A life in letters: Carluke

I moved to Carluke a few days before my 10^th birthday, in May 1962, and lived there for 16 years, a period which included the happiest, and the most difficult years of my life. My father had taken up a post in the X-ray department at Law Hospital the previous year, and decided to move nearer his work from our previous house at Westerton, a western suburb of Glasgow. I have written elsewhere about my time at Carluke Primary School, and my time working at Carluke Library. Here, I’m recording some general impressions.

Our new house

Our first house in Carluke was 36, Douglas Street, newly-built on a piece of land which also included another new house set further back occupied by the Whiteside family. Beside our house ran a broad lane which Jennifer Muncie (who lived in the older house at the top) called ‘the wee road.’ I remember the newness of the house; the wall-paper in my bed-room with green ducks on it; the new washing machine, to my eyes sophisticated: a Hoover Keymatic – programmed according to which edge of a square bevelled key you presented to a slot at the top of the device. The purchase of a roll of paper kitchen towels on an upright wooden dispenser seemed a new extravagance.

The land around the house was uncultivated. In time my father added a wall round the front and side of the property, a garage at the top end; and a porch filling the narrow space between the house and the ‘wee road’. It’s construction was masterminded by local joiner Frank Forsyth, who once the lower brickwork was in place drove round from this yard in Kirkton Avenue with the whole infrastructure of the porch on a trailer behind his van, and then fitted it in place. He promised me that the brown lead sheets on the roof, just beneath my bedroom window, would in time change a pleasing green: when this never happened I felt a slight sense of betrayal. 

In time the garden was cultivated too, after I had staked a claim to a corner by creating a cave of rubbish and lumps of earth into which I  crawled through a rubber tyre. Inside I felt secure.  The gardener brought with him what was to me an impressive new gadget - a rotivator. He laid lawns and concrete slabs, and marked out flower beds, one of which was assigned to me. I sowed an excess of flower seeds, but was never too enthusiastic about weeding, though in time I learned to mow the lawns with the small Atco petrol mower which dad purchased.

Down the High Street

At Westerton there were just a couple of shops within easy walking distance of the house – a butchers and a Co-op.  Carluke instantly impressed me by the variety of retails outlets in the High Street. There was a Templeton’s supermarket towards the top, where the post office had been before it moved to a new building in Stewart Street, but otherwise shops remained, as no doubt they had been for many years, in private ownership. The day we moved, we went for tea at Eason’s the bakers who had a restaurant above the shop – a rather bleak room, I recall, though sun-lit that afternoon -  but I was excited by the adventure of being in a new town.  In time, I grew to prefer Wallace’s bakers, at the foot of the High Street close to the old Town Hall on account of a confection they produced called  ‘chocolate dice cake.’ 

Another early visit was to McCubbins, a traditional ironmongers, where I bought a blue thermometer which I hung up beside my bed. In time, I got to know  Mrs Barber’s newsagents; Hincksman and Forrest, the pharmacy; and the butchers at the corner of Union Street, where you could see huge carcasses suspended from metal rails – I’d be dispatched there regularly when we had a dog to purchase ‘plate mince.’ Each of these shops had its own distinctive smell – Mrs Barber’s for instance, was redolent with the mingled aromas of books, newsprint, glue, rubber bands, old wooden shelving. 

In 1962, I think there were three private grocers in Carluke (one owned by the family of Alastair Gardner who was in my class at school), who did home deliveries - by bicycle in at least one case.  There was a music shop which displayed classical record jackets in the window – there I first heard of Verdi’s opera Aida (which at first I mistakenly pronounced with two syllables instead of three.)  And there was a shop which impressed my parents with its range of stock (I can’t recall the owner’s surname, but her first name was Mary.) There, I was introduced to the joys of Lego – my first box came from there – simple white and red bricks, which for me opened a new door to creative play. I saved up to buy additional packs of bricks – blues, and yellows; curved bricks to build a tower with; and best of all, a brick with a small electric bulb in. A less useful purchase was a big board with roadways on it, and vacant lots on which you could erect buildings – my architectural visions were too grandiose to fit in the small space available. I built a swimming pool and church, and created an ‘extension fund’ to save up for the bricks to expand it, modelling the similar fund at the local Baptist Church. And I built a ‘President Kennedy Memorial Building’ at the end of 1963. Sometimes I took my bricks round the Paul Birrell’s house, and we’d erect structures and then subject them to an aerial bombardment before they were stormed by ground forces. ‘Why must you always be destroying things boys’, said Paul’s mother Mildred. It was still less than 20 years after the 2^nd World War, and our kids comics were still full of daring commandos and German treachery.

Another High Street premises I was very familiar with was the barbers, down at the bottom close to the Evangelical Union Church. I’d be sent there on Saturday mornings, clutching the appropriate fee, and sit waiting on the bench, watching trimmed hair falling to the floor, looking out of the window, and listening as the radio played Puff the magic dragon, and similar songs.

In time I became familiar with the town furnishing firms – Graham’s who had premises beside the old graveyard and also ran an undertaking business, and Brooks in Hamilton Street. My parents were towards the end of our time in the town, devoted to the services of Alec Brooks who provided us with carpets, furnishings and curtains. 

At the top of the High Street, close to the Wee Thackit pub (which I learned to view with the disapproval with which I’d gathered such establishments should be regarded) was the building housing above a licensed grocer’s business the dentist under whose drill I suffered, and the Carluke office of the Carluke and Lanark Gazette which in the mid-70s I visited occasionally trying to publicise the library service.  In the same period, they occasionally published Christian reflections I’d written at Christmas and Easter, and carried a series I wrote about Carluke’s Boy Poet William Rankin Lightbody, whose grave is marked in the old St Luke’s Church graveyard by a truncated pillar, and whose literary remains were published subsequently. They were not in fact of any great literary merit, but I discussed them at considerable length. I later tried to sell the same articles to the Scots Magazine, without success. The sight of my name appearing in print appealed to me in those days of my hunger for significance. 

