The Long Glasgow Kiss

I got a call from Davey before I took the tram down to Bridgeton. There was, as expected, nothing to report other than Kirkcaldy had left for his afternoon session at the Maryhill gym he had always trained in. I had told Davey to stay on the house, not on Kirkcaldy and that’s what he had done. I could tell he was worried that I would be disappointed that he had nothing to report, but I reassured him he was doing just fine and he rang off as eager as when I had left him there.

For the rest of the world, a Glaswegian was a Glaswegian was a Glaswegian. They all looked the same, spoke with the same impenetrable patois, worked in the same industrial sweatshop of shipyard, factory or steelworks; they all lived in the same kind of slum. They also shared the same schizoid tendency to be the warmest, friendliest people you could meet while, at the same time, displaying a propensity for the most psychopathic violence. Sometimes simultaneously. Within Glasgow, however, lay a chasm that divided its working class. On the surface it was a religious divide: Protestant versus Catholic. The truth is the divide was ethnic: Scottish Glaswegians versus Irish-descent Glaswegians. And the focus for the biblical hatred between the two communities were the football teams, Rangers and Celtic.

Bridgeton was part of the city’s fringes. And it looked pretty much like all the other parts of Glasgow’s fringes. The streets were lined with tenements or four-storey apartment buildings. The building material of choice in Bridgeton had been red rather than blond sandstone or red brick, but it was all pretty academic as all the buildings had been grime-darkened, like every other structure in Glasgow. Occasionally an ember of the underlying colour would glow through the soot, giving a tenement the look of a dark, rusting hulk looming into the sky. Like other parts of the city, the worst of the slums were gradually being cleared to make way for new blocks of flats. The spirit of the Atomic Age had reached Glasgow and soon all of its denizens would enjoy the very latest modern amenities. Like flushing inside toilets.

But Bridgeton was different from the other areas of the city in one way. It distinguished itself in the intensity of its hatred for its neighbour. This was the most ultra-loyalist Protestant, Catholic-hating part of Glasgow.

A few weeks before, as it was on the Twelfth of July each year, Bridgeton had been a mustering ground for the pipe bands, drummers and marchers who celebrated the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne. And once they had mustered, they would march triumphantly through the streets of Glasgow. Especially the predominantly Catholic streets. Surprisingly, the curmudgeonly Catholics didn’t seem to get into the spirit of things and refrained from joining in with songs containing lyrics like ‘We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood, surrender or you’ll die’.

But Glasgow was nothing if not a city of balance and fairness, and there was an ultra-republican Catholic, Protestant-hating part of Bridgeton too. The Norman Conks, the Catholic counterparts of the Billy Boys, had been concentrated in the Poplin Street and Norman Street part of Bridgeton. Their speciality, as well as offering the same skills for plastic surgery with open razors as the Billy Boys, was throwing Molotov cocktails made with paraffin or petrol at the marchers on the Twelfth. Or occasionally the odd ‘sausage roll’: human excrement loosely wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.

I sometimes wondered how Rio could compete with Glasgow’s carnival atmosphere.

As I walked through Bridgeton, however, there were no marching bands and little in the way of a carnival atmosphere. In fact, even on a pleasant summer’s day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere less festive. I certainly was glad I hadn’t brought the Atlantic with me. There were no other cars parked in the street in which MacSherry resided, and a knot of five or six children, faces grimy and feet bare, were playing maliciously around a streetlamp. As I walked past one block doorway, a man of about thirty stood watching me from beneath the brim of his cap. He was wearing a collarless shirt and a waistcoat, his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose forearms that looked woven from steel cable. He had his thumbs looped into the pockets of his waistcoat and leaned against the doorway, his heavy-booted feet crossed at the ankles. It was the most casual of poses, but for some reason he gave me the idea he was some kind of guard or lookout.