The Deep Dark Sleep

We were passing through an area of flat, open countryside as we approached Milngavie. Off in the distance – a darker grey silhouette in the lighter grey of the fog – I could see something long and cigar shaped suspended from what looked like a gantry. I had seen it before, and more clearly. It looked like something Michael Rennie should have stepped out of in a science fiction movie and it had always puzzled the hell out of me. I decided to take advantage of having a Milngavie local in the car with me.

‘Oh that? That’s the Bennie Railplane,’ MacGregor said in answer to my question. ‘It’s been there since before the war. There used to be a lot more of the track that it hangs from, but they took it down along with all of the railings and stuff for the war effort.’

‘Railplane?’

‘Yes. It was built in the Twenties or Thirties. It was going to be the transport of the future. It could travel at well over a hundred miles an hour, you know. But no one backed it and it never got more than the test track there.’

I thought about dreams of a future that never happened: the Empire Exhibition of Thirty-eight promising a cleaner, brighter Glasgow full of art deco buildings, with the Bennie Railplane connecting cities at superfast speed. What could have been. Like my wartime dream of me returning to Canada, making a proper life for myself. A lot of things had been killed in the war. Ideals and visions, as well as fifty million people.

I dropped MacGregor outside a bungalow in Milngavie which he admitted, a little embarrassedly, was where he still lived with his parents. He hesitated before getting out of the car.

‘You won’t say anything, will you, Mr Lennox?’

‘What happened tonight stays between us,’ I said.

‘I’m very grateful, Mr Lennox. I owe you for this.’

Oh, I know, I said to the empty car as I drove off. I know.

In the absence of widespread indoor bathrooms, the Victorian Glasgow that exploded in population but not in area was faced with a major public health threat. The great unwashed of Glasgow really had been. The city’s response to this problem was an array of public baths, swimming ponds, pools, Turkish baths and municipal ‘steamies’: communal laundries that were often attached to public bath houses.

In the Glasgow of the 1950s, and in the comparative rarity of the real thing, you could even have a ‘sun-ray’ bath at the Turkish Baths in Govanhill, Whitevale, Pollokshaws, Shettleston and Whiteinch. A sun-ray bath would cost you two bob; a combined Turkish-Russian and sun-ray bath would cost you four shillings and sixpence.

Bathing was segregated, the baths open between nine a.m. and nine p.m., with separate days for each gender at each venue.

Unofficially, there were set times when, if you were of a certain disposition, you could meet like-minded gentlemen in at least two of the bath houses.

I spent two evenings checking out the baths, asking if anyone knew Paul Downey or where I could find him, or if someone called Frank worked there. I was met at different locations with different responses, from the hostile and suspicious – as I had in the queer bars – to the unnervingly welcoming. But nothing took me closer to finding Downey; I could find no one who would admit even to recognizing the name.

Despite the knocks and hardship it had often endured, Glasgow was a proud city. And that pride was often given eloquent expression in the most impressive civic architecture in the most unlikely of locations. Govanhill Public Baths and Turkish Suite in Calder Street was a perfect example: a stately building from the outside, and Edwardian palace of ablution on the inside.

After asking a pool attendant, I was told that Frank was one of his colleagues and he was on lifeguard duty at the moment. The attendant sent me to wait in the gallery of the gents’ swimming pool. I sat on the fire engine-red seats and watched the handful of swimmers in the water. Every splash resounded in the chlorine-fumed air of the white-tiled and deep red-beamed pool hall. You could have held an opera here, and not just because of the acoustics; the décor of this public bath house bordered on the opulent.

‘You wanted to talk to me?’ A large collection of muscles bundled into a white tennis shirt appeared beside me. In contrast to the bulging biceps and beefy shoulders, and despite being predictably square-jawed, the features of the face were fine, almost delicate. His fair hair was bristle-cut at the sides and back but long and thick at the top, and a dense blond lock had a habit of falling across his forehead and slightly over one eye. I had the impression, somehow, of a cross between some idealized Nazi image of Aryan manhood and Veronica Lake.

‘I’m looking for Paul.’ I said it as if I knew him.

‘Paul who?’

‘You know who … Paul Downey.’

‘What do you want him for?’

‘Just to talk. I know you know where he is, Frank. Where can I find him?’