My Year As A Video Games Programmer

I got a blog comment on my other blog last week asking for information about a video game I worked on back in 1987 and that whole episode in my life came rushing back to me so I thought I'd better get it down before it fades from memory.

Early in 1987, I was made redundant from a company called MacSerious Software when they decided to drop their Apple hardware sales force. That's another part of my life that I won't go into here but on a speculative visit to the local Dumbarton job centre, I noticed a card advertising for an experienced 6502 programmer. I wasn't expecting to see anything like that in there so I reckoned it was some sort of karmic intervention as I had indeed done some extensive work with the 6502 processor, which was what was in the Apple, Commodore and BBC computers of the time. Since I needed a job to support my wife, three-year old daughter, new mortgage and a car it was worth checking out.

The job was with Gannon Designs in Alexandria so I called, got an interview with the M.D. Martin Gannon and basically got the job on the strength of my previous work. I had absolutely no experience of games coding and was completely self-taught in 6502 assembly programming but I had done a lot of work on it, writing stuff like experiment process control and analysis on the Apple II and an image analysis suite for the BBC Micro, had several articles published in an Apple II focused magazine and had a bit of a hobby in removing the protection from Apple II games. Anyway, getting into video games was probably every programmer's dream at the time so I jumped at the chance.

Martin Gannon had been a fireman who, rather than spend his dead time on duty sleeping or playing cards like the rest of the watch, began programming games on the C64 and Vic-20 computers. He turned out to be a bit of a computing prodigy and even had a game out for the Vic-20 before the technical manuals had been released by figuring out how the video chip worked himself. He left the fire service when Argus Press M.D. Stephen Hall recognized his talent and pushed him to set up his own games development team and do work for the Quicksilva and Grandslam labels. Martin's first words to me were " Hi, I'm Martin! Bye the way, I've got a medical condition that makes me break wind a lot from both ends but it's not smelly so please don't be put off by it. So, you've done some 6502 coding…" and I knew were going to get on well.

Gannon Designs was based in a small industrial estate behind the ex-torpedo factory in Alexandria and, unlike the bigger developers, was just a little office and a single programming room. The building we were in was pretty anonymous looking, which was pretty sensible if you know the Vale of Leven area. If the local wildlife had got a sniff that the place was full of home computer kit, then we'd have been turned over quickly and regularly. With five of us and all the computer kit jammed into that one wee room along with a Pac-Land arcade machine and a fancy coffee machine, so began my introduction to the world of games programming.

Things were definitely looking good. We had deals to do the Pac-Land and The Hunt For Red October conversions for the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Sony MSX systems. Martin was working on a game of his own design called The Tube, a sort of mixed-mode space shoot em up and also doing a fair bit of sub-contracting work for other development teams by writing customized, protected, fast tape-loaders for them. Our graphics designer Mick also got to design loads of game loading screens for these so if you ever see a wee lozenge with MD in it in the corner of a game loading screen from that era, then it was probably done by Mick and the loader would have been Martin's. I've never since seen anyone capable of hand-coding and patching raw machine code as fast as Martin could do it - the man was a genius with computers.

I got put onto working on The Hunt For Red October even though we had no design yet. I dutifully read the book and got down to working out some of the physics involved in moving a sub through a 3-D environment while the rest of the team got on with trying to figure out Pac-Land. We had no support from Namco other than a photocopied manual in Japanese so the guys just played the arcade machine over and over and over to get the graphics and levels mapped out.


We never really got much further on The Hunt For Red October. Argus wanted The Tube completed and work on coding Pac-Land started so they gave The Hunt to another team to let us get on with the other games and I moved over to helping Martin on The Tube. The C64 didn't have any decent development or storage systems so we did our assembler coding on a BBC Master, which was linked up to a C64 via the parallel ports. We just squirted the assembled code over to the C64 for testing whenever we needed to and stored all the source and object files on BBC floppy disks. It was a very efficient way to do it.

The C64 was an amazing bit of hardware for the time, coming as it did with dedicated graphics and sound processors. Having a 6502-based processor meant it could only address 64K of memory, yes only 64k so think about in terms of what we're used to now. I mean, I walk around with a 4Gb pen drive in my pocket. Anyway, we had to fit all of the game code into a measly 64k as well as the levels, sound, graphics and sprite data in a single tape load. There were a few games, like Gauntlet, that loaded their levels from tape each time but the wait involved in doing that just wasn't acceptable for most people so we didn't consider it. The C64 mapped its 32K ROM-based OS and BASIC into memory at startup so that took up half the space right away but Commodore in their wisdom used a 6510 processor in the C64, which allowed us to switch that out, leaving the whole 64K of memory to play with. The only problem with that was that, with the OS off, there was no handy library of routines available and we had to do absolutely everything ourselves. Without the VIC-II graphics and SID sound chips, we'd have been in serious trouble.

As for The Tube, as I said earlier it was something that Martin had designed himself. The idea was that there was this big tube out in space that sucked in ships and stripped them of cargo, etc. and your ship was next in line. It basically consisted of three levels - a first-person shooter, a sideways scroller and a top-down vertical scroller/puzzle. By this time Martin had also recruited Steve Kellett, another guy with a great track record on games development, and he did the sound effects and designed the logic puzzle in the game. Music for The Tube was done by a guy called David Whittaker and he did a wonderful job of it. If you want more info on the game or listen to the music, then you'll find a wealth of it here. I ended up coding the first-person shooter level, which involved simulating flying into the mouth of the tube while being bombarded by alien drones. The user got to man the sliding gun port and stop the aliens striking the ship so things could get a bit manic trying to move the gun target using the keyboard. I also helped out a bit with the sideways scroller level but I have to admit now that I wasn't a great fan of the game as the graphics were a bit on the basic side and the game-play tended to be on the easy side. The soundtrack was a cracker though!

