Jeely Piece

A child in a Glasgow back court shouts up at a kitchen window, and a few seconds later something small and flat in waxed paper comes down on the cobbles or the grass. That is the jeely piece in its natural habitat. In Scots a piece is any bread you carry out of the house to eat somewhere else, and jeely is jelly, which in the west of Scotland means jam of any kind. Mothers on the second or third floor of a tenement wrapped the slices in the paper from the bread loaf and dropped them to the children playing below, and for a generation of Glaswegians the first thing they remember eating outdoors is a sandwich that arrived by air.

The build leaves almost nothing to decide. Two slices of plain sliced white, spread edge to edge with butter or, in many a household, margarine, then a layer of jam from whichever jar was open, strawberry, raspberry or a sharper plum. The fat is thin and goes right to the crust so the jam has something to sit on, and the jam goes on in a skin rather than a heap, because a piece spends the next hour in a pocket or a school bag and anything piled up will end on the paper. Wrapped, it makes a soft crackle in the hand. Unwrapped, it is warm from the body, the crumb gone slightly tacky where the jam has crept in, and the first bite is all sugar and fruit acid against bland bread.

The word has a regional hinge worth hearing. The Dictionary of the Scots Language gives jeelie as the Scots form of jelly, and lists piece an' jeelie as the common phrase, with the compound jeelie piece for the snack itself. In Glasgow and the central belt a child asks for a piece on jeelie or on jam, while Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire speakers say a piece and jam. The same dictionary files jeelie under another Glasgow sense as well: slang for a bloody nose, as in a punch that makes the nose go jelly. In a city that talked about its food and its fights in the same few syllables, the sweetest piece and the sorest hit share a root.

Eaten at playtime, on the stair, or on the way to the swing park, the jeely piece belongs to childhood more than to any meal. It needed no table, no knife after the first scrape, and no adult to sit with it. Dumbarton, a few miles down the Clyde, picked up the sandwich as a nickname: a 1927 book records its residents as "jeely piece eaters." A sandwich had become a way to name a town.

By the 1950s the tenements were being cleared and families were moving to high flats, and the throw from window to court stopped working, and the sandwich lost its delivery route before it lost its place in the lunchbox. A piece dropped twenty floors lands as a smear of bread and jam on the paving, the cold wax paper split open, a fact the city later turned into a song. Mothers kept making them anyway, now to be handed over at the door or packed in the bag on the way to the lift.

The shout that got into print

The earliest dated printing the Dictionary of the Scots Language gives is 1839, when Chambers's Journal has someone scolded for taking so much that it "would have made jelly-pieces" for the others. Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished Weir of Hermiston, printed in the 1890s, has the housekeeper Kirstie decoy the young hero into her room and give him "a jeely-piece", and a 1932 novel has a character asking for the bowl of milk and the jeely-piece promised him. The word was in ordinary talk long before anyone thought of it as a Glasgow specialty.

The Glasgow tenement version has its own date. In 1958 the writer Cliff Hanley put the cry into his memoir Dancing in the Streets: "Haw Maw! Throw doon a jeely piece!" The line reads as a call every back court already knew, set down at the moment the back courts were emptying. The Glasgow Evening Times prints nearly the same words in July 2004, "Haw, maw throw us down a jeely piece", which shows the cry outlasting the tenements, the windows and most of the mothers who answered it.

Adam McNaughtan, the schoolteacher and songwriter, wrote the Jeely Piece Song after hearing a Hanley broadcast; the Tobar an Dualchais archive gives 1968, while other accounts say it was first sung in 1967. The song takes the 1958 shout and gives it a twentieth-floor problem: the child below is still hungry, and the piece cannot survive the drop. McNaughtan sang it in the Glasgow folk clubs, and it reached the cassette The Glasgow That I Used to Know in 1975. A cry first printed by Hanley in 1958 and sung by McNaughtan within ten years became the best-known sentence about a jam sandwich in Scots.