Glasgow (23 page)

Woolworths was my usual haven. Because it was warm and bright and filled with people. Here was Life. Pushing and shoving, smiling and laughing, talking and living. Music played all day. The record counter had a constant supply of melody. To the lingering refrains of ‘When The Poppies Bloom Again' I would sit on a high stool eating a Chocolate Fudge Ice Cream and beam happily at the world about me. Guiltless. It was all heady stuff.

Later I grew bolder and went, imagine the bravery!, to the cinema alone. For sixpence, in the middle of the stalls with a packet of peanuts or a Mars Bar, I sat in my element and got two movies, all the Advertising, the Newsreel, the Forthcoming Attractions plus a pink, green and amber lit Organ Recital.

Life was
never
to be dull and drab again. I would always live like this, and the Hell with Effort, Loyalty and ‘The Times'.

It would be useful to say at this point that it was the moment my whole future was laid before me. The great silver screen, the glamour, the glory, the guns and the chases. Camera angles, Lighting, Back Projection, Split Screen, Fade and Dissolve flew past my eyes twice a week and vanished like dreams. But I was the Original Audience for which these films were made. The refugee from worry, humdrum life, anxiety or despair. I only wanted to be bewitched, enthralled, be-glamoured. The rest of it washed away like silt in a tub. Nothing at all rubbed off at that time. My personal disillusion, even disappointment, was so great, my anger so deep, that I had fixed it clearly that I would try no more. They could come and get me and punish me in whatever way they liked: I had given up. But until they did come to get me, or sent for me, I was going to have as pleasant a time as I possibly could. What on earth was the point of going on any longer? I had tried, and failed again. So be it.

The Paramount was a new, glittering Picture Palace with a deadly reputation. I had heard it spoken of in muted voices in many of the parlours to which I was bidden, or sent, for those Bakings and Teas. It was the meeting place of all the Evil in Glasgow, the Crooks and Thieves and Bookies. Any young girl going there alone, it was said, invariably ended up with a hypodermic in her bottom and a bunk in a boat at the
Broomielaw awaiting the next tide down the Clyde for Morocco. Indeed the people Upstairs knew of one girl who, missing her companions, had foolishly gone alone to see Robert Taylor and was never heard of again apart from the fact that an usherette had seen a dark-skinned man helping a young lady to a taxi from the foyer saying that she had had a ‘fainting fit'. It made going to the Pictures much more interesting.

In any case I felt secure because of two things: first I was a boy, secondly I always sat in the middle of the stalls where it was lighter, and never in the shadows where, of course, anything might happen. Armed, this day, with my logic, I went to see a special showing of Boris Karloff in
The Mummy
. I had seen it two or three times before, ages ago, but it was still my favourite next to
The Bride of Frankenstein
. I also saw Mr Dodd.

Mr Dodd was almost entirely beige. A beige raincoat, beige face, beige hair and freckles. He sat two or three seats away from me and smiled pleasantly all through the Forthcoming Attractions. And still I didn't know.

During the interval, when the lights went pink and green and the organ rumbled through a selection from something or other, he smiled shyly across the empty seats and I smiled back, and he moved along and came and sat beside me. He asked if I would like an ice-cream, and I said yes, and we ate together in pleasant, companionable silence. He was very polite, quietly spoken and smiled a lot; and when he took my empty ice-cream tub away from me, plus the wooden spoon and stacked it neatly into his own and tidily placed it all under the seat, he patted my leg kindly and whispered with a secret wink that I was, in all probability, playing truant from school, wasn't I? Shattered with surprise that he had so quickly found me out, I lied swiftly and said I was ‘off school' with a sprained ankle. That seemed to content him and the programme started again so that there was no need for more conversation.

It was very nice having someone to laugh at the film with, to share fear with, and to enjoy relief with all at the same time. He was very attentive and once, in a particularly creepy part he put his arm protectively round my shoulder, which I thought was very thoughtful of him indeed.

