We are an unruly mob of primates progressing in a wending straggle down the metalled road from Knockenkelly to Auchencairn.

Two older adults – one male, one female.   Three adult males and three adult females.  Two young females and a male barely out of infancy.

The youngest, blonde, adult female pushes a Silver Cross pram the size of a coracle. Inside the pram are white cellular blankets and a small square pillow but, for now, the pram is being used as a barrow.  Its intended occupant rides on his father’s shoulders, chubby legs clamped around his neck, fingers slippery in his Brylcreamed hair.  From that privileged vantage-point, the boy is taller than everyone, for his father is tallest of them all.[i]

My Uncle Tommy’s 8mm cine-camera documents the day, in colour: it is perhaps the last time all three generations were together in one place.

On film, my grandfather, George, seems indulgent as I squat between his legs in red jersey and blue shorts (terry-nappy still pinned in place). I gaze towards the lens, defiant and sceptical even then. He and my grandmother wears sun-glasses: a gift from their eldest daughter, Chrissie? 

My cousins, Isobel (5) and Cathy (4), fret amidst a boorach of women, flasks and jeelie-pieces.  Wasps buzz about the sweetness.  The burn murmurs close by. 

My mother seems anxious, as always. 

My father smiles but is still awkward in the company of his in-laws.  A flowery parasol intrudes into the scene but I cannot know if it is for me or a plaything of one of my cousins.  Sun-block hasn’t been invented yet among the labouring classes.

Braeside, on Knockenkelly, became established as the Elliott’s holiday destination of choice before I was born.   In the years before and during World War 2, they had frequented Rosneath and Kilcreggan, just across the Firth of Clyde from Greenock.  After the war, their loyalties switched to Arran, far further down the Firth.  The steamers  to Arran sailed from Ardrossan, Fairlie and Wemyss Bay: not the Broomielaw. There was still a serviceable pier in Whiting Bay then, though the service was less frequent than to Brodick.

Braeside was owned by man called Sinclair who worked in the same shipyard as my grandfather[ii].  Just like the Elliotts, the Sinclairs lived in a comfortable council property in West Drumoyne,: but they also owned Braeside, a 3 bedroomed house and a two bedroom but-and-ben.  The property had  a big open garden with sweeping views across the Firth to the East and over to  the rocky mystery of the Holy Isle to the North.  The Sleeping Warrior could be imagined out of the ridges of the North Arran mountains as the sun set behind them.  Beyond the open garden was a soft fruit orchard, overgrown, which yielded blackcurrants, raspberries and gooseberries at the appropriate season[iii]. Jam was exported back to Govan each summer. The property was accessible by a dirt track off of a dirt track.

The lives of the Elliotts and the Sinclairs became intertwined, somehow, around the end of World War 2: perhaps through a stairhead rammy between matriarchs, perhaps connection through the school or kirk or shipyard[iv].  By the late 50’s they had formed a yet-more-extended family group.  They took their holidays together at Braeside, the Sinclairs occupying the Big Hoose for the Glasgow Fair, the Elliotts renting in  the Wee Hoose at the same time. They too had a growing multi-generational family by then with five or six grandchildren, all presided over by Mrs. Sinclair, a terrifying matriarch[v] with a cat, Tootsie, worthy of a Bond villain : together the families lived separate but sociable lives for the summer. 

Unlike the Big House, the butt-n-ben had no running water inside and the toilet was a remote brick-built cubicle at the bottom of the garden, beyond banks of stinging nettles, cold and dark at night and the refuge of slugs, spiders and doomed Daddy-Longlegs. 

There were beds in every room of the Wee Hoose except the lean-to kitchenette but still children had to top and tail or sleep on camp-beds by their parents’ bed. We washed and filled the kettle at an outside spigot closer to the Big House.  Potties, stowed beneath the beds,  were a feature of every room except the kitchenette.

Myself, my grandfather and father 1959

Compared to eleven and a half months of the year regulated by the factory whistle, Braeside days were a brief summer sprawl of late breakfasts and sitting still, walks down the High Road to the village for the messages or down the Barn Road  to the beach at Sandbraes[i].  Cheese and toast by the fire. Mince and tatties.[ii]

The choice of the King’s Cross burn that day in August was probably in deference to the previously mentioned Silver Cross pram and the need for a metalled road, the Auchencairn, which zig-zags back and forth from Knockenkelly, past Kelvinhaugh and Oakbank then dog-legs down to the main Whiting Bay to Lamlash Road.  Our little group marshalled at the foot of the brae, opposite the white washed bus-shelter, before crossing into the woods.  

