My dad was a brickie, y'know, Rob.


'Tis a small world.


Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 2:50 AM
Subject: Biography Project


> 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? 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.
>