Glasgow (14 page)

Money was a subject I never remember as a topic of conversation at home during my youth. Such things as the rent of our town house or the cost of country lodgings for holidays, or even the prices of clothes, food or household articles never came up in talk. Father, of course, went off on foot each morning (after kissing us all round the breakfast table and being assisted with his coat and hat in the lobby and waved out of sight) to ‘make money' for us; and he returned each evening a little tired after having presumably made enough for our needs. He came home also for a midday meal, after which he lay down on the long red-leather-covered sofa where, covered by us with a huge tartan shawl and undisturbed by the continued family life about him he immediately slept. After some twenty minutes he sprang up refreshed and fit for a renewal of his money-making.

The building where these daily efforts were made bore an appropriate resemblance to a money-box – one of those early money-boxes that were known as ‘savings banks'. These were of cast metal painted black, square in shape, elaborately corniced with a slot in the roof for the entrance of pennies. It was in West Regent Street, and we entered it only on special occasions. As we drew near to its pseudo-Gothic portals we became silent: as we ascended the wide but dirty stone staircase awe fell upon us. My father was, I believe, a commission agent. He negotiated in particular the shipping and sale of textiles to the West Indies. Some of the ships concerned were built for, and for a time at least owned by, him. One of these, a steamship named the
Claudine
, I launched from its slips on the Clyde when I was perhaps thirteen years old, and we all
took part proprietorially in her trial down the river. Another of his ships, the
Collossie
– a sailing vessel named after the village where part of his childhood was spent – my sister Fanny launched. The
Claudine
was wrecked on her first voyage, the
Collossie
, under a diferent name, came to figure in Robert Louis Stevenson's tale
The Wrecker
. It would seem that father was not lucky with ships, and looking back I seem to know now what was then never apparent to me, that he was frequently unlucky in business undertakings, which were much in the nature of commercial gambling. I remember once his bringing home to show us a yard or two of printed cotton – yellow corn stalks in full ear effectively set against a background of turkey red. Some of this, he told us, had been sent ‘on spec' to the Sandwich Islands, and it had so pleased the islanders that the more prosperous took to riding about on horseback with streamers of the fabric fluttering from their shoulders. To such a pitch did this emulation in display develop that he had a request for a repeat order of many bales – possibly the hold of the
Claudine
was full of them.

But such exotic hints had little or no connexion in my mind with the making of money by my father. I had a vague idea that consequent upon certain mysterious ceremonies enacted before his large desk, of which he was the sole master, coins in sufficient quantity insinuated themselves through a hole in the office roof. I have said we were awed when we were there. Father in these surroundings became for us a different being – more distant and impressive because of the numerous underlings through whom we had to pass to reach him.

Of the money father made we each had a penny a week in pocket money. Much thought and choice was expended each Saturday on the laying out of this penny that father had made and given us. In those days, a penny seemed to go a very long way. You could buy a wooden box of sherbet for a halfpenny (with a wooden spoon in it to eat from delicately) and the other halfpenny could be laid out in a more permanent possession, such as a rubber balloon, or one of those contraptions at the end of a long string, which by a process of suction could fish up something desirable from the deepest street area, if lowered between the iron bars on pavement level. I have even on occasion fished up another penny, thus increasing my weekly allowance by 100 per cent. At a more advanced age we began to receive a threepenny piece each Saturday and when this was raised to sixpence, maturity was announced.

Coins counted to us, not money. This persists with me even now. With a half-crown to finger in my pocket, I feel far removed from destitution. As a petty trader I take some beating. But money in its larger
sense has always remained a mystery, with me as an uncomprehending outsider. It is something that is made in larger or smaller quantities. If I were to pick up piles of stones in his field for a farmer I should demand and value the sixpence paid for each pile. But I cannot see myself as ‘earning' money.

With guidance and encouragement I should have made a good counterfeit coiner.

‘GLASGOW', 1890
William Topaz McGonagall

Long after his death William McGonagall's position as the world's worst poet remains unchallenged. Born in Edinburgh, which is not something the capital likes to boast about, McGonagall (1830–1902) was of Irish stock. He spent part of his childhood on Orkney before settling in Dundee. Drawn to the boards, he did some acting but it was as a poet, and a woeful one at that, that he was to achieve fame. In 1878 he published his first collection of poetry, which included his ‘master-piece', ‘The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay'. Cursed with what's been described as a ‘calypso-like disregard for metre' and a tin ear for rhyme, he went on his way regardless of the brickbats thrown at him. What can be said of his paean to Glasgow? That it could not have been written by anyone else?

A MINOR EPISODE,
c
. 1892
John Buchan

Perth-born John Buchan (1875–1940) was the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister. He was educated at Hutchesons' Grammar School and between 1892 and 1895 at the University of Glasgow. Thereafter he juggled several careers, in all of which he shone. Today he is best known as a writer of fiction and will forever be associated with
The
Thirty-nine Steps
(1915), in which he introduced the character of Richard Hannay. Between 1922 and 1936 he wrote a thriller a year. Despite accusations of racism, anti-semitism and snobbishness, his reputation has endured, not least because of the power of his story-telling. In 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada, taking the title Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield
.

I never went to school in the conventional sense, for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family, but I had many academies. The first was a dame's school, where I learned to knit, and was expelled for upsetting a broth pot on the kitchen fire. The next was a board school in the same Fife village. Then came the burgh school of the neighbouring town, which meant a daily tramp of six miles. There followed the high school of the same town, a famous institution in which I believe Thomas Carlyle once taught. When we migrated to Glasgow I attended for several years an ancient grammar school on the south side of the river, from which, at the age of seventeen, I passed to Glasgow University.

I found my first real intellectual interest in the Latin and Greek classics. For the next three years I was a most diligent student, mediaeval in my austerity. Things have changed now, but in my day a Scottish university still smacked of the Middle Ages. The undergraduates lived in lodgings in the city and most of them cultivated the Muses on a slender allowance of oatmeal. The session ran from October to April, and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o'clock class through a variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay through the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the slopes of Gilmorehill. Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weather – fog-like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odours which even at their worst spoke of the sea. There was the occasional lift in the London train, which could be caught at a suburban station, and which for a few minutes brought one into the frowst of a third-class carriage full of sleepy travellers from the remote and unvisited realm of England. And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.

As a student I was wholly obscure. I made few friends; I attended infrequently one or other of the numerous societies, but I never spoke
in a debate; and I acquired the corporate spirit only at a rectorial election, when, though a professed Tory, I chose to support the Liberal candidate, Mr Asquith, and almost came by my end at the hands of a red-haired savage, one Robert Horne, who has since been Chancellor of the Exchequer. My summers were spent in blessed idleness, fishing, tramping and bicycling up and down the Lowlands. But my winters were periods of beaver-like toil and monkish seclusion. I returned home early each afternoon and was thereafter at my books until midnight.