by
George Friel, 187 pages
Part
of A Glasgow Trilogy
590 pages, Canongate
Review
by Pat Black
I
no longer live in Glasgow, but I still belong to her, and she won’t let me
forget it.
I’m
almost five years gone, now. If I was an astronaut and Glasgow was the Earth,
she wouldn’t appear blue any more – just another twinkly dot among a million
others on my scanner. It’s nice to know she’s still there, even if I’m not.
George
Friel is a somewhat forgotten part of the city’s literary canon. Born in 1910
and dying in 1975, he would have seen the city utterly transformed in his lifetime
(some say the council planning department did more damage than Hitler). A
teacher by trade, Friel knew a little bit of success in his literary career with
The Boy Who Wanted Peace after it was
dramatized on Scottish television. He drew favourable notices for his work, particularly
from Anthony Burgess, but his books remained in relative obscurity for most of
his life.
I
was stunned to learn that Friel was known as a rather unsentimental chronicler
of Glasgow in the post-war years. For me he seemed to pander to a toxic nostalgia
which chokes a lot of the city’s popular art. One of Glasgow’s most successful
home-grown theatrical shows is The
Steamie, a musical about the women who worked in the city’s laundries in
the 1950s. This is close to blasphemy for some, but when washed down with the
comedy of Dorothy Paul, it gives me bellyache. When I was a young man it spoke
to me of the austere generations which came before, still stunned by the idea
of a house with its own lavatory, and deeply envious of they young yins and their ambitions. This was the language of
people who seemed to have nothing but contempt for me.
“Aye!”
yells the old woman down the stairs, leaning on her mop. “I remember you when
you were a snotty wean! Don’t gie me any o’ yer lip! I know your faither!”
I
guess everyone had a wee woman like that in their close, who we remember with
affection despite the fact she was a horrible, nosey, bitter old harridan.
Weren’t you?
“In
the name o’ the wee man! You need a good boot in the erse, so ye do!”
Grace and Miss
Partridge
is an ensemble piece, looking at the two characters in the title and the people
round about them. Grace is a little girl who lives in a tenement close,
somewhere in north Glasgow in the 50s or 60s – Maryhill, I suspect, or maybe Possil
Park.
Up
the stairs lives Miss Partridge, a tapped old maid who has visions of family
ghosts and various other entities. Miss Partridge was once married and lived on
a farm in America, but something went wrong, and she came back to live out her
spinsterhood as a clerk for a laundry firm. She’s a figure of fun among the
local population, and is particularly tormented by the hordes of children who
swarm over the back greens. Miss Partridge is the type of old besom who provides
the best sport of all for semi-feral wee bastards the world over; the type who
rises to the bait, howling across the middens at her short-trousered
provocateurs.
One
of these children is the apple of Miss Partridge’s eye; wee Grace, who lives
downstairs from her. She dotes on the little girl with an uncomfortable
intensity, and dearly wishes she had one of her own to love. Miss Partridge’s
only living relative, her younger brother Tommy, worries when he finds out
about this. Miss Partridge has a past only Tommy knows about, involving a stint
in a mental hospital following an incident involving another little girl.
Friel’s
canvas broadens to take in Hugh Main, a round, cheerful medical student who
calls on another of the close’s residents, his cousin, Donald. This douce highlander
is a hulking figure taken to joining in the children’s games in the back court,
in a fashion which seemed a little odd back then but which would be viewed with
the deadliest suspicion nowadays. I remember that sort of stuff when I was
growing up; guys who would come down and play football with the boys on their
own. Might have been totally innocent; might not. I’ll never know. Curiously,
this echoes Percy in The Boy Who Wanted
Peace, a weirdo who converts boys much younger than him into his Brotherhood
of El. As in that novel, strict religious observance in both Donald and Miss
Partridge are taken as a sign of madness in this one.
Big
Donald is in love with another girl in the close, Roberta, or Bobo, a beautiful
19-year-old who turns heads wherever she goes. But he’s too repressed, too bound
by dogma, to do anything about it. His fellow bible thumper Miss Partridge sees
the frank, fleshy Bobo as the devil incarnate, and wastes no opportunity to
tell her so. She fears that Bobo represents Grace’s destiny; she believes the
little girl must be Saved before her innocence is sullied by adult life.
Bobo
drives big Donald mad, little skirts, tight sweaters and all. Donald encounters
her one evening as she leaves the close’s communal toilet in her nightdress;
the effect is like a thunderbolt, but not from above. Bobo basks in the
attention, from admirer and detractor alike.
Hugh
Main, a sensitive but playful man, gets on very well with Bobo, but in a
strictly platonic way. Main’s lack of physical attraction despite their obvious
rapport made me wonder if perhaps he preferred men (although Friel never so
much as hints at it). Main, bored to tears with his cousin’s queasy dual
obsession with scripture and the pleasures of the flesh – Bobo’s in particular
– seeks to set him up with the girl, even though she has a highly significant
other. Bobo’s boyfriend, Dross, is a juvenile delinquent who is being drawn
into a life of crime with three other low-level hoods, taken to tanning sweetie
shops and post offices after dark.
The
three strands of the novel – Grace and Miss Partridge; Donald and Bobo; Miss
Partridge and Bobo – all head towards potentially deadly outcomes.
The
story is narrated in the first person by an unseen character, and through him
Friel manifests his affinity for working class people in Glasgow’s great
post-war schemes. It’s this light-hearted rendering of the characters and sympathy
for their motivations and backgrounds, whether fair or foul, which I mistook
for sentimentality in his earlier work. But Friel is not afraid to dish out
some ugly scenes. His wry, semi-detached humour gives way to something far more
caustic, and the flimsy curtain of nostalgia is crudely torn away to reveal the
Glasgow of No Mean City.
There
is an equivalent scene featuring withering, merciless treatment in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, where the
motherless boy offers to fight the school bully - and is duly punched up and
down the playground. Grace and Miss
Partridge’s grim lesson was far more shocking, a senseless, unjust fate in
an unforgiving setting. Friel once said that there was no point being dishonest
about things and “playing Mr Glasgow” – the city was, and still can be, a
frightening and violent place. It’s worth noting in passing that Bible John was
active around about the time this book was published.
I
wonder if the tough guy stuff is simply the other side of the coin to
sentimentality. I picked up on this in my own storytelling a while ago. Many of
my early short stories concern folk who are either heading for a beating, or
preparing to give one out. Once I spotted this pattern, it became tiresome, and
I’m at pains to correct it.
I
hate it, that black streak of cynicism. It suggests that every victim of
violence is somehow to blame - for not stopping it, for not seeing it coming,
for not being sufficiently violent themselves. I can picture the smirk slashed
across the face of that thrawn old bugger with the mop as she intercepts you
creeping back into the close, trying not to drip blood on her pristine stairs.
“Aye! That’s what ye get!”
Friel
finishes off with a cheeky coda, where we get a view of the hidden narrator’s
adult life. He has a conversation with his mother after she’s read the same
manuscript you have, oozing irony as she tears him apart for writing fiction
where real history might do better.
This
is where Friel flexes his muscles a little, reminding us that there’s a bit
more to his game than fish suppers, cracked lintel and flickering stairhead
lights; and giving the briefest acknowledgement that Grace and Miss Partridge was published in 1969.
Friel’s
single-end symphony is a beautifully composed piece of work. There’s no doubt
he was a fine prose artist, but also a man of his time. He could fly far above
Glasgow, but not for too long. He was in with the bricks, twitching the
curtains, unhooking the key to the communal lavvy, never daring to miss his
turn for the stairs.
A brilliant review and I look forward to reading more.
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