Runaway Read Online Free PDF

post-war years before discovering sandblasting, and the marvellous red and honeyed stone that lay beneath the grime. Flats that, once renovated, are still lived in today, while those they built to replace them have long since been demolished.
    I sometimes wish I could get hold of those planners and architects and wring them by the neck.
    My father taught English and maths at a school in the east end. He was raised in tenement flats on the south side, opposite Queen’s Park. His father had been a street artist before the First World War, but joined the Royal Flying Corps during the war years and trained as a photographer. Somewhere I still have an album of his photographs, taken while lying along the length of some flimsy fuselage and pointing a clumsy camera at the trenches below. Early aerial surveillance. The trenches just looked like cracks in dried mud. Hard to believe there were people in them. After the war he opened his own photographic studio in Great Western Road.
    I suppose my dad must have got his religion and his politics from his dad. My father was an atheist, and a socialist in a constituency that was then a Conservative stronghold. By a process of osmosis, I guess I must have acquired both from him.
    My mother, by contrast, was devout Church of Scotland. And although she never admitted it, I always suspected she was a closet Tory. Her favourite rag was the Scottish Daily Express , so I suppose it was only to be expected.
    I always felt sorry for my mum, though. She had a marvellous talent for drawing and painting. But her father refused to let her go to art school, despite the impassioned pleas of her art teacher. It simply wasn’t the done thing in those days for a woman to pursue a career in art.
    So she applied instead to join the civil service. In the entry examination she came out top for the whole of Glasgow. But naturally, since she was a woman, was rewarded with a job as a telephonist. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough for her, when she married my dad she was handed her jotters. Married women were not allowed to work in the civil service.
    She continued to draw and paint, of course, wonderful shaded portraits and watercolour landscapes. But less and less as the years went by. I always perceived in her a feeling that life had somehow passed her by. And while much was passed on to me by my father, perhaps a sense of failure was the one thing I inherited from her. If she had hoped for success vicariously, through me, then I must have been a source of further disappointment.
    In 1965, of course, there was no hint of any of that. I was just exploring my talents and, like my contemporaries, being swept along by the sea of change that was washing over the whole country. And music was what drove it, like the moon and the tides. The Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks. Exciting, violent, romantic, ground-breaking music that fired the imagination and made everything seem possible.
    All remnants of the war were swept away by it, too. Rationing, national service (although the draft was still in force across the Atlantic), the stuffy old BBC Light Programme, short hair, collars and ties. There were pirates out in the North Sea playing rock and roll. Anyone with any spark of musical talent wanted to pick up a guitar and play.
    I was desperate to be in a group. To stand up onstage and play guitar and sing about love and loss, and this world that shifted beneath my feet. I had music in my head all the time, and it wasn’t long before I found like minds and like talents among my peers.
    But I hadn’t always been in love with music. When I was six my parents sent me to piano lessons, taught by a spinster lady called Miss Hale who lived in a semi near Tinker’s Field, just five minutes from our house. I hated it. I remember sitting in her semi-darkened front room, playing scales on an upright piano, the sound of kids on the swings coming from across the road. C, D, E, F. And now chromatics. And if I made a