Not far along Stewart Street heading north was the local garage, close to the Windsor Bingo Hall, where my mother bought me my first car when she received a legacy following the death of her father – a blue  Mini, which cost,  I recall £750. 

Carluke was therefore a self-sufficient place. The Crawforddyke Estate had expanded the town southwards from the town centre, and there was new building in the Wilton Road area during the years I was in Carluke. I think the population in those days was about 5000, but it was still a sense of community, and  you recognized many of the local people. 

Douglas Street

There was a sense of neighbourliness in Douglas Street – I became friends with Jennifer Muncie (who told me that her mother insisted she be called ‘Jennifer’, never ‘Jenny’) , and the Steele cousins, Norman and Leslie who lived close to us, and to a lesser extent with the Whiteside children – we were all roughly the same age, and we mucked around as kids do playing in our back yards, or venturing down the line of the old Roman Road which continued north from Holm Street to the Luggie Road through fields as yet not built up. 

We stood waiting outside Mrs Adamson’s house (she being a matriarch of the local Adamson transport empire) for the Capocci man to come in his van playing The Happy Wanderer.  I was largely happy those days. I remember being annoyed at myself for allowing my parents to buy me, from the sports shop next to the garage at the foot of Wishaw Main Street a pair of roller-skates – they’d seen some of my friends with these. I went back and forward along Douglas Street clunking on eight small wheels, but I could never pluck up courage to entrust myself to the skates, just as I would  run towards a ‘slide’ in the school playground in wintry days, and then freeze, unable to release myself into to the freedom of exhiliarating motion. And so the skates remained little used, and my happiness was dented.

Also in the neighbourhood, in the Council flats across the road lived the Misses Clark – at one point they were selling a Ford Anglia, which my father bought for my mother, and I was allowed to use in the days before I had the mini. I remember driving faster than was safe along the deserted back road from lower Braidwood home, having spent the evening with some family friends, Andrew and Jeanette Weir playing Elgar’s Cockaigne overture very loudly on a cassette player. Near the Misses Clark lived a lady whose name I can’t recall who was entering a convent, and while clearing out gave me a pile of children’s novels which opened my eyes to a deeper, more thoughtful kind of writing that the Enid Blyton texts I had hitherto majored on. 

On the other side of the ‘wee road’ from us lived Mr and Mrs Frame, who were friendly. Mrs Frame invited me in to select, one volume at a time, the novels of Arthur Ransome  - richly imaginative landscapes which I loved. These books had belonged to their son, who was a cinema manager. (Cinemas were another venue of which as a child, I felt I was supposed to disapprove.) The same Mrs Frame, however ticked us off for going in to her garden once too often to retrieve a lost ball without asking, and after that I viewed her with some suspicion!

Walking to school

Over the years I got to know most parts of Carluke. My most frequent walk was to primary school – I could take different routes. My normal route was via Milton Street, Kirk Road, and Kirk Street, past the Jam Factory, which smelled of hot steam. Scott’s ‘jelly works’ was the town’s main industry. They also made Scotchoc  cooking chocolate, and according to their annual adverts in the school magazine, ‘Jumpers’, which always puzzled me as I didn’t ever see any signs of knitwear production.  Off Milton Street, a piece of land was home to large greenhouses – fruit production was another of the town’s staple industries and many of the fields now built over had been home to greenhouse, although by the 1960s many of these were derelict and out of production. Annually, the soil in the greenhouses would be steamed to sterilize it, and I particularly remember the giant steamer and a huge pile of coal or coke arriving in Milton Street to allow this common process to be undertaken. 

At the corner of Milton Street and Douglas Street, lived Mr Marshall, who to me seemed impossibly old, and  like us attended the Baptist Church. While my father was the church treasurer, Mr Marshall came along annually with a lady called Mary Allan (I remember her aged father, housebound, his head bowed over his Bible, praying, a godly man of the old school) to audit the books. One day, passing Mr Marshall’s house, I thought I heard a gasp for help. Knowing he lived on his own, I went to tell my parents what I’d heard. They sent me back to knock on his door to ensure he was all right – fortunately, he was. 

A lad in Milton Street, older than me, set up a band with some of his mates, (was it called ‘The Miltones’?) and practiced so loudly that the sound could be heard back at our house. My parents shook their heads!

The alternative route to and from school involved walking the length of Douglas Street, and then heading east along Clyde Street, where I’d hesitantly scuttle past the house where it was said that ‘Something bad had happened,’ and then meet my classmate Paul Birrell in his family’s upper flat across from the end of Kirk Road, which he shared with his family: I remember his mum, and sisters Susan and Jane. Paul and I would walk to school, yattering away. I remember a conversation in which we concluded that if there was a war we would join the Royal Engineers as that seemed more constructive than killing people – we obviously had a gentler side than we showed when crawling around in his front room, bombing Lego villages..  I remember Paul telling me a rhyme: ‘Tarzan in the jungle, sitting on the gate, waiting for the toilet, [rude noise, dramatically generated with a glint in the eye] Too late!.’  And I remember asking Paul what the word ‘Sluvsya’ meant, as in the ‘Sluvsya, yeah yeah yeah’ which he was bellowing out.  

