The View

I was looking out the window, in Granda’s small kitchen, making him a cup of tea. It was one of things that I did automatically when I went to visit. Granda was sitting watching the telly. Well, I think that’s what he was doing. He had the sound up and his nose was that close to the telly, he was almost part of the programme, but I’m not sure what he was watching. It sounded like a war movie, but it might just have been a war.

Granda jumped back, into his chair, when I touched him gently on the shoulder, as if he had been sniped.

‘Tea?’ I passed him the mug. The tannic acid had made the inside of his white mug browner than a toilet pan, but it didn’t bother granda and it didn’t bother me.

Granda was like Santa in his workshop. He was surrounded, on every side; the mantelpiece, the sideboard, even the floor, by what seemed like, all the saints of heaven. None of them was smiling. Pride of place, of course, was statues of The Virgin Mary. One of them, the one with rosary beads, wound around its feet, if you could call two blue boils that, seemed to have been made out of a blue Domestos bottle. I must have seen it thousand of times, but it was the first time that I’d ever noticed it.

I picked up the statue, unwinding the beads. That was the only rattle the bead would get aff me. The Virgin Mary was a Domestos Bottle. I recognized the red top. I unscrewed it. The Virgin Mary’s insides smelled pretty clean. There was still something lying at the bottom of the bottle. I didn’t know whether to clean Granda’s cup with it, or anoint him, give him The Last Rites.

‘Where did you get this thing?’ I asked Granda, shaking my head. He never seemed to fling anything out.

‘Aye, that was wee Tommy’s,’ said Granda, suppin’ his tea.

I knew this could go two ways. I could shut up and leave it or I could ask him. I took a deep breath and sat down in the chair with the wobbly leg.

‘Who was wee Tommy?’

‘Ach, you know wee Tommy,’ said Granda loudly, as if the increase in tone would make me know him better, ‘he was lucky. He used to work outside Singers, selling newspapers.’

‘Well, that’s not quite true,’ said Granda, settling into his chair.

‘Tommy started aff inside Singer’s. When you saw the spiked perimeter fences and the barb wire around Singers you’d think that was to keep people out. But it wasn’t. They were to keep the workers in. It didn’t work, of course. It was a factory and everybody knew how to make shortcuts through every fence and perimeter wire. There were more escapees than there were out of Colditz. Most of them ended up in the local boozer, The Atlantis, and when they had too much, would break back into Singers again. More men were lost breaking in, than breaking out.

Some of them were stupider than others. At every break brown overalls would scurry, like worker ants, across Kilbowie Road, in such numbers that the traffic would begin to slow down and then stop. The bar staff would be prepared. Halfs of whisky would be stacked on trays on the bar. One tray on top of another, ready to be whiskied off and given to the nearest paying customer. Pints would be stacked on top of pints. Behind the bar, waiting, glass towel in hand, would be George, who owned the pub. Gimpy, who helped out. And Isa, who thought she owned the pub. She kept order, but it was so busy, it was sometimes difficult to know the difference between her loud squawking and the Singer’s horn. Just when you thought it couldnae get any busier, another guy would fight his way upstream to the bar. There were guys standing on the stairs. Guys that had never been in a lounge-bar in their life, supping away, as if it was the very thing. There were even guys standing in the toilet with their pints; eye balling you; waiting to see if you were goin to miss the wall; daring you to spray pish in their direction, or down their leg. And man there was that much smoke, in the whole place, that you didnae even need to light up. All you had to do was lean back and suck smoke out of the air. The sensible ones always left first. The less sensible one next. The dafties didnae leave. Monday to Thursday, that was the way things went. There were mair sensible people, than insensible. But as Friday and Saturday approached and as the pyramid of drink grew at the bar, overshadowing everybody, “the fucked if I’m going back to that shitehole contagion seemed to grow and spread”. Normal men seemed to breakdown and buy another half and half, gulping them down as if they were the last drink they were ever going to get. They would stagger back to work at Singers unaware of the enormity of what they had done.

But God himself had no more authority that the gaffers. From even before the first toot of the factory whistle they’d be telling you what to do, and how to do it. Even before you were finished they would be there to tell you you werenae doing it quick enough, or good enough and to hurry up.

The only thing that kept working people going was football. That and a bit of scamming.’

