(Re)remembering and narrating the childhood city of R.D. Laing

Introduction

The Scottish born psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Ronald David Laing, was born in Glasgow in 1927 and died in 1989, aged only 61. Studying medicine at Glasgow University, then moving to the field of psychiatry, and finally training in psychoanalysis at the famous Tavistock Clinic in London under the guidance of more recognizable analysts such as Charles Rycroft and Donald Winnicott, Laing became a globally renowned figure for his controversial and inspiring views on mental ill-health. Through works such as The Divided Self (1960), The Self and Others (1961), and Sanity Madness and the Family (1964), Laing demonstrated his desire to investigate the intricate connections between mind and body and through utilizing an ‘existential-phenomenological’ approach attempted to understand his patients within the contexts of their own local, social and familial worlds. ¹ Many critics, including fellow psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, condemned his views as attempting to romanticize mental suffering but this did not halt Laing gaining a cult following – as a so-called counterculture hero – and becoming one of Britain’s most influential, yet forgotten, intellectual figures. ²

Despite Laing’s popularity, particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s, it appears that fame came at a high price. While his most admired texts are still in print 50 years after their first publication, many of his ideas have largely been ignored by the medical establishment and instead his personal life has taken centre stage with media articles reporting not on his humane approach to psychiatry, but his problematic relationships with family, alcohol and his profession. ³ However, despite this there have been attempts recently to engage with Laing’s life and work in a more critical and imaginative manner. From Allan Beveridge’s innovative use of patient case notes to highlight Laing’s position as a psychiatrist, to Gavin Miller’s numerous attempts to situate the life and work of Laing in their Scottish historical and cultural contexts, it is clear that there is a burgeoning field of critical enquiry beginning to take shape. ⁴ Although, within this field, some attempts to tell the stories of Laing’s biography have been made including, most recently, artist Luke Fowler’s Turner Prize nominated piece, All Divided Selves (2012), little attention has yet to be paid to the different sites and spaces of his life and the significance that these have to his clinical practice and wider philosophies of mental health and its care. ⁵ Utilizing Laing’s ‘archive’, his autobiography Wisdom, Madness and Folly, and a documentary film that appeared as part of John McGreevy’s Cities project in the late 1970s, this paper seeks to explore Laing’s (re)remembered childhood worlds in order to think more explicitly about the significance of these different sites and spaces – and their memories – on his ways of interpreting and making sense of the world in the present. Responding to Owain Jones’s recent call for more attention to be paid in geography to the individual and private memories that are crucial components in the makings of our lives, this work seeks to investigate the processes of (re)remembering childhood worlds and the importance of thinking in more depth about the presentness of the past. Drawing upon Laing’s different forms of remembering his childhood landscapes in adulthood, from private sketches of his family home to pre-production meetings of his Cities film, and the different narrative styles they inspired, from autobiography to film scripts, this paper seeks to open up further questions about (re)remembering childhood landscapes and the narratives sought to convey them.

Memory, geography, and storying past places

When I cast back to an event from my past . . . I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of ‘now’ intervene. ⁶

‘Memory’ is not a singular entity but a complex set of inter-relational processes functioning through different modes, and recently geographers’ engagements with issues of remembering and forgetting have, in recognition of this multifaceted nature, become increasingly diverse. The inextricable bind between memory and place, as highlighted by Tim Cresswell in his introductions to place, ⁷ has captured attention and transcended into work on issues as far ranging as the history of geographical knowledge, ⁸ ‘haunted’ landscapes, ⁹ and psychoanalytic geographies, ¹⁰ to name but a few. For Stephen Legg, these types of examinations into issues such as nostalgia and memory reveal the importance of space and place, not just as weak metaphors, but as formative factors in thinking about the presentness of the past. ¹¹ As Owain Jones has noted, we are ‘creatures of spatial remains’, with our relationships of the present being continually shaped and formed by past experiences and as such, ‘[m]emory (of one kind or another) is then a fundamental aspect of becoming, intimately entwined with space, affect, emotion, imagination and identity’. ¹²

