The Day After The Music Died

Peter McHugh

To the casual onlooker a one tenement looks very much like another; to a ten year old each block is a different country, a different world, each with a different terrain. Some are in friendly territory some are in the hands of the enemy. Some have a shop frontage indicating high back courts, some are entered at ground level, some entered on a lower level still; the basement, the dungeon or dunny. Each unique back court had its walls to be climbed, its chasms to be leaped and its middens to be raked. My own back court at Gorbals Cross was particularly blessed, it had a high back court, overlooked by the gigantic redbrick remains of an abandoned brewery, the backcourt in its turn overlooked a ground entry tenement containing a particularly slimy, leprous but fascinating dunny. A more living proof of social stratification I have yet to come across.

Those in the high back were, in comparative terms, affluent. A mixture of Jews and Irish Catholics, who worked in one of two industries, namely upholstery and the building trade and who, give or take the odd mix up over special holidays and their peculiar dietary requirements, mixed freely and easily with each other. However particular opprobrium was reserved for the underclass that lived in the dunny. Mrs Rosenberg, that unique ethnic creature, an Irish Jew bemoaned that they 'neither worked nor wanted'. My mother on the other hand, who had lived and worked in America, took a more liberal view; 'They were, poor, souls,' she would announce, 'merely feckless.' ... (continues)