Leaving Alexandria

A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

Richard Holloway

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786898913
• eBook ISBN: 9780857860750
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito religioso

The prize-winning memoir: "an enlightening walk through a life that encompasses West Africa…rent strikes, the divided self and the question of grace" ( Scotland on Sunday, UK).
An international bestseller and winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize, Ricard Holloway's candid memoir "is many things. It is a compelling account of a journey through life, told with great frankness; it is a subtle reflection on what it means to live in an imperfect and puzzling world; and it is a highly readable insight into one of the most humane and engaged minds of our times. It is, quite simply, a wonderful book" (Alexander McCall Smith).

At the tender age of fourteen, Richard Holloway left his hometown of Alexandria, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained for the priesthood at an English monastery. By the age of twenty-five he had been ordained and was working in the slums of Glasgow. Through the forty years that followed, Richard touched the lives of many people as he rose to one of the highest positions in the Anglican Church. But behind his confident public faith lay a restless heart and an inquisitive mind.

"Richard Holloway's memoir is endlessly vivid and fascinating. It's the record of a mind too large, too curious and far too generous to be confined within any single religious denomination…a delight and inspiration to believers, non-believers, and ex-believers alike."—Philip Pullman

1

CARMAN HILL

My father always got up well before six. Sometimes, if I was sleeping in the kitchen, I’d watch him from the bed recess when he didn’t know I was looking. I would notice how quiet and economical he was in his movements. The kettle goes on first to make a cup of tea, which he drinks standing up. Milk, no sugar. He takes nothing to eat. Fills his pipe with the wad of Walnut Plug he’s rubbed up in his hands. Gets it going with one match. Then he stands looking out of the window, his left arm along his waist supporting his right elbow, his other arm upright, holding the pipe in his mouth with his right hand. I wonder what he’s thinking as he stands there motionless. It’s getting light. What’s he seeing? He turns, opens the door quietly. With a sudden pang I realise what a considerate man he is. The door snecks softly shut behind him. He walks swiftly down Random Street, left along John Street, right down Bank Street to the Leven, then north along the riverbank to the Craft.

This is where he is from, the Vale of Leven, twenty miles north of Glasgow; but he’d been away a long time, walking the streets of Glasgow looking for work in what my mother always referred to as the Hungry Thirties. He’d try anything then to put something on the table for the five of us, including carrying his own weight in cheap coal up tenement stairs. It was the war that rescued him and brought us back to the Vale and his job in the Craft, the United Turkey Red factory in Alexandria. War work, he called it. To begin with we sublet two rooms in Bridge Street, but my mother importuned the house factors Burgess and MacLean to rent us a dilapidated old room and kitchen in Random Street. And we were happy there. Glad to be employed again, my father worked all the hours there were in the early years of the war, and we didn’t see a lot of him. I too was glad to be back in the Vale, back among hills. And walking them became a passion, a passion that never faded.

It was my mother who started it. During the long double-summertime days of the war, she took me, my wee sister Helen and my big sister Gertie exploring the hills that surrounded us, and Carman was her favourite. We’d walk in through the woods of Poachy Glen, on the edge of Renton, till the path steepened on Millburn Muir and led us to the top, 800 feet up. From up there we could see in every direction, but my eyes always went north first, to Ben Lomond and the great loch over which it presided. At over 3,000 feet, it was massive rather than craggy, and from Carman it looked like a purple ziggurat. It sat halfway up the east side of the loch at Rowardennan, along the road from Balmaha, both stops on the voyage of the Maid of the Loch, the paddle-steamer that plied the loch throughout the summer months.

By the end of the war the family walks had petered out. Years of energetic smoking began to tell on my mother; and Gertie, five years older than me, left school at fourteen to work in a chemist shop in Renton and moved out of my orbit. Helen, three years younger, sometimes came with me; but she had pals of her own to play with and didn’t always want to join me. I had pals too, but walking was something I preferred to do on my own, so even as a boy I was a solitary walker. Sometimes I went up Staney Mollan, near the loch at Balloch, or Pappert Hill over on the east side of the river; but most of the time it was Carman Hill I returned to, back to an early love. And it was always to the north I turned first when I got to the top, always to the Ben and its island-patterned Loch. Yet the view to the south was just as dramatic. The Leven met the Clyde at Dumbarton, a few miles away, and from Carman Hill I saw it coursing into the bigger river at Dumbarton Rock, a plug of volcanic basalt 240 feet high, and since the fifth century a fortress of the British Kingdom of Strathclyde – Dùn Breatainn. At school it always struck us as funny that Great Britain got its name from as dismal a town as Dumbarton. Turning to the south-west, I saw the river spreading itself into the Firth of Clyde as it flowed on into the distant sea. The Clyde was a majestic river, but she was a worker as well as a queen, and wherever my eyes followed her, up river to Glasgow or down river to Greenock, on a clear day I could make out the cranes of the shipyards that lined both sides of her banks. And I knew that down below me in a few hours, workers from Denny’s in Dumbarton and John Brown’s in Clydebank would be getting off the train at Alexandria. Bank Street would be loud with hundreds of men in tackety boots clattering home for their tea after a long shift in the yards. But the Vale of Leven had its own industries, drawn there by the river that gave the valley its name.

