More clearing away, more tidying-up, getting ready supper, eating it, clearing it—you might almost have hated the sight of food with the number of times you messed the stuff. But you didn’t: instead, you were hungry all day, ate a large supper at nine o’clock, found work nearly done and yawned a bit, and sat listening to Ma’s radio in the sitting-room, a deserted place most nights but for you. And you’d listen to talks on ethics and cocktails and how to go hiking on the Côte d’Azur, minding the baby, copulation in catkins, and the views of Jacob P. Hackenschmidt on Scotland and Her Ancient Nationhood; and you’d switch the thing off, losh, that was better, worth paying a licence to keep the thing quiet, drowse instead and think of the countryside, corn coming green in clay parks this night as often you’d seen it when you were a quean, wedded to Εwan in Kinraddie long syne—you that waited the feet of another Ewan now.

In Paldy Parish as the June came in there came a wave of heat with the month, it lifted the guffs from the half-choked drains and flung them in under the broken doors down through the courts to simmer and stew, a body could hardly bear the touch of his sark as he lay in bed by his wife of a night, the weans would whimper and move and scratch on the shake-down over under the window—stewing in the front of a half-open furnace. And a man would get up in a Paldy tenement and go along the passage to the WC, blasted thing crowded, served a score of folk, not decent, by God what a country to live in. On the Broo since the War and five kids to keep, eating off your head—och, why did you live?—never a minute of quiet to yourself, nothing but the girnings of the wife for more silver, the kids half-barefoot, half-fed, oh hell.

And the wife would turn as she heard him come back, lie wakeful and think on the morn’s morning—what to give the weans, what to give the man, fed he must be ere he took the streets to look for that weary job he’d not find—he’d never find one you had come to ken. Hardly believe it was him you had wed, that had been a gey bit spark in his time, hearty and bonny, liked you well: and had hit you last night, the bloody brute coming drunk from the pub—a woman couldn’t go and hide in booze, forget all the soss and pleiter, oh no, she’d to go on till she dropped, weans scraiching, getting thin and like tinks, and the awful words they picked up every place, the eldest loon a street-corner keelie, the quean—oh God, it made a body sick.

And the quean would turn by the side of her sisters, see the faint glow of the dawn, smell the reek of the Paldy heat—Christ, would she never get out of it, get a job, get away, have clothes, some fun? If they couldn’t afford to bring up their weans decent why did father and mother have them? and syne nag and nag at you day on day, on this and that, the way that you walked, the way you behaved (take care that the loons don’t touch your legs), the way that you spoke—nothing pleased the old fools, and what you brought home they thought should be theirs, every meek that you made, nothing for yourself, stew in the reek of the Cowgate’s drains till you died and were buried and stank to match. My God, if a lassie couldn’t do anything else she could take a bit walk out to Doughty Park, fine there, though the place was littered with Reds, fair daft, the Communionists the worst of the lot, aye holding their meetings and scraiching and bawling that the workers all join up with their unions and fight for their rights and down with the gents.