Robin Hamilton
That building site ...
It was 1966, the summer between my first and second years as a student at Glasgow University, and I was working on the building site to make a bit of money. People there divided sharply between the over-forties, and kids my own age, and never the twain did meet. The kids were Catholic Glasgow Irish, which was pretty obvious from the start. What I only gradually came to realise was that they weren't just illiterate Glasgow Catholic bog-Irish (they'd all left school at sixteen), but that they were the core of a very hard Catholic gang (these were the years of Tongs and Cumbie -- they weren't Cumbie, but a smaller and tougher version thereof.) And there was me, privileged middle class Protestant university student who'd been to a grammar school (Hutchesons) and was working there for a bit to earn some pocket money while they were there for life.
What would you expect?
Closest I can come to describing their attitude towards me was protective -- "Hey, Robin, fuck off that wan, it's tae heavy fur ye, we're trained tae it." Stuff like that. Though they were nice and tried not to make it too obvious I wasn't quite up to snuff. Once (before I quite realised what I was in the middle of) I decided to push it a little to see how far I could go (how stupid can you get? -- pretty stupid at 18, sometimes) and turned up with a copy of the Faber Hughes/Gunn double, and ostentatiously started to read it at lunch. A couple of them wandered over to see what I was doing, and I casually waved the book. "Oh, that's whit ye dae up the Hill, then." And off they wandered on.
Only time I had anything remotely resembling trouble wasn't really my fault. I was (as one does, sometimes) humming "Sean South of Garryone" and they landed on me like a ton of bricks -- "Jeez, Robin, fur Christ sake stop that. Don't ye know he was a flaming poofter?" (Well, I thought he was a martyred hero of the Uprising). Most of their granddaddies had probably been wasted alongside him by the Black and Tans. Long memories in Glasgow. They forgave me for it -- as an ignorant Protestant, how would I be expected to know? They were deeply homophobic.
The night before my last day on the site, we all went out for a drink to celebrate my coming departure, or commiserate, or something. The one time in the entire month I can remember the two generations coming together, though the older men only drank a decorous pint or two and left after an hour. Rest of us settled down to make night of it, bit of serious drinking. None of your half-and-a-half-pints, but doubles with a pint of heavy. For some lunatic reason my doubles were gin, not scotch. Wasn't even pretension, god knows what it was. Idiocy?
After a bit, my memories go blurred till I suddenly surfaced in the middle of a chip shop stand-off with one of the kids spitting curses at someone just out of my bleary eyesight, and the guy behind the counter holding a toureen of boiling chip-fat above his head and screaming, "If youze buggers dinnae get out o here at wance, am goin tae drown yeez aw in this." Fortunately, neither side was weaponed up (it was a social evening for us and it must have been for them too) or, even as drunk as we all were, there might have been trouble.
Anyway, they dragged me onto a bus (clustered protectively around me as usual -- well, I wouldn't have been much help in a fight anyway, so they were probably right in that instance) and off I went to bed to try and sleep it off.
I actually made it to the site the next day. As did maybe half the others
(I felt mildly proud, insofar as I could through my hangover, that I might
not be able to work as hard as them, but at least I was there, and not all
of them had made it out of bed). Though no work got done, pretty
obviously -- the Older Men covered for us (rules of the game).
Then I left ...
One of the only two times in my life I ever felt completely at home.
The other thing that stuck with me was that two of the kids were brighter than me. Wasn't anything I could do about it at the time, but that was always in the back of my mind later when I looked over the apparently no-hopers whom I was interviewing for a university place. So I tended to make more than my quota of offers to underqualified applicants. Who more often than the norm ended up with good two ones or better.
So that's the story of The Dear Green Place.
