Our Fathers

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Good at life, bad at a living. He could never pay his bills.

  How some reputations improve in translation from this world to the next. Hugh was to speak of his father as a kind of god, or thereabouts a champion among men, who was only cursed with bad fortune and the wrong vocation. And other people remembered him well. He’d an older, bookish friend in Ochiltree. They drank wine together.

  ‘Thomas had the sore gaiety,’ his friend wrote in a letter. ‘His nobility was deep in another time.’

  Hugh never really knew his father. But he always had a thought of him. A man with the spirit of goodness, and a habit of failure. Thomas became mythic with his blond hair, his eyes pinned over the hills.

  But nothing went well. His days were filled with private unease. Up with the lark and its malicious twittering, down in the fields with his brown and white cows, which were famous milkers, but never for Thomas. And the idiot boys he grew up with would trot past the gate with their prize-winning bulls.

  Jock the Lairds, Fairlie Geordies.

  Tam had no luck in the world like theirs. His sad-eyed cows drank Carrick water in the snowy sun, and scarce made a pint he could sell. But it wasn’t in Thomas’s nature to blame a soul who wasn’t himself. He kept his skinny animals like pets. And no one doubted Tam loved that hopeless land at his back door. He truly loved it. Every grass and hideous weed he knew by name; the hills had long befriended him. So no he never blamed the county of Ayr. It was all he had. Bar Famie and poetry and drink, his only loves.

  Tam once wrote a letter to a cousin in Ireland, saying that he only stuck to the farm because of Robert Burns. ‘My habits are bad in the field,’ he wrote, ‘but never mind, there’s something to see in the battle for stuff over here, with the thought of the poet’s hand there beside you.’

  I would hear these tales of the distant Bawns. As a growing boy I dreamed of Thomas. I wanted to be that kindly man, who had wandered the fields, and loved his wife, and named the flowers, and wrote them lines by the burn. Even now, with all the years, and the spinning worlds of difference between us, I would still, sometimes, be happy to fail, if only to fail with his hand beside me. And just like his son, I never knew him. But I’d know his hand. I still look out for its shadow across the page.

  The Bawn crops were dismal as well, and Thomas put this down to the evil luck of his ancestors, whose bones he knew were deep in the byres of Skibereen. In the worst of times, afraid in the night with a clattering shutter, he lay awake with those terrible faces, and thought in the dark of his father Lorcan. He had come to Glasgow, away from those ghosts, the green in their mouths, the common graves, and all that unholy black of the land. He had come to a Scotland free of the sickness of mud. Or so he thought. The face of Lorcan Bawn by the bed. Thomas’s eyes. The clattering shutter.

  The Irish water, running over. Running from Cork to the sands of Ayr.

  The night shade.

  Up in his bed young Tam would know how his father swore on the cross …

  ‘Never another farm or shovel …’

  Better we drown in the engine grease at Glasgow. But Thomas Bawn had wanted to make good the past. To make new life. And the soil at Ayrshire seemed good for the purpose. He came down to his fate on the Caledonia line. Coal fires burning along the way.

  But some things worked out. Famie and Thomas were famous together. They laughed and laughed at the whole wide world. They filled the fields with tattered scarecrows. The frowning elders of the local kirk. Famie and Thomas were famous together. Admired by the young and scorned by the old. But legend knows they didn’t care. Tam and Famie would love each other on the kitchen table (one of the things the old nurse said) …

  ‘And never a loaf of bread on it besides …’

  Tam made a kind of whisky in the barn. He sold it to worthies around the hills. And Famie worked when her mind was right. She was a steam presser in Newmilns. But often enough her head would go – she’d shiver and quake – and she’d slide on her nerves to the door of Glengall.

  And Tam would turn up at the hospital like a wee boy. Tears in his eyes, with flowers he’d picked. Famie would rave and thirst in her bed. Ever so gently he craved her health.

  ‘There’s something the matter with my wife,’ he said.

  There was something the matter, but nothing wrong. He never judged her. She was, to him, like one of the saints, the blushing idols she coddled and cooed.

  He once got expelled from the mental wards for singing a song. She was bound to the bed. He sang her ‘The Belles O’ Mauchline’. And just how that music made patterns on the wall, and wandered on air outside the wards, and lit across the gardens there, and over the sea, I just don’t know.

  I don’t know.

  But I see it that way. And I hear the words. Thomas putting Famie’s name in the place of Jean Armour’s. A song gone out of the window of the mad-house at Glengall, and over the fence, and into the spray, with the wild sea salt, and all the clouds, and the sound of waves, in a time we can never know.

  In Mauchline there dwells, six proper young belles,

  The pride o’ the place and its neighbourhood a’.

  Their carriage and dress, a stranger would guess,

  In London, or Paris, they’d gotten it a’.

  Miss Miller is fine, Miss Markland’s divine,

  Miss Smith she has wit, and Miss Becky is braw,

  There’s beauty and fortune to get wi’ Miss Morton,

  But Famie’s the jewel for me o’ them a’.

  And Famie’s eyes would fall about in distress and no doubt yearning. Thomas would sit there – the ward for a second the wide, wide earth – and the matron would come with her pawky regrets, the tale of her final warning. Thomas removed, as he was told, but not before he had slid the cloth band from his young wife’s face, and there in front of the poor daft people of the parish, he licked her mouth and kissed her lips until her lips were trembling wet, and then he went on till the trembling stopped.

  Famie’s health improved when my granda Hugh was born. But money got worse. Tam was like to drink all the whisky he made at the still. And one day he wanted to be in Glasgow. He looked at Hugh, and cursed their lot. He wanted free of that hopeless farm, and away from the merciless tongues of the shire, and into the shade of St Mungo’s cell, the only city he’d ever known. He knew he might drink to the last of himself. Glasgow was made for men like him. All his legible, calm days were over.

  And this was a beginning in Famie’s life. Her madness waned, her baby opened his eyes. But for golden Thomas the day was closed. The move for him was an end. He could see it coming, the bottle, or France.

  *

  In Govan the wars came early, with all-night work in the shipyards, and massive cranes lifting high above the Clyde. And at every angle tenement streets, the buildings scarred and black as lungs, the backlands piled with ash.

  But the Bawns came first to a Glasgow of lights.

  They were left with a bit from the sale of the farm. Enough to get them started. They stayed two weeks in Battlefield with a second aunt of Tam’s. The aunt was one of the ‘good side’. She owned a run of tobacco shops. A portly, puce, disdainful woman, she kept her money, and used it to bolster a curdled gentility. She let Hugh stay after someone called him a poet. He said that was right. She gave him a fortnight on the strength of his lovely hair, and put up with Famie, a ‘slip of a lass’, an ‘Ayrshire daisy’, but ‘hardly marriage material’.

  In that first week they inspected the shops, and they sat in Miss Cranston’s Tea-room. Famie was jigged by the ovals and squares: the modern look of it all. At first she was scared of the trams in Argyll Street, the warehouse buildings so high off the ground. Tam would slow her down. He’d check her eyes. He’d calm her nerves. One whole day they stayed in Buchanan Street. Up and down with giggles and stares. Sometimes Tam would go off for an hour. Famie would walk, and say hello, and think of the life they could have in Glasgow.

  My great-grandmother told her son a thi
ng years later. She said that week in the middle of Glasgow was the happiest week of her life with Thomas. It would have seemed so. The sickness of the Ayrshire farm was behind them, and the trials of Govan lay just ahead. For a week or so, in the Kibble Palace, at the Broomielaw, on the grasses of Glasgow Green, they felt they were tied up with progress, with modern life, and the promise of health for Famie. Glasgow seemed like a foreign place. A city of bonnets and handsome braes, of slender teacups, and drinks at an hotel. But it all seemed over before it began. The aunt refused to extend their stay when she caught Tam in bed with a bottle of sherry.

  The money ran out. Tam went to work at the Parkhead Forge, a place where they made battleship guns. It was all he could get in a hurry.

  It was a cold day.

  They moved to Govan with a bundle of blankets and the map of Cork. Black rain running down the windows. Famie’s heart just sank. The tenement at Grace Drive was overcrowded. And the rent wasn’t cheap for a house so far from the Forge. Tam went out and bought a box of plates, and a picture in a frame, the great St Mungo, a salmon bending over his hands. Famie shifted. She cracked a smile.

  The next few days she stalked the flat with a hot knitting needle.

  Pit-pit.

  She was out to kill wee beasties. There were roaches under the box-bed, bugs in back of the fire. Famie killed them all with her needle. She’d seen worse in the barns at Mauchline Moor. The baby Hugh was sat on the table. Big eyes for his mother. The Bawns were only in Govan a month when Britain went to war.

  Tam would eventually go to Flanders. He said he would see the fields again. And drunk as he was, our Famie knew he would rise and go with the best of them. He wanted to fight for all they had known, and Famie cried, with nothing to say. This was the only nation they knew. And yet a distant reason ached at the back of their mouths. He wanted to fight for England? A reason rose to tell him no.

  They stood at the sink; the air between them was silence, and whisky.

  Yes. In the quiet of that moment Tam and Famie knew a reason. They knew why he shouldn’t die for England. ‘But it’s Britain,’ he said. ‘We need to fight.’

  They knew of reasons sure and strong. But just as sure, on that Glasgow evening, with few more words to come to their aid, they knew that neither songs nor dreams nor Irish boys would keep the rain from that sorry window.

  ‘We need to fight.’

  And so he did.

  Years later, in the 1940s, in the months of her final illness, Famie Bawn would remember that moment in her Govan kitchen, with the taps dripping, and the look in Tam’s eyes, and she’d never forgive the Dublin Irish for burning their lights as the German bombers picked out the route to Clydebank. She remembered his blinking eyes, the confusion in them, the thought of his fathers, the pain in his eyes, stinging already with the mustard gas. And she’d never excuse the Irish their lights. She never had time to. And God protect her, she went to her saints just hating every last one of them.

  With the men away, and the bairns in their prams, Famie proved herself a great friend to the women of Govan. The war somehow changed her personality. She gathered strength from nowhere, from nowhere known to us. And even her look changed: her voice grew firm, her face matured to a kindly impatience, and her long hair was thenceforth wrapped in a bun. She was ready to look at the world and its troubles.

  The Bawn family obsession with public housing really began with Famie. She was in there at the start. Her shyness, her general air of sadness, never held her back in that field. It was to become the great issue of her life. And what she achieved in these small years has rolled over time to scold and to haunt us. Hugh would live in the shadow of Famie’s ideals, as I do in Hugh’s, and might always do.

  *

  It seems Famie had grown close to her neighbours in 1915. She was well known not only in Grace Drive but in many of the streets surrounding. She had organised a rota for the wash-house – that was how the women got to know her – and then she took in ironing and kids, allowing their mothers to work more hours. She had little money for Hugh and herself. But she didn’t seem to worry that much. She had been to worse places in her own mind.

  She waved a banner of common sense over most things. But it was the evictions that created the Effie Bawn people still remember.

  Effie. That would become her public name.

  She was never political before that. She had never listened to politicians. She had only listened to saints. But the rent strikes brought her out to the world with her small fists clenched in a white-knuckle fury. But her voice was steady: she retained the energy that had once been her help in the excoriation of Ayrshire priests; yet her words had changed. She now spoke British English, with a Glasgow accent, with fewer Scots words than they used in Ayrshire, but a strong Scots accent of the mind, as we would come to call it sixty years on, in a Saltcoats school she would never see.

  The free market was a bad ruler in Famie’s day. Tenement landlords were cruel and invisible, hiding behind their curlicued, ampersanded companies, their ornate windows in St Enoch Square, from where they served as the bleeders of slums. The landlords had a good war. All they fought for was rent. They wanted more rent than people could give.

  From her front window in Grace Drive Famie had watched the early evictions of 1915 with a sense of horror, a blossoming dread.

  ‘It’s not to be believed.’

  The news of men dying in France, and those remaining in Glasgow working full pelt to send cannons and ships to their aid. Bullets, bombs.

  Not to be believed.

  Fathers dying in trenches, and their children and wives put out on the street. Famie was sick at her Glasgow windows. And standing there she saw other women, swaying sick at their windows too. Women stood on tenement stairs, covering their mouths, watching the bailiffs at their work below. Famie saw these other women, and they saw her. Their eyes would meet from house to house. Mary Barbour up the road was keen to get them organised. Famie joined her. Together they brought the women of Govan in league with women in other parts. They agreed that no one should pay their rent.

  The field out there was an unknown land, with pain, and broken bodies. The thing to do was to hold your ground. The women’s emotion rose up like smoke, and joined the air of political fact, as if somewhere they could hear the guns, and picture their husbands crying for shame.

  The rent strikes began. Life would not be the same again. Not for those women, nor the babies they held. And not for the country either. The stuff of Mary Barbour’s heart, of social change, would be bred in the bone, and Scotland would make a legend of change, of socialist leaders, and future bliss. A century of hopes would stand in our blood. We’d stir them up, and bleed them away. But Effie Bawn was in at the start. Her family would never leave houses alone.

  ‘We Are Not Removing’, the placards said.

  So many of them painted up in Effie’s kitchen at number 11.

  The women who came to the meetings were not of the poorest. They had well-mended dresses and petticoats and boots. Once the strike was going, some of the women came to Govan from the groves of Kelvinside, their handbags heavy with the books of William Morris. They also carried the pamphlets of the Independent Labour Party. A ham hough for the soup. A tin of shortbread.

  Hugh inherited those shortbread tins. They stood on a shelf in the spare room at Annick Water. Most of them were decorated with pale scenes from the first Empire Exhibition of 1909. But some were later than that: 1938. Beauties they were: The Palace of Engineering; The Palace of Industry; The Garden Club; The Dominions’ Pavilion. They were stacked on the shelf. Hugh had stuffed them with insurance policies.

  So the women would come to Grace Drive …

  ‘Scandalised at the action of these awful lairds. How and ever, we will see them beat.’

  Some days the women went down to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes-in-arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the baillie
.

  ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’

  ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have it.’

  ‘Three weeks to pay, or eject.’

  Sometimes: ‘Pay by Wednesday, or remove all articles.’

  The women of Govan and Partick and Wilton Street would hiss over the bannister. They would hiss and bawl and shake their children at the magistrate.

  She was Effie now. That’s what the women liked to call her.

  She started a system of watching. They would place their placards in the windows of all the tenants up for removal. And in every block the women took turns to watch the street. They stood with a bell. First sight of the bailiff’s officer the alarm bell would ring out the strikers’ angelus. And down the women would come from all parts of the building …

  ‘Some with flour, if baking, wet clothes, if washing,’ wrote Effie’s lieutenant, Helen Crawfurd.

  And any missile that came to hand. Helen wrote of how the bailiff would run for his life, fiercely pursued by the mob in their aprons, mad for justice, brandishing wooden spoons. The engineers and labourers would sometimes appear from the shipyards with their black faces. Out they came at the sudden behest of Mrs Barbour or Helen Crawfurd or Effie Bawn in their high dudgeon. No bailiff in Glasgow, for all his court decree, would dally on his heels when this pretty rabblement came tramping down the street. The rent strike held like a pig-iron gate.

  Hugh was just over two years old. But the colours stayed. And the noise. The day of the rent-strikers’ march on George Square.

  He was there in the arms of Effie Bawn, and sometimes he walked on his first legs, leaning out from her hand, the big gold band on her finger. The morning was harsh. The Glasgow puddles held every oil and grime of the sky that day. Fog was everywhere. The Clyde had earlier spurned its banks; the Green was all mud. With a coat of frost on their backs, the leaves of autumn spun in circles in the public parks, and blethered about the statues.

  Leaves all rotten and lolling like tongues at the feet of great men in their iron clothes of dignity.