Cyber Seance 17

[Moonwatcher]

Cyber Séance 17. 22 May 2005

The Tenement
Part 5

Moonwatcher stood on the patchy weed grass covering the open area of dusty waste ground.

He hadn’t actually been born here, but near as damn it. No, that momentous part of his life had taken place a couple of miles to the north, in a labour ward of Stobhill Hospital. But it was to this patch of wasteground that he was brought a few days after his cord was cut. It wasn’t wasteground then. He turned up the collar, dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his heavy Berghaus jacket and slowly turned through 360 degrees to take in the view on this dry, sunny but chilly day. When he lived here, this was a bustling community of shops, people and...tenements. This was Garngad, and he’d returned.

The ground on which Moonwatcher stood was the precise spot where 168 Millburn Street once stood. He knew that from the red sandstone school directly in front of him. Rosemount Primary School as it was then, now had a sign over it’s front entrance proclaiming it’s new role as a Community Centre. This barren gap site had been empty for over 45 years, ever since the slum tenements that formed the triangle of Garngadhill, Rosemount Street and Millburn Street had been demolished. The footprint of the triangle was still visible, the old kerbs and pavements acting as markers, bearing witness to the houses that once stood here. But it was the spot on which he stood that Moonwatcher focused his attention. He walked forward onto the pavement and turned his back to the school. As he gazed at the site, imagination rolled back the years. As if a newsreel of the demolition process was running backwards, the tenements began to rise from the ground. In his mind he saw the three storey, grey sandstone blocks, with their windows, chimneys and closes, emerge from the dust and tower over him. Directly in front of him, leading into the gloom, the close of 168. He stepped forward and walked into the tunnel. The familiar sound of his own footsteps, echoing through the close, registered in his brain. He didn’t need ears, the sounds were already there, recorded forever during his childhood. He heard the sound of people chattering on landings, patter, laughter, children playing, coal being emptied into bunkers, doors being opened and closed. He remembered too, the shouting, the violence. Images of his father being bent backwards through an open landing window with a drunken neighbour’s hands around his throat. He remembered his mother, desperately struggling to pull the neighbour off her husband while screaming up at Moonwatcher, standing on the landing above, to get inside the house and close the door. In her final months she was amazed and shocked that such an awful memory had been retained by her son whilst he was so young.

As he passed through the close and out into the daylight of the back court, Moonwatcher saw the middens, rubbish strewn and smelly. Waste paper fluttered past in the breeze. Dogs and cats rummaged for scraps in the bins. He saw himself squatting on the ground with some pals, scraping the dirt with a large spoon and tipping it into one of the many empty bean and soup cans that were lying around. A puddle of mucky rainwater provided the liquid needed to produce just the right consistency of mud in the can. They were making ‘dirt castles’, a pale imitation of the sandcastles made during those infrequent trips to the seaside at Saltcoats or Portobello. He knew that soon they’d get tired of that and start to play hide and seek, or cowboys and indians, among the middens and closes.

Moonwatcher reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out an old black and white photograph, carefully encased in a transparent plastic sleeve. It showed a mother, rather dishevelled, sitting with a gaunt looking baby on her lap. Beside her, a small boy stood with a toy car in his hand.

A moment in time.

Moonwatcher had never known a stronger willed, more defiant woman in his life. The look on the boy’s face echoed that defiance. He looked up, and could see the window of the single-end where that photograph had been taken. The wetness on his cheek and taste of salt on his lips brought him back to reality - the tenements vanished.

Crossing the street, he entered one of the two gates giving access into the playground of the school. He remembered riding his white horse around this playground. An imaginary horse of course. Dressed in imaginary white hat, mask, six guns with everlasting supply of bullets at his side. As the Lone Ranger he would ride ‘Silver’ out one gate, along the pavement and in the other, repeating the circuit over and over again – until his Granny Yuill shouted over at him, from her upstairs window at 162, to get himself inside the playground and stay there.
He walked over to a small red brick outhouse at the side of the playground. This had been the outside toilet of the school. The door was padlocked, probably used as a store these days. Moonwatcher raised his right hand to his face and examined his thumb, noting the deep scar and discoloured nail. Flashback. He felt the cold galeforce wind and the driving rain. He heard the door banging. He felt the pain as the door slammed shut on his thumb. The smell of ether in the infirmary. He plunged his hand back into his pocket.

There was a nursery in progress when he entered the building.The woman at the table just inside the door was uneasy at his presence. Moonwatcher was uneasy too. He could see kids further inside, sitting around tables, painting and laughing, in what used to be the main hallway and corridor. But it seemed the whole interior had now been sectioned off with partioned, plasterboard walls. All he wanted to do was visit his old classroom. He knew exactly where it was – or where it used to be. But, although sympathetic, the woman explained that there was no way she could allow a man, a stranger, inside while the nursery was in progress. He could see her point, a sign of the times. Disappointed, he left.

