My Gran Bolland had a very loud door bell.  It had to be.  She and Aunt May lived in the upper apartments of a maisonette at 147, Green Road in Paisley.  The outside door was at the foot of the stairs and the door on the landing was always shut.  To keep out the draught. 

Somewhere in my middle years at St. Pauls, I was selected to learn to play a musical instrument.  One day a week a peripatetic music teacher, Mr. Calqhoun, visited the school to tutor chosen pupils in brass instruments.  I started on the cornet.  We attempted the Londonderry Air, the  Trumpet Voluntary and the Dam Busters Theme.  It didn’t go well.

Soon after, I was shifted on to the euphonium and thence to the trombone.  I couldn’t really read the music.  I was working farther and farther back in the band, gravitating helplessly towards the instruments with the fewest notes but still unable to read the dots. I only knew the melody, so oom-pa-pah was quite beyond me.

Given the mayhem of every evening at home, homework was out of the question and, given John was on constant night shift, music practice was not happening.  Hence the  disappointment regularly  expressed by Mr. Calqhoun for wasting the precious opportunity offered to me[i] and the punishment beatings from Mrs. Campbell.

When I was about 10, I suffered the brief opportunity to be part of the regional schools’ orchestra.  The orchestra rehearsed on Saturday mornings at the new John Neilston High School in Millarston.  Every Saturday, I set off from Foxbar with my trombone, walked down the Chain Road then up the steep hill of the Green Road, past my Gran’s house and on towards the gates of the Ferguslie Mill. On reaching that magnificent red-brick mill, I  descended again, past the coal yard and the mill-pond, to the new  school at the foot of the brae.

Two hours later, having failed to read any of the notes or barely approximate the tune, I marched back, still with the trombone. On the way back, I stopped in at my grandmother’s house before the final climb back up to Foxbar.

It was usually just before lunchtime.  I realise, now, that I regularly ate her lunch.

Kate Armour was a stern but, in her way, gentle woman.  Quite short but solid in her will and her convictions.  Catholic. Carnaptious, Aunt May would say in later years.  They were an odd couple, the pair of them.  The atmosphere in that upstairs flat was always abuzz with kindness and desperation.  The scent of lavender masking the smell of damp.

My grandfather, Charles, had died in 1965.

I recall my cousin, Anne, telling me next morning in the ground floor cloakroom of St. Pauls.  It was, like most interactions with Anne, pragmatic, detached.  Anne was eleven then. It was already apparent that Anne was the next matriarch in line after Aunt May after Kate.  But what about me?

I didn’t attend my grandfather’s the funeral: I have a sense that children ‘didn’t’ back then.

In the years before his death, my grandparents lived in a tied-house on the works premises at the Shanks sanitary ware factory on the Red Road.^[iii].  Charles, who had started on the site in 1919 as a sanitary ware inspector, was the gate keeper by then. 

I recall stepping out through the wooden gate in the brick wall of their back court into the space and dust of the brickyard.  It was summer.  The brick wall of the back-yard was (in hindsight) more reminiscent of ‘English’ terrace houses than anything I had ever seen of Glasgow tenements or modern housing schemes.  Beyond the green-painted plank door, the domestic gave way to the industrial.  To a six year old, the brick work yard seemed vast, hot and dusty.  Urinals and water-closets stood everywhere, awaiting dipping, awaiting shipment.  Trucks were parked onsite.  Kilns squatted.  There was a huge brick chimney in the middle of the site.  Towering.  Built in 1836[iv], it was 286 feet high.  A hundred times taller than me!

Inside, my grand-parents’ house had a dark quiet – the quiet of ticking clocks and prohibited front-parlours.  The yard was a vast gritty realm of fireclay and furnaces.^[v]

I still encounter sanitary ware with a vague feeling of pride.

*

Kate had looked after me, occasionally, in Foxbar, in the years before my grandfather’s death but her lair, in the years after his demise, was at the foot of the Green Road, less than half a mile from the now derelict sanitary-ware works where she and my grandfather met almost 50 years before.

Kate’s house on Green Road backed onto ‘Green Road Park’. It wasn’t really a Park but the Burgh Council’s source of turf. The park, in turn, abutted onto a rope walk, partially screened by a dank thicket of hawthorn and elder trees.  On weekend adventures, we peered through gaps in the corrugated iron onto the dusty mysteries of string. 

