大象传媒

As a child I always wondered about it.

Around 1965 I became concious of my immediate surroundings as a 5 year old playing in the street and we had a problem at our end of the street. The house numbers at the other side of the street didn't start till number 13 while on our side of the street they correctly started at number 2.

The side of number 13 was sheared off flat and had some kind of concrete facing painted a sort of red to match the red sandstone structures of the buildings. Where numbers 1 to 11 SHOULD have been was a flat weedy and slightly desolate looking hole upon which stood "the pre-fabs".

"The pre-fabs" was always said in a sort of hushed and embarassed way and people looked away when they mentioned them. The people who lived there looked normal enough and everyone on the street made a point of treating them as they would anyone else on the street but there was no doubt that they were different - their emergency concrete slab sided houses looked truly awful by 1965.

An errant bomb aimed at the shipyards in Scotstoun on the Clyde in 1940 had knocked the end off our street and it never looked the same.

In due course around 1966 the families living in "the pre-fabs" were moved out, the Glagow Corporation razed the site and erected some modern "pebble-dashed" block of council housing. Within a couple of years it didn't look much better than "the prefabs" had.

Around the same time every house around the hole in the street suffered a series of ceiling failures. It was a sort of "norm" to hear someone say - "oh yes - one of our ceilings came down last night". The general opinion was that the lath and plaster ceilings had actually been damaged by the near miss 25 years before but took a long time to show their true colours.

Around that time my mother had just lifted my little sister from her cot and as she left the bedroom with her and closed the door behind her - that ceiling came down with a crash. My little sister had nearly been a casualty of a wartime bomb 25 years after it exploded!

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