Nine months after my admission to Mrs. Kossof’s infant class at St. Paul’s Primary, I watched a grown man beat a very small boy around his naked calves with a leather tawse. The boy was Alex MacGregor. Alex was small for his age. Mr. Boyle, the headmaster, was a thickset bald-man.
Mrs. McGrath, the P3 teacher, had called Boyle in when Alex refused to acknowledge guilt for some misdemeanour.
Confronted with the headmaster and his tawse, Alex (age 6) refused to lift his hands to the punishment. As we watched, Boyle seized him by the arm and lashed him, repeatedly, around the legs.
Kennedy had been shot in Dallas the year before. I remember watching on the TV. And I remember this.
*
I was already young when I started school in the Spring intake of 1963. When Mary led me by my reluctant hand into the infants’ classroom of Saint Paul’s Roman Catholic Primary in Foxbar, I was 4 years and 7 months old[i]. In the big, glass-clad classroom, the chairs and tables seemed very small compare to the furniture at home. Still more unusually, there was an Ostrich Egg (blown). A fellow pupil, Alasdair MacDonald, was very big. We had story time. Rumpelstiltskin seemed a very bad idea. Mrs. Kossof wore a furry hat (though that may only be word-association).
In the short, halcyon time that followed, I was the boy remembered for knowing the names of all the animals. And I did; at least to a degree unusual at that time. I knew my giant ant-eater from my wildebeest, my leopard from my jaguar. My buffalo from my bison. Perhaps I was precocious.
In Infant class at St. Paul’s we were taught the four Rs: Reading,Writing, Arithmetic and Religion[ii].
We learned to recite the Hail Mary.
Father Brady visited us : which seemed an odd thing for a man to do. The only other male members of staff were the headmaster, Mr. Boyle, and the janitor. But this old man, dressed in black with his shirt on back to front, came and sat with us. He listened, gravely, as we recited the first few entries in the catechism.
Who made the world? God made the world.
Who is God? God is our Father in heaven, the Lord and Creator of all things.
Why do we call God our father? We call God our father because He gave us life and provides us with fatherly care.
Already, for me, this ‘ground-up’ approach was beginning to come unstuck. How did God being our father relate to Father Brady being our father relate to John being my father? And if God was my father, didn’t that suggest that God would be a distant and generally unreliable figure who, quite feasibly, didn’t give a toss?
*
The Pressed Steel had become Rootes, in 1963, as part of government ambition to create car-manufacturing capacity in Central Scotland. Incentives were offered to Lord Rootes to establish a plant on the edge of Elderslie to manufacture the new, British-designed, Hillman Imp. Apart from recouping as much as possible of his £23,000,000 investment in volume car production, Rootes had no desire to be in Scotland. Like any sensible motor manufacturer, he would have preferred to expand in Coventry, where he had offices, technical know-how and engine shops.
The Pressed Steel had been pressing steel for car bodies and railway rolling stock at Linwood since the ‘50s but 1961 saw a huge expansion in the plant along with a whole new town being built (around the old Linwood core) to provide homes for the expected workforce.
Foremen were imported, somewhat reluctantly, from the existing Coventry plants[iii]. The Linwood assembly line was, it was claimed, capable of producing 60 cars an hour: which required assembly workers to repeat a standardised set of operations every minute, a rate of production that was never consistently achieved. A great many of the new production line workers were drawn from the declining shipyards on the Upper Clyde, skilled men unused to Fordist manufacturing and steeped in Craft Union (and sectarian) attitudes and culture.
Paisley’s previous experience of ‘Fordist’ manufacturing had centred on the Mills where the patriarchal attitudes of the Cotton oligarchs and the predominant employment of women had restricted Trades Union development to an extent. The Government’s mixing of assembly line production – Wilson’s ‘White heat of technology’ – with the traditional craft mentalities of the shipyards would prove an explosive mixture.
John, however, was a maintenance plumber (and a Catholic): definitely not one of the line-workers in the Crazy-K. Working constant nightshift from the early ‘60s, I imagine him lurking in the interstices and blind-spots of huge plant. White collar supervision were absent at night and there was no one place he was expected to be. So long as he and his plumber’s mate, John Corrigan, cleared their assigned jobcards on the shift there was time to read, sleep…drink.
