I didnae know what Granda was talking about, but that was normal. I just let him ramble on. I don’t know what he was looking for down the side of the chair. He no longer had a pipe and I didn’t smoke, but he asked me for a fag anyway. I gave him a Foxes Glacier Mint.
‘But your da smoked,’ he said
‘No, he never,’ I said nodding my head.
‘Aye, your right enough,’ said Granda, ‘he was a queer fellow your da’.
‘People used to offer him fags all the time. It was the natural thing to do. You’d pull out a packet of fags and you’d hand them round.’
Granda looked at me meaningfully. ‘Only a Protestant would sneak away and light one up himself.’
‘Everybody smoked, said Granda, ‘so nobody went without. Even if you had no sweets you could always gee a wain a fag instead. But your Da was always different. He never struck a match, or put a fag in his mouth his whole life. People used to forget and hand him one anyway, but then they’d remember and say something like “och, it’s big Dessy” as if he had suddenly appeared, right in front of them like a non smoking ghost.
Your da was like a celebrity because he didn’t smoke. They just couldnae understand it. So they’d try to explain it. “Big Dessy’s got a right bad chest, so he cannae smoke”. “He’s got a bad heart.” “He’s got TB”. “He doesnae want to go baldy.” But the baldy one was kinda difficult, because wearing hats made you baldy and Dessy never wore a hat. Then it was as if all these different theories of why big Dessy never smoked were circulating in the air, fighting with each other and then the one that everybody accepted, the one that struck the winning blow, the one that everybody mouthed at each other, whilst grabbing back the fag they were never going to gee to Dessy was, I cannae, cause, “Dessy was a fitness fanatic”. Now in those days naebody ran about the streets half naked, what do you call it, jogging? And nobody cycled unless they were going to their work. But because big Dessy didn’t smoke he was a fitness fanatic.’
‘And it wasnae no just the fact that your da never smoked that made him seem strange, it was the fact that even the building smoked. Every Tenement building, every school and every corner shop had a fly wee puff. The shipyards, John Browns, Bairds and The Singers’ Sewing Factory were heavy on the smoking. Even Beattie’s the Biscuit factory gave out more soot than sweets. But we weren’t like those Londoners talking all that guff about pea- soupers and being unable to see your hand in front your face. Us Glaswegian’s knew where we were going. And with the Clyde and the Caledonian canal being so close you could smell a clear day and if you couldnae, with one wrong turning you could be literally up to your arse in shite.’
‘The thing is it was healthy smoke. It was the kind of smoke that wafted in the workers. Like everyone else I was booted out of school and the next day I was a worker at Singers. But it was just the like being at school. The woman went in one gate and the men went in another and you never seen head nor tail of them until the horn went. But there was one big difference. Singers, like any other factory or shipyard, was a GOD SAVE THE QUEEN kind of place and us Catholics were more a GOD FUCK THE QUEEN, GOD BLESS THE POPE kind of people. That meant that even us men were lower than women in these places.
My machine mechanic apprenticeship started with a broom. Paddy Mullan was double my age and a dab hand with the broom. It was quite straightforward, or so I thought. You pushed a broom up and down the lanes between the lathes and around the steel buckets and dabbed between the puddles of oil and milky white fluid and brushed the curly bits of shaving into a heap and put them in the bucket. Paddy didn’t tell me this. I learned that myself. Paddy told me to watch out for the overhead line that connected every man and beast in the place to its constant turning and not to talk to Protestants. I wasn’t sure about how it was possible to get my sweeping brush, at ground level, tangled in a cable at roof level, or who where the Protestants. All the machinists looked the same in their brown dust coats.
I siddled up to Paddy, which wasn’t that difficult. He seemed to have spent the last hour, leaning into a breeze that his stationary broom had created.
‘Mr Mullan,’ I whispered to him. Well actually I shouted, but with the noise of the machines it seemed like a whisper. ‘How could I get my brush tangled in the overhead lines and who are the Protestants?’
‘Mr Mullan, as I later learned, could only hear certain things.’
‘ “Ya, stupid fucking fucker,” he said to me, sweeping everything I’d already swept up in an animal frenzy that lifted dust and shite and caked my throat in stoor so that I was coughing and choking and going to be sick.
‘Standing beside me, like a shiny faced apparition, as if to emphasize the point, was the other apprentice, the other machine mechanic that had started with me that very day. George was wearing a smile that I’d have liked to have change for something else. But he was also wearing a white coat, as if he was a doctor and not a mechanic.
“I’ve been sent to check how you’re getting on,” he said, in all innocence.