The hours were long at Gannon Designs as deadlines have to be met and I imagine that's still the case in the games development world today but we all enjoyed what we did. However, when some twonk in marketing published the promo material well before the game was ready, we ended up doing lots of all-night coding and testing sessions to get the game completed. In fact I remember distinctly working all night on it to get my bit finished just before jetting off on holiday to Spain the next morning. I was still working at eight in the morning and the flight was at ten so I really wasn't popular at home that day.


With The Tube out of the way and most of the graphics and level design having been done by the others, we all got into coding Pac-Land at last. Pac-land was a reasonably straight-forward but seriously addictive platform game that involved racing sideways through various landscapes (town, forest, mountains, desert, ponds, bridge and castle) avoiding Pac-Man's familiar adversaries, the ghosts, to return a lost fairy to her home in Fairyland.

I got the job of controlling and animating Pac-Man as he ran and jumped around the levels and his handling his interaction with the ghosts and scenery. I also controlled Sue, the lead ghost, and handled all the title, start, middle and end-level animations as well as animating the timers, score and credits, etc. We did the game in the standard, 40-column text mode in order to save memory, which meant that Mick had to design all of the level backgrounds using custom character sets and I think he did a excellent job of it. All the other graphic elements like Pac-Man, the ghosts and interactive scenery objects were done using the VIC-II chip's brilliant sprite capabilities. Memory was so tight though that I came up with the idea of compressing the sprite data and only expanding the ones required for each level. In the end, we simply didn't have room for all the levels so had to make do with a cut-down version.


As with most C64 video games of the time, all of the code handling was triggered off of the screen refresh interrupt. To put it simply, most of the processing was done when the video scan beam had finished displaying the screen and was moving back to the top to start again and all of it synced off of a 25 frames-per-second trigger. In that gap, we had to act on any user input, update all sprite positions, scroll the screen if necessary, keep the music and sound effects going and update all the goings on around the screen border. It had to be done that way to avoid visible glitches on screen so all we did in the foreground program was a looped check for user input.

We had several months to get the job done and everyone was upbeat at the start but the long hours and the realization that we were never going to be able to fit all the levels and extras into the C64 eventually took its toll. In its time, the Pac-land conversion was definitely at the leading edge of C64 programming and no-one else had produced a full screen, smooth sideways scrolling game with as much animation going on before. In fact, it was so complex that we ran out of background processing time on each screen refresh and to avoid a screen glitch, I had to break the scrolling routines into two so that we scrolled the bottom half of the screen while the video scan beam was still drawing the top half. It was a huge game and took us much longer than anticipated, even with Steve Kellett co-opted onto the team to help as well. The delays also meant we had the publishers breathing down our necks about Christmas deadlines, which realistically meant that the game had to be ready for the October, pre-Christmas sales orders.


Towards the end, we were working seven extremely long days a week and we knew it was going badly. Martin was under severe pressure from Argus while also having to do coding work on the game and run the business and have a life with his wife and young son and things eventually broke under the strain of it all. Len, our MSX programmer went AWOL for a couple of weeks and then it was Christmas. Family life was suffering to and I only rarely got to spend time with my wife and daughter. I remember diving out of the office to the nearest jeweller on Christmas Eve to get a present for my wife; I just hadn't had the time to shop for anything.


The coding quality started to suffer too and with two of us working on different parts of the C64 version with no source code control system things eventually got out of sync with the master source, which threw a bug into the system that took me days to find. In January of 1988, Argus pulled Gannon Designs funding and that's when it all started to go really bad. Martin fired Mick for refusing to remove his customary MD logo from the loading screen as it was a condition of the license that no one got any credits on the game and Mick retaliated by dropping a huge magnet on what he thought were the graphics master disks (we had backups). By that time Tommy (the Spectrum and CPC programmer), Steve and myself started looking for new jobs before the inevitable happened, which it did in early February when Martin called in the receivers. I'm not sure what happened to Len, he just vanished and I've never heard from him since. We were all made redundant in late February, having had no wages since Christmas.

Also laterally, Martin had been prone to inexplicably falling over and after some tests we found out that he'd contracted Motor Neurone Disease, which is a terminal condition. After the break up of Gannon Designs, his condition deteriorated quite quickly and he sadly passed away about a year or so after. We did keep in touch from time to time and the last time I spoke to him, he was lying on the floor (he couldn't walk by then) programming the bejesus out of an Amiga 500.

Well, that was it - the year of my life spent in computer games development. It was a great experience and a terrible experience all at the same time but also a very memorable one.

Still Poor But Denser Than Average

We're just back from a couple of weeks holiday in Gran Canaria to discover that we still haven't yet won the lottery so can't retire to somewhere sunny like that. Well, when I say we hadn't won the lottery, I did win a tenner but that wouldn't even get us to Helensburgh for the day.

On the upside, as I broke my elbow back in August and the fact that I'm getting old (sigh), I got an appointment to go for a bone densitometry scan today. The results were that my bones are denser than average, which is a good thing. As you age, your bone mineral density decreases and with that there's an increased chance of developing Osteopenia or Osteoporosis. These conditions are more prevalent in women but they're obviously looking to gather data from both sexes and maybe start treating them earlier.

And The Lack Of Posts Is Due To...

...my having broken my elbow last Sunday night.

It was one of those things. The back door was open and I thought I'd just nip out to the bin with some garbage and next minute I was sailing through the air and landed badly on the concrete patio slabs. That was quickly followed by a few expletives and some rolling about on the lawn, which is where Lorna found me, her having come out to see what the ruckus was about. There was a time when I'd have just rolled on contact or not even tripped over my own feet at all, but I suppose I'm getting older; sigh!

Anyway, I thought I'd just strained my right arm but next morning it was pretty obvious that all was not well so we headed off to the local hospital where it was eventually pronounced broken. Well, at least they thought it probably was but the x-ray wasn't conclusive so they stuck it in a sling and told me to come back the next day.

More x-rays are duly taken and yes, it's definitely broken! All I get then is a collar and cuff strap, told it'd heal by itself, take some pain killers and come back in three weeks. Not even a plaster cast people can sign for the trouble but I have to admit I'm happier about that. I'm typing this with my left hand or at least one finger of my left hand so posting is difficult.

It's amazing what you can't do easily with just one hand. Try pulling up your trousers, fastening a belt or pulling on a pair of socks one handed and you'll see what I mean. Tying your own shoe-laces is just out of the question. I'm right-handed as well so having to do everything left-handed just makes it even more awkward. Try spreading some jam on toast and you'll soon see how frustrating it gets, chasing the toast around the plate with a jammy knife.

I'm slowly learning to use a mouse and type left-handed and I'm just about okay to type for a wee while before the arm gets too sore so I'll maybe try and post a few articles soon. It has to be better than having to watch day-time television.

Graduation Day

Today, my wee girl graduated from Glasgow Caledonian University with an honours degree in Accounting (BA Hons. Accounting).

The ceremony was presided over by the current Chancellor, Magnus Magnusson who used to present Mastermind on the BBC, and along with about 800 other graduates she got bonked on the head by him with some blue thing and that was it. Hope no one had lice :)

Now all she needs to do is get out into the real world and get a job…

My Life: Gone Fishin' - Beginnings, Mad Scotsman, Wet Feet and Worms

Fishing, or angling as it is more properly known by posher folk than I, was one of my main pastimes as a boy and young man. I've already mentioned how my mum bought me my first fishing rod and reel up in Keith and I pretty much caught the bug after that.

The Equipment

Armed with my new bamboo rod, wee bakelite reel, some hooks and a tin of worms, I'd be off for most of the day wandering up and down the Brandy Burn trying to catch a few trout.

It wasn't too long after that the dad got me a much better, solid fibreglass rod and a decent Daiwa fixed-spool reel and those did me good service for many years. The rod is probably still in use as I'd left it at mum and dad's some years ago and dad used it until only a few years ago when he gave it away to a friend for their son's first rod.

I really got going when my aunt and uncle gave me an ABU Suecia 352 spinning rod as a present. Now that was a serious step up in quality - hollow fibreglass, light as a feather, a lovely yellow gold colour and super sensitive. ABU, a Swedish fishing tackle maker, were one of the best rod and reel manufacturers of the time and I accumulated a few more of their products over the years. They're still on the go, after some mergers and acquisitions, and are now known as ABU Garcia but they're nowhere near as good as they once were.

Anyway, I still that ABU Suecia 352! It's three inches shorter than it should be, courtesy of a van door, but I moved all the rings to suit the new length and it's still an excellent rod for creeping around small burns.

The Quarry

Brown Trout were the main target at first as, being Scottish, we absolutely never fished for what are commonly termed "coarse" fish such as roach, perch, carp or the like. Those were seen as pretty useless since no-one ate them and only mad Englishmen seemed to bother fishing for them. Of course, being allergic to fish myself, I'd have to be categorized as a mad Scotsman since I loved going fishing and couldn't actually eat anything I brought home. Still, the fun was in getting out into the country or to the sea for the day, regardless of the weather, and I didn't much care if I came back with a bag full of fish or just an empty piece box.

What was guaranteed were a pair of sore feet, possibly wet too if I'd gone in over the top of my wellies. It was quite common to be squelching around in water-logged boots for hours and when you got them off later that night, the steam would be rising off of my poor wee wrinkled toes. I'd also have to wring the water out my big boot socks before s

The Bait

For trout bait, we'd go digging for worms the night before and we'd make up a little batch of dough as an alternative. If worms were hard to find, and that wasn't unusual, we have to buy a tub of maggots and we have to hide all of this from mum. I remember once forgetting about a tub of maggots in my bag and later getting some stick from her when we were plagued by a stream of bluebottles emanating from the end cupboard. Serious anglers kept them in the fridge to stop them pupating but we'd never have gotten away with that.

Anyway, earthworms were much better option and there are basically three kinds commonly found in the UK…

• Lobworms - these are the most commonly found worms in ordinary soil and can be up to six or seven inches long - great for big mouthed fish like salmon but a bit on the large side for trout fishing.
• Brandlings - these are the elite of worms, the little red and yellow banded variety found mostly in rotted manure and compost heaps. As you might guess finding either a compost heap or manure dump in Glasgow was a pretty rare occurance so brandlings were very rare indeed.
• Redworms - now these are my favourite trout bait. They're smaller than lobworms and usually have a flat tail but they wriggle very nicely and almost always do the job. Again, they're a bit harder to find than lobworms but when you do, they're treasured.

The Locations

Aside from the Brandy Burn in Keith, most of my early fishing was done around and about Glasgow but I'll get into that later, it's getting late and bed is calling…

I've Got Aristocratic Roots - Scots Wha Hae!

My cousin Jan's into genealogy and has been digging around her dad's side of the family and thinks she's discovered that his and my dad's side of the family has some aristocratic ancestry.

