My birth father lifted his hands above his head and put the white mask of God on his handsome face. A born-again man now, gone were the old tribal ways, the ancestral village – African chiefs’ nonsense, he says….

  I was eight, I was forced south. Not long after, when I opened my mouth, a strange thing happened. I lost my Scottish accent. Words fell off my tongue: eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit stummer, teuchter, heidbanger, so you are,…

He was seven and I was six, my Brendon Gallacher. He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher. His father was in prison; he was a cat burglar. My father was a communist party full-time worker. He had…

walking by the waters, down where an honest river shakes hands with the sea, a woman passed round me in a slow, watchful circle, as if I were a superstition; or the worst dregs of her imagination, so when she…

I had been told about her. How she would always, always. How she would never, never. I’d watched and listened but I still fell for her, how she always, always. How she never, never. In the small brave night, her…

My seventy seven year old father Put his reading glasses on To help my mother do the buttons On the back of her dress. ‘What a pair the two of us are!’ my mother said, ‘Me with my sore wrist,…