On the way to school we’d pass the house of Sheena Watson, who went to the Baptist Church and once gave me an EP of Salvation Army Band music for Christmas.  We’d turn into Kirkton Avenue, past Frank Forsyth’s joiners yard and Bryce the builders yard before entering the playground.

Kirkton Avenue was home to Linda Bryce, the builder’s daughter. I remember once, in my 20s when we were both at University visiting her and ineptly playing her the last few minutes of Wilton Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast very loudly, much to her amusement.  Lower down Kirkton Avenue lived the Fleming family, who were stalwarts of the Baptist Church. Annette was in the year below me at school.

I remember one December twilight, after our primary school Christmas party, walking home as snow fell, looking up at the lamplight as the flakes tumbled through the brighness. I was looking forward to Christmas. It must have been 1962 or 1963 – the magic had not yet departed, and in fact it would be perhaps my best Christmas ever, with three ‘big’ presents – a huge wooden box with a sliding lid of Lego bricks, a set of plastic aircraft with interchangeable parts, so that you could design your own, and (joy above all, a Petite typewriter with plastic keys which actually worked.) But this was before Christmas. I was walking up the little rise as Douglas Street takes leave of Clyde Street, and walking slowly beside the sloping bank of snow-covered grass I had a cleansing sense of wonder, of joy, of wholeness the memory of which has always remained with me. I have only one similar, and lesser memory in Carluke – walking down the path from Clyde Street to West Avenue where South Avenue now stands, a decade or so later. A cloud in the otherwise blue sky caught my eye, and again there was a transcendent sense of wholeness, and peace and perhaps the sense of being at one with all things.

Getting to know the town

Quite often when we had the dog in the  mid-1960s, I’d take it for walks: I had this rather crazy concept of ‘aleatoric walking’, coming from the Latin word (Alea) for dice. ‘Aleatoric music’ was a phrase used by avant garde composers of the period – they composed different musical sequences, but the order in which these were played was determined by the toss of a coin. An ‘aleatoric walk’ was one in which the route I took was, at each junction, determined by a similar chance process.

My walk might lead  me up Holm Street (past the Kerrs’ house, just next to the post-box attached to a lamp-post – they went to the Baptist Church) past my mother’s friend Margaret Stewart’s house, where she lived with son John and daughter Elizabeth, and then down Mount Stewart Street to ‘the cross’. Past the house and yard of Gilchrist and Schaeffer, Bryce’s competitors, and the building where David and Maggie Simpson lived with their kids Jim and Heather – David and Maggie were heavily involved in the Baptist Church, and led the children’s activities with love and enthusiasm. 

Downhill, past the entrance to St Andrews Church of Scotland where I used to sit listening to my friend George Cringles practising the organ. He played for services at the church occasionally, and on one occasion asked me if I’d like to play for a wedding at which he was unable to be present. Fortunately, tempting as the fee would have been, my better judgement prevailed – I could just about master the keyboards, but not the footwork! St Andrews was also the venue on at least one occasion for an inter-church Sunday School choir competition. Our church had put on a creditable performance, but that year the competition was won by an energetic, rousing and contemporary rendition of a song called I cannot come based on Jesus’ parable about the guests invited to a wedding, who decline to attend, and a series of excuses. 

There was some co-operating between churches in the town, but in the circles I moved in as a child and teenager there was a deep suspicion of the ‘ecumenical movement’ especially insofar as it included theological liberals and Roman Catholics. There was also suspicion of the ‘charismatic movement’ and questions about how ‘biblical’ were practices such as divine healing and worshipping in a God-given language. Some churches, such as the Gospel Hall had minimal engagement with the wider church community in the town.

Mount Stewart Street led me past the Roman Catholic Church; the Wee Moss, a play area in front of a line of police houses; the rear of the Crown Hotel’s function suite; the smelly gents toilet set into the grounds of the Royal Bank of Scotland; and the ‘bus stance where I’d catch the ‘bus each morning to Wishaw High School.

I remember walking uphill past the Wee Moss one day driven by the exhiliaration of having finished a piece of writing I was pleased with, clutching it under my arm in a folder. I also remember walking towards the Wee Moss, just turning the corner outside the old sweetie shop opposite the top of School Lane. It’s late in the evening; it’s summer and there’s pale sunlight and an evening stillness; I’m walking beside my father.  I was having difficulty sleeping, afraid of entrusting myself to sleep, and my father sweetly went out walking with me a few evenings, talking softly to me, seeking to still my spirit.

The Market Square

My aleatoric walk might lead me across Stewart Street and up through the Market, a triangular piece of land at the heart of the town furnished with flower beds and seats, a shelter, and the town’s War Memorial. I remember two things connected with the Market. Firstly, it was the venue for the weekly open-air meeting held on Sunday afternoons during the summer months by the local Gospel Hall which my parents and I attended from 1970 onwards.

A small group of us would roll up in cars just before three, and unload a portable harmonium with folding legs,  and a battery-powered microphone and speaker. Even then, the meeting was old fashioned. There would be traditional gospel hymns; someone would sing a solo or two (I regret that it was on occasion me, defiantly conspicuous in my Hunting Macrae tartan kilt, bellowing out How great Thou Art.); there might be a ‘ testimony’ as someone shared their faith story, and there would certainly be a short (or not so short) sermon. The words and music echoed off the walls of the surrounding houses. While it was taking place, Gospel Hall folk would be walking round the park, and along the queue of cards waiting at the traffic lights, handing out gospel tracts to anyone who would accept them. They loved God, and they meant well.