A walk along Garngadhill showed the extent of change taking place in the area. The Little Sisters of the Poor convent, once known as St Josephs, was gone. Only the high perimeter wall remained, enclosing a bright new housing development of private housing. A street sign reminded everyone that the correct name of the street was ‘Roystonhill’. Moonwatcher smirked at the thought. They’d have a hard job getting rid of the old name as long as people like him were around. Further along, the new housing intensified. There was certainly a lot of investment and renewal going on now, and he wondered how long the gap site at 168 would remain empty. The old Townhead/Blochairn Church with it’s tall spire was almost gone. Only the spire survived, having been saved after a campaign by locals. It had been restored and a small landscaped garden had been formed around it. Moonwatcher smiled as he was reminded of the Tam o’ Chancer poem he once wrote featuring this church. Garngadhill ended ubruptly a little farther on.. In his day, it would have led down to Castle Street and Townhead with it’s shops, cinemas, library and busy traffic. Now the deep, noisy, chasm of the M8 motorway blocked the way. Not that it mattered because Townhead had gone anyway. Retracing his steps, he made his way down Tharsis Street, stopping outside the tiny Tharsis Street Church where his great, great uncle and his wife had been church officers in the early 1900s. Some of his ancestors had been married there, and his uncle had died within it’s walls. Further down, he stepped onto the main Garngad, now Royston, Road. Little was familiar to him now. He remembered the trams clattering down here, sparks flying from the overhead power lines and the squealing of metal wheels against the rails. He remembered how he would sit with his parents on a tram or Corporation bus at night, returning from a visit somewhere, and look up at the night sky above the tenements and see the moon. It always intrigued him how it seemed to follow them, regardless of the movement or how far they travelled. He had never stopped looking at the moon. The tenements that lined Garngad Road were among the first to be demolished and he recalled clearly as a child, standing watching the slums of Cobden, Turner, Villier, and Bright Streets crash to the ground in great clouds of dust, the lines of green tipper lorries, with their big engine hoods, waiting for their turn to move forward and have the bulldozers fill them with rubble. Moonwatcher could still smell the dust of the falling tenements.
The climb back up the hill was tiring and he was glad to reach the top of Garngadhill once more. Making his way over to the gap site where he’d started, he contemplated on how many of his ancestors had lived in this small area over the years. Virtually every street in the Garngad had housed members of his family. They had worked in most of the local industries, all gone now, at some time or another. They would have seen the place at it’s busiest, best and worst. It would have been noisy, dirty and smokey. It had acquired a notorious reputation for gangs and general violence. Yet for those who lived here, there was a feeling of belonging that probably originated with the first immigrants who arrived desperately seeking work and a new life.



Moonwatcher stood on the patchy weed grass covering the open area of dusty waste ground.

He knelt down and scooped up a handful of the dry earth; sifted it through his fingers.

Two and a half years earlier, he’d embarked on a personal journey. His father had just died and his mother would follow almost a year to the day later. For Moonwatcher, it was a time of deep reflection and desperate need to explore his past. His life began here in Garngad, he retained vivid memories of those early years. But he needed more. He needed to go further back, discover his ancestors, find out who they were, what they did. He needed to learn more of his parents with whom no words had been exchanged for over twelve years. Above all, Moonwatcher had to find himself.

Now, here in this place, his journey was over. It had taken him from the famine torn townlands of Ireland to the slum tenements that once stood here on Garngad Hill. From the ploughed fields of Clydesdale to the dizzy heights of the Forth Bridge. From the beaches of Gallipoli to the trenches of the Somme. Moonwatcher now knew who he was and felt comfortable with himself.

It would have been so much more difficult had it not been for the advent of the Scotland’s People website, which uncannily came into being at the time of his father’s death. And then there was the remarkable development of the Discussion Group - in both it’s manifestations. For most members, the Group offered unparalleled guidance, information and assistance to those pusuing their family history. But for Moonwatcher it had provided something more. On the Group’s Forum, he became a Storyteller. Stories gathered on his journey. In telling these stories, he was able to sort things out in his head – the good, the bad, the ugly. To the members who read, listened, responded and encouraged, he would be forever grateful.

But the past was the past and, as he looked once more at the street running in front of what had once been the close of 168, he knew the time had come to move on. He indulged his imagination one last time and pictured a horse and cart before him, sitting patiently outside the close, waiting for the coalman to return. The cart faded, replaced by a green van, loaded with furniture, two boys and a budgie, bound for a new world in an outlying housing estate. And now the scene changed to the present. The guy standing next to the dark blue Mazda 6, was being watched suspiciously by two women across the street. He smiled and checked his watch, an Omega ‘Moonwatch’. It was time to go home. Jumping in the car and turning the ignition, he gunned the engine. Disk player blaring, he took off along Millburn, immediately turning sharply right and right again, tyres screaching and throwing up a plume of dust that prompted the gossiping women to shake their heads. The car completed the triangle and shot past where the old red police box used to stand, before roaring off down Garngadhill.

Moonwatcher smiled, ‘That’s for the kid who played in the middens.’

********** END **********

[AndrewP]

(message to make the Cyber Seance posts appear in sequence)