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It happened one day that I woke up in a drawer with four strangers staring down. The sounds of a bustling street below, riveters, angry hammers, and the burning neurotic sizzle of welding torches marrying metal together to form mighty vessels wafted in from the nearby industries. I was three-months old, and these folks, two older girls and a middle-aged couple, were to be my new family for reasons that are not clear to this day.
My new home was a third-story tenement in the shipyard town of Govan, Glasgow. It was the late fifties. The landscape was subdued by oppressive tenements that blocked natural light and created avenues as dull as Victorian photographs. It was a place where ungroomed dogs festered the streets and infestations of vermin surfaced into the nocturnal crescents and corners of our homes in search of food. It was a place where people knew the value of the pound and the price of poverty. A place where working-class men stood around corners dressed like characters from a T.S. Lowry print. A place where razor gangs, money lenders and bars operated from every corner. A place where it always seemed there were better places to be brought up. For a long time, I thought growing up in this environment was the beginning; where my character was shaped, but something had already begun that process.
My new father was an incredible storyteller. In the evening, he would enter my room and relate abridged versions of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Huckleberry Finn.
I have often wondered if it was empathy for the characters that drew him to the stories he read. My few recollections of him are lost in the fluidity of memory.
But the stories are as vivid as the stench and sounds of that town. In these books were characters who shaped my thinking, expanded my view of the world, and became my friends. I saw within books characters like myself, who taught me the noble qualities that would bear directly in my future years and who I became and at times, failed to become.
Note:
Note: Parents in the west would often tell children that a stork brought them when the child asked, "Where did I come from?"
stork | Etymology, origin and meaning of stork by etymonline