Beyond Peacock’s Rope Walk was the bone-works.  The stench of rotting and rendering was the pervasive odour of my childhood, a constant presence even in Foxbar, well over a mile away^[vi].  Bolland family lore told of whales and circus animals dismembered there (like any rendering plant for fallen stock): the tales loaned the place an exotic tinge though, of course, it was the butchered carcasses of cattle and sheep, hooves, heads and horns and blood flecked bone, that formed their baseload.  The road surface between the Green Road and the railway bridge at the end of the Canyon was always caked in a noisome pale crust of effluvia spilled from the constant stream of trucks.

I remember Kate’s house on Green Road smelled of old-women but cleaner, somehow, than my maternal grandmother’s, Isabella’s^[vii]. 

There was a piano in the living room which I never saw anyone play.  There was a drop-leaved table by the window, a bookshelf with various devotional books (and the Cruel Sea) and, on top of the display-cabinet, my father’s Hong Kong cigarette box. Snow-globes and mementos from Lourdes; Our Saviour Jesus Christ exposing his heart from the back wall. A statuette of the Virgin in the alcove.  The tv was always on with the sound turned down.  At that time on a Saturday, it would usually be the horse-racing from Doncaster, Aintree or Wincanton.

From the table by the window, if you faced the kitchen door, you looked down on the gate in the high privet hedge.  The latch on the gate made a distinctive noise and, in later years, I realised the loud drang of the door-bell was probably superfluous.  She had been watching for me coming.

Kate cooked beef-olives (from Watsons at the top of New Street)  or gave me mince for lunch. She made her custard (from Brown & Poulson’s powder^[viii]) half-and-half with water.

My Aunt May was rarely there when I visited on Saturdays.  I would see her next morning when she climbed the brae to take my brothers and I to mid-day Mass (having already attended early Mass with Kate).

May – Mary Toye – was my father’s eldest sibling, named, according to Scottish convention, after her maternal grand-mother.  She was a district nurse at that time, a spinster: she was 45 years old.  There is a rumour that she  loved a Polish airman during World War 2 but he didn’t survive.  There was never any hint that she had formed any romantic relationships thereafter.  She had a career: she registered as a nurse in 1946  so must have trained during the war.  She was  a staff nurse, then a school nurse: now she worked out of the Russell Institute in Causeyside St.  The building’s elegance bestowed mystique.

Her style of nurture was that of a martinette.  Whining was not tolerated and her remedy for cut knees (with gravel) was a scrubbing brush from under the sink and Germolene. [ix]

But 147 Green Rd. was a place of solace, for me, away from the mayhem and anxiety of Tay Avenue.  A quieter, older place.  I didn’t go there to play.  When visiting I sat, trying not to get too distracted by whatever drama was playing out in silence on the black and white tv.  There would be tea and biscuits if there were other family guests.  The place was a portal to a ‘Bolland’ hinterland: my paternal uncles – Robert and James – and Charlie’s widow, the terrifying Brigit who lived in Bellshill.  Great uncles – Phillip – were sometimes mentioned but, more mysteriously, the Johnstone arm of the family, Armours and Toyes: Auntie Annie, Kate’s sister, was frequently discussed and I had to pretend I actually knew who she was.  I doubt if I ever actually met her.

There were links back, through the Armours, to Donegal where May, I think, sometimes visited but Kate’s holiday resort of choice was Pittenweem in Fife.

*

Sometime after Raymond was born, we moved house.  We were now 2 adults and 4 boys in a 3 apartment flat.  Raymond, once out of his cot, earned us more points on the housing queue  and, fortuitously, the Thompson’s decided to move out of their top-floor right flat, sensing early the rapid degeneration of the Rivers as a place to live. 

The knowledge of an upcoming tenancy – pre-negotiated with Edith Thompson – enabled Mary to ambush the factor in his office in the town with the combined force of her points on the housing list and the impending date of a vacancy.  So we moved: twelve feet to the left and eighteen feet higher.  A  room with an even better view  across the fence.  Most summer evenings we enjoyed amazing views of the majestic climb of Smoky Joe – the Iceland Air evening flight to Rekyavik  – into the  sunsets behind the Newton Woods .

