Ghost City

Ronald Frame

We were known by the blazers of our schools; grey, navy blue, Prussian blue, marine blue, leaf green, bottle green, purple, lilac, navy and moss green, chocolate-brown and gold, beige. In the suburbs of Glasgow, as of Edinburgh, the vital question was "Which school do you go to?" Always single-sex, quite naturally. The Academy, Kelvinside, Boys' High, Girls' High, Laurel Bank, Westbourne, Park, Hutchie Boys, Hutchie Girls, Belmont House, Craigholme, Drewsteighnton.

The sixties were still the days of precedent of fathers' sons and mothers' daughters, of professionals. Trade already had a foot in the door, and probably paid the fees more promptly than others. But we were brought up with the psychotic Scottish attitude to money: respect for those who make it off their own bat, and a deeper sense that it is a vulgar matter and ought to be beneath regard.

The appearance of our suburb was a schizophrenic mixture of Scottishness and Englishness. Sandstone villas, of red or grey, and a somewhat gaunt style of architecture: sash windows with the lower panes plain glass, and the upper stained, oblong fan lights of enchased or frosted glass, tiled vestibules, the largest houses equipped with an ornately skylit billiard room in the attic.

I have a persistent memory of polished granite curling stones set on front steps, and the names on gates and gateposts, like a litany - 'Brora', 'Loch Fannich', 'Raasay', 'Beinn Dearg', 'Glenquoich', 'Kinlocheil', 'Schiehallion', 'Ardnish'. Another type of domestic building was a pure and unadulterated import from England: white walls or pebbledash and small-paned windows, rain barrels, oak front doors, red rosemary roof tiles, and names evocative of their foreignness: 'Walberswick', 'Lyndfield', 'Staplehurst', 'Hurstpierpoint', 'Penwithick'.

We could never be quite sure where we belonged, to ourselves or as northern vassals of a southern imperial power. (After I was born there was a debate as to which I should be called: 'Ranald' or 'Ronald'. The Scottish lobby lost out, and I was given to the mainstream, to what was thought to represent convention even with its Sassenach cast.)

One of the two principal sports in our suburb was tennis - my coach, a cruel look-alike for Simone Signoret in her last days, would wearily remind us as we panted after lost balls about a handful of past (long past) pupils who had played Junior Wimbledon - and the two rival clubs with their lists of rules and their cindertracks and Balmoral bicycles thrown down under the straggly rhododendrons returning to wildness, they could (more or less) have been in any of the Home Counties.

The other sport was skiing, a more risqué pastime. The organisers put their faith in the blasting cold Grampian air and the hot alcohol-purged punches at the obligatory ceilidh, that those - and the terror of all that unmitigated distance of purple heather - would add up to good clean living of the White Heather Club variety.

Roman Catholics were virtually beyond our ken, and a coloured face would have been an event - if we'd ever encountered one. Most of us had parents who went to church - Church of Scotland, of course - and their choice of which one, like which school, was carefully made. If, as an adult member, you missed more than two Communion Services in a row, you were drummed out, for life and eternity.

The minuscule Episcopal Church - hassocks, cassocks and choirboys - was straight out of 'Dad's Army' and treated by the rest of us as a bit of a joke. Somehow, the Presbyterians' dreary décor and twenty-minute sermons - very pussy-footing reflections on our modern consuming world - and the bossy, trilling voices in the choir and the frequently fluffed organ anthems were all supposed to bring you closer to God. Jesus Christ, one was constantly reminded, was only a carpenter's son. You could never have pictured him - even wearing a cap - going to the right school, or making it to the Nazareth equivalent of tennis-fours, which caused you to wonder if everything had turned out so gloriously by God's say-so after all.

Some random memories. As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.

Another incident, which still haunts me. I was ten and after school I was running for an orange-and-yellow bus picking up at a stop: the one just by Wyllie's book and pen shop on Sauchiehall Street. I sprinted out from behind a lorry; a car's brakes screamed, its tyres burned rubber on the road - and I found myself no more than two inches from its front chrome bumper. It shouldn't have happened - the alertness of the driver's reactions, the instantaneous effectiveness of the shoe on the pedal on the brake pads - but it did, and I owe my life to somebody I know nothing about, appearance or name.

The viciousness of our Latin classes at ten and eleven years old, having the language thrashed into us by a man who had been tortured by the Gestapo in his youth. Nothing, even chemistry, could ever be so bad after that. We even survived two years of Cicero, and our reward was blood and guts in Virgil and Tacitus.

Greek by comparison was tourist stuff: from "The sailors are in the marketplace", "The teeth of the lion are large and sharp", to Homer's purplish travelogues and the Swann - Hellenic lectures of Thucydides - or as we called him "Thucky-die-daze". I was better at Latin. Fear and trembling did the trick there, having the rudiments - literally enough - impressed upon us by our tormentor as our corrected ink exercises were hurled across the room, or a grammar book was slammed down on a thick, unreceptive skull.

