A Life In Pictures. Alasdair Gray

The Gray family in garden behind the manager’s bungalow, munitions workers’ hostel, Wetherby, Yorkshire , circa 1943

       Mora as a sunbeam Both circa 1943

       Alasdair, the Church of England chorister Both circa 1943

      With camera activated by a time-switch on a tripod Dad photographed himself and family on weekend outings, when I usually posed as an intellectual with notebook or library book. This was not wholly phoney act. When eight I started writing and illustrating wee stories and verses which Dad typed, and when twelve I won a Scottish BBC competition that let me read some on Children’s Hour. But he wanted me to go walking, climbing and cycling with him. I used occasional bad asthmatic bouts to avoid doing these things because he understood them better than me – eventually Mora became his main out-of-doors companion – but whenever I submitted to his guidance I enjoyed the hills. Despite which I went with him to Earl’s Seat on the summit of the Campsies with Maisie Ward’s biography of G. K. Chesterton, got from Riddrie public library, and insisted on reading during our rests.

       A day trip outing to Dunoon , circa 1945

       Alasdair & Alex on Earl’s Seat, Campsie Fells , circa 1952

      In 1949 or ’50 Dad’s lower post-war wage made Mum decide to take a job in a hat shop, then as clerk in Collins the Publishers office, Cathedral Street. She weakened with what her doctor thought was a menopausal illness. After several months she asked for another opinion and cancer of the liver was diagnosed. On a warm day when I was seventeen we sat together in our back green. I had hurt her by failing to get a school leaving certificate in Latin, then a necessary qualification for Scottish universities. Since her death I have been incapable of taking any examination seriously. In our back green I also sat with her kind and witty sister, my Aunt Annie, who lived long enough to be proud of me as Writer-in-Residence in Glasgow University.

       Amy & Alasdair behind 11 Findhorn Street, Riddrie, circa 1951

       Amy’s sister, Annie Miller and nephew , circa 1953

       Two: Childhood Books, 1937–49

      WHEN VERY YOUNG I drew every scene with a firm brown, horizontal line at the foot of the paper representing ground, and a blue horizontal line representing the sky at the top, for I thought the outer world had a floor and ceiling like our home. Dad destroyed this primitive model of the universe by explaining that the earth resembled a golf ball turning round the sun, represented by a table lamp. This bored and annoyed without convincing me, but destroyed my notion of the sky as a protective ceiling, because I now saw that if it existed there must be more space above. A religious dad might have told me there was a Heavenly Riddrie above the sky where my dead granny now lived. I remember also drawing a giant who had captured many princesses, but because I could then only draw stick figures with featureless buttons for heads (alright for the giant, not for beautiful women) I drew circles attached by lines to his body. When asked what I was drawing I said, “a miller running to the mill with sacks of corn”. I only recently worked out how a pre-school urban child knew how flour was made. Dad thought all questions a child asked should be honestly answered. On country walks he bored me by using a little pocket book to identify trees by the shape of their leaves, years later telling me he had no interest in botany, and bought the book because I kept asking the names of trees. A story I liked, The Tinderbox, contains three magic dogs who help a poor but ruthless soldier abduct a princess and seize a kingdom. One dog has eyes as big as millstones. I must have asked what millstones were, been told, and thus enabled to invent an innocent fiction to disguise one I was ashamed of. Why was I ashamed of rape fantasy years before knowing of sexual intercourse? Perhaps I identified the princesses with my mother, though she was so much the climate I lived in that I hardly saw her as an individual before her death. When I was ten or eleven I sometimes entertained her in the evening with stories and drawings while she knitted or sewed, but stopped when sexual fantasies invaded my imagination and sexual frustration drove me out at night to walk about in the loneliest places near our home, as I had no girlfriend and was too socially awkward to visit cafés that were then teenagers’ social clubs. But she made me feel women are a safer sex than men, for it was never she who spanked me.

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, 1933 edition, 24 x 16 cm

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, 1933 edition, 24 x 16 cm

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, 1933 edition, 24 x 16 cm

      My parents were glad when my vocabulary, knowledge and work pleased others, especially my teachers, but they never praised me for these things in case I grew proud, because pride is liable to downfall. They called attempts to draw attention to myself instead of my work “showing off”, and discouraged that. At social gatherings they liked me to sing ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (my party piece) or recite puerile verses I had written, or take part in political arguments, because that was giving people something, not deliberately drawing them to me. Yet from infancy Mum and Dad clearly wanted me to become very clever, as is shown by a childhood event I cannot recall, but Dad told me about years after.

       Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, Bernard Shaw, 1932, designed & illustrated by John Farleigh, 20 x 13 cm

       Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, Bernard Shaw, 1932, designed & illustrated by John Farleigh, 20 x 13 cm

       Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, Bernard Shaw, 1932, designed & illustrated by John Farleigh, 20 x 13 cm

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, special edition , 24 x 16 cm

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, special edition , 24 x 16 cm

       The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, special edition , 24 x 16 cm

      When I was four or five he had read me Shaw’s