The Market was also the venue for the annual visit of Santa Claus shortly before Christmas. I remember being present in the crowd one year, watching as Santa drove in on a horse-drawn cart from the entrance opposite Rankin Street, and handed out gifts to the children. Santa was in fact a local personality, Roy Russell, who ran the Tao Ha riding school outwith town, and also had a mobile greengrocer business. I remember he’d reverse up the ‘wee road’ and stop and blow his horn outside Frank Forsyth’s structure until my mother went to the door and gave him her custom. He was a loud, but tender-hearted man who had been a Japanese Prisoner of War during WWII, and still bore the marks of this. 

I was also, briefly, a student at his riding school. I was given a hard hat, and went to the Tao Ha for a few lessons. We learned indoors, in a straw-strewn building with a corrugated iron ceiling. I could mount the horse, and let it carry me round the track slowly. But then very low jumps were put in place (about 6” high) and we were supposed to encourage the horse to leap over these. It was, however, another instance where I was not relaxed enough to yield myself to the horse’s motion, on entrust myself to it. In turn, the horse sensed my fear, and so my days as an equestrian finished before they had properly began. For some reason, I agreed to go on a pony trek one day, and found myself following Roy with other kids across fields and along lanes and roads, hating every moment.  My one memory is of the girl in front saying, when her mount peed generously in the mud ‘I wish I could do that.’

More of the town

At the top of the Market, I might head further up Market Road past the then High School building, which at that point was a ’Junior Secondary’ which did not provide education above secondary four. My chief memory of the building was of the day I spent there in March 1974 supervising the Polling Station for the first of the two General Elections that year. Each room in use had its own ‘Presiding Officer’ and ‘Polling Clerk’ – I was appointed Presiding Officer in Room 1, supported by an old school friend, James Wade as polling clerk. But the officer in charge of Room 1 was also notionally responsible for the polling station as a whole, which I found rather challenging, especially when I was finding it difficult to follow the instructions for sealing the metal ballot boxes with wax before the station opened. I was there from 6 in the morning until after 10 at night, and in the process met the local police chief and the Labour Party candidate, Judith Hart who was the successful candidate. In those days, as a local government employee (I was with the library service by that point) you could both keep your day job pay for the day in question, and claim remuneration for your work at the polling station. And in addition, I sold an article about my experiences to the Glasgow Herald.

Further up from the school on Belstane Road was the Moor Park playing field. I do remember visiting this with my father, a vaguely-desgnated uncle Stewart and his two adopted daughters Alma and Ruth who were visiting us from their home in Mossend. Stewart was a model aircraft enthusiast, and we flew a couple of his broad-winged creations with their little petrol motors. I loved the sense of being in charge as they swooped above – but I was only entrusted with the controller very briefly.

I might go down the road on the other side of the school, Chapel Street which took you past the church to which the Baptist Church moved in the early 1970s before delivering you at the bottom of the High Street. Turn left, and on the corner of John Street a short distance away stood the Rankin Memorial Town Hall, which had been built in memory of the local 19th century polymath Daniel Reid Rankin, famed for his fossil collection and his published history of the community. Carluke Library used to occupy part of the ground floor on the right hand side of the building, and I visited this regularly as a child. But I was rarely in the Town Hall itself, an exception being my visits with my parents to listen to the preaching of an Irish Evangelist who was visiting the town. Eddie MacMaster. I remember going back one night to buy a copy of the EP disc of Eddie singing Christian songs. I knew my parents were looking for some kind of response to the preaching from me, and thought that buying the record might be a positive sign. ‘It’s going to be a pack-out’ I remember saying on the last night of the preaching, but this was over-optimistic and there were lots of spare seats.  A sudden, morbid thought that night: the polished wood of the Town Hall ceiling spoke to me of coffins.

But I remember a magic moment in the early 60s. The kids from the Baptist Church were going our carol-singing one evening, led by Maggie Simpson and Ethel Cargill. I presume our starting-point was at the church, but I completely lost track of where we were in the darkness as we went from house to house. And then I looked up and saw, further up John Street,just ahead of us, the Town Hall Steeple with its illuminated clock, and I remember the sheer joy of knowing where I was, and being where I was, and being somewhere completely different to what I’d expected.

That night, coming up John Street towards the Town Hall, we would have passed in the darkness the old cottage in its own grounds where our family friends Margaret and Norman McGrail lived. Norman worked in personnel at Cummins Diesel Engine factory in Shotts, though in the later 1960s he got a job with the Highlands and Islands Development Board in Inverness and the couple moved north. As a child, and later, I deeply appreciated their friendship. I enjoyed visiting their house to see them; their goat which they kept for goat-milk; and their Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and Staffordshire Bull Terriers. I watched a bitch giving birth, and our dog Prince (Kennel Club name Calderbrig Behram) was one of their pups. They asked Indian medical friends from Law Hospital to help them choose names for their litters: the names for the pups in each successive litter began with different letters of the alphabet.  I remember one day meeting them when I was out on a walk, and being invited to their house. I went with them, and sat watching an episode of Dr Findlay’s Casebook (which I’d never seen before) until the phone rang – it was my parents wondering if by any chance I was there. Neither the McGrails or I had thought to notify them of my presence.

Margaret offered to give me piano lessons, with no expectation that I would sit any exams. And so I went to her week by week after. I didn’t practise thoroughly was not in case very gifted, but I loved sitting down drinking soft drink, eating Wallace’s chocolate dice cake, and taking her copies to read of the stories I had scrawled in ink in cheap notebooks.  (Speaking to Margaret after she reached old age, I told her that my daughter Bethany has an A in Higher Music and enjoys playing the piano, and Margaret replied with blunt honesty ‘She must have interited it from your mother.’) After Margaret moved north, my parents arranged for me to go to Mrs Ellis in Strathlachlan Avemue for piano lessons (her husband worked at the hospital, and her daughter Helen was my contemporary. However, my motivation was poor, and I soon abandoned these lessons.

