The Colours They Are Fine by Alan Spence 1977

When I read Alans' sequenced tales from boyhood up to leaving Glasgow for London and returning for Hogmanay .a line from the opening'Tinsel' hit hard. Wee Aleck is reading his Wonders Book of the World and 'nothing in the book was like anything he had seen'. I was 19 then and from Wembley Park. Ok no-one in my family was called Janet or John and I had a lot of aunts mostly living abroad who were all called Eva or Trude but the houses, the children playing with the ball and the dog in the garden - I am from the land of Janet and John.

Alan drew me into his world of Glasgow tenements, back court games of make believe,  small boys playing at farms and cowboys and Indians, harvest festival at Sunday school, a ferry ride from Govan to Partick, the fairground which stays in town for months and the children of the gypsies join their school. It is a world where sectarianism - some of you will know from the title that Aleck goes to a Protestant primary school co-exists with auntie Lottie saying 'it takes a green stem to haud up an orange lily.' Everyone is poor, Aleck's Dad has been laid off  work in the shipyards beause his hands are peeling to ribbons with eczema and his mum works part-time in the bakery and then has to rest in bed exhausted by asthma. She dies when he is eleven.

Returning to the stories years on it is the nonsectarian reading of the title that impresses me the most. Yes the Glasgow of the 60's and 70s had colour, fineness, life, beauty, warmth and human tapestry. It also had more than its share of poverty, sickness, violence and sometimes despair. Alan must have sometimes needed to work hard to see the goodness. I'm glad he did.