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By Root 1293 0

a meal of sawdust to the mouth. And of course there was homework. My father wanted to relieve the drudgery of learning by taking me cycling and climbing, but I hated enjoying myself in his shadow, and preferred the escapist worlds of comics and films and books: books most of all. Riddrie had a good library. I had a natural preference for all sorts of escapist crap, but when I had read all there was of that there was nothing left but good stuff: and myth and legend, and travel, biography and history. I regarded a well-stocked public library as the pinnacle of democratic socialism. That a good dull place like Riddrie had one was proof that the world was essentially well organized. I realize I am talking here about my life from 11 years onward, after the Second World War. During it, with evacuation in 1939 to a farm in Auchterarder (an experience I used in The Oracle’s Prologue) in the mining town of Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (which I used in 1982 Janine, my second novel) and Wetherby in Yorkshire, life was not under the almost total jurisdiction of the Scottish Education system with my parents’ full support, so not at all dull.

Q When did you realize you were an artist?

A I did not realize it. Like all infants who were allowed materials to draw with, I did, and nobody suggested I stop. At school I was even encouraged to do it. And my parents (like many parents in those days) expected their children to have a party piece – a song or poem they would perform at domestic gatherings. The poems I recited were very poor A A Milne stuff. I found it possible to write verses which struck me as equally good, if not better, because they were mine. My father typed them for me, and the puerile little stories which I sent to children’s magazines and children’s radio competitions. When I was eleven I read a four-minute programme of my own compositions on Scottish BBC children’s hour. But I was eight or nine years old when it occurred to me that I would one day write a story which would get printed in a book. This gave me a feeling of deliriously joyful power.

Q What sort of things did you draw when you were a child?

A Space ships, monsters, maps of imaginary planets and kingdoms, the settings for stories of romantic and violent adventure, which I told my sister when we walked to school together. She was the first audience I could really depend on in the crucial years between seven and eleven. If you have read Lanark you will notice how much of Book 1 – the first half of the Thaw section – draws upon my childhood. It does not show how much help and sympathy my mum, dad and sister gave me. I took it for granted as something natural and ordinary because so did they. When I came to use the material of my childhood in that novel what I remembered were our quarrels – they were more dramatic than the support I took for granted.

Q When and why did you want to make a story of your life?

A Surely everyone wants to be a hero or heroine? I’m sure all children do, probably when they stop being babies and find they have very little power over the world, apart from the power they imagine having. Books contained worlds I could grasp and manage through day-dreaming. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents’ bedroom beside Carlyle’s French Revolution, Macaulay’s essays, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Noble Families by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers Library volume called Humanity’s Gain from Unbelief, an anthology of extracts for atheists called Lift up Your Heads, a large blue-grey bound volume with The Miracle of Life stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on the Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life that has Vanished, Evolutions as the Clock Ticks, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, Man’s Family Tree, Races of Mankind, The Human Machine at Work, Psychology through the Ages, Discoverers of Life’s Secrets. The 476 pages (excluding the index) were half given to black-and-white photographs and diagrams. The middle shelf also held Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism