A Postillion Struck by Lightning (26 page)

Bishopbriggs was where the trams from Glasgow ended. Clacketting, racketting, lurching their way from Renfield Street through the black canyons of faceless tenements in Springburn, trundling through acres of blighted wasteland, scabbed with wrecked cars, rubbish tips, blackened clumps of thistle and thorn, they coasted gently into the blank granite square of what once might have been a pleasant country village. Here the small gabled houses, empty-eyed windows, draped in white lace, secret with half drawn blinds, gleamed in misty rain. Beyond slate roofs, the pointed caps of the Tips, like my sister's spilly hills of
sugar only black. Dead volcanoes spotting the ruined fields. “The Bingies”, relics of a thriving pit closed since the start of the Depression.

From the terminus, the steel rails shining like swords in black granite cobbles, past a scatter of gas lit shops, up a brick alley, through a long dripping tunnel under the railway line, one arrived on “the other side” of the town. A straggling, cold, ugly housing estate, in Avenues, Crescents, Terraces, and Drives; no Streets or Roads for the new middle classes. Flat-faced pebble-dash houses; four windows up, four below, pink-grey asbestos tiled roofs, concrete paths, creosoted picket fences and washing dripping in every back garden. All about one there was nothing to see but row upon row upon row of roofs, backed here and there by the pointed nose of a Tip or a few wind-twisted trees high on an, as yet, untouched hillock. It rained gently.

24 Springburn Terrace was the same as all its neighbours. The only way I could distinguish it for the first few months was by the fact that it stood on a corner and had a slightly larger area of garden around it with a lamp-post at the front gate. The houses were not Houses at all. They were flats. One up and one down. The down one had a front door in the centre, the up one had a front door at the side up a flight of concrete steps. Walls and the floors were made of cardboard. From the front door a long narrow passage. To the right a sitting-room, beyond that a bedroom. At the top of the narrow passage a lavatory and bath together. To the left a dining-room, beyond that the kitchen with a door leading out into the pleasures of a wan garden. Yard more like. A hedge of Golden Elder, a few neat flower-beds, a bit of grass in the middle and in the centre of that a tall iron post for the laundry. A small world for three ill-assorted people.

Aunt Belle, my mother's elder sister, was tall, kind looking, with a patrician face and soft auburn hair flecking with grey. Her husband, Uncle Duff, was slightly shorter than she was, with thin black hair parted in the middle and glued to his head with Yardley's Hair Cream. His small black moustache looked as if it had been smudged on with coal. They welcomed me to this unprepossessing house shyly and warmly with a crackling fire and high tea.

“All boys like to eat,” said my aunt, “so I did a Baking for you especially!” There were five different sorts of biscuits, scones, and cup cakes, as well as a Madeira Cake with candy peel on top. Sandwiches, toast, anchovy paste, and strawberry jam.

Also a canary, Joey, who lived in the window in a cage with a yellow silk frill round the base to stop the seed from scattering. Afterwards, in the sitting-room across the hall, we sat by the fire, my aunt sewing, my uncle showing me his bound volumes of Bruce Bairnsfeather's cartoons. I wondered, vaguely, where I should sleep.

About nine o'clock he went out to the kitchen to make the cocoa for supper. My aunt put aside her sewing and said I must be tired after such a long day and so many excitements. I was aware that she meant travelling, and trains and farewells and all that sort of thing. She explained gently that they had moved out of their bedroom next door so that I should have it, and that they would sleep on a Put-U-Up Settee in the dining-room.

“This is a rather small house for the three of us, but I'm sure we'll manage very well,” she said. “It's the Depression, you know. Uncle lost everything, I'm afraid, and so we just had to cut our cloth to suit the material. It is not the sort of place we like to live in. But it'll just have to do. I don't suppose you remember the other house, do you?”

I did. Gleaming mahogany furniture, heavy and sombre, shining brass jugs filled with flowers and leaves, a piano scattered with silver frames, high windows velvet-curtained, all looking out over a soft green wooded park. Not at all like this sad, apologetic, squashed little house.

Some of the old stuff had made the swift descent from gentility to near-poverty and looked defiantly out of place in such cramped quarters. The ladder-backed chairs in the dining room, a tall mahogany bookcase, some bold chintz armchairs with antimacassars pinned to them like maids caps, my grandfather's water-colours in thin gold frames, a set of Nashes Magazine Covers for 1918 framed in black passe-partout, and the black marble mantel-clock which thinly struck the hours and quarters.

My bedroom was a square of pink distemper. Two windows over the bleak square of garden and the dead backs of the houses beyond the ragged hedge. A one-bar electric fire, a yellow oak wardrobe with an oval mirror which reflected the entire room, a dressing chest, a dressing table and a wide yellow oak bed spread with a shining pink satin cover. In the bed a scalding aluminium hot water bottle called a “pig” … and a hot brick wrapped in flannel.

I was told to use the bathroom first. A bath, a basin, a lavatory.
His ivory brushes stuck together by their bristles, W.D. entwined in black on the back. The oval tin of Yardley's grease. Toothbrushes huddled in a tumbler like old men at a wedding. Izal on the lavatory paper. We said goodnight, and I lay in the dark of the wide yellow bed listening to them raking out the fire in the sitting-room and setting the china for breakfast. Then bathroom noises and the lavatory flushing twice. Pattering of feet down the corridor to the front door, a chain rattling, a bolt running home, the dining-room door closing. Silence and then the slow, low, murmur of worried conversation through the wall.

