Mamie takes High Road to dream job

A FORMER cleaner who was introduced to creative writing only three years ago, has begun work as writer-in-residence in Castlemilk.

Mamie Lang, 60, said the Castlemilk Writers Group, formerly run by the author Des Dillon, had changed her life and she was looking forward to giving something back to her community.

The group, which Ms Lang will now run, is funded by Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Arts Council. It regularly attracts classes of more than 30 people.

“I so much wanted this job I never even asked what the wages are, I still don’t know,” said Ms Lang who started work yesterday at the Castlemilk Arts Centre.

“Three years ago, I was cleaning offices and now I’m doing this. If you really want to learn, you will learn.”

Ms Lang is proof of her own theory. Within seven months of starting her own tuition, she was contributing material to the STV soap opera High Road and was soon employed as a script editor.

In that capacity, she commissioned scripts from Mr Dillon, the man who had encouraged her to write in the first place.

“All the people who I loved in High Road, like Sneddon and Mrs Mack, they’re all my friends now and they love my scripts. it’s just amazing,” said Ms Lang.

“It’s great that at this age, a whole new world can open up for you. At 60, though, you have lived life – you don’t say, ‘I wonder what I could write about?’”

Her own experience of becoming a writer was like being reborn, she said.

In 1998, she responded to an advertisement for the writers’ group in her local library.

When she first met Mr Dillon, he asked her to tell him a story, and she responded by recounting the death of her father.

“I wanted them to play Lord of the Dance at his funeral – he was always asking me to sing it for him – but as we came walking up the aisle with the coffin, they played Terry Wogan singing the Floral Dance.

“People were thinking, ‘Look at poor Mamie, she’s sobbing.’ I was wetting myself laughing.”

Mr Dillon encouraged her to write the story down, and Pappy’s Last Journey has now been published in Cutting Teeth magazine.

Ms Lang, who lives in Shawlands, can call on rich experience for her stories.

Educated in a convent school in Paisley, her first job was as a child, picking up used bobbins from a cotton-mill floor.

She taught herself to play banjo while pregnant with her daughter, but had to endure a difficult marriage before she threw herself into the Sixties folk scene.

She travelled widely with singer Josh MacRae and, after his death in 1977, fled to the United States to travel on Route 66. Among many adventures, she even performed at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Ms Lang had, however, been nervous before a much smaller crowd – the interview panel for the Castlemilk job, and she felt she had a confession to make.

“In 1959, the year St Mirren won the cup, I was fined five shillings by Sheriff Hunter for poaching in the Brandy Burn in Paisley. They confiscated the salmon too.”

Fortunately for Ms Lang, the panel overlooked the incident.