Visiting the doctor

During the early 1970s, I had several courses of medication to treat anxiety and depression. Our GP was Eric Paterson, who lived with his family in Station Road, and whose surgery was in an old building close to the garage in Stewart Street. This was the time before the various medical practices in the town moved into the new health centre, and before booking surgery appointments became the norm. If you needed to see the doctor you simply turned up at the surgery at consultation time, and awaited your turn. After you’d been seen, you left the consulting room by a different door which took you into a hall-way from which you returned to the pavement.  Except that if you happened to be the son of another doctor, your dad arranged with Eric Paterson that you would present yourself at the surgery at an appointed time, and knock on the outside door. The doctor would let you in to the hallway, where you would sit waiting until he’d finished with his current patient, upon which you’d be summoned in. I think the medication I had helped to some degree, but did not fundamentally address the issues I had. 

And so, my remaining years at Carluke, while not unremittingly gloomy, were often difficult and testing. The bedroom at 36 Douglas Street overlooking the ‘wee road’ which had once been a haven of Lego bricks and creativity had become a place of fear, and tears, and strange, torturing small-hours anxieties.

The majority of the social interactions of my parents and I revolved round church – this was both because church events were time-consuming, and also because of the understanding which was certainly expressed, but which I perhaps interpreted more rigorously than my parents and the other church folk intended, that people who were not Christians, or even ‘not our kind of Christian,’ were somehow ‘on the outside,’ or, as the theological term had it ‘in the world.’ Relationships with ‘the world’ were not, I believed, encouraged. As I entered my mid-teens, I was also troubled with church because I did not, in truth, fell that I belonged. I had tried to ‘pray the prayer’, and read many books about God. There were moments of certainty, but I had no sense of the joy or the sense of belonging which, if you were to believe the ‘testimonies’ you heard from other Christians was the normal experience of those who said ‘yes!’ to God, and so, tragically I saw myself as a failure.

I don’t think that the kind of religious environment which was mine as I grew up led to the neurotic pain which I experienced, for I know now that I was born with a tendency to anxiety/depression. But certainly the sense of neither belonging ‘in the world’ or ‘in the church’ tore me apart – particularly in the light of the constant emphasis among many evangelical Christians in the early 1970s that Christ must surely return soon, and that those who were not his would be ‘left behind’ to face the consequences of their unbelief.

I have written separately about my experiences of the Martin Memorial Baptist Church, and Carluke Gospel Hall. When my family attended the Baptist Church in Stewart Street, we round from the house – up Holm Street, and along Kirk Road, past Mrs Graham’s shop stood – it looked as if it had been built in the back garden of her house, and the times I was in it seemed to be chronically under-stocked, but Mrs Graham did sell serviceable home-made ice-lollies.  We’d pass the red-brick building where Mrs Turnbull from the church lived – I saw the slogan IRA spray-painted on the garden wall, and I thought it odd because the only IRA I knew of was Ira D. Sankey, musical companion of the 19^th century American evangelist D. L. Moody, and compiler of the voluminous Sacred Songs and Solos with which I was very familiar. Round the corner, past Stevenson’s green-tiled newsagents (the shop-owner’s son Colin was in my class at school) we arrived at the church. Set a little back from the road, the Martin Memorial Baptist Church had a traditional frontage, behind which lay the sanctuary, and behind that a small hall, kitchen, toilet and minister’s vestry. It was to extend this accommodation that the church ‘extension fund’ which I mimicked in my Lego play was set up.  

Leaving Carluke

In 1975 my father decided to move from 36 Douglas Street to 22, West Avenue, which he named ‘Arderyth’, and old name for Airdrie.  It was a lovely house, all on one level, in a lovely location. But astonishingly, we only stayed there for three years. During that time, I worked as librarian at Carluke Library, before taking up a post with the Christian Youth organization Scripture Union, first of all in Falkirk, and then in Glasgow. But in 1978 my father decided to move to Airdrie.  Some time previously, we had begun travelling to an Airdrie Church, it must have made sense to my father to relocate to North Lanarkshire.

But I do know that what I needed was not different people, a different church, or a different place to stay, but an inner growth towards self-knowing and self-confidence, and a personal sense of faith. This would come, and it would come in Airdrie, but I think I could have grown anywhere given the right circumstances. I could have grown, and grown independent as I belatedly did, in Carluke, and I wish my parents hadn’t felt the need to relocate themselves – they moved back to the Clyde Valley a few years later, by which time I was living on my own.

I wish that I’d been at a more positive point in my life when the time came to leave Carluke, but I have many positive memories of my time there, looking at life from the window above the ‘wee road.’

A life in letters: Work - librarian at Carluke

(Click here to read about my previous role, as Trainee Librarian.)

Towards the end of my nine-month Post-Graduate course in Librarianship, in the spring of 1975, there was a major local government re-organisation in Scotland, which saw the former County Councils swept away, to be replaced by two tiers of local government comprised of District and Regional Councils. At the Regional Level, Lanarkshire became part of the much larger Strathclyde Region. Educational Libraries, formerly part of Lanark County Libraries, were administered by the region, and the old County Library building in Auchingramont Road became HQ of the Education Library Service of Strathclyde Region’s Lanark Division. Public Libraries, on the other hand, were assigned to the Districts to administer, so that where in the past there had been one County-wide service, there were now a number of smaller District library services, including that provided by Lanark District (later Clydesdale District) which included Lanark, Carluke and Forth Libraries, and the related mobile services.

