It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

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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 22
a cupboard in knightswood football programmes I used to collect, or in the pages of the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, which I was given for my seventh birthday. But there’s one memory from my childhood that overshadows all others. On 25 June 1951, Norman was looking out of the window hoping to see Dad coming whistling up the street when he saw a policeman opening our gate. Seconds later there was a knock on our main door, at the side of the house. Mum went down and he told her that she’d better get round to the Western Infirmary, because my dad had just been taken there. She ordered Norman and me to go out and play and went off to find Mr Kirkland, one of only two people in our street who had a car, to ask if he’d take her to the hospital. We were playing football in the next street a couple of hours or so later when one of the neighbours came to find us and told us that we were wanted back home. He didn’t say why, but I knew there was something wrong as soon as I turned the corner. There were three cars, all parked outside our house. Norman, being only six, didn’t realise that spelt trouble. The two of us went up the stairs and into the lounge. It was packed out with relatives: Mum’s sister, Auntie Cathy and her mum, our Gran, had walked over from Upper Knightswood. On my father’s side, Auntie Dove and Uncle Tec had driven over from Newlands, Auntie Jean and Uncle Jimmy had come from Baillieston and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Willie from Rutherglen. They all looked up at us with pity in their eyes. I forget who it was who told us that my father had just died of a heart attack. Dad had been to see the doctor that morning about something quite trivial – a painful toe that was probably gout. Yet as he was being examined, he had symptoms of a heart attack. The gp told him he should go straight to hospital. He took a bus to Western Infirmary, where he collapsed and died at the porter’s gate. He was just 41. *** For most of my life since that day, I’ve wondered what it would take to make a heavy smoker like my father stop. When I was Chief Medical Officer, working out an answer to that question, that would apply to everyone, was a key part of my job. How do you stop someone 23
Page 3 and 4: sir kenneth calman was Scotland’s
Page 5 and 6: It Started in a Cupboard Adventures
Page 7: Contents Foreword 9 Introduction 9
Page 11 and 12: Foreword Compiled by Susan Calman a
Page 13 and 14: foreword The 1995 Calman-Hine repor
Page 15 and 16: Introduction the original purpose o
Page 17 and 18: chapter 1 A Cupboard in Knightswood
Page 19 and 20: a cupboard in knightswood the river
Page 21 and 22: a cupboard in knightswood It’s od
Page 23: a cupboard in knightswood Mum was d
Page 27 and 28: a cupboard in knightswood across a
Page 29 and 30: a cupboard in knightswood sermon,
Page 31 and 32: a cupboard in knightswood also when
Page 33: committed to publishing well writte

It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

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