Glasgow (24 page)

To enable a coupling to take place in a semblance of privacy behind the curtain, the woman would step out in her shift, snatch a blanket off the bed and wrap the child in it on the floor boards near enough to the cooking range for him to get some radiated warmth from its banked-up fire. Afterwards she parted the curtains and came out naked to lift the unsleeping, finely aware child back into bed, to lie between her and the man lying open-mouthed in post-coital sleep.

For an unmarried girl to live away from home on her own was unthinkable. Even if special circumstances, such as the death of parents, led to her living under someone else's roof as a lodger, she would not be allowed men visitors in her room. As for the few unmarried men who could afford to live on their own in single-ends, one-room tenement flats, no respectable girl, or married woman for that matter, would want to be seen visiting one of them unchaperoned.

That corner of a close beside the ash-pits was a place outside time. Because the celebration did not take place under anyone's roof, moral responsibility could be kept at a distance if need be. The place of that shrine of Venus in the life of the locality was understood by everyone. Fathers knew where to look for their daughters out too late.

A girl impatient to escape from home might go there with her ‘feller' and let him ‘stamp her card' – get her with child. And then, with luck, persuade him to accept paternity and marry her: a common enough route to matrimony.

No one approved. Few openly disapproved. Fatalistically, all connived.

Residents making their way back through the close to the ash-pits or the clothes line in the back yard, sensing a couple's presence, retreated discreetly and returned later. Lovers seeking a vacant shrine wandered
on to the next close, and the next. Some, driven and impatient, gave up the search and stood together in the lavatory on one of the half-landings. But that infringed the code and nearly always led to trouble. In theory each lavatory was shared by people from two floors, about six flats, but in practice by many more. Almost invariably the other lavatory in the close, or some in closes nearby, would be out of action because of blocked pipes or damaged cisterns or flush mechanisms, so there was seldom a moment when every functioning lavatory in a tenement was not in heavy demand, often with a queue stamping their feet waiting to get in. If a couple were making love in one, the anxious souls waiting on the cold stone steps made their feelings plain, firmly but usually not unkindly: ‘Och come on! Go an' find yersels a place o' yer ain doon the stairs tae do yer canoodlin' in! Ah'm tellin' ye, if ah don't ge' in there in a minute ah'm gonae shi' ma troosers!'

THE ART OF TAPPING LIFTS, 1939
Alastair Borthwick

For a generation of mainly working-class Glaswegians the city's proximity to countryside and the hills was the perfect way to escape urban tedium and the daily grind. Indeed, many of those who found solace in the mountains were unemployed and had little – if any – money to spare for recreation. On a Friday evening the sight of men laden with rucksacks heading north for the weekend in hope of a lift was common. Once beyond the municipal boundaries the whole of Scotland seemed to open up and there was freedom to roam. In his classic memoir
, Always a Little Further
(1939), Alastair Borthwick (1913–2003), who was born in Rutherglen but raised and educated in Glasgow, evokes an era when climbing mountains, which had previously been the preserve of the well off, became a popular pastime with those who hitherto had not had access to them. When Borthwick first happened upon ‘the cave' he found three young men in situ, ‘squatting round a fire, frying kippers and dangling on a wire over the flames a large black pudding'
.

Thanks to the cave, I came much in contact during the months which followed with the members of that small but persevering class known as the hitch-hikers. Their chief interest, in some cases approaching the proportions of a religion, was climbing; and hitch-hiking, or the art of tapping lifts, was their method of bringing good mountains within reach of the city.

There are those who take an uncharitable view of the activity, claiming that the man who begs for lifts is no better than the man who begs for pennies, but I prefer to think of the hitch-hiker as the twentieth-century troubadour. Once the troubadour was welcome at any castle, for he earned his keep by song, and song was thought good value for money. So it is with hitch-hiking in its higher forms, as it is practised on the Loch Lomond road today. Words, and not song, are the hitch-hiker's capital. I have met them silent; but as a class they can give the Irish points in dialectic, and they turn a story well. Driving is a boring task. Many a good tale has been told, and many a dull journey enlivened between the Arrochar road-end and Anniesland Cross.

Some of the tales smack of the epic, and not in construction alone, for some hitch-hiking feats verge on the fabulous. For years the record was held by a lad who left Glasgow with half a crown in his pocket and intent to camp in Skye, and tapped a lift on the outskirts of the city which took him to Sligachan Inn, two hundred miles away and not two hundred yards from the spot where he had intended camping; but recently this feat has dwindled into insignificance as the brotherhood has realised the full possibilities of the thumb as mode of transport. In 1936 one Glasgow lad travelled to Paris for three shillings, tapping lifts on both sides of the Channel and making a charming smile bridge the gap created by his ignorance of the French language. His only extra was his cross-Channel fare. And in 1937 two of the Creag Dhu [mountaineer club], finding themselves idle and with time heavily on their hands, tapped lifts to Switzerland and back. The tale goes, too, that they even hitch-hiked up the Matterhorn behind a guide party.

The best story I have heard about this peculiar mode of travelling was told to me one November night at Arrochar by a gentleman rejoicing in the name Choocter. What far-fetched process of corruption and illusion created this nickname I do not know; but Choocter he was, and I never knew him by any other name. He was tall and thin, with a slight stoop. A lock of hair hung down almost over one eye, and his climbing jacket and breeches were patched after the homely manner of all climbing jackets and breeches. His accent was such that any one born beyond the bounds of Glasgow would have found much in his conversation that was obscure. He was as companionable a lad as one would care to meet; and I first fell in with him while he was buying a half a pound of sausages in the butcher's shop at Arrochar. He had travelled up from Glasgow free, of course. I bought what I wanted; and it was while we walked down the road to the Youth Hostel that he told me the story of himself, Wullie, Ginger, and Wee Jock.

