Sketch Ma Baws

Most people grow up in a place they profess to love yet want to escape from. This was not the case with me. I never desired to leave Glasgow and yet I owed it no favours. Why should one love a place that has treated one so badly?

Stockholm Syndrome, only in my case Glasgow Syndrome.

I never wanted to leave and cried and mourned when I had to. Yet, I wasn’t even brought up there. I spent the first decade of my life in South Lanarkshire without even knowing it. As far as I was concerned, East Kilbride was on the outskirts of Glasgow: Greater Glasgow. Glasgow the city was our focal point and all my relatives lived there. My Granny in Bridgeton then in Toryglen. Aunties and uncles in Drumchapel and Bridgeton. In fact, thinking of it, the rough little hamlet of Bridgeton was the focal point of the focal point.

As a child, to me, it seemed to be always dark in Bridgeton but sometimes in the light of summer, it was actually a place surrounded by verdancy. Glasgow Green, Richmond Park and the Clyde nearby running purple from the dye expelled by Templeton’s carpet factory, an orientalist building emulating the Doge’s Palace in Venice. In the darkness of winter, it smelled of chip-shops and the great many public houses trading there. There were bonneted men cartoon drunk and staggering and blousy women not too proud to fight in the street.

The Bridgeton Umbrella was the central symbol of the area, yet few knew why it was there. It stood at the junction of London Road, Main Street and Dalmarnock Road, a domed structure of iron and stone. People met under it and, it is certain, some would have used it for shelter from the often-incessant rain. Gangs would no doubt congregate around it in readiness for the rumble ahead. Bridgeton had a history in this respect. Billy Fullerton and his Billy Boys were not a musical combo. Not unless you liked the sound of razors slashing flesh.

 And, by the way, if you were local and without airs you called it Brigton, the ‘g’ as hard as concrete.

We’d visit my granny there who lived in a ground-floor tenement flat on Madras Street with her youngest daughter who was ‘dux of the school’, a dark, intelligent lassie who fought her corner with two older sisters and a big brother. The father – my grandfather who I barely knew – was left to further assault his liver and fuel his temper somewhere in Maryhill.

My granny was a loyal woman who liked a laugh. She invited affection but wasn’t the greatest at handing it out. She’d had a long, hard time of it and maybe had a lot she liked to keep to herself. Still, there’d always be a few coins for ‘the grandweans’ on the sideboard on the way out.

My mother and I would wait on Dalmarnock Road for the bus home to East Kilbride. More often than not she’d be aggrieved at some slight, real or imagined. Families are like that. The closer you are to people the more they can wound you and my mother was soft, polite and sensitive, likely cowed by the emotional violence she’d grown up with. She’d become in some ways the whipping girl since the night she’d fetched a polis to her father, scared as she was for the safety of her mother and wee sisters during one of her fathers particularly troubling drunken rages.

Back to EK and the cold yet cosy flat on Baird Hill in The Murray district of this bright New Town. East Kilbride came into being as a New Town in the 1950s but had existed in the village sense for generations. The thing about it is that, as one of the five New Towns built in Scotland around this time, it seems to me to be by far the prettiest and most well thought out. Nine miles south-east of Glasgow it is a town surrounded by farmland and country-side. It had its own built-in industry just waiting for a work-force. It was essentially built as a way of clearing the slums of Glasgow so it had a population of young families and folk from the likes of The Gorbals and Anderston: a Glasgow shipped out to the country, so to speak.

It is here that my father would start his one-man campaign of militant socialism. My auld man was born into upper working class respectability but didn’t necessarily like to be reminded of the fact. Garrowhill was leafy-laned and semi-detached and his parents were aspirant for more even if it meant deferred gratification for their eldest son all alone and lonely for nine years until a brother was born. He wasn’t allowed inside ‘the ice palace’ as he would later coin it in a poem and would need to wait for his workaholic parents to return home in the greenhouse for warmth lest he soil the furnishings.

Somewhere along the line he rebelled against his parent’s conservatism and seek to shift the world to the left. He was to become a scourge to light industry in the East Kilbride area literally on one occasion putting a spanner in the works. For this and other activities, he was ‘black-listed’ and forced to seek a wage as a mayonnaise mixer in west London. My mother was left with me and would walk with me in my pram the five miles to Hamilton and back no doubt bewildered by the man she’d married. All she wanted was a cosy home without all the anger and rage she’d left behind and she’d found herself with a budding John McClean aggrieved about just about everything in the Capitalist world surrounding him. Frying pan into the fire? Not quite. There was enough mutual love and adoration to see them through but it would be a bumpy road.

I’m not sure even now what I, as a child, made of the place I was formulating my world in. My senses and emotions were cauterised early by humiliation. As such I tended to stroll about alone in a worried daze with only imaginary friends for company (and I very soon fell out with even them!). When in company, I was too wary to enjoy the experience and was certainly among the stragglers, the limpid, craven hangers-on.

It was natural then that I would attract and even seek the company of other limpid, craven hangers-on. Outsiders tend to gravitate toward one another. Thus, you are in the company of the socially shunned, the weirdly dressed, the folk named ‘Smelly’ (actually ‘Smelly’s were beyond even our pale. They were the super-shunned.), kids with speech impediments, and, for sure, kids that allowed themselves to be bullied and picked on.

I was friendly with a rotund kid named Jamie Campbell. He was considered ‘posh’ because he lived in a big private house up near Brewster’s Hill. From a socio-psychological point of view he was an interesting case. He was never ‘one of the gang’ yet neither was he bullied in any way. Kids, even at that age, would be aware that his relatively rich parents would have clout and there would be retribution for any abuse meted out. Bullies generally only ever bully their own because, certainly at that time, nothing much could or would be done about it.

Jamie told me his mother said to invite me for ‘my tea’ which in Scotland means the evening meal. Duly I went round there, and it was indeed a different world. Big house, big garden, demurely expensive soft furnishings. I was flabbergasted, however, to be offered egg and chips and some buttered bread. I expected a feast of hog’s head and salvers of beef with maybe a glass or two of claret to wash it all down, the sort of banquet a feudal king might expect. But egg and chips? For years this bothered me. Was that their usual fare or were they slumming it for the kid from the council house?

When it was a bright summer day in East Kilbride it conjured up Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas or any bucolic scene from an English novel. As I say, it was a pretty town with greenery all around and idyllic hamlets such as Eaglesham and Thorntonhall. Also, places like Clarkston where my Granny and Grandpa Wylie now lived having climbed to the next rung and were now in a very neat, detached bungalow atop a hill from where one had a panoramic view of all of Glasgow. They’d scraped to the very bone to get there, he an engineer with Mavor and Coulston’s of Bridgeton who specialised in mining equipment and she a French Polisher of coffins among the many other jobs of whatever menial nature she could get to save an extra bob or two.

My old man had been a tram-conductor for Glasgow Corporation when in his early twenties and, returning home to Clarkston after a late shift with his bag of takings, had caught his old ma trying to steal a few coppers from it. ‘Every penny a prisoner’ is a Glasgow phrase describing money-obsession and meanness and my Granny was smitten with this disease. She couldn’t help herself. Concerning the move from Garrowhill to Clarkston. My father was returning to Glasgow from his National Service as an Airman in the RAF and they hadn’t informed him of the move. He was told of this by his Garrowhill neighbours.