Now a distinguished novelist and poet in the African modernist tradition, Bernard Kojo Laing had been a skinny ten-year-old boy when he left Accra to live with my parents and go to school in Alexandria. It was a silly Scottish boast that caused the move. Bernard’s parents had been complaining to me about how difficult it was to educate their large family. They were worried, in particular, about what to do for ten-year-old Bernard. Send him to Scotland, I said, it has the best education system in the world. I reminded George, Bernard’s father, who was Provost of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Accra, that his great grandfather had come from Scotland as a surveyor in the late nineteenth century. Maybe it was time he connected with his ancestral roots. It never occurred to me that my parents would balk at the idea of taking on an African boy they’d never met. Nor did they. Nine months before my own return, a friend of the Laings, an English businessman working in Accra, took Bernard with him on one of his flights to Britain and brought him to Elmbank Drive. It wasn’t easy for him at first, but by the time of my own return to Scotland he was well settled and the Vale had taken him to its heart.
Those years in Accra had been life-changing for me as well as for Bernard. They were also complicated and lonely. Bishop’s House was an attractive white colonial building near the Cathedral. It was on a cliff overlooking the South Atlantic. I soon discovered that gazing out to sea is a great prompter of melancholy. The house had been situated to catch the breezes that made life more comfortable for Europeans in what was still known as the white man’s grave, because of the tropical climate and the diseases and infections that went with it. Every day we took a prophylactic called Paludrin, and slept under mosquito nets at night in the bright airy house, though the precautions did not stop me getting a bad bout of malaria. I ran the Bishop’s office by myself, and held the fort when he was away on one of his frequent treks. I was quick at the work, so it left time for a bit of youth work in local churches and a lot of time for reading and exploring. It was reading that precipitated the crisis.
I had hoped to leave my troubles behind when I sailed for Africa. Instead, I brought them with me. I was still battling the flesh, trying to beat my body into submission to the spirit. And I soon realised that Africa was not the place to win the battle. On our way out from Liverpool we had tied up at Freetown in Sierra Leone for the best part of a day, and I had spent the time exploring the quaint Victorian city. I was electrified by the number of bare-breasted women I saw going unself-consciously about their business in the midst of people who seemed unaware of this stunning and arousing fact. My attention was quickened, my senses heightened. I had never seen anything so beautiful or so tormenting. It filled me with a longing that was as much sadness as lust. I did not then understand how unsatisfiable romantic yearning was, and how addicted to the search for hidden doors and whispered avowals. It was no better when I finally got to Accra, where I spent much of my time in a state of embarrassed arousal.
The reading I plundered in the well-stocked local library in an attempt to distract my mind did not help. The mistake was to discover James Joyce. Soon my official reports to the Novice Master at Kelham became stream-of-consciousness descriptions of my reactions to what I was seeing as I wandered the streets and prowled the beaches of Accra. At last I was talking about the subject that had secretly obsessed me for years, but my talk alarmed him. James Joyce was not recommended reading for a young Novice struggling to control a galloping libido, so he ordered my immediate return to Kelham. I refused. I would not leave the Bishop in the lurch. I would stick to the plan and go back after two years. Then I must withdraw from the Novitiate, he replied. I refused this order as well. All of this was transacted on blue airmail letters, and we were clearly at an impasse. It was my duty to collect the mail from the Central Post Office in Accra where we had a box. One day I collected a letter for the Bishop from the Father Director at Kelham. Unusually, it was marked ‘strictly personal and confidential’; and I was pretty sure it was about me. The Bishop sat on it for a day before inviting me into his office. He’d been informed about the correspondence that was flying between me and the Novice Master, and he knew about the standoff between us. The Society did not want to throw me out, so the Director had asked him to resolve the issue one way or the other, either by sending me back to Kelham immediately or, if I insisted on staying, persuading me to withdraw from the community. Maybe the fact that he needed me to complete the two years he’d been promised influenced his judgement, but he went on to say he did not think I was capable of the kind of implicit obedience life in a religious order required – there was no mention of celibacy – so wouldn’t it be better if I faced facts and withdrew from the Society? It was my decision, but I had to make it today, one way or the other.