It seemed that Choocter and Ginger had been on the point of leaving
the Vale of Leven for a few days' climbing in Glencoe, sixty miles away, when they were smitten by a desire to eat chips; and, as all the world knows, there is a shop just before the start of the Loch Lomond road, which has something of a reputation for chips. There they had gone, and there had met the opposition, Wullie and Wee Jock.

‘In his kilt,' Choocter added, as if that made it much worse.

‘Wullie was just gettin' tore into a poke o' chips,' said Choocter, ‘so we pretended we was goin' on ahead. O' course we hid in ahint the first dyke we came to; and in a wee while, by goes Wullie and Wee Jock, in his kilt, stuffin' themselves wi' chips. We waits anither two-three minutes just for to gie them a start, and then sets aff, slow-like.'

For an hour they had walked on, leaving the houses behind them and dropping down the rolling countryside which falls to the south end of Loch Lomond, confidently expecting first rights on any car which passed. But as they approached the loch Choocter glanced behind him, stopped and swore. It was, he saw, going to be a hard night. The fight was on. Diamond was about to cut diamond. For Wee Jock (in his kilt) was a hundred yards behind, emerging cautiously, like a mouse from the wainscot, from behind a hedge. Choocter sighed, and cast about for cover.

The sides were fairly matched; and, an aptitude for guile being strongly developed in all concerned and the means of their journey appealing more to them than its end, compromise at this stage did not occur to them. From that point on, all thoughts of progress seem to have been abandoned, and the journey resolved itself into long waits behind walls and trees, grubbings about in bushes, occupations of darkened barns, and elaborate game of chess in which the only popular move was the knight's. Tactics of a high order were employed. At one stage both parties were even travelling backwards.

The night grew darker, and traffic thinner. Despite piteous thumbings, no car stopped; and as eleven o'clock came and went their hopes dwindled. Even the chance of spending the night at Inverbeg Youth Hostel, a few miles ahead, had disappeared as time and energy were dissipated behind hedges.

‘It was cuttin' wur ain throats, mister; it was cuttin' wur ain throats,' said Choocter solemnly.

Stalemate was reached shortly before midnight, when lack of traffic made further attempts useless. Choocter and Ginger gave up for the night somewhere near Luss, where they found a bell-tent left unoccupied at the side of the loch by some trusting soul, and crawled inside, working on the assumption that, as the tent was completely empty, no one would be likely to claim it at that hour of the night.

‘We woke early . . . six o'clock,' said Choocter. ‘We'd nae blankets,
and I was sleeping in a
Glasgow Herald
and a sheet o' broon paper. Ginger woke first. He was in an
Express
but the pages is far ower wee. He wallapped me in the ribs and pointed oot' o' the tent.

“‘Look at thon!” he says, fair wild.

‘I looks; and there lyin' on the verandy o' a house-boat at the loch-side was Wullie and Wee Jock, in his kilt.'

A nice question of tactics was involved. Wee Jock, having, as has been noted, a kilt as well as a
Glasgow Herald
to keep him warm, was still sound asleep and might be expected to remain so for at least an hour, leaving the road clear for Choocter and Ginger. But the traffic was scarce at that hour of the morning: there are few milk-producing farms north of Luss, and no milk-lorries run to and from the city. The most they could hope for was a stray carrier's van, and even that hope was slender. Besides, if they should fail to tap a lift before Wee Jock awoke, they would leave him with first chance of all lifts for the rest of the day. They decided to lie in hiding until the other two should wake and move on.

The three hours which followed were, according to Choocter, desperate. During two of them, Wullie and Wee Jock slept, the dew of the morning wet on their raincoats, while the sun came up behind Ben Lomond and the island-shadows shortened on the Luss Narrows. The morning mist died in the treetops. And still they slept. It was bright, clear morning, and bitterly cold for those who had little but the daily press to shield them from the chill shadows of the tent. Most galling sight of all was breakfast on the houseboat, which started at eight-thirty. Wee Jock produced a folding stove from his rucksack, and Wullie cooked slowly and deliberately, an operation which nearly broke Choocter's heart, for, as he so delicately put it, he and Ginger had ‘nae chuck' and were exceedingly hungry. But in the end they packed and moved off, leaving the others lying on their empty stomachs, contemplating nature.

‘We gi'ed them hauf an hoor's start this time, and aff we went. Hauf an hoor. Jings, man, we thought we had them this time, though the wait near kilt us wi' hunger and the cauld. But . . . ach . . . we hudni' gone more nor a mile affore I looks back; and there, jookin' in ahint the last corner, was Wee Jock, in his kilt. Man, it was chronic.'

From nine until noon the running fight continued, first one side gaining the rear, then the other, for the Loch Lomond road is thickly wooded, with cover for an ambushing army. They hid in drains and ditches; they lolled by the lochside in the hope that the others should pass. But when both parties met behind the same hedge, each thinking the other was in the rear, a peace conference was obviously called for. In three hours they had covered only two miles.

They tossed for first lift. Ginger and Choocter won. All four walked
on together for an hour until the first car responded to signals, and Wullie and Wee Jock were left in sole possession of the road. It was a good lift, and took Choocter and Ginger over Glen Falloch and beyond to Crianlarich and Tyndrum, where their driver branched off for Oban. They set out to walk the rest.

I should like to be able to record that five minutes later Wullie and Wee Jock drove by in a Rolls Royce and were taken all the way to Glencoe; but well-turned plots happen seldom in real life. The truth of the matter was that the two stragglers were landed at the Tyndrum branch a few minutes later, and all four plodded on again together. After five miles (an unprecedented distance for a hitch-hiker to walk, according to Choocter) an aged but empty car stopped beside them, and its driver waved towards him. He was an apologetic creature.