Swing Hammer Swing, blow by blow

HE would write a full page to get a decent paragraph. He wrote and

revised, then revised again. The click-click-clack of his manual

typewriter was like the ticking away of time itself. For 30 years he

chipped away at it.

Time for writing was found through a succession of jobs, one for each

of the seven drafts of his novel in progress. When it was time for the

children to go to sleep in the family's Govanhill flat, he was chased

out of the bedroom. When it was time to lay the dinner he was chased

from the table in the living-room. Later, with the move to Linwood, he

got his own den. After the onset of Parkinson's disease he made a

quieter, two fingered tap-tap-tap on his word processor.

Late on Tuesday night time finally rewarded him. At a formal dinner in

London his wife Margaret put her hands over her eyes and mouthed, ''Jeff

Torrington. Swing Hammer Swing!'' and the same words echoed back from

the platform. Sir Michael Angus, chairman of Whitbread, was announcing

the winner of Britain's book of the year.

Earlier that night Jeff Torrington had dictated a ''just in case''

speech to Margaret in their hotel bedroom. She scribbled down his joke

about taking 30 years to write his novel because he couldn't find his

pencil. All his life Jeff had faced up to situations with evasive wit.

You could call it a defence mechanism. You could call it facetiousness.

As he dictated the short speech it didn't seem to matter. He didn't have

to be too serious. He would never be required to read it. Now, at a

dinner the couple had been determined to enjoy as a night out, Jeff

found himself at the lectern, pulling the same speech out of the inside

pocket of his dinner jacket.

He quoted Frankie Howerd: ''Never has my flabber been so gasted.'' He

quoted the Bible: ''I have been made to drink of the wine of

astonishment.'' The chairman congratulated him, saying he had enjoyed

the novel without understanding a word of it. He presented the Whitbread

cheque for #20,500. Cameras flashed. Invited guests applauded warmly.

Television watched his return to Margaret at their publisher's table. He

whispered to her: ''I've lost the cheque.''

They carried out as discreet a search of his pockets as could be

managed as reporters lined up for quotes. Whitbread's publicity

consultant looked around the lectern. The first questions were coming

in, treating them like pools winners. Would the Whitbread change their

life? Would they move to another house? What would they do with the

money? ''Take a trip to New Orleans to listen to some jazz,'' replied

Jeff. If they could find the cheque. This was getting to be a habit

among prizewinning Scottish writers. Alasdair Gray, also on the

Whitbread short-list that night, had lost his cheque some months earlier

for the Guardian fiction prize.

At the Waldorf Hotel the next day the media scrum was really beginning

to form. Secker & Warburg had sent down a publicity minder. Jeff was

giving an interview at the bar. A television crew was standing by.

''Photographers were falling over themselves to be first,'' recalls

Margaret. ''They told us we would get a lot of attention from the media.

But I certainly didn't think it would be on that scale.''

A bewildering time. But at least the cheque was safe. It had turned up

in the papers Sir Michael Angus had swept up at the awards.

Back in Linwood at last on Friday afternoon, Margaret was entertaining

newspaper and radio journalists in the kitchen of the terrace house the

couple bought from the council. Television had them out to Gorbals where

Jeff grew up and whose life the novel preserves against the demolition

hammer, the story of Tom Clay, told with a unique idiom that Jeff

Torrington strived for so long to craft and give to the voice of his

narrator. With remarkable affability and patience, he was still giving

interviews at the weekend.

He shows you the scrapbook of cuttings that starts with his first

stories that appeared in the Evening Times and the old Edinburgh Evening

Dispatch, at three guineas a shot for their author. He shows the story

in the New Edinburgh Review that earned him #20. It finishes with the

Whitbread First Novel Award that brought the prize of #2000 in November.

Only two leaves of the scrapbook remain to be filled, suggesting that

it, too, anticipated a quiet end to the story at the Whitbread Awards

last week.

From the sideboard he produces a Christmas card from his eldest son,

also Jeff, himself born only two years before the novel started, and now

32. It contains the poem he wrote out of pride for his father's

achievement in getting the work published:

Swing Hammer Swing, it seems to me,

Has been on the go since I was wee.

'Keep the noise down. Dad's in his den',

Was the phrase that was used quite often then.

And so much over the years has been put in your way,

As if trying to halt the life of Tam Clay.

A lesser man would have chucked it all in,

Consigning Swing Hammer Swing to a death in the bin.

But now your hard work has all come to fruition,

They have even started printing a

second edition.

After the Whitbread award last week it is entering its fourth edition,

which Secker & Warburg will begin rushing into bookshops from this week.

Another edition is planned for June, if further reprints are not

required before then. Until the Whitbread, Jeff's total income from the

book was an advance of #350. His first royalties are due at the end of

this month.

Time has accelerated for him astonishingly. His only regret over the

past few days is that he has not been allowed enough of it to work. He

has a volume of short stories he wants to complete, drawing on the

experience of eight years in the Talbot car plant at Linwood before he

was made redundant more than 10 years ago.

And there is another novel, using the material on Tom Clay's childhood

that he was persuaded to cut from the novel. His friend James Kelman

told him: ''You are allowed to write two or three novels in this

country.'' You fill up the screen and maybe find one good sentence. Like

the one, drawing on a memory of an actual cinema promotion stunt over 30

years ago, that determined that the seventh draft of Swing Hammer Swing!

would be the last, and the most wonderfully successful. ''Something

really weird was happening in the Gorbals -- from the battered hulk of

the Planet Cinema in Scobie Street, a deep sea diver was emerging.''