This is a tale tapped out on my iPad while I was visiting my son and his family in Abingdon (April 2024).

It recalls a nexus in my life, aged 16. As background, here is snapshot of my life to that juncture.

The story touches on my father’s mental health after his six years in the submarine service during which he spent many years based in Malta and around the Mediterranean, in the thick of it. The truth is, he never fully recovered from those traumatic experiences.

In later years he told us of several occasions when their sub was hunted down and trapped by German M-Class Minesweepers and depth charged. On one such occasion they were trapped lying silently on the seabed for over 48 hours while the enemy waited on the surface, equally silently and hoping to hear them trying to escape. In those days the subs dived with just the air they had, with no auxiliary oxygen and CO2 filtration as in modern submarines. Gradually the air pressure in the sub dropped and noses and ears began to bleed with everyone wheezing and gasping for breath.

My mother was a complex personality. This is an understatement. Even now I’m not sure I understand her behaviour.

Primarily she was a kind-hearted person who wanted everyone to love her. This comes across the story. She was clever, with a lot of unrealised potential. She left school at 14 and worked in the local Co-Op in Govanhill. later she was a cleaner and became quasi-manager of the local synagogue when the original manager died and the congregation was dwindling. She had a good vocabulary and enjoyed crosswords. She loved ballroom dancing and was was good at it. Victor Silvester on TV was a favourite.

Her father died when she was seven years old and she was always ‘the baby of the family’ with three older brothers and three older sisters. She was better spoken than my father and rigorously pulled us up on grammar and the sounding of words. She never swore, not once. She taught us to be polite and to ‘do the right thing’ always and wherever possible, to be kind to people less fortunate than ourselves. She sent us to church and Life Boys and Boys Brigade but did not attend.

And Mum loved to read, curling up in a chair before a blazing fire and reading late into the night, consuming a stack of books from the local lending library, smoking, drinking tea. She loved to meet and greet and could blether to friends and neighbours for hours. She opened her purse to anyone in need and because of this and her excessive smoking, she was completely unable to ‘get by’ on what my father earned.

Like her mother (Granny Bremner), and two of her sisters, Mum did not drink alcohol, ever. Tea and cigarettes were her addictions. American Cream Soda and Ginger Wine at Christmas and New Year.

But she had a flaw. She was secretive and hid things from my father, from others who might have helped and from me. She did not tell outright lies, as such, but much of what she did was at best ‘clandestine’. The issue was always her poor management of money.

In Pollokshaws we had lived in a ‘single end’ with an outdoor WC shared with others. Presumably the rent was low and there were shops of every kind nearby. At Greenview Street, we lived near a tram terminus with a frequent service of other passing trams which meant Granny Bremner and Mum’s sisters were only about half an hour by tram away. Generally however, to save money, we usually walked.

When we were rehoused to Arden, as explained in the story, she was floundering with the extra cost of higher rents and more expensive foods bought from travelling van shops: baker, butcher, fishmonger, vegetables, groceries (cigarettes), coal deliveries. During the early years in Arden there were no shops, schools or churches. No libraries, no amenities. There was a tram service and later a terminus was created for the No 57. There was also the No 25 and No 25A trams from nearby Carnwadric all involving a trek and a wait to catch a tram. No hopping on after a minute or two wait like in Pollokshaws.

Later, I would learn that these SSHA houses in Arden had been built on the cheap with ‘no fines concrete’ a slurry poured into metal shutters, affording a quick method of construction. The insulation value of these external walls was very poor and heating a much larger house was a huge extra cost burden.

To be fair, many of the families near us were equally poor, struggling. Being a softy, my mother was always an easy source of ‘borrowed’ cigarettes and cups of tea, milk and sugar, seldom repaid.

My father did his best by working overtime, handing his weekly pay packet to my mother and ‘letting her get on with it’, receiving ‘pocket money’ for his pipe tobacco and the occasional beer or a night at ‘the dogs’ (Shawfield Greyhound track).

The key failure, I realise now, is that my parents did not work together as a team. Dad left matters fiscal to Mum and she pretended she was coping.

To make ends meet, my mother borrowed (always in secret from Dad and often from me too), usually from her sisters and from Aunt Margaret, matriarch of the Bonthron family, my father’s oldest sister. Or she ran up debts on ‘tick’. Over a period of weeks into months, Mum lost the plot, robbing Peter to pay Paul until the muddle was revealed. Usually this became obvious as Christmas approached or the Glasgow Fair holiday loomed when another bust up happened and my father would lose it, explode and ‘lift his hands’ in frustration.

When they made up, her debts had been cleared. Looking back, I suspect this emergency money must have come from my mother’s sisters. Then, after a few weeks, when my mother’s face had healed, Mum and Dad patched things up and we would go back to live with Dad.

However, as I got older, I became more aware that there was always an undercurrent of tension, especially for me, the eldest child by five years and my mother’s (only?) confidante, party to most of her devious maneuverings.

Right, enough of this sad reminiscence.

This story is, I hope, amusing and informative of my life at that time.

There, you have it.

Read on.