According to her delving around in old records, she thinks we're related to John Gordon of Glenbuchat, more commonly known as "The Old Glenbucket". Gordon was a famous Jacobite supporter who had fought at the Battle of Killiecrankie at age 16, the Battle of Sheriffmuir at 42 and at 72 he was still active in the 1745 rebellion right up to the final defeat at Culloden. This was a man well in with Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) and reputedly present at the raising of the standard at Glenfinnan.

The ancestral "pile" was Glenbuchat Castle in Aberdeenshire, although it has fallen into a bit of disrepair these days but it's in the hands of Historic Scotland now so I assume it'll be well looked after and provide a good historical resource for the nation and visitors.

It's warming thought to be possibly related to such a staunch patriot and particulalry one who supposedly haunted the dreams of King George II.

Scots Wha Hae!

Happy Birthday To Me!

Oh well, another year has gone by! My hair is greyer and the eyes and ears are a bit less sharp but I'm reasonably healthy so life isn't too bad.

The stress of living under an absolute piece of trailer trash and her uncontrollable brat for the last few years has taken it's toll but we've got new neighbours now and, apart from a bit of access hassle that seems to have been resolved, they seem a pretty reasonable and nice couple so here's hoping the future is rosier.

Got a nice new pair of trainers from Lorna and she also wants to buy me a Topfield Freeview PVR as well so I'm well pleased. At last, two Freeview tuners and a 160GB hard drive - an astounding bit of kit for a telly addict and you can also feed it MPEG files from the computer. Mum and dad gave me a wad of cash as well, which always amazes me and I always say it's too much but they never listen. I think they still think of me as their wee boy but I've got a 21 year old daughter and 17 year old son so I think I'm a bit past that now. Anyway, I'll need to think of something to buy with that now. I think I'm getting Red Dwarf VI from the kids but they usually surprise me as well.

So, we're now off home and then away out for a celebratory nosh-up at our favourite curry house and perhaps there will be some alcohol involved as well (hic!). So Mr India's West End Balti and Dosa House, here we come!

My Life: F'it Like Loon?

Continuing the tales of holidays from my youth...

Fishing, Butteries and The Doric!

That would mean going up to Keith during Show time to stay with some of dad's side of the family and that was always good fun. We sometimes sayed with mum's Aunt Jean and Uncle Alec as well as they lived in Keith as well. We usually got into the show free as we usually had relations working on the gates or as stewards.

Keith is also where I caught the fishing bug as mum bought me my first rod and reel from the tackle shop in the town and I spent many an hour trying to catch brown trout on the Brandy Burn and River Isla. Caught quite a few as well! I've been fishing ever since although not so much these last few years. I'll need to get back into it again as it's a great thing to get out for the day and into the hills or onto a rocky shoreline.

It's is also where I discovered Butteries, which are the most delicious salty rolls on earth. Mind you they're not for the diet concious being almost 50% fat. You can get them in lots of supermarkets these days as Aberdeen Rolls but these are a pale imitation of the real thing, purchased from almost any small bakery in the north east. There's also a softer, flourier variation called Softies, more like baps, and these are nice too.

Most local folk up there speak Doric, which is a very old Scots dialect and when we'd first arrive, it'd take a day or two to get used to it well enough to hold a conversation. It's all "Fi't Like?, loons and quines" but Of course, dad had no bother and fell into it right away but mum and I took a bit longer. Then, you'd get the opposite effect when we got home, having to relearn Glaswegian again!

Blackburn

When my Aunt Jean bought a house in Blackburn in Lancashire, that was another potential holiday destination. It was somwhere near Cherry Tree Station but that's all I remember, other than it backed onto fields and you can see that from the photo to the right. That's us in the garden with me, mum, cousins and neighbours and Aunt Jean.

I spent a few summers down there and made friends with a few of the local kids. From there we could venture out for day trips to places like Blackpool and Southport. The photo on the left is mum, myself and two cousins, who's names elude for the moment, on Blackpool Beach. I must ask my mum to remind me who they are as I don't think I'veseen them since those photos were taken.

Camping Around

When I got a bit older, I joined the local Scout troop and that opened up opportunities to go camping under canvas.

We had a fair few camping holidays at Auchengillan, which is pretty close to Glasgow and handy for short breaks, and a couple of weeks on the banks of the River Tweed near Berwick-upon-Tweed. That was great fun as we were pitched right beside a serious salmon fishing run and we spent hours watching the men working with little boats and a net to catch the silvery salmon and sea trout.

With the camping craze well and truly in effect I got a small tent, one of those little white one man jobs. It was great for taking away fishing and I remember having to use it earnest one day when four of us decided to trek from Loch Lomond over to Garelochhead via Glen Fruin one crisp winter's day. We'd been dropped off by one of my friend's dads and off we went into the hills only to be hit by a blizzard a few hours in. We couldn't see two feet ahead and the snow was getting thicker on the ground so we put up my wee tent and all crammed into it, hoping to wait it out. We'd brought a wee gas stove with us as well so it was hot soup and sandwiches all round and no worries that we could be in any danger. Luckily, an hour or so later the snow stopped and we dug ourselves and the tent out and headed back towards civilization.

We've still got a tent, a much better one, and still occasionally go camping. However, I'm not as young as I used to be and a night lying on the ground plays murder with my back so I've got a wee folding camp bed thingy that seems to do the trick. It's either that or a couple of lilos inflated under the sleeping bags.

My Life: Cows, Scones and Porridge!

All Packed And ready To Go!
Cousine Roderick and I on Aunt Jean's Suitcase.