This emphasis on the importance of space and place in such memory-work is followed through into the innovative approaches geographers have sought to investigate the ways in which memory and place are interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. Work relating to different sites of collective memory, from the concrete and physical sites of monuments shown eloquently in Nuala Johnson’s work, to the non-material – more performative – acts of rituals and commemorations as demonstrated by Steven Hoelscher, all seek to highlight and conceptualize attempts to provide a sense of the past and their re-presentations in the present. ¹³ Gareth Hoskins’s work on materializing memory is an exceptional example of how geographers have utilized memory to explore new ways of appreciating the complex relationships between people and things. For Hoskins, viewing remembering as a performance entailing collaboration between visitors to a heritage site and objects can arguably aid in enlivening and deepening understandings of our past in the present. ¹⁴

Glimpsing into these literatures, of which there are considerably more than this paper has the capacity to dwell upon, it is clear that opening up issues of memory and place creates an intriguing space where the past and present jostle for attention. ¹⁵ Jones, in his review of geography, memory and non-representational geographies, draws attention to the need in the geographical literature to ‘attend more fully to the more specific, intimate, private memories of individuals and families’, as ‘each of us bears freights of memory bound up with domestic spaces and collectives we grew up in . . . these shape us and our practices most profoundly’. ¹⁶ Work into the complex relationships between the past, present, place and material traces, such as Caitlin DeSilvey’s excavation of a Montana Homestead and Hayden Lorimer’s entwined animal/human encounters in the Cairngorm Mountains, ¹⁷ has begun to pave the ways forward to addressing how ‘our spatial lives are not merely present relations between body and current space, but a fantastically complex entanglement of self, past spatial relations and memory in current life’. ¹⁸ As Charles Fernyhough has noted, ‘remembering is always (re)remembering’ an event that takes place in the present, not the past, as when one thinks back to previous events it is not so much the event itself that is recalled but the last act of remembering it. ¹⁹ Therefore, it is within this intriguing intermixing between past experience and present consciousness that holds the potential for creative collaboration in the storying of (past) lives and (past) places, which this paper, through the lens of R.D. Laing, seeks to tease out and explore.

Recently, in a special issue of cultural geographies, the various forms and spaces of narrative were considered alongside ‘the role of narrative as a resource for making sense of the material world’. ²⁰ Within these tales told the processes of (re)remembering plays a crucial part and signals that in one way memory is endlessly creative and can function just as imagination does. ²¹ For example, Lorimer’s excavation of A Land (1951), written by archaeologist, journalist and writer, Jaquetta Hawkes, seeks to examine how ‘mineral memories and bodily memories are locked in tandem’. ²² For Lorimer, Hawkes was a writer whose work was not afraid to delve ‘deep into the vast structure of recollection’, treating memories of past worlds and experiences ‘like finds from an archaeological dig site; as pieces of evidence to be sifted through, and eventually fitted into a matrix of theories concerning symbolic power, cultural meaning, social change, agency and creative expression’. ²³ The looping of time is also considered by DeSilvey, in her experimental narrative of a Cornish harbour, as she intricately connects memory not only into the workings of the present but into the future. Through a project of anticipatory history, DeSilvey wishes to demonstrate how the harbour could become ‘a model for imaginative decommissioning’ where ‘the past [is] made visible with fragments of the harbour retained as elements of a reimagined landscape’. ²⁴ These works, and others, demonstrate the ways in which narrative can form in the interplays between past, present and, indeed, future, and could therefore suggest that one way of viewing memory is ‘as a means for endlessly rewriting the self’ and as such it cannot help but make ‘storytellers of us all’. ²⁵

This paper seeks to respond to Jones’s call for more geographical engagements with memory at the more private and individual level by exploring the storying of (past) lives and (past) places through R.D. Laing’s attempts to (re)remember and (re)imagine his childhood city of Glasgow. Beginning with an examination into the storying of the Cities film, through the use of pre-production film meetings and Laing’s own personal notes, this section attempts to situate Laing’s (re)remembering of his childhood worlds in the context of adulthood and to consider the complex associations that this inevitably brings. The following section explores some of Laing’s Cities and autobiographical stories, with a key emphasis on the site of home and its associated spaces, in order to reveal the significance of these sites and spaces – and their memories – to the ways in which he interpreted and made sense of the world around him through their retelling in the present. Finally, this paper looks into the makings of Laing’s intimate and individual memories, in order to reveal and reflect upon the narrative quality of memory and the importance of taking seriously these types of private and individual memories in uncovering the presentness of the past.

