So Young, So Young..!

My mother walked with me in my pram the five miles from East Kilbride to Hamilton and then back again. She was a young woman and lonely in her new environment, or perhaps it was the only way to stop me bawling the place down indoors. Nobody walks to Hamilton for no reason, it’s not that kind of place!

Trying to think my mother's thoughts that day nearly sixty years ago. Newly-wed to her rather unconventional husband, five-years-older and more worldly-wise. The hopes and dreams of a young wife. Would her wild man settle down and finally aspire to the things that she did? He seemed to view conformity with extreme distaste. But, for now, maybe commonplace thoughts like what he might like for his tea tonight or maybe some new outfits for the growing bairn.

The almost brand-new flat in East Kilbride, like a dream come true for her if a little out of the way. She’d lived her whole life (except for those few months when she was ill in London when they’d first married) on the west-central side of Glasgow, next street down from the buzz and glamour of Sauchihall Street, and now she was nine miles away in this pretty Lanarkshire New Town. You’d think she’d want to be as far away as possible from the hell of her family home, but she missed her mum and her sisters (even her Dad) in a mournful what-might-have-been kind of a way.

Her new neighbours – some transported from the slums of The Gorbals – were older and street-wise and Jean – for that was and still is my mother’s name – was somewhat daunted by them. In their basement Bath Street flat, she, her mother, father, two sisters and elder brother were somewhat protected from life in the poorer districts of Glasgow, some would say ‘the real Glasgow’ where gang culture was common and children still ran barefoot. Her dad was a motor mechanic and brought home (sometimes) a wage which allowed them to see themselves as a little ‘above’ that sort of existence.

These things matter in any society! Not snobbery, just the way of things. Her in-laws, though, they were a pair, at least the mother was. ‘A right yin’ they’d call her in vernacular. ‘Fur coat and nae knickers’. Already she’d upset her new daughter-in-law. Not good enough for her boy, it would appear. It was unspoken between them but it was odds-on that they’d headed for London after their marriage at Martha Street Registry Office for the simple expediency of getting away from their respective parents. Her father a raging alcoholic, his mother a woman of slum-cunning who perhaps wasn’t quite the full shilling! A semi-illiterate who’d grasped and fought her way out of the Shettleston tenement she was dragged up in to somehow through art and austerity achieve the respectability of a Garrowhill semi-detached and an aspirant husband who gladly kept out of her way.

She thought of these things as she strolled pushing the pram through the sun-treacled day, the country air filling her longs and offering bucolic smells which were new to her. This is nice, she thought, and somewhere in her frantic brain she supposed it was, though it crossed her mind that she was somehow running away from something, maybe even herself…!