the car lot had a terrifying alarm system that went off every other night and sounded quite a lot like a 6-year-old’s idea of the four-minute warning.
In the centre of Pollokshaws was an underground shopping centre where shops struggled to stay open. Not the bookies or the boozer that were in there; they did fine. Food was just less of an essential. The W of ‘Pollokshaws Shopping Centre’ had been stolen long ago and replaced with a shaky, spray-painted ‘G’ under which old ladies would stand around nattering, taking a sweepstake on which of their friends would last the winter. In the dead centre of it all was a memorial to the Scottish socialist John McLean, who would have wept.
You had to be careful going through here with your mum. If she saw someone she knew, you’d have to stand disconsolately by her side while they exchanged information about prices and graphic descriptions of the illnesses of mutual acquaintances. It might as well have been in another language. My mum spoke Irish, so it often was.
There were maybe half a dozen high flats in the area. Most tower blocks in the Seventies were so depressing they should have put a diving board on the roof. I think Scottish architects in the Sixties must have been given massive bribes by the makers of lithium. The way they’d been positioned meant that the main street, Shawbridge Street, was essentially a wind tunnel. My brother used to walk me to school when I was very little (he’d make me walk about five steps behind, so people didn’t know I was with him). One day we got caught up in a wind so fierce that I lifted right up into the air. I hovered briefly, about four feet up, like a tiny superhero who had foolishly attempted to strike fear into criminals with a duffel-coat costume. The wind stopped suddenly and I landed right on my face. I was really proud of my torn trousers and gashed leg – a proper injury!
There was a bit behind one of the high flats that got so windy that nobody could hear you if you shouted into the wind. Well, you couldn’t hear yourself; I don’t know if anybody else could hear. Maybe everybody round there dreaded blustery days because random children would turn up and scream obscenities outside their windows. To be honest, we did that on sunny days too.
I got a telescope when I was a bit older. Actually my brother got a telescope that he never used. I’d train it on the windows of the upper storeys and look at folk – there were a couple of buildings that you could see right into. I think I was partly hoping to see women’s tits, inspired by a scene in Gregory’s Girl, but it was largely just curiosity. There was a couple who’d always dance together, drunk. It was sweet and a little bit sordid.
One of my favourites was this woman (although I thought of her as an old woman, she was probably mid-30s) who’d do really high-powered Eighties aerobics and then put on a coat and go outside onto the balcony and smoke fags for ages, just looking down into the street. Once a guy had jumped out of that high flat and hit one of the concrete posts at the bottom where we used to play leapfrog. It never really got cleaned up properly and he became an impressively large stain that lasted for years. As a kid, I wondered if this woman was thinking about jumping. I wondered why this guy had jumped and distrusted my dad’s explanation (‘He was drunk’). As a teenager I grew really disgusted with the area. I’d look up at the flimsy little net curtains in the windows as I walked home from the library every night, wondering why we didn’t all jump.
My favourite window was right at the top of a block on Shawbridge Street. A guy did martial arts in his living room wearing a sort of ninja outfit. It’s hard to be precise, but it looked like an all-black bodysuit and maybe a balaclava. He had nunchakus and a wooden sword and he’d be there every night – occasionally you could even see him leaping about with the lights off. I was visiting my parents years later when I was at uni and thought that I must just have dreamt this guy. I got out the same old telescope and pointed it up at his window. Ten years later and he was still there. Looked like he’d gotten really good at it too.
The high rise nearest us had a bunch of shops set into the basement. The main one was an Asian newsagent that constantly changed hands as shopkeepers weighed up the cost of cleaning graffiti against the profit margin on a chocolate tool. When I was little there was a Sixties-style soda bar which had somehow survived into a completely different era. It was run by two old ladies with big beehive hairdos and they sold ice-cream floats and milkshakes, very, very slowly. It closed when one of them died. I remember one of the local mums telling me about it when we were coming home from school one day. I asked what had happened to her and the woman grunted, ‘Her liver went.’
We always got our hair cut at this barber called ‘Old Hughie’s’. Old Hughie was from the Islands somewhere, was always completely pished and had a wooden leg. My mum would sit balefully behind us as we sat in the chair, encouraging him to take more hair off. She always left bitterly disappointed that we still had a little hair. Pretty much the only cut that would have satisfied her would have exposed a sizeable section of our brains.
The place had a history of housing immigrants from way back. There was an old song about the time it had consisted of a whole load of Flemish people in the nineteenth century called ‘The Queer Folk o’ the Shaws’. The place had stayed pretty queer. There was a library and a swimming pool and that was it. On the hill at the far end of town was our church, the church hall and school. All built on a hill screened by trees. John Stirling Maxwell, who owned the area, had allowed Catholics to build those only if they were somewhere he couldn’t see them.
At the time religious division in Glasgow seemed absolute. It was brutal too. When I was just a little kid a Celtic player electrocuted himself by accident in his loft. ‘It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To’ was number one and on the radio, and at that week’s football you could hear the Rangers fans singing ‘It’s My Attic and I’ll Fry if I Want To’. A Rangers player called Tom McKean gassed himself in his car and the graffiti was ‘Gas 1, McKean 0’.
I remember getting my tonsils out when I was a wee lad and I made friends with a Protestant boy on my ward. Neither of us could sleep the night before our operations and we sat up watching trains going by out of the window. The city underneath us seemed dark and wonderful. We were up till morning, watching tiny silhouettes go to their work. When my dad asked me what I’d done in hospital I said, ‘I spoke to a Protestant.’ It just seemed much stranger than anything else that had happened.
I was also born with what used to be called ‘bat ears’ – protruding ears with no folds in them. At secondary school these would have been the equivalent of having ‘Insert Cock Here’ tattooed on my chin but the primary-school kids weren’t too bad about it. I think there was a huge waiting list to get an operation but somehow my mum managed to persuade a surgeon to do it quickly. He was genuinely doing it off the books or something, like a mechanic might have a look at his mate’s motor after hours. Afterwards, I had to wear pads over my ear for weeks, secured with a big hairnet. Well, that’s what it looked like to me. To everyone at school it seemed to say, ‘Please slap or punch me in the ears.’ I was supposed to go back a couple of years later and get my lobes pinned back as well. Unfortunately, the guy had selfishly died in the interval so I’ve still got these weird protruding lobes. Who knows how many jobs this bloke was knocking off in his lunch hour, out of the goodness of his heart? I often look at people with big earlobes in Scotland and wonder if we’re all part of some perverse brotherhood.
The bit of Pollokshaws we lived in wasn’t a bad place for wee boys and girls. The sort of things that horrify estate agents are pretty good for kids. There was a big bit of waste ground nearby and people didn’t seem to mind you digging big holes in the grass or building dens in the trees. A den meant dragging sheets of wood, plastic or whatever you could find up against the body of the tree and then boldly proclaiming it a den, rather than building anything. Once we found a load of discarded doors and used them to completely surround a tree, creating a plywood armadillo. You had to jump into it, nobody having thought to use one of the doors as a door.
I had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Karen. I shared a room with John, and Karen had