But when our form-mistress, Miss Lightbody, returned to us after our regular beating sessions, she was all sweetness and coy smiles to the man. When he'd made his theatrical exit with cloak flying and leather tawse secured beneath his jacket, sensually laid over his thin shoulder, her face immediately fell. As the resounding steel tips of his shoes grew fainter, she gave us her sourest expression and put a curious degree of pity into her voice. "Boys". Her accent was Kelvinside genteel, but not quite so super-genteel as the best front-of-shop one she reserved for parents and the senior school heads of department. (Miss Lightbody instructed us in elocution, not southern received pronunciation, but that unique, strangulated version of long, distorted vowels, believed to be the mark of true home-bred gentility.) "- boys, why do you have to be making such heavy weather of this?" Sometimes her hands shook, and her breath smelt of the tobacco that stained her index finger, because she had been up in the eyrie of a staff room, terrified to think of the sneering, sarcastic jokes and the flashing strap of leather.

She wanted to cry for us, perhaps, but she couldn't allow herself to. At ten and eleven we were being propelled into the adult world, hurled in at the deep, deep end. Three years later, still approaching the prime which Miss Jean Brodie on the east coast had luxuriated in, Miss Lightbody died - quite unfairly - of lung cancer. Such redoubtable women.

Between the ages of nine and thirteen we were theirs, and as Miss Brodie would have claimed we were theirs for life. They taught us what couldn't be unlearned again: taking personal pride in self-discipline and hard graft (being able to shut yourself in a room for a couple of hours or however long it might take to tackle a specific piece of work), practising good manners and quiet courtesies as an instinct. Even the elocution. Perhaps the price of such tight control was a certain uniformity, and not a little dullness. But in their spinsterly way they knew the supreme value of self-dependence.

Every Friday morning there was a test over three periods of what we'd learned in the week, and once every month a more searching super-test which lasted all five periods of the morning, until the lunch break.

At the age of nine I could cross the length of Glasgow on a succession of buses, wearing regulation garter-topped stockings and compulsory cap and - if I'd done well enough to earn the honour in last week's test - with a First World War medal on a striped ribbon pinned to my brown blazer. I must have looked like a chocolate soldier. At the time, however, I thought nothing of it, and no harm ever came to me; if you have the courage of yourself, the dangers fall away, like the temptations of Vanity Fair.

During that same interlude, between the ages of nine and thirteen, the history we were being taught was European and Scottish: the Armada, the Black Death, and the six King James's, Kings Malcolm I-IV, Alexander I-Ill, Margaret of Denmark, The Maid of Norway. We concerned ourselves with English history only obliquely.

Likewise in geography periods we celebrated the existence of all the red countries in the atlas: the British Commonwealth, that is to say, and preferably those corners colonised by Scottish adventurers and missionaries.

A quarter of my own school were Jewish - shul-boys, so to speak - and their spiritual home was two and a half thousand miles away. During the '67 War they spoke with tears in their eyes of going out to fight to the death in the Sinai heat.

Home-readers included Kidnapped and an interminable Neil Munro novel about the 1745 rebellion, set among heather hills and gurgling burns. What persuaded me I wanted to write one day was hidden away in another textbook. The World's Classics Scottish Short Stories, with a green, white and black synthetic 'tartan' paper cover.

The story was by Dorothy K. Haynes, about the busy tedium of one day in the life of a quarryman's wife in a fifties tenement - doing the wash in the wash-house, whitewashing the bed recess, eating a mutton pie with ketchup for lunch, flicking through old magazines, papering the walls of their one cramped livingroom with a pattern of rosebuds over the old one of peacocks and pagodas: a simple, dignified, affecting story about memories and surviving dreams in Mrs McCallum's head, which make life unaccountably shine for her, in the quiet sifting of sunlight through summer dust, and to the floating tones of a belfry bell.

For ten years I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel. It was heady music, and evocative, and faintly decadent: playing it, one should have been able to be impressionistic, that is not too accurate, but in fact it was perilous to lose a single second's concentration, so tightly was the business constructed - one hand playing against the other, each at their own tempi. It has to be as meticulously disciplined as jazz.

Two Saturday evenings per term there would be a "hooley", as it was called, at Miss Mac, the piano teacher's house, "Oronsay", in Hyndland, where we went for our lessons. We were divided into two camps, the Picts and the Scots. Only grave illness or a rugby international in Edinburgh, at Murrayfield, was an excuse for non-attendance. The evenings took three forms. First, the table tennis duels, my especial dread, which were performed in front of the mustered howling Picts and Scots with racquets you drew lots for. Each racquet had been sawn into a ludicrous shape - the stave of a question mark, a circle with three smaller circles cut out, a triangle to paddle the air with. Then there were sit-down games evenings. Divided up into groups of four, we rotated round the tartan-carpeted room, from baize card-table to baize card-table, playing more and more aggressive games with ever keener rivalry.

