“For children are innocent and love justice.” – G.K. Chesterton
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The Stories That Saved Me
It happened one day that I woke up in a drawer with four strangers staring down at me. From the street below, the sounds of pop rivets, angry hammers, and the burning, neurotic sizzle of welding torches drifted in from the nearby industries. I was three months old, and these strangers—two older girls and a middle-aged couple—were to be my new family, for reasons that remain unclear to this day.
My new home was a third-floor tenement in the shipyard town of Govan, Glasgow. It was the late fifties. The landscape was subdued by rows of oppressive buildings that blocked out the light and, in my memory, left everything tinged in sepia. Ungroomed dogs roamed the streets, while infestations of vermin surfaced in the night, scuttling through the crescents and corners of our homes in search of food. It was a place where people knew the value of a Pound—and the price of poverty.
For a long time, I believed this environment was the starting point of my character’s formation. But something had already begun that process.
My father was a gifted storyteller. At night, as he wheezed gently—a lingering symptom of a bronchial condition—he would read to me from Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn. Like many Clydesiders of that era, he was a Socialist, and I believe it was the theme of justice in those books that appealed to him—and shaped me.
The stories I encountered in those early years remain as vivid as the stench and clatter of the town itself. Their characters expanded my world, became my companions, and taught me virtues that would influence both who I became—and who I sometimes failed to become.
Not far from our home was The Modern Book Shop, an Aladdin’s cave of wonders for a child. It sold toys, comics, and books—including imported American comics. My favourite was Casper, the Friendly Ghost. He was little more than a dialogue cloud with arms, eyes, and legs, but I was absorbed by his gentle adventures. Casper, a nonconformist ghost, refused to join the ghouls and hobgoblins who delighted in mischief. He just wanted to be kind. His creator, Seymour Reit, had written him to comfort a friend’s daughter who was afraid of the dark—a man who clearly understood the quiet trials of childhood.
One day in the sixties, in the school playground, I had one of those early encounters with the cruelty of the world:
“What’s
that?” I asked Declan Walsh, a boy I played with.
“A party invite,” he replied.
I looked around. Other kids had envelopes too. I began to search for Janet, the birthday girl, and found her skipping with her friends.
“Can I have one?” I asked bashfully.
Janet
stopped, spun on her heels, and danced around me singing,
“Bum, bum, bubble gum,
My mammy said you cannot come!”
I walked home that day feeling sorry for myself, unsure what I had done wrong.
Like Casper, I had a deep inner need to be accepted. He only wanted to make friends—but because of his very nature, he inadvertently frightened children, despite his wide smile and congenial eyes.
Tenement life was closed in. I don’t remember much contact with other children until I started school, and by then, I hadn’t yet developed the social skills needed to navigate it. I was shy—wired that way from the start—and found a kindred spirit in Casper. He was my friend, because he understood.
Looking back, it wasn’t the party itself that mattered. It was the experience of exclusion. We are social creatures, born with a need to belong. I hated the injustice of isolation, even if it seemed trivial to others. Like most humans, I craved the universal need to love and be loved. When I couldn’t find that in life, I found it in books. Suspended in their pages, I reimagined my life—and, for a while, made peace with it.