It's an interesting though
somewhat morbid thought that at some point in your lifespan somewhere will be
the box you’ll end up in. It’ll have been assembled (do IKEA do coffins?) and it
will be lying empty in some warehouse somewhere just waiting for you to
complete its journey underground or in the firey substances.
My granny in her youngish years
was a coffin polisher at Wylie and Lochead on Parkhead Cross (she was to marry
a Wylie too though not one of the coffin baron lot). She did the French
polishing so she must have been trusted with the more expensive coffins as this
mode of polishing – or shellacing - is a long and arduous process and kept for
the finer woods like mahogany.
This granny – my dad’s mother –
was motivated in everything she did with ‘getting on’. A somewhat couth-less
individual, I doubt she could read or write to anything more than the most
basic level, she was determined that she wanted better than where she grew up,
the youngest of eight living in a worn-down tenement in Shettleston. Her own
father was a puffer captain, Skipper Matthews. This auld Para Handy would be
off puffing up the Western Isles returning only to impregnate his poor wife yet
again. My father often remembered a kindly man who seemed to have time for him,
a lonely boy living in an emotional ice palace.
Mary Matthews, for this was her
name, was no oil painting. If she were alive in more recent times, you may say
that she bore a passing resemblance to the snooker player, John Higgins, and he
not looking his very best, either! It was perhaps for this unfortunate reason
that she did not marry until she was twenty-eight and then to someone five
years her junior.
My grandfather, Alan, was a
dapper young man from Kinning Park who was training to become an engineer in
Mavor and Coulston’S at Bridgeton Cross. How this odd couple met is a source of
constant puzzle to me. She, ordinary of appearance and from poor beginnings, he
‘a catch’ in anyone’s book. I can well understand the attraction on her part,
but he. What was in it for him?
My granny was to become the
Laurel to my grandfather’s Hardy. They both trod the same road together but
whereas my granda had pretensions to a certain dignity and respectability, say
masonic dinners and cruises around the Med, my granny rent these asunder with
her Spoonerisms and crude public outbursts.
“Ah didnae want a bunch o’
flooers in ma drink, son!” at a waiter in Spain handing her a cocktail, the
Shettleston slum coming to the surface as my granda’s face reddens with shame.
What she most certainly was,
though, was a grafter. While Alan was earning decently as an engineer, she was
picking up good ‘pin money’ elsewhere and all this accumulated wealth was going
towards one aim which was onward and upwards. Sandyhills, Garrowhill,
Clarkston, St Leonards, the leafy lanes of Ayr, each locale calculated to lead
profitably to the next and every penny a prisoner on the way. For his whole
life my father only ever buttered one slice of his sandwich, he had been forced
to wash greasy dishes in cold water. The original latch-key kid though without
the key he had to wait in the greenhouse after school for one of his parents to
return from the daily graft for fear that home alone he would dirty the floor
and mess up the furniture. He’d tell us comic tales underscored with sadness of
having his school shorts patched with bits of carpet and wearing odd footwear
to school.
His pronouncements of “A welly
and a clug, son” were likely apocryphal but you always felt they were based
somehow on true and painful experience.
My da must have felt in his
young life like some sort of burden. He couldn’t have formulated such thoughts
in his young brain, but it was like he was like an appendage, his existence was
only due to social codes. It was the ‘done thing’ to have children so they had
produced one. If it wasn’t out of love, then out of social necessity. He was a
necessary abhorrence.
Can you ever say you’re unlucky
in the parents you get? Is that allowed or even fair?
Of the two, I’d say my mother
was unluckiest. Growing up with an angry father with a serious drink problem
and the propensity for creating a mayhem of emotional violence was not what you’d
call lucky, and it left her cowed and anxious for a lifetime. My father only
had to put up with a sort of sterile neglect and a definite second-place to
aspiration.
This may be a harsh evaluation.