From Carman I could see the Leven flooding out of the Loch at Balloch Pier and snaking its way to the Clyde. It is only five miles from Balloch to Dumbarton as the crow flies, but the Leven takes seven serpentine miles to get there. Just down there, due east of Carman, it twisted completely back on itself at Cordale Point and again at Dalquhurn Point. And it was swift. We were told that only the Spey was faster, so we should respect our river. The Leven was swift not only because of the colossal force of the water that poured into it from Loch Lomond, the largest lake in Britain, but also because it flowed down, descending twenty-six feet from its source at Balloch to its exit into the Clyde at Dumbarton. All five towns along the river were obvious to me from up here. On the east side, going south from the loch, Balloch – really only a village – was clear; then came the small towns of Jamestown and Bonhill. Coming back west over the river, I could make out the Victorian hump of Bonhill Bridge, the link to Alexandria, the newest and biggest of the five towns of the Vale, a creature of the bleaching and dyeing industries that had established themselves along the Leven early in the eighteenth century. On this side of the river, back up the way to the loch, was the factory where my father worked. It had a Gaelic name, Croftengea, after a mighty oak tree that was reputed to have been a gathering place for the local clan, but to everyone in the Vale it was known as the Craft, a rambling, dilapidated dye works owned by the United Turkey Red Company.

Up on my hill, I pictured my father in there, dyeing bales of cloth hour after hour; and I would wonder what colour he’d come home tonight. He’d strip to the waist and wash himself down at the kitchen sink, and I’d furtively examine his small, wiry body. Then he’d eat the meal my mother had cooked for him, and fall asleep in his chair by the fireside. Everyone called him Wee Arthur because he was only a couple of inches over five foot. He was admired by everyone. I admired him too; but I longed for a more heroic figure for a father, big and heavily muscled like our neighbour John McGlashan, a physical training instructor in the army and a champion welterweight boxer. Mammy had told me that Daddy had been a long-distance runner when he was young, and that he would walk twenty miles a day without noticing it when he was looking for work before the war. I liked to hear that, but I wanted him to be bigger. He was back in the factory in which he had served his time as a block-printer when he was a boy – but not now as a tradesman. They no longer printed cloth by hand the way he had been taught. Though his trade was obsolete, he’d held on to the short lead mallets that were the tools of his craft. They were kept under the bed in the kitchen recess, wrapped in a bit of cloth. Why did he hold onto them? I wondered. He was a labourer now, maybe what they called a skilled labourer, but he did not complain. Actually, he didn’t say much at all, except when he had a drink in him; then he could be talkative and amusing. I liked him, knew he was a good father. He worked hard for us. It was only that I wanted a more heroic figure, larger in scale. But Wee Arthur he was, working all the hours there were, down there in the Craft or Croftengea.

Alexandria was not a Gaelic name like Croftengea, nor was Renton, down the road from it on the west side of the Leven, the fifth of the towns along the river. The dominant family in the area in the eighteenth century were the Smolletts, the most famous of them being Tobias, the novelist. We were told that our street was named after his most famous novel, Roderick Random – whether true or not, it was certainly true that our town got its name from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Smollett, Member of Parliament for Dunbartonshire in the late eighteenth century, and the son of Alexander Smollett and Celia Renton, after whom Renton was named.