School holidays were always something to be looked forward to. I'd usually be bundled off to my aunts in Dennistoun for most of the summer break while mum and dad were at work but that was okay as there were a couple of lads in the close of a similar age and we got on fine together. Holidays abroad were practically unheard of back then but we'd usually go away as a family for a few weeks and stay with relations.

However, my earliest memories of holidays were when my aunt Jean would sometimes take me up to stay at her father-in-law's croft at Forss, near Thurso, and we could be up there for weeks over the summer break. If you thought having no running hot water was bad, the house didn't even have running cold water and all the water had to be hand pumped into the tank from a well up the hill. This was usually done twice a day and it was one of those chores that a wee boy just had to have a shot at every now and then - builds character and muscle doing that for twenty minutes, twice a day.

Farm life was great for a small boy as there was loads of stuff to be getting into. Probably a health and safety nightmare these days to let children anywhere near half of it but things weren't so strict then but the really dangerous stuff like sickles, shears and scythes were always locked away.

Great Aunt Liz and Uncle Arthur were seasoned crofters, renting their bit of land from the Milk Marketing Board of the time. They had a small herd of dairy cattle that produced the milk quota for the board, which amounted to only about two or three churns of about 45 gallons each a day. There was even a little dairy shed for pasteurizing the milk, all shiny pipes and bubbling noises. The full churns were heaved onto a wheel barrow, usually with me on top, and then dropped off at the end of the lane beside the main road for pickup by the milk lorry and I'd get a hurl in the barrow back up the lane. That's me and Arthur in the photo.

It was standard practice for Uncle Arthur to be up and about by 5:30 to get ready for milking and if he slept in, the cows soon woke everybody up, complaining about being full of milk and fit to burst. Same again at around six in the evening, the cows were brought in and milked again so having a day off just wasn't really on the cards for a small farmer. I liked the bit where I got to feed one of the calves, me holding a bucket of milk for it and trying desperately not be trodden on, as they weighed a lot more than me then, or licked by their sandpapery tongues. I also didn't really like getting squirted by milk if Uncle Arthur was feeling mischevious and I got too close during milking but then he got a milking machine and some of the fun went out of it, at least for me but I'm sure he appreciated not having to milk each one by hand. By the way, you have to try real fresh milk at least once, it's so different from the processed, semi-skimmed stuff we get nowdays but was really thick and creamy.

There were hens and a few ducks so I got to help collect the eggs and could be a dangerous job. They'd often give you a solid peck while you were rummaging around under them, feeling for any eggs. I also liked searching around the farmyard as you'd often find a few rogue layer's nests in the barns or beside the dykes. The there was the barn, an amazing place full of hay and occupied by an old mechanical wooden threshing machine, which was still used to strip the various cereal crop grains of the stalks and bag it up for market. It was a great place to have adventures and to chase the ever present mice around.

As well as cows, they had sheep that lived mostly up on the hillside above the farms and Arthur had a really good sheepdog that loved herding the hens around as well. Mind you it was a working dog and you daren't ever try and pet it as it'd have had your hand off. The sheep'd only be brought down into the fields for lambing, shearing and wintering. Shearing those days was a manual job and I kept well out of the way as that was serious work.

Uncle Arthur had a little blue tractor that ran on paraffin and when I was a bit older I sometimes got to drive it around the field while he dropped off turnips for the sheep from the trailer at the back. It was his normal practise to start the tractor running across the field with the throttle set and then start unloading the turnips out back and one of my firmest memories of the time was of me, seeing that the tractor was about to run into the burn at the edge of the field, taking control of the wheel and saving the day. I'm sure he would have nipped up and turned it himself before it was too late, as he did it by himself all the time, but I felt like a wee hero back then. After that it was my job to steer the tractor while he did the feeding - kept me out of his way I suppose and made me feel useful.

Aunt Liz was an amazing person, one of those wee women that never stopped. She cooked, cleaned and fed the poultry and collected, cleaned and graded the eggs into boxes, which she sold to a shop in Thurso. She also made crowdie, sometimes flavoured with caraway seeds, butter and cheese from the milk and sold that too. On a Monday she baked, and I mean baked, almost the entire day was taken up with baking the week ahead's supply of soda bread, scones and pancakes on her trusty Raeburn stove and on Wednesday, she topped up the supplies again. English readers please note that Scottish pancakes are not the thin things you know by the same name, they're about 10cm in diameter and up to 1cm thick. Our crumpets are closer to your pancakes but they're much lighter. I suppose I began my love affair with scones back then as they accompanied almost every meal.

Breakfast, which was taken much later than you'd normally have it nowadays, at around 10:30 as Uncle Arthur had been on the go for several hours, was usually porridge accompanied by a bowl of fresh creamy milk and followed by lots of Aunt Liz's baked wonders. The porridge was made with salt and the concept of putting sugar or honey on it just never arose, probably an English corruption of one of our national dishes, and I've taken with salt ever since. Also, you didn't pour the milk over the porridge but instead took a spoonful and dipped it in the bowl, which stopped the milk warming up. I can't remember having lunch but we did come in mid afternoon for what was called "half-yoking".

Once I'd got into fishing I used to walk round the hill and fish for trout in the River Forss or we'd go down to Brim's Ness and spin for coalies and pollock. Great times and great memories were had there.

My Life: Schooldays

Dunard Street Primary School

Primary school for me was Dunard Street Primary in Dunard Street, Maryhill and I can remember my first day as a four-and-a-half year old, betrayed when my mum tried to get me to go into this ominous looking building surrounded by metal bars with the horrible intention of leaving me there! It took her a while but she finally managed it, regardless of my screams and tantrums, and so I embarked on my journey through Scottish education.