Storying the Cities film

Picture This:

Begin with an idea

so fundamental and compelling

that you hardly give it a second thought.

Now think twice.

Think about cities –

how deeply they affect all of us.

Think how they have entered the imagination

of literally everyone on this earth

Now imagine six of the world’s great cities.

Hold them up to the camera.

Catch them unawares.

Invite six of the world’s

most stimulating people to guide you through these cities –

their history, their personality

and their daily lives.

Picture this felicitous blending

of storyteller and story told.

Picture it in six, hour-long programs

of remarkable insight, genuine power and massive appeal.

Lights, please. ²⁶

This theatrical passage was part of promotional material designed to advertise the Cities project, six one hour television documentaries, directed by Canadian film maker John McGreevy. ²⁷ The project was an attempt to ‘present spontaneous portraits of some of the world’s remarkable places’ ²⁸ through the unique eyes of the humans who inhabit these urban landscapes. McGreevy was passionately attracted to the complexity of the city, due to the intensity it inspires within the human experience, and he noted that he had always found ‘in the passing parade on any street corner an inexhaustible source for reflection on the way we live’. ²⁹ It was these elements, and more, that he wanted his project to capture on film. Each documentary was focused upon a particular city, but McGreevy was also keen to find a ‘host’ to guide the viewer around her/his city and to become absorbed into her/his impressions of it. These guides were of crucial importance for McGreevy, as he was adamant that the picture of the cities projected in the films were not to be an objective portrait, but rather a view expressed through the deeply personal encounters that these people derived from their own experiences and memories. ³⁰ Certain well-known individuals were approached to take part, such as Peter Ustinov and Anthony Burgess, and among them was Ronald Laing.

Filming began with Laing’s portrait of Glasgow in Scotland, and, although McGreevy wished to take an improvisational approach, it appeared that Laing desired some direction in what exactly McGreevy wished to gain from him and his tour. At the time of the project Laing was in his early fifties and located in London, having left Glasgow many years earlier and therefore his childhood city may have felt somewhere that he had long left behind. ³¹ In a transcript of a pre-production meeting between the two figures, McGreevy relayed,

A way to hang it together, well one thought is in terms of a visual autobiography. And that depends on how compelling[ly] you can cast a spell on people so that they really become interested. ³²

The key to the project’s success, for McGreevy, hinged upon the ability of the host to elucidate her/his own personal experiences and memories of the city so that the tour became a spectacle bursting with individual moments and anecdotes. McGreevy noted that, although many of the films appeared as guided tours he personally looked forward to capturing on camera those ‘accidental moments of personal idiosyncrasy’ that brought to the fore the spirit of the hosts. ³³ Certain enchanting examples, for McGreevy, included,

Peter Ustinov . . . moving through the rush hour crowds of Leningrad with considerable sang-froid, seemingly talking to himself and receiving astonished looks from the passers-by; Jonathan Miller invoking the spirit of his dead nanny in Highgate Cemetery; Glenn Gould singing Mahler lieder at dawn to the elephants in Toronto’s zoo. ³⁴

All of these moments revealed as much about the person as the place they were situated within, but importantly fused the two in an intriguing relationship that had the potential to ignite the imagination of the viewer. However, at times, it appeared that the chemistry between the city and its host failed to click, and reviewers critiqued some of the films, such as Ustinov’s portrayal of Leningrad, for its slow and uninspiring ‘tour of a dead city of architecture’. ³⁵ However, Laing’s portrait of Glasgow was much more successful as he attempted to follow McGreevy’s spellbinding approach, and through his personal anecdotes managed to bring a (re)remembered version of his childhood city back to life.