The clock struck a quarter. Ting Ting Ting. Light from the lamp-post flickered through leaf shadows on the buff paper blind. A draught waggled the cord and made the little acorn handle tap tap against the glass. In the house upstairs someone else pulled a chain and I heard a soft cataract of water and a pipe beside the wardrobe started to knock gently.

I turned into the pillows and tried to smother my blubbing.

I travelled to school every morning with Uncle Duff. We caught the eight-five. The same compartment, the same faces. Three
Glasgow Heralds
, two
Bulletins
, one
Express
. Queen Street station, an enormous inverted iron colander. Black and sooty, rife with pigeons and the smell of urine. Blazes of brilliant light here and there in the gloom from the bookstalls. Farewell to Uncle, he to his office in St Vincent Street, me to George Square and the long haul up the cobbled stone street to The School. Standing isolated in the centre of a vast asphalted playground, surrounded by high iron spikes, its red sandstone blocks rotting in the filth from the city, it resembled a cross between a lunatic asylum and a cotton mill. Faceless windows gazed blankly over the streets below. Electric lights gleamed dully even on the clearest days. A smell of chalk and concrete dust, of sulphur and soot.

Green glazed tiles, ochre distemper, red varnished wood. Cold, unloving, unloved. A Technical School for Technical People. What on earth was I doing here? I who could only just about read and write? Chosen by Uncle Duff for a “good solid background under a progressive teaching staff”, it was thoughtfully accepted by my parents as the Final Desperate Measure to try and
force some learning into my addled head. They had made a swift tour of the place, dragging me in stupefied horror behind them, had outlined to the Progressive Teaching Staff what was wanted, had shaken hands in a cramped Victorian Headmaster's Study and departed with relief for the South. Leaving me to sort out the road leading to “
The Times
”.

It was only a matter of days before I knew, for certain, that I was in the very worst place for my sort of complaint. I had the technical brain of a newt. Here everyone sat entranced while glum-faced teachers poured one liquid into a flask, and another liquid on to iron filings or something equally inane. They sat with tongues hanging out, and darting eyes crossing the wide blackboards following hieroglyphics which I was told were called logarithms, long division, or agreed, with eager nods, the bold assumption that “if A equals B and C equals D thus E, F, G and X are equal to the sum total Q”.

I never knew how many apples a farmer had left in his basket if he gave his wife two-thirds. Or how much water slipped away in an hour if the bath-plug was released and the tap dripped at the rate of fifty drops per minute. What the Hell! I was lost. Notebooks were virginal white. Pencils unblunted. Rubbers un-rubbed. Surrounded by a class of thirty I started to observe them in preference to the impossible messages on the blackboards.

Raw-boned hulks most of them seemed. Red hair and freckles; fair hair and pigs eyes; white faces and acne. Stooped grey-flannel backs, prematurely humped, arms like gorillas stretched out along their desks: booted feet twitching for a football. Or anything to kick.

No vivid Trevor Ropers, no fat kind Foots, no bespectacled Jones G. C.'s here; these were tough, Irish-Scots, one parent away from the Pits, four years or less from the Barricades. Foreigners. And what made things harder was that I couldn't understand a word they said, nor could they understand me. A gulf had started from the very first day with the barrier of our common tongue. I was the odd man out, the Sassenach, posh, weedy, incomprehensible, alien. But I knew that because I was New, this slit-eyed raw-boned herd of bullocks was biding its time until the terror which was growing steadily within me should start to leak away, like blood in a sea of sharks. And when they scented it, they would attack. This I knew.

My desk mate—we sat two to a bench like slaves in the galleys
—was called Tom. He was dark, thin, pleasant looking with round tin glasses. He showed me where to hang my cap and coat, where my locker was, where the lavatories were, the classrooms I would use, and where to eat our lunch if we didn't go home. Which neither of us did.

A long brick shed, it was pushed into a corner of the Yard almost as an afterthought. It had a tin roof and was euphemistically called the Tuck Shop. Banks of greasy wooden tables, benches on each side, a long counter at one end with tea and coffee urns and racks of soggy hot, or cold, meat pies, sausages, cheese buns, bread and dripping and Mars Bars.

At the other end, two pin tables for the elder boys. We were not allowed to use them until we were sixteen, but everyone did anyway. In one corner a foul, stinking lavatory which was three walls with an open drain round the edges. Sluggish streams of gently steaming urine bubbled along this trough. Cigarette ends and gobs of spittle bobbed about like floats in a stream. On the walls above the slate slabs against which we pissed, a whole holocaust of wild scribbles and obscenities, none of which I understood any better than their language.

In the other corner a cabin with doors like a stable so that one could see the feet and the top of the head of the occupant. Sometimes there were two or three pairs of feet scuffling about below the door, and the knowing shouts and bellows of laughter made me sick with apprehension, not understanding what was going on in there.

Tom used to guide me out of the Tuck Shop as often as the weather allowed and we sat, each with our bottle of Cola, a hot pie and an apple or an orange, on the low wall which ran round the dustbins watching a thousand games of football played with an old tennis ball or a rough block of wood. He talked away from time to time, and I tried to understand him, which made him laugh, and he tried to understand me, which made me laugh too. We were warm together, and I knew that I liked him, but conversation was, of necessity, limited. I did, however, glean that his father was a coal-man and that he, Tom, had won a scholarship to this unenviable school.

I was deeply impressed. Not that his father was a coal-man, but that he had been clever enough to win a scholarship and could still be so gentle, patient and kind. I liked him very much, and he became my mate.