Prinlaws Boy

May, and the hawthorn out all along the path by the railway line between Leslie and Markinch - ne'er cast a clout till May is out - and that smell, which has meant freedom to me since i was about twelve. There is a bridge on that line. i used to go and stand underneath it and wait for the goods train to come over the top of me and fill the whole arch with noise, and on a good afternoon the driver would wave.

Everybody else wanted to be away on it. i only ever wanted to stand underneath.

Markinch is the home of Haig's whisky and therefore of most of the local employment, and a few miles the other way is the town that made linoleum for most of the world and produced one Prime Minister, and if you have come up that coast on the train you will know that Kirkcaldy announces itself a good while before you see it. They used to read a poem at us in school about a boy who can tell by the queer-like smell that the next stop is Kirkcaddy. Every child in Fife sat through that poem in the certain knowledge that it was about somebody else's town. i was born in it, in the June of 1950, which is the last date i intend to put in this book without a good reason.

We were in Leslie mostly, in Prinlaws, which is the sort of street that gets called a close community by people who have never lived in one. What it was, if you want it straight, was poor, and full of a kind of violent tenderness i have not come across anywhere since - men who would take the belt off to their own boy on a Tuesday night and then walk four miles in the rain on the Wednesday to sit through the small hours with somebody's dying mother.

My father sold things. That was his trade and it was also, i have come to think, his religion; he had the bag and the raincoat and a way of standing in a doorway that made the doorway feel it owed him something. Later he laid carpets. Later still he did other things i only half know about, and by the time i had my own long career of getting into rooms and leaving them again it had occurred to me that a travelling salesman and a touring musician are the same animal working off different lies.

My mother was a Geordie out of Blyth on the Northumberland coast, where the boats came in and the men were black to the eyes, and she loved American blues in a way nobody in that street thought to find strange until i started telling people about it forty years later. She ironed to Lightnin' Hopkins. Have that picture the right way round: a small woman in a council house in Fife in the nineteen fifties, pressing my father's shirts on a Tuesday afternoon, and out of the wireless comes this enormous loose-limbed Texan telling her all about his troubles, and she is nodding along with the iron going.

She kept her own arrangements about God out in the coal shed, and i have told this before and people always assume i am at it: in among the coal and the bogeys and the frozen tins of paint stood a large painted wooden statue of a black woman with her hands crossed in front of her, whom my mother called the Black Sophia.

We were neither catholic nor protestant, and in the Scotland of that time that left a hole which other people were extremely keen to fill for you. Ye MUST be wan urr thi ither, they would say, with the finger going, in a playground, children who had it off their fathers. My pal Drew Johnston was in the orange scouts and his people were very clear about which one they were. He came round one day when we were both thirteen and found her in there, and stood looking at her for a long moment, and then said, very kindly, that i didnae want tae be telling anybody aboot this being here, it'll give them the creepy-crawlies. Then we went and washed cars for pocket money, because there were Daredevil comics to be had. i have thought about that boy's diplomacy on and off for fifty years and never once managed it.

My sister Wendy came off her tricycle one afternoon, possibly with a broken arm, in a house where the grown-ups had gone out to walk to the doctor's because nobody in that street had a telephone, and she would not stop, and since i was the eldest and it was therefore my department, i took her mind off it by throwing small wooden bricks at my little brother Ed's head until he started as well. Two children crying, one of them laughing at the other one crying, and me in the middle of it having arranged the whole thing.

The librarian in the new town of Glenrothes, an older woman who decided on evidence i have never been able to reconstruct that i was all right really, began shovelling books at me — this was 1964, and i was spending a good deal more time in that library than anybody had intended, in a town built on the assumption that if you gave people enough underpasses they would stop fighting. In one week i got through Catch 22 and The Caine Mutiny while my erstwhile classmates were losing the will to live across the way in double science. Out of the window you could see the Lomonds. Somewhere between those shelves and those hills the Russians got me - the poets, the women especially, Akhmatova and the rest of them, who looked over my shoulder and let their silver coated phantom breath seep into me and gave me a kind of lifelong protection, although from what i have never been clear, and they certainly never undertook to keep me alive.

The drinking started early, whisky from about eight years old onwards. The formal drinking, the sit-down this-is-what-men-do drinking, started in the Polish and Ukrainian working men's clubs, because the pits had brought those men to Fife and nobody had thought to inform them they were supposed to be miserable about it. They danced. They had the accordion and the small glasses and that unembarrassed grief which we Scots keep locked in the shed along with the Black Sophia and take out at funerals.

And by fourteen i was playing the folk clubs myself, in the back rooms of hotels that smelled of gravy and Fairy Liquid, where Archie Fisher and Hamish Imlach were kind to me in a way i was far too young to notice….