A review of Laing’s film praised his efforts and noted that,

Laing had packed his commentary with a succession of living moments . . . We met the bar drinkers with a flowing stream of repartee, the eccentric poet Hugh MacDiarmid – the ‘incorrigible free thinker’ – and everywhere Laing proved his parts by showing the Glaswegians at work and play. ³⁶

Girling appeared intrigued by the many ‘facets’ Laing revealed of his city, from the bustling tenement buildings to the eerie but spectacular views from the snow stained gravestones of the necropolis, and he reflected that these were captured beautifully by McGreevy’s overall idea,

And throughout the director caught the sounds and voices that added to the sensual experience of an ugly, industrial city being shown as a warm ‘home of imagination’ that had inspired Laing’s work. ³⁷

Laing’s depiction of his Glasgow was unique to him, showing as much of his own personality as it did the character of the city. From his bursting into traditional song with his instantly recognizable Glaswegian drawl to his visit to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed library housed in the Glasgow Art School, this was a portrait of Glasgow that he wished the viewer to see. A further reviewer wrote that ‘you will like Laing and feel a communication with him . . . he is not just a writer but a communicator, someone with an inescapable ability to find “you” wherever that may be’. ³⁸

Laing’s portrayal of Glasgow for the Cities project was an important and complex process of (re)remembering as the city was his childhood world that he had left at the age of 25. The different aspects of Glasgow that Laing addressed hence centred heavily on his childhood and the sites and spaces that held significance in these memories, and undoubtedly inspired his later recollections in his autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985). ³⁹ This work has many correlations with the sites and spaces discussed in the Cities film. Designed to be the first of three volumes, Laing’s autobiography covers the first 25 years of his life centring on childhood, University life and psychiatric training. ⁴⁰ In the introduction to the film he remarked,

Glasgow is a place of stark, clashing contrasts. But such contradiction is the stuff of drama, creation, imagination. Glasgow has all that compacted intensely – in its commerce, its industry, its learning, and its people; in its violence and tenderness and great warmheartedness. I lived in this city for the first twenty-five years of my life . . . ⁴¹

The Cities project encouraged Laing to (re)imagine his home city and to delve deep in his memories of childhood, recalling episodes that, in his adult world, had become changed or lost to him. Susan Engel notes that, ‘we trust memory against all evidence: it is selective, subjective, cannily defensive, unreliable as fact’, but it is the power that memory has to link with the imagination that is its greatest aspect as ‘in memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates’. ⁴² For Laing, it was this recreation of his childhood city that led him to turn to the concept of memory and to rely heavily on the imaginative and creative places that it took him. Valerie Krips argues,

Our memory – which includes memories of childhood – runs like a thread through our thinking and experiencing. In this sense, we are never free of our past. We are, however, fully capable of reimagining and renarrativizing it. ⁴³

Laing’s Cities vision, and his later autobiography, was hence no straightforward reconstruction of his childhood city of Glasgow, but instead the (re)remembering and (re)imagining of a childhood world that had as much to do with forgetting as remembering, and that was made up of fragments of memories drawn together through his position in an adult world. Laing noted in his own autobiography that when recounting the stories of his childhood it is completely possible that ‘it may all have been a dream’ ⁴⁴ and ‘[t]he whole story could be entirely my imagination’, demonstrating the importance of both remembering and forgetting when reviewing childhood from an adult perspective. ⁴⁵

The question of to what extent adults can ever re-enter into their childhood worlds is discussed by Jones, who sees these childhood worlds as both ‘endlessly revisited and forever gone’ in the same enchanting moment. ⁴⁶ Jones reflects that,

Once childhood is superseded by adult stocks of knowledge, those adult filters can never be removed to get back to certain states. Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be a child are inevitably processed through adultness. ⁴⁷

For Laing, it was unavoidable that his childhood city was recreated through this adult lens, with the objects, sites and events of childhood being viewed through the associations that adulthood brings. However, deep resonances still flickered between Laing’s adult and childhood worlds, and it is to the micro-spaces of Laing’s Glasgow childhood conveyed through the Cities film and his own autobiography – and, in particular, the site of home – that this paper now turns to reflect upon the presentness of the past in storying (past) lives and (past) places. Through intermixing a range of different narratives produced from Laing’s ‘archive’, Cities film and autobiography, the complex processes of remembering and (re)remembering certain sites, spaces and episodes from childhood will be revealed and their significance to Laing’s adult world discussed.

