The Toy Garage

My dad made a toy garage for my little brother with his own hands. He made it out of hard-board and I was a witness to him at this work.

It was Christmas in East Kilbride some time in the very late 1960s and the snow was compacted on the streets and on the roofs (we had some sort of roofing slab landed outside my bedroom window which had been blown off in the winds of 1963.) The winds blew so hard off the Fenwick Moors as to sometime render forward movement in the more exposed parts of this New Town next to impossible. You felt that if you opened the flaps of your inadequate jacket to the gales then it would take you on its gusts as far as Glasgow-proper nine miles away.

My mother and father are likely skint due to my father’s nefarious industrial activities. He was prone putting spanners in works and calling wildcat strikes and maybe he’d found himself black-listed once more. And so, he laboured at the toy garage. He painted it in bright garage colours like yellow, red and green and it looked a picture, just like the real thing.

My mother had no idea what she was taking on when she married my father only three months after they had met at the Glasgow dancing. He was a competition winning singer in the style of the time -Sinatra, Ecksteine and the like – and she his junior by five years at just nineteen. She knew what she was attracted to; his warmth toward her, his smile, his way of making her laugh, even his singing voice…

“If yer da had been a rotten singer, son, you and your brother might never have been born!”

…but she had little clue he was a left-wing firebrand intent on the ruination of Capitalism in all its guises. All she’d have dreamed of was a peaceful little house in a quiet area for she and her husband to raise a family. What she got was an individual who appeared to be deliberately downwardly mobile who wouldn’t be content until he’d eradicated his lower-middle-class upbringing entirely and had them living in a tower block on a scheme.

Love, as they say, is blind.

Christmas morning for me and my wee brother was Laurel and Hardy and presents and my Da singing a song and making tea and toast. My ma would have the presents arranged under the tree (I’d hear them do this the night before whispering so as not to spoil the Santa Claus illusion) and we’d get up early-early and the excitement was infectious. Toys, Action Men and selection boxes; sweets galore and maybe a little ginger wine to warm the cockles. Safe, secure and happy.