The Boy Who Ran Through Ferguslie Park Is Still Running

Jim Green was born in a cold December to a man who punched the air in a Paisley street. He has spent the seven decades since refusing to stay where he was put.

Jimmy Green got the news on a building site. His wife had gone into labour, so he pulled off his wellingtons, stuffed with cut rags because there was no money for socks, and ran. Not a short distance. Across Paisley in December, in a greatcoat that the wind cut straight through, to a maternity hospital that had once been a mansion house. When he got there, Sister McKenzie came out and told him he had a son. Jimmy went to the window, held the baby up toward the indigo winter sky, and said out loud to God: look after him. Then he jumped on a tram going the wrong direction, kissed the conductress, sang to strangers on the top deck, and danced in the street when he got off.

That baby was Jim Green. Another Feg is his account of what happened next.

A Feg is someone from Ferguslie Park, the housing scheme on the edge of Paisley that for generations has carried a stigma heavier than the name. Jim grew up there in the 1950s. His father was a building labourer who moonlit as a debt collector for an illegal bookmaker. His mother hauled a Silver Cross pram up four flights of stairs in an attic flat they rented for five shillings a week. When winter shut down the building work and the money stopped entirely, the good coat went to the pawnshop on New Sneddon Street. The family got back on its feet, moved into a council house with a garden that smelled of cut grass and sunshine, and then had four more children and did it all again.

Jim writes all of this in a voice you do not forget. He remembers everything: the exact list his mother sent him to fetch from Galbraith's on a Tuesday, the ink stain a newspaper left on your backside in his grandmother's outside toilet, the way the smog in 1957 was thick enough that his mother wrapped a scarf round his face for the walk to school, and the scarf came back black. He remembers the first funfair, the circus with real elephants, his father putting him on his shoulders for the walk home and the smell of his thick black curls. The poverty is never dressed up, and neither is the warmth. Both are simply true.

What Another Feg does that most memoirs do not is resist tidiness entirely. This is not the story of a man who escaped his beginnings and arrived somewhere clean. Jim Green went to university and lectured there. He also went bankrupt. He ended up on a farm in Denmark with nothing, trying to restart from scratch. He worked offshore in the North and Irish Seas in conditions that would finish most people. He got involved in security work, then in covert operations and organised crime investigations. He was attacked by gangs. He was shot at. Twice. He stood as a candidate for the Scottish Government and worked alongside cabinet ministers for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He also stood in 10 Downing Street and attended the Queen's Garden Parties, and had grown up in a house where mice left teeth marks in the lard in the frying pan overnight.

The cover was done by John Byrne, the celebrated Scottish painter and playwright, who is himself a Feg, and who understood exactly what the book was for.

Jim has been writing it since 2004, when he was in his fifties and attending a creative writing course at the University of Glasgow. He has ten grandchildren and lives in a country house six miles from Feegie. He says he has never really left.

He is right. You can tell on every page.

Target Audience:

Another Feg will find its readers among anyone who grew up working-class and has spent any part of their life wondering whether it was supposed to matter. It will hit particularly hard for Scottish readers, those who know Paisley, Renfrewshire, the post-war schemes, the dialect, the particular texture of a life lived in those streets in those decades. It will also reach the wider audience for social memoir: people who want a life on the page that is genuinely full of contradiction and incident, that does not sand its edges down to make the reader comfortable. And it will speak to anyone who has ever had to start over from nothing, more than once, and done it anyway.

About the Author:

Jim Green MBA was born in Ferguslie Park, Paisley, in December 1950. He holds a Masters in Business Administration and has had a career spanning lecturing, offshore work, security and organised crime investigation, and political life. He began writing this memoir in 2004 under the tutelage of Fiona Parrot at the University of Glasgow. He is married to Elaine. He has three children and ten grandchildren. He lives six miles from where he started.

Availability:

Another Feg by Jim Green is available now. Review copies and interview requests welcome.

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