A Letter to Dead Parents

Glaswegians keep their affections a secret. If they nod to each other in the street, it is indicative of high regard (even husband and wife!). It was ever, thus. Words like love would only be employed in situations of mutual intoxication and would more often be aimed more at the bottle than the spouse.

Glasgow was both industrial and riven with unemployment in the early 1930s. Men stood idle in the streets while others carried on the business of building ships and trains. Boats still had to be loaded and unloaded but more and more clamoured and begged for the privilege.

In this milieu two unlikely people met and would marry. She, Mary McWhaw Matthews, abiding ‘on the shelf’ at 28, he, Alan Paton Wylie, a dapper 23-year-old with a career as an engineer ahead of him. She the youngest of eight from the streets of Shettleston in the east of the smoky city, he, the son of proud Highlanders settled in Kinning Park on the southside.

How on earth did they meet?

‘The dancin’’ in Glasgow as in other places was that great leveller though even within this cultural egality there were certain subtle but well-known distinctions. The Plaza, Eglinton Toll if you thought yourself a cut above and The Locarno for the generality. I make an educated guess that my grandparents meeting place would be Denistoun Palais in the north-east of the city. Somewhere my auld grandpa wouldn’t look too conspicuous in his spats and reasonably handy and suitably aspirant for my auld granny in her hunt for ‘a good catch’.

“My faithers a skipper on the puffers. He and you would get on great what wi’ you kennin’ aboot injuns and that!!”

My granny was uncouth and almost completely illiterate all her life, but she possessed the shrewdness and cunning of the streets. Men to her were a means to an end and my poor granpa was but a fly in her web.

It was true that ‘Skipper Matthews’ plied his trade on the puffers up and down the Firth of Clyde – a Para Handy figure, perhaps – delivering cargos to the Highlands and Islands (on my granny’s wedding certificate he is cited as ‘Yachtsman’, a somewhat grandiose generic term). When he’d come home from his voyages his poor wife would invariably fall pregnant, hence the large family.

My young father was fond of this romantic figure and many years later would write a poem honouring their relationship.

Hoarding

My grandpa would hoard anything

Except, that is, for money,

That he spent on drink and the horses.

Stubs of pencils, buttons, bits of string,

Anything he could stuff into tins,

Any tins, sweetie tins, biscuit tins,

Tobacco tins, small and smaller tins.

Off he would go with me in my pram

Trundling faster than you’d think he’d manage

Into Tolcross Park in the city of Glasgow,

Into the park to bury his boxes

In the park’s many grassy banks.

A wee trowel he had for the digging

Of holes big enough to bury the boxes.

“You just never know when our

Things might be needed,” he would say.

“And we will have when others haven’t!”

The sun would start dying,

He would put away his digger

And push me homewards

Away from our treasures.

 

So, a kindly man he was to my father but, who knows? Maybe an occasional wife-beater and a problem drinker and these things were not mutually exclusive.

My granny, along with many other jobs, polished coffins for money. French polishing. Shellacking. This technique was only required for the more expensive caskets, mahogany, perhaps. There is no doubt that she was a grafter and the driving force behind aspirations.

“She waited for your granda to qualify before she’d commit to him!”. This from my mother who would become the butt of barbs and insults from the old bugger.

“In other words, she waited to be sure he was her meal ticket?”

“Indeed, she did, son!”

But what was the attraction for my grandfather that he even had to win her favour by being a successful apprentice? He wore spats for goodness sake and had a good head of hair. Surely, he could have done better than this older woman who, quite frankly, was no oil painting. Was he so shy and inexperienced with women to be so easily manipulated? How else was he beguiled by this somewhat crag-faced femme fatale?

My father would be the first offspring of this strange, passionless marriage. He was born into the very austerity of it. And what a lonely little boy he was. These days you’d be calling Childline. A ‘latch-key kid’ before the phrase was ever the thought of only, this kid wasn’t even trusted with a key. He had to wait on his parents return after school in his father’s greenhouse as he describes poignantly in this poem.

Greenhouse

I needed a refuge, a place to be warm.

Away from a Scottish wind

Which sought-out the thin, and the lost.

 

I was denied entry to the tailored place,

The buttoned-down, swept, and washed house

Where warmth was tidied away.

