A life in letters: Stirling Avenue

The street running parallel to and eventually joining Maxwell Avenue in Westerton, near Glasgow. I lived in Maxwell Avenue from around 1954 until just before I turned 10, and I walked along Stirling Avenue every school day after December 1959 on my way to the new Westerton Primary School.

Although Maxwell Avenue had electric street lighting, the lamp-posts in Stirling Avenue carried gas-powered mantles. One day, out on my tricycle, I collided with one of these lamp-posts. I must have been concussed, because I had absolutely no recollection of the accident, or of abandoning the trike and making my way home.  My mother was out, and I was found and taken in by our neighbour, Mrs Dunlop, who having been a nurse would not have been too taken aback by my condition. I came to sitting in her living room watching Lassie on her back-and-white television. Later, the tricycle was recovered. I can’t recall my parents’ reaction to the day’s drama.

Near the path which led to the school lived someone from my class who invited me to a birthday party. I remember he had a train set, and I was keen to have a go at playing with it, just to show that I could. Shortly before the party, my parents and I had visited a family – I think connected with Allander Hall – who had a daughter around my age. Annabel had a train set, and I had spent some time under the dining room table with her, the railway track snaking round the chair-legs, operating the train confidently.

Eventually at the party it was my turn to have a go, but excited by the audience and by the chance to prove myself, I made the train go too fast, and the engine derailed on a curve. The shame of it! It was made clear that my turn was over.

Just across the road was the pavement (which ran past my friend Hillary Dunn’s house) where three other lads and I played one day with a home-made wooden cart. But why, in my recollection was it always me who bent low and pushed the others up the hill, and never me who rode back down again? 

I remember standing with a group of friends beside a lamp-post at the north end of Stirling Avenue – perhaps even the one which concussed me. It’s evening, the air is cool, the sun has set, but there’s still light in the sky. The gas light is turned on, and we stand watching as the faint glow grows brighter and changes colour until it reaches full strength. There’s a magic and timelessness about this memory as though the moment occurred many evenings, but it was probably a one-off. I put my watch back twenty minutes or so, and later put it back again so that, arriving home well past my curfew I could blame chronometer error. I can’t recall ever being chastised for this. Perhaps my parents knew the pricelessness of these childhood moments standing outwith time.