Long since demolished, Number 4 Galloway Street in Paisley was the room and kitchen on the top landing of the dilapidated tenement where in 1941 John Boyle was born. Originally from the remote island of Achill, off the west coast of Ireland, his parents were among the many impoverished rural labourers who in the thirties and forties flocked to Scotland for the potato harvest. John's father was barely literate, and when his mother became pregnant the couple took the tiny flat and settled into life in the small Catholic community in the predominantly Protestant west of Scotland town. Galloway Street beautifully captures both the harshness of poverty and the warm good humour of the family's life in the enclosed community where they lived. The first of six children, wee John grew up sleeping four to a bed, dressed in cast-offs and making what he could of a Catholic education in a town where religious bigotry was a way of life. But he was also surrounded by the stories, songs and laughter of the place his parents still called home. It was only at the age of ten, when he was sent to Ireland for the first time to spend the summer in Achill with his unmarried aunt, that he had an experie