By the time the show was over it was well after six, and I would have to leave my new friend quickly and ‘limp' to the station and Bishopbriggs where my aunt would be waiting to hear from me how well the rehearsals for the school play were going. My excuse, true as it happened, for the lateness of my arrival. Mr Dodd was sad, he told me his name and that I was to call him Alec, and made an appointment for us to see the film again at the end of the week. It was to be his treat, he said, and
after we would go to Cranstons for tea but that I could still be home in time so as not to worry my aunt.

* * *

Tea at Cranstons was an impressive affair at the worst of times, and this was the best. Quiet, calm, warm, sparkling with silver, white table-cloths, flowers in fluted vases, motherly waitresses in crisp aprons and little caps, and a silver stand of cakes. Mr Dodd knew his way about very well and was pleasant to everyone and anxious that I should eat as much as I could for, he said, he was a Medical Student and he knew just how much ‘fuel' the working lad's mind had to have to keep it going. He told me how his mother had saved and scrimped to send him to School and then on to Medical College where he was now studying. The conversation slid back, inevitably, to the film and he astonished me by saying that he knew exactly how mummies were bandaged and how they were embalmed; it was really very easy to do, he said cheerfully, and anyone could make a mummy if they knew how to bandage. I was overcome with curiosity and asked him more and more questions; he tried to demonstrate with his table napkin but it was too small and too thick, so he suggested that since he lived nearby and had all his books and bandages there we should go at once and he could show me in a trice.

I accepted immediately; already telling my aunt the lie about the play. And I still didn't know.

His flat was a rather poky room with a kitchenette in a high block over a tobacconist and sweet shop in Hope Street. It smelled of ether and stale cigarettes and was pretty untidy, for which he apologised, and pulling hurriedly at the unmade bed and taking some dirty plates and a bottle into the sink. There were books everywhere, a typewriter, old shirts, and a gas fire which plopped when he lit it. On the wall were pictures of Rothesay Castle and two men wrestling. He opened a thick book filled with diagrams of bandaging; people were swathed in them, heads, hips, legs, wrists, arms and everything else. It was very comprehensive.

Chattering happily, he pulled a large cardboard box from under the bed and spilled rolls and rolls of blue-wrapped bandages of every size all over the floor. These, he said, were just the trick to turn me into a splendid mummy and if I would just remove my jacket and shirt and vest and sit down in that chair he would turn me into Boris Karloff in the flick of a fly's eyelid.

I dutifully, rather shyly, did as he suggested while he started to unroll yards and yards of filmy gauzes. It was not very long before I was
strait-jacketed in strips of thin cotton bandages from the top of my head to my waist, arms securely folded, in the correct position of mummies, across my chest, a small slit left for each eye so that I could hazily see through a vague fringe of white blur, a small hole left for my nostrils so that I could breathe. Otherwise I was trussed like a fowl. Taking down the oval mirror from the mantelpiece he showed me the effect which I found impressive, uncomfortable, and very restricting. I could merely manage a vague motion with my head, which didn't show, and roll my slitty eyes. I could neither see properly, nor even hear for that matter, and I was totally mute.

As he turned from replacing the mirror, and as I stood to indicate that he might unwrap me as soon as possible, I could see that he was speaking, but only a blurred mumble came to my bandaged ears and it was with some rising degree of alarm that I found myself clutched firmly in his arms and dumped on my back in the middle of the brass bed. I tried to struggle and yell out, at least to sit up, but I was totally rigid and the only sound I made was smothered in yards and yards of thick white gauze. Putting his beige face very close to my ear Mr Dodd said that it seemed a pity not to finished the job and make me a full mummy from head to foot, that would complete the Effect.

My shoes and socks were wrenched off and thrown under the bed, then my trousers and to my silent screams of protest, he ripped off my underpants and I was stark naked before his eager, now red-faced, gaze.

