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Story by Murdo Morrison about Yoker
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Date Posted: 14:40:14 05/12/02 Sun
I was delighted to find a site devoted to the old tenements. I just want to share a brief extract from some notes I made to try to capture memories from that time. I lived in a tenement in Scotstoun, Glasgow from about 1950 to 1957. It is still an important early memory for me and I am happy to share it here. Although now an American I will always be a Glaswegian at heart.
I spent the first seven years of my life in a tenement in Scotstoun, Glasgow. I always remembered the address, 2005 Dumbarton Road. It was in the middle of a long row of similar structures, built, perhaps, around the last decades of the eighteenth century. At the rear it was easy to see the added column of toilets, built to try to bring the building into the twentieth century. Several families shared each toilet which were apportioned one to a landing. One of my earliest memories is of my father putting on his coat in the middle of the night and taking me out of the house and down the stairs to the wc.
The flat was of the kind commonly called a single end in Glasgow. There was a kitchen joined to a small bedroom by a narrow passage. Cooking was done on a range built around a central fireplace which provided the heat for the oven too. This had to be periodically cleaned with 'black lead', an exhausting process. My sister and I slept in a box bed, curtained off from the kitchen. At least it was warm, even in winter. We treated it as our own province, a walled off 'castle', where we piled up pillows and sheets, and made 'tents' with the blankets.
We lived on the top floor and another early memory is sitting up on the sink, boxed in with rough, plain wood, with a looping swan neck pipe sticking out of the wall, to look at the tramcars clanking past on the street below. Most were double-decked, either the older models, many of which had been remodeled from versions built around the time of the Great War, or the newer 'Coronation' types. Sometimes we would see the rarer single-decked 'Yoker' car go whistling past.
It was a simple life with few material embellishments. We had an old tube (we called them valves) radio for our primary source of entertainment and news, but it was also a time when books, and simple conversation whiled away an evening. 'General knowledge' was a very popular concept with our teachers who would ask us many, detailed questions about our world. The amount of knowledge we were expected to have at our fingertips, to be considered a member of the educated population, was phenomenal. We were expected to know where cocoa was grown, or the capital of Australia, just as we were expected to be able to recite our multiplication tables. It would be anathema to many modern educators, and yet, if it were so bad, why did my generation seem so much better informed? We were preoccupied with 'knowing' things. It was possible to buy 'quiz books' inexpensively and we would sit around the fire with our parents testing our knowledge in each category. The older generation, though many had had to leave school early to augment their family income, yet valued education and wanted their children to have better opportunities.
Our playground was the house. There were no gardens, or lawns. From the street you entered our tenement along a dark 'close' which went all the way through to the back court. The main stairs led from the close to each of the landings. The 'backyard' was a bleak area of mostly bare earth interspersed with blighted grass and grubby dandelions. Here were the 'middens' where housewives threw their trash and the ash from coal fires into large open cans. I can remember the lingering smell of rotting food and ashes from the coal fires even now. Immediately behind the middens was a railway embankment, along which clanked small goods trains with long lines of coal wagons leaving behind their lingering, sooty aroma.
Despite the air of poverty, the working class ladies who lived in the close took great pride in their domain. The close and stairs were washed carefully and made bright with pipe clay.
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