... now that the issue of homophobia has come up, I  thought I might post
this.

Deeply homophobic (and dedicated to Chris Jones <g>).

Robin

THE DEAR GREEN PLACE

That building site ...

It was 1966, the summer between my first and second years as a student at
Glasgow University, and I was working on the building site to make a bit of
money. People there divided sharply between the over-forties, and kids my
own age, and never the twain did meet. The kids were Catholic Glasgow
Irish, which was pretty obvious from the start. What I only gradually came
to realise was that they weren't just illiterate Glasgow Catholic bog-Irish
(they'd all left school at sixteen), but that they were the core of a very
hard Catholic gang (these were the years of Tongs and Cumbie -- they weren't
Cumbie, but a smaller and tougher version thereof.) And there was me,
privileged middle class Protestant university student who'd been to a
grammar school (Hutchesons) and was working there for a bit to earn some
pocket money while they were there for life.

What would you expect?

Closest I can come to describing their attitude towards me was protective --
"Hey, Robin, fuck off that wan, it's tae heavy fur ye, we're trained tae
it."
Stuff like that. Though they were nice and tried not to make it too obvious
I wasn't quite up to snuff. Once (before I quite realised what I was in the
middle of) I decided to push it a little to see how far I could go (how
stupid can you get? -- pretty stupid at 18, sometimes) and turned up with a
copy of the Faber Hughes/Gunn double, and ostentatiously started to read it
at lunch. A couple of them wandered over to see what I was doing, and I
casually waved the book. "Oh, that's whit ye dae up the Hill, then." And
off they wandered on.

Only time I had anything remotely resembling trouble wasn't really my fault.
I was (as one does, sometimes) humming "Sean South of Garryone" and they
landed on me like a ton of bricks -- "Jeez, Robin, fur Christ sake stop
that. Don't ye know he was a flaming poofter?" (Well, I thought he was a
martyred hero of the Uprising). Most of their granddaddies had probably
been wasted alongside him by the Black and Tans. Long memories in Glasgow.
They forgave me for it -- as an ignorant Protestant, how would I be expected
to know something like that? They were deeply homophobic.

The night before my last day on the site, we all went out for a drink to
celebrate my coming departure, or commiserate, or something. The one time
in the entire month I can remember the two generations coming together,
though the older men only drank a decorous pint or two and left after an
hour. Rest of us settled down to make night of it, bit of serious drinking.
None of your half-and-a-half-pints, but doubles with a pint of heavy. For
some lunatic reason my doubles were gin, not scotch. Wasn't even
pretension, god knows what it was. Idiocy?

After a bit, my memories go blurred till I suddenly surfaced in the middle
of a chip shop stand-off with one of the kids spitting curses at someone
just out of my bleary eyesight, and the guy behind the counter holding a
toureen of boiling chip-fat above his head and screaming, "If youze buggers
dinnae get out o here at wance, am goin tae drown yeez aw in this."
Fortunately, neither side was weaponed up (it was a social evening for us
and it must have been for them too) or, even as drunk as we all were, there
might have been trouble.

Anyway, they dragged me onto a bus (clustered protectively around me as
usual -- well, I wouldn't have been much help in a fight anyway, so they
were probably right in that instance) and off I went to bed to try and sleep
it off.

I actually made it to the site the next day. As did maybe half the others
(I felt mildly proud, insofar as I could through my hangover, that I might
not be able to work as hard as them, but at least I was there, and not all
of them had made it out of bed). Though no work got done, pretty
obviously -- the Older Men covered for us (rules of the game).

Then I left ...

One of the only two times in my life I ever felt completely at home.

The other thing that stuck with me was that two of the kids were brighter
than me. Wasn't anything I could do about it at the time, but that was
always in the back of my mind later when I looked over the apparently
no-hopers whom I was interviewing for a university place. So I tended to
make more than my quota of offers to underqualified applicants. Who more
often than the norm ended up with good two ones or better.

So that's the story of The Dear Green Place.