Newton Mearns

A while ago I was in Glasgow and drove to where I lived for a couple of years when I was four or five in Newton Mearns. There is a small block of flats there called Broomcliff. We lived on the first floor, I don't recall the number, but I do have many sharp memories of that time. Behind the flats was a row of garages next to which I learnt to ride a bike (my brother and I called the bike Tronic because the right pedal rubbed agianst the chain guard every time it went round and made the noise: tronic) and behind the garages there seemed to be a permanent building site. When I ventured in there, the blokes working there would sing "Hadrian, Hadrian, the one coat paint", which I am told was an ad on TV at the time. I got extremely muddy in there once. The flats had a distinctive kind of clean smell, which they still have. There were rubbish shutes on each floor which was quite exciting. There was a hill down from the garages to a kind of roundabout at the front of the flats where the kids played on their bikes, I managed to turn over my tricycle going down that hill and cut my knee open. I recall crying in the lobby, mum phoning dad to tell him she was taking me to hospital, more crying and the smell of TCP. I was given a Chopper as an early birthday present, it was orange and was one of the original ones which had adjustable handle bars (not fixed like later, safer models). There was a boy who had got kind of Chopper copy for passing his exams to get into Hutchison Grammar, but mine was the first actual Chopper in the area although mine was not earned through hard work but my nagging rather a lot I seem to remember. Setting off on it for the first time was more exciting than driving my Porsche off the forecourt for the first time.

Occasionally I would attend coffee mornings with my mum, I particularly remember an older lady from upstairs called Bunty making me laugh. We would get Lucky Bags from the newsagent down the road. My uncle (who must have been 17) and I locked ourselves in a bedroom to play on the Scalextric set that my brother had been given for his birthday that day. I used to play chess with an older boy from a flat upstairs. He would come down to our flat in his pyjamas, I think he let me win. There was a scandal when he got expelled from school or something. I remember a very Action Man and Meccano oriented Christmas, my mum's hair piece coming off before a dinner party, fondue, getting our first dish washer, eating Scotch pie and beans at the table that is next to me as I type this, the smell of fresias, going to bed in the afternoon because we were going to the circus at the Kelvin Hall that evening, my dad's new aubergine Ford Zodiac, having to stand up in the back of my mum's Mini when I had had a toilet related accident at school and going to visit Uncle John and Aunt Anne (pronounced "an tan")in Cambuslang, they had the first colour TV I had ever seen and a model of Concorde. Their kids had the most astoninshing set of Action Man gear including jeeps, tanks and I think a parachute. We would eat chips there, and a skinny friend of their's from up the road called Graham could eat loads.