I remember using a little slate and a piece of chalk to start with but it must have been just at the end of that era as I don't think we did it for very long. Pity as it's much cheaper option than using paper and pencils but a bit limiting having only one surface to work on.

I only have a few memories of my time there but they were mostly happy ones and I graduated as Dux in my final year so it can't have been that bad. I didn't get the usual medal for some reason as that year the prize was a whopping great encyclopedia, which was almost certainly more useful and my mum still uses it to help solve crossword puzzles.

About mid-morning we'd all get a break during which we'd be issued with a little bottle of milk, about a third of a pint I think. This was the government's scheme to make sure all us kids got something in the way of nourishment, and a bit of calcium, in the morning. Everyone got this free, so even the really poor kids got something, until education secretary Thatcher the snatcher abolished it in the 1970's for children over seven. Quite often, if it was really cold during the winter, the bottles would be frozen solid and we'd bring the crates into the classroom early and stack them besides the radiators to thaw them out.

The only negatives that come to mind were the school dinners and learning that I needed to wear glasses. Bit of a bummer finding out at age seven that I'd be being called "speccy four-eyes" for years but I've been wearing them ever since.

As for the dinners, let me clarify the nomenclature a bit. We had dinner at what is now called lunchtime and we had our tea when most of you lot now have dinner so we had breakfast, dinner, tea and supper (still do really). Anyway, that aside, there was no such thing as a menu back then so there was always a bit of anticipation of what was going to be served. Memories of horrid little balls of mashed potato that never tasted anything like what I got at home, carrots boiled to buggary and tasteless gravy still linger to this day. Every now and then they'd inflict a wee variation on us like cheese potatoes, where the colour of the balls changed to yellow but the taste never quite resembled any cheese I was familiar with.

I hated fat as a child, still do mostly, and I remember a teacher insisting I eat eat some really fatty Irish Stew and to clear the plate. Of course I promptly threw it up over the table - revenge is sweet (or at least a bit stewy).

Not a bad school really and I think I only got the belt once and that was for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Wusnae me Sir!" but we all got it. The belt I mean or the Tawse as it was really called. See the section at the end of this post on Corporal Punishment for a better explanation of this.

North Kelvinside Senior Secondary School

I was only 11 when I started secondary school in 1966 and I think being six months or so younger than most of the year's intake made me a bit of an outsider. On top of that, friends from primary were either in different classes or had gone to Garrioch Road Junior Secondary as we had a two tier system in those days.

I wasn't great at sports and didn't follow football much so it wasn't too long before a couple of swines called Ranstead and Gillespie decided to make to make my life there as miserable as possible. Being bullied isn't any fun at all and I wasn't the only one they picked on so here's hoping they've had their comeuppance by now.

One other memory I have is of the panic that ensued when it was rumoured that the Mummies were going to be round at four to sort out one of the teachers. Glasgow had a fairly unhealthy gang culture at the time, nothing like it had been some years before, but they wear still pretty rife and the Mummies were one of the local gangs along with the Fleet, Tongs and the Toi. Such was the reputation of this gang, we were sent home early and the police were were called in to fend off any impending attack. Needless to say that nothing transpired and the streets were quite. I suspect now that the rumour was just that and was probably started as a joke by some schoolkid. The gangs then mostly fought among themselves and rarely bothered anyone else.

Got the belt a lot more here but then almost everyone did. Our maths teacher belted anyone for anything but she was so useless at it that no one was that bothered. However, there were a few teachers there that were good at it and had seriously nasty belts and you behaved in their class I can tell you.

I have to say that I hated my time at this school and was so glad when we moved from Maryhill to Knightswood in 1968. The school was closed in 2001 and has since been demolished.

Knightswood Secondary School

We moved to Knightswood just after the great storm of 1968 and it felt like a new page had been turned - a new house and a new school. To a kid from Maryhill, Knightswood was like moving out to the country. The streets were wider and had much less traffic and almost every house round about had a garden - amazing.

Knightwood Secondary was pretty good and I enjoyed it far more and made some new friends as well and it even had a decent dinner hall. Can't say as anything momentous ever happened to me there but the teachers were a reasonable lot and most everyone got on fine. From there it was off into the grown up world of 1972. I didn't fancy going to university or college (and probably didn't have the qualifications anyway) so it was time to look for a job but I'll cover that later.

Corporal Punishment

Just to explain about the belt or Tawse, which was the official form of corporal punishment dished out in Scottish schools when I was a boy. Basically it was a leather strap of varying length and thickness and some even had three tails. The "Lochgelly" was the model to have as well as that was where the best ones were made. Depending on the model and the teacher dishing it out, the effects ranged from a mild slap to extremely serious pain.

To receive it, you could stand with one hand out to the front or side or with both hands crossed in front. Some teachers had a preference on how they liked you to stand and either way could cause problems. Too close to the side attack and the belt could wrap around the hand and arm and too close in front and you could get it all the way up the wrist and arm. Too far away from either angle and the ends of your fingers could get a bad hit.

Of course a miss was always your fault as it got a laugh from the class at the teacher's expense. Deliberately dodging the belt by moving your hand or hands out of the way was a risky move as it almost always added a stroke to the sentence. Refusing the belt outright meant a trip to the headmaster's office and invariably a stronger sentence from him or your parents were called in.

My Life: Puddles, Hudgies and Frogs

I grew up in Maryhill, living there for about 13 years up till 1968. Glasgow was coming out of it's "No Mean City" era and while we still lived in what would be called a tenement block, it was far from being a slum. The photo here is of Queen's Cross at the junction of Maryhill and Garscube Roads. Looking down the road, we lived in the first street on the left.