Despite one small extra room,  the upstairs flat had no more mod-cons than the downstairs one but there was a sort of snootiness about the top floor, despite the climb: everyone and their not infrequent dogs were not passing your door day and night.  In the matter of windy-hingin you definitely did look down on your neighbours.

Like the Thompsons, the other neighbours of my early childhood – the Smiths, the Crombies – quickly moved on and away, to own-door properties in Hunterhill or elsewhere in Foxbar, following the aspirational trajectory, out of tenements into cottage-types, but also fleeing the rumour that ‘it was all going downhill’ under the pernicious influence of neighbouring Ferguslie Park.

Ferguslie Park was another of Paisley’s post-war schemes but established closer to the centre, behind Millarston and close to the Armitage Shanks yard.  Ferguslie Park was separated from neighbouring areas by railway lines and major roads that bounded it.  It has been described as ‘the largest cul-de-sac in the world’ .

By 1971, the male unemployment rate was nearly three times that of  Paisley as whole, and 30 percent of the male workforce in Ferguslie Park were unskilled, compared to Paisley’s 12 percent. The proportion of lone-parent households was double that of Paisley, as was the level of overcrowding.  Although I know many who grew up at that time cherish memories of their Feegie childhood, social engineering had its undesired effect.  Parts of the scheme became dilapidated and lawless.  Those who could get out did get out – reinforcing the rumours of migration into adjacent schemes like the Rivers. Those who remained were stigmatised as Fegz.

In the late 60s, the first generation tenants on the middle landing of our tenement were replaced by the Garretts and the Sproules.  The only other persisting residents were the Boyles in top floor left: a lovely couple without children who kept themselves very much to themselves, though I know they made pink blancmange and had their own ice-cream maker.

Since I can’t recollect their names, I suspect we abandoned the ground floor tenants to their fates.  The Sproules and the Bollands shared their noise and, having two boys close to my brothers’ ages, the Garretts were known.   Tina Garrett favoured Bacardi and  extreme flashing Christmas lights in her front window from November onwards. Cathy Sproule was dying of cancer whilst smoking herself to death.  Her man brought poteen back from trips back to Ulster and drove a lorry for the bone works at the foot of the Chain Road.

Since we had, nominally, more young children, if there was to be a party in the close, at New Year for example, it would as well be in our flat and, since the neighbours had to put up with the noise anyway, it was as well to invite them.  If things got out of hand and the Sproules weren’t invited, Andy Sproule would chap on his ceiling in protest, on one occasion driving a broom-handle through the plasterboard.

Parties were loud and raucous, windows wide to the world to let out the heat and smoke and the sound of Sinatra, Perry Como or Jim Reeves. Whisky and McEwans, Tennents lager, advocat (for snowballs), shortbread and black-bun, ginger cordial for kids.  In the mornings after, we cruised the debris looking for left over spirits.  Guinness apart, I never didn’t like the taste.

It was at one of those parties that Davy Garrett, Tina’s husband, announced he was leaving his wife and kids.  It must have been three in the morning.  I was in bed.  My brothers were sleeping.  Davy, a lorry driver, sat down on the edge of my single bed and explained to me that he had had enough: in the morning he would be gone and he wasn’t coming back.  I still don’t know what he was looking for.  I was about 10.  Someone to listen?  A bearer of the bad news? Absolution?

He told me and he took his drink and went back to the party.  Next morning, he disappeared.  It didn’t feel wise to tell anyone I knew.  I kept his secret.  If it was a secret.

*

As the relationship, whatever it was, between my parents unravelled, I became more and more inward – unwilling to leave the house, go out to play, involve myself with children (for I must have been a child!) of my own age. Old before my time, Mary would say. But she never ceased to cling.

After John had been huckled out to work between 8 and 9 o’clock, Mary read books mostly.  There were desultory experiments with knitting but knitting was her mother’s thing: Royal Blue V-neck jerseys in increasing sizes every year.

Mary’s appetite for books – and the need to pick up the Family Allowance from Foxbar’s only post-office on a Tuesday – led to regular expeditions across the Brediland Road to the Amochrie shops.  Beyond the shops was the Community Centre and Public Library, so I would be cut loose in the Children’s section whilst Mary browsed for books that tickled her own fancy.

