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Severely Dealt With:
Growing Up in Belfast and Glasgow.
After years of devoting his efforts to assisting the cause of Guy
Aldred, with his United Socialist Movement, and "The Word", and
latterly keeping the memory of the unorthodox communist alive*,
John Taylor Caldwell has been persuaded to record his own life
story.
This 'odyssey', an "intricate task of retracing intellectual
and philosophical development, as Bob Jones of Northern Herald
Books notes, met at first with a "typically self-effacing
response". Years of recording the lives of others had perhaps led
to an under-valuation of his own experience as testimony to f the
impact of the self in it's initial struggle to imprint it's will
on a hostile environment.
Cushioned by a certain standard of welfare state and post-
war upbringing, it can be a shock when the squalor of industrial
life in the early 20th century is the backdrop for a comrade with
such a sensitive demeanor as John. We have been exposed to
numerous literary descriptions of "down and out" inner city
slums, and the degree of poverty described in Belfast and Glasgow
is captured with an intensity that is impressive.
The book travels a route through the first stirrings of
consciousness, and gives a genuine account of the child's view of
the world. Punctuated by asides to explain the descent of the
family's fortunes, the historical period and it's esoteric
offshoots, the book records the consistent drive present within
his self from an early age to create his own philosophy.
"nowadays it would be said that I had a hyperactive mind. It was
never still. It burned inside my head
llike a great flame in a little candle. It illuminated a
stream of hazy visions, colourful dreams and profound thoughts. "
>From a "trancelike state in which insomniacs aver they are still
awake and observers declare that they have fallen asleep" he
"drifted into a visionary world beyond experience" in which he
now recognises that
"this was the urge to return (which) is in all of us; the
yearning for the womb, or the tomb....native to non-being: life
is an interruption, an aberration, a wrench from the ineffable
reality - a pain, a sickness from which we constantly try to
escape in pretending to be someone else, somewhere else, in some
other time. That ios why escapism is such a major industry. No-
one dares be himself. To seek self is to brave reality, and that
could not be endured. All Art and Religion are struggles to
escape, sometimes from the nightmare of being and sometimes from
the truth
of its extinction"
While embarked on such imagining, not all thought was so
philosophical but John refuses to divulge his "serialised
daydream...lest I set Freudians in a flurry"!
The chapter 'Severely Dealt With' records the experience of
schooling, and the sheer brutality and regimentation afflicted on
working class children, "outcasts...herded into classrooms, not
just to be educated, but to be disciplined, to be tamed. Hence
order, silence, unquestioned obedience.....made to fear
authority".
This was a time of change and potential upheavel, the end of
the first World War, the partition of Ulster and 'Bolshevism' and
the book records the subtle influences at work amongst the
different layers of the downtrodden class. His mother answered
his questions about riots spreading to his street in terms that
"respectable people..don't go in for that sort of thing".
However, such was the despotic influence of his own father, the
domestic violence, that such worldly events offerred a relief
from the hunger and beatings that pervaded everyday life. This
leads to the harrowing description of his own mother's death
through such violence and his older sister's estrangement from
the father who married to have sex, with ten unwanted chidren the
result: "the very thought of affection would have turned him
sour".
John. now 14, travelled on the steamer to Glasgow 'to
keep house', his father having moved to escape debt rather than
the growing sectarian violence. The 'good old days' depicted was
of a
"big city, where the people lived' up closes' which had stone
pipe-clayed stairs with a lavatory on each landing to do three or
four more houses. At night many of the closes were occupied by
the homeless, some of them addicted to a brew concocted of
methylated spirits and an injection of coal gas from the
stairhead lighting.
It was a tough city where many of the side-street dwellers wore
cloth caps with
razor blades sewn into the cap, and often carried cut-throat
razors in case tthe need arose tocut a few throats. The 'polis'
were to be feared: mostly big men who, like the Irish, spoke in
amusing malaprops (for instance 'Come on get off', 'If you want
to stand their you'd better move along') "
One of the first incidents that stuck in John's mind was of a
hanging at nearby Duke St. prison, a youth called brought up on a
culture of violence. He imagined,
"beneath the bell's great hammer, having the sentence of the
Court pounded
into his mind in a last stroke of retribution".
As it happened, he got a job as a page-boy in "The Picture
House", for 2 years and this allowed further scope for his racing
imagination. Although occasionally sidetracked by cinematic
adventure, historical rather than romantic, the mind struggled
with a philosophy that emerged firstly by dealing with God
("thereness"), and moving on by chance encounters with orators
from subjectivist and 'marxist' pedigrees. One of these orators,
'Quinn', ironically committed suicide in a river he maintained
'did not exist'. Even today, a surly family organised as the
Glasgow Humane Society fishes bodies out of the Clyde.
In the recent Book Launch for 'Severely Dealt With' organised
by the Glasgow Anarchists, the actor Kenny Grant read the chapter
"Never Again", in which 'Caldiie' recounts the anti-war mood
which typified Glasgow in the mid-20s.
"On walls and rosadways were thick pipe-clay chalkings:
WAR IS MURDER, WAR IS HELL, NEVER AGAIN"
The experience of the World War horror was an everyday reality.
Notoriety came the way of the family when the 'Cruelty' came
to learn about the neglect of the children and their frequent
beatings and the case achieved press attention. The book breaks
off with the prospect of 'going to sea', but not before John
recounts the impact of sexual awakening, which his philosophical
contemplation had not prepared himself for, despite the callous
womanising of his father. After a panic, belkieving he had
contracted VD, he vowed to "keep strict control...clear of loose
women...and solitary practices".
This is not a nostalgic trip through biography, but a
compelling journey of discovery achieved in the most difficult
circumstances. Recalling sectarian conflicts, and having lived a
lifetime of propagandising for communism, John let's slip that
" it took me another sixty years to realise that mankind is
quite mad".
But disappointment that capitalism continues, thriving on the
escape from self mass culture encourages, and the persistence of
anti-social tendencies, hasn't existinguished the author's hope
that the causes of war, exploitation and alienation are
identified and 'put to right' in a social revolution.
(Severely Dealt With: Growing Up in Belfast and Glasgow,
Northern Herald Books, 5 Close Lea, Rastrick, Brighouse HD6 3AR
for z5.95 pounds or like 'Come Dungeons Dark' , (his account of
Aldred's life including his conscientoius objection) Luath Press
6.95 pounds from AK Distrib).