……it was a different landscape back in the 1950s in the big cities of the UK… Docklands Govan in Glasgow, where Master Gallacher spent his infancy, had more than its share of rented tenement housing… up to three-storeys-high, grey, austere, stone buildings, sum’times red, depending on the material available when the corporation developed them in the latter part of the 1800s…

…by the time I poked my nose into the WURLD, much of the fabric of the municipal edifices in Govan had fallen into slum condition… that didn’t stop us children from enjoying playing in the them… no hint of the modern kids’ panoply of mobile gizmos to entertain ourselves… there was no money for such luxuries, even if they had been available… these handheld indulgences were for an age some sixty years in the future… gangs of thirty or forty street-boys and girls mixed easily to flail long…