The Moment When You Know

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.” (Burns)

 

There are moments in your life when you see something through someone else’s eyes, and it feels as though you are seeing it for the first time. In a way you are. Your own life, especially when you are relatively young, just seems normal to you. How could it be otherwise? You need an alternate point of view in order to get perspective. Most of us will experience moments like this in our lives, perhaps many. I want to talk about one that happened to me. The moment I knew I was a member of an oppressed minority.

Since I have become involved in the debate over Scottish independence I have encountered a bit of resistance. I’m not talking about the resistance from the ‘No’ side. That is well known, and I have, and will continue, to discuss it in other posts and other places. No, I’m talking about resistance to me personally, by people on the ‘Yes’ side, my own side. Not many people, just a few. And the reason is because I left. I got out of what was, at the time, a seemingly hopeless situation. Some seem to feel I should have stayed, and suffered with them. I sympathise with them, I really do. But would it be uncharitable of me to wonder if the real reason is simply that I got lucky. They didn’t. If they’d had the chance to do what I did, how many of them would have taken it?

Yesterday I saw the following post in a pro-independence facebook group, “Vote YES to Scottish independence and end the union.”

“Why do 800,000 Scots live and work in England?
Why have so many Scots migrated the world over?
It is certainly not because they don’t love Scotland. The reason is lack of opportunities.
Westminster has been keeping all the decent jobs and big investment for the south (mainly London). This causes much of our Scottish home grown talent to either move to England or move abroad.” (Iain Brown)

It made me think again about my own reasons for leaving. I wanted to give him a proper answer, and I didn’t think a quick post on a facebook thread was going to be adequate.

You see, I left school in the depths of the greatest recession (at that time) since the 1930s. The Thatcher recession. No, she didn’t start it, but she deliberately exacerbated it. For ideological reasons. It was always somewhat personal between Maggie and I. I was part of the generation who lost our free school milk, which she took away when she was education minister in the Heath government of 1970-1974. I didn’t come along after it was gone. No, my classmates and I came to school one day, expecting our little bottle at play time, only to find it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t coming back. It may sound like a small thing, but everyone my age remembers it only too well.

By the time I left school, she had destroyed the manufacturing economy of my country. I’m from a working class town, a shipbuilding town, called Clydebank. As the name suggests, it is situated on the banks of the River Clyde, the shining river, my river, where it is joined by the River Cart, making it a spot where large ships could be launched using the junction of the two rivers to execute a three-point turn. The shipyard there, John Brown’s, gained the reputation of the world’s greatest, building such famous ships as the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the HMS Hood and the QE2. But by the time I left school all that was dying. The yard was still there, building oil rigs, but with a fraction of its former workforce. The other major employer in town, Singer Sewing Machines, had closed up shop a few years earlier. There were no jobs. None. The boards at the local Job Centre were completely empty. There was a rumour that somebody once got a job in the Job Centre, but that may well have been an urban myth.

This single Titan crane is all that remains of that once great shipyard today:

So I went to college and tried to increase my skills, in the hope that might help. But it didn’t because there were still no jobs. So I dabbled in student politics for a little while. Still no jobs. So eventually, in desperation, I went down to London. I’d heard there was still work to be had there. Which, after a fashion, there was. It was casual, unregulated and badly-paid. And when I say badly, I mean completely unliveable. I was far from the only one in this position. There were many of us, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Northerners, and we found ways to survive, but it was hard. The only realistic way was to be on the dole, because you could get your rent paid on top of the basic rate of £25. Given that the standard wage was £32, and the average rent to share a room in a cramped flat was £100, it was the only way.

The thing is, they wouldn’t pay for a room in a flat. They would however pay for a cheap hotel or youth hostel, even though they were usually even more expensive. So we stayed in youth hostels. This meant we were meeting travellers, backpackers from other countries. When I’d been there about six months I met Gayle.

She was from Australia, Ballarat in fact. We fell in love. It happens sometimes when you’re young. We lived together in London for just over a year, and even managed to take a few trips, on a very tight budget, to the cheaper countries of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. But there was a limit to how long we could live like that. We loved travelling and wanted to do more of it. Much more. Gayle had told me that there was work to be had in Australia, and work which was well enough remunerated that you could actually save money.

So in the end, the decision was a no-brainer. We were married in London in July of 1984, and we made plans to go to Australia at the end of the year. So this was serious. I’m not sure exactly when, but I organised to take Gayle to Clydebank to meet my mother. As everyone in these situations is, I was nervous. Would they get on? Well, they did as it turned out. I shouldn’t have worried. The reason Gayle was such an ideal travelling companion was her extraordinary empathy. She could find a way to connect with just about anyone. And of course they had me in common. My Mum was as protective of her son as any mother, but Gayle charmed her and they got on famously.

Now at this time my mother was living in a dismal council flat. It wasn’t that old, late 60s I suppose, but it was badly designed. Flat roofs don’t really work in a Scottish climate, and they were riddled with damp. The council was doing its best, despite reduced resources and restrictive rules, courtesy of Westminster, and they had started to move people out in order to rebuild them, with sloping roofs. My mother was one of the few remaining tenants in her block. As we left I decided to take a picture of the place, so I asked Gayle to hang on while I did so. This is the picture:

My mother’s was the top floor flat, on the right of the picture. When I had taken it I turned to Gayle, only to find that she was crying. Quietly sobbing, tears rolling down her cheeks. Initially I was confused. I didn’t understand. I asked if she was alright, what was wrong? With a gesture she drew my eyes back to the building in front of us.

“It’s so awful! You’re poor mother, she has to live like this! And you, this is where you were brought up! I had no idea it was so deprived!”

And she pulled me to her, put her arms around me, and sobbed her heart out on my shoulder. And that was the moment it happened. The moment I truly understood what had been done to me, my family, my friends, my people, my country. I was already political, I had been an activist, I already hated Thatcher and the Tories with a passion. But I’d never seen it from someone else’s point of view before. And I saw that this had been done not only by Thatcher and the Tories, but by 300 years of foreign rule, rule from a remote, imperial metropolis, by people and institutions who knew and understood nothing of this, nothing of us!

Douglas Adams once wrote that, “It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.” But it can also be very enlightening, especially when what you are seeing is yourself and your world. In some respects it’s the only way you’ll ever see it objectively. Gayle helped me, with her empathy, to do that in regard to Scotland, and I will always be grateful to her for that. I lost her (to breast cancer) twenty years ago now, but I know that she of all people would understand why I have to be in this debate. Why I have to campaign. Why I have to fight. No, not to fight, why I have to prevail.

So to respond to Iain’s post – “Why have so many Scots migrated the world over?
It is certainly not because they don’t love Scotland.” No, it is not! I am, and have always been, a patriot. I love my country. I was brought up on stories of her history, and the history of the Clan MacPherson. We MacPhersons made our choice long ago, when we chose to ally ourselves with Robert the Bruce and the cause of freedom and independence. We have never wavered or departed from it. We fought beside him at Bannockburn, we fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. And even though times have changed, and this time our battle is a democratic one, I will honour my ancestors! I will be there, and I will take my place on the side of freedom, the side of independence, the side of Scotland!

Saor Alba!

 

This is an excellent piece of contextual history about Clydebank.