The Auld New Year

December 31st, 1959. It was Hogmanay, only a few minutes of the Old Year remained; those minutes bridging the past and the future. My father held me, aged four, cooried in the crook of his arm. We stood outside the front door to our house; a single-end on the ground floor of a tenement close, in the East End of Glasgow. We were waiting to be the First Foot of the New Year across our threshold: bringing good luck and prosperity for the forthcoming year. The First Foot had to be tall, dark and handsome; my father, aged thirty six, was all of these.

The warm yellow light from the gas lamp on the wall of the Close, made shadows of us on the damp plaster wall; our two heads lumped together. A snell wind blew through the Close from the black, barren wasteland of the back court. That back court was my infant playground, a park of grassless earth, strewn with silver shards of broken bottles and hard tamped earth; a space filled with brick washhouses and dustbin shelters.

The Old Year’s wind brought on its icy breath, the smell of ancient ghosts and the first fragile flakes of snow. My father’s shoulders, tense with the cold and anticipation, made a pillow for my nodding head. My cheek felt the jagged nap of the cloth of his jacket, my small hand, hooked around his neck, traced the line of his shirt collar. He was dressed in his best clothes, to mark this moment of magic, on this special day. We were waiting for the welcome of a New Year; waiting for the bells of the Old Parish church to tell the midnight. We were leaving behind the old world of dead generations, and memories of wars that were not of our making.

The bells rang out, “Welcome”, to a new decade and a new world. My father, an optimist and a dreamer, believed this. As the bells were striking, he was crooning Robert Burns into my ear, ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot.’ He knocked on the door, senses sharp with the quick thrill of what might happen when the door opened; although you knew already what lay beyond. Then, the door pulled wide and the warm rush of air from the house gathered us in, my mother smiling and my baby brother in her arms.

As the first minutes of the New Year marched on, there would be other knocks on the door. “Happy New Year, tae yin an’ a”. The aunties and uncles, cousins and friends would start to arrive, offerings of whisky and shortbread, gratefully accepted. The weans were always allowed to stay up for New Year. The youngest, sound asleep, tumbled among the nest of coats and jackets on the box bed in a recess of the single room. The older children, important with a call to duty, would help serve sandwiches and drinks. “Pan” bread, tinned salmon, cooked ham, and cheese; Dundee cake and shortbread. The children were attentive to instruction, fulfilling a vital role as the adults issued orders, ‘Fill up your Auntie Jean’s glass, she needs a wee bit more lemonade in her whisky.’ Later, well into the early hours on that first day of January, the children would start to doze: heads nodding, curled at the feet of parents, aunties and uncles, or older cousins who were verging on adulthood, and who had already left school and were working in the local shops and factories. As they dozed, drowsed with heat from a coal fire, and the comfort of family, the children would imbibe the singing and the stories; tales of family and friends, passed and gone, lost to two world wars and disease. ‘Aye ye’ll mind Malcolm, the cousin that lived over Grangemouth. Grand lad. Died at Gallipoli.’ Recalling in the oral tradition, unknown aunties and uncles, wasted to war and surrendered to Tuberculosis.

At the dawning of the New Year’s first day, the adults would rouse themselves from maudlin memories: reluctantly they sipped the last of their whisky, and called for one last song. ‘Gie us “the road tae Dundee” Jeannie hen.’ The song evoking a longing for a time or place that perhaps never was, or at least was several generations away. From a time when their own grandparents and great grandparents had left distant towns and villages, farms and coasts; to trail like rag tail pioneers to a city where there was work: to expanding factories and new seams of coal. These songs and stories would permeate into their bone, become the basis of nostalgia: for a time when family and friends lived and worked and created communities of apparent permanence. In years to come these stories would evaporate, like the people themselves, victim to the technologies of a new century and to transient globalization. But for now, as the old year departed, and at the start of a new decade, there appeared to be a spark of hope, a transition to a new and better world.