As a boy, Digby spends Saturdays at the Gaiety with his mother, who shields him from the dancing girls and stares past the performers, reminding him of the father he never knew, Archie Kilgour. Archie’s petty cruelty—the kipper nailed under a table—becomes Digby’s emblem of abandonment. Buoyed by show tunes and dazzled by aviation’s dawn, Digby dreams of flying his mother away from their life.

On Wednesdays, Digby meets his mother outside the vast Singer factory, where sectarian divides mark pay and status. After “efficiency” cuts, she helps organize, only to be dismissed; expected solidarity fails, and the strike fund won’t support her. Mother and son move back to Nana’s cramped flat, scraping by on odd cleaning and caregiving jobs while a doctor labels his mother catatonic. Poverty, bigotry, and Nana’s scorn harden their days.

Years pass. Digby hones his drawing and anatomy studies, fixating on a body’s reliable architecture and resolving to study medicine. When he suggests leaving school to work, his mother forbids it and pins her hopes on his success. He secures a Carnegie scholarship, but returning home one Sunday he finds her hanged with his school tie. The police remove the body as neighbors stare; her long-dead spirit has finally left her flesh.

Reeling, Digby seeks noise and company in pubs, is ejected from one, then battered in a Rangers bar where sectarian hostility turns violent. Bloodied in the street, he looks up to headlines exalting Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing on May 22, the soaring milestone mocking the collapse of his own world.