhead Cross”

“Wylie and Lochead”

“Aye, that’s right. How do you know these things? Amazing. But yer Da would have to wait in the greenhouse until she came home which was sometimes well on into the evening. He’d be in there for hours. Wisnae allowed to let himself in incase he dirtied the carpets. Yer Da had nightmares about that for years, and never took to gardening like his Da”

The starlings chatter on the depleted blossom tree outside. All of a sudden they zoom and there is silence.

“Your mother, though, my Granny MacCallum. She was a weaver, is that right?”

“Aye, a weaver, son, at Templeton’s on Glasgow Green. Tough work!”

“That’ll account for her fore-arms. She used to wash my hair with Sunlight Lemon Liquid in the kitchen sink. I used to have bruises”

“Aye, she could be rough handed alright. Ye didnae want a skelp from her. But, she had it tough with my father. I sometimes wonder how she put up with it for so long. I was put in a home for getting the police to him. My mother was angry about that as well, even though I did it to protect her and my wee sisters. He was going mad. I was never forgiven for that though. The police was worse than him being violent apparently”

“Eventually she left him, though?”

“Aye, divorced him as well, which wasn’t really the done thing back then. You were expected just to stay with your man. But she’d had enough. That’s when she she got that place in Bridgeton. Madras Street. You’ll remember that as a wee boy?”

“Aye. Davie’s sweet shop. Used to give me sweets cos I had the same name.”

“That’s right. That hoose had rats and mice and all sorts. The bloke that lived next door had an air rifle and used to shoot them.”

The Brigton of my youth (you only said Bridgeton if you were posh, which meant you weren’t really from around there and lived in the leafy lanes of Denistoun). Plenty parks and greens, chip shops in bountiful supply, wee sweet shops as I’ve said, and a pub for each human denizen. A dieticians nightmare, though the residents self-culled in other more violent ways. This was, after all, the locale of the razor gangs. The Clyde riverman and his hook were kept ower-busy fishing casualties from the murky depths.

“Before she got that flat she lived with your Auntie Joan in a room and kitchen with my Auntie Mary who lost her man in the war”

“He fought in the war?”

“Aye, but not the second one, the First World War where he’d lost a leg. It turned to gangrene some time during the Second World War and he died in the Erskine Hospital. Yer Auntie Mary was with him when he died and she had to walk home to Bridgeton during the black-out to mind her children”

“Jeez o! Was that no’ some walk? Must be fifteen miles”

“Aye, in the black-out as well. He was a lovely man, my Uncle Wullie. Used to let us play with his wooden leg”

“I aye remember aw yer Aunties by you talking about them. There was Lettie and Nettie and…”

“My Auntie Jeannie as well, and Mary. That was your Grannies four sisters. Your Granny was the youngest. She had three brothers as well. Nettie lived up at Dobie’s Loan with her husband my Uncle Jimmy. He was a Catholic and we were all Protestants which was unusual then. A friend of the family, a Francis Patrick, had a child out of wedlock, a wee boy, and my Auntie Lettie who couldn’t have children took him in and that was my cousin, Jim McGuire who was a lovely man. I remember being there when he found out at his twenty-first birthday party and him standing there crying. He never knew his real mother and father.

My Uncle Jimmy was a lamp-lighter, you know, a gas-lighter. They sent young Jim to a Catholic school but he came home crying saying he was scared the statue of the Virgin Mary in the school hall-way was going to fall on him so he went to a Protestant one after that”

“Lettie sounds quite a character”

“O she was. A bit of a wheeler-dealer you’d call her now. Bought pawn tickets off folk then sold them on. She worked for Summers the Plumbers for a while up at the Round Toll going out towards Possilpark”

The starlings come back for further chirps and more wan blossoms fall to the ground. Downstairs the Cypriot woman chants her Orthodox prayers and my mother says “are you sure your comfortable there, son, here, have another cushion” for perhaps the seventh time and tells me about her Auntie Nettie’s man, Jim, who delivered Barr’s Irn Bru on a horse-drawn cart.