Pride

I found this photograph of my first home on the Virtual Mitchell website, which is the online historical image library of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. We lived in a ground floor ‘room and kitchen’ in the tenement building on the right hand side of the photograph. Like many Glasgow families, we were displaced by the City’s comprehensive ‘slum clearance’ programme, uprooted and dispatched to one of the large peripheral housing schemes to enjoy such luxuries as a separate living room and scullery, a bath with hot and cold running water and even a veranda—how very continental! But it wasn’t the same. The reasons are well-documented—the old communities and were broken up, extended families became fragmented and there were hardly any shops or community facilities in the schemes.

My mother never once complained about our old home, or our new home for that matter, but her happiest memories were of the time when she lived in the old place. The dog that followed my father home, the cat that sat on the side of her old Singer treadle machine, fond memories of her children when they were little. My mother was a very proud woman,  and very resourceful too. She was never impressed by snobbery or who had what. 

I can’t imagine that she would agree with the Mitchell tagging a photograph of our old tenement as ‘slum housing’, though. Many of the old sandstone tenements were solidly built, she said, and many of the people who lived in them were fiercely houseproud, keeping their homes spotlessly clean and always taking their turn in scrubbing the stairs in the close every week.

My mother often lamented what had been done to our old area, redeveloped as tower blocks with bleak concrete shopping arcades. Not one of the old tenements was left standing. I can recall my brother taking me to the site of our old home, telling me where the midden was, and where the fence was, and where his friend’s back court was. Most of the rubble had been cleared but I can remember looking at a black sandshoe and wondering who it had belonged to. Sometimes my sister would take me out on the bus—I was always sworn to secrecy not to tell where we’d been—and she would take me to play in our old swing park (which is still there today). Like the housing schemes on the periphery of the city, the ‘redevelopment’ areas failed to live up to expectations—the tower blocks have been blown up and shopping arcades are boarded up and deserted.

Of course, we know that problems are neither created nor solved by bricks and mortar alone, and neither are memories. My memories of my first home are not so much my own because I was too young to have a sense of ‘place’, bur rather the stories I was told and from family photographs that give a sense of occasion but not so much of ‘place’. Finding this photograph has shown me the ‘bigger picture’, putting the lives of my parents into the bigger context of the times they lived in and what they did for us, and for that I’m very proud of them too.