When Celtic won. When we beat the Rangers. All was right in the world. We didnae have to say a thing. There would just be mair guys looking over the top of their machines, open mouthed, smiling plastic teeth, than would even have dazzled a dentist’s convention in Giffnock, all looking in the same direction, at the gaffers.’

The gaffers were all Protestant men, members of the Kirk, members of the Masonic Order, Members of the Orange Order and members of that great Ibrox institution that had been gubbed. They expected no word of condolence. And they were never disappointed. They could make our life hard, but as Jesus said, always turn the other smiling cheek.

Much thought and conscientious labour was given over to the wasting away of work time. I was put to work with wee Collie on the c14 parts on the old packing machine. There were two rates of pay. One was based on attendance and the number of hours worked. This was a basic rate and Collie snaffled this up, working undertime for overtime. The other was a piece rate per part. Collie worked it out for me. If I made a 132 parts I would get an extra penny in my pay. I was in no great hurry, but on my first day I’d worked it out that I’d made an extra half crown. Collie just let me get on with it. But when I smugly pointed out to him, when I was shutting my machine down, at the end of the day, how much extra I’d made he just nodded and smiled sadly as if I’d didn’t have long to go.

Even his words were measured out during work hours.
“Aye,” Collie said, “you’ve made around a half crown. But you’ve still to get super tax off those extra earnings. And you’re an apprentice. You don’t get any extra for your learning. In fact us workers pay for your learning. But who gets the extra half crown. No you and no us. Singers and the Government get it.”

Collie shook his head, as if the very thought was making him ill.

‘But what can I do?’ I said to Collie.

Collie seemed to give this a bit of thought. His machine was still running, as he was doing a wee bit of overtime.

“Ach, just stick them in this box and I’ll put them through later for you.”

‘Thanks,’ I said to Collie, handing him the perfidious parts which he put beneath his machine, flinging an old rag of a dust coat, he’d kept, over them.

Collie knew what he was doing and he kept me right. There weren’t many scams that you could pull in Singers. All over the world people had Singer’s sewing machines, apart from the people that made them.

I mean, it wasn’t like John Brown’s shipyards. When they were painting a battleship, every close in the View was painted yon grey way, that it would have been no surprise if a pack of German U Boat had wondered off course, up the Clyde and then turned left up the Caldeonian Canal and having spotted all that grey paint in the View, grounded itself trying to sink them. I mean it was only natural that you would take what was given to you.’

‘The QEII. That was a great ship. I mean, some of the houses in the View had never seen such glorious fixtures and fittings. Mrs McLaughlin, God Rest her soul, she was one of the first to gain the extravagant luxury of an outside toilet on the inside. We would have no place to put one in our house. I mean she had only one son, fat Robbie. That boy fair could eat. Maybe, he brought it home for himself. His fat arse needed a bigger pan, one fit for a queen. Anyway, he fitted it, just inside the front door, so it got a bit of draught and the down pipe. In the View everybody knew everybody else’s business, but in that closed mouth community, it was all the talk of the steamie. Did Mrs Porter no come off the 64 Auchenshuggle bus, with a gaggle of ladies behind her and no go straight up the close stairs and bang directly on Mrs Mc Laughlin’s door for a look-see, in a way that was totally unseemly, even for a woman?

But the womenfolk were the not just the backbone of the community, but the head and shoulders as well. The menfolk were the arse of the community, but sometimes we just had to shake our heads and say nothing, especially if it involved family and it involved the Holy Family, well…

