She shared that trait with her husband. Only my sister and I knew her austerer side. The photograph of me as a baby like an overfed young Winston Churchill was taken with my granny in the back garden of her semi-detached council house on Cumbernauld Road. I hardly remember this care-worn English woman, Minnie Needham who married carefree Harry Fleming, though the upper photo of us a year or two later in a photographer’s studio suggests we were close. My determined look recalls the time when, about two years old, I could say what I wanted, but not why.
Alex Gray , circa 1932
Amy Gray , circa 1932
Alasdair Gray & Granny Fleming , 1936
Minnie & Harry Fleming in their back garden , circa 1932
Alasdair Gray & Granny in same back garden , 1935
After the evening meal we called tea I pestered Mum and Dad to take me to the kitchen and stand me on a stool before the shallow sink where dishes were washed. (A deeper sink beside it was for washing clothes, and me too before I was big enough to be dipped in the lavatory bath.) I demanded a mixing bowl, knife, cabbage leaf, sliver of soap, milk and other ingredients. I cut up the hard ones and mixed them in the bowl with the rest, expecting a wonderful transformation, perhaps thinking no such mixture had ever been made before. I remember staring down at little dark green squares of cabbage and white flakes of soap, puzzled that they stayed obstinately themselves and were not combining into something new. I was obviously trying to work magic. Seventy-three years after that failed experiment I am amazed by my parents’ tolerance. They were the sanest, least religious folk I ever met, with no irrational prejudices. They gave me magical stories, knowing children liked them, but never suggested miracles were possible. By the age of nine my wish to be a wizard had become the wish to be a great scientist and inventor of spaceships.
The Gray family lived in the tenement shown below. The middle window in the gable belongs to the living room of our three-room-and-kitchen flat. Mrs and Mr Liddel lived below us, as I have said, and above us Mrs and Mr Barclay, he being our local newsagent and tobacconist. Across the landing from the Barclays lived the Steele family, whose father was a printer for the Daily Express newspaper; across from us lived Mrs Bunting, a widow, across from the Liddels were Mrs and Mr Marchant, whose job I did not know or think about. I believed that he, like everyone else in Riddrie, belonged to the British upper class – the makers of things, nurses, postmen, shop-keepers, printers and their wives who kept the country going. Schoolteachers, doctors, civil servants also lived in the kind of tenement and semi-detached villa where my family and grandparents lived. Riddrie was one of the first Glasgow housing schemes built in 1930 under the only Socialist measure passed by the first short-lived Labour government. Like many first things of its kind (Elizabethan stage plays, Hollywood comedy films), it was also the best. It stood between two good public parks, contained a variety of shops, churches and schools, municipal bowling greens, a well-equipped library, allotments, gardens and a tree-lined boulevard. It had no pubs but nobody I knew wanted them. Years passed before I realized Riddrie was not a classless cross-section of Socialist Britain. It housed tradesmen and professional folk who had made the Labour Party our local government, partly because private landlords had been charging them high rents for poor accommodation. So these better-off working folk were first to be allocated homes in the new schemes. Later schemes were built more cheaply, with fewer amenities. Blackhill, frankly called a slum clearance scheme, was divided by the Monkland Canal from Riddrie.
Findhorn Street viewed from Cumbernauld Road. The middle window in the gable (facing south) belongs to Alex & Amy’s flat , circa 1930
Mum or Dad probably posed me with a book for a photograph but I obviously enjoyed the pose. I think the book was The Miracle of Life, a book of essays about natural history, evolution and the human body illustrated with fascinating photographs and pictures. The body’s inner functions were shown as a combination of telephone exchange and chemical factory designed to extract oxygen from air and nourishment, from food and circulate them in the blood while pouring out waste, but it showed nothing of sexual reproduction. At an early age Mora and I were told we had come from our mother’s body when smaller and found the idea amusing as we imagined ourselves occupying a small furnished livingroom in her stomach.
Alasdair and Mora Gray , 1937 or 1938
Sister & brother & Holiday Fellowship hut on hillside above Balloch, 1938 or 1939
At Millport, capital of Wee Cumbrae, Firth of Clyde islands , 1945 or 1946
World War Two brought painful shortages to the prosperous British classes but full employment and better jobs to many lower wage earners. The Grays were at their most prosperous from 1942 to ’44, when Dad became manager of a hostel for munitions workers in Wetherby Yorkshire, because his voluntary work for Scottish youth hostels and the Holiday Fellowship proved he was fit for that. We can be seen here in the garden of the manager’s bungalow. In Wetherby Mora took dancing lessons: here she is dressed as a Sunbeam. I joined the Church of England choir because it paid me two shillings a week for attending it and rehearsals. I also enjoyed the singing. Until ten I usually wore a kilt. Though the only boy with one in Riddrie Primary, I was only mocked for it at the primary school in Stonehouse, a mining town we were evacuated to before Wetherby. Here it was accepted because folk thought all Scots wore them. On my first day an older boy told me, “If anyone’s bashin’ you, just let me know.” I amicably disagreed with classmates about the r in bird and similar words. Like most English they never pronounced it. Like most Scots I did, and by insisting on doing so have perhaps come to prrronounce my r more distinctly than if I had never left Glasgow.
Alasdair Gray studying The Miracle of Life [see chapter 2, page 11], circa 1937
I believe the happiest period of my mother’s life was the months of being the wife of a well-paid manager. She sang in hostel concerts organized by my dad, and was a popular member of the Wetherby Women’s Institute. Two women whose wages were paid by the Ministry of Munitions helped her with housework. One of them, Ethel, asked Mum if she could come to Scotland and serve her after the war, and was told that after the war Mum would probably be no richer than herself, and there was no room for a servant, even in a Riddrie municipal tenement. When the war ended and Dad’s job stopped, before we returned to Scotland, the Wetherby Women’s Institute gave her a patchwork bedcover on which every member had embroidered their signatures in a different colour of thread or wool.
Back in Glasgow Dad was unwilling to return to his box-cutting machine. His applications for middle-class jobs failed so he became a labourer on a building site then, through friendship with the site clerks there, was employed by the Scottish Special Housing Scheme as a costing and bonus clerk.