Although I dipped a few paragraphs into ‘books I ought to like’ – Jennings, Biggles, Billy Bunter, Just William – these children were clearly not me, for I was clear I was not a child.  For books without pictures, I favoured adventures, buckle-swashing and daring do. 

I read an unabridged Three Musketeers in a single night: I remember my shock when the executed Milady!  A consumed Jules Verne – helped by some foretastes through Classic Illustrated.  Nigel Tranter and G.A. Henty engaged my attention: revisionist teuchter heroism and hyper-jingo. 

With Henty, I marched with Frederick the Great, sailed with Drake and Vasco da Gama, suppressed rebellious natives in China, Afghanistan, Malaya.  The protagonist was usually a drummer boy, a stowaway, a squire privileged to march beside a hero who marched in the service of a hero.  That schtick.

And, if time didn’t offer sufficient distance, space offered new horizons for a boy who had never gone farther than Arran (and would not until he was in his 20s).  I was a fan of Willard Price’s Adventures, borrowed from the Library and could buy, with pocket-money, bowdlerised editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs from Woolworths, the first steps in bookish lust (in both senses). 

I never liked Tarzan much but John Carter was much more interesting.

I wasn’t the only one who favoured historical and exotic locations.  My mother’s favoured genre was the breathless, soon to be un-tight-laced and remarkably explicit (and racist) work of Kyle Onsett, Lance Horner, Sergeanne Golon and Jean Plaidy.  Hal and Roger were replaced by Angelique and Lucretia Borgia[x].  Slave overseers and Barbary Sultans replaced rogue elephants and Komodo dragons.

I was also favoured by Mary’s sister with cast-off copies of National Geographic, a perfect magazine, they thought, to widen horizons.  The journal introduced me to more exotic landscapes,  fascinating scientific developments and the heroic efforts of the US Armed forces in Vietnam.

*

Whereas Christmas in my mother’s extended family usually involved a full family get-together with a meal, there was never space – or maybe appetite – for such junketing among the Bollands.  In part it reflected the decline in the standard of council housing since the 1920s.  The spacious ‘Intermediate Scheme’ tenement apartment of the Elliotts could accommodate the whole family around a single table without displacing all the furniture from the living room whereas, in Green Road, there was no space for such a gathering.  In any case, Christmas was a religious not a secular affair with Midnight Mass and Morning Mass and all the trimmings.  Gifts were given: but only to children.  There was no sense of celebration: only worship. Neither Kate nor May drank though, when they did, their schooners of sherry were large and serial. 

In lieu of Christmas, there was the annual Green Rd. party, usually in November, presided over by my Uncle Robert, Charlie Owens and Willy Arroll (who lived across the park in Morar Drive)[xi].  The party was a diasporic catholic Irish affair: there was food and pudding and dancing and singing.  My father got up on stage to sing his party-pieces: Ramona or I Believe or I’ll take you home again Kathleen or The Wild Mountain Thyme^[xii].  He was a good singer: a tenor who modeled himself on Nat King Cole and Jim Reeves. 

As the evening wore on towards maudlin, the singing degenerated to Nobody’s Child and My Way, then the Irish rebel songs, Dublin in the Green and Roddy McCorley.  [xiii]

*

My Uncle Tommy says that it was he who solved the problem of my poor results in school.

In his version, he pointed out a nuclear submarine surfacing in the Firth of Clyde between Whiting Bay and the Heads of Ayr one morning.  We were standing together on the lawn at Braeside.  Amazed that I couldn’t see what he was pointing to, he insisted that Mary take me to an optician.   The optician diagnosed me as, unequivocally, short-sighted.

Thereafter, to add to my miseries, I became a child with national health spectacles.  From my far-back desk, where the dunces sat, I could finally see the blackboard.

Myself, I think things changed at the end of the lobby.  But that’s a different story.

By Autumn 1968, after a dark (or blurred) passage, the smart-arsed little boy Mrs. Kossof remembered as knowing the names of all the animals had re-emerged.

That year, I came second in the class after Margaret McKim.  Before that, girls had always been first, second and third. 