Scotland in the 1930s and 40s and, indeed, beyond, evokes a notion of a hard,
loveless place where expressions of emotion other than violent rage in men and
sorrowful weeping in its womenfolk would not be the norm. Were children cuddled
and smiled upon with praise and affection? I’m sure they were in a great many
cases, but you get the feeling they were also treated scoldingly and somewhat
harshly.
My father was the child of
parents who believed themselves to be, and with strong reason, climbing the
social register. My grandfather, being a skilled man, would be what,
lower-middle-class, certainly upper working class and rising and my father would
be expected to behave in an accordant manner (which clashes somewhat with the ‘welly
and a clug’ and the carpet-patched trousers but hey ho! Sociological analysis
is never ‘black and white’ and my father was known to extemporise with his
stories). Little such boys would be mini-versions of their father in their
appearance and manners. They’d wear short trousers and sensible shoes and
generally look like friends of the Famous Five.
My father could have been
nothing but a disappointment to my grandfather (or, ‘you’ll never be the man
your father is’ as my granny kindly put it). Everything my grandpa turned his
hand to he was adept at. Growing roses, making wine, building walls, there
seemed to be nothing he wasn’t good at and this crushed my dad’s confidence. ‘Ye’ve
not cut that grass properly at all, Robert. Go and do it again’. Seemed the
only thing he could do to his father’s satisfaction was collect horse-waste for
the garden.
Robert the Dung
“Quick son, there’s a horse and
cart”
My Dad, a great rhubarb man,
Seldom missed a chance to
Send me out into the streets
With brush and shovel
To gather up dung
In a big galvanised bucket.
I delighted in his delight –
A full pail of the smelly stuff
He taught me to mix the dung
In a steel barrel – “slosh
In the water, son, and feed
The rhubarb” “Your Ma will
Make us Crumble with it”.
If I had lived in
A Welsh village I would
Have been known as
“Robert the Dung”.
He couldn’t compete on his old
man’s terms so he created his own agenda in an astonishing rebellion. Where my
granda was a blue-nose Rangers man my da would support Celtic, where the auld
yin was a tory my da became a militant trade unionist and socialist
(anarcho-syndicalist you’d have to call him in his earlier days) and where my
granda was staid and solidly beige in the bowling green blouson sense, my da
became a Bebop loving dancehall singer and later develop a penchant for velvety
jackets and corduroy loons.
My father’s CV can only be
rivalled by my own or maybe a travelling hobo in the American depression of the
1930s. He and Woody Guthrie could have shared many a work tale.
My da ‘served his time’ as a
Woodwork Machinist but he seemed to hate his trade and never pursued it. He
became instead an itinerant journeyman initially in the very literary sense. Glasgow
Corporation tram conductor, then driver, then conductor again (a crash on
Jamaica Bridge with a lorry. Family joke: “Can you describe the crash, driver?”
“Not really, your honour, I was upstairs at the time”).
The auld maw could have got him
the sack as a conductor when, after a late shift he brought his satchel of
takings home and she robbed a few bob out of it. I can imagine her unable to
resist the prospect of ‘free cash’ even at her son’s ultimate expense.
When my ma and da got married
in the April of 1958 at Martha Street registry office they successfully escaped
for a while their respective families by hopping on a bus to London. My mother
remembers her rank embarrassment as a newly-wed and deeply naïve nineteen-year-old
her new mad mother-in-law in lieu of confetti shouting “Jean, remember yer a
wummin’ noo” as my mum boarded the bus.
While in London my father
worked in a variety of jobs: assistant butcher in Sainsbury’ and as he told us,
a mayonnaise mixer at the Heinz factory in Acton. On his return he resumed his
life as itinerant employee usually as a factory worker in light engineering.
This was the late 50s and early 60s, times of near full employment when jobs
were ten a penny. You literally could leave a job one day and start a new one
the next.
From an early age, I remember
being taken by my father to visit my granny and grandad (my mother had given up
going to visit the in-laws early on through bruising experience). First it
would be the detached bungalow in Clarkston then, for a short time quite near
us in the ne St Leonard’s estate on the outskirts of East Kilbride, then, from
about the mid to late 60s on it would be the lovely bungalow in Belmont on the
outskirts of Ayr.
