ABSTRACT
The house where I was born in 1934 is just behind Hampden Park Football Stadium. We lived at the inner edge of a large estate built by private enterprise in the 1920s on the southern outskirts of Glasgow. There were three types of house, clustered in fairly clearly-defined areas, and referred to locally as Toytown, Ticktown and Tintown.' Toytown' and Ticktown' were in the centre and consisted, respectively, of owneroccupied bungalows and 'semis'. We lived in Tintown' and these were rented maisonettes, built in blocks of four, two up and two down, with a small patch of garden. The upstairs flats of adjacent blocks shared an outside staircase, wooden and slippery in wet weather, with a concrete slab at the foot. When I was about three, I fell from top to bottom of this stair, surprisingly without serious injury. We moved, on Coronation Day, 1937, to a similar house, two streets away, and off the main road; my parents had been afraid that I might run out into the stream of traffic. I remember waving a Union Jack and watching my father load our furniture on to the open lorry which he drove for L.M.S. Railways.