But while the British government were, unwittingly, bringing Detroit to Paisley, they were also overseeing (or not) the final demise of the ‘Empire’, an Empire that, though effete, had not yet completely unravelled. I was two when National Service ended and McMillan made his Winds of Change speech in South Africa: four at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In 1965. my Uncle James took my father, my brother Brian and myself down to Greenock to ‘see the fleet’ which was being reviewed by the Queen. This was a double treat – for James was the only one of my relatives in my parents’ generation ever to own a car. Brian and I sat in the back seat. It was a misty, drizzly day. The warships sat, sitting ducks, in rows across the Tail of the Bank. Despite the excitement at destroyers with racy names and dreadnought submarines, I could sense even then that this was something past[iv].
Fleet Review – Tail o the Bank, 1965
*
In those days, John came home from work, every weekday morning, smelling (pleasantly) of sweat and cigarettes. Sometimes, he came home by way of the Spey Avenue shops and brought-in well-fired rolls, a Daily Record and twenty Senior Service. I loved the stubble on his chin, the coarseness of his bunnet.
I remember the tea-packet cards he brought back from work for me, the foreign postage stamps torn from the envelopes of workmates. These seemed the kindest things that anyone ever did for me: momentary shared interest, the love and enthusiasm for faraway times and place. I do not remember Mary’s Christmas gifts (boxing gloves – the machine gun – the long cannon?) – the magic tarnished because I had to wrap them myself. They do no shine like the cards picturing Hanno the Carthaginian or Vasco Da Gama. The triangular stamps from the Cote d’Ivoire.[v]
When I was still at primary school, there was a whole ten-minute gap between his arrival and my setting out to school: it was a half-mile walk through the scheme to St. Pauls. The interval might be less if he went for rolls.
*
I awoke with my mother shaking me by the shoulder. It was the middle of the night. I was six years old.
In his early childhood, my brother Charles was susceptible to febrile convulsions. When the convulsions came, Mary shook me awake in the middle of the night to help her with him. In my memory she wore a pink flannel night dress. John was on constant night-shift at Linwood: they were longer shifts and there was overtime. Each night he would set off to work at about quarter past eight, following the path of the Chain Road to the car factory.
Charles was rigid in Mary’s arms, so taut his spine arched back. Hot and quivering, his pyjamas plastered onto his limbs as we carried him down the lobby to the bathroom. The taps were already running. We lay him down in the cold bath. As Mary supported his head above the water, I struggled to prise his jaw open with the end of a tea-spoon so that he will not swallow his tongue. One of his milk-teeth is levered from the gum. Blood. Tooth. Bathwater. All of us soaking.
Mary sent me out into the cold dark close to ask the Thompson’s to call Dr. Haldane. The Thompson’s lived on the top floor, two storeys up. They were the only folk in our tenement who had a telephone. Edith Thompson was kind to my mother but her husband, Bill, was a big, gruff, moustachioed man who frightened me. In soaking pyjamas, I climbed the first flight of stair, past the Comries, and up to the top-storey where we were forbidden -ever – to play. The close walls gave way to the open stairwell. I hated standing on the rough doormat, stretching up to the heavy iron knocker, shivering, hammering to wake them from their sleep. I was barefoot in wet pyjamas. He was big and brusque and half-asleep. He smelled of pipe-tobacco.
“Edith!”
Of course, they called the doctors. Dr. Haldane, also gruff and moustachioed, made a house-call. My father came home from work in the morning, just like any other morning. Like this was normal.
And repeat: in real life then in nightmares. Even now I am terrified to ask for help of any kind.
*
I was already familiar with (old) Father Brady from Sunday morning mass at St. Pauls Church but my earliest drilling in the ways of faith came from my Aunt May. May marched herself up the Chain Road, rain or shine, to take us (the children) to midday Mass at St. Pauls on a Sunday.
May, who remains my favourite memory amongst my extended family, was pious, kind, fierce and sad and her teachings were by no means doctrinal. Her disciplines were simple: go to church, behave in church, kneel at the right moment, stand at the right moment. Remember to genuflect if possible.[vi] Christ was a man butchered on a Cross: not the babe in the manger. But these were Marianist times. The Virgin stood in every corridor of the school crushing the life out of that poor snake.
May’s weekly interventions were necessary.
Mary, believing herself to be nominally ‘default’, – i.e. Presbytarian i.e. Protestant – had no particular faith and certainly no inclination to get her sons out to Catholic church of a Sunday morning (Saturday evening, Friday evening or on the mornings of Holidays of Obligation). John was only Catholic in so far as the was afraid of his mother and sister.
In later years, once our school attendance had put us on the church’s radar, the priests from St. Pauls occasionally sallied forth on evening pastoral visits. Mary was terrified of the parish priests – even the young and very attractive Fr. Kilpatrick – to the extent of sometimes forcing us all to hide. When the priest did gain entry, these episodes were undoubtedly the most socially awkward moments of my young life.[vii]
*
What did you learn at school today?
Though no-one in my house ever asked that question. What I was learning – or not – was not the point. I learned about terror. It was a lesson to be reinforced.
We had to queue in lines, hand in hand, in the canteen where we took our school lunches. Boy with boy. Girl with girl. We were expected to fill up tables in order, next in line.
One day, Mark Corrigan[viii] and I went in, hand in hand.
Mark spotted some friends and an empty seat. I aimed for our allotted place (for two).
We didn’t release each other’s hands, tugging back and forth in the centre aisle until Boyle came and belted us both. There was thick pink custard in white ceramic jugs and mince n mash, coconut sponge and shepherd’s pie. It was more like a meal than anything either of us saw at home. Our hands shrivelled with the pain. Then the bell rang and it was over.
*
Whilst my father came and went and lived on a different diurnal cycle from the rest of the world, I filled some small part of the space he vacated: Mary’s wee helper, companion, partner. For a while, she tried to take an interest. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a fad for Airfix models bought from the toyshop on Moss Street – WW2 aircraft & warships, of course[ix], but also a figure of the Black Prince and, once, a big complicated model of the Swedish warship Vasa. Mary let me stay up with her after John had gone out to work and, on one occasion, we sat up late into the night, painting all the individual cannon and appurtenances, attaching all of the fiddly plastic riggings and the pressed-white plastic sails. It was the first time I had ever completed anything – and with her help – down to painting all of the pieces and attaching all of the rigging. When we were done, we proudly set it on top of the display cabinet, fully-rigged.
John returned next morning, with well-fired rolls, muttered, “Affa stuffy in here!” and threw wide the windows.
The fresh wind from across the fairway caught the sails and the Vasa scraped across the polished walnut of the china-cabinet and over the edge of its world. Crash![x]
Of course, it was probably salvagable – masts broken and rigging tangled but the hull intact. But I didn’t – couldn’t: some point had been made. Or was being made.
To make up for this inadvertent disaster, John later offered, helpfully, to get my plastic model Stingray[xi] (obtained with the coupons from cereal packets) painted for me at ‘the work’. Unfortunately, cars going through the Linwood paint-shop were oven-dried. Troy Tempest and Marina never stood a chance.
On reflection, there was no love in that ground floor flat – none that stood still – alighted – nourished anyone. There was the impulse to love but no love. There was aspiration (and perhaps denial). Perhaps Mary’s forever-dissatisfaction set John the task of emptying the sea with a teaspoon: me too. We had no roots: no foundations. Only lost cards from Brook-Bond Tea packets. I loved the smell and the feel of my father. He was dying before my eyes. While my mother played the weaker part ( and the more enraged and vindictive) at the end of her tether.
*
In Room 7, the first classroom in the ‘big school’, Mrs. Campbell set homework – arithmetic and spelling.
Each morning she belted every boy in her class – one for every incorrect question: six was the limit and the tariff for not doing the homework. A numerate child would have figured out that it was better not to attempt too many questions. Then again, a lack of numeracy was the problem.
There was a little girl in the class above me – a besom of a girl who had run out in front of an ice-cream van in full view of the congregation skailing out of Mass onto Brediland Road. Bright sunny Sunday (midday mass) – brash pink ice-cream van – broken child. Ambulance. After that she was bullet-proof. A fierce, entitled bully and a girl. One day she pushed me over, unprovoked, onto the tarmacadam. I got back up and kicked her on the shin in retaliation. Mrs. Campbell gave me six strokes of the tawse. The girl went unpunished. Even now the injustice stings.
*
Bless me father for I have sinned…
School photographs from that time show little boys in shorts: little girls in grey pinafore dresses. Socks awry. Pudding bowl haircuts. Gap teeth. All subject to the violence of insecure adults, harried and frustrated and feeling something must be done to address the rising panic their powerlessness evoked. The beating of small children each day, every day, in every class. The moral and emotional callouses they must have developed. The febrile terror in which we lived.
Not that relations between children were any less cruel. Any weakness. Any difference was mobbed and punished. The slightest suspicion of incontinence was crucified. There was herd-panic when someone shat themselves, loose diahorreal stool spilling from the hems of grey flannel shorts across the bench, onto the lino floor.
It never seemed to happen to girls.
Another call for the jannie with his bucket of sawdust. Another frenzy of shaming.
I found myself helpless, stuck between my terror of drawing attention to myself and asking the teacher that I might be excused and the terror of shitting myself. And even when, and not always, I mastered the impulse till next break, the toilets were a vulnerable place.
