The Community

Grandma Harris with six sons.

The people of the Gorbals were once intertwined into a  rough-and-ready tapestry, each thread woven into the fabric of life. It was a neighbourhood where very little went unnoticed and few lived in complete solitude. A friend of mine, one of many, who sailed off abroad, grew up near where I was born in an old close on Hospital Street.  my grandmother—the formidable woman who held court in the only house on Abbotsford Lane, raised fourteen children under one roof. Dinah Soslove, a neighbour said of her, half-in jest, “She was pregnant every Christmas.” And in those days, it was common. My grandmother endured twenty-three pregnancies, with nine ending before life could begin.

It was a different life then. My Aunt Rosie, a trained midwife, brought me into the world at home on a table in a house in Hospital Street in the Gorbals, I was told. I remember a photograph of her—tiny, cheerful, surrounded by the other midwives, all of them young and full of purpose. My sister Connie, barely five at the time, might still carry some glimmer of a memory of that day. Home births were commonplace back then, accepted as the way of things, though they were hand-in-hand with risk. Too many women, too many infants, never made it through those fragile hours. It’s hard to imagine now, when hospitals hum with machines and help is only ever a button away.  Scarlet fever, whooping cough, rickets, diphtheria, polio and the iron lung - all were common and widespread.

Hospital Street.  St Ninian's Leper Hospital established here in
1350 by Lady Lochow, treating sailors arriving from abroad with leprosy.

My grandmother on my mother’s side fared somewhat better, though she too bore eight children into that tight world of scarcity with a robust strength. And so, by the miracle of birth, I found myself with more than thirty first cousins—an abundance of relatives that feels almost unimaginable in today's western society.

Grandma Harris, the matriarch of Abbotsford Lane, lived in the great house everyone seemed to know—the only one with both an upstairs and a downstairs in the area. To a child, it felt enormous, full of corners and curiosities. What remains clearest in my memory is the grand piano, polished to a shine with a crystal bowl of fruit placed proudly on top. She’d would command, “’Have a piece of fruit,” though I don’t know if I ever did. There was something awesome about her—those stern white curls, that tough exterior carved by years of keeping order in a house overflowing with children. Yet beneath it all, there lay a softness, a well of affection she kept mostly hidden but never fully concealed.  

Grandma Sless

By comparison, Grandma Sless's house in Portugal Street was austere.  Bare linoleum with a table and chairs in the middle of the room.  On the table stood a tall, silver samovar underneath of which was a candle.  The tea was served in a glass held in a silver cage with a handle.  The tea was bitter. "Have a sweet," she would say.  This would take the edge off the tartness of the black liquor.

Looking back, it was a world that has slipped away—harder in the post-war days, kinder in others, and stitched together by threads of harmony we rarely find today.

Abbotsford Lane. a jumble of debri.  Grandma's house is on the right at the crossroads