In 1959, my parents and I lived in an upstairs flat on North Street,  near Paisley town centre.  The pair of them married at St. Mary’s Church in the West End in February 1957.  They were both 25 years old at the time of the wedding.  Overnight, Mary’s fateful decision to marry John translated her from the comfortable pre-war tenement in Drumoyne to a late-Victorian slum.

By then, her big sister, Chrissie, was living in Canada and married to some sort of shoe-selling executive.  

Sammy, her oldest brother, had a cosy wartime pre-fab in Sandyhills.

Tommy was buying his own home, in a new, owner-occupier estate on the boundary between Paisley and Glasgow. 

Modern accommodation with modern amenities: hot water and inside toilets.  The second floor flat on North Street had neither. 

North St., OS

By then, John was a time-served plumber working out of the council depot at Blackhall Street.  In his absemce, Mary and I were restricted to the limits of the room & kitchen flat or the small world of Paisley Town centre.   Excursions involved bumping the pram down flights of worn stairs then returning for me and then her bags: a process to be repeated in reverse, more effortfully, on our return.  She dared not leave the door ajar during this exercise: one day a neighbour, she insisted, snuck in and stole her purse.

Paisley 1954

Like Govan, Paisley centre was a mix of industrial squalor and paternalist endowments. Despite the crammed close Victorian buildings, our flat was not far from the Fountain Gardens and Love Street football ground.  The roar of the crowd seeped into the flat on match Saturdays.  The gardens, gifted to the town by one of Paisley’s cotton-oligarchs, had an arctic-explorer-themed, cast-iron fountain as its centrepiece, garishly painted originally and replete with (almost) life-sized walruses.  Even at 18-months, I am told, I loved the gushing water of the fountain and the tusked walruses basking in the pond[i].

Fountain Gardens Restored

In 1959, we already had our name-down for a council house: John’s status as a council employee probably helped a bit.  Paisley Burgh Council was rapidly increasing its housing stock, building vast new schemes on the burgh’s recently extended boundaries at Glenburn and Foxbar.

If, for the Elliotts, Braeside was a delicious respite from Drumoyne, for Mary, it was (and remained) a refuge.  And this cinematically imprinted day, 1^st August 1959, was my Elliott baptism[i]. 

The moment itself is not recorded on film, only retold and revised until it became installed memory, a stowaway.  There is a footbridge across the King’s Cross burn just where we picnicked.  Our sprawling dejeune sur l’herbe obstructed the bridge on the south bank.  I was still unsteady on my chubby legs.  Strangers, approaching the bridge on the opposite bank, were constrained by our sprawl.  As the Elliotts hurried to clear the path, there were friendly greetings and mumbled apologies.  Tommy was, as always, cheeky-cheerful.  John sat back with Sam.  The strangers were embarrassed, awkward, squeezing past.

The story retold is that ‘they’ knocked me off of the bridge.  Until I saw the film recently, I always imagined a younger child, not yet walking, sitting on the wooden planks above the sparkling greenish water.  More probably I overbalanced – perhaps I was nudged accidentally by one or other of the milling adults – perhaps deliberately by Isobel.  In any case, I fell into the burn, splashing screaming wet, as adults scrambled to drag me out of the pool  Pushed or stumbled – the blame was pinned on passing strangers – my baptism into Elliott confabulation. From then I become part of reported history.  At least they would have a clean, dry nappy in the pram.

Notes

[i] A precise date can be inferred from circumstantial evidence: 1^st August 1959^[i].  Since the Elliotts holidayed on Arran during the Glasgow Fair^[i] and the Burgh Council, for which my father worked as a plumber, took the Paisley Fair^[i], our co-presence on Arran overlapped by only one or two days. And, on that day in 1959, the weather being fine, we chose to go on a picnic.

[ii] Fairfields

[iii] As traditional, brambles were taken from the roadside hedgerows.

[iv] Accounts differ

[v] Even compared to Kate Armour

[ii] My mother’s brother, Sammy, worked in a foundry then: her other brother, Tommy, returned  from National Service to some kind of white-collar job at the Rolls-Royce.  George, at 63, was still at Fairfields.

[vii] Both unmade dirt tracks

[i] The walruses were de-tusked sometime in the 1960s, presumably fro safety reasons, but have since been restored to their previous toothsome splendour.

[i] I had been formally baptised into the Catholic Church as a Bolland at St. James’s soon after my birth.