Remember Young Cecil

21/12/2025

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       We might have assumed James Kerman’s story would be called 'Remembering Young Cecil', offering the gerund. Instead, he calls it 'Remember Young Cecil', and we may wonder why. Words matter to Kelman, though in a particular way that can both be invisible and visible for what might seem like the wrong reasons. This could at least be how an unsophisticated reader masquerading as an arbiter of the English language may read it. The stories around Kelman’s Booker Prize for How Late it Was, How Late are well known: “the London Times…called How Late it Was “a perversion of the literary novel”, and Rabbi Neuberger… said the book was “just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy” (Glasgow Review of Books) Here a reader will notice a sentence like “he stuck it on the shade above Table 3 and Wee Danny done the same with his fiver” and wish to correct that done to a did. Aren’t writers supposed to be better at using language than most? To counter such a claim of so naively sophisticated a reader would take time, energy and patience, and sometimes, when invoking his critics, Kelman has the latter in short supply. For the moment, we can return to the title while saying a few words about the story's narration.

    Remembering indicates someone in charge of the recollection, but Kelman’s title almost offers it as a question, a collective response to Cecil rather than an individual memory. The narration may be in the first person, but perhaps the narrator could have been one of several people who might have narrated the tale; anyone who was around at the time when the titular character entered the snooker hall and showed himself a better player than everyone who was years older. Cecil still comes into the pool hall, Porter's, now and again, the narrator says at the beginning of the story: “Young Cecil is medium-sized and retired. For years he has been undisputed champion of our hall. Nowadays that is not saying much”, as Kelman tells us that some of the tables are now rented out for card games. That the narration has an air of the plural despite the first person is evident when the narrator says, “I mind the first time we clapped eyes on him.” Here, we’re offered mainly observations on Cecil that could have come out of conversation as readily as observation. When the narrator says, “…with a first name like Cecil nobody needed to know what his last one was,” these are working-class men in the presence of someone who appears to be from a different class and perhaps can seem like he is from a different world. Even now, when he comes into the snooker hall, Cecil remains reserved: “Young Cecil has a habit of not talking. All he does is smile. And not that very often either.” He is there to play a game of snooker; the others seem to be there for the environment.

   However, the story rests on Cecil representing the people, even if we might wonder how close to his admirers he happens to be, and whether admiration for a sportsman, however good, is not often a reflection of one’s modest life and expectations. Cecil went on to have a day job reflected in the opening line, and turns out to be a good player, though far from a great one. He plays well enough, and the others are long-term unemployed as the narrator speaks about their broo money. Cecil is someone to look up to partly because the narrator, Wee Danny, Tam Moir and whoever else was hanging around the snooker hall didn’t seem to have much going on in their own lives. We might infer this from the story’s emphasis on these glory days, and that the narrator and others are still hanging around the pool hall now, even if it is no longer much of a destination. Maybe it never was: it was a bit of a dive compared to McGinley’s place, the basement of an office building with only one table. It is where Young Cecil starts to play after everybody recognises his prowess, and the sort of place the narrator is usually excluded from entering. “Once or twice a couple of us got let into the club as well”. But not often.

    Kelman’s purpose is to tell us that Young Cecil entering their lives means this is important, but needn’t be quite so important to us. It isn’t that Kelman doesn’t have us wondering if Young Cecil will beat Wee Danny, who is deemed the best player around before Young Cecil’s entrance. The narrator tells us it looks like a safe bet for Wee Danny as they look at their mate with envious eyes, and we even hear how Cecil makes a mess of the break, with Wee Danny cleaning up, scoring fifty-six. Presumably, these are just initial nerves, because then Young Cecil takes over and wins, and wins again: Wee Danny “met his match that day” and the others transfer their admiration onto a boy years younger than the rest of them, assuming they are a similar age to Wee Danny, who is around his late twenties.

   The sports story would seem potentially to lend itself to a traditional, classical form. It is about ambition, winners and losers, the suspense of victory; the fear of loss. Kelman is someone chiefly interested in milieu, in locating characters in texturally plausible environments and would be very far away from someone who cares for aspirational characters. Instead of looking for exceptions to the rule, he is more inclined to wonder why the rule only allows for exceptions. As he says, “why does a sports star earn $10 million a month for whacking a ball, and an auxiliary nurse who works six 10 hour shifts a week in the contagious wing of a hospice earns less than the cost of living?” (Salvage) An economist might sigh and bang on about supply and demand, though Kelman would probably see the economist as simple-minded as the reader who thinks Kelman has missed an auxiliary verb when his characters say they done something. It suggests a narrow notion of meaning when Kelman’s purpose is to question it in as many forms as possible. “Authority acts to stop doubt, even to stop people pausing in the act of acceptance. A pause suggests uncertainty. There is no right to be puzzled. Kids are punished daily for this. Mummy, what is hell? Sssh. But mummy . . . Ssh. But . . . Go to bed! Oh but Mummy . . .” (Salvage) Kelman resists the assumption and is consistently concerned with the questions arising around it.