Happily, I would skip alongside
my father’s seemingly giant strides up the hill from Clarkston train station up
the winding hill to Ferineze Avenue from which escarpment one could take in a
view spanning the whole of Glasgow. Clarkston was and is one of those places
that don’t change much because they don’t have to. They have no need of
refurbishments or community centres for disaffected kids because they were
perfect to begin with. Solid houses, solid churches, pretty trees and pretty
shops the locale is effective in every way in attracting the right sort of solid
people to live in it. Engineers like my grandfather, solicitors, doctors and ‘the
like’, all with solid little wives and clean-cut kids.
My granny would greet us with
her unusual ‘geh geh’ laugh and my granda would hang back with his;’ Hello, Robert,
hello, son’, the latter meaning me. My granny was all pinny and flowery dress
(except when my young mother did visit then her styles would invariably
be aped by my granny and displayed at the next visit. She’d be in middle-aged
woman’s attire except for a fashionable new bonnet) and my granda dressed like
a smart elderly man long before it was his time to. Smart checked shirt and a
pair of trousers which came all the way over his expanding belly and held up
with a belt or braces. He had sleek silver hair and rosy cheeks and an air
of dignified resignedness about him. He wouldn’t show you his melancholy but
you knew it was there for his private moments. My granny was less knowable. On
the surface cheery, even bluff but you came to know that there were other sides
to her. My mother was easy prey for the auld yin and she knew exactly how to
wound her. My mother was referred to as ‘a streetwalker’ though in what context I cannot imagine. A woman less likely to
pursue such a living you couldn’t find.
My granny would spit at someone
like a goose if she was crossed, a single comment could cause a mayhem of upset
and I remember one time standing outside the house with my mother and little
brother as my father and grandad tried to calm a situation down. Whether she
had what we’d call today ‘mental health issues’ I don’t know although she had
an older sister who believed that men followed her when they clearly didn’t. I
tend to think more she had street-cunning and would attack viciously if
threatened or imagined she was being ‘done down’ somehow.
My grandparent's house smelled
to me of apples and roses with just an edge of furniture polish but this memory
could be influenced by my granda’s rosy cheeks and the apples and roses he
lovingly nurtured. In the summer months, he spent as much time as he could in
his garden which surrounded two sides of the house. In winter, it would be his
garage where he pursued his other hobbies such as the fragrant Madeira wine he made
perfectly. It seemed that his domain was always outside of the house and at
least part of his intention was to be where my granny wasn’t for the most time
possible. He’d be out trimming and weeding long into the crepuscular summer
evenings while she’d be indoors amongst the pristine furnishings watching her
shows on TV. My dad told us that the couple would go months without saying a
word to one another after some wounding row.
Did I think she liked me very much? Nah, not really, but then I’m not sure that she liked anyone. It wasn’t really in her sphere of possibilities to feel that way about people, but I don’t necessarily feel it was because she was a cold person. She saw ‘usage’ in people; ways of gaining something, and if you were no use to her then she didn’t see any point. The only use I ever was to her is, so I’m told, when she took me out in my pram one time and realised that acquaintances in the locality would stop her to have a look at the baby (I had a head of the blondest hair as a child). As was the custom they’d leave ‘a few bob for the wean’. I don’t really need to tell you the rest.
She died wi’ some style the
auld yin, from a heart attack on a runway in Tenerife. I wasn’t the slightest
bit close to her. I barely ever spent any time alone with her (saving the pram
adventure) and when I did visit alone one time to spend a week during the
summer holidays, she had me in bed by 6pm, and I was 12-years-old by this time.
Still, she was my granny and if I haven’t written this with even a scintilla of
affection, I’ve given the wrong impression. I remember her face, physique,
voice and laugh as if it were yesterday, and if we do all meet in an afterlife
then there are many things I’d like to talk to this cunning auld grifter about.
