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Back to SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage Linklater’s Scotland - Easter in EasterhouseMagnus LinklaterColumnistFiled 31 Mar 05This article, which was
originally published in the Spectrum section of Scotland on Sunday
THIS morning, Easter day, Julie Brown will climb into a tank of water and be gently lowered beneath the surface. Surrounded by her family, her friends, and, of course, her two young children, she will, for a few seconds, be totally immersed. When she emerges, drenched but happy, she will be baptised. “It is quite a thing to get soaked in public,” says Sandy Weddell, minister of the Baptist church at Easterhouse, in Glasgow. “But this is part of the privilege of our faith. It marks a definite point in Julie's pilgrimage - an open declaration that Christianity is important.” We are chatting over coffee at the back of his church, where a lively congregation of 50 or 60, ranging from babes-in-arms to pensioners, have been singing a lusty selection of modern hymns to the accompaniment of a band, clapping, holding arms aloft, swaying in time to the music. Sandy has been preaching on the theme of consequences, about how we live in a society that seems to have lost the idea of how our behaviour impacts on other people. He has asked a young boy in the front row to explain the meaning of the word "consequence", and been given the answer: “When you do something wrang, ye get intae trouble.” It is, says Sandy, as good a definition as you could get. It is also a sober commentary on an event that has dragged Easterhouse once again into the limelight. Barely a week earlier, two-year-old Andrew Morton had died in Glasgow's Southern General Hospital after being shot in the head by an airgun as he watched firemen tackle a blaze near his Easterhouse home. A crowd had gathered, and had begun throwing missiles at the fire crew. Then someone fired an airgun. The pellet missed its target, struck Andrew's skull, and lodged in his brain. He died three days later, mourned by his family. A 27-year-old man has been arrested. What kind of people, I wonder, attack their own firemen? What is wrong in Easterhouse, a place that was once described as the most deprived housing scheme in Scotland, but whose slums have been swept away, to be replaced by new, people-friendly houses, an arts-and-leisure centre, even the headquarters of the new National Theatre of Scotland? Can it be that, despite regeneration, a culture of violence still lingers? Is this what the singer Frankie Vaughan found in the 1950s, when he came here to persuade the violent gangs of the time to hand over their guns? Or what Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, observed when he experienced his “epiphany in Easterhouse”, and marvelled at the evidence of poverty in modern Britain? The answer, of course, is no. There can be no real comparison between the bright new Easterhouse, and the dark, soulless town of old. But there is evidence that a new malaise has crept in to replace the old, and this one may prove harder to shift. Colin Swann, a young fireman, who plays the drums in the church band, confirmed that he and his colleagues regularly come under attack when they are called out - frequently to false alarms. He described children as young as two or three being encouraged by their older siblings to pick up stones and throw them at the fire engines. “In the summer you sometimes have kids deliberately setting fires. Then, when the crews come along, you see the parents standing watching, sometimes even saying, "Leave the kids alone, they're just having fun.” He is saddened but no longer surprised at what he and his colleagues encounter. No one is in a better position to explain this kind of attitude than Sandy himself. He has worked here for 25 years, and he has seen the transition from the old Easterhouse to the new, a population that has halved, with lower unemployment and greater investment than ever before, but which still struggles with its social problems. “Nothing's new in history,” he says. “When Easterhouse came out of the Glasgow slum clearance programme, things were very positive. But new housing is only part of the solution. If the social fabric is not there, the plaster cracks.” What is lacking, he believes, is something he calls “the apprenticeship of the family” - the way that certain codes of behaviour are passed on from parents to children, instilling a natural hierarchy that is respected and obeyed. If that is not learned young, he says, there is no proper social relationship later on. Brought up himself in an Edinburgh close, he says that rules were absorbed in those days “by a kind of social osmosis”. “If you don't have that,” he adds, “everything falls apart.” He points to the way that, for all the new housing, some Easterhouse people have never managed to acquire the old sense of community. “You see new houses, but then, outside them, folk have dumped rubbish. They seem oblivious to the idea of social living.” More sinister than this is evidence of a new gang culture in Easterhouse, which is preventing a broader sense of community in the area. “The place is divided into territories,” says Sandy. “Sometimes they're separated by as little as a quarter of a mile, or the width of a dual carriageway. There's an invisible line that you have to know about. Children and teenagers have to be careful which routes they choose, and if they get it wrong they may have to run for their lives.” So why are people, who enjoy benefits that a previous generation only dreamt about, still apparently angry enough to hurl stones at firemen, or to stake out their gangland territories? Sandy describes it as a kind of frustration. “It's a natural development that all young people go through. We've always had angry people, but usually there has been a restraining hand somewhere in the family. All too often, these ones don't have adults to look up to, to trust, or simply to talk to. What do you do when even the grannies and the grandads are divorced?” If this were the end of Sandy's message, there would be little comfort to be drawn from Easterhouse this Eastertide. But inside his sparsely furnished church was powerful evidence to show that there is another story to tell. A congregation that any church would envy, made up mainly of families with young children, joined in a service of song and worship with every evidence of enthusiasm. Later, the children pour out for Sunday school, while Sandy takes us through Ephesians 4:1 and explains the text. “As a prisoner for the Lord, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” Taking care to give the Greek origin of the key words, he explains that everyone has a calling - “even if you've been locked up in Barlinnie, they can't take that away from you”. Afterwards, he says that there are ample reasons for hope in Easterhouse. “It's easy to be got down,” he says, “but even in the worst-case scenario, human beings have a surprising capacity to make a difference. For every one bad person there are five to ten really good folk who just want a good life. You've got to keep a sense of balance. Not everyone is a drug addict, not every family is a mess - and some of the strongest, I've found, are single-parent families.” If there is to be a revival of standards, he says,
Easterhouse is the kind of place to find it. “God chose the
weak things of the world,” he says. “Revivals work among
the ordinary folk, not the intelligentsia. Part of me believes that
if anything is to happen, it will be in places like this. God hasn't
given up on Easterhouse, so why should I?” Magnus LinklaterThis article: |