In one mindless exercise you had to pick up plastic straws from a heap with a little curved brass hook and not disturb the pile; in another you had to guide with a steady hand a closed metal hoop along - God help us - a switchback of electrically charged wire.

Finally, there were the infamous stramash evenings. We all perched on children's folding canvas camp-stools, behind music stands at their lowest settings, and played a variety of percussion instruments - gongs, cymbals, drums, tambourines, triangles, and some fiendish dulcimers - while Miss Mac played 'Bluebells of Scotland' and Gilbert and Sullivan and the 'Gay Gordons' on the piano, shrieking out the bar numbers as we reached the point - vaguely - in our accompaniment: "Thirty two!", "Fifty nine!", "Eighty six!" The windows ran with condensation, our armpits ran with perspiration; knees cracked, there were glimpses of lilac school knicker, and even a drooping gusset of the black tights, de rigeur for uniform now as then. Some unfortunates had pimples that had popped or were about to, others blackheads and sheeny grease slides on the wings of their noses; hair hung lankly or was too soft to comb, freckles joined together to map a cheek with its own little Sicily or Madagascar; there were teeth braces, and incipient moustaches in male and female, and both sexes of ankle hanging from the backs of shoes during another epidemic of athlete's foot. There really must be a hell, because at the hooleys in Hyndland we had our first intimation of it.

Sundays in my teens were spent on homework: from 8 am until at least 8 pm, with stoppages to be fed and watered. I was carrying up to ten subjects simultaneously. Even applying myself the round of the clock or longer - sometimes I wasn't finished until midnight, and Saturdays always included an amount of preparatory work - each subject was only cursorily treated: I timed them by the watch on my wrist. Greek, I've been told, has always been indifferently taught in Scotland. Why? Do we not truly believe in it? All those tenses and implied choices, aorist/preterite and the optative to complement subjunctive and future perfect - are they all too wishy-washy and indecisive for a traditionally black-and-white intellect?

But by another reading, we Scots should have been receptive to these subtlest nuances in the distinction between tenses in the Ancient Greeks' language. Who more practised than ourselves at the might-have-been, after all? We relive our past, not quite truthfully, in a purple alpenglow of possibility. Might have, could have, would have...

For all the evidence of a national adventuring spirit, we live also with the consciousness of failure: four, five, six hundred miles from London and the South, on a cold wet edge of Europe.

With the example of precedent, we have a right to suppose the worst, and so we anticipate it: defensiveness becomes what it has to but ought not to, wee censorious mouths and that awful smugness, the inward-turning, the struggle for faith in ourselves, the "wha's like us?" battle-cry which repetition renders as full of thunder as a pea-rattle in a drum.

Glasgow - as Philip Prowse of the Citizen's Theatre has observed - has the feel of a north European sea city: of Hamburg, of Amsterdam, of Gothenburg. On its hills it bears a distinct resemblance to Genoa, or to Turin; the Victorians built their warehouses as Italian palazzi, lived in colonnaded villas, and worshipped in churches of an angular, mythically antique style devised by "Greek" Thomson.

And I've never responded to American taste, East Coast literary or Hollywood cinematic. In my late teens when essential tastes were formed, I went to see sub-titled European films in the Cosmo cinema during its last days. (And where better to watch Visconti for one, than surrounded by so much slightly tatty operatic Art Deco maroon plush?) The books I read were European, black-spined Penguin Classics, or grey-spined Modern Classics I bought from the sliding wallracks in Wyllie's.

I read and read, even travelling home on the 'Blue Train', on that colourful-sounding excursion to the suburbs. Restaurants called 'The Blue Train' exist in Paris and Manhattan, and that's why I can believe that, try as you will, the past is only lying in wait in gleaming new circumstances, ready to haul you all that long, long way back.

Cafes and wine bars in Glasgow, as in Edinburgh, masquerade now under Parisian and Milanese names, and it's said to be a revival. But new money has no memory. There was real style before them, an informed opulence, but it has disappeared: there is a ghost city, and I can remember it - just- from my childhood and early schooldays.

Older people refer to shops and restaurants and hotels that didn't survive the fifties and the sixties, pummelled to rubble as successive labour-dominated councils razed despised Victoriana - just as the Victorians in prior turn had done away with medieval Glasgow.

