My Reluctant Journey

Chapter 1

Being gay is not the easiest road to travel in this world, being a divorced Dad with two kids is also difficult; being a gay divorced Dad with two kids is really bloody difficult. The two parts of your life are at opposite polarities from one another and want to be separate. In nature, they should not co-exist together at all, but for some of us that is the hand we are dealt and we have to try and handle it the best way we can. Some people are really good players in life's parenting game and win through easily with their cool judgements and consummate skill. Other people are not such good players and lose despite their best efforts or through the lack of them. For my part, I thought I was a reasonably good player. I was honest, hard-working and loved my children. I also had an example of how not to be a father from my own upbringing. I believe I did the best job I could with the hand I was dealt, no-matter what others may think. Perhaps if you manage to read my story to the end you can judge for yourself whether you think I deserved to have won the game or lost. This is my story of how I played the hand God dealt me.

My story begins on a dull grey September morning in Glasgow, Scotland, typical of so many mornings there, where the sky always seemed to be grey and nearly always raining. I was born on the fifth of September 1947 in a one room flat, called a single end, these days we would just call it a slum. We lived at number 8 Tamworth Street a cul-de-sac off Remsdale Street in the old east end of Glasgow. This was a poor working-class area of the city called Bridgeton. It was redolent with rundown grey tenement buildings in the grey streets to match the grey sky and was famous for its sectarian violence. The Catholic gangs of the Calton area close by fought the Loyalist gangs of Bridgeton and where the open razor was the weapon of choice for both. This is what I was born into and how I began my journey in life.

Both of these streets where I spent my earliest years are long gone along with most of the old east end of the city. They were replaced many years ago with modern buildings and new flats, gone for good like a lot of the old Glasgow, although some of the landmarks from that time still remain like ghosts of the past to remind us. The old east end is just a distant memory now for those of us who still remember it the way it used to be. The city corporation slowly eradicated the slums that blighted the city and gave Glasgow such a bad reputation throughout the world, one that remains to this day. The citizens these days have a better way of life with newer housing and amenities that those of old could only dream of, and that is a good thing. The old memories never go away however and so I will share mine with you while I can still remember them. We start from my earliest childhood recollections until the present day where I live as an openly gay man. Being a gay man back then when I was born could not have been easy as it was still illegal and conducted clandestinely in the shadows only. But it did go on, it has always gone on, and that is something that will never change until the end of time.

We were not a rich family, but my father Archie at least had a job as a leather worker in the local tannery called the Martins Leather Company, which was also located in Bridgeton, very close to where we lived. This smelly old factory was located just across the London Road which was the main artery through Bridgeton, thus my father only had a five-minute walk to get to his work. As a child I used to think that if I followed this road I would end up in London itself, which in fact you would, but that was a long way for a wee boy to walk. Later in my life I was to take that road and did indeed end up in London, but that was a long way off and much was to happen to me before then.

My father was a tall thin man with thinning hair even when he was young, and was not particularly handsome. He maintained a strip of hair down the middle of his head for as long as I could remember. He also had a tendency to be a bit camp, like Bruce Forsythe the popular British TV presenter. This was an act he would put on when he was in one of his rare good moods and usually befuddled through drink.

My mother Catherine called Kitty by her friends, had moved up to the Glasgow slums from England after she married my father. He had been sent down to her hometown of Stanley Co. Durham as a Bevin Boy to work down the coal mines instead of going into the armed forces during the war. He professed that he was devastated when he got his telegram, as he wanted to go into the army with his friends, but he had no choice in the matter. Whether he liked it or not, he was destined to be a miner for the duration of the war, but being paid a soldier's wage.