Nostalgia of the Tenement
Helen Ramsay
Nostalgia of the Tenement
As deep within my mind I see, a barefoot lad that once was me.
Of folks and places all well kent, Nostalgia of the tenement,
Two wally dugs upon the brace, Maw throw me over a jeely-piece,
The jawbox where I scrubbed my feet, the pipe-clay patterns of the
street,
We little had of worldly wealth, a jeely-pan upon the shelf.
A jug or two at Christmas sent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
Milk cans rattling at the dawn, the fender stool we all sat on,
The Monday ritual of the pawn, things and customs long since gone,
The jet black kettle on the hob, the dinner cover minus knob,
The old zinc bath below the bed, the heilan soldier made of lead,
The next door neighbor old and bent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
The day I won a hundred jorries, stolen rides on back of lorries,
A golliwog deprived of hair, "Doon the Watter" at the Fair,
The loabby and the kitchen press, the blankets in the old wood chest,
Things of childhood sentiment, Nostalgia of the tenement.
The rumble of the Riddrie tram, a two pound pot of rhubarb jam,
A card from Flanders from the war, insurance money in the drawer,
The waxcloth polished fresh and bright, the bath-brick used on Friday
night,
A footprint in the wet cement, Nostalgia of the tenement.
The built-in bed where four weans slept, green bunker where the coal
was kept,
The wee canary bonnie bird, that early in the morn was heard,
The dabbities that widnae stick, the old oil lamp, the flickering
wick,
Saturday penny, carefully spent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
Hunch-cuddy-hunch and kick the can, the many barefoot miles we ran,
Peever, Forfeits, Gird and Stick, Release and Moshie, take your pick,
These were our games in yester-year, little we knew of adult fear,
Ragged but happy and content, Nostalgia of the tenement.
The clabber dancing, mouthpiece band, how many cards are in my hand,
The dykes, the jumps, the battered toes, climbs, adventures, tattered
clothes,
Guesses at the sweetie shop, meetings at the tramway stop,
Patch sheets make a bonnie tent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
Picnics at the Cuddies Park, scurry home before the dark,
Ali Bali who's got the ball, wickets chalked upon the wall,
Fetch the rags for Candy Rock, a jumper and your father's socks,
Eddie Polo, Pearl White, Episode 3 on Thursday night,
Oh! For the days so happy spent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
Nuts and apples, Hallowe'en, Dook for them the bath is clean,
Ha'penny Pea-Brae, Vinegar Sour, Georges Square - pinch a flower,
Carters, Horses, Heavy load, jam the breadth of Parly Road,
Wan, two, three a leerie, I went out tae spin my peerie,
The ship that sailed the eely ally oh, a step for the hint I didn't
know,
Never a word of discontent, Nostalgia of the tenement,
Are you a Billy or a Dan, somebody sent the cruelty man,
Take you choice, Cock or Hen, join the Fitbaw team again,
And though we didn't own a thing, some paper and a dawd of string,
Would make a ball that we would boot, until the Bobby made us scoot.
Up the closes, through the pen, Nostalgia of the tenement,
The caur has disappeared for good, a car park, where the chippie
stood,
The old Townhead, a wind-swept wreck, the tally shop a discotheque.
Now as I reach my final page, I look back on a by-gone age,
And wish that once again could I, hear my mother's goodnight cry,
"Ben the room and coorie doon", Children of old Glasgow Toon,
Close the book my muse is spent, Nostalgia of the tenement.
Unfortunately, author unknown.
--
Cheers, Helen
hramsay at cogeco dot ca
Glenallan
"Helen Ramsay" <r...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2l8orfF...@uni-berlin.de...
The Lavvy.
There is only one thing less comfortable than a lavatory
pan with no seat, and that is a lavatory pan with half a seat.
Our last house in Toonheid sported this unusual,
(even for Toonheid) toilet arrangement.
The Toonheid tenement, much like all the others in Glasgow,
housed perhaps three or four families of three to ten people each,
so it was hardly surprising that the ster-heid-lavvy took real abuse.
The trouble was that no one seemed to care.
Over the decades, when things fell apart, well, that's how they stayed.
I cannot remember a single Toonheid toilet that was fit to shite in.
Invariably, the pan was cracked or broken, the windows missing a
few panes and the door lacked a lock.
All of this should have dispirited anyone,
but fortunately we didn't know any better.
Merciful release came in the early fifties when Glasgow Corporation
started to construct the post war 'housing 'schemes' at Drumchapel,
Castlemilk and Easterhouse. Mind you, these places were and are
very far from perfect, but for the first time in a hundred generations,
Glaswegians and Toonheiders in particular could look forward to a
bath and the necessities of life without freezing to death
This was the beginning of the end for Toonheid.
Glenallan
---------
Glenallan
I was driving along Kennedy Street in Glasgow the other day,
and passed by the spot where my ancestral home once stood.
Some of you will know that this entire area, known affectionately
as Toonheid lives on only in a diminishing number of memories.
Toonheid was famous for nothing in particular.
Its houses were ancient grey sandstone tenements which reeked
of the stench of urine and shite. Long ago I was domiciled in one
of these quaint little places. It was a far cry from the Grannies
Hielan Hame, so beloved of generations of Scots who live
everywhere but Scotland.
Toonheid gave up the ghost in the seventies, I believe, when
Glasgow Corporation razed it to the ground to make way for smart new
hooses for the lieges. My ancestral home, which I am told, subsequently
became a brothel was a victim of this sea change in the fortunes of the
working people of Glasgow.
In particular, my thoughts were guided to the Grafton and Carlton cinemas.
There was one other opposite the Carlton, in Castle Street adjacent to
Valerio's café, but I forget its name. As a boy, when the notion took me,
I could run round all of these three cinemas to see what was showing,
and then make up my mind where I would spend the next three hours or so.
It was always a hard decision if the Bowery Boys and Buster Crabb were
showing in different picture hooses.
It was a time of innocence. There was no 'drugs scene' or any
great expectation, for good or ill, that things would ever change.
Indeed it appeared that the tenement buildings had always been there
and that they would always remain. Parliamentary Road, with its awesome
name was the Main Street of Toonheid. It had seen countless generations
of young Scots before I, jist anither wee boy, appeared on the scene.
Parly Road had its fair share of men's pubs in its length from the
Empire Theatre to Castle Street at its other end. There was always a great
bustle of activity in Parly Road, which constantly had tramcars running
to and fro. In a short time I learned the art of dodging the trams as I
crossed from one side of the road to the other. In fact, I always had
a smug pride that I carried out Tram Dodging with consummate skill.
If you are ever in Glasgow's Renfield Street, take a look at the
locals ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving with the buses.
You'll see what I mean.
Anyhow, as far as I could see there is only one bulding
remaining in Toonheid, amid the sea of new hooses.
It is St Mungo's RC Church.
As a wee Presbyterian with an inbuilt sense of bigotry,
which has waned through the years, my pals and I would scatter the
water in the wee font at the door to the four winds.
There was no particular malice in this.
It was jist something that ye did in 1947.
Glenallan
---------
Glenallan
As a wee boy, with a few pence pocket money, my
Glesga keelie pals and I used to take ourselves off
to Tom Ferris's Philatelic Shop at the top of the as then,
unreconstructed West Nile Street.
It was only a mile or less.
This was a 'must see' wonderland of stamp and coin collecting
for adults and children alike.
Tom Ferris, (I never actually knew him, I was only ten),
probably did more than anyone else to educate the raggy arsed
urchins of 40s/50s Glasgow in geography
than all the volumes of The Mitchell Library.
His shop was a 'brilliant wee place', always packed out on
a Saturday with schoolboys. Tom, used to sell great big bags
of stamps to young collectors for pennies.
It was from this source that we first learned of
The Dominion of Canada and Ceylon and Tristan da Cunha.
There were even stamps from the Dominion of Newfoundland
and huge stamps you could wrap a parcel in, from
Russia and Poland.
Ach, there were stamps from everywhere and a shilling could
get you a thousand. It was always good fun to look through the
Stanley Bibbons book of stamps. As I remember Stanley Gibbons
quoted values that were a thousand times what I paid for the
stamps.