It was easy to make out Random Street from Carman Hill. All I had to do was find Alexandria Station, which was at the foot of the street, and trace it back up to where it met Mitchell Street, the crescent that linked Main Street with Bank Street. Random Street was one of the oldest streets in Alexandria. Bits of it went back to the early 1800s, and we lived in one of those bits, a row of red sandstone cottages, each habitation a room and kitchen, a ‘but-and-ben’ in local parlance. They went back to the days when farming was the only industry in the Vale. There was no lighting in the room at the back where the three of us children usually slept, apart from the window onto the back, but we had a gas light in the kitchen, above the fireplace. You turned the gas on with a wee tap at the side, applied a match flame to the white mantle in the lamp, and a quiet light suffused the room. That room was the scene of many singsongs after the war. Uncle Harry, my father’s favourite brother, was back from North Africa and working beside him in the Craft. They spent Saturday evenings together in the pub at the bottom of the street and brought a carry-out back to the house when the pub closed. The family told me I had a good voice, and I was urged to go through the repertoire of songs I had memorised from the wireless.

Yours till the stars lose their glory

Yours till the birds cease to sing

Yours till the end of life’s story

This pledge to you, dear, I bring.

Then there was, ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and ‘Bless This House O Lord We Pray’. As an encore, and without embarrassment, I’d sing:

My mother’s name was Mary

She was so good and true

Because her name was Mary

She called me Mary too.

My mother, whose name was Mary, would watch me fiercely, drawing deeply on her Woodbine, eyes brimming. But she was the real singer. Though untrained, she had a true and powerful soprano voice that years of heavy smoking never diminished. She came into her own on Hogmanay, when we gathered round the fire in the kitchen to bring in the New Year. When midnight came and our first-foot had sunk his dram, someone would say, ‘Mary, gie us a song’ and all eyes would turn to her. She’d stub out her cigarette and start, and it was always the same song she’d start with:

Bonny Scotland I adore thee

tho’ I’m far across the sea

and when loneliness creeps o’er me

my thoughts fly back tae thee

and in fancy I can see ye yet

your lovely heather braes

reminds me o’ departed joys

brings back sweet memories

Scotland, Scotland,

Scotland aye sae braw

my hairt is aye in Scotland

tho’ I’m sae far awa

take me back amang the wildwood

and roon the rowan tree

oh take me tae my ain wee hoose

that’s aye sae dear tae me

sae dear tae me, sae dear tae me

that’s aye sae dear tae me.

And there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the room. It was a strange thing, missing Scotland when we were right there in the middle of it, being overwhelmed with homesickness when we were sitting in our own kitchen before a blazing fire. Wherever it came from, this sadness is rooted in the Scottish soul:

how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing . . . the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years . . . it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs.¹¹

The wee house my mother seemed to be mourning even as we lived there was 31 Random Street, and it became legendary in our memories. I have an old photograph of it, and am surprised to see that the pavement outside the cottage is not made up. Kerbstones separate it from the roadway, certainly, but the sidewalk is made of packed earth and crushed stones. On the opposite side of the street from us there was a terrace of two-storied tenements, with outside stairs round the back to the flats on the upper floor. They were characteristic of the town as a whole, and reflected its industrial growth. There were some handsome public buildings in the Vale, but most of the houses were in two-storied terraces like the ones in Random Street. Better-off people had bigger houses up the hill above Main Street – on Middleton Street and Smollett Street – but even here there wasn’t much that was really grand or pretentious. And everything was near everything else. On a winter morning I went up Mitchell Street and across Main Street to Rennie’s Bakery to buy rolls. The shop wouldn’t be open, so I’d go to the bakehouse round the back, where I’d stand in the warmth and watch them pulling the trays of hot rolls out of the ovens with long wooden poles. There was a Co-op store in Mitchell Street, and a fishmonger’s and butcher’s on Main Street. We bought sweeties at Goodwin’s corner shop at the top of the street, where you could pay into a club for presents at Christmas. There was a greengrocer’s in Bank Street, and other shops at the Fountain, a memorial to Alexander Smollett, which sat in the middle of the road between Main Street and Bank Street. But I haven’t yet mentioned the buildings that were of particular interest to my mother and me, the picture houses.

My mother was addicted to the pictures, a habit I inherited. She usually took me with her twice a week, and Helen sometimes came too. Gertie was now a working woman with a boyfriend serving his time as a joiner, and they were both keen dancers, so the movie habit never hit my big sister. I got it badly and it stuck. Mammy and I would check the Lennox Herald, the local weekly paper, for the listings, but I don’t think we were very discriminating and would sit through just about anything. It was an escape into romance and fantasy for me; but what was it for my mother? I suspect now it was the same for her. There was always something eager and unsatisfied about her, as if she was trying to compensate for a great loss somewhere and was filling her pockets before the sweetie shop closed for ever. An attractive, volatile, charismatic woman, she was the emotional centre of my life and I can still recall her most frequent endearment. She told me repeatedly that I was her wee ton of bricks. I loved her and hated to be separated from her. I knew the outline of her history, of course, but it was only after her death that I was able to fill in the detail.

At ten she had been orphaned and sent to Quarriers Home in Bridge of Weir, south-west of Glasgow. I have a copy of the page from the ledger of admissions that recorded her entry to the orphanage on 4 September 1917.

Mary Johnston Luke born 7th April 1907 at 12 Vernon Street, Glasgow & Violet Vallance born 30th January 1910 at 124 High Craighead Road. Presently in care of Mrs Docherty, 220 Possil Road, Glasgow. They were in contact with Whooping Cough and are just discharged from the Observation House, South York Street. Mary is by a former marriage but known as Vallance.

Father of Mary is James Luke, Iron Moulder, deceased. Father of Violet, William Vallance, No 8254 Pte. 46th Infantry Brigade B.E.F. France; presently in Stobhill Hospital.

Mother Christina Vallance, formerly Luke, M.S. Johnston, 37 years, died at 202 Possil Road on 6th Aug 1917 of Heart Failure. She had been drinking and pawned the children’s clothing.

George, 3 years, is in Ruchill Hospital with Whooping Cough. He is to be cared for by Mrs John Kyle, 214 Possil Road by the father’s arrangement.

The ledger states that there were no relatives willing to care for the three children, though the entry names an aunt and an uncle. The records at Quarriers note that Mr and Mrs Vallance had taken out an insurance policy against being unable to care for their children. Mr John Gray of the Hand in Hand Insurance Society, 150 Hope Street, Glasgow, made the arrangements for the children’s admission and for the appropriate allowance to be paid to Quarriers, then known as The Orphan Homes of Scotland. They also record that before his return to France, Private Vallance arranged for George’s admission to the orphanage. Violet is noted as having ‘Hip Joint Disease’, for which she was wearing a plaster cast and using crutches to walk.

A later entry in the ledger goes on to record that on 7 May 1919, Mary and George were discharged to Mr William Vallance, then living in a ‘damp’ basement room at 30 Kelvinside Avenue, Maryhill. His occupation was given as a Lead Works Labourer, but the recorder noted that he had been unemployed since coming back from the war and was receiving Unemployment Benefit. My mother can hardly have known her stepfather when she and George were released into his care a month after her twelfth birthday. He had been a regular soldier in the HLI or Highland Light Infantry, the famous Glasgow regiment of wee hard men, and he had fought in France throughout the war. She was never explicit about what life was like for her in the basement in Kelvinside Avenue, but we could tell it hadn’t been easy. By the time Violet was released to Bill Vallance on 26 September 1926 my mother was long gone. At eighteen she had already met and married my father. Violet and Granda went on living in the room on Kelvinside Avenue till his death in 1959, and Violet long after that. We visited them frequently on trips to Glasgow from the Vale. I remember going to the back of the close, then down a few steps to the basement room, which looked out onto the back court. Violet, who used crutches all her life, kept it ‘scruptiously clean’, as my mother put it. My memory of those Maryhill visits was of the heroic quantities of Scotch broth Violet made to celebrate our coming.

They were an unlikely couple, my parents, and not only because she was several inches taller. Where she was volatile, exciting, dangerous, Daddy was stoic, calm, uncomplaining, the steady parent. He was the third of eight children, five boys and three girls, born to Richard Holloway and Mary Buchanan, who had married in 1901. But there was a twist in his story, too. Sometime during the 1920s his father emigrated to New York, taking with him his son Dick and daughters Jessie and Beatty, leaving the other five – Tommy, Arthur, Joe, Gertie and Harry – in Scotland wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Prologue: The Graveyard
• I: 1940–56
• 1. Carman Hill
• 2. Place of Sacrifice
• 3. The Fall
• 4. The Side Door
• II: 1958–67
• 5. Tenements
• 6. Angel of the Gorbals
• 7. Broadway
• 8. The Absence
• III: 1968–84
• 9. Thirty-Three Steps
• 10. Coming Through
• 11. A Double-Minded Man
• 12. Boston Common
• IV: 1986–2000
• 13. New Cloth
• 14. Drifting
• 15. Leaving Alexandria
• Epilogue: Scald Law
• Notes