A guest post from my children and my father

I wanted all of it all again to do again

and this time pay attention

- Hannah Sullivan

The other weekend we were at the birthday party of a friend of our four year old son. As happens at these things, there was a bouncy castle. My son didn’t want to go on without me. With this particular bouncy castle, you had to climb through a little square hole to get inside. So in we both went. Once inside, I tried to hide in the corner so as not to accidentally crush any pre-school children. As each new child squeezed through the little hole, and into the bouncy room inside, there was an expression of such delight on their faces. It’s hard to think of occasions on which you see that look on the faces of a large group of adults. Maybe a meet-up of very old friends is the closest thing.

A few weeks back I was walking through the countryside with a four, a six and an eight year old. They were talking about why the dinosaurs weren’t around any more and how an asteroid had wiped them out, and how birds are their relatives, and the middle one asked if all the dinosaurs are in heaven now?

The children’s babble veers instantly from the absurd to the deep. My son claims his friend did “ten thousand burps” at nursery in one day. He tells me he misses my father. He tells me he and his sister are changing their names to Bottom and Flamingo.

With our older one I have been experimenting with doing vaguely dangerous grown-up things. I have been showing her how to light candles with matches, which she loves. How to use the very sharp knife, and not catch her tiny, beautiful fingers. She made her first ever cup of tea, using a heavy kettle full of boiling water. It’s a privilege to be with someone the first time they ever do a thing.

Everyone wants to feel useful, and I have never felt more useful than when my son was really small, stroking him to sleep during a big thunderstorm.

In the middle of life I feel we have good visibility of both the start and the end of life. How things were, as well as how things are now.

It’s sometimes difficult to accept that my children’s childhood is not mine, even though I inflict on them a lot of old stuff: old Postman Pat and even older Thomas the Tank Engine books. I worry that the train stories I make up for my son imply that the country has a larger base of heavy industry than it does. This is probably wish-fulfilment on my part.

The change in how we live over just a couple of generations is mind-blowing.

Before he died my father wrote some notes about his childhood. My uncle also wrote some notes for his eulogy too.

Both the material change and the social change will, I think, completely kaboom the minds of our kids once they are old enough to appreciate it. As an example, my uncle recalls how in 1950s Glasgow my father was prosecuted for playing football on a Sunday:

In the Royal Burgh of Rutherglen it was illegal to play football on a Sunday. However one Sunday he was playing a bounce game on Croftfoot pitches near Spittal when the cops descended on their Lambretta scooters and ‘booked’ all the boys too naïve to run away. Amazing as it seems today my Mum and Dad had to go to a sheriff court in Rutherglen later that week where he and others were found guilty and fined half a guinea (ten shillings and sixpence or 52.5 pence in new money). In old money that was quite a lot for our weekly budget finances.

Here are some snippets from my father’s notes:

At some age between (probably) 6 and 8, I moved to Sydney St. I now know it was a kind of tactical move on the part of my parents. They moved from a hugely overcrowded but reasonable house in Riddrie, where we all lived with my mother’s parents, to what was basically an east end slum in which my father’s father lived.

It was another council house, in which my Grandfather Hugh lived alone having lost his wife Annie some time before. (I never knew or met her). The tactical aspect was, move in to a slum, put your name on the council waiting list, and hope to be offered a new council house in one of the many council housing 'schemes' being planned. The tactic did eventually work, and we moved to Castlemilk, but that is a story for later.

So, Sydney St - one floor up in a tenement, it was "a room and kitchen". i.e. one room with a cold water sink, and a 'range' with a coal fire which provided the only heating and cooking facilities. We had another room, joined by a hallway. The two rooms had an electric light, but there was no light in the hall, only a coal bunker. There was no bathroom (I got bathed in the sink!) but there was a toilet, which was outside on the landing, and was shared by three families, including us.

To sleep, there was a ‘bed recess’ in each room, with a double mattress on each, raised on springs and set about 3 feet off the ground to provide some storage room, as there were no cupboards, except (maybe) something as part of the range.

My mother and father slept in the kitchen (living room), and my grandfather and I slept in the other room. I never got on with my grandfather Hugh, who was a bit of a cold fish towards me, as compared to my other granny and grandad, who were kindness itself. He liked a good drink every night, and I think he had got into such a habit of visiting the pub on the corner, then coming home pretty drunk and simply falling into bed, that it was quite a shock to his routine to suddenly have to not waken a small boy.

My grandad was a coal miner and he got a good coal allowance, which was delivered once a month. However, unlike normal domestic deliveries, his coal often came only loosely crushed and had big lumps in it too big for the fireplaces. One of my (favourite) jobs was to take a hammer and break up the lumps of coal.

The tenements were built around “back courts” which were open air spaces (concrete or cobbles) separated by “dykes”, which were 20 foot high walls, which the middens were built into, and where the wash house was. The midden was basically an alcove with a sloping roof into which metal dustbins were set. There were never enough bins for all the people who wanted to use them so you had to be quick after the midgemen had been to get your house rubbish out otherwise you would have to keep it in the house.

The wash house was literally that, a place to wash clothes. It had four big copper pots set into the bricks over a coal fire. So you carried the cold water in buckets to fill up the coppers then you lit the fire under the coppers and waited till the water was warm enough to do your washing. One of my wee tasks was to help my mother by using a paddle to stir the clothes around and fish them out when they were done.

Another feature of life in Sydney Street was the gas lighting. The street was lit at night, not by electric lights, but by very traditional gaslamps. The lamplighter would come round every night before dark, open each lamp, and light the mantle using his pole, which had a hook to turn on the gas, and some kind of spark ignition system which he could operate by pulling on a cord attached.

Very occasionally, if we hadn’t sockered him for a while, he would let us hold the pole and pull the cord. A big thrill indeed. The same man also lit the lights in the closes and stairwells, which were also gas.

In fact since the toilet was outside on the landing the (very weak) light from these gas lamps was the only light in the toilet, and came in via a big glass panel above the toilet door. Of course since the landing was totally enclosed, other than any daylight filtering in from the windows on the stairs, during the day the toilet was more or less a blackout zone and when you locked yourself in the toilet by using the huge key you had to be careful not to drop the key, otherwise you would struggle to find it to get out.

Another of my tasks was to cut us old newspapers into squares of about 6 inches across, punch a hole through using a knitting needle, then thread the sheets together with a piece of string with a loop on the end to hang on a nail in the toilet.  This was everybody's toilet paper in those days.

My childhood was completely different to my father’s. I remember, in no particular order: the rhythmic hiss-hiss-hiss of him making pressure-cooker soup on Saturdays; his love of choc-ices and the original Star Trek TV show; the little wooden plane he made me; the electrostatic hiss of rain on the windscreen of the Fiat Panda on trips to the Yorkshire Dales.

I remember the delicious dry smell of cigarettes on trips to my gran’s in Glasgow, and the hypnotic slow-moving glow of the fake plastic fire in her bedroom.

I remember the taste of Lorne sausage on a burned-top Scottish morning roll (the taste of which is an ultra time-travel-madeline for me even now).

I remember coming in from playing in the snow on a blue-black evening, and hearing the sound of the Vidiprinter on Match of the Day, and the fact that he always read to me in bed, as I’ve just done for my son.

There are lots of things I think about when I read my dad’s notes. How life got so much better for normal people in the decades between outdoor toilets and the moon landings. How we should take time to tell the kids about how much things have changed. How, just like my son, I miss him. About how I should pay attention while I can.