The memories recede yearly beneath copper-tinted money towers, in the wide-eyed stares of seamless plate glass. Simpson Hunter, Rowan's, MacDonald's, Copland & Lyle, Manson's, the North British Hotel, Forsyth's, Jackson's, Pettigrew & Stephen, Daly's, Wyllie Hill's, Wyllie & Lochhead, Sorley's, the St Enoch Hotel, Lyons, the Grosvenor, the Berkeley, Ferrari's, One-O-One, the Clyde Model Dockyard. Nostalgia is a vast temptation, and one which the Scots race is prone to. Perhaps it's the citified variant of the Celtic supernatural third eye which is our national legacy: the recognition and articulation of those phases of time running parallel to the meagre living one, currents that pull beneath the surface of the stream.

It was Edinburgh, not Glasgow, which had the tradition of split psyches: Deacon Brodie, Burke and Hare, Jekyll and Hyde, Major Weir, one (respectable) man by day and another (a brigand) by night. Or Robert Louis Stevenson walking at nightfall from the genteel New Town to the Old Town of low dens and dives. A city of Election and Damnation, of long shadows on Close walls, echoing footsteps in the steep, staired vennels between the nine-storey tenement-lands like cliffs.

But today it's Glasgow that has the split psyche. There's the proletariat Glasgow of cliché, strident and complaining and unforgiving, and there's the ritzy, glitzy, revamped new version, packaged with glib ad-slogans. A surface place - but what if its appearance is its reality? Does it have an intellectual structure? The much-hyped paintings of the New Glasgow Boys - and Girls - borrow weighty references, they're clad in other artists' names and styles.

Shopping malls are fashion cat-walks, where the emperors parade their new clothes, and the indoors air has a fusty, manufactured taste.

And somewhere else, out of the reckoning, is Another Glasgow, the one in which I and all my sort were brought up.

Edmund White has spoken of the significance of social dislocation in the shaping of the American creative mind - a sideways or, more likely, downwards slide on the social scale. I didn't slide but a sense of precariousness seems to me essential to do the thing that I do, which is writing novels and stories. You're holding on to the old beatitudes, be they personal (parents, a remembered history) or more general (a shared milieu - the customs and roles of a certain caste in the community). It's an emotional and social impairment: nothing is ever as good as...

So says memory, as it has done in all the ages of history, but it's compounded now by the speed of vertical (up-and-down) social movement.

There's an element of resentment, of course, which has to do with others having showy money: I at least, I need to believe, have the gifts of undemonstrative education and infallible courtesy, which their money is too sticky-new to buy. And I also have some measure of talent, sufficient at any rate to distinguish me beyond considerations of class, profession, income. Thus - I can persuade myself - I make myself immune, to a degree, from categorisation. Well, maybe...

The British middle class define themselves by their appearances but somehow it's more extreme with the Scots: complicated by our self-righteous Calvinism, the difference is more pronounced between who we appear to be and who we really are. Falls from public grace are bloodier, even more vituperative affairs in the north than in the south.

It's a situation made to be written about. Yet the writing involves flouting all the rules which were dinned into you as you grew up: all disposing to the same end, namely, our commonly abiding by the social niceties (adhering to the sectarian and attitudinal) status quo, not drawing attention to yourself. The writing act each time is one of the grossest treachery, not of individuals - you learn to cover your tracks - but betrayal of your background. A felt-tip pen is like a Kalashnikov.

So much has disappeared. At thirty-seven I'm already a ghost. Writing fiction, they say, is like making maps, like trying to trace your way back to a certain place; in my own case to a city, one far from perfect but quite complete, one that can never be so whole again.

In one of the great Glasgow department stores we would sometimes meet up after school to have afternoon tea - my mother, my sister and I - while mannequins walked between the tables and a small orchestra played.

Women then had a sound: silky, sheeny, slithery. The models wafted perfume behind them, scissor-striding. Sometimes they smiled, but sparely. They never spoke, so you didn't know to hear whether or not they were "ordinaire", as people called the condition in our neck of the woods. I wondered how on earth you could hold them, these aloof paragons of elegance, how to stop them from walking away from you.

At seventeen I started to rush-write stories. They appeared in Scottish newspapers. Everyone we knew read them, and I saw them reconsidering me in a new, not very favourable light. I was giving too much of myself away. They might have been reading my diary. I had power for the first time in my life - to demand time, to occupy people's thoughts for however long a short story took to read - but the having of that power frightened me. I stopped; I didn't write another story for the next ten years. When I was ready again, it just boiled up out of me, all my piety and my rage.

I have to warn you - I've been immersed in fiction-writing for the last decade. Even the facts have started to recede. This isn't 'my' story any more than it is several thousand others'. Novelists too are notoriously unreliable chroniclers. If I am a kind of ghost, then the past is already suspended between what may have been the truth and the fable it's already turning into.