Politics

Scottish Review : Kenneth Roy’s east end

21 November 2008 · kreast-end

Broken
Society?
Kenneth Roy’s report from the
front line in Glasgow’s east end

A young woman pushing a pram tentatively boarded the Easterhouse bus. In her hand was a £20 note. I remembered my friend Mujdeh Yousef, recently arrived from Afghanistan, whose husband also had a £20 note – his only one – and, having inserted it in the cash machine of a Glasgow bus, was told by the driver that it was exact fare only; no change, no charity. The present holder of the £20 note was better informed. She proffered it without hope to the driver, who shook his head. What next….?
     The orthodox plot tells us that she should have been thrown off the bus. But she wasn’t. Instead she was ushered inside and asked by the driver to trade her £20 note for smaller denominations acceptable to the cash machine. A couple helped out (others, fumbling in their purses, would have done so had they been able) and the woman was almost pathetically grateful, thanking her rescuers three times during the course of her brief journey. I wonder what would have happened if no one on the bus had had change of £20. Actually, I don’t wonder: I am fairly sure. The driver would have turned a blind eye, and she would have travelled for free. I know the driver’s first name – many addressed him by it – but I will not publish it. He deserves to keep his job.
     After she left, I watched her push the pram up a narrow, deserted, tree-lined path to a destination not in view. And I thought: how vulnerable she is making herself; for the second time within minutes, how exposed is her position.
     Who designed this path? Who thought it a good idea?

When the bus reached Easterhouse, no great distance from the city centre despite its reputation as a terrifying outer ghetto, I was disappointed not to be confronted by drug-crazed welfare dependents with two heads, living out their sad, crushed existence in streets of boarded-up windows and overgrown gardens pock-marked by infected needles. Really, I was just anxious to confirm the stereotypes and return to civilisation with a routine ‘Isn’t it awful’ story. But the expected copy was already perversely failing to materialise. Instead I found myself mentally noting a shopping centre dominated by the quintessentially suburban ‘Next’.

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