Chip Fat, Vinegar and Beer – Glasgow in the 60s

Bridgeton Cross, The Coocaddens, Knightswood all November dark in my memory. In tenement flats, they’d be laughing at Lex Mclean or Para Handy on the telly in black and white. Lights aff and just the lumens for illumination. Maw, Paw and the weans or maybe Paw will be down the Two Ways drinking too much beer with his pals. O joy of joy when he comes hame aw steamin’. Will he bring chips or a bad mood?

 

This was back when Glasgow was at the arse-end of being industrial and just at the beginnings of the slum clearances out to preservations like East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Drumchapel and beyond. Single-ends and dingey tenements on their last legs which housed folk that aged well before their time. I remember there being sunshine on certain days but it was never refulgent and copious, always sparsely spread out and miserly as if it were rationed and shouldn’t be binged upon.

 

Travel on the upper deck of a Corpy bus through Bridgeton Cross maybe about five or six at night as folk were settling doon to their ‘tea’ and you’d not only contract emphysema from the nimbus of passive smoke but you could look in people’s windaes and see family life in action. Each window like a picture at a social realism art exhibition. Too mundane ye’d think but No! This was the stuff of real life. Of Spam fritters and dinners fae the chippy and homemade soup made fae flank mutton that tasted like it was distilled in paradise. This was the whole world of gaudy wallpaper and three-piece-suite’s fae Goldbergs on the never-never. Young wifie’s with bee-hive hair-do’s and blokes trying to look like Johnny Cash. Brigton gun-slingers leaving Brylcream on illicit pillows.

 

I could see all this from the steamed-up window of a Number 2 to Rutherglen. All good and well and no doubt absorbingly interesting to the reader (or is it inducing a veritable tundra of yawning boredom?) But one day something a little more intriguing happened. I was spying on my early evening diners as usual when I spied through the window of a first floor tenement flat an unusually pretty young lady who had for company a mannequin dummy, not just a torso but a complete human simulacrum, which she appeared to be dressing and talking to to (either that or there was someone else in the room, but I couldn’t see anyone.)

I was only 14 and my hormones were raging like an electric storm, a post-pubescent tempest of eroticism had rendered my brain fevered and filthy with contorted images of the naked female form that would have baffled Picasso. Was this dark beauty so lonely and bereft of male companionship that she needed a dummy of one as a substitute? (It couldn’t be that she was simply some sort of designer or tailoress working on a commission or for personal satisfaction.)

I caught glimpses of my lady in the window perhaps two more times but something inside me told me it was a little creepy to be spying on this young woman; that I was some how sullying our ‘relationship’ - one that she was blissfully unaware of – by keeking in on her in this way so I determinedly avoided looking when I passed this way. She may still be alive, an elderly lady that had no idea she was once the object of the intense fantasies of a teenager on a Glasgow bus.