(Re)Remembering Laing’s childhood worlds

Laing was born on Friday 7 October 1927, and came to reside at 21 Ardbeg Street, a neat sandstone tenement flat, located in the area of Govanhill in Glasgow, and it was this building that forever held a special place in Laing’s memory, being a pivotal site in his Cities film. ⁴⁸ Standing, both hands tucked cosily into the pockets of his tan coloured trench coat to shelter them from the bitter Glasgow weather, Laing stands at the foot of his old tenement home. Gazing upwards away from the camera, he looks lost in contemplation, as the winter sunlight glimmers on his former flat’s living-room window. ⁴⁹ When recalling his tenement, Laing stated that, ‘this is where I was born, this was my “close”, this is where I spent the first twenty-three years of my life’, ⁵⁰ and it was here that Laing experienced the initial meeting place between his self and the world. ⁵¹ The site of home for Laing became his first universe which he shared with his mother Amelia and his father David, who had met and married ten years previously, ⁵² and it was within these walls that he encountered some of his most influential experiences. ⁵³ In many ways the architecture of Glasgow tenements, ‘with their shared ‘close’, or entrance passage, leading to the stairs to the upper “houses” and through to the shared back court with its communal wash-house, was a concrete expression of community’. ⁵⁴ For many, the tenement was a community in a microcosm with cooking smells permeating the close, doors remaining unlocked for neighbours to come and go, and children playing in the street below. Pubs and shops were often located on the corner of tenement buildings and were a meeting place for many generations of families, as it was commonplace for family members to live in close proximity to one another. However, for Laing’s family it appeared this sense of community was not as strongly felt. Despite both Amelia’s mother and father residing close to Ardbeg Street where the Laing’s lived, and David’s parents and younger siblings living streets away, the families rarely met. ⁵⁵ This lack of engagement with the wider community led Laing’s childhood tenement world to be very much smaller than many of his fellow Glaswegian neighbours, as often the front door would be locked and the three of them would be together enclosed in their own little world of family life. ⁵⁶

The memories that this building held were both cherished and feared by Laing, for his childhood, although a time of care and playfulness, was not always the idyllic moment that it is often assumed to be, with loneliness and times of sadness being an equal remembered presence. ⁵⁷ As an only child, Laing became part of small but complex family unit who shared a unique connection, as he later acknowledged in a more general statement about family: ‘one could say that the family exists everywhere, in each of the people who are in it, and nowhere else’. ⁵⁸ The physical structure of home was, in itself, influential to Laing’s development as it acted as a microcosm of the world and a frame through which Laing could view and interpret the world outside of its confines. ⁵⁹ Figure 1 shows a drawing that was found inside one of Laing’s many diaries, which he refers to as his ‘journals in time’, showing the remembered spaces of his tenement home. ⁶⁰ Sketching the different rooms of his home, with the careful positioning of the doors and windows, signals part of the process of his (re)remembering and (re)imagining of a crucial aspect in his childhood world that he began for the Cities project and continued in the writing of his autobiography.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Laing’s sketch of his (re) remembered childhood tenement home.

Laing spent the majority of his early childhood within his tenement home, and in notes he made for the Cities project he commented that,

Glasgow is a very inside city. From the outside, you could walk around the streets for hours and wonder whether it is a ghost town[,] everyone is ‘inside’. ⁶¹

This observation of Glasgow arguably stemmed from his childhood perspective of the city, since for much of his early life Laing in effect viewed his home city from the inside-out. Laing would spend much of his early childhood gazing out of his living-room tenement window, staring transfixed at the people in the street below. For many families living in the tenement buildings the large bay windows in the front room often became mitigation against loneliness as it kept people in touch with the goings-on in the world outside. ⁶² It is well documented by Laing’s biographers that Amelia was particularly controlling over Laing’s use of space as a child, ⁶³ noting that ‘I think she wanted to create a world in which the outside didn’t impinge – she wanted to protect him from that, from anything untoward’. ⁶⁴ Because of this, Laing, spent much of his time within the confines of home, alone with only his mother for company. To Laing, ‘[t]he window was a one-way screen’ allowing him access to the unfamiliar outside world. ⁶⁵ He remembered,

And how the mood and character of the street changed, as it grew dusk, as the men came home from work and the streets emptied and the gaslighter went round lighting up each lamp in turn, one by one; the shops began to close and people pulled their curtains to, their blinds down and eventually sat round the fire watching those ‘blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion’. ⁶⁶ And then to bed. ⁶⁷

This exercise of observing, not only the changes that occurred in the outer landscape of the street but also the interplay between the people and their environment, led Laing to recall being a spectator in the lives of others, an interested observer of the nuances of the people in the street below. ⁶⁸ Laing later noted that, the watching of others from the window ‘was the best possible preparation I could have had for what later became apparent was one of my central interests – human interaction’. ⁶⁹ He recalled that, ‘[t]he hours and years some children spent birdwatching, I spent watching people’, and it was this interest in human interaction that led to the window becoming a crucial element in Laing’s childhood world. ⁷⁰ It was from this position at the window that a young Laing began to explore, through his eyes and ears, the sheer variety of human beings, ‘noting their idiosyncrasies, their body language, the details of their movements’. ⁷¹ When gazing out, Laing recalled that he thought,

How do I know what I can do? Can I make someone walking by look up at me? Can I make someone walk faster or slower? Can I make the gaslights dimmer or brighter? . . . The people in the street were not toys like my tin soldier. I had not found out how to turn people into puppets, but maybe . . . ? ⁷²

These moments demonstrate Laing’s escape from the body and into the imaginative worlds of the mind. In fantasy, he could make anything happen and travel to places far beyond his tenement world of home. Interesting correlations could be drawn between these interests and his future profession as a psychiatrist, as Laing, for example, would spend many hours observing refractory ward patients in Gartnavel Royal Hospital, desperately seeking to understand their ways of being from a spectator position. ⁷³ From this spot, a young Laing watched the world passing by and it appeared that his mind became free to imagine, to create an entirely different spectacle. This reversion into fantasy is an important part of childhood, and arguably adulthood also, and for a young Laing, trapped by adults in a particular living space, he became attracted to this form of escape. ⁷⁴

Covered in a light dusting of crisp white snow the view from the roof of Govanhill Library reveals a grey industrial Glasgow landscape. Against this dramatic backdrop the camera catches the silhouette of an angel, majestically poised to take stock of the wonder that is beyond it. ⁷⁵ The site of the local library became a different form of freedom from the world of home, as during the school holidays Laing recalled that he would often spend the majority of his days in Govanhill Library absorbing himself in the delights he found there. Laing began to read from an early age and soon started to look over illustrated histories of the world, carefully attempting to dissect the words, through compiling his own word dictionary, and scouring pictures on every page for ideas that would spark the imagination. ⁷⁶ From the back bedroom of his home Laing could see the statue of an angel perched on top of the library appearing ready to take flight into the sky above, and he recalled,

Right outside my bedroom window was the dome of a public library on the top of which was an angel, poised on one foot, as though to take off to the moon and the stars. ⁷⁷

This image was significant in its appearance in both the Cities film and his autobiography, becoming symbolic, for him, of the power that the mind could hold and the freedom it could bring. In doing so, it became part of a poignant (re)remembered landscape that helped to situate him back into his childhood state.

The sites, spaces and episodes that featured so prominently in his Cities film and later autobiography, demonstrate a complex interrelationship between adulthood and childhood that oscillates through different modes of (re)remembering. Laing’s remembered time spent inside his tenement home gazing out at the world beyond his window perpetuates attentiveness to the sites and spaces of the wider world that is then conveyed strongly through the narratives shown. As an adult, Laing became increasingly drawn to thinking about issues surrounding the spaces and places of psychiatric care, observing the lives of schizophrenic women – unusually for the time period – from the perspective of their family home and creating ‘asylum’ spaces, such as the infamous Kingsley Hall, in the style of concrete communities. ⁷⁸ Laing’s determination, as an adult, to understand, rather than explain, his patients, and to attempt to do so through a highly interpersonal psychotherapeutic exchange resonates from a desire to connect with the nuances of individuals within the context of their own life-worlds. ⁷⁹ Both these aspects of Laing’s adult life demonstrate inquisitiveness into the differently inhabited spaces of his patients’ worlds that could be related to the (re)remembered image of a young Laing perched at his tenement window staring into the street below and negotiating his way through his own complex set of family dynamics. Although there is the requirement to tread very carefully in the making of such grand connections between Laing’s (re)remembering of different childhood sites and spaces and his adult profession, there are clearly echoes that reverberate between the two that these differently relayed stories help to delicately reveal. Jones, in contrast to Nigel Thrift, talks of memories as embers, ‘for they retain a trace of fire – of life – and if disturbed, or fanned by a breath of air, can burst back into renewed life’, and therefore [memories] are fundamental aspects of becoming. ⁸⁰ The following section continues in this vein by delving further into the processes of (re)remembering and storying such (past) sites, spaces and episodes, in order to think in more depth about the narrative quality of memory and the different ways in which these embers can glow.

