Hospital Street

My parents' wedding. From the left: Grandpa Harris, Grandma Harris,
Uncle Manual, Auntie Sadie, Dad, Mum, Grandma Sless, Grandpa Sless.
Seated, Auntie Mildred.

My Grandfather, Israel, on my mother’s side was, as far as I know, a builder’s labourer, though he metamorphosed and became a tailor at some point in his life.  I vividly remember his shaving mug, brush and open razor lying on a shelf at the side of a sink.  

My last memory of him is from my window, three stories up in a tenement block at 190 Butterbiggins Road in Glasgow.  He was holding up his walking stick to stop up the traffic and smiling.  Ironically, he died under the wheels of a motorbike. There is humour in every situation if you find it. I guess he never did get used to life in the UK, especially the traffic in the city.

To remind you, I was born at 6.30am on 27 April 1947. Being born in a hospital later became fashionable. A hospital did exist as far back as 1350 on this site. Apparently, when sailors disembarked from ships coming from exotic places some had become infected with leprosy, they were treated at a hospital which used to be situated somewhere on the street where I was born.  I have only a very vague memory of the close in which my house was, the close being a narrow passageway through which entry could be gained to the flats in the tenement.

 There were other families in the same area, mostly from the same villages in Poland, Lithuania and Russia from where they had fled the pogroms.  My father’s family came from Gombin in North West Poland.  Where my mother’s family came from I’m not quite sure.

 Gabin Synagogue destroyed by the nazis in WW II

The story goes that my grandmother, Jane Sheryl, and her sister would hide in the cellar and through a crack in the door, they would watch the Cossacks (drunk on the local brew) ride through the village and unmercifully cut down anyone in their path.  This would have been in Latvia, I was told by my cousin Dorothy.  My grandfather kept a Cossack sword in a cupboard in his Glasgow home.  On the shelf in a cupboard were cigarettes cards with caricatures of footballers and film stars.  

Shashka

The sword, or shashka, was beautifully curved with a red tassel at the D guard.  The construction of a shashka fits its primary combat technique: the strike is applied by the part of the blade close to the hilt, and then the shashka is pulled to increase the cutting action. On the blade was a series of tooled designs representing leaves and branches.  Where he got the sword I don’t know but I do remember handling it and wondering.

Because of the troubles, my great grandmother, my mother’s grandmother, put her two daughters on a boat, both only being 8 and 6 years old and waved goodbye from the shore.  That was the last they saw of each other.  The year was 1908. This is how my grandmother came to Scotland, landing in Dundee and perhaps thinking it was America as many of the emigres did...and having eight children.  

She was coming from a shtetl in Latvia and everywhere outside of the shtetl was foreign and New York was a world away as they had no idea of even local geographical distinctions, only the name must have conjured up ideas of riches and a comfortable life.  Sometime later, one of my mother’s sisters, Etie, had emigrated to Australia and didn’t meet my mother again for another 23-years.