Lorraine Adair 22/06/66—31/3/2024

I heard about Lorraine Adair’s death in a convoluted way. I sometimes pass her sister on the canal embankment on my bike. Teresa is usually walked by a Rottweiler. I hang an arm out and wave as I pass. Teresa is married to Tam Henry. Lorraine was the youngest of the eight Adair’s. There are more Henrys than cement in Clydeside brickwork. So she’s related to most Catholics in Clydebank and many Protestants, too. I’d passed her twice in three days. I’d stopped on the cycle path outside Yoker’s football ground to as a favour of Tam for an older guy, and to get his number. On Fakebook, I assured her that I would message her.

Lorraine had died on Easter Sunday, she messaged me back with Tam’s number. I knew Lorraine from way back. But hadn’t seen her in well over twenty or thirty years.

Castle Street (where I also lived in the late eighties) was their stomping ground in the sixties and seventies. Lorraine was born in the year England won the World Cup, which was as good a reason as any for the family to emigrate to Australia. James (Jimmy) Adair had moved to Dalmuir from Lothian, and like any working man, went out suited and booted for his pint after work and on the weekends.

Agnes already had seven good reasons to stay home and play mum. Ireland’s greatest export was its young men and women. The latter, in particular, had the pick of the men with an early Tasmanian devil of a gender imbalance of four or five to one, which was also typical of the Oasis nightclub across from Clydebank Library. Assisted passage for those that made the journey to live and work in Australia. The number of those emigrating to Australia had halved from the fifties to the sixties. Jimmy Adair had it all worked out. A better life for him and his family.

Agnes had it worked out too. She was pregnant. Lorraine-Agnes made it eight. She was going to be brought up at home in Dalmuir. Women know best, then as now.

Lorraine never moved far from her roots. Quebec House in Dalmuir to Jean Armour Drive. She planned to marry her sweetheart, Joe Lyden, and become Mrs Lyden on the 25^th May this year at the Beardmore Hotel. The family home, they’d shared their joy as grandparents to Bobby and Fiona’s, daughter Orla Rose, now aged ten, Kerry and Paddy’s terror tot at two, Shay Patrick.

I knew Lorraine when all women had bubble perms and some men too. She’d that throaty laugh. And I-know-what-your-up-to look typical of most barmaids of that era, with a cupped hand out—almost a quid a pint, or the price of a subsidised trip to Australia for Pound Poms, when she was born. Packet of cigarettes, almost two quid. Thatcherism bit deep. Most men in that bygone era with beards (and some women) were referred to as Cat Weasel. That included that stupid-looking cunt, Billy Connolly that had played a banjo in the old Club Bar, now the Horse and Barge. Of course, the Big Yin got heckled. Where do you think he got most of his material from? Worse was the other Humblebum, Gerry Rafferty, he couldn’t even play the banjo, and could only mumble into the microphone.

Joe Lyden didn’t have a beard, but he did have a moustache. But we’d moved on to Magnum PI. A step up down from Cat Weasel as a telly star and role model. As a left-footed, stocky midfielder, who drunk twelve pints after the game to relax and turned out for his work team, Thor Ceramics on a Sunday morning, I-know-what-your-up-to look Lorraine behind the bar gave him was followed by something unprecedented, and I-like-it! She even smiled at his antics. A bit of scatter cash. Joe could afford a week’s wages, £120 for a good double-breasted suit from Ralph Slatter’s.

Lorraine as a small-town girl had transferable skills. There wasn’t much difference between pulling pints and waving a ladle in Clydebank College canteen and pushing forward plates of pies and beans and going home stinking of chip fat rather than fag smoke and booze.

Managing the book shop on campus of West College Scotland was a coming full circle. A recognition that the colt-footed student, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-looking-for, but I do ideal. Nobody ever reads Economic or Sociology textbooks, but I’ll sell them to you and you carry around in your backpack for a while, unopened. And even beauticians need A1 paper and sharp pens to design their fabulous careers. It was a long route from the bubble perm.

Something was bothering Lorraine’s gums. Her mum would have cried she’d been eating too many sweets. Get over it.  

Lorraine got over it. Repeated referrals to the dentist and Dental Hospital in Glasgow found the root cause to be cancerous. Thirteen operations. None of them minor, some of them major. One operation in the Queen Elizabeth to remove lymph nodes lasted a full shift. Chemotherapy combined with radiotherapy. Both literally floor you and can lead, ironically, to a lack of hydration, mouth sores, bed sores and, sometimes, hallucinations.

Groups of patients with similar symptoms are clustered together. Those in remission do not get to ring the bell. Lorraine rung her bell and went home quicker than most, quicker than clinicians expected.  

Life begins anew. Cheap flights to Spain. Boozy holidays with her sister in their mobile home. Planning to marry Joe.

When the bell rings, sometimes it rings for you. Relapse. One cancerous cell becomes a cancerous condition. No cure. Life annihilates itself. Lorraine had to for once take a step back before she stepped forward. The part of the brain associated with empathy and conscious experiences fires off neurons last broadsides. All memories cascade and implode. They become something bigger than self. One last hurrah. An unconscious Easter dream of rebirth. A small-town girl that left much of herself behind in those she loved. She died with her family.

Funeral arrangements. Saturday, 20th April, Dalnottar Crematorium for a Humanist Service at 10.30 am. A burial in Dalnottar Cemetery at 11.15am. Then onto Stevenson Street Bowling Club Dalmuir for refreshments.