The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

interviewer who ran after him shouting unanswered questions. This was broadcast along with distant views of the horses, the faces and voices of concerned neighbours, the comments of a qualified animal doctor. The owner was subsequently charged with cruelty to animals by the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was found guilty and jailed for several months as he could not afford to pay a fine. The horses were humanely killed because nobody else wanted them.
    Â   
    Which of the following cared most for the horses?
    Their owner.
The RSPCA.
The broadcasters.
    Who gained most by these events?

    Â   
    Lawyers conducting the trial.
The broadcasters.
Other horses with incompetent owners.
    Â   
    Who lost most by these events?
    Â   
    The owner.
The horses.

JOB’S SKIN GAME

    F OR GOD’S SAKE DON’T BELIEVE what my wife says: I am still one of the luckiest men who ever walked the earth. Yes of course we’ve had our troubles, like hundreds and thousands of others recently, and for a while it seemed impossible to carry on. I’d have paid a man to shoot me if I’d known where to find one. But I survived. I recovered. The sun is shining, the birds are singing again, though I perfectly understand why the wife has not recovered and maybe never will.
    Â   
    It was my father who had the really hard life, years and years of it: a joiner’s son, self-educated, who after many slips and slides turned a small house-renovationfirm into a major building contractor. Before he expired he was a city councillor and playing golf with Reo Stakis. He sent me to the best fee-paying school in Glasgow because “it’s there you’ll make friends who’ll be useful to you in later life”, and yes, some were. Not being university material I went straight into the family business and learned it from the bottom up, working as a brickie’s labourer for a couple of months on one job, a joiner’s labourer on another, a plumber’s mate elsewhere and so on till I had first-hand experience of all those jobs and painting, plastering, slating, wiring, the lot. Of course the tradesmen I served knew I was the boss’s son. He told them so beforehand and warned them to be as tough on me as on other apprentices. Some were, some weren’t. Either way I enjoyed gaining manual skills while using my muscles. I even worked as a navvy for six weeks, and (under supervision, of course) drove a bulldozer and managed a crane. Meanwhile, at night school, I learned the business from a manager’s standpoint, while calling in at the firm’s head office between whiles to see how it worked at the costing and contractinglevel. So when the dad collapsed of a stroke I continued the business as if nothing had happened. My mother had died long before so I inherited a fine house in Newton Mearns, a holiday home on Arran and another in the south of Spain.
    Â   
    Is it surprising that I was able to marry the first good-looking woman I fell in love with? She was more than just a pretty face. In business matters she resembled my father more than me. I was less brisk than he in sacking workers when we lacked orders to fully employ them.
    â€œYou can’t afford to keep men idle,” said the wife. I told her that I didn’t – that I found them useful though not highly profitable jobs until fresh orders arrived.
    â€œMaybe you can afford to do that but your wife and children can’t!” she said, using the plural form though still pregnant with our first child, “You’re running a modern business, not a charity, and seem anxious to run it into the ground.”
    I quietened her by signing the family property and private finances over to her on condition that she left the firm to me. It prospered! We sent our boys to the same boarding school as the Prince of Wales.Being smarter than their old dad they went from there to Glasgow University, then Oxford, then one