We played there for hours.
We had the freedom given by parents liberated from years of war and we loved it.
The backies was an area of wasteland bordered by four storey tenements on three sides and a weed filled sloping lane on the fourth. An area of stones, gravel, broken glass, tin cans and many other wonders.
I still have a scar on my forehead from a tin can lid frisbee. Long before frisbees were a thing. My Ma said they could’ve had your eye out with that. We all heard those words many times. It was an earned badge, a rite of passage like so many others.
Friendships were forged in that wasteland cauldron. Characters created as twenty children scattered in every direction to hide while one tried to retrieve the kicked can from the weedy lane and replace it so the search for the others could begin. Friends were needed to protect the can during the hide and seek. Our south side Glasgow version of hide and seek. Tears of joy and tears of frustration. Fun and games every evening and weekend in what seemed like endless days.
The centre ground of the backies was a dark brick one story building not unlike the tenement wash houses but bigger, squat and solid and forbidding. A left over bomb shelter. A reminder of our frail freedom. Thick walls contained brick passageways smelling of damp and danger. No door but an opening, threatening and scarily inviting. Had it ever been bombed? We imagined it had been at the very centre of the Luftwaffe onslaught. That seemed more acceptable.
There were other rumours. A secret meeting place for who knows what? An entry to an underground place of mystery and darkness? Those who ventured in suggested signs of violence and things we didn’t understand. That kept us out. As did the dark, sooty imprint of a hand on the doorway wall. It was proof. This was the meeting place of the Black Hand Gang. Or so we chose to believe.
Time and peace stretched on and the bomb shelter was demolished. Suddenly one of the shadows that haunted our wasteland was no more. Those of us still young enough to play there now had piles of broken bricks to fashion into ramparts and forts. Skinned knees and elbows and whoops of Roy Rogers and Big Chief Sitting Bull.
On November 5th the grown ups built a huge bonfire on the site of the shelter. It blazed like the bombs had landed but we wrapped potatoes in foil and found them the next morning in the embers like survivors from the blitz, burned but delicious, blackened but alive.
Life drew us all away. I still have a friend from those times. Well at least one. Memories of others. The universe has conspired to take us in very different directions but has brought our roads together from time to time and our friendship still flourishes. He was my best friend, still is. Formed on wasteland and adventure.
What of the backies? A car park now with a sign that says no fly tipping. I thought it had become a modern, safe, sanitised play ground. Maybe I imagined that. It wouldn’t have been right anyway, any more than a car park. It was a playground once, fun, fear and friends.
To us it always will be.