Before the age
of six I don’t know who I was: just a baby then a boy living with his mum and
dad and infant brother in East Kilbride, a ‘New Town’ in South Lanarkshire. I’d
contend it is the prettiest of the five New Towns built in the Scottish central
belt post-war. These towns were built to contend with such words as ‘overspill’
and ‘slum clearance’ mainly from Glasgow. The air seemed clean, the sun
sometimes shone but mostly it seemed to rain, and the wind blew fierce and cold
from the Fenwick Moors.
We lived in
The Murray area of the town in a two-bed ground floor flat. It was a cold flat
andmy mother and father regularly toiled and juggled to pay bills. Sometimes my
father was out of work almost always to do with his somewhat militant trade union
activities and my mother very quickly became adept at ‘making do’ and keeping
us all fed. In the winter months, the rain and snow would breach the meagre
windows and a coal-fire would need to be lit to keep the partially-carpeted
place at least tolerably ‘less cold’.
Behind the
flats there was the ‘plantation’, a seeming forest of young fir trees; dark
umbrella’s under which a child could play and fantasise about monsters and
magic things. Further down a swingpark and a burn over which I jumped and into
which I fell with a regularity that put a strain on my mother’s good humour.
I had two
imaginary friends, Solly and Bobo. What conversations I had with them I don’t
remember but they were my earliest confidantes. My father was away some of my
earliest time. I have a vague notion he was absent some of my first couple of
years due to some breach between he and my mother and then he went to London to
find work being ‘blacklisted’ from light industry jobs in the west of Scotland,
or at least that is the family version.
I have a
nagging idea that my father had the ‘call of the wilds’ in his early married
years and perhaps particularly after he’d become a father. He’d been a
semi-professional dancehall crooner when he and my mother had met and perhaps
felt the loss of this pursuit. Also, his trek to London re-united him with his younger
brother who he was devoted to and perhaps reunited him also with wilder more
carefree days. This may be speculation on my part, but I’m convinced through
odd statements through the years and my own intuition that there is some truth
here although I don’t pursue this line of enquiry with my mother preferring to
leave her to hard-won peace of mind.
My mother
in her solitariness and with my father absent would take me for long walks in
my pram. This would sometimes be the 5 miles to Hamilton and back perhaps on a
sunny summer’s day. Mother and child in lonely communion. What were her
thoughts on such days, this attractive dark-haired woman in her early twenties?
Sure, she’d married a strange restless man a few years her senior and, sure, he
was away in London to earn their keep, but it was still better than the hell
she’d left behind in Bath Street. The drunken, tormented, angry father. The
miserable nights waiting for him to come home in a rage with his accusations of
marital infidelity.
My mother
was born at the start of a war and in the middle of grief. The woman – Jeannie Weir
– who would have been her grandmother had died some four weeks before and the
war had started just days before her birth in castle-cum-maternity hospital
beneath the Wallace Memorial in Stirlingshire. Her mother, Maggie, the grieving
daughter had been evacuated out of Glasgow to the relative safety of the
countryside. What an ordeal for the woman and what a black start for my mother.
I believe there was to be a sometimes barely concealed resentment from mother
to daughter thereafter, as if she was forever associated with grief and bad
news. The scapegoat.
My father
grew up in a different type of misery and loneliness, born to a couple who were
suited in only one thing: acquisitiveness. Love and affection were all but
shunned in their pursuit of ‘betterment’. My grandfather Wylie was a trainee
engineer in his early twenties when he somehow bumped into his future wife,
Mary Matthews, some five years his senior. How these two even met is a
conundrum I will never solve. He, a ‘good catch’ from semi-prosperous Kinning
Park and she the youngest of eight from the back streets of Shettleston. They
really were the most unlikely couple.
She was a
hard, hard worker, mind, with a fierce determination (if you upset my granny
she would spit at you like a goose). A French Polisher – a shellacer - it is part of the family folklore that she
polished expensive coffins maybe for Wylie and Lochead at Parkhead Cross. She
married the young Alan Wylie when he’d completed his apprenticeship and off
they went in pursuit of social status, a nice house and a family car.
