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'The Disenchanted Toy Shop'
by
Tim Neil
Tom
McKendrick was born in Clydebank in 1948, 3 years after the end
of the Second World War, three years before the commencement of
commercial jet services, and approximately ten before the end of
Clydeside's last boom in ship construction.
What McKendrick
grew up with was a place of quite extraordinary busyness. A place
in which ships were built, post was sorted, trains interchanged
and sewing machines were made, a place in which there was every
kind of career to choose from apart from the highly paid. Now Clydebank
sleeps for a living. People work elsewhere, or are unemployed at
home, or are busy dying from the varieties of asbestos they were
exposed to in Singer's or the shipyards - the other choice on offer
in (pick a year) 1960: what colour of the filthy stuff to work with,
white or brown.
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Salt
is rubbed into the wounds by the fact that Clydebank sits
squarely underneath the approach to Glasgow Airport. So the
town is reminded every five minutes, during the hours of daylight,
of the industry that has largely replaced their most famous
stock-in-trade:
The
last part of the invisible road along which the airplanes
fly lies directly above the slipways at the eastern end of
the former John Brown's yard, now awaiting redevelopment into
something more resolutely modern .A mall, perhaps ,and because
the airport is barely more than a mile away across the Clyde
the planes are low enough to see the whites of the tourist's
eyes, loud enough to make conversation, even thought, impossible,
low and loud enough to inspire disbelief that such things
fly at all.
A
large and able body, unsure what to do with itself these days:
Clydebank. Britain too, of course.
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