Glasgow (36 page)

The next thing he remembers is that there was a sudden explosion as his superiors backed instantly out of their chairs. He remembers that he was
standing up himself. A great jet of half-digested breakfast was thundering across the table. Tam was sick over the table, himself and over the Area Manager. It was some years later that Tam ventured into hotels again.

WHEN THE CLYDE SWAM WITH SERPENTS, 1967
Alan Sharp

Ostensibly a review of C.A. Oakley's
The Second City,
novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp (1934–2013) here takes the opportunity to memorialise the Glasgow he remembered from the perspective of a native of Greenock. The author of two highly praised novels –
A Green Tree in Gedde
(1964) and
The Wind Shifts
(1967) – he went on to write the screenplays of several films, including
Ulzana's Raid
(1972) and
Night Moves
(1975). Serial killer Peter Manuel (1931–58) is believed to have been responsible for at least eight murders, seven of which he was found guilty of and hanged
.

There are different ways of writing about places. Mr Oakley in his book about Glasgow has chosen to inform and illustrate; and leave evocations to the memories of his readers . . . For me Glasgow is still the Metropolis, the place one went to escape the provinces. It's where first things happened. First heavy date, first foreign films, first contact with those denizens of the moral underworld, homosexuals and prostitutes. As the 7.10 rolled over the bridge into the Central and the Clyde swam with serpents of oily neon it was a world of Kafka and Raymond Chandler and Holden Caulfield that we entered, one in which it all might suddenly happen. That it rarely did is why you find a great many people from the outlying towns who decry Glasgow a ‘dump' or a ‘hole'. There was always a time when they ventured there and returned empty-handed.

The essence of Glasgow has always lain for me in its humour and its devotion to the national sport . . . There is in Glaswegian wit a black, sour quality, of whose genuine mordancy ‘sick' jokes are but an effete reflection. There is, for instance, a real texture about the quip that Peter Manuel could have pleaded insanity because ‘when they picked him up he had a Third Lanark season ticket in his pocket'. Or the woman, children around her coat-tails, following her staggering raucous husband home from the pub and as she passed the Citizen's Theatre and its emerging patrons cocked a head towards her spouse and said: ‘Drama.'

With football it's the same . . . It is on the barren slopes of Hampden that much of Glasgow manhood has had its character formed,
moulding that lyrical pessimism which is the hallmark of the West Coast Scottish imagination . . . In Glasgow, as in all industrial societies, there is the week and there is the weekend. Life accumulates a tension, a log-jam of energy from Monday to Friday and erupts on Saturday. Sunday is shot through with a remorse and melancholy that finds external image in the flavour of the Sabbath; the quiet streets, the slant of empty sunlight and the slow drift of hymn-praise from the congregations battened down in the hold of God.

A SUPER YO-YO, 1968
Pearl Jephcott

Built in the north-east of the city, the eight Red Road tower blocks were intended to address a housing crisis, and to a certain extent they did. But as Pearl Jephcott (1900–80), a pioneer of social research at Glasgow University in the 1960s, makes clear, their height introduced problems planners had not foreseen. There were some compensations. On the upper floors you could see the Campsie Fells to Ben Lomond and the Arrochar Alps, then west past the Erskine Bridge and out to Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran, continuing south over Glasgow and east towards Edinburgh. The highest floors of the blocks were reserved for communal drying, which was grand if the lifts were working. The last of the flats were demolished in 2015
.

Complete breakdown due to an external cause such as an electricity failure or a strike is one of the hazards that faces the lift user. Glasgow's 1968 hurricane cut off the electricity in certain blocks. At Red Road some families had the alarming experience of walking down to the ground floor, the children terrified because unfamiliar shadows were cast by a candle. A few months later a strike of maintenance men meant that, in a number of cases, one of the block's two lifts was out of action for up to three weeks. One mother told how she had to lug a pram and toddler up 18 flights; on another estate a man walked up and down to a 17th floor four times in one day; in another case an invalid had stumbled down 9 flights, unaided but for her two sticks. The lifts also vary in their basic reliability, in the efficiency of the firm's servicing, and in the caretaker's ability to deal with the minor troubles he is authorised to handle.

Any block with a high proportion of children is especially vulnerable. There is always a critical stage, the early days of the block's occupation, when both the children of the block and those of the vicinity ‘play the lift', using it like a super yo-yo. Trouble also tends to occur when
the load is heavy, i.e. when school comes, and during holidays. Another strain is caused by the small child who can only reach the button by jumping, using a stick, etc. One real sinner, in that he holds up the lift, is the milk boy who props its door open with his crate while he collects from perhaps 16 flats. Or on a quiet floor footballers have been known to use the lift cage for a goal!

The necessity to use a lift can have odd repercussions on the tenant's daily life. Somehow one needs to be tidy if going in the lift. Thus it deters people from popping out in their slippers for the odd bit of shopping, or seeing what the kids are up to. Or again, there is the pensioner who, if he has to use the lift, won't bother to take a turn round the estate before the evening sets in. The occasional whiff of fresh air, and the occasional brief spell away from the rest of the household, are useful in terms of health and temper: but they have gone as far as the ‘typical' flat-dweller is concerned. That the lift may even dictate the pattern of the tenant's day was shown in the case of the mother who never went out in the afternoon because of the risks of the early evening queues which meant she could not be sure of getting back in time. She was also liable to incur black looks if her pram stopped others from squeezing on to the lift, a matter that did not make for good relationships within the block. The lift's uncertainties had other repercussions. People spoke of the difficulties doctors had in getting to their patients because of lifts not coming, or out of order, and of workmen who went away disgusted with the jobs not done.

‘CITY OF RAZORS', 1969
Eddie Linden

Who Is Eddie Linden?
was the title of a book by Sebastian Barker, which was subsequently adapted for the stage. It was a question that had long perplexed many writers, many of whom had been published in Linden's legendary magazine
, Aquarius.
By any standard, his life was remarkable for the Dickensian cruelty that was visited upon him. Of Irish-Scots extraction, he was born in 1935, ‘illegitimate', adopted and rejected. He left school at fourteen and abandoned Glasgow to take up a number of menial, low-paying jobs in London. Homosexual, he has had a love–hate relationship with Catholicism. By the time of his eightieth birthday, in 2015, he was one of the few, true surviving bohemians. His poem ‘City of Razors' is his less than fulsome salute to the place that made him and very nearly broke him
.

‘CHOLESTEROL',
c
. 1970
Adam McNaughtan

Is there a ‘Taste of Scotland'? Or, for that matter, Glasgow? Undoubtedly. We are talking here about saturated fats and a surfeit of sugar. Fruits and vegetables are for sissies. What we like are puddings and pies, with a side salad of chips. Those who know about such things say with authority that the shrivelled size of Glaswegians came from their dismal diet, which led to disease and early death. As the historian Tom Devine has opined: ‘It was clearly safer to endure the privations of life in the Western Highlands than a hazardous existence in the perilous conditions of the wynds and alleyways of Glasgow and Dundee.' Be all of that as it may, there are still countless Glaswegians who, like the folksinger Adam McNaughtan, are still to be convinced by the advocates of healthy heating
.