My
grandfather had been somewhat of the young dandy, a wearer of white spats. I
fancy he’d been somehow lured into the relationship by the wiles of the older
woman. I remember him as a kindly, gentle, rosy-cheeked man who did everything
well whether that be growing roses, building a wall or making wine. In all of
these pursuits he endeavoured to be as far away from my grandmother as homely
geography would allow. In the summer, it seemed, her domain was indoors while
his was without. My dad would maintain that there would be periods of months
when they would not communicate beyond the demands of necessity.
My father
as a child was the original latch-key kid only he wasn’t even trusted with a
key. After school he’d be forced to huddle in his father’s greenhouse for
warmth and await the return of the two workaholics to the family home. In a
poem he referred to this home as ‘the Ice Palace’ suggesting a lack of warmth
both environmental and emotional. For his first nine years he was an only child
until the blessing of his young brother, Billy.
Both my
mother and father had a bad time at school and, perhaps, for similar reasons.
My mother was tall and timid, no doubt cowed by the emotional violence at home
and my father was too tall and timid and would have suffered from being ‘the
posh boy from the posh district’. By this time, his aspirant parents had bought
a property in the leafy Glasgow suburb of Garrowhill. His schoolmates would
have come from a different catchment area, the much less salubrious Shettleston
or Baillieston.
My father
told us a story of how he implanted razor blades into a potato and had this
swinging from a string like a deadly conker to repel his tormentors one day in
the school playground. There may be something to this tale. Who knows? But, my
father, like the jazz men he came to revere, was capable of ornamentation and
embellishment in his stories. In the end, I doubt he knew which of his stories
were true or not and to what extent. He’d tell us that his mother patched his
school trousers with pieces of carpet. He told us he was sent to school wearing
unmatched footwear (‘a welly and a clug, son!’). Wholly accurate or not, these
stories are indicative of an improvisational mother watching the pennies at the
expense of her son’s self-respect. He also told these stories proudly
suggesting he reveled in their absurdity and his apparently impoverished
upbringing (which wasn’t true in the ‘slum kid’ portrayal he was aiming for).
To me, my
father spent his life playing down his upper working class beginnings even to
the extent of being deliberately ‘downwardly mobile’ which must have alarmed
and confused my dear mum who would have very much enjoyed a more respectable
path. She herself, didn’t come from the slums in any way but a spacious basement
(albeit with barred windows like a prison) on Bath Street at the west end of
Glasgow. Her father was a car mechanic, somewhat more of an exotic job then
than it is now, and a sometimes chauffer, all peaked cap and smart uniform. My
mum, who has never to my knowledge told a lie in her life, told me that he was
once employed carting the Shah of Iran around the sandy substances.
Both my
parents, I believe, were somehow miscast in life early on. My father’s response
to his upbringing (“You’ll never be the man your father is, Robert!”) was to
rebel totally against it. Where his father voted Conservative, he became a
radical socialist, where his father supported Rangers, he loved the Celtic, and
rather than pursue the spoils of property and status my dad would seem to be content
until he had us all living eighteen floors up in a council tower block. My
mother fell for this lovely gentle madman mostly because she adored him but
partly to escape the hell of her home life where she was miscast and
scapegoated. One instance explains the brutality of how she was mis-portrayed.
One
particular evening shortly after the birth of the fourth child, Joan, the
roaring Robert MacCallum returned from the pub drunker and angrier than usual.
“Another
Hamilton bastard!” was how he referred to the new child implying that it was
another man’s work. Because he seemed intent on harming her younger sisters, my
nine-year-old mum did her best to protect them and felt impelled to run around
to the police box on Sauchihall Street and fetch a constable.
She was
never forgiven for this action. Her father spent a night in jail and my mum was
sent away for some months to a ‘home’ full of strangers. This, it was bluntly
explained to her by her mother, was to protect her from the wrath of her father
but her mother wasn’t too pleased either. Domestic violence was deemed less
socially embarrassing than having ‘the police at the door’. Poor child was only
trying to protect her siblings. She should have been applauded, instead she was
made even more the pariah and punished.
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