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Severely Dealt With: Growing up in Belfast and Glasgow John Taylor Caldwell is over 80. For the last 60 years he has been an active anti-parliamentarian, a close comrade of the late unorthodox anarchist-communist, Guy Aldred * and more recently a writer and historian recording these times. Now, encouraged by the publishers, he has turned attention to his own eventful life. The first volume deals with his first 16 years, moving from Dumfries to the hurly burly of Belfast, and a voyage of discovery that led him to Glasgow. It is remarkable how John has been able to recall his innermost thoughts and cope with recalling the brutality he suffered as a child. He also provides a vivid picture of life, as his family spiralled down the social ladder. The respectable pretensions of his father, insensitive to the misery inflicted on his wife and kids (he fathered 10 by way of three women) are brought into focus, as his employment prospects worsened in Belfast and the standard of housing worsened with each successive move. It is a life before the 'safety net' of the Welfare State, of poverty, not couched in 'good old days' nostalgia but of subsistence, with the children being dragged down to the level of street urchins. The state's attitude when school beckoned was to treat these working class kids, catholics and protestants, as "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". The sadistic recourse to physical punishment commonplace in such 'centres of learning' is described, with some humour in the chapter, "Severely Dealt With". John remembers, sharing a bed with all his brothers and sisters, lying awake - "...nowadays it would be said that I had a hyperactive mind. It was never still. It burned inside my head like a great flame in a little candle. It illuminated a stream of hazy visions, colourful dreams and profound thoughts". The book is amazing in its record of how his mind developed its own philosophy, from a child through to a page boy in the Picture House in Sauchiehall St.. For those interested in history, we get a view of pre-War xenophobia, the horrors of thousands maimed, and the post war mood that "WAR IS MURDER, WAR IS HELL, NEVER AGAIN" is captured from a child's view into adolescence. At the recent book launch in Glasgow Cross, the actor Kenny Grant read this brilliant chapter on the post-war mood in Glasgow, Anti-militarist with disabled out-of-work soldiers everywhere. In Belfast, the mood was deflected by the revived sectarianism accompanying partition, and in "Rooting out the Fenians" we get a child's view of catholic families being driven out of the east Belfast streets. After the death of his mother, through domestic violence, John, still tied to his uncaring father, was called over to manage house in Glasgow, where the father fled to. We get a chilling account of Glasgow: "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 the need arose to cut 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') ". We also hear of a hanging of an unfortunate youth Kean, whose hanging took place at Duke St. Prison, and John imagining him in his cell "beneath the bell's great hammer, having a sentence of the Court pounded into his mind in a last stroke of retribution". Although many biographies of the period have been written, John Caldwell's book is unique in it's experience of brutality and poverty first hand, while recording the path of his conscious development from philosophy to anarchist communism. The book can be obtained for 5.95 from the publishers, Northern Herald, 5 Close Lea, Rastrick, Brighouse HD6 3AR. or after requesting a catalogue (send a large SAE) from AK Distribution, 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh.