The River Clyde, Scotland’s third-longest river, flowed through the earlier part of my life. As a child, my father lived close to the south Lanarkshire plain across which the river meanders. When I was a kid we’d cross and re-cross its waters on Saturday afternoon drives. Carstairs. Thankerton. Biggar. Afternoon tea at the Wyndales House Hotel.
When I was very young, we lived near the top of a rising avenue in a Glasgow suburb. The Clyde was just a few miles away, and on misty nights I’d lie warm and safe in bed listening as the booming of foghorns on the river reverberated over shrouded rooftops. Sometimes I’d be lullabied by the whine of aero engines at the Rolls Royce plant at Hillington on the south side of the river.
Occasionally we’d drive down grey tenemented streets, and cross the Clyde on the old Whiteinch Ferry (the one called the ‘horse ferry’ to distinguish it from the much smaller passenger ferry.) It was an elaborate cake-stand of an affair, roll-on-roll-off. On girders high above the open vehicle deck where we sat in the car during the brief crossing, was the wheelhouse. The Whiteinch Ferry was withdrawn when the Clyde Tunnel opened in 1963.
One summer when I was in my early teens my father’s colleague Robert Walker rented a house in the Clyde Valley a few miles beneath the Falls of Clyde, its grounds stretching to the riverside. We visited one evening. There were three daughters, a son, and a baby boy. As an outsider welcomed for the evening I glimpsed the tantalising joys of family life. My father, Robert and we kids walked down to the river. A tiny stream spurted busily down a bank into the flowing waters. The Walker kids got their hands dirty, diverting its flow. ‘It might be a sewage burn,’ I said to my father morosely, holding back
Much later we visited the Walkers one Sunday afternoon in their house at Whitecraigs on the outskirts of Glasgow. A couple of the siblings, now teenagers drove into the city centre and took me with them. I remember gliding over the Kingston Bridge, high above the river making its way through the city centre. I envied their independence, their freedom, their self-possession, their ownership of the bright Sunday afternoon city.
My most frequent crossings of the river were made on the long, broad bridge which the trains cross on their way in and out of Central Station. For three years I arrived their daily on my way to Glasgow University. Nearby, the Clyde is spanned by the bridge at the bottom of Jamaica Street. This was the scene of a crazy, anguished play I wrote while a student, desperate with my burden of religious hypocrisy which no-one would acknowledge.
My play was called Possess it merely, taken from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy:
O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
It was about a girl in a similar position to myself, seeking to persuade her parents that despite their beliefs to the contrary she was not a Christian. The limited extent of my understanding of human depravity was evident from the fact that the worst thing my character could do to prove she was unregenerate was to get herself pregnant. But her parents regarded their daughter’s pregnancy not as evidence of her lack of true faith, but as an individual moral lapse, and still they refused to believe that she had not taken the crucial step of accepting Christ. Possess it merely ended with the girl flinging herself one night from Jamaica Bridge, and falling down, down into the oily embrace of the River Clyde’s dark waters.
In the 1980s, my parents lived at Crossford in the Clyde Valley not far from Lanark. Occasionally, when I was visiting them, I’d make my way along the river bank above Crossford Bridge. The scene, sunlight shining through the trees and sparkling the gentle current with light, was perfect. I knew it was beautiful; I could analyse the elements contributing to its beauty, and yet emotionally I remained distant and untouched.
Downstream from Glasgow City Centre, on the south bank of the river is the site now occupied in part by the Science Centre and the BBC and Scottish Television headquarters. This was in 1988, the 120 acre venue for the Glasgow Garden Festival, which was visited by 4.3 million people between April and September that year. There were rides and gardens and entertainment and shops: what I recall most vividly is the wind garden where strangely-shaped objects produced eerie sounds.
I spent a (rather grey) day there sometime over the summer. I was not wildly enthusiastic about going, but I felt I should visit: my parents frequently mentioned their joyous school visit as teenagers to the previous big Glasgow international showcase, the Empire Exhibition held at Bellahouston Park 50 years previously. There was no real sense of connectedness and joy that day as I left the car park beside the Exhibition Centre and crossed the Clyde on the newly-opened pedestrian bridge. But at least I was not alone – I shared the day with my colleague and friend, Fiona Colquhoun.
Another colleague was with me when I caught site of the Clyde far beneath us on a sunny evening in July 1990. We’d flown down to London that morning to an award ceremony at the House of Commons. The Educational Library Service had been shortlisted for a library publicity award sponsored by the Dumfries Library Booksellers T. C. Farries; their local MP Hector Munro had arranged the impressive venue. We tubed into London from Heathrow, met our boss Margaret Sked and her partner at a pub near Whitehall and made for the House through sweltering streets. We didn’t win, but that hardly spoiled the day. Nearly home, we passed over Hamilton and the river snaking through Strathclyde Park, and swept round over Kirkintilloch before crossing the river again just before touching down. I made it back home in time to catch the end of the First Night of the Proms – the triumphant conclusion of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.
No comments:
Post a Comment