Singing in the Streets
by Maria Fyfe
(Luath Press, £14.99)

IN TELLING the story of her life, from her birth in 1938 in the Gorbals up to the moment she entered Parliament in 1987, Maria Fyfe proves herself to be a writer of rare brilliance.

[[{"fid":"26829","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Her Glasgow memoir Singing in the Streets is fast-paced and dramatic, moving and extremely funny. Head and shoulders above others in the field of political autobiography, she has a poet’s eye for detail and deft picture-painting and a writer’s genius for telling an extraordinary story.
 
It’s a story of a working-class woman’s self-emancipation and commitment to the emancipation of others. And it’s a love story that is never sentimental but that makes you weep.

Like the story of Mary Barbour, the architect of the rent strikes of 1915 and a role-model from her grandparents’ generation, the tone throughout is indefatigable and optimistic.

As if to emphasise her ordinariness, Fyfe wears her writerly skill very lightly. She describes holidays in boarding houses on the Clyde, supervised by a landlady with “greying hair tied back in a bun that was always losing anchor.” With that single image you know exactly the type. You stand in the presence of this long-lost post-war matriarch.

Those kind of details evoke a wartime childhood like bright beads on a string. And, as she guides us through her experience of the 1940s and 1950s, the emotional shape of a young woman’s life becomes apparent, as when she expresses admiration for a devoted father who knocked out his teeth to get a job because dentures were cheaper than implants.

This was a common practice in working-class families, my own included, but I had never come across it in a book before.

From her father comes her humour, practicality, politics and lack of sentimentality and also the germ of her heroism — he had survived the last wave of slaughter on the Western Front by five minutes.

He hated the popular Glaswegian novel No Mean City (1935) for its caricature of working-class life as gang-ridden and violent. Fyfe identifies the ambition when very young to become a journalist and to write a better novel. And after a life in politics, with this memoir, you feel that she achieves it and does her dad proud. It’s something of a landmark in Scottish literature.

Her relationship with her mother is more complex. Like her father, she was the child of Irish immigrants and devotedly Catholic. The book opens with the three-year-old Maria, her two older brothers and her mother crossing the U-boat infested Irish Sea to escape the bombing in Glasgow.

But the Ireland that was her mother’s haven is a ghetto of poverty and prejudice. You feel in the growing girl the deliberate non-identification with everything her mother stands for and many of the great jokes in the book are at the expense of a religious education.

Then, after her father has died and her mother, irredeemably old-fashioned, moves in, Fyfe’s compassion for her is shot through with the clarity of an Electra: “I think she badly missed Dad, the only one who always put her first and she had little or no capacity to adjust to widowhood.” This judgement foreshadows her own life.

But the most brilliant narrative is the story of her own heart. She evokes the details of childhood – the sweet wrappers, the comics, the jokes, the uniforms, the Catholic education of girls, the dance-halls, the chat-up lines (“Did it hurt when you fell out of heaven?”) — but these are not just super-accurate recollections. They are also markers in an environment laced with sexist oppression.

With characteristic brevity, she explains why she fell in love with Jim Fyfe, her husband: “He talked to me like a human with a brain and didn’t chat me up.” This modest and yet overwhelmingly romantic sentence completely alters the narrative and you feel Jim’s presence in the subsequent chapters. The book starts talking practical politics because it is talking to him.

First Jim gets a degree, then she gets a degree and begins a remarkable political career. And then, suddenly, just as the opportunity of standing for Parliament becomes real, her husband dies without warning of an aneurism.

At this point, the achievement of the book becomes clear. Even though it is only the prelude to her career as an MP, it is an extraordinarily well-crafted and unsentimental account of the emotional journey, the inner development of the woman who is about to take public office. Understated but heartfelt, it is a woman’s rite of passage to maturity.
 
But the story doesn’t end there. Maria Fyfe died last week, leaving this immense gift of her story, her voice and her presence. But only a few weeks ago she was still writing. There is a typically trenchant postscript that discusses Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, Johnson’s Brexit shambles and Sturgeon’s opportunistic call for a referendum. “Waving the Saltire doesn’t answer any questions,” she says.

Her last paragraph makes you readdress the whole book once more as a rallying call to socialists in tough times — 1959, when she joined the Labour Party after three defeats in succession, 1987 when she became an MP in a Thatcher-dominated Parliament and today. In her words: “Let’s go to it!”