I wrote my first short story in Mrs. Thompson’s class: it was something about pyramids and archaeological excavations. Mrs. Thompson pinned it to the wall at the back of the class-room. My first publication. 

Despite what must, in hindsight, have been a change for the better, my new-found confidence and engagement in Primary 11 had its downsides, however. 

In the middle of the term, Mrs. Thompson went off sick.  Her temporary replacement was a probationer, fresh from Norte Dame.  She cheerfully led us through a lesson-plan about the American West and, in particular, ‘Indians’.  It was supposed to be a relaxed, afternoon, fun-activity thing after the rote 4R learning of the morning.

Things came unstuck, however, when considering the role and importance of ‘buffalo’ in the lifeways of Native Americans. 

“Bison,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“It’s a bison. Not a buffalo,” I said.

“It’s called a buffalo.”

“Buffalo have big horns and leathery hides,” I said. “It’s a bison.”

“Buffalo.”

“Bison.’

“Buffalo.”

“Bison.”

She beat me across the palms with a leather tawse until my hands shrivelled up red with the beating. I was 10.

“Bison.”

6 strokes.

*

By the late 1960s, there still wasn’t a fridge in our household.  We cooked by gas and Mary did the laundry, when she found the will, in a small Hotpoint single-tub.  We did, however, have television  – compliments of Radio Rentals.  Television vastly expanded my world. 

The wireless, in our house, had been a woozy bakelite hand-me-down with weird stations like Helsinki and Moscow which required constant tuning.  In comparison, television merely leaked beguiling information into our living room and our lives on a continuous basis.  The telly on with the sound down was a default state if conversation was expected: but conversation quickly atrophied and the sound stayed on. 

‘We’ never really took to ITV: it always felt a bit parochial and common.  Blue Peter was preferred to How or Magpie.  Animal Magic and Jacques Cousteau replaced my animal encyclopaedias (and supplemented Willard Price and the National Geographic).  We unconsciously learned hermeneutics trying to puzzle out what was going on in The Singing Ringing Tree and Tales from Eastern Europe more generally.  If the stench from the bone works was the Proustian madeleine of my childhood, the music to Robinson Crusoe, on constant repeat, was its sound track.  I did enjoy The Flashing Blade.

But TV news also made the world obligatory and indiscriminate. Reality crammed into my life. 

The starving children of Biafra unsettled me. Nguyễn Văn Lém having his brains blown out on a Saigon Street was a shock.  Egyptian Prisoners of War in their underwear in the Sinai Desert.  Ball bearings thrown under the hooves of police horses in Grosvenor Square. B-Specials burning down the Bogside.  Argylls patrolling the streets of Aden.  Fraternal Assistance in Prague. The world, it was clear, was a violent and unpredictable place and it didn’t seem clear to me that the forces for good were winning.

*

As well as a certain number of priest-visits in a month, primary school also required an occasional traipse from the school to the church and back.  This was especially true when the time came for rehearsals for the sacraments.  These were communal affairs: whole year groups confessed, communed or confirmed in a single industrial-scale event.

Apart from a rigorous distinction between genders, Catholicism – and its social corollary of being described as a pape, taig, tim, cathy-cat, left-fitter or fenian – was the primary norming process in St. Pauls. We were mostly of Irish extraction, with a smattering of Poles and Italians, and we were to be preserved and set-aside from the Presbytarians, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, Jews and, for all I know, Eastern Orthodox.  The question of other faiths – Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Ba’hai – never entered the equation.  I believe there were no people of colour in Foxbar in 1967.  Only Protestants and Catholics.

Confession and communion were a double bind.  To fail to join the queue for communion was to admit to May that I was not in a state of grace i.e. I had not attended Confession the night before.  It seemed reasonable for May not to have to climb up the brae from the Green Road to march us to confession: surely my mother could have been relied on to see to that?

But Doctor Who and Juke Box Jury clashed with Saturday Confession and, besides, you never knew if you’d get nice Fr. Kilpartick or stern Fr. Brady. The choice of confessional could make the difference between three hail Mays and a full rosary.  And what if I hadn’t noticed myself sinning – had nothing to say? Sin was compulsory since confession was compulsory: otherwise, no state of grace, no communion and the sceptical glare of my Aunt May.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned…”

And, of course, if the sin was egregious, better to lie – sin by omitting to confess – then confess to lying.

