
Severely Dealt With:
Growing Up in Belfast and Glasgow.

After years of devoting his efforts to assisting the cause of Guy 
Aldred, with his United Socialist Movement, and "The Word", and 
latterly keeping the memory of the unorthodox communist alive*, 
John Taylor Caldwell has been persuaded to record his own life 
story.

   This 'odyssey', an "intricate task of retracing intellectual 
and philosophical development, as  Bob Jones of Northern Herald 
Books notes, met at first with a "typically self-effacing 
response". Years of recording the lives of others had perhaps led 
to an under-valuation of his own experience as testimony to f the 
impact of the self in it's initial struggle to imprint it's will 
on a hostile environment.

     Cushioned by a certain standard of welfare state and post-
war upbringing, it can be a shock when the squalor of industrial 
life in the early 20th century is the backdrop for a comrade with 
such a sensitive demeanor as John. We have been exposed to 
numerous literary descriptions of "down and out" inner city 
slums, and the degree of poverty described in Belfast and Glasgow 
is captured with an intensity that is impressive. 

    The book travels a route through the first stirrings of 
consciousness, and gives a genuine account of the child's view of 
the world. Punctuated by asides to explain the descent of the 
family's fortunes, the historical period and it's esoteric 
offshoots, the book records the consistent drive present within 
his self from an early age to create his own philosophy. 

"nowadays it would be said that I had a hyperactive mind. It was 
never still. It burned inside my head
 llike a great flame in a little candle. It illuminated a 
stream of hazy visions, colourful dreams and profound thoughts. "

>From a "trancelike state in which insomniacs aver they are still 
awake and observers declare that they have fallen asleep" he 
"drifted into a visionary world beyond experience" in which he 
now recognises that

 "this was the urge to return (which) is in all of us; the 
yearning for the womb, or the tomb....native to non-being: life 
is an interruption, an aberration, a wrench from the ineffable 
reality - a pain, a sickness from which we constantly try to 
escape in pretending to be someone else, somewhere else, in some 
other time. That ios why escapism is such a major industry. No-
one dares be himself. To seek self is to brave reality, and that 
could not be endured. All Art and Religion are struggles to 
escape, sometimes from the nightmare of being and sometimes from 
the truth 
of its extinction"

While embarked on such imagining, not all thought was so 
philosophical but John refuses to divulge his "serialised 
daydream...lest I set Freudians in a flurry"!

     The chapter 'Severely Dealt With' records the experience of 
schooling, and the sheer brutality and regimentation afflicted on 
working class children, "outcasts...herded into classrooms, not 
just to be educated, but to be disciplined, to be tamed. Hence 
order, silence, unquestioned obedience.....made to fear 
authority".

     This was a time of change and potential upheavel, the end of 
the first World War, the partition of Ulster and 'Bolshevism' and 
the book records the subtle influences at work amongst the 
different layers of the downtrodden class. His mother answered 
his questions about riots spreading to his street in terms that 
"respectable people..don't go in for that sort of thing". 
However, such was the  despotic influence of his own father, the 
domestic violence, that such worldly events offerred a relief 
from the hunger and beatings that pervaded everyday life. This 
leads to the harrowing description of his own mother's death 
through such violence and his older sister's estrangement from 
the father who married to have sex, with ten unwanted chidren the 
result: "the very thought of affection would have turned him 
sour".

      John. now 14, travelled on the steamer to Glasgow   'to 
keep house', his father having moved to escape debt rather than 
the growing sectarian violence. The 'good old days' depicted was 
of a 

"big city, where the people lived' up closes' which had stone 
pipe-clayed stairs with a lavatory on each landing to do three or 
four more houses. At night many of the closes were occupied by 
the homeless, some of them addicted to a brew concocted of 
methylated spirits and an injection of coal gas from the 
stairhead lighting. 
It was a tough city where many of the side-street dwellers wore 
cloth caps with 
razor blades sewn into the  cap, and often carried cut-throat 
razors in case tthe need arose tocut a few throats. The 'polis' 
were to be feared: mostly big men who, like the Irish, spoke in 
amusing malaprops (for instance 'Come on get off', 'If you want 
to stand their you'd better move along') "

One of the first incidents that stuck in John's mind was of a 
hanging at nearby Duke St. prison, a youth called brought up on a 
culture of violence. He imagined, 

"beneath the bell's great hammer, having the sentence of the 
Court pounded
 into his mind in a last stroke of retribution".

   As it happened, he got a job as a page-boy in "The Picture 
House", for 2 years and this allowed further scope for his racing 
imagination. Although occasionally sidetracked by cinematic 
adventure, historical rather than romantic, the mind struggled 
with a philosophy that emerged firstly by dealing with God 
("thereness"), and moving on by chance encounters with orators 
from subjectivist and 'marxist' pedigrees. One of these orators, 
'Quinn', ironically  committed suicide in a river he maintained 
'did not exist'. Even today, a surly family organised as the 
Glasgow Humane Society fishes bodies out of the Clyde. 

    In the recent Book Launch for 'Severely Dealt With' organised 
by the Glasgow Anarchists, the actor Kenny Grant read the chapter 
"Never Again", in which 'Caldiie' recounts the anti-war mood 
which typified Glasgow in the mid-20s. 

"On walls and rosadways were thick pipe-clay chalkings: 
WAR IS MURDER, WAR IS HELL, NEVER AGAIN"

The experience of the World War horror was an everyday reality.

    Notoriety came the way of the family when the 'Cruelty' came 
to learn about the neglect of the children and their frequent 
beatings and the case achieved press attention. The book breaks 
off with the prospect of 'going to sea', but not before John 
recounts the impact of sexual awakening, which his philosophical 
contemplation had not prepared himself for, despite the callous 
womanising of his father. After a panic, belkieving he had 
contracted VD, he vowed to "keep strict control...clear of loose 
women...and solitary practices".

   This is not a nostalgic trip through biography, but a 
compelling journey of discovery achieved in the most difficult 
circumstances. Recalling sectarian conflicts, and having lived a 
lifetime of propagandising for communism, John let's slip that

" it  took me another sixty years to realise that mankind is 
quite mad".

But disappointment that capitalism continues, thriving on the 
escape from self mass culture encourages, and the persistence of 
anti-social tendencies, hasn't existinguished the author's hope 
that the causes of war, exploitation and alienation are 
identified and 'put to right' in a social revolution.

(Severely Dealt With: Growing Up in Belfast and Glasgow, 
Northern Herald Books, 5 Close Lea, Rastrick, Brighouse HD6 3AR  
for z5.95 pounds or like 'Come Dungeons Dark' , (his account of 
Aldred's life including his conscientoius objection) Luath Press 
6.95 pounds from AK Distrib).