Wee Tommy didn’t just sell newspapers, The Daily Record in the morning, outside Singer’s gates, he also sold holy water. I don’t know where he got his containers from. But I think it was before Barbie dolls so he didn’t model them on her. I think he got the idea from all those statues of holy water being brought back from Lourdes. The ones were the crown of Our Lady screws off and you tip the water out. And wee Tommy could put his hand to anything. He could make anything. The big boys in Singers, when they used to have a problem with any machine, simply used to send for wee Tommy. He had the run of the place. The thing is Tommy was an avowed Socialist, but he would pray, in Mass on Sunday, for the conversion of Russia. At the same time he was never a man to turn down an opportunity to make a bob or two. Not many folk could afford to go all the way to Lourdes for a bit of water. And wee Tommy never said that his water came from Lourdes. In fact wee Tommy never said much about his water. He’d give you a wink and a container of Holy water and make a one finger to the lips motion as if we were still in primary 1 and he was Mrs Boyle the teacher. There was a rumour, which only a woman could have made up, that the water was direct from the womb of the Virgin Mary, when she was carrying Jesus. Wee Tommy was a precision engineer, not a doctor, not a paediatrician, but he was not going to state the obvious: the Virgin Mary must then have been a very big woman indeed, with very big stretch marks, to generate so much water. But when an application of the Holy water cured Terry Ross’s scabies and that, and a bit of shoe polish, made Mr Carlisle bald spot disappear, well there were no stopping sales. When the water cured Mr Burnett’s alcoholism, wee Wullie could have retired from selling papers, only he couldnae as he needed it for a front, especially as he had more children than God had angels in heaven.

Wee Wullie wasn’t just a paperboy. Wee Wullie wasn’t just a Catholic. Wee Wullie was an orator. It was him that gave me my first copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. Wee Wullie was better at explaining things that Karl Marx or Robert Tressel/Noonan. When I gave it back to him he thanked me.

“Have you read it?” he asked me.

Aye, I said. It was a daft question I wouldn’t have been geeing it back to him unless I’d read it.

“What did you think?” asked Wullie.

Aye, it was good I said. Wee Wullie waited for me to say something else. While he waited he punted a few papers. I could see a few women standing near bye, waiting for the men folk to finish, so they could swoop for their Holy water.

I needed to be going.

Aye, it’s just like out life, eh? I said to Wullie.

That got him started on his high horse.

“Aye, there seems something beautiful about the assumption man is more than a beast, burdened by what he produced through labour.”

Wullie got excited by what he was saying:

“He could use all that technology to increase his mastery of nature.”
Wullie never spat, but he spat then, in the direction of Singers:

“Technology could be used to free us from the slavery of factory work and help build an efficient modern society. Not for the few, but the many, shared equally in a controlled economy that can be made to work for us and not against us.”

Wullie paused and sold another paper.

I have to be going, Wullie I said, thanks for the book. The hooters going to go.

“Aye, away you go son, and don’t you listen to anything they say about me in there.”

I didn’t know, at that point, anybody knew Wullie in the factory. I thought he was just an old guy that sold papers.

Wullie leaned in conspiratorially, just before I left him that morning.

“There are only really two problems,” Wullie said, “Overthrowing the bourgeoisie and overthrowing the upper classes, but they’re really the same problem, overthrowing the Protestant yoke. And don’t listen to anything they say about me in their.”

That was the second time that he’d said that. I assured him I wouldn’t listen to anything anyone had to say about wee Wullie, but I was newly determined to hear anything that I could that wasn’t directly about him.

Wee Wullie, the precision engineer, had the run of the factory. He knew everybody and everybody knew Wullie. He was that well known that he was invisible. He didn’t need to clock in or out. He could go anywhere in the factory. But you could always find him at the end of the production line with the newly assembled Singer’s Sewing machines looking on like a proud parent, ready to buff down any rust or rough spots.

New machines were kept under lock and key. They were counted and recounted. So nobody really new how Wullie did it. It was true that the steel fence at the back was shown to be held on by four coach bolts. But it was still a good weight, made out of cast iron. It would have needed a couple of men to move it. And there was still an 18 foot drop to the canal below. Some people said that Wullie built a raft and sailed the new machines across and that the engine was made out of parts from the Singer’s machines. Others said that there was a rope and pulley system. Whatever way it was, it worked. The Singer’s machines needed to be smuggled out of the country and sold abroad, in Bearsden, were they ate things like brown bread. And that was Wullie the precision engineers undoing. Didn’t everybody in Bearsden have a phone and weren’t they always yacking to each other about how wonderful everything was and if it wasn’t wonderful, surely there was someone in head office that could make it wonderful? Weren’t the people from Bearden owed at least that? And that was how wee Wullie was caught. Only he wasnae caught, because doesn’t everybody not from Bearsden not look the same? Wee Wullie didn’t go back. He thought it was a scurrilous attack on his good name.’

“Time I was off,” I said to Granda. He was going to his bed anyway.

‘Mind what I told you,’ he said.

“Aye,” I said yawning. And I was out the door.