Remembering Glasgow's Garbage Mountains and Hordes of Rats

In The Book of Man I wrote:

The middens were infested with rats. They’d appeared in force during the months when the Cleansing Department went on strike and rubbish filled the back courts in stinking piles. When the strike was over and the rubbish was gone, the rats were still with us. They got so big that the tabloids began printing stories about “super-rats.” For once they weren’t exaggerating. They were true, the stories about huge hungry rats attacking babies in their cots, and fight...