The Real James Herriot Read Online Free PDF Page A

the River Clyde, were undeniably some of the most depressing buildings imaginable, both outside and in. There was a central passageway, the ‘close’, through which access was gained to the dingy flats on either side – with dark, forbidding stairways snaking up to the higher levels of the building. These tenements were often damp, dirty and appallingly overcrowded. Many families in the slum areas of Glasgow, like the Gorbals or Cowcaddens on the other side of the city, lived squashed together in one or two rooms. Toilet provision was rudimentary, with up to twenty or thirty people sharing one privy which, commonly, was not even within the building. Poverty and disease were rife. Many children developed rickets through malnutrition and I can remember a young woman who worked for my grandmother, having the bowed legs that betrayed a childhood of deprivation and hardship. No wonder the people living in these awful conditions would often turn to violence and drink to seek some escape from their squalid existence.
    However, other tenements, such as the one in which Alf was to spend his earliest years, were in a different category altogether. Although not very prepossessing from the outside, they were perfectly respectable within. To walk inside one was often a revelation. The uninspiring, sometimes grim exterior belied a pleasant, roomy interior with high, sculptured ceilings in the living-rooms and ample space everywhere.
    The ground-floor flat in which Alf spent the earliest years of his life, although not exactly the finest example of the Glasgow tenement flat, was perfectly sound and respectable, so much so that the entrance to his home was known as a ‘wally close’. These were quite special in that, having tiled walls, one was considered to be a few rungs up the ladder of affluence living ‘up’ one of these. Each flat consisted of three or four rooms – a large living-room with an adjoining kitchen and one, sometimes two, bedrooms and a bathroom and lavatory. There were recesses set into the sides of the living-room across which curtains could be drawn, thus providing extra sleeping accommodation.
    Milk and coal were both delivered by horse and cart. The milk was left in a jug outside the door, and the coalman would clatter into the house to dump the coal into a bunker situated in a corner of the kitchen. The coal was used for heating and, in many flats, it was also the means of fuelling the cooking ranges that were the dominant feature of the tenement kitchens. As well as cooking and heating the home, these imposing black steel fireplaces provided all the hot water the family needed. Alf’s first tenement home may not have been a palace but it was comfortable and adequate.
    One of the myths that has grown up around Alf Wight and his success is that of his dragging himself up from the ‘grinding poverty’ of his youth. The fact is that his Glasgow days were exceptionally happy – with the cold finger of hardship rarely felt by young ‘Alfie’ Wight. The Yoker area of Glasgow – a respectable, working-class part of the city – was one in which many Glaswegians aspired to live. There was certainly heavy industry, shipyards and steelworks – and there were parts of Yoker where faint hearts would fear to tread, especially on Friday and Saturday nights – but much of it was inhabited by solid citizens who were well above the poverty line.
    Only a few minutes’ walk from Alf’s home would take him out into green fields and farmland, backed by the Kilpatrick Hills and the Campsie Fells in the distance – a very different picture from the Yoker of today. The stage upon which Alfie Wight played out the happy hours of his childhood has been replaced by a scene of neglect, dominated by drab buildings and wasteland. Boarded-up shops are a testimony to the crime that, as in most other big cities, seems to be a constant threat. As he played on the streets and in the nearby fields with his friends, young Alf without