A Friday Night Before the World Grew Heavy
I asked my sister, now in her eighties, “What was your happiest childhood memory? ” She didn’t mention holidays or presents. She went straight to the rear courts of the Govan tenements to a period before my time. Back court where the bins, the dykes, the washhouses, and the Friday nights set aside for what might now be called Govan’s Got Talent.
The anticipation in her was fit to burst, like a boiling haggis. Our mother would be busy fashioning some paper‑mâché flourish for her costume, and by the time the great night arrived, Anna was ready for the stage.
But it wasn’t only her own performance she lived for. She had a gift; a kind of instinctive firgun, that Hebrew word for the joy we feel in the happiness of others. Even as a child she couldn’t help slipping into everyone else’s act: singing, reciting, dancing, helping, interrupting — whatever was happening at the building round the back that became a community gathering, Anna had to be in the thick of it. Her delight wasn’t competitive; it was contagious. She shone because she wanted everyone else to shine too.
Even the neighbour who preferred to spend his Friday nights drinking beer with his mates found himself drawn in: “Come and see Anna performing round at the steamie.” It wasn’t the promise of a show — it was the promise of her joy.
There was no television audience, no bright stage, no prize at the end of it. Only the back court of a Govan tenement, a gathering of neighbours, and a wee girl who believed, with all her heart, that the show must go on — not for applause, but because something in her felt most alive when others were lifted.
And perhaps that was the happiness of it. For one Friday night, among the bins and the dykes and the washhouses, the ordinary world became a theatre. Not because it was transformed, but because she was: a child who hadn’t yet learned to doubt herself, who hadn’t yet been taught the adult habit of shrinking. A child whose joy in others’ joy made the whole back court glow.
Maybe that’s why the memory has stayed with her all these years. Not because she was the star — but because, for a brief moment, she lived in a world where everyone’s light made her brighter too.