Classmates leered over the walls of the toilet cubicle as I stank of shame.
Control of shit was, in Primary school, what control of cock became in Secondary school. Another thing in the body which might betray you at any moment to ridicule and shame. I learned to control my shit. I learned to keep my secrets. I hated myself and could not ask for help. I was too weak to compete.
I was last off the wall picking sides for anything.
When the whole school (at least the boys) fought battles on summer lunchtimes, I was not accorded my due rank as the relative of one of the ‘Captains’[xii].
I spent more and more time with the girls, who spent play-time knitting with huge thick needles. Even at primary, I was a ladies’ man.
Were we real people then? Or just corms, grubs, larvae?
We seem people, in memory, cruel or craven. Helen, Joan, Geraldine, Gerry, Chris, Alasdair, Joe, Joe, Leonard, Mary, Alex, Margaret, Josephine, Mark, Adrian, Geraldine, Jim, Andy, Renee, Veronica, William, James…there must have been others – there were 28 or 30 of us: who?
Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now.
My one male friend at school was Adrian Rukowski, the highly-strung son of a Pole who, like my father, worked in Linwood.
Adrian’s father, however, was something white-collar and they lived in the own-door properties at the top of the scheme. I think I only visited him once and not ‘inside’. It was, I see now, a long way for a small boy to walk, across Brediland Road and up, past Amochrie, around Durrockstock Dam, up onto Foxbar Road… almost as far as Glenburn.[xiii]
I recall Adrian could run very fast, and had weirdly exaggerated, bony hands. I never met him again after primary school. I think they moved away. He became an administrator in the National Health Service. I have never been good at holding on to friends.
And then there was Catherine Mary Renee Daily. We won the twist competition together at the Rootes Christmas Party in 1964: a chocolate digestive each. It felt a little sordid.
Notes:
[i] . I kept on being younger than my peer group as time passed.
[ii] The importance of the 4th R to those who were educating me should not be understated. The primary object of the ‘system’ was to keep me in the faith, irrespective of the wider educational outcomes.
[iii] As were the engines.
[iv] Only in later years did it occur to me that the trip was more a tribute to their lost brother, Charles, than to Britain’s Imperial past. My uncle Charles died in 1962. His widow, Bridget, a fierce hard-bitten woman, mining stock out of Bellshill, made my grandmother seem mellow.
Robert, my father’s surviving elder brother was devout. He served on the altar at St. Mary’s until the time of his death. Married to a much younger woman, May Boyle, he moved out to the edge of Foxbar with his young family in the 1960s but returned to settle at the top of the hill on Green Rd. in the 1970s. He never discussed the impact on his future health of his childhood injuries, but he lacked stamina for the rest of his life and had bouts of uncoolable rage.
My father’s younger brother, James, married a non-conformist Christian, a pentecostalist. The Bollands (except for my parents) refused to attend the wedding, though his wife, Nancy, was tolerated afterwards. Nancy seemed ‘posh’ and the couple were childless. They could afford a big house on the edge of Barshaw Park. James had his own painting-and-decorating business and Nancy worked in Babcock’s offices. She kept two obscenely randy dachshunds and served potato croquets on the few times we went round to visit. They did give good Christmas presents though – including my first Chemistry set.
[v] When my interest in philately did, accidentally, uncover a (relatively) rare stamp, Mary took me up to the Barrows one Sunday and made me sell it.
[vi] Later, May gifted us black rosaries. These, too, had a helpful formula which, provided you remembered the sequences and the prayers, required no further thought.
[vii] On one occasion, it is remembered, Fr. Brady berated my maternal grandmother, for not ensuring the boys attended mass. The offence given apparently resulted in John going down to the church to explain that, although Mary had been obliged to convert to Catholicism to marry John, according to the Holy See’s ordinances at that time, the requirement did not extend to the rest of Mary’s family.
[viii] The son of my father’s plumbers mate, John Corrigan.
[ix] It was compulsory to now your Fockwulf from your Messerschmidt, your Dornier from your Heinkel and the Bismark and Scharnhorst were always more interesting than the Hood or the Rodney.
[x] Of course, there is the irony that the original Vasa sank after travelling 1300m across Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage in 1628.
[xi] TV Series 1964-1965 by Gerry Anderson: See also Fireball XL5
[xii] My cousin, Gerald.
[xiii] Sometime after Lord Rootes took over the Pressed Steel (but before Chrysler took over from Rootes), Adrian’s father changed their family name from Rukowski to Rootes. This seemed a craven thing to do: to erase your identity in order to fit in.