I had a single stamp from South Africa worth
£10,000, but so had everyone else.
I have never figured this oot, tae the present day.
We must all hae been millionaires.!
Many a good night was spent on sterheid landing, under
a gas light with yer pals, using those wee sticky hinge things
that I could never get right, swapping discoveries of childhood
imagination as well as stamps.
Now, Tom Ferris's shop is long gone, and West Nile Street
has been rebuilt 'in the modern idiom' (which is architect-speak
for having made an erse of it), but I am sure there must still be a
'real stamp shop' in Glasgow somewhere.
Well, maybe not.
Stamp Collecting is probably too tame for the murderous
wee bastards that are runnin' aboot these days.
Cheers
Glenallan
---------
;-)
Glenallan
---
Stories from the Chimney Pots
http://www.glenallan.dsl.pipex.com
For a nice wee tune about Glasgow go.......
http://www.glenallan.dsl.pipex.com/glasgow.mp3
Glenallan
The Cuddy's Park
To the north of the old Monklands Canal, where the M8
motorway now runs, there was an interesting hinterland
of Toonheid. In those far off days it was all more or less open
ground.
First when you would pass the wee railway station on Pinkston Road,
which incidentally was Glasgow's first, on the left, lay the
considerable
expanse of The Cuddy's Park.
My dad had played there when he was a wee boy.
The Cuddy's Park had hills and valleys and a railway marshalling
yard, as well as a scrap yard and surrounding sawmills.
It was a ready-made land of adventure.
What is not commonly known is that the tunnel from Queen Street
Station
runs directly underneath and there is a ventilation shaft, which peeps
above just 100 yards or so north of the M8. Nowadays it is disguised
as a kind of miniature Stonehenge, where once it was just a circle of
railway sleepers.
Every winter, when the snow fell, hordes of youngsters would
invade the Cuddy's Park from far and near. There was a really
good sledge run where the park backed on to the old Pinkston
Power Station, whose twin chimneys were a landmark in
Glasgow from thirty miles away.
I recall swimming as a boy in the basin where the heated
water from the power station disgorged into the canal.
Occasionally someone got drowned.
On the other side of Pinkston Road, where Sighthhill now
stands lay a football ground and a soda waste mountain
from our own local chemical plant in Tennant Street.
This was known as the Salt Waste.
Because of its literally mountainous proportions, little rivulets
and streams ran down into a slimy sea of soda waste, which was
the Stinkie Ocean. The Stinkie Ocean was so large that
rafts were built to sail across it.
Underneath lay a green sludge reminiscent of an old sci-fi movie.
(I know about these things)
In those days, it was customary to rake through middens for 'lucks',
scant regard being paid to such notions as hygiene.
It was possible to make a passable axe from an old tin can flattened
over a stick. Likewise a suit of armour could be made from a
selection of cardboard boxes from the co-op shop.
My auntie served in the co-op, so that was handy.
Copyright. All Rights Reserved Glenallan-Xanadu 2003
Helen K
read the Nostalgia of the Tenement a couple of times. I'm nearly greetin'
noo with nostalgia masel. Now I have to learn how to store the MP3 file.
Thanks to you both Cheers Helen K
Glenallan
"Helen K" <hkcpromp...@nospam.yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:cco815$o4i$1...@titan.btinternet.com...
Maybe when I retire I'll set up
Radio Glenallan World Wide. :-)
The Global Nostalgia Station ;-)
Eh! Whit!?
Robert Peffers
"Helen K" <hkcpromp...@nospam.yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:cco815$o4i$1...@titan.btinternet.com...
Hi, Helen.K,
Just store it as an MP3 file on your hard disk. It should play back on
several players including the ubiquitous, "Windows Media Player.
--
Aefauldlie, (Scots word for Honestly),
Robert, (Auld Bob), Peffers,
Kelty,
Fife,
Scotland, (UK).
Web Site, "The Eck's Files":- http://www.peffers50.freeserve.co.uk
E-Mail:- b...@weedugpeffers50.freeserve.co.uk
(Tak oot the wee dug tae send e-mail).
---
Aa ootgannin screivings maun hae nae wee beasties wi thaim..
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