Of Me and Others - Alasdair Gray

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work. On another occasion when our home had been burgled and drawers and cupboards ransacked and clothing etc. taken, he returned home to learn of the theft. His first thought was for his working clothes and all he said was, “Well, they left me the best suit, the one I need for my work.” After 40 years with the same firm he reached the age of 65 and was told he was getting too old for his work as a blacksmith. Without warning he was handed his weekly wage, which I don’t think ever exceeded 30 shillings, was thanked for his long and useful service and given the advice to look for a lighter job. His hand was shaken by the owner and he left, knowing that at his age he would not be able to get a tradesmen’s job. In his last five years of labour he was a hammer-man to blacksmiths at Stewart & Lloyds at Rutherglen, much heavier work than that done by the men he was assisting. I never heard him complain. He was a teetotaller and did not smoke. His weekly spending was for butterscotch, the odd tram fare when on his Saturday afternoon walk. Often he would rise on Sunday morning and walk up to ten miles before going to church at 11am. On Saturday afternoons he would take me on walks along the paths round and over the hills which surround Glasgow, the paths which Alexander McDonald wrote about in Rambles Round Glasgow. When Mother, after an illness, spent a week at Strathaven, Father and I walked there and back5 each Saturday having taken the tram to Cambuslang.

      One of my treats was to be taken to Celtic Park by Uncle John, who was Mother’s brother and manager of the newside at Beardmore’s6 furnaces. The oldside was hand-fed furnaces where Uncle Tom was the leading hand. Both lived at Parkhead. I can still hear the hush of the thousands on the terraces as Jimmy Quinn barged his way toward the goal with his opponents floored by his strong shoulders, to be followed by the roar which exploded when he cannoned the ball into the net.

      Mother was good with her hands. She knitted, crocheted, made jam and baked and had time for church work. Her contribution to the family purse always ensured that at Glasgow Fair the Grays had a week’s holiday. Never once did we stay at home in that time. Occasionally we also had a day Doon the Watter7 on other holidays.

      In politics my father was a radical liberal, though he never was active as a political worker. He knew Keir Hardie and was instrumental in getting K.H. to speak at Dalmarnock Congregational Church where at that time the minister was the Rev. Forson. Incidentally Father had a Bible class at the Sunday School and from his class came the two Graingers who later were medical doctors in Bridgeton and three Forsons, all of whom became Congregational Ministers, one of whom succeeded his father in my father’s own church church. I went to John Street School as an infant and later into the Higher Grade School, where I was a mediocre scholar, being better with my feet and hands than with my head. I remember the celebration when George the VII8 became King. We each received a small box with the heads of the King and Queen on the lid. We were marched from school to Glasgow Green for fun, games and sport, but what I did is now beyond me. Glasgow Green was not only where football was played. Part was the bleaching field and the nearby folk after the weekly washing would spread out or hand their clothes and water them for the sun to make them white. It was nearby what was to become the Greenhead Baths. It was also here where we school children were taken for swimming lessons. We would line up outside, having raced from school for first place in the queue where we prepared by partially undressing so that no time would be lost in the boxes beside the pool.

      Every New Year all of the Stevenson family (my mother was a Stevenson) visited Granny who lived above a wide pend just beyond the present Tramway garage at Parkhead. All the Uncles and Aunts and their children were present, four families in all. The youngsters sat down first and had steak pie followed by plum pudding in large helpings, then were sent out to play while the parents had their dinner. Through the pend9 there was a large gable end where we played hand ball. We picked sides and each side in turn had to hit the ball against the gable end, the ball being hit after it stotted once on the ground. The side which failed to return the ball to the wall after one stot lost a point, and the first side reaching perhaps 10 points lost the game. When the elders finished washing up after the meal we all returned to the house and games and song passed the afternoon, each person reciting or singing his or her party piece.

      It was on Sunday that the black morning coats were worn for church. Father, Bill who was church organist and choirmaster, and Jim who sang in the choir (he also sang in the Orpheus Choir) also wore their tall hats. When Father died in 1921 I was an outpatient at Bellahoustoun hospital, a military hospital, being given treatment following a war wound. In order to maintain the dignity of the family at the funeral I also had to get a morning coat and tall hat.

      END OF ALEXANDER GRAY’S NARRATIVE

      YOU STARTED READING THIS because you are more interested in me than my father. This essay has become a preface to an autobiography instead of the sketch for one I intended, yet Dad’s self-negating account of his first family – even the style of his language – tells a lot about the characters of working people who shaped mine, though the gentle radical blacksmith who taught the Bible to three Bridgeton doctors and a clergyman died 13 years before I was born, and I don’t know when his wife died. My Dad only spoke of his life before marriage when I asked about it, which was hardly ever. This reticence included his experiences of fighting in France between 1914 and 18. There was an exception to this in my late teens when I had bouts of asthma. These sometimes made me feel all life and history was a bad disease, a disease which could only be cured by a God of Love in whom I had no faith despite all Christian churches praying to Him. A Socialist and Agnostic, my dad believed with Marx that humanity would one day solve every problem it had the sense to recognise. As he could not persuade me of this he tried to help by introducing me to his parents’ God in ways which respected their faith and his own. I made a note of these words, which told some things his written account does not, and eventually I paraphrased them in the 26th chapter of my first novel.

       “My father was elder in a Congregational church in Bridegton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money. But there was something wrong with me. Then the 1914 war started and I joined the army and heard a different kind of prayer. The clergy on all sides were praying for victory. They told us God wanted our government to win and was right there behind us, with the generals, shoving us forward. A lot of us in the trenches let God go at that time with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed Duncan, all these airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notions are nothing but aids to doing what we want anyway. My parents used Christianity to help them behave decently in a difficult life. Other folk used it to justify war and property. But Duncan, what men believe isn’t important – it’s our actions which make us right or wrong. So if a God can comfort you, adopt one. He won’t hurt you.”

      This speech – or, to be accurate, the words it paraphrases – did not help me at the time, for words cannot cure a physical pain unless they are a sort of hypnotism. But when my health mended it helped me believe what I still mainly believe: that original decency is as old as original sin and essentially stronger: that those who pray are consciously strengthening wishes which (whether selfish or not) are already very strong in them, and which decide the nature of the god they invoke.

      I swear that extract contains no invention, just two bits of condensing and an exaggeration – 10 years of voluntary service are made out of what was less. It also contains an image I used in another piece of writing: the image of a small boy at family prayers who suspects he is at fault because he feels God is not with him. This became part of a play I wrote in 1964 called The Fall of Kelvin Walker. It was televised by the BBC in 1968

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