Growing Up In The West - John Muir Canongate Classics

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mates at an Old Firm match, venting borrowed rage in a long barbaric yawp: ‘He held his hands high above his head and roared and roared until his throat was sore.’ This final image is a grim one, and it makes us question what Dunky has learned in the twelve months covered by the novel. In some respects, the swaggering thug on the slopes of Ibrox is a long way from the nervous boy of the previous year, feeding the horses in the winter dark. From another perspective, however, very little has changed; Dunky is as far as ever from a proper conception of manhood. And one thing is certain: it’s still dark.

      With Tom Gallacher’s Apprentice (1983), we move north from Ayrshire to the ‘precipitous streets of Greenock in the 1950s’. Apprentice is Gallacher’s first work of prose fiction and the opening instalment of the Bill Thompson trilogy, which continues with Journeyman (1984) and Survivor (1985). When his sequence of Clydeside stories made its appearance, Gallacher was already in mid-career as a playwright, his prolific output throughout the seventies and early eighties including radio plays, adaptations of Ibsen and Strindberg and original stage plays like Revival! and Mr Joyce is Leaving Paris. This theatrical ‘apprenticeship’ leaves its mark on Gallacher’s fiction. His faults as well as his virtues are those of a dramatist: his mise-en-scène is effective, his dialogue has polish and point, but his characters can sometimes seem overblown and ‘stagey’, and they are rather too ready to state their case in loudly impressive soliloquies.

      The form adopted by Gallacher in Apprentice – the short-story sequence – is one with a distinguished pedigree in Glasgow fiction, having been used with some élan by writers like Gaitens, Friel and Spence. Gallacher’s sequence is tightly constructed: there are five stories, one for each year of the narrator’s apprenticeship, and each centres on a different character, one of the ‘spirited, funny, maddening people’ whom Bill encounters as he serves out his time. We are thus confronted with the paradox that, while Apprentice is the only text in the present volume to feature a first-person narrator, its narrative focus is the most diffuse and decentred of all. Bill Thompson is less concerned with his own ideas and fancies than with observing – and where possible learning from – those around him. He is not simply an apprentice engineer but an ‘apprentice human being’. He is also being inducted into an unfamiliar culture, undergoing an ‘initiation – into adoptive Scottishness’.

      For Bill is an outsider, a young Englishman from a moneyed background, the well-spoken product of a minor public school. His father, a consultant engineer, worked his way up from Clyde yards and wants Bill to benefit from a Clydeside apprenticeship before he joins the family firm. Bill is thus, as one of the locals points out, ‘More of a visitor than a real apprentice’, and this external perspective is crucial to the functioning of Apprentice. Neither credulously sympathetic nor antagonistic to the lives he chronicles, Bill maintains a perspective that is not so much objective as disinterested. Through Bill, Gallacher also avoids the danger of narrative condescension. When an anthropological note creeps in – as when Bill describes the habitat and manners of the natives, their standards of hygiene and their courtship rituals, or muses on the ‘foreign language of industrial Scotland’ – this is tempered by Bill’s awareness that his own accent and manners seem equally outlandish to the inhabitants of Greenock.

      Bill’s status as a temporary resident, a ‘fanciful outsider who just happened to be passing through’, throws into relief the predicament of the locals, for whom the prospect of escape seems impossibly remote. This note of pessimism is worth stressing, since it is easy to miss amid the bantering exuberance of Gallacher’s Greenockians. Though its touch is light and its tone often quietly celebratory, there is a good deal of darkness in Apprentice. Its concern with what James Kelman calls ‘everyday routine horrors’ – losing a child to the dampness of the slums, lacking the cash to put food on the table – is marked. There are also some disturbing episodes which verge on the histrionic – the matricide of Delia Liddle, for instance, or the madness of Isa Mulvenny, who winds up as a kind of Greenock Miss Havisham, a tenement Mrs Rochester, pining for the husband and the son who have forsaken her. What keeps these scenes on the near side of melodrama is the contrast between the extravagance of the action and the precise, unflustered prose in which it is rendered. Throughout the stories, indeed, we encounter a prose whose almost archaic formality (‘She again essayed the disdainful tossing of her head’) registers Bill’s distance both from the demotic language of those around him and from the raging disorder of their lives.

      As befits a fiction centred on a shipyard, the actual processes of labour have their place in Apprentice – as they do throughout Growing Up in the West – but here the focus is resolutely small-scale and intimate: the turning of a valve, the cleaning of an oily sump, the drilling of a brass plate. There are no grandiose panoramas in Apprentice. Gallacher knows that the human frame is not ennobled but diminished when viewed against a backdrop of gargantuan machinery, that the great cranes of the yard render the workers ‘insignificant and identical’. Accordingly, there is no naïve ‘Clydesidism’ here, no earnest hymning of the riveter’s glory, no paeans to the epic stature of the welder. The swelling chords which overwhelm a novel like George Blake’s The Shipbuilders are thankfully absent here. Even where the characters do rise to feats of heroism – as when Andrew Mulvenny risks his life to close down an unmanned rolling mill – we never mistake them for paragons. An unmannerly braggart and a domestic bully, Mulvenny remains incorrigibly human.

      While it would be unfair to describe Bill Thompson as a misanthrope, he isn’t quite bursting with affection for humanity at large. He is one of those who are ‘not charmed by their fellow men in the mass, in the crush, or in the queue’. This preference for the discrete individual may help to explain the striking fact that – alone among the books featured here – Apprentice contains no reference to socialist politics, to Clydeside’s culture of labour activism. Apprentice is political in depicting a world of brutalising poverty and exploitation. But the world it depicts is not itself political. There are no firebrands in its yards, there is little sense of class solidarity, and there is almost nothing in the way of political consciousness. We hear some truculent and knee-jerk resentment of Bill as a ‘stuck-up’ Englishman, a born member of the boss class; but no one in these stories believes conditions might be improved except on a personal level, through petty crime, emigration or a ‘college education’.

      Thrown back on their own resources, Gallacher’s characters must improvise responses to the chaos in which they move. One might say of these characters, not that they are emptily theatrical, but that they are – for the most part quite knowingly – actors. They hold themselves together in a collapsing world by maintaining a certain persona. From the aristocratic labourer Lord Sweatrag (‘He was acting. He was certainly acting, but with what style’) to the impossibly brash Delia Liddle (whom we first encounter in a theatre), these characters are playing out a rô le. It is a mark of Gallacher’s tact as an artist that he refrains from dictating where such rô les begin and end. Despite its surface crudeness, then, there is decorum in Gallacher’s characterisation, a refusal to claim any definitive knowledge of the person behind the

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