Prized Possessions by Jessica Stirling

Author:Jessica Stirling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Thirteen

Three Saturdays in four Polly was obliged to work until one o’clock. She did not complain about the schedule. Being well indoctrinated in the conditions of public service she tended to regard a Saturday off not as an entitlement but as a favour conferred upon the clerking staff out of the goodness of the councillors’ hearts. Besides, Saturday was a busy day for local councillors. They were mostly ordinary working men, and a couple of women, who had been elected to protect the interests of what had been – but was no longer – a small independent unit within the dominion of the City of Glasgow.

Passing of the Local Government (Scotland) Act eighteen months ago had thrown things into a state of confusion. Even Mr Laughton, the Clerk Principal, was no longer absolutely clear how power devolved downward through the reconstituted county councils or who was expected to do what for whom. The ten good men and true – plus two women – who had been elected to serve the community for a three-year term carried on much as before, for policy in the higher realms of administration seemed to be directed not at preserving the status quo but mainly at appointing convenient scapegoats to take the blame for financial mismanagement further up the monkey-puzzle tree.

By the end of 1930, therefore, there was no such thing as a burgh council operating in the Gorbals. Officially it had become a nominated local council working within the remit of a county council who – this being Glasgow – had been brought within or were certainly answerable to the City Corporation.

Polly, then, was an agent employed by the Corporation to carry out functions excisable within a district and, as far as she could make out, to do more or less what she had been doing before. This, alas, still involved working three Saturdays in any given month, not galloping out of the archway at the side door of the old Burgh Hall building until five minutes after the hour of one o’clock, and not displaying too much youthful elation that might indicate that she was damned glad to quit the place and that if it burned to the ground before Monday she would shed not one solitary tear.

Polly was a model of decorum, of course, brisk but ladylike. At twenty she was no silly wee lassie. She no longer consorted with riffraff from the dole queues or those girls who, like her sister Babs, had escaped the factory floor more by good fortune than merit. Accountants from the Assessor’s Office or the Department of Finance, not to mention visiting architects and engineers from Transport or Road Works, thought her very superior and would have been surprised to learn that her mother worked in the slops of a laundry and that Polly skiddled home not to a nice little villa in Giffnock or Cathcart but to a tenement flat in the sump of the Calcutta Road.

They would also have been surprised to learn

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