Where cakes and kisses were carefully counted,

Except in monsoon times when love.

And kisses, were profligate.

 

I needed the thin key to the garden-end greenhouse

Where I could sit away from the cold and

Disappointment, a place to sit out the

After-school hours

Until my mother lit the ice palace,

And offered comfort, cold as the

Frost-breathed interior.

 

The boy soon found himself in a social fix and a victim of the school catchment area. He’d have been ‘the posh kid’ and he’d spend the rest of his life trying to rid himself of that tag, but it seemed to stick with him like a stain no matter how ‘downwardly mobile’ he became (in factories they would say he was ‘neither fish nor fowl’). He was growing up in semi-detached grandeur in upper working class Garrowhill while his peers were from the mean streets of Shettleston and Ballieston. Incongruously, and if we take my father’s word for it (like the true ‘jazzer’ he was to become, he could be prone to extrapolation), his mother dressed him in somewhat urchin style.

“A welly and a clug, son. That’s what I had on my feet. That’s what she sent me out in.”

She also patched his worn trousers with old pieces of carpet.

Was he, then, bullied for being posh and also for being bizarrely attired?

Lonely at home and lonely at school the only solace he could find were in imaginary friends and garnering whatever acquaintance he could from other like himself: outsiders and social outcasts. Is this a negative way to form relationships? All parties aware that in their wildest dreams they’d rather be hanging around with the cool gang, but they’re stuck with misfits like themselves.

Beggars can’t be choosers!

 

There would be long periods when his parents wouldn’t exchange a word. Weeks. Months. In the summer his father would spend as long as he could in his garden. From the early morning until long after dusk had settled, he’d be at his roses and laying crazy paving and whatever other tasks he could devise. In the winter he’d be in his shed making Madeira wine or playing his banjo until the neighbours complained. All of these pursuits were designed to be anywhere his wife currently wasn’t. The house was her domain where she cleaned and hoovered until there was no longer a speck of dust in the place. She was one of those that kept the cellophane cover on new furniture for as long as it lasted under the strain of arses.

 

A Messerschmidt crash-landed in a field over Sandyhills way. There was a procession of excited kids behind the coal lorry that carted it through the streets. A ‘Jerry’ had either been captured or had copped his whack in this alien machine with swastikas on it. A Jerry. A Nazi. Young Robert looked on from a close on the Shettleston Road. This wasn’t his safe territory, and he was wary of the other boys and their boisterous excitement. He wondered about the pilot and felt a strange kinship with the unknown man and immediately felt a twinge of shame. The Germans were the enemy and had been bombing the city but who was this man who had captured and died? He looked at the broken shell of the plane on the truck and truly wished he could fly away in it.

 

My granda could be exacting with his young son.

“You’ve not mowed these edges at all well, Robert! You’ll have to do them again and….properly!!”

There was one thing, though, that he could hardly fail at..

 

Robert the Dung

He wrote this poem about it….

"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"

 

Rain or shine, Mary could be counted on to be working. A freelance French polisher could earn in the posher areas with the finer furnishings. With her ‘every penny was a prisoner’ to use the colloquialism. Poverty and want had taught her prudence. Such physical robustness was belied by her insistence that she was ill: she had a ‘bad stomach’. This may or may not have been the case, but I believe she used her chronic ‘illness’ as a method to control and manipulate those around her to her will. She deflected criticism with it as much as she garnered attention from it. My father was to inherit this trait and he used it much the same way with his own family. It’s a complicated area to discuss especially as my father’s ‘bad stomach’ would eventually be his killer and was likely caused by the tremendous stress and tension under which he lived his life.

Mary could start an argument in an empty room. She could drop a remark like a bomb and sit back and watch the devastation she’d caused. If you argued too fiercely, she’d begin spitting at you like a goose. Many is the time us kids would be ushered out of the tidy wee bungalow in Ayr as the chaos ensued inside.

Apart from that she could be quite a jolly soul with a distinctive ‘heh heh’ laugh. She pretended she’d ‘made’ cakes that were very obviously shop bought. Why she did this we will never now know.

 

Perhaps more puzzling than how they met and why they married is why – nine years after their first – they would have a second child. Mary would be in her late thirties by this time, so it was a dangerous move for a woman. It wouldn’t have been ‘a mistake’ as Mary had a profound distaste of sex (she confessed to my mother that she was ‘glad that was all over with’ before proceeding to explain her rather rudimentary method for staunching menstrual flow). I like to think that the birth of wee Billy was a gift to my lonely father. Perhaps they recognised his solitariness and arranged for him a pal?

My grandfather was a somewhat melancholy and overlooked man with a quiet sense of humour (the man would of a sudden break into a sand-dance in the front room a la Wilson, Kepell and Betty). He died aged sixty-six of a brain tumour. Only months before he’d blacked-out and crashed his car into someone’s garden in the local area. This would have caused him as much social embarrassment as alarm. After he died some bowler-hatted types called at the house to demand regalia in a little black case that denoted that he was a Grand Master in the Masonic Lodge. My mad granny died only a few years later after she collapsed on the runway of Tenerife airport. Whether she was returning from or beginning a holiday I do not know.

Once, on a foreign holiday in some sun-drenched locale she had ordered a drink. The waiter returned with a fancy cocktail.

“Ahm waaantin’ a drink, son, no’ this effort wi’ floooers hingin’ oot it”

You can take the girl out of Shettleston!!

My granda would have turned the colour of his Madeira wine with shame.

 

A Letter to Dead Parents

Dear Mother, Dear Father

I want you to listen.

There are things still

Left to be said

So that I can

Make sense of myself.

I did not want much

From you as parents.

Not a lot more than comfort,

More attention and consistency.

I wanted you both to be

There for me, not out

Working for a

Better house, better car,

A fatter bankbook.

I hated the cold, and coldness

Inside, and outside of the house.

There was seldom a fire

In the hearth in-case it caused dirt.

It always seemed so cold,

So clean, and so cold.

I hated that so much;

The lack of comfort that led

Me to seek warmth in the greenhouse

(Always kept warm to protect the

Prize tomatoes – I envied those tomatoes)

Until I would freeze again

In the ice palace

We called our home.

I was the original “latch-key kid”

Excepted that I was never

Trusted with a key

In case I brought home dirt,

The dirt of the streets.

I ran around those streets.

Propelled by my anger,

 Encouraging by my hate

To hate other children

I was not equipped to be a hater-

So skinny, so small,

So bloody scared.

My smallness, my frailty

Made me easy prey

To schoolmates who must

Have sensed my disease.

I was bullied and bullied in turn.

 

At that time I needed prayer,

And prayed to a god

Personified by the cruxiform

Of my bedroom window.

I prayed that you would return

From a dance, or from the cinema

To reassure me against my

Awful fear of being alone in the dark.

The click of the opening gate

Brought thanks to the god of

The bedroom window.

 

Mother, Dad, I became a man

And wasn’t very good at it.

I never felt real, never felt

Anything very much.

The scared, fragile child

Grew to be a scared, fragile man

Who taught himself to live the

Only lie good enough to make

Some kind of life possible;

A lie full of wisecracks.

Cracking wisely has been the

Seasoning in my diet of

Everydayness.

There have been fleeting

Times of lightness, weightless

Hours of grace when I could touch

The world of real people.

But this could never last, and

I was back on the outside -

Cut-off.

This barren landscape was a place

Of anonymity, uncertainty, and coldness;

A place where I could think what others

Felt, but could not feel for myself.

I sang and danced my fear

In pubs and dancehalls

Becoming known for being

Someone I never was,

Being big, bold and brave

To survive the terror that was me.

 

Now I am old.

As old as Dad was

When he died.

As I was no good

At being a child

Or a man, I am no good

At being old.

I have polished my act

As a clown, and I can

Use my wit well –

“Hold my own”, as they say,

“With the best of them”.

I am liked, Ma and Dad,

Even loved by those who

Are generous enough to

Ignore my flaws.

If you are both “up there”,

Have a word with “the Boss”

And ask him to give my frail self

Another try at all of this.

I am sure I would do better next time.

 

If I had learned the trick of love

I would love you both,

I would send you my love

To make your heaven

More heavenly still.

I have no hate to give you,

For I have no hate;

It is another piece that is missing.

 

That is about all I have to say.

Think about what I said.

Look after my daft, lovely brother,

I miss him so much.

You see, Ma, Dad,

Billy was lucky.

He did not have irony

In his soul.