Foreword

‘Are You A Billy Or A Dan Or An Old Tin Can?’

That was the battle cry of the school children in the pre-war Gorbals district of Glasgow in the years between the two Great Wars and this is the story of one such family from that district and in that era. It depicts the close blood-bonds between its members, despite the poverty, the adversity and the apathetic conditions under which many of these people lived. It also displays warmth of love ...fidelity and loyalty with a sensual innocence that is almost perversely crude in its telling. There were no airs and graces, with these people. A spade was a spade, although there were many who would prefer to call it a bloody shovel.

MARY BLAIR, the mother, was a sensible, down-to-earth, matter of fact woman, who loved her five children with the protection and jealous care of a mother hen. She was a widow, having lost her husband Willie in a coal-mining accident, when her family were small.

AGGIE, the eldest daughter, yearned for nothing more than to give her young life to God and serve Him in the confines of an enclosed order of nuns.

SADIE was a tempestuous creature that loved life and wanted only the best it could offer.

CHARLIE handsome, blonde, blue eyed Charlie was basically a very normal young man who wanted to live and let live and marry the sweetheart of his dreams; a young Jewish girl called RACHAEL An evacuee from the London blitz, who came, with her younger brother NATHAN, to stay with their grandmother, MRS. HARRIS in Glasgow for the duration of the 1939-45 War.

MEGGIE was Charlie’s twin, with much the same character that Charlie had, but her destiny led her away from the family and from her native land of Scotland.

WILLIE, the youngest and the namesake of his father, because of the striking resemblance that Mary Blair saw in her son at birth to her dear departed husband and who indeed grew up to be his very double. His passion for life, embraced his whole family with an ardour and devotion that was quite rare for a young man of his generation, since he was born in the 1920s. Willie’s particular love was for his older brother Charlie and for Charlie’s girlfriend ... a love that brought about a conflict of loyalties that dragged him through sorrow and heartache from his schooldays, until after Charlie’s death, when he left his beloved Scotland to begin a new life; a fresh start, devoid of his painful memories, in England’s capital.

For if you were a Protestant, you were a Billy ... If you were a Catholic, you were a Dan and if you were neither a Protestant nor a Catholic you were an Old Tin Can. It was as simple as that ...

***

‘This is not particularly a love story, but it is a story of a particular love.’