I went out into our clifftop garden and gazed at the breaking sea for ten minutes. Then I went to my room and put together a little package containing my red girdle, the crucifix that used to hang from it, Father Kelly’s Constitution of the Society, and a letter announcing my voluntary withdrawal from the Novitiate. I sent the parcel off to the Novice Master, House of the Sacred Mission, Kelham, Newark, Nottinghamshire, England. I knew it would take a month to arrive via the Elder Dempster Line, which had regular sailings between Takoradi and Liverpool. As I left it at the big post office in the teeming centre of Accra, I pictured it landing on Brother Noel’s desk in the office at Kelham where I had taught myself to type on his old Underwood. I saw him place it, with all the other mail, on the large wooden table at the bottom of the great stair, where it would be picked up by the Novice Master after breakfast one morning weeks away. I am sure that’s what happened; but I never did hear if it got there.
So it was in Accra that I finally lost the direction I thought my life was supposed to take. It was there I said ‘No’ to the great demand, there I realised what a disappointment I must be to God. And it was there I began to recognise how incommensurate my character was to my own ideals and aspirations. It’s hard when you discover that the person you are is not someone you admire; not the person you want to be; not cut out to be a saint. But there were compensations. The biggest discovery was that there was a world outside religion. I had been so intent on following God that I had paid little attention to the world he was supposed to love. That changed radically in Accra. I was present at the liberation of the first African colony and saw Kwame Nkrumah, Africa’s first Big Man, carried by his supporters into history as the Gold Coast became Ghana. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ he paraphrased, ‘and all these things will be added unto you.’ It was in Africa’s first independent nation that I discovered the ferment of European politics. I devoured the Overseas Weekly Guardian and New Statesman when they arrived at Bishop’s House, and kept in touch with news of the Suez fiasco and the birth of CND on a shortwave radio. There was an exciting world outside the monastery, a conflicted and unequal world. Maybe it would offer me opportunities for other types of heroism, other ways to play the given-away life, other stages on which to strut. Though the tug of disappointment never left me, now the world was all before me. Where would the road lead me as I took my solitary way?
It never occurred to me that it would lead to the priesthood. I had forgotten the aspiration that originally brought me to Kelham. It had long since been subsumed in the higher purpose of the monastic life, and with that at an end I thought the enchantment of the religious dream was over for me. I decided that when I got back to Scotland I would head for university. I secured a place to read philosophy at Aberdeen, though they told me I’d have to brush up my Latin. I can’t remember why I felt it necessary to tell him what had been going on in my life, but I wrote to the Bishop of Glasgow to bring him up to date. By airmail return he cancelled my plans. Forget about Aberdeen. When you return you will do a year’s study at the College of the Scottish Church in Edinburgh, then I’ll ordain you. When you are back, get in touch and we’ll fix it. Yours, Francis Moncreiff. I had not, after all, completely lost the habit of obedience. I went along with his
plan.
So it was that a year after I left Accra I was, to my surprise, ordained by the Bishop of Glasgow and posted to a curacy under the saintly Rector of St Ninian’s Albert Drive, down the road from Gorbals. After a year kicking around in digs in Pollokshields, I moved into Gorbals where I had already been helping out at Lilias’s youth club in Bedford Street Lane, a minute’s walk from her flat in Abbotsford Place. It provided me with a new theatre in which to try on a different role, one closer to my own roots, one I felt I was returning to rather than coming to for the first time. And the religious dimension had shifted too. I had found another Jesus. Not Jesus the celibate abandoning himself to the loneliness of the night of God. This Jesus was the rebel taking up arms against the night of the world, a night in which the poor mourned and cursed the darkness. I was still afflicted with the old duality, one me watching the other me strutting on a new set of boards. But I also discovered something more authentic amidst the posturing, something I had not encountered before: anger at how the world ordered itself. What had previously been used as devotional tropes, instruments for spiritual self-laceration, I understood now as challenges to the powerful of the world, a world whose values Jesus had tried to turn upside down: ‘Blessed be ye poor . . . Blessed are ye that hunger now . . . Blessed are ye that weep.’36 Gorbals was like the world Jesus blessed and cursed. It was a good place for a fight, and something in me wanted a fight.
Not that I ever felt personally in danger. Young men fought among themselves with ‘chibs’ (blades) and hammers for the thrill of it certainly, but they rarely turned on civilians. The only regular violence I had to cope with was when Raveena, the young daughter of the Singh family on the floor below me, came up for me at the weekend to deal with her parents. Mr Singh got drunk on Friday nights, as did many Gorbals men, who came home when the pubs closed at ten and made life hell for their families. I tried to do something about it by starting a Friday night movie club, for men whose wives wanted me to keep them out of the pub before the pay packet was wasted and they staggered home in a guilty rage. I took them round the corner to the New Bedford in Eglinton Street, a jazzy cinema from 1932 that showed a lot of Westerns. But Jack Lemmon in Cowboy and Alan Ladd in Shane couldn’t compete with the tradition of getting ‘stōshus’ at the weekend, so the club folded after a few weeks. And Mr Singh had never joined us anyway. When Raveena came for me that first Friday night I feared the worst for her mother because Mr Singh was an enormous man. I needn’t have worried. I found him lying on the kitchen floor, turban off, hair unwound, with his wife banging his head on the linoleum as she cursed him in passionate Punjabi. Cheered by this cultural reversal, I helped them carry Mr Singh’s groaning bulk to bed – and not for the last time. But it wasn’t violence within the community – sad as it was – that really angered me. It was violence done to the community by forces outside its control that angered me more. A violence that, in the end, would destroy the physical fabric of the community itself. And it had been brewing a long time.
The arrival of the suburban railway system in nineteenth-century Glasgow started the flight of the middle classes from Gorbals, but the population of the district was constantly increased by new arrivals, immigrant groups fleeing starvation in Ireland or persecution in Europe or poverty in Asia. By World War II the population was over 50,000 in an area the size of a dozen football pitches.37 It was what came after the war that began the destruction. Glasgow’s housing stock was in an apocalyptic state. An official survey established that 98,000 houses were unfit for human habitation. Most of the old tenements had no hot water, internal lavatories or baths, and they were all tired and dilapidated. It was the era of the slum landlord, most of whom were incompetent as well as grasping, and some of whom were actively criminal and warehoused the poor into derelict buildings of last resort when there was nowhere else for them to go. And South Portland Street was the epicentre of the problem.
It was my route into the city centre. It was where I did my laundry at the local Bagwash once a week. I would dry my load in one of the machines and then take a pillow case full of clean clothes back to my room and shove it in a corner from which I fished out clothes as I needed them. South Portland Street also housed the local library, a handsome red sandstone building, bustling and well lit. But it was also the main operating zone of a housing racket run by a well-known Glasgow boxing dynasty. I organised a survey of stairs owned by them. In each room of every five-room flat I found a family with children, all sharing a single WC, and with little in the way of cooking facilities. What city officials described as multiple occupation was intense in the street. In one flat I found sixty-seven people sharing a single WC. When I was raising money for a housing association we started in order to reclaim the old tenements from the depredations of the planners and racketeers, I featured a photograph of this lavatory in an advertisement in The Lady magazine. Under the heading Ideal Homes, the ad told readers, ‘Last winter 67 people were using this W.C. in a tenement not far from the centre of Glasgow.’ The ad brought in a satisfying amount of money, as did another of our advertisements: ‘Room to let. 12 feet by 10 – do family of 10; coal fire provided for cooking; share cold water tap and W.C. with three other families; only 19 other families on stair (99 people); convenient for Glasgow city centre. RENT – £2 a week.’ As well as raising money for the cause, that advertisement also elicited applications to us from families who thought we were the landlords and wanted to rent the flat. The real landlords had a family in it a few days after it had fallen vacant.
The best way of getting at slum landlords was to take them to the Rent Tribunal. By the terms of the contract with their tenants they were supposed to keep their properties ‘wind and water tight’. That clause offered the opportunity of a challenge, which, while it could never remedy the overall situation, achieved some redress for the tenants in the form of reduced rents. I organised a series of rent strikes in South Portland Street, which I defended at the Rent Tribunal on the grounds that the landlords made no attempt to do even minor repairs. During the strikes I made sure the tenants paid their rents to me, so that the landlord could not counter sue them for withholding. We always won these actions, but they were only successful skirmishes in a war that was already lost.
No one doubted that something had to be done to respond to Glasgow’s housing crisis. I thought that the best response was to modernise and rehabilitate the existing stock. With others, including sociologists and town-planners from the university, our campaign reminded people that Glasgow’s tenements had been a good solution to population density at the time they were built. The streets of grey and red sandstone seemed organic to the landscape and climate of our northern nation. Even the cheaper ones were built to last, and they looked as though they belonged where they stood – and knew it. Why not keep them, improve them, modernise them? Had they been consulted, that is what the natives themselves would have gone for, but social engineers are famous for their indifference to the views of the subjects of their experiments. No one bothered to ask the people who actually lived in Gorbals. Glasgow wanted to do something dramatic to counter its reputation as the slum capital of Europe, so they opted for what they called comprehensive redevelopment, the complete flattening of the district and the erection of an entirely new housing pattern. They blitzed the traditional horizontal grid of streets and sent them into the sky in the famous twenty-storey high-rises. It was an astonishingly violent solution, and once a district was sentenced to it a deadly blight descended on it. It was like putting a whole neighbourhood on death row for decades before muscling it onto the electric chair. Was that what my wee singer in the backcourt had been lamenting? That here could be no abiding city? That here was another place where not one stone would be left upon another?
6
ANGEL OF THE GORBALS
When Lilias first got in touch I was living in digs in Kenmure Street near Maxwell Drive where the 59 tram woke me at midnight screeching round the corner on its long clank to Mosspark. She ne
eded a man to help with her youth club in Abbotsford Lane. Would I be interested? I’d heard of her, of course. Everyone in Glasgow had. The Daily Record called her ‘the Angel of the Gorbals’, but to the clergy of the Diocese of Glasgow she was Miss Graham the Welfare Worker. Gorbals wasn’t far away, but I wrapped myself in the big fawn duffle coat I’d bought in an Army & Navy Store when I got back from Africa and went there on my motorbike.
There were thick fogs in Glasgow that winter and it was easier to weave through them behind the headlight of a motorbike than to stumble around on the sidewalk. I inched my way down Maxwell Drive to Eglinton Toll. Turned right off Eglinton Street at Cumberland Street. Next left down Abbotsford Place. The gas lamps shed a halo as I ghosted along the street to Bedford. I turned right and parked. The lane ran between Bedford and Cumberland streets parallel to Abbotsford Place. Its cobbled surface and low buildings identified it as one of the mews of Victorian Gorbals. Most of the old stables were wrecks, but some survived as workshops and garages. Lilias’s club was upstairs in one of the less dilapidated buildings right on Bedford Street. Its low ceiling and rectangular shape made it a cosy place in which to hang out. The equipment was basic, like thousands of youth clubs at the time. A record player and billiard table was about it. But there was ‘Ginger’, the generic West of Scotland name for soft drinks, mainly Irn-Bru and American Cream Soda, a drink no one from the USA would have recognised. And crisps, potato crisps. Boxes of them. The contrast with the youth fellowship I ran at Saint Ninian’s, less than a mile away, was startling. The Pollokshields teenagers were a confident group, getting ready for university or college, all of them with secure futures ahead of them. The boys in Lilias’s club were already alumni of young offenders’ institutions, and most of them would soon graduate to prison. The brighter and more energetic they were, the more trouble they seemed to attract and the more hopeless their future seemed to be. I was to spend a lot of time at the Sheriff Court on the other side of the Clyde near Glasgow Green, speaking up for these boys, usually to no avail. Off they went defiantly to gaol, their careers as Glasgow hard men marked out as predictably as the future dentists and engineers and schoolteachers of Pollokshields. Everyone had been dealt a hand in life, but it was obvious that the dealer had rigged the deck against those born in this postcode.
Leaving Alexandria Page 10
