A life in letters: Wishaw

The town in Lanarkshire, about five miles from my home-town of Carluke, where I attended secondary school. Most of my memories of the town relate to my time at Wishaw High (1964-1970), but I was familiar with it as a younger child.

Coming on the bus from Carluke, as I did every morning, you passed Waterloo Cross, at the time controlled by traffic light, kept straight ahead, and then went down the gentle gradient to the Barr’s Irn Bru works at the corner of Stewarton Street and Greenhead Road.

One afternoon, having been home at lunchtime and returning to school for an afternoon exam, I saw something just past Waterloo Cross which disturbed me deeply. There was a pub on the corner, but at the time I think it was closed for refurbishment.  A car was parked on the broad pavement outside, and a man was approaching it with difficulty from the recessed door of the building. He walked awkwardly, as though in pain.  That was all, and yet the sight filled me with a sick apprehension which says more about me than what I saw.

I knew that the man probably had some disability. But I think my fear was that he was desperate to relieve himself, and had been trying without success in the shelter of the pub door. His contorted walking was caused by the pain of extreme urgency. I found it hard to concentrate on the exam that afternoon.

The bus continued straight ahead at the Irn Bru works, up the hill past my friend Jim McGonigle’s house to the top cross, where I usually got off. Near the cross was Mr Archibald the dentist’s, where I had my first tooth removed, and the clinic which I had to attend one day for an injection, having missed the NHS team who had been vaccinating at the school. My register teacher had told me about this clinic appointment, and I planned to go along without mentioning it to my parents. Somehow, I was embarrassed when they, having been notified of my forthcoming vaccination by letter, asked me about it.

Downhill from the top cross, to the left was Caledonian Road, which always held a certain enticement because I believed it was the location of the pub where my classmate Yvonne M. Davis’s dad was the landlord. Turn right at the cross, and you were in Kirk Road, where there was the cinema (I listened with interest to accounts of evenings spent in the back row of this alluring flea-pit), the offices of the Wishaw Press, who produced our annual Wishaw High School magazine The Octagon, and further along Wishaw Swimming Pool (where I used to go for a hot dog and a fizzy drink on Wednesdays when the café was open, and where P.E. teacher Jock Bonomy tried to get me to launch out at the deep end during a swimming lesson, and seemed unnecessarily disdainful when I lacked the courage to comply.)

Also in Kirk Road was the shop where in my early teens I saw in the window a china dog ornament, and thought it would be an ideal present for our dog-loving friends Margaret and Norman McGrail. I went in and enquired the price.  They were asking more than I had expected, more than I had with me at the time. Could they keep it for me, I asked – I’d come back with the correct money. They did, and a few days later I returned and purchased this fragile gift, somehow managing to get it home in one piece in my schoolbag. As I anticipated, Margaret and Norman were delighted with it.

Hurrying to school in the morning, I’d continue on foot along Main Street, turning right into Kenilworth Avenue (a number of the streets in the area are called after Scottish Border locations associated with Sir Walter Scott and his novels.) Kenilworth Avenue was bounded on either side by wooded areas, in the heart of one of which stood the public library which I frequently visited at lunchtime. It had one of those enormous Victorian reading rooms with broad, sturdy tables, chairs, and newspapers to read which attracted people with no-where better to be.

Further along, Kenilworth Avenue broadened out into a circle on to which the back entrance of the school opened – there, in my 6th year, I used to meet my driving instructor for lessons after school. I remember once coming out on to Kenilworth Avenue, and seeing a car from ‘my’ driving school with a different instructor from usual sitting in the passenger seat. I hesitated approaching it for about twenty minutes, expecting ‘my’ instructor to arrive in another car, before timidly I approached the vehicle, timidly tapped on the window, and asked the instructor if he was waiting for me. He was less than pleased at the delay.

Just inside the black slatted school gates was the spot where I was walking out of the school at lunchtime when big snowflakes were falling and landing on my spectacles and the ground was covered with snow. Yvonne M. Davis comes in the gate with some other girls. Later, I write her a very poor poem beginning ‘It blizzarded. You gaped.’

On the other side of Mail Street from Kenilworth Avenue was Hill Street which led down to the station through which my train passed on my way to and from university in Glasgow. We’d watch our former classmate George Barr blowing his whistle and marshalling passengers on the platform.

Before you reached the Station, you passed the Post Office. When I was in 6th year a teacher asked a friend of mine (in all seriousness, I think) to post a potted plant for him. We inexpertly wrapped it up in see-through plastic, attached an address label to it, and joined the queue at the Post Office. The clerk pointed out what should have been abundantly obvious to us, that the plant was seriously under-wrapped. We returned to school, wrapped it more durably in cardboard and brown paper, carefully marked it ‘this way up’, and this time succeeded in getting it past the gatekeeper into the care of the Royal Mail.

Continuing along the Main Street from Kenilworth Avenue, you passed Baird’s Department Store on your right, and the Wimpy Bar on your left, in both of which I lunched. The Old Parish Church, location of special school events was on your right, as, further down the hill, was the post box from where one year I tremblingly despatched a Valentine Card to Lesley B.M. Jesson.

Opposite the end of Dryburgh Road there was, in the early 1960s, a small privately-owned bookshop which belonged to a woman whom my parents knew, and I was taken there while still in Primary School to spend a book token. I bought a one-volume encyclopaedia with lots of text, and grey photos which seemed old-fashioned even then. The one I remember most vividly was of an old man (or so he seemed) called Robert H. Goddard standing beside an incredibly flimsy looking rocket. Goddard (1882-1945) is credited with designing and building the first liquid-fuelled rocket, and given that he was in his early sixties when he died, I must have grossly over-estimated his age.

Dryburgh Road itself led to the school, and also to Belhaven Park, where occasionally there were semi-pre-planned fights between pupils from Wishaw High and St Aidan’s schools, which I carefully avoided. There was a public toilet in the park, and I remember once defecating there as a young teenager not because I particularly needed to, but curiously because (though I couldn’t have put it in these terms at the time) there was some kind of erotic thrill in relieving myself in a slightly risky environment.

On Main Street, just beneath Dryburgh Road, was the sports shop my parents took me to when I was about 11 to buy roller skates. The other kids on the street where roller-skating freely, and mum and dad very kindly thought I might like a pair as well. I was dubious, but went along with the plan. I wore them a few times, shuffling along disconsolately holding on to walls, fences and lamp-posts, unable to let myself go, to entrust myself to balance and momentum, guilty that I wasn’t using what had been kindly bought for me.

After the garage at the bottom cross, Main Street veers to the left, and heads out of the town centre towards Motherwell. The buses we caught to travel home (the 241 service) came up from Motherwell, and you could catch them at various places – one at the bottom cross near the sports shop, one outside the Old Parish Church, one at the top cross. But the more stops the bus had passed in Wishaw before reaching the stop you’d chosen the fuller it would be, and the less chance you’d have of getting on. So sometimes a few of us would plunge out of school the moment the bell rang at 3.55pm, hare along Dryburgh Road, down Main Street to the bottom cross, and then pound along Glasgow Road to the bus stop just beyond Cleland Street, where we’d wait for the first bus to arrive which would be almost empty.

I remember the distinctive smell of those buses, of diesel and upholstery, and smoke wafting down from the ‘upper saloon’ and the conductor standing on the open platform. I remember some of us besieging a bus at the top cross, homeward-bound. It was one of the then innovate vehicles with opening doors at the front. The conductress is trying to get all Wishaw High School pupils to go upstairs rather than into the non-smoking lower deck. She stands fiercely blocking the way, her hands grasping the metal poles on each side of her. I wriggle under her arm into the lower saloon. She remonstrates with me.  ‘I have a right to enter,’ I proclaim, nervousness making me pompous.  She remonstrates further. ‘I will fight you to the House of Lords’ I continued. She accepts defeat. Poor woman!

Other significant locations in Wishaw were the Driving Test Centre, a pre-fabricated building where I reported when (successfully) sitting my driving test, as did my mother (also successful) some time afterwards, and the big house further up Kirk Road which I remember visiting with my parents when I was about 11. It was home to a family who had recently lost a husband and father, and the knowledge of this weighed on me throughout the visit. I remember they had a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with a cupboard to itself, which impressed as did the full-size, stand-up fridge in the kitchen, like the ones I’d seen advertised in National Geographic. The father’s name was Guy, and when playing with the kids, I said spontaneously in conversation something like ‘You guys’ and felt immediately that I had desecrated something sacred, and was stricken with guilt.