It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

it started in a cupboard
May 1944, I sat in Section K, Row L, on the East Stand, though I can’t
tell you anything else about the game. And the first time I saw Rangers
play a foreign side was on 25 November the following year, when
they played Moscow Dynamos – who caused controversy by taking
to the field with12 players. It was a Wednesday afternoon kick-off,
but still a stonking 10 shillings a ticket.
Without anything I’ve hoarded to prompt my memory, however,
I can still remember the big freeze in 1947, when the snows were so
deep that the Great Western Road – the A82, the main road to Loch
Lomond – was closed, and we could sledge down a hill and all the
way across it. And I can remember Hogmanay in the days when the
Clyde was rammed with ships, and the sound of their horns at midnight
welcomed in the New Year. In 1948, I remember the huge family
reunion we had in Troon, when uncle Alex and his wife Laura finally
came back to Scotland from the Far East. He had been captured after
the fall of Hong Kong in which his son had been killed, and spent the
rest of the war in appalling conditions in Japanese prisoner of war
camps. By the time peace came, he was completely emaciated, and
had no idea what had happened to his wife: mercifully, she had somehow
managed to escape to Australia, where they finally met up again.
Significant or trivial, but all mixed together – that’s how memories
flood back when I reflect on my childhood. Firing up the memory neurons
in my brain, a whole variety of unrelated scenes and facts from
childhood leap across my synapses. My mother tying my laces and
asking me to run down and see what food was in the shops (‘There’s
mince in the butcher’s’ I would announce to the whole street on those
comparatively rare days when there was). Long games of marbles
that we’d play on roads empty of all traffic apart from the occasional
horse-drawn coal cart. Listening to Children’s Hour on the radio.
Cycling for a picnic in the Bluebell Woods of (then undeveloped)
Drumchapel. Playing interminable games of football where we used
the ‘pig-bins’ (where food waste was kept to be fed to pigs: another
hangover from wartime rationing) as goal-posts. Long after I ever
needed to know it, I can recite my Co-op number – 251214 – or the
best-ever Rangers line-up (Brown, Young, Shaw, McColl, Woodburn,
Cox, Waddell, Gillick, Thornton, Finlay and Duncanson). Shards of
my childhood are buried in memories like that, or in the print of the
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