    The sports story allows Kelman the opportunity to use tropes of success and undermine the assumptions sitting behind them. Young Cecil is a winner, but he is in an environment where losing is the norm, where people are without jobs or money. He might not be so middle-class (as we discover at the end), though he is relatively so next to the narrator, Wee Danny and others. In the big match, Cecil takes on a player from County Durham, and Kelman sets up the tension as well as the generic writer he consistently rails against, but sets it up for different ends. “The word went the rounds that McGinley and Sweeney were bringing up Cuddily. He was known as the Country Durham at that time. Well nobody could wait for the day. It was not often you got to see the chance to see Cuddily in action, and when you did it was worth going a long way to see.”  The suspense Kelman generates is always contained by the nuances of the poverty he insists upon revealing and the attention to the specifics of the game they are playing, and all contained by a narrative voice that invites us into the story but doesn’t go in much for contextualising the tale. It is as if we are overhearing the story rather than having it narrated for our purposes. Any suspense is contained by the limited perspective, one saying this is a story about Glasgow lives, and not about readers and their expectations.

      What matters finally isn’t whether Young Cecil wins or loses the game; it is that Kelman finds a world that can intrigue us while constantly alluding to the financial impoverishment of the milieu, without at all signifying it. Little is made of the characters being unemployed, excluded from places like McGinley’s and that Cecil seems luckier than most as he marries and gets a job “as a docker or something”. Cecil only returns to the hall after retirement, but we might wonder if the narrator, Wee Danny and others have been going for years without much interruption. Did they get married, have children, have jobs? We don’t know. What we sense is that they haven’t done anything more exciting with their lives than follow Young Cecil when it looked as if he would become a major player.  

   This leads us to muse over the absence of perspective, as the story throws us into the narrator’s point of view and expects us to find our way around without good grammar or without what Tom Jenk interestingly calls notation. “Psychological notations that were common to Victorian prose…began to disappear with the modern writers. Hemingway discovered that he could leave it out. Readers would understand his characters without having them explained psychologically. ('Minimalism: A Discussion') Kelman offers something similar when saying “I had to get to grips with the “I-voice” as a young writer. Nobody is more central than the “I- voice.” In the English literary tradition the general function of the “I-voice” is to tell a story about unfortunate other people. That was the way I found it. The “I-voice” occupied a position of authority, a sort of social worker. I wanted unfortunate other people to tell the story themself.” (Salvage) Jenk’s idea of the shift from psychological notation to its relative absence, and Kelman’s claim that he wanted the characters to speak from within their environment, are similar: that the reader will be thrown into a life potentially very different from their own without expecting a life like their own to be telling the story, giving reasons for behaviour, attitude, accent.

     The narrator’s background, beyond the immediacy of the pool-room, can only be inferred. We don’t know how long he has been unemployed and. whether he would continue to be so for much of his life; did he marry and have children? All we know is that the game meant a lot to him and others, and perhaps because those around the game didn’t have a lot. After Young Cecil loses to Cuddily, the narrator says, “well that was that and a hell of a lot of long faces were going about our side of the River - Porter’s was like a cemetery for ages.” It is clear that the loss affected more than the narrator in that use of the plural, and helps explain the title, which can also suggest an imperative. Remembering Young Cecil might indicate a moment recollected in personal tranquillity over social engagement. Remember Young Cecil makes us wonder how many of them would be discussing this modestly talented figure for years afterwards. Clearly, he represented hope and, in a low-key way, money too. “…The bevy used to flow. They were good days and one or two of us could have afforded to let our broo money lie over a week if we had wanted.” While Kelman’s 'Not Not While the Giro' is a tale of the worst of times when on the dole, and with no money until giro day and an empty cupboard, this is the best of times, yet hardly luxurious. The point is that it happens to be for the narrator and his mates, with Kelman’s purpose to register that enthusiasm on the narrator’s terms and not ours. That doesn’t mean we won’t muse over the limitations of the people’s lives, but this won’t be registered in narrative pity. It will instead be by involving ourselves in Kelman’s I voice, with its grammatical errors, its refusal to contextualise, its breathless enthusiasm for a period in the characters' lives "where it went well for a hell of a long time.”

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Remember Young Cecil

       We might have assumed James Kerman’s story would be called 'Remembering Young Cecil', offering the gerund. Instead, he calls it 'Remember Young Cecil', and we may wonder why. Words matter to Kelman, though in a particular way that can both be invisible and visible for what might seem like the wrong reasons. This could at least be how an unsophisticated reader masquerading as an arbiter of the English language may read it. The stories around Kelman’s Booker Prize for How Late it Was, How Late are well known: “the London Times…called How Late it Was “a perversion of the literary novel”, and Rabbi Neuberger… said the book was “just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy” (Glasgow Review of Books) Here a reader will notice a sentence like “he stuck it on the shade above Table 3 and Wee Danny done the same with his fiver” and wish to correct that done to a did. Aren’t writers supposed to be better at using language than most? To counter such a claim of so naively sophisticated a reader would take time, energy and patience, and sometimes, when invoking his critics, Kelman has the latter in short supply. For the moment, we can return to the title while saying a few words about the story's narration.

    Remembering indicates someone in charge of the recollection, but Kelman’s title almost offers it as a question, a collective response to Cecil rather than an individual memory. The narration may be in the first person, but perhaps the narrator could have been one of several people who might have narrated the tale; anyone who was around at the time when the titular character entered the snooker hall and showed himself a better player than everyone who was years older. Cecil still comes into the pool hall, Porter's, now and again, the narrator says at the beginning of the story: “Young Cecil is medium-sized and retired. For years he has been undisputed champion of our hall. Nowadays that is not saying much”, as Kelman tells us that some of the tables are now rented out for card games. That the narration has an air of the plural despite the first person is evident when the narrator says, “I mind the first time we clapped eyes on him.” Here, we’re offered mainly observations on Cecil that could have come out of conversation as readily as observation. When the narrator says, “…with a first name like Cecil nobody needed to know what his last one was,” these are working-class men in the presence of someone who appears to be from a different class and perhaps can seem like he is from a different world. Even now, when he comes into the snooker hall, Cecil remains reserved: “Young Cecil has a habit of not talking. All he does is smile. And not that very often either.” He is there to play a game of snooker; the others seem to be there for the environment.

   However, the story rests on Cecil representing the people, even if we might wonder how close to his admirers he happens to be, and whether admiration for a sportsman, however good, is not often a reflection of one’s modest life and expectations. Cecil went on to have a day job reflected in the opening line, and turns out to be a good player, though far from a great one. He plays well enough, and the others are long-term unemployed as the narrator speaks about their broo money. Cecil is someone to look up to partly because the narrator, Wee Danny, Tam Moir and whoever else was hanging around the snooker hall didn’t seem to have much going on in their own lives. We might infer this from the story’s emphasis on these glory days, and that the narrator and others are still hanging around the pool hall now, even if it is no longer much of a destination. Maybe it never was: it was a bit of a dive compared to McGinley’s place, the basement of an office building with only one table. It is where Young Cecil starts to play after everybody recognises his prowess, and the sort of place the narrator is usually excluded from entering. “Once or twice a couple of us got let into the club as well”. But not often.

    Kelman’s purpose is to tell us that Young Cecil entering their lives means this is important, but needn’t be quite so important to us. It isn’t that Kelman doesn’t have us wondering if Young Cecil will beat Wee Danny, who is deemed the best player around before Young Cecil’s entrance. The narrator tells us it looks like a safe bet for Wee Danny as they look at their mate with envious eyes, and we even hear how Cecil makes a mess of the break, with Wee Danny cleaning up, scoring fifty-six. Presumably, these are just initial nerves, because then Young Cecil takes over and wins, and wins again: Wee Danny “met his match that day” and the others transfer their admiration onto a boy years younger than the rest of them, assuming they are a similar age to Wee Danny, who is around his late twenties.

   The sports story would seem potentially to lend itself to a traditional, classical form. It is about ambition, winners and losers, the suspense of victory; the fear of loss. Kelman is someone chiefly interested in milieu, in locating characters in texturally plausible environments and would be very far away from someone who cares for aspirational characters. Instead of looking for exceptions to the rule, he is more inclined to wonder why the rule only allows for exceptions. As he says, “why does a sports star earn $10 million a month for whacking a ball, and an auxiliary nurse who works six 10 hour shifts a week in the contagious wing of a hospice earns less than the cost of living?” (Salvage) An economist might sigh and bang on about supply and demand, though Kelman would probably see the economist as simple-minded as the reader who thinks Kelman has missed an auxiliary verb when his characters say they done something. It suggests a narrow notion of meaning when Kelman’s purpose is to question it in as many forms as possible. “Authority acts to stop doubt, even to stop people pausing in the act of acceptance. A pause suggests uncertainty. There is no right to be puzzled. Kids are punished daily for this. Mummy, what is hell? Sssh. But mummy . . . Ssh. But . . . Go to bed! Oh but Mummy . . .” (Salvage) Kelman resists the assumption and is consistently concerned with the questions arising around it.

    The sports story allows Kelman the opportunity to use tropes of success and undermine the assumptions sitting behind them. Young Cecil is a winner, but he is in an environment where losing is the norm, where people are without jobs or money. He might not be so middle-class (as we discover at the end), though he is relatively so next to the narrator, Wee Danny and others. In the big match, Cecil takes on a player from County Durham, and Kelman sets up the tension as well as the generic writer he consistently rails against, but sets it up for different ends. “The word went the rounds that McGinley and Sweeney were bringing up Cuddily. He was known as the Country Durham at that time. Well nobody could wait for the day. It was not often you got to see the chance to see Cuddily in action, and when you did it was worth going a long way to see.”  The suspense Kelman generates is always contained by the nuances of the poverty he insists upon revealing and the attention to the specifics of the game they are playing, and all contained by a narrative voice that invites us into the story but doesn’t go in much for contextualising the tale. It is as if we are overhearing the story rather than having it narrated for our purposes. Any suspense is contained by the limited perspective, one saying this is a story about Glasgow lives, and not about readers and their expectations.

      What matters finally isn’t whether Young Cecil wins or loses the game; it is that Kelman finds a world that can intrigue us while constantly alluding to the financial impoverishment of the milieu, without at all signifying it. Little is made of the characters being unemployed, excluded from places like McGinley’s and that Cecil seems luckier than most as he marries and gets a job “as a docker or something”. Cecil only returns to the hall after retirement, but we might wonder if the narrator, Wee Danny and others have been going for years without much interruption. Did they get married, have children, have jobs? We don’t know. What we sense is that they haven’t done anything more exciting with their lives than follow Young Cecil when it looked as if he would become a major player.  

   This leads us to muse over the absence of perspective, as the story throws us into the narrator’s point of view and expects us to find our way around without good grammar or without what Tom Jenk interestingly calls notation. “Psychological notations that were common to Victorian prose…began to disappear with the modern writers. Hemingway discovered that he could leave it out. Readers would understand his characters without having them explained psychologically. ('Minimalism: A Discussion') Kelman offers something similar when saying “I had to get to grips with the “I-voice” as a young writer. Nobody is more central than the “I- voice.” In the English literary tradition the general function of the “I-voice” is to tell a story about unfortunate other people. That was the way I found it. The “I-voice” occupied a position of authority, a sort of social worker. I wanted unfortunate other people to tell the story themself.” (Salvage) Jenk’s idea of the shift from psychological notation to its relative absence, and Kelman’s claim that he wanted the characters to speak from within their environment, are similar: that the reader will be thrown into a life potentially very different from their own without expecting a life like their own to be telling the story, giving reasons for behaviour, attitude, accent.

     The narrator’s background, beyond the immediacy of the pool-room, can only be inferred. We don’t know how long he has been unemployed and. whether he would continue to be so for much of his life; did he marry and have children? All we know is that the game meant a lot to him and others, and perhaps because those around the game didn’t have a lot. After Young Cecil loses to Cuddily, the narrator says, “well that was that and a hell of a lot of long faces were going about our side of the River - Porter’s was like a cemetery for ages.” It is clear that the loss affected more than the narrator in that use of the plural, and helps explain the title, which can also suggest an imperative. Remembering Young Cecil might indicate a moment recollected in personal tranquillity over social engagement. Remember Young Cecil makes us wonder how many of them would be discussing this modestly talented figure for years afterwards. Clearly, he represented hope and, in a low-key way, money too. “…The bevy used to flow. They were good days and one or two of us could have afforded to let our broo money lie over a week if we had wanted.” While Kelman’s 'Not Not While the Giro' is a tale of the worst of times when on the dole, and with no money until giro day and an empty cupboard, this is the best of times, yet hardly luxurious. The point is that it happens to be for the narrator and his mates, with Kelman’s purpose to register that enthusiasm on the narrator’s terms and not ours. That doesn’t mean we won’t muse over the limitations of the people’s lives, but this won’t be registered in narrative pity. It will instead be by involving ourselves in Kelman’s I voice, with its grammatical errors, its refusal to contextualise, its breathless enthusiasm for a period in the characters' lives "where it went well for a hell of a long time.”


© Tony McKibbin