Fortuitously from my point of view, when posts were being assigned in this new structure, there was no obvious candidate to fill the job of Librarian at Carluke Library, and Willie Scobbie, the former County Librarian, despite what he knew of my chequered record showed considerable confidence in me by putting my name forward for this post. And so it was that without as far as I remember filling in an application form or attending for interview, I found myself appointed as Carluke’s new librarian, responsible to the District Librarian.  It was a wonderful opportunity.

One week, at the end of May 1975, I finished my course at Strathclyde University which I passed with Distinction. I was awarded the Dunn and Wilson prize in Public Library Management which I think I can be proud of, for though the quality of learning on that subject we had been exposed to was very poor, my fellow-students were a very able group. The next week, I was back beneath the hyperbolic parabaloidal roof, librarian of a public library with a staff of three, including a library assistant with special responsibility for children’s services, and a budget of £5000 per annum. I remember it snowed on my first day in the job. I was to be there for just under two years.

Small town librarian

I had a sense of satisfaction in my role as small-town librarian. I was responsible for all aspects of managing the library other than staff selection. I enjoyed building relationships with the borrowers, selecting books with their interests in mind at the weekly key copy meetings in Lanark, helping them find the information they needed, and acting as a passionate advocate when this was required – for instance I tried unsuccessfully to get one elderly lady registered as visually impaired. Looking back, I can see that I was a good, committed, popular local librarian, but at the time I found it difficult to be so positive about my achievements.

What I felt weakest at was staff management. During my course we’d received no practical guidance on this subject, and no training of any kind was offered me when I took up my new post. Given my lack of self-confidence and my inability to be assertive, I found it difficult to build appropriate relationships with my colleagues.

I was on friendly terms with them – especially with one of them who, along with her boy-friend  played in a Christian band. When she and I were on the evening shift together, we sometimes read out the last few pages of Mills and Boon romances when the library was quiet just before closing time. I would take the male part, and my colleague the female, and we took it in turn to read the linking narration. We found this great fun, although of course it was thoroughly unprofessional.

But I found it difficult to give my staff instructions about changes in practice which I thought were necessary, or to point out when their commitment felt short of what it should have been.  I considered that while I was happy at any time to help re-shelving books returned by borrowers, this should not be regarded as one of the duties of the professional librarian, but I lacked the courage to put this view to my team. Nor did I have the confidence and common sense to discuss the issue with my managers and seek their advice. Instead, I simply got on with shelving armfuls of books shift after shift, resentful, and feeling bad about myself as I did it because of my cowardly silence. Whenever I did or said anything I thought might be even remotely controversial, and I saw my colleagues talking quietly together at the other side of the library, I was quite convinced they were talking about me and my confidence sank quickly into the quicksand of my heart.

Relations with the District Librarian

I didn’t find the District Librarian particularly understanding or supportive, although I realise that from his point of view it could not have been easy having an unknown and untried member of staff thrust upon him in a management position. At one point during my time at Carluke, it was decided by the Council (presumably as the result of a recommendation put forward by the District Librarian) that the post of library assistant with special responsibility for children’s services should be downgraded, so that the specialist dimension was lost. I have no recollection of being in any way consulted or involved in the process leading to this proposal.

I recognised what an excellent service we were offering to children and how committed Noreen Duddy, the colleague currently in post was in selecting and promoting good books for children, and interacting with kids in the library. So I tried to defend Noreen’s post as it stood without any real knowledge of local authority decision-making processes. I quoted to the District Librarian  (and to anyone else who would listen) the COSLA (Council of Scottish Local Authorities) Standards for the Public Library Service which, at least in my interpretation, was clear on the fact that a library the size of Carluke’s should have a staff member dedicated to developing children’s work. I also involved a local councillor, herself an enthusiastic reader, in arguing our case.

For these activities – and especially for the latter – I found myself in trouble with the boss. In my ignorance, I may have gone about things the wrong way, but the District Librarian should surely have appreciated the passion which motivated me. I particularly disliked the threat with which the wrist-slapping was accompanied. In those days, you became a Chartered Librarian not, as now, by writing a ‘professional development report’ demonstrating and evidencing your evolving knowledge and skills, but simply by getting your line manager to vouch for your competence on an official Library Association form. In the aftermath of my failed attempt to prevent the downgrading of Noreen’s post, My boss reminded me that if I were to charter, I would require his support, and that that support would not be forthcoming if there were any further instances of insubordination. Again, I lacked the gumption to make clear to him that I thought this threat was inappropriate, or perhaps the truth was that with my low professional self-image I felt it was only what I deserved.

In the event, he did sign the appropriate form when I’d served the requisite number of months on his team at Lanark District, and I posted it off to the Library Association. There was a space on the form where I could indicate whether I wanted the Chartership document to be sent direct to my home address, or to my line manager – I guess the expectation was that your boss might want to arrange an appropriate presentation ceremony. Assuming this was the standard practice, I asked for my Charter to be sent to Head Office.

One day as I walked into his office in Lanark, the District Librarian held out a cardboard tube to me. ‘Why on earth did you get this sent to me for?’ he grunted, with no sense of occasion whatsoever. This insensitivity marked all aspects of his relational style: he failed to connect with me, and to provide the encouragement and leadership which would have helped me overcome my weaknesses and value my strengths.  Instead, afraid to be real with him, I buried even more deeply the sense of desolation I often felt.

I remember one day Fred Bell, a colleague from Lanark roared into the car park at Carluke Library on his motor-bike. As he stood in the staff room peeling off his gloves and yellow jacket and unstrapping his helmet I felt what I imagined the kids in Enid Blyton novels must have felt when their current adventure was going pear-shaped, and they’d reached the end of their own resources and their parents turned up and there was someone to lean on. As Fred appeared from under his bikers’ gear, I could have flung my arms around round him and hugged him.

