The Deep Dark Sleep

PROLOGUE

Gentleman Joe Strachan, it would seem, had slept the deep, dark sleep for a long time.

Gentleman Joe had slept the deep dark sleep while I had been up to my knees in mud and blood in Italy; while the Luftwaffe had growled high above him on its way to rearrange Clydebank’s town planning; while Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had carved up Europe between them and had given an idea to Glasgow’s crime bosses, the Three Kings, about how they could do pretty much the same kind of carve-up with the Second City of the British Empire. The fireworks at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had also done nothing to disturb Joe’s slumber.

Even the constant toing and froing above him — the propeller churning of the vast Clyde-built ships or insolent tugs — had failed to stir him.

For the deep, dark sleep that Gentleman Joe slept was the undisturbed rest one only found at the bottom of the Clyde after somebody lullabied you to your final slumber with a solo for blunt instrument, tucked you up nice and cosy in some shipyard chains, and slipped you over the side of a midnight rowboat in the middle of the river’s deep channel.

But, as I say, I spent the war years as ignorant as everyone else about Joe’s repose. I just wish I had stayed that way.