The Kiln. William McIlvanney

Storeman, they'd write. Joiner. Plumber. Fitter at Mason's factory. What the bloody hell is ma feyther? He took venomous delight in swearing in his head towards him. Why did everybody else know what their father was and he hadn't a clue? The bastard. What was he trying to do to him? He made him feel like a dunce.

      He would go out to the teacher's desk and begin an elaborate, apologetic mumble. At four o'clock he'd be out of the school like a sprinter - there were no devious routes home taken on those days. He was confronting his mother at five past four, his teeth bared in an imitation of his father. ‘What,’ he once said, feeling as he said it how clever the expression was, ‘is he this week?’ He could be bitter about his father.

      Sometimes his mother could answer the question and sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes his father didn't seem too sure himself. He would ponder, picking his way round unimaginable obstacles, and he would say something like. ‘Tell ye what, son. Jist say Ah'm on for maself.’

      ‘The boay canny say that,’ his mother would say. ‘He needs to say something specific’

      ‘Unemployed,' his father would say.

      Eventually, he found his own way round the problem. He knew his father had been a miner. But that was very specific. Panic can make you understand context in an exact way. (He picked up a lot of words from his mother. She once told him words were power and he took the thought into himself like a secret weapon.) You're either a miner or you aren't. His father was obviously not a miner any longer. He didn't have a lamp for his bunnet and he didn't come home black. Anybody could see him and find that lie out easily.

      But he had also been a van driver and a labourer and tried to be a scrap dealer and had been a street bookie. He knew that being a street bookie was illegal because his mother had told him not to mention it to anyone or the police might get to hear of it. That was out. He decided to make his father a general labourer.

      It was a genuine inspiration, he felt. No teacher ever questioned it and he came to feel that he had made a contribution to the security of his family, shut out the prying eyes of strangers, given his mother one less worry and protected his father's strangeness.

      But it certainly didn't change anything except the ease with which he could fill in forms at the school, he had to admit as he washed the residual soap off his face and dried it. His father had continued to dream incorrigibly about the big breakthrough into wealth.