ON the road out of Hamilton there used to be signs which indicated ‘‘Motherwell and Beyond’’. As a boy I remember standing in awe underneath that sign wondering, what could be beyond Motherwell. I believed then, and still do, that the world was flat, and contemplated unwary travellers tumbling over the edge somewhere beyond Motherwell, if there really was anything beyond Motherwell. It was a world unto itself.

The very name Motherwell was always the butt of facile jokes, especially from English-speaking foreigners or comics invited along to the local Miner’s Welfare. ‘‘Glad to hear your mother’s well, so how’s your father? He OK too? Nobody care about him?’’

Another annoyance was to hear the town referred to not its own right but as being “somewhere near Glasgow” or recognised only because it featured among the Saturday night football results on the radio. These moments were offensive to local pride, which was real. Strangely there is no recognised term for inhabitants of the town. Motherwellian sounds merely odd.

Few natives knew, and fewer outsiders cared, that the town has a history that stretches back into the Middle Ages. In the last couple of weeks, it has received great but bemused attention in the literary journals of London, on the BBC and now in New York with the publication of Deborah Orr’s book, simply entitled Motherwell, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99). The work is not a sociological or historical survey but a deeply introspective autobiography which plays on the overlap between the town’s name and the author’s references to her mother, who emerges sometimes as mother-well but, more frequently, as mother-unwell, at least in her dealings with her daughter.

A distinguished journalist, Orr was born and bred in Motherwell and saw the place change during her lifetime. The story of family and town are intertwined not just in the chapters on her childhood years, as would be common in an autobiography, but for her whole life, even after she had moved to London. Motherwell and mother were always calling her back, but not longingly, and her unforgiving description of her relationship with both her parents makes for an uneasy read. Orr died of cancer shortly after completing the work, which has been lavishly praised by her colleagues in the London media – who care nothing for the place but who knew the author – but subjected to baffled, often unfair, criticism in the social media by people from Lanarkshire who know the town and sometimes knew her family. Ah kent his faither, or mither, is the most withering of Scots contempt.

It is only the recent history of the town that interests Orr and we will come to that, but its story stretches back. In other countries, such as Italy, non-metropolitan centres have retained their dignity and have cultivated a history of their own, but in

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Scotland this sense of historical value has been lost to such places. The town was originally named Modryval and only became Motherwell in the 18th century. It is curious that so many Scottish place-names had Catholic names which survived the Reformation. The name really means the Well of the Mother of God, and while it hardly competed with Canterbury or even with such Scottish sites as the shrine containing the statue of Our Lady of Haddington at Whitekirk, it may well have been a place of pilgrimage. The main street is called Merry Street, which does not refer to the good humour of the inhabitants but is actually a corruption of Mary Street.

There is also in the town a district called Ladywell, the posh area where as boys we were not welcome, but it was once the place where the actual well was positioned. There is a circular wall giving some dignity to the spot and making it one of the places that visitors or tourists, who do not flock there in their multitudes, should not miss. It was once prominently displayed in public but is now concealed in a private garden.

I WAS told a totally plausible tale about some of the stones that were all that remained of the well, but which had been ignored over the centuries and lay neglected in the hedgerow. In the 30s, Canon Taylor, the man who oversaw the construction of the Catholic Grotto in nearby Carfin, sent a couple of stout lads to pack them on to the back of a lorry and transport it to a more reverential home in the new grotto, but they were interrupted by a local landlord who chased them off. Quite right too.

Orr is well aware of the history of her town, but it is contemporary history, the disastrous changes wrought in her own lifetime, which interests her.

The old town, never a place of beauty, fell victim to the virus of “planning” which infected all Labour councils in the west of Scotland in the post-war era, and now has a soulless shopping centre at what was the heart of the town and where people once lived and congregated.

She makes the wry but insightful observation that ‘‘the heritage industry moves in when people don’t know who they are any more and have to focus on who they were’’. There is now a tentative heritage industry in Motherwell, but it passes by the people who live there.

A heritage centre, with a helpful and enthusiastic staff, stands where the swimming baths, one of the first indoor municipal pools in Scotland, once stood.