Life as an under ten was pretty idyllic as I'd no worries or cares as long as I was warm, fed and clothed. All we had to concern ourselves about was school and playing. We mostly played as a group of friends in and around the local tenement blocks. There were a few playgrounds with roundabouts and swings, etc. but they were a bit of a walk away so going there was a special occasion and we usually had to make up our own entertainment...

War Games

All we needed was a ball for a kick around on the street or round the back and if we felt like being organised it was war games in the form of two teams pretending to be anything from cowboys and indians to WWII soldiers and usually involved popping up every now and then, making "ack-ack-ack" machine gun noises and then diving back down out of sight again.

Stankie

One street game we played was "stankie" with marbles or, if you were one of the lucky ones, with steelies, which were basically steel ball bearings. Play consisted of rolling your bools up the stank covers in the pavement, which were always at a slight angle, and trying to get them to stop in the little holes while your opponent tried to use his to knock yours out. You could either play for fun or keepsies depending on how many marbles you had and how confident you were.

There was an engineering works a few streets away and it was always good for a rummage around outside looking for steelies that had been dropped or discarded. Needless to say that marbles were a common drain on everyone's pocket money.

Puddles

If it rained, then there'd be puddles and, once the deluge stopped, a rush to get the wellies on and get out for a splash around. Puddles are great things for a small boy - you could float bits of wood in them and pretend they were boats or you could even use toy boats if you had them. I remember my mum buying me a nice blue boat after being brave and not crying while getting one of the standard "jags" (innoculations) kids had to get back then, but back to the puddles!

Obviously, splashing was mandatory as was bombing any pretend boats but god help you if you got covered in the muddy water or worse, wading in too deep and filling your wellies with it. The street gutters were also good for racing old ice-lolly sticks down when the rainwater was flowing but you had to catch them before they disappeared down the drain.

Running Around Madly

These games were the traditional fall back for something to do round the backs. You'd probably know it as Tag but we called it Tig, same thing though with all it's variations. Basically if you were "het", then you got to chase the others around until you touched one and then they were "het" and so on until everyone fell about exhausted.

Hide and Seek required a bit more cunning and, if you were "it", the ability to count as fast as possible, which always got everyone tongue-tied. Of course if the really cunning ones managed to hide themselves well enough, everyone gave up searching for them and went off on another tack.

The new urban sport of Free-running was being practised by almost every kid in Glasgow when I was a boy. We'd be running, jumping, climbing and dreeping over walls, wash-houses, middens, etc. in a kind of "follow-my-leader" chain to see who could get over the trickiest bits.

Saturday Matinees

Almost every Saturday morning we went to one of the local cinemas, either the Blytheswood or Seamore in Maryhill Road, to see the latest children's movie. It was usually a comedy or a cartoon, which passed the morning, and if you'd been lucky enough to collect a few empty lemonade bottles during the week, then that paid for the ticket. Of course if you didn't have enough for a ticket or were just feeling adventurous, then it was common practise to wait outside at the side door until some helpful friend nipped down and opened it once the lights had gone down and you could sneak in. Unless the manager caught you coming in, he didn't really stand a chance of trying to catch a group of small boys running wildly around in a cinema full of noisy kids in the dark and once you'd found a seat, you were pretty safe.

The Blythswood was a pretty plain looking place but I remember the Seamore as having a big illuminated windmill, or more likely a lighthouse, above the doors but it closed in 1963 and got burned down about five years after that.

Dinkys, Corgis and Matchboxes

I'd play with them for hours on end if I was stuck in on a rainy day or for a wee while before bedtime. What are they? Why die cast model cars, buses, lorries and tractors, etc. I wish I'd kept them now as they're worth a lot off money these days. Just do a search on the net for them and you'll see just how much they can go for and to think we used to actually touch them and play with them like they were of little value. Of course we always chucked the boxes away and the lot were kept willy-nilly in an old shoe box (I can just hear the serious collectors shuddering with horror).

Better off kids (or their dads) had train sets of the Triang/Hornby variety or slot car racing games like Scalectrix but we made do with our little metal cars.

Hudgies

A hudgie was the art of jumping onto the back of passing carts, lorries, trucks or vans for a short ride along the street. Obviously no one ever attempted it if the vehicle was moving fast and the best candidate was usually a coal lorry as it made frequent stops along the street to sell sacks of coal or briquettes. We'd get chased by the driver if he saw us but was part of the fun of the game.

There was no green-cross code when I was a boy and growing up playing in the streets was a good way to learn to be traffic-wise as you always had to keep an eye out for anything coming. We also soon learned to be adept at crossing the roads among moving traffic and the thought of dashing across the busy Maryhill Road never phased us at all. There was a Zebra Crossing, with its trademark yellow Belisha Beacons, just up the road a bit but that'd have been too easy.

Adventures

Adventure is in a boy's soul and we were boys. Three of us, aged about five or six, caused an uproar by wandering off after school to see Santa's house, which I suspect now was probably a park-keeper's cottage in either Ruchill or Kelvingrove Park. Needless to say we got in terrible trouble when we strolled in later that afternoon, blissfully unaware that quite a lot of people were out there looking for us.

Other standard adventures were trekking off to one of the local public parks for the day. we had a choice of Ruchill, which was closest, Kelvingrove and Dawsholm Parks or the Botanic Gardens. Ruchill Park was fairly ordinary but had a good wide hill for sledging in the winter, My uncle Hugh, an engineer, made me a sledge one year and, being solidly made, I think it's still kicking around in the family somewhere, having been passed on by me a long time ago. The park also had an excellent little conical hill with a flagpole on top from where you could get a great view over the city. That hill was apparently artificial, having been constructed from the rubble of a demolished hospital and was nicknamed Ben Whitton after the Parks Superintendant of the time.