Laing’s childhood stories

Laing once commented that, ‘my mind has its stuff’, both ‘highs and lows, blacks and whites, and evil, as well as some nice things’, and it was this ‘stuff’ that Laing drew upon in order to (re)remember and (re)imagine his childhood and to create his Cities film and autobiography. ⁸¹ Wrapped up within his childhood memories, Laing found certain sites, spaces and episodes that travelled in his mind through time with him and that, often unbeknownst to him, still had an impact upon how he viewed and acted within his adult world. When (re)remembering his childhood city, Laing was encouraged to revisit a number of these sites and episodes, conveying them and their significance through the mode of storytelling for both his film and his autobiography. Engel argues that,

Stories are dynamic, modifiable, constructed. Yet each time a story is told it also becomes a text and, therefore, an object that you can reflect on . . . In this respect, we are the stories we tell of ourselves. ⁸²

Revisiting the material landscape of Glasgow for the Cities project allowed Laing to become transported back to many of the buildings, sites and spaces that were important aspects in the stories he remembered of his childhood. The childhood moments that he had previously attempted to (re)remember became suddenly more ‘real’ as being situated in the place of Glasgow he began once again to touch, smell and gaze upon the elements of a city that he was endeavouring to recall. When attempting to create his Cities film and his autobiography, Laing had to begin to tell himself stories about his past in order to trigger the memories he wished to conjure for the projects, which then appear as scribbled notes in his ‘archive’. He wrote,

I think my earliest specific memory is of the taste of stone-ginger. I tasted it in a street in Troon, and I was told it came from China. I have memories before this, but not located as specific occasions. I remember my grannies [sic] lap, the black lace of her dress, her grey-white hair. Auntie Mysie and her sweets, that she was always telling me I could eat, and my mother always warned me against. ⁸³

Yet, the significance of these types of memories in the present through their (re)remembering casts them in a different, more generative, light. Many of the stories were often snippets of brief moments in time and space that, although told with great personal and emotional detail, commonly appeared as ghostly mutterings of a long-ago past, separated by a great distance between the then and the now. For Engels,

Adults recalling their childhood say that they observe their past self much as they observe a child on a playground, as somehow both separate and living from a wholly different perspective. The self in their stories, like the child on the playground, inhabits a somewhat foreign land. ⁸⁴

Revisiting his childhood often led Laing to view his city as a place far away from his present world as an adult, and therefore many narratives running through the Cities film, as discussed previously, portray Glasgow as something of a lost place where the events and happenings of childhood have long since occurred.

Although Laing portrayed many of his childhood memories as distant, there was also a contrast in that some of the stories told in the film and elsewhere seem so vivid that they appear to have occurred only a moment ago. One particular story narrated with an almost frantic immediacy, one that is consistently recounted in many different written forms over a number of years, is the moment when he discovered the truth about Santa Claus. Laing recalled that, just after his fifth birthday he began to ask questions about how the sneaky character of Santa Claus operated, and after a failed attempt to stay awake to catch Santa in the act of delivering his presents, Laing turned to his parents to provide some answers;

‘Think’, they said, ‘and we won’t have to tell you. Who is Santa Claus?’

I gave up. ‘Who is Santa Claus?’

‘We are!’

‘You are!?’ It had never occurred to me.

I knew that my mother and father were sitting looking at me, waiting for me to thank them for all these lovely presents. I couldn’t. I was stunned. Pain grabbed my throat. Santa Claus was them. I hated Santa Claus and them for being the same. ⁸⁵

For Laing, this event and its consistent (re)remembering and (re)telling had devastating consequences, and for some critics it became Laing’s very ‘first existential crisis’. ⁸⁶ From a very early age, he was recognized as a painfully sensitive child whose obsession for attempting to rationalize external events led him to become emotionally anxious over many things. ⁸⁷ The realization that his parents had tricked him, by his own recognition, led a young Laing to become wary about what he would so freely believe in future. ⁸⁸ The Santa Claus story became an encapsulation of how Laing viewed parts of his childhood, and its continuous (re)telling suggests a desire to capture this moment and somehow retain its emotional significance. ⁸⁹ The different types of memories conveyed by Laing towards recalling his childhood became shared through different forms of narratives. It was these different types of stories, both wholly remembered and almost forgotten, that helped him to go back in time to a past Glasgow and to take those keenly waiting on a dreamlike tour through his (re)remembered and (re)imagined childhood city.

