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Objective Truth and the Grinding Machine
For Edinburgh International Book Fair publication, republished in A Scottish Childhood, 1998.

When I was very wee I didn't read at all. I listened. My mother sang Elvis and Peggy Lee songs, the odd Rolling Stones hit as they appeared. These gave me a notion of how relationships between the sexes were conducted (there were no men in our house), the meaning of LURV (ie sexual attraction and not LOVE which was something in English war-time films that involved crying); a sprinkling of Americanisms (to help conceal/sophisticate the accent I had been born into and which my mother assured me was ignorant and common) and a basic grounding in ATTITUDE (known locally as LIP). This last, was the most one. In fact, the only useful one. The words to BLUE SUEDE SHOES are carved on my heart.

I was reading by the time I went to primary school. I know because I got a row for it. Reading before educationally permissible was pronounced SERIOUSLY DETRIMENTAL TO HER IN CLASS. This was true because I had to do it again their way, with JANET and JOHN and The DOG with the RED BALL. Books were read round class ie too slow, and you got the belt if you got carried away and keeked at the next page before you were allowed to. Kidding on you weren't interested became an intrinsic part of EDUCATION. This did not trouble me. I was a biddable child. Most are.

At home, I read OOR WULLIE and THE BROONS. I read the BEANO and liked DENNIS THE MENACE but thought BERYL unlikely. The BUNTY was best because it had GIRLS in it. I loved Wee Slavey (the maid with the heart of gold) and the Four Marys (who went to boarding school). Only the former seemed a role model, however. I also read Enid Blyton Fairy Tales (but not the FAMOUS FIVE dear god no) and Folk Tales of Many Lands. They were a whole set in the local library. I read the Folk Tales over and over then began fingering the mythology and World Religion books on the adult shelves whereupon the librarian (or Defender of Books from the inquiry of Grubby People and Children) smacked my hands and told me I wasn't allowed those ones: I would neither like not understand them and was only SHOWING OFF. This was another timely lesson in the value of hiding natural enthusiasm because it sometimes annoyed people in authority who preferred OBEDIENCE TO RULES as more suitable. I didn't stop looking: I stole it. I ran errands to the same library for my nineteen-years-older sister who read six books a week and hit me (literally) if I brought back books by women authors.Women canny write, she'd say: Women canny write. Maybe she was scared it would be too romantic. Just her way. Other hitting offenses included being sent a subscription to Reader's Digest by an uncle who didn't know any better, asking to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream on the telly and keeping a diary. Enjoying words was an occupation fraught with pain, full of traps, bombs and codes. Worse, it was addictive. Earlier than I learned to do the same thing with sex, I learned to look as though I wasn't doing it at all and became devious as hell.

Thrillers, adventures and war stories caused no ructions. They were the things my sister liked. My mother read too, mostly biographies of film stars - to learn how they'd escaped, I suppose. Some of the film stars she read about were women but they hadn't written the books themselves so that was ok. She also read the odd novel from a stack on top of the cupboard shelf which I could not reach. They had pictures of women with the their frocks falling off on the covers and the name ANGELIQUE featured on the spines. I already knew enough to know she was not the author. My father had apparently been a reader but he'd been dead for ages and not around much before that either. His books - from a club - were stacked at the bottom of a cupboard. The only one that looked as if it might have jokes was a big black tome with gold letters on the side: THE COMPLETE PLAYS of BERNARD SHAW. I stole it too. At ten, I accidentally wrote a novel in blue biro and pencil in which the lead character, a BOY my own age who lived in a colonised nation, died horribly after saving his family and village from invading Normans, whereupon the aforementioned family realised, too late, what bastards they had been to him all along. My mother found it but didn't tell my sister. She lit the fire with it.

Secondary school proved mother and sister uncannily perceptive. Women couldny write. There were none, not one, not even safely dead ones like Jane Austin or the Bröntes, as a class text. Women who appeared in the books by men seldom the central characters, or of they were, were usually SYMBOLIC. This helped reinforce the notion that women were not interesting in themselves and that ART did not concern itself with them. It took a bit longer to compute that them was us. Me. From there it was only a short step to work out that the more something was about or by women, the less likely it was to be ART at all. This troubled me a fair amount. It meant ART was on my sister's side. To hell with that then. Books would let you down. I fell out of love with BOOKS and intensified being in love with MUSIC because nobody had told me (not yet anyway) that women canny compose. The Head of Music became a beacon and my sister couldn't say boo because he was a TEACHER. He taught me MOZART was pronounced MOTZART and not as spelled on the biscuit tin at home. He taught me lots of things. Through third to sixth year, I sang and played Purcell and Byrd, Britten, Warlock and Gesualdo (my sister's aversion therapy meant I could have nothing to do with something called ROMANTIC music, even if it was by men) and read and sang FOLK SONGS. I had always sung pop songs but these ones were old and some were written as though women might be singing them. There were songs about being pregnant, about men, working, raising children. This was not ART of course, but it was exciting. Dangerous, even. My mind was made up. I would go the Uni and study MUSIC and be a CREDIT TO MYSELF. Also it would be one in the eye to Head of Girls who said I was not university material. The day I was leaving, I turned up at school in trousers and got sent home. This did not trouble me. I was taking the music and getting out. I visited Hillhead, peering out the filthy windows of a 59 bus, salivating. I was on the threshold of being able to let my enthusiasm out to play without apology or concealment. I would revel in Great Works of Music and ponder the meaning of Profound Literary Texts. I couldn't wait.

I should have. Of my English syllabus, less than two of the authors on the set list were female, and only one was Scots. My music list seemed not to know women - or Scotland - existed at all. There were no folk songs. In my third year, I cried a lot and they let me have a year out. I was, I realised with intense embarrassment, suffering from a broken heart. I went back and finished only because my advisor (whom I saw three times in my whole turbulent Uni career) said, Girls often give up, it's nothing to be ashamed of. Books were bastards. I could no longer listen to music. There was only one thing for it.

Teaching. On teaching practice, I turned up at school in trousers and was sent home. Finally posted, the store-room was familiar too. On the suggested reading list for senior pupils, there were thirteen women on a list of over sixty authors. Of those, ten, including Jane Austen, the Bröntes and Jessie Kesson were classified under the heading LOVE AND ROMANCE: Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a SCHOOL STORY. After the crying stopped, I started laughing and the laughing started something on a slow simmer at the back of my brain. After ten years and lots of reading I tracked down by myself, that simmer melted down all the bloody nonsense I'd been led to believe about AUTHORSHIP, WOMEN, SCOTLAND, CLASS and ART. And at last, like EM Forster, I could CONNECT. I could connect reading lists with straitjackets, the university with Saltcoats Library, and my sister with Hitler.

It was like finding the nose on my face.

It was better because, for the first time since I learned how to pronounce MOZART, it suggested I had the right to know things too. I felt the dangerous rush of FREEDOM in place of the RULES and I started to remember things. I remembered things I had known from a long time ago. I remembered Elvis. And I knew three things. I knew:

(a) the words ART, GOOD and REAL are bigger than a lot of folk would have us believe;

(b) I didn't have to believe everything I was told; and

(c) anything starting with women canny stunk like a month-old kipper.

My mother was dead.

I had not seen my sister for years.

I started writing.