My hometown was named after the shipyard which had given birth to it – Clydebank. By the time I was born the shipbuilding industry, once the iron core of the city, was obsolete. The yards and factories had long been demolished and all that remained was one large, rusted cantilever crane which stood stoic against the murky skyline, a stark reminder of the once thriving dockyard, now barren wasteland.
My mum spoke often of the shipyard that her own father and brother had worked at, of how affluent and vibrant the place had been then. When the shipyards closed, she said, they severed the town’s main artery. My grandad had been a welder and helped construct some of the most famous ships in the world; Queen Mary, Britannia, The QE2. He salvaged a small piece of rubble from the demolition and kept it on top of the mantelpiece, as treasured as an artefact retrieved from Tutankhamun’s tomb.
My mum worked alongside my nanna in Singers sewing factory, side by side, on the assembly line. A vivid memory I have is of the narrow treadle sewing machine, complete with walnut wood cover, which sat in the corner of my nanna’s cramped kitchen and of how, during one of the many house parties, that same cover would be flipped on its side and used as a makeshift seat for a guest to sit on. When my nanna died, I pleaded with my mum not to get rid of it, but she couldn’t. She said it felt as raw as keeping her coffin in our living room.
The Clydebank my grandparents knew was one of industry and affluence before, over the course of two nights, the Luftwaffe obliterated it to debris and ash, almost destroying the town completely. It was the worst destruction and loss of life in all of Scotland. My mum, only five years old at the time, remembers running from close to close as they tried to find shelter from the bombings; of the high-pitched whine which shuddered in her chest as they dropped, of how she feared the silence more. I was an adult before I knew that my Grandad had to identify the bodies of seven members of his family, from the many bodies laid out in a nearby chapel, who had all been killed overnight. I can’t imagine the weight of that, how he must have carried it his whole life. And yet, they never left. With a steely defiance, they stayed and rebuilt.
The Clydebank I remember is one of modernisation and rebirth – with a bustling shopping centre, cinema complex and its own football team. Saturday afternoons were spent browsing in John Menzies with my best friend, Tracie, although we never had enough money to buy anything more than a copy of Smash Hits and a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. We lived on the same street, and spent our weekends sprawled on the parched grass beside the canal bank, skimming stones at trolleys lodged in the muddied water, before wearily heading home when the streetlights flickered on or when our stomachs growled.
I remember the day that Tracie and I saw the bulldozers tear down our primary school. We sat on a low stone wall, watching sadly as they sliced through the blanched grey walls like putty.
‘That was Mrs Taylor’s class,’ said Tracie. ‘I liked her.’
There was a sparse crowd gathered. It was a stifling hot morning, and, after a while, people got restless, babies fussed and cried in their buggies, but Tracie and I stayed until the end. Our school had been flat roofed, pentagon shaped, with a tree planted in the bare courtyard at the hollowed centre. On sunny days, our class would take a sheet of paper and a crayon and rub it against the bark, then the teacher would tape the drawings to the windows. Once the building had been flattened and shovelled away, there was nothing left but that lone rowan tree, until they ripped that from the earth too and shoved it in a chipper. On the wrought iron perimeter gates, pupils had stuck notes to it.
‘Do you want to write something?’ said Tracie.
I shook my head, feeling as though a brick was lodged inside my ribcage.
What do you say when a part of your youth has just been erased?
After that summer, we’d both be starting secondary and the annihilation of our primary school felt symbolic, somehow; the end of something.
A full stop.
On our first day of high school, we were so early, that we took the long way there, up past the fancy houses on the hill, so we could play our “If I was rich, I’d live here” game. I always picked the white bungalow with mint green wooden shutters, and she always picked the mock Spanish villa with two garages and a marble fountain in the garden.
‘I’d love to live in that house,’ she sighed.
‘Yeah, just not here though?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever leave.’
Tracie’s sister had started working as a cashier in the big new supermarket that had recently opened, and Tracie said that, in a few years’ time, she wanted to work there too.
This is my hometown, I thought, and everyone I have ever known or loved has lived here. There was a comfort in that, knowing I was tethered to something solid, something dependable, but I worried that the rope might one day snag, and I’d get stuck and never be released.
Growing up, I was eager to leave. And yet, I now stay with my own family less than ten minutes from my childhood home. To be born in a town, to spend your whole life there – as I have – is to absorb its ghosts. This is a town forged in steel and blood. I have always lived within walking distance of the river Clyde, and it runs like a dark vein through my city, forever pulsing, pulsing, pulsing.