Tales from the Back Green by Bill Paterson review: 'steers clear of introspection'
Bill Paterson’s memories of growing up in 1950s Glasgow reveal surprisingly little about their author, writes David Robinson
Between their first broadcast in 2003, their hardback publication in 2008 and their paperback publication this week, even more of the Glasgow that Bill Paterson remembers in these tales from his childhood in the 1950s has slipped away.
Although the paperback comes with an added chapter that puts a historical frame around his native Dennistoun, the text remains exactly as delivered in a series of 15-minute talks on Radio Scotland. For a book reviewer, this is problematic. Yes, it’s easy to imagine Paterson reading it in his wonderfully warm, weighted voice - surely the nearest Glaswegian comes to the trustworthiness of a Morgan Freeman voiceover. But a book requires more than that.
A good radio talk needs the immediacy often achieved by a conversational tone. All those discourse markers in Tales from the Back Green (“well”, “mind you”, “remember when” etc) are there for a reason: tiny hooks to keep the listener’s attention. But what works on the ear sits less well on the page.
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Paterson’s aims are modest enough: to give a picture of what it was like to grow up in Dennison in the 1950s. Emphatically, his book is not a memoir: his mother remains virtually invisible, his brother isn’t mentioned at all apart from in the acknowledgements at the end, and he explains that “as soon as I became aware that I had to dip my toe too deeply in the waters of autobiography, I called a halt.”
His reminiscences aren’t completely rose-tinted: polio takes away childhoods, the nearby Blochairn steelworks seem to be a byword for horrific industrial accidents; the fog is every bit as bad as London’s; traffic is lighter, but there seem to be more crashes; Sundays are terminally boring and require him to wear a blazer and polished shoes even to buy a newspaper. Football and gang violence are widespread: after witnessing one bloody melee outside Ibrox, his father switches the family’s allegiance from Rangers to Third Lanark. Against that, all the tropes of a 1950s Glasgow nostalgia-fest are present and correct: endless footie in the back green; the quiet joys of Airfix modelling; the rowdy ones of the Saturday morning cinema, the teenage ones of a month in Millport and a slow discovery of the beauty of the Highlands.
Only occasionally does Paterson depart from such familiar memories, and when he does his book is at its best. His account of dropping a massive dust-bomb on the dried-out back green in an attempt to imitate the newsreel shots of H-bomb tests is one such example. Another is his account of the credence given to outlandish promises supposedly made by friends’ parents - to build a spectators’ stand to watch their football games, to build a mini-steam engine just for their own play, to give them a cow. We forget how much adults used to be respected - or was it just fear?
Patterson’s Dennistoun was spared the redevelopment that wrecked almost every surrounding district, especially Townhead, which suffered “one of the most misguided and brutal urban renewals undertaken anywhere”. Again, not a new theme, nor is his evocative lament for the ripping up of Glasgow’s extensive tram network or his detailing of the horrors of 1950s interior redecoration.
Did he realise that at the time though? There are moments when I have my doubts, when the child’s perception seems to be overwritten by an all-knowing adult anecdotalist explaining such things as the aesthetics of Victorian plumbing. And while Paterson’s horror at overdevelopment seems real enough - one has only to think of his 1973 breakthrough role as McChuckemup in The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil - I would have liked to have heard more about why he spent three years as an apprentice quantity surveyor. Because this book steers clear of introspection, we don’t get any answers, and sadly it stops at the very moment that his career as one of Scotland’s finest actors begins.
Tales from the Back Green: A Glasgow Childhood, by Bill Paterson, Birlinn, £9.99
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