Swiftly and with the expert precision of a born embalmer, he rolled me about the bed in a flurry of bandage. I was wrapped like a parcel, rolled this way and that, on my back, on my side, every which way until I was reeling with giddiness and terror. I was wound tightly into a cocoon as a spider rolls a grasshopper. Helpless, inert, more a dummy even than a mummy, I lay rigid as Mr Dodd, his mouth stuck with safety pins, tucked in the loose ends; when this was done, and with great strength he manoeuvred me off the bed, stiff as a telegraph pole, and set me upright on cotton feet to see my reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door. Peering desperately through the eye slits I could see that he had made a complete and thorough job. Boris Karloff wasn't half as convincing.

Unable to stand by myself I was forced to lean against the serge shoulder of my host whose face was bathed in pleasure. Surely my heart could not beat so quickly with terror and I should still live. It leapt from my chest and now pumped and throbbed in my throat. It stopped entirely when my horrified eyes saw, pathetically through the swaddling rags, my genitals, naked and pink and vulnerable as a sugar mouse.

Mr Dodd placed his mouth to my ear again and said that he thought he had made a very good job of things and hoped I was pleased too, and without waiting for any kind of reaction, which I would not have been able to make in any case, he swung me, like an immense skittle, into an arc of 180 degrees, so that the whole filthy room whirled round my head and I was back down on Mr Dodd's bed; and in Mr Dodd's hands, inches from my face, was a pair of scissors. I tried to faint. I heard him say that in Real Life They Cut That Off – and lay supine waiting for Death. Gently his hands caressed my helpless body, kindly he whispered that he had no intention of doing such a cruel thing for how else, otherwise, would a boy like me be able to masturbate? He said that all boys enjoyed masturbating and that he was much too good to deprive me of the rights. My mind had become a mass of solid jelly, Nothing flickered there apart from deadly terror, shame, and grief at my wickedness. I couldn't rationalise. I closed my eyes and said three or four ‘Hail Mary's'.

If I prayed surely, this time, God would hear? The anxious, firm, slippery fingers, caressing and anointing me splintered my whole being into a billion jagged fragments. I was only aware that if they didn't stop something terrible and horrifying would happen.

Which it did. And I knew.

COUPLING,
c
. 1936
Ralph Glasser

The son of immigrant Jews from Russia, Ralph Glasser (1916–2002) grew up in the Gorbals in the years between the two world wars. Taken from school at fourteen he became a barber's soap boy and a presser in a garment factory. After years of night study he won a scholarship to Oxford to which he travelled by bike. ‘In pre-war days,' he wrote in
Gorbals Boy at Oxford
(1988), ‘for a Gorbals man to come up to Oxford was as unthinkable as to meet a raw bushman in a St James's Club – something for which there were no stock responses. In any case, for a member of the boss class, someone from the Gorbals was in effect a bushman, the Gorbals itself as distant, as unknowable, as the Kalahari.' It was a member of the ‘boss-class', John Betjeman, who encouraged Glasser to write about his life and upbringing, which he did, beginning with
Growing up in the Gorbals
(1986). Here Glasser describes the effect of living in such close and dense proximity had on people's sex lives
.

Parental approval of ‘walking out' seldom extended to canoodling, petting, at home. In theory, canoodling did not take place. Apart from moral prohibitions, most houses, as tenement flats were called, were full to bursting, and privacy was out of the question. A spare room was a rare luxury, possessed by a few better-off families, better off by Gorbals standards – clergymen, skilled artisans – who might live behind Renaissance facades in the tenements in Abbotsford Place on the southern edge of the Gorbals near Eglinton Toll, where Victoria Road and Pollokshaws Road took you to the lower middle class districts of Langside, Shawlands, and on to Newton Mearns.

In most of the houses we knew every space was taken up by beds, mattresses on the floor, a few bare wooden chairs, a battered kitchen table. One or even two of the younger children commonly shared the parental bed, usually a mattress on planks resting on trestles in a curtained alcove in the kitchen.