The Spinningness of Things

Billy Watt

The day I remember was a day out of the system. I'd already had a couple of days off school with a thumping cold and had got to that stage where the fever fades but you feel lightheaded. Everything gets magnified.

My mother had taken me with her to my Granny's, where blue Woodbine smoke and the smell of stewed tea had chased me out of the living-room. There was a big old iron gate at the top of the stairs leading down to the street - this was Belville Avenue in the east end of Greenock - and I used to stand on the bottom rung then hurl myself out over the twenty or so steps.

The gate was obviously well made, like things used to be before fiscal analyses. Strangely, it opened away from you rather than towards you, which allowed the wild thrusting forward. The four rungs reached up to my chest and I could get a fair speed up, pushing out to Maria downstairs' privet hedge and then swinging back to the gatepost. Danger and safety. It felt like you were somersaulting over a cliff edge. Then all those well-made nuts, bolts and hinges carried you back ineluctably for another push-off.

Inside the house, my Granny would be letting it rip in that language that was fading already, sitting beside the fire with her legs apart. Teeny fi Troon. A roll o notes that wid choke a cuddy. A face sucked in like a goat's erse. That poor doo wi hauf a leg. Sticky-fingered Stevie next door. As black as the earl o Hydes waistcoat.

At this time of the afternoon the street was empty and all the windows were blank. Generations had lived in those houses. There were histories behind them. When you're a kid you think that anyone who was around before you must have had a hot line to Neanderthal Man. But it made for stability to know whose uncle had fought in the Somme and who could remember from before there were gas lamps.

My mother once told me that, when she was living at home with my Granny, she had been unable to thole the darkness one night during the blitz and had pulled back the blackout curtain. The roofs across the street had glistened like fishscales under the moonlight - then suddenly a German plane appeared, splintering everything with tracer fire. She hadn't tried it again.

In gaps between the houses I could see the gantries, like Meccano herons, spinning stiffly down by the river, this being back in the 60's. Scott, Lithgow, Lamont, Kincaid - big names. During the next few years my mates would leave school to start apprenticeships down in those yards, as joiners, welders or platers. I would hesitate.

Between three and four in the afternoon you could hear the town release its pent-up breath. People would start to appear in the street - initially from the bookies or the dole. Then shortly the horns would unleash everyone from the dockyards. Pushing out idly from the gatepost, I imagined being stuck in school with my fingers twitching at my haversack. I could hear the buses changing gear down in the far town and I knew that my stolen freedom would be over tomorrow morning. But, launching out into haphazardness, I imagined the changingness of things. The world of adulthood was spinning around me but I was standing on rungs that were solid as a rock.