My grandmother's house in Millroad Street existed to remind us that we had probably done something wrong. The Glasgow habit of calling it a house has survived with me, but it was really a tenement flat across the road from the fish shop where my grandmother worked. The flat had a plastic holy water font by the front door and the three rooms smelled of vegetable soup. I can still see the green wallpaper in the bedroom, with its slanted rain of tiny yellow flowers. I see her spectacle case, a tumbler for the false teeth she preferred not to wear. An oval mirror hung on a chain and a black and white photograph was pressed into the frame. It was of her husband, Michael, dead for 35 years by then and sorely missed.

LRB 5 November 2009 | PDF Download