“…it has been…”

Like an overdue library book, the bigger the delay the greater likelihood of a lie to confess to or, eventually, a strategic flit out of the faith.

When sufficiently purged of my sins, the proffered host – a thin, plasticky disk of stamped ‘bread’  – a bit like the rice-paper you got in Flying Saucers but without the sherbet – was not to be chewed: held on the tongue and not swallowed until at least half way up the aisle. I followed the back of May’s coat.  My brothers followed me.   May smiled as she stood beneath her fur hat to allow us back into the pew.  I tried to feel infused with the body and blood of Our Saviour Jesus Christ but, really, I did it out of love and fear for May.

I was confirmed in Christ before leaving primary school: certainly before the age of reason.

Confirmation seems to me the most ambiguous of the sacraments. 

My Uncle Robert, the only one of my father’s brothers who was both devout and alive, was my sponsor.  In his forties by then, Robert was still an ‘altar-boy’ and remained one into his seventies. 

My oldest paternal uncle, Charles, was already dead and the youngest, James, had scandalously married an evangelical, at the Elim Church. The seemingly logical choice of my devoted Aunt May was unthinkable.  Same-sex sponsorship was the rule in keeping with the second norming principle.

I chose the name Paul: for the name of my school.  My parents’ general indifference to faith and liturgy had left me with no particular preference for or curiosity about ‘saints’.  So many colourful and exotic alternatives had been missed.  Ignatius. Cajetan. Moluag.  But no!  Just pick the nearest one.  And so…John Paul… two ends of a very extended saintly spectrum.

There had been rehearsals on the Thursday night before.  But, in rehearsal, there is no slap!

White shirt, school tie, short trousers.  Robert, in a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, smoked while we waited our turn outside the church.  Cars, buses and ice-cream vans passed along Brediland Road behind us, oblivious to the sacrament.  At the allotted minute, he ground the cigarette underfoot and led me into the church and down the aisle, next in a long file of ten year olds inching toward the bishop. 

Kneel. Formula. Smack.

Bishop Black’s blow stung.   Soldier of Christ, as I now allegedly was, Robert led me off to the left, through the sacristry and round the back, out to where the priests’ house was and, thence, back to the front steps again.  He lit another cigarette.  That was me: confirmed. Like a logo stamped on a cigarette carton.

I had vaguely ‘understood’ Confession and Communion.  The need to clean up your besmirched soul before receiving Our Lord and Saviour.  The advisability of receiving Our Lord & Saviour when offered.  But this smack on the cheek by a grown man in a surplice and mitre, one of 50 such blows the bishop dispensed that afternoon?  Soldier in what army?

Notes: 1968

[i] It was.

[ii] The Owens were close family friends – those ‘queer’ extended family members who were aunts and uncles, except not by blood.  Charlie Owens was particularly close to my Uncle Robert.

[iii] 109, Ferguslie

[iv] Around the time Charles’ great grand-father arrived in Paisley.

[v] Shanks had bought Browns in in the early ‘60s. In 1969, Armitage bought Shanks to create Armitage-Shanks. In 1971, Armitage Shanks blew up the chimney. By the 1980s, their parent company, Blue Circle had shut down the factories in Paisley and neighbouring Barrhead.

[vi] Not helped by the fact that our downstairs neighbour, Andy Sproule, drove for them and would bring his truck home end-of-shift on a Friday without unloading.  A cart full of dismembered animals, bones and horns and heads and hooves, sat over the weekend in the cul-de-sac, winter or summer.

[vii] Kate, habitually, referred to Isobel as ‘that auld woman’ though Isabella was two years younger than Kate.

[viii] Made in Paisley

[ix] The Elliott faction favoured TCP.

[x] Not the one you think.

[xi] The link was Charlie Owens.

[xii] ^[xii] Gilbert and Wayne 1928 but after Jim Reeves, ^[xii] The Bachelors 1964,^[xii] Westendorf, 1895,^[xii] Traditional 

[xiii] The rebel-song tradition continued until my cousin, Gerald, joined the Marines in 1973  and was posted to Ulster.