In the 50s, it had an inspired coach and produced Olympic champions, another source of municipal pride.

The municipal centre has been displaced, but near the old town hall there are inscriptions on the pavement indicating significant dates in municipal history, ancient and modern, and even a column proclaiming the achievements of those who passed this way.

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Two families dominated the town in different ages – the medieval Dalzells, also spelt Dalziel or Dalyell but always pronounced Dee-El, and then the Victorian Colvilles. The Dalzell estate, dominated by a grand, Scottish-baronial mansion now divided into flats, is now more accessible now than it used to be. The grounds contain the remains of a 12th-century chapel dedicated to St Patrick, now the mausoleum of the Lords Hamilton of Dalzell.

There was once a sign on the estate which said ‘‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’’. As boys we thought that ‘‘prosecuted’’ was a synonym of ‘‘executed’’, and having watched too many cowboy films we assumed it meant that trespassers would be shot on sight. It did not stop us prowling about the locality. So much for the deterrence theory of criminology.

The family produced some colourful characters. In 1388, Sir William of Dalzell lost an eye at the Battle of Otterburn, but two years later when peace had been re-established he attended a tournament in England arranged by Richard II. There he got into a dispute with one Sir Piers Courtenay, which ended up with a challenge being issued and accepted. However, the wily Sir William claimed under the laws of chivalry any two contestants had to be on equal footing, so he insisted that the English knight have one eye gouged out before he would meet him in a joust. The king laughed away the claim, but admitted that it showed the superior wit of the Scots. The ennobled Dalziel family moved to Surrey in the 1950s, but the name is still present locally in the title of the High School and the local co-operative.

Motherwell was also a microcosm of Scotland, and Deborah Orr displays the same duality of judgment towards Motherwell as towards Scotland as a whole. She writes that ‘‘it was bewildering, this duality, this keeping of two flames, one of Scottish victimhood, the other of Scottish superiority. So much past, so little present ...’’ The sentence tails off in that series of puzzled, inconclusive dots.

For Motherwell, much of the civic pride was aroused by its great steel works. David Colville opened the first plant in 1871. His son became provost and MP and there is a grand family plot in the graveyard known, curiously, as the Globe. The family maintained its local roots, unlike comparable industrial families in, for example, Paisley, but only for a time.

Under their skilled management, the steel works prospered so that, with its offshoots, it became the biggest and finest steel works in Europe. The central factory was officially called the Lanarkshire, but was always known locally as Colville’s. Orr writes that ‘‘it was our heritage, part of us and made us part of the world’’. She remained emotionally chained to Motherwell, part in pride part in shame, loving and detesting it in equal measure. She recalls her delight when years later she attended the opening of the Tate Modern in London and discovered that the black girders had been made in the Lanarkshire steel works.

The grand Colville house, now a bank, stood on the main road into Motherwell, and the “Lanarkshire” dominated the town in every sense. Motherwell was steeltown, and the football team was nicknamed the “steelmen”.

The works provided employment, and gave people, men especially, the sense of confident selfhood that comes from having a purpose and a place in society. My own father was a butcher, and said he could feel the difference in his takings when the works were on short time. There was more to it than the economy. Men not given to poetry would show signs of emotion when in after years they remembered the sky being lit up when in the evening the furnace doors in Colville’s were opened, and a brightness seemed to prance from cloud to cloud. The works were nationalised in 1967 as Ravenscraig, and Margaret Thatcher put an end to all that in 1992 when the factory was closed.

Orr writes movingly about standing with a crowd watching as the giant gas holder was blown up and collapsed mournfully and apologetically in on itself. When the already tottering campanile in Venice collapsed at night-time on to St Mark’s Square in 1902, damaging no property and injuring no person, people said that the bell tower ‘‘had shown itself to be a gentleman’’. Watching images of the event, I thought the gas holder merited the same praise. Not so the people responsible for their vandalism towards a great industry and a way of life.

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DEBORAH Orr was born in 1962, and lived through the upheaval at a social and personal level. The barriers between private and public life were in her case porous, and while the focus of her attention is her own family, the wider life of society is always in sight. Childhood is a time when wounds can be inflicted that cut into the psