4

Gentlemen of the West

MY MUM LEFT the family home when I was about ten years old. I remember coming home one day to find her standing outside the house with my sister, having been gone for a couple of weeks. They came into the house for a while and I recall an argument between her and my dad. Then she went away with my sister and never came back. It wasn’t the first time they had broken up. It’s funny how you blame yourself for these things even at this young age. It’s probably a mixture of wishful thinking and childlike egotism to think that if only you were somehow better, your parents would be able to work out their differences. From then on, we didn’t see my mum with any reliability. When we did, the quality of our time with her was patchy. This was mainly due to her drunkenness or preoccupation with obtaining booze. But things quickly brush over you at this age, either because you are too aloof or because it makes it easier to cope. I remember a brief honeymoon period after she left when life felt much more peaceful. My relationship with my little brother, thanks to football and wrestling, really began to blossom. It wasn’t until I started attending secondary school a few years later that I began to feel the impact of the abandonment. It led to a deep insecurity.

This manifest in many ways and, at its worst, was physically unbearable to experience. It began with fear that people did not like me or that I was in imminent danger. I also longed for a connection, because it seemed to soothe the symptoms of the insecurity, and I would form deep emotional attachments to people – especially girls – who paid me the slightest bit of attention. But because I was so used to being let down and rejected by my mother, I was always on high alert that the people I felt attached to were going to hurt, betray or leave me. Abandonment was such a strong theme at this point in my life that I actively sought this pattern out in all my relationships, without even realising it, and began to confuse deep feelings of emotional insecurity with being in love.

These niggling psychological difficulties, coupled with the generally aggressive social environment, made it hard for me to concentrate on schoolwork. My head was always racing with internal dialogue about the various fears and anxieties I had. I was always rehearsing conversations I might have or replaying old ones over again. It seemed fear was the only thing capable of concentrating my mind. This made learning difficult, especially when it came to subjects I struggled with. Another thing that made this school such a challenging place to learn was that so many other pupils had similar problems.

Crookston Castle Secondary School was built in the early 1950s. It was designed to be repurposed into a military hospital, should the need arise. Back then, at the dawn of the Cold War, who’d have thought it would be the school itself that turned into a war zone? The school took its name from the medieval castle grounds in which it was set. Crookston Castle stood 500 yards from the edge of the playground, encircled by a deep moat at the highest point in Pollok. However, despite being a very well preserved historical monument, nobody seemed to go there very much. I always felt this was a shame because the summit offered a stunning panoramic view of the area which, despite its glaring flaws, was quite a sight to behold – provided, of course, that it was viewed from a safe enough distance.

Right in the centre of Pollok stood a modest shopping precinct, opened in 1979, called the Pollok Centre. It was about half a mile in length and home to a variety of high street stores and supermarket chains. The centrepiece of the Pollok Centre was a large cuckoo clock, which transfixed successive generations of children with a display of music and robotics every quarter of an hour. Beneath the clock, there was a seating area for people to catch their breath, have something to eat or smoke.

The Pollok Centre stood about half a mile from another place of interest, on the outskirts of the scheme called Pollok Park. This was a sprawling country pile, gifted to the people of Glasgow by the Maxwell family in the early 20th century. From the top of the castle, it was evident that the area had, essentially, been carved out of the countryside. Over the decades, the urban areas of Glasgow expanded and joined up, but Pollok existed on the edge of this and was still very much connected to its more rural past – at least aesthetically. Despite lots of trees, football fields and leisure spaces, the disparity in the quality of housing on either side of the river was obvious: one side was far more run-down than the other. But this was not, as you might assume, a mark of class, but rather, luck of the draw in terms of what sort of home you were given by the council. New homes were always being built and old ones were always being modernised while other parts were being ‘regenerated’.

Most of the people living in Pollok had a council house but this didn’t stop us from acting like we had more money than we did. I suspect the deep sense of shame many of us felt about our poverty – and an overwhelming desire to conceal it – was why the Pollok Centre was so popular. Here you could acquire everything you needed to appear better off than you really were; new trainers, tracksuits, chains, rings, football strips and boots. Such sought-after items and accessories were expensive but the price of looking poor was always far higher. Catalogues, like Littlewoods and Kay’s, and Provident agents or ‘provy-men’ (money lenders) came to the rescue of many a single parent throughout the course of the school term. Then there was always the shifty looking guy on the corner who had a few bob – as long as you paid him back on time.

There were pockets of affluence, but they existed in ‘outposts’ which usually adopted (or retained) a different name. In Pollok, for example, there is an area called ‘Old Pollok’ which is closer to Pollok Park and is a noticeably nicer place to live. People aren’t shy to remind you of the difference and make a social distinction between themselves and the area regarded as ‘deprived’.

To the south of the river stood a long line of flat-roofed tenements, encased in grey, roughcast concrete, complete with blue verandas which doubled up as viewing platforms, clothes-horses and ashtrays. You won’t be surprised to learn that dampness was an issue in the houses with flat roofs; rainfall, instead of trickling down a slope to a drainage system, would often just linger on the horizontal surface until it found a way into people’s homes. On the other side of the river, things appeared far less cluttered. There were wide open spaces, football fields, forests, parks and boulevards punctuated by neatly organised semi-detached, four-in-a-block housing which, when viewed from the castle top, seemed to coil up the hill like the swirl of an ice-cream cone.

From this vantage point you could see the different phases of development that had taken place; some ongoing, some complete and others abandoned as the area continued to expand to meet the demands of population growth. But with every shiny new-build thrown up there was always some other structure falling down – often with people still living in it. It gave Pollok a messy air of incompletion. It felt like a prototype of a real area and it was therefore hard to take much pride in it. Any efforts to keep the place clean and tidy were futile and it was more common to throw litter in the street than put it in a bin. Not many things around here were built to last and broad swathes of housing stock were already earmarked for demolition despite being relatively young in architectural terms. However, my school was an exception to this rule and seemed determined to outlive everything in its vicinity – including many of the children who attended it.

The school sat on the south bank of the Levern, which was less of a river and more a stream of consciousness that carried polythene bags to the Clyde – a real river. We just called it the ‘burn’. For us, its main function was to provide a clear territorial faultline over which running gang fights could take place. For generations, groups of young men – and sometimes women – gathered on either side of the various bridges laid down along the burn and provoked each other until a fight broke out. This was a tradition stretching back to the seventies. Most of the time it was harmless; people shouting insults or drunken threats, chasing each other before retreating to their own side. But sometimes it got serious and people got hurt. Other times they got killed.

School forced many of these violent tribal factions under one roof, along with the rest of us, for 35 hours a week. On a grey day, it looked more like a prison facility or a factory, complete with a jagged steel fence stalking the hilly perimeter. It was one of those trend-ridden designs which seem so futuristic and fashionable in their day. The school, like the tenements listed for demolition across the road, had a flat roof. It was so ugly that it became something we not only laughed about, but took a certain pride in. We regarded everything around us as either derelict, dirty or falling into a state of disrepair. Sometimes that was unfair and inaccurate but these tropes about the place being a ‘shite-hole’ ‘fulla junkies’ were invoked so regularly that their veracity was irrelevant.

I started secondary in 1996, the year Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was released. In four years, I didn’t venture too far from Pollok as it was a bit of a stoat into the city centre – around 40 minutes by bus – which was something politicians hoped to remedy by green-lighting a new motorway, much to the anger of many locals. Near the end of my school career, I was venturing beyond the borders of Pollok and across the Clyde to the fabled, almost mythical, West End, where I attended a weekly session with a child psychologist. The appointment was something to look forward to and, apart from breaking up the monotony of a regular school day, it also gave me a couple of hours off the leash to explore the city unsupervised. At lunchtime on Thursday I would leave school and take a short bus trip to Govan before jumping the underground to Hillhead.

The first thing I remember upon stepping off the escalator and onto the busy street was an odd feeling of relaxation. People here looked and sounded different in a way that was immediately apparent. Where I grew up it was unusual to see people of colour, unless they were behind a shop counter, but here it was very multi-cultural, like the world described in my modern studies class. Where I grew up it was unusual to see clean pavements, but here the streets were in pristine condition and nothing like the turd gauntlet I was accustomed to running every day. Here dogs were attached to leads and walked by their owners, as opposed to the collarless, feral hounds running around outside the shopfront along the road from my house.

Having taken a few moments to catch my breath, adjusting my eyes to the world in wonderful technicolour, I remember my first thought being, ‘So, this is how people dress when they aren’t afraid of being stabbed?’

The Notre Dame Centre, where I attended my counselling, was five minutes from the affluent strip of town, known as Byres Road. You know when you and your friends attempt to impersonate a stereotypically ‘posh’ person? Well, the people on Byres Road are what that impersonation is based on. On Byres Road it is not unusual to find a small, fashionable dog waiting in the retro wicker basket of an up-cycled penny-farthing while its owner proceeds into a cafe to politely complain to a barista named Felix about being undercharged for artisan sausage. Byres Road is where I learned that there was more than one type of coffee and that you could drink it in a glass. It’s where I discovered that fruit was a pleasure in its own right and not merely a cheap alternative to Haribo. But more importantly, this part of the city was where I was first confronted by the strange idea that living in fear of violence was not, as I had been led to believe, an immaculate fact. Bizarre as this place seemed to me, I was also captivated by it because I would never have thought such an easygoing place could exist – especially in Glasgow. Ironic that I only found myself in this serene part of town because I had to attend anger management.

Using the only thing culturally familiar to me as a means of navigation (the famous Greggs bakery chain), I waded deeper into this unknown territory. Though not before purchasing an obligatory sausage roll, bottle of Coke and a fudge doughnut. Then, up the leafy road I went, feeling very pleased with myself as I charged past local kids nibbling on rabbit food.

Despite this being a densely populated residential area, mature trees flanked slanted tenement flats, leering clumsily over the pavements like lanky security guards. This wasn’t the first time I had seen tenement housing of this type but never had I witnessed it in such a grand scale. It was the attention to detail that distinguished the buildings here. It seemed like things gained more value the older they got, as opposed to falling into dereliction. Here things were built to last and the architecture seemed to project that quality outwards. The planners had not foreseen a time when every family here would own at least two cars, but this cramped feeling, rather than a source of stress, merely accentuated the exclusivity and prestige of the area and, by extension, the social status of all therein.

The oddest thing, however, was that you never saw anybody coming or going from those tenements and you never saw neighbours talking to each other. It was almost as if people never grew up here, but instead bought their way in and that their houses were all lying empty because everyone was out at work.

Mind-boggling.

As I continued upwards to the Notre Dame Centre, children from a local school were walking down towards me, on the other side of the road. I immediately sensed they were non-threatening and as they drew closer I overheard them talking. I couldn’t quite follow the thread but I could hear enough to know they were using the kind of words that I always had in my head but felt too inhibited to speak. They were expressive and uninhibited with one another. A part of me wanted so much to walk over and join the conversation, as it seemed like we would probably have had a lot of things in common, but as I passed them they suddenly went quiet. Instantly I knew why: that’s what you did when you were walking past something that made you anxious.

Falling silent, and perhaps a head bow, was a way of showing deference to a potential threat; a signal you weren’t looking for trouble and wished to pass without incident. So often I had executed this exact manoeuvre on my own turf to avoid confrontation. The signal was always a gamble because once a potential attacker knew for certain that you didn’t want to fight, they often took it as a green light to get more aggressive. In this inversion of my usual experience, these kids seemed to perceive me as the threat. It was a jarring role reversal and I experienced a mix of pride at being feared and resentment at feeling misunderstood as I continued up the hill, short of breath, to my destination.

As I approached the building, I replayed the collision of our worlds in my head, imagining alternative scenarios in which I gave the perfect account of myself, before sauntering on, casting a lifelong shadow in the memories of my foolish detractors. An intoxicating bravado took hold as I agonised about why the group fell silent as they passed me. I reasoned that I had been harshly judged by snobs who could do with a clip around the ears as an introduction to the ‘real world’. A real world where I lived and of which they knew little. And then the vengeful thought occurred to me that should I ever be confronted by this flock of straight-laced mummy’s boys again, I would not hesitate to call them all gay.