Conclusions

In Laing’s Cities film he commented that, ‘in a way there are as many Glasgows as there are eyes to see it’ and, as he left Hutchesons’ Grammar School, aged 17, he was about to expand his childhood horizons by becoming a student at Glasgow University. ⁹⁰ On leaving school, Laing’s immediate ambition was to become a doctor as,

It was one of these things approved by my parents, and to me it offered entry into the secret rituals of birth and death, and would give me access to sexual knowledge. Besides there seemed no point in studying anything that was really important, like philosophy or psychology in a University curriculum. These things were matters of personal apprenticeship and I did not know of any master philosopher or psychologist teaching at a University of Britain, and my personal horizons had not stretched beyond the shores of the British Isles . . . I had not even seen much of Glasgow. ⁹¹

Laing’s reflections on Glasgow and therefore his alertness to ‘geography’ often remained at the intra and inter-personal scale – the small spaces of the imagination, encounter, exchange, sociability and trauma – and remained somewhat decontextualized from the wider social, political and economic geographies comprising the city in which he lived. Hence, one reason for the focus of this paper to be so explicitly on the site of home and its’ associated spaces. The Cities film, however, did capture certain elements of the wider social, cultural and political landscape of Glasgow, filming Laing walking through the old industrial Clydeside waterfront, dwarfed by the ships and cranes that dominate this murky landscape, and talking with the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid about issues of Scottish Nationalism. Standing in a deserted football pitch with a fire burning in the background, representative of a wasteland, Laing conveys, ‘[d]arkness, desolation, life bared down to the bone; mere existence, bare survival. And culture? Where in that world was there a place for Bach or Chopin?’, encompassing a whole set of social and cultural associations about Glasgow that could be brought to light. ⁹² These elements and their significance to Laing’s makings that, although, are beyond the scope of this work, are indeed exciting avenues to explore in further detail. However, this paper has chosen to centre on the micro-spaces of his childhood city and its hinterlands as the memories they ignited and inspired were particularly powerful when (re)remembered by an adult Laing.

All of the sites, spaces and episodes that Laing presented in the Cities film and later in his autobiography, showed a part of his history, memory, character and imagination, allowing a rare insight into his initial makings. This paper has attempted to demonstrate through an investigation into Laing’s ‘archive’, autobiography and Cities film how significant certain sites and spaces – and their memories – were to the ways in which Laing interpreted and made sense of the world around him in the present. Jones reflects that,

Memories are living landscapes seen obliquely and from an always moving viewpoint of on-going life. So I suggest memories are always in parallax, sliding over each other. Distant memories can seem to stand still, like a far-off hill seen from a moving train, making a backdrop to whatever the closer foreground has to show as it rushed by. But, of course, it is the perceiver who is moving through the moment as the near past and more distant past make an animated landscape. ⁹³

The intriguing relationship between the past and present which jostles around the stories told in this paper, seeks to demonstrate further the complex entanglements between the self, past spatial relations and memory in current life. Investigating intimate and personal memories, in such a manner, opens up different ways of thinking about how memories are produced and told. Jones notes that, ‘[g]eography can help open up the tracings of the spatial remains that make us’, and by examining Laing’s (re)remembering of his childhood city this paper has sought to open up pathways for future investigations into such tracings. ⁹⁴ Daniels and Lorimer observe that, ‘[i]n the shadows of the story stirs the storyteller’, and throughout this work the different stories and narratives produced by Laing on his memories of childhood have been overlapped and entwined in order to create a more creative account of his childhood worlds, allowing certain sites and spaces to be brought to the fore. ⁹⁵ Storying (past) lives and (past) places brings to light the narrative quality of memory and as Fernyhough notes, ‘accepting the narrative nature of remembering does not destroy its magic’ as, ‘stories are precious, and that applies equally to our own stories of the past’. ⁹⁶