Kelvingrove Park is a vast place, straddling both sides of the river Kelvin and stretching from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum practically all the way to Charing Cross. Dawsholm Park is also quite large but further north and we used to venture up there to feed the grey squirrels that were always keen to eat peanuts right out of our hands.

When we were a bit older we found the tunnel entrance to the unused railway station in the Botanic Gardens. It required a walk of faith, feeling our way along the pitch black tunnel, until there was a break above that let in some light. Then it was on again for a bit in the dark until we got to the station platforms themselves, which were open to the sky above but access from the street was blocked off. What did we go through all that for? Why frogs of course! The wee blighters bred in the puddles and water filled holes in the trackbed and if it was the right time of year, then you could be sure we'd catch a few.

Photo of Botanic Gardens Station by Duncan Cumming, some rights reserved.

Seasonal Fun

Guisin' was the art of dressing up at Halloween and going round the neighbourhood in groups of two or three chapping on doors. We'd sometimes have a hollowed out turnip lantern and I was almost always dressed as a pirate with eye-patch, cape and sword and one of my mum's scarfs tied jauntily around my head. If the inhabitants were welcoming, you'd recite a wee poem or sing a song and get rewarded with a selection of fruit, nuts or sweets or sometimes even a few pennies. If you were really lucky, you'd be invited in to dook for apples, which involved perching on a chair with a fork in your mouth above a basin of floating apples and if you could drop the fork into an apple, it was yours. You might even get the chance to try to eat a scone covered in treacle hanging on a piece of string. A far cry from the Americanized "Trick or Treat" nonsense we have to endure these days.

Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Night) was a major event in the calendar. Fuel for the bonfire had to be gathered from near and far in preparation for the big night and it had to be guarded too. Almost every tenement block had its own bonfire and it was quite common for your stockpile to be raided by nearby gangs. Not that we'd ever have done that ourselves (sound of low whistling can be heard here). Our wood was usually stored in one of the old wash-houses in the Doncaster Street back and consisted of everything flammable we could get hold of - old doors, furniture, pallets, settees and chairs, the more the merrier. Mum would usually buy me a box of fireworks to set off myself - things like bangers, jumping jacks, Catherine wheels, rockets and maybe even a Roman Candle or two. The bigger your bonfire, the more people would come and let off their fireworks too. Too big though and the Fire Brigade might just turn up as well and put a real dampener on things.

Next time, I'll deal with school and my education, such as it was...

My Life: Origins

Born in Glasgow (Scotland) in 1955, Duke Street Hospital to be exact, I grew up in Maryhill in what you'd call a standard working class family. We weren't exactly poor but money was something that was carefully looked after.

Home, Sweet Home

Home for mum, dad and myself was in Hinshaw Street. We lived up a close, two floors up in a standard Glasgow tenement in what was known as a "room and kitchen", which was exactly what it sounds like, a single bedroom and a kitchen that also had a bed recess. It also had a small lobby and associated coal bunker and I can still remember the sooty, coaly smell of it even now. Each close and landing was lit by a gas lamp at night, which helped light the stairs as well.

We had no hot running water and the toilet was outside, down the stairs on the half landing. If you wanted a wash, it had to be in the kitchen sink with water boiled in the kettle and no, it wasn't an electric one. If I wanted to "go" after dark, then it was a creepy walk down the stairs in the diminishing light of the gas lamp and a serious run back up before the boogey man got me.

The advent of central heating hadn't materialised for most of us Glaswegians at that time but we had a real coal fire in the kitchen and I can remember spending hours in front of it watching the coals burn, the flames flickering in and out with little cracking and popping noises. Of course, having a real fire meant that we had a real chimney and that always meant stockings on the fireplace at Christmas and a note popped up the lum, telling Santa what I wanted.

The Back

The tenement block had a central, enclosed courtyard commonly referred to as "The Back" and this is where most of the local kids played. It was pretty big, a wasteland by today's standards, but it also contained the communal wash-houses and middens. The wash-houses were unused in my youth, having been a throw back to a time before the local Steamie, and were more or less derelict but provided useful cover when playing such games as "Hide-and-Seek", "Japs'n'Americans or "Cowboys and Indians" - all concepts probably alien, and a bit non-PC, to the kids of today. We had no computers, games consoles or internet in those days, we didn't even have a television until 1963 and that was black and white and only got the BBC.

The middens were another endless resource of fun and it was pretty common for a group of us to go midgie raking to see if there was anything useful a small boy could salvage such as old toys, broken clocks or radios, comics, wheels, etc. I know it sounds terrible nowadays and we used to get into terrible trouble if we got caught at it but that wee hint of danger and the possibility of discovering some "treasure" made it a worthwhile adventure for an under-ten year old boy. We'd even occasionally go on raking expeditions to the back courts of some of our more affluent neighnours as they always threw out better quality stuff. Of course, more often than not there was nothing useful to be found and all you got was covered in ashes or if you were really unlucky, some rotten vegetables.

My pool of friends came from different streets so the territory covered a few blocks and we could be found playing in any one of several streets or backs, only coming home for dinner, tea or occasionally shouting up for "piece", which would be thrown out of the window wrapped in paper to make sure it didn't get dirty hitting the ground. Great was the kudos if you caught the falling sandwich but that was a rare occurrence.

Another great source of fun were puddles but I've written enough for today so until Chapter Two...