Special Activities

Apart from all the routine work of managing a library in those days before computers were widely in use, when loan statistics had to be counted manually, and notifications of overdue books written out by hand each day, I organised some special activities.

Library events were less common than they are today but I was determined to see what I could achieve. I set up a painting competition with prizes: it was judged by myself, a local councillor and a reporter from the Carluke and Lanark Gazette. I’m pleased to say my boss supported this initiative, and I think allowed me to use money from the book-fund for prizes. I sent publicity material about the competition to all the local schools, and, in a somewhat over-the-top fashion to anyone else I could think of (including church ministers) asking them to encourage children to take part.

Thus we managed to impact the whole community, and received masses of entries which were duly judged before the planned awards ceremony. My colleagues and I sellotaped all the entries to the glass walls lining the library, in the hope that those children who had taken part would drag their parents into the building to see their work on display, and perhaps be inspired to use our services.  The success of this event even rated a mention in the local Council Minutes and won the District Librarian praise, although he was less than pleased that he had to enlist the services of cleaning contractors to remove the remains of the sellotape from the glass.

This was just one of several occasions when I worked fairly closely with the local paper. After my time as a trainee in the library, I had written a four-part series for the paper on a local Victorian ‘boy poet’, whose work had been published posthumously, and who was a curiosity rather than being in any real sense a remarkable writer. The local reporter used us when necessary as a source of information for stories – we were, for example, able to help her when she was doing a piece on the suspicion that their might be valuable archaeological remains on the site of the planned new Carluke High School building. We confirmed that some remains had been unearthed in the vicinity of the new building, although this evidence did not in the end prevent the development from going ahead.

On one occasion, I realised that in my enthusiasm for helping journalists (I had a less than balanced enthusiasm for what I saw as the glamour of the press) I was on the point of acting unprofessionally by using my contacts with library members as a means of uncovering information which was not already in the public domain.

One day, a perky little stuffed bear was left behind in the library, we assumed by a child. I sat him where he could be clearly seen, above the shelf behind the counter where we kept reserved books awaiting collection by borrowers. It occurred to me that the bear could generate some library publicity, and so he appeared on the front page of the next issue of the Gazette accompanied by plaintive details of his inadvertent abandonment among the bookshelves. And (with a little help from myself) the bear, signing himself “Browsin’ Bruin” wrote a letter which was published in the following Friday’s paper extolling the kindness of library staff in providing him with temporary accommodation and assuring the worried populace that he was now back home, having been claimed by the children of the local Baptist minister who was a keen library user.

Once during my time at Carluke Library we attracted the attention of a wider-circulation paper, the Glasgow-based Daily Record. One of our library users claimed to take exception to a small picture book by the artist John Burningham called The dog. It was a thoroughly innocuous little book about the daily doings of a puppy. On one spread, the pup is portrayed balancing precariously on three legs while relieving himself in a corner of the garden, and the accompanying text reads ‘The dog peed on the flowers.’  Our customer claimed that her young child had been shocked by this explicit language, and contacted the Record.  They ran a two-page feature with a photo of the allegedly disturbed child, the mother, and the offending two-page spread.  The accompanying article included a brief comment from me. I’ve no idea whether the woman received any payment for the story, but the general impression locally was that she had made rather a fool of herself over the issue, and certainly no-one thought any less of the library service as a result.

Another special event I organised at Carluke was a talk entitled Lanarkshire in the beginning given by W. D. Ian Rolfe a Glasgow University geologist. Back in the 19^th century, one of the leading Carluke citizens of was the polymathic Daniel Reid Rankin who published a history of the town, and after whom the Town Hall (now demolished) was named. His passion for geology led him to amass a collection of local fossils which eventually found a home in the Hunterian Museum, where Dr Rolfe was a curator. It occurred to me that there would be a certain resonance in bringing some of the fossils back to Carluke after a century, and Dr Rolfe agreed to give a presentation on the geology of the local areas, and to bring with him some items from Rankin’s collection.

I promoted the event as widely as I could, personally choosing the title. I felt that in settling on Lanarkshire in the beginning I was being very daring, as I was aware that some of my friends in the Brethren believed that Dr Rolfe’s account of ‘the beginning’ would be decidedly at variance with their conviction that the conventional explanation of the fossil record was misleading. On the day the geologist came to tea with my parents and myself before the talk, which was attended by a small (but respectable) audience - I don’t know why I had ever imagined that such an event would be a crowd-puller!

A selection of Dr Rankin’s fossils was laid out on a table for people to inspect after he’d finished speaking: to my mortification a particularly minute specimen was purloined, possibly by one of the small boys who were in attendance. But if Dr Rolfe was upset by this, he didn’t let it show, and I judged the event to have been a success.

I also had the idea of inviting the previous County Librarian, the avuncular Willie Scobbie (who was working towards his retirement as the Lanark Division Education Librarian) to come and play Santa Claus at a Christmas party for children at the library. To my surprise, when I wrote to him proposing this, he replied accepting the invitation – which left me in perplexity, wondering how you go about hiring Santa suits. However word of my plans must have reached the District Librarian, presumably via whoever typed Willie’s reply, and one day he said to me ‘What I’m hearing about Willie Scobbie playing Santa at your library can’t be true, can it?’ His tone indicated that if this were the case, then my plans would meet with his severe disapproval, and lacking the courage to stand up to him I lied. ‘No,’ I said. In a secret place I guess I was relieved since this gave me an excuse not to wrestle with the complexities of organising reindeer and worrying about the health and safety issues involved in landing a sledge on a hyperbolic parabaloidal roof.

I can see that I was looking for a way of building my sense of significance through my work, and that in pursuit of this goal, I was prepared to go down any route which presented itself, be it quarrying local history resources to write articles, or setting up library events. Making information widely available, awakening people’s interest in the history of their community, helping meet peoples reading and information needs – these were not for me so much ends in themselves as vehicles which I used in a desperate quest for personal significance. I used to beat myself up about what I saw as a. deeply flawed attitude to serving society - getting involved not primarily because promoting change is good in and of itself, but because it helped me feel more comfortable with myself - but I realise now that we all act from mixed motives, and that what matters is not so much the imperfection of your motives as the impact for good which your actions have on the lives of others.

Librarians' Christian Fellowship

During these two years at Carluke Library I became involved with the fledgling Librarians’ Christian Fellowship as Scottish Representative, organising events, producing and circulating publicity material to attract new members, and attending committee meetings.  Perhaps the chief issue which exercised my mind was the question of censorship in libraries. Should we as librarians, and specifically as Christian librarians, provide material on all subjects of interest to our readers, or should we exclude from our shelves books on controversial or politically sensitive subjects or books presenting in an appealing light belief systems with which we personally were not in sympathy?

Initially, I was in favour of such censorship. In particular, I believed that books on say witchcraft, occult forces and atheism could damage people spiritually, and I was both repelled and naively attracted by explicit descriptions of sex. In those days my convictions were very black-and-white and unsubtle – it didn’t for instance occur to me that portrayals of opulent materialism could be equally spiritually damaging. And it troubled me that since I was responsible as librarian for the stock on my shelves it was logical to assume that I was morally accountable for any negative affect of that material on folk who borrowed it. And so I was tacitly supportive of censoring materials, although I can’t in fact actually remember refusing to stock any book – my convictions, when faced with the challenge to action, were clearly not sufficiently strong.

Over the years however, I have come to realise that the Christian who is called to be librarian is called to be a good librarian, and that being a good librarian involves providing access to books and information published within the law on all subjects, with the proviso that the books stocked should be the best-written and best-designed of those available on the subjects in question. The Christian librarian’s responsibility is to provide the material which he or she is contracted to supply – what the reader makes of it is their own responsibility. 

Trade Unionism

The other issue which exercised me during my two years at Carluke was the question of Union membership and industrial action. In those days, a ‘closed shop’ operated in local government, and so I had to join the union NALGO (National Association of Local Government Officers), now UNISON. At that time, I was implacably opposed to striking, and the calling of a one-day strike intensified my sense of alienation from my colleagues. My view was simply that it was to God, and not to my employers that I was, in all my actions, ultimately accountable. It was my responsibility to provide a service and my obligation to my God and to my customers in my mind outweighed any obligations to support fellow union members in industrial action. I published an article along these lines in the Brethren monthly The Witness and let some of my colleagues see it.  As it happened, I had a job interview in Edinburgh on the day of the strike and so I didn’t have to make any awkward decisions about passing colleagues on a picket line and opening the library alone.

I’m not sure how much I knew at that time about the Christian origins of the labour movement, and it simply hadn’t occurred to me that where there is a genuine injustice then action is appropriate, and in that case supporting colleagues is every bit as much of a Christian duty as serving customers. 

Conflagration

Late one evening in the early months of 1977, I was lying in bed reading one of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ sermons when the phone rang. It was the police – the library was on fire! I got there as quickly as I could – the familiar car-park was bustling with police and fire-fighters, who already had the outbreak under control. The interior of the staff-room at the front of the building was black and smouldering, and in the heat the tiles above the front desk in the public area were showering down dripping globules of molten plastic. There was no physical damage to the rest of the building, but the space under the arching roof was heavy with acrid smoke. With the fire officer’s permission, I went into the building, and as every good librarian would have done in those pre-computer days, I carried the precious wooden trays of green cards to a relatively safe place.

Within a few days, we were in business once again. The District Librarian arranged for the commercial cleaners to come back to deep-clean the undamaged part of the building; my colleagues and I washed the covers of all the books with soapy water; and we set up tables in the centre of the library and worked from there. (This left us in a rather exposed position – one day I was threatened by a man, high on drink or drugs and brandishing a broken bottle. The tables didn’t give as much security as I would have wished when I took refuge behind them!)

In the library office, one wall had been lined with deep shelves. Most of them were filled with books, one was packed with folded back-issues of the Carluke Gazette, and one housed a Baby Belling cooker. It was plugged in to a socket on the wall at the back of the shelf, so that to switch it off at the mains you had to reach behind the appliance. It appeared that the fire had been caused by the cooker being left switched on at the mains switch, and presumably at the unit itself. The heat had set fire to the newspapers on the adjacent shelf, and the blaze had rapidly spread.

When I was discussing with the District Librarian the need to employ contract cleaners to get the library back to a state where we could open to the public, he pointed out that the fact that the cooker had been left switched on was my responsibility, and that if I made it difficult for him by insisting on a higher quality of cleaning than he was prepared to fund, then I might find myself facing the consequences of my mistake. This felt like the ultimate betrayal, but I lacked both the courage and insight to argue back. I can’t in fact remember whether I had been the one locking up the library on the evening of the fire, but I would have thought that the design of the office, with a cooker in such close proximity to flammable material, was at least as much to blame for the consequences as the people who accidentally left the appliance turned on, and didn’t notice before leaving the building.

I was only in Lanark District Council’s employment for a few weeks after the fire before I left to join Scripture Union. And so I stepped from under the hyperbolic parabaloidal roof before the fire damage was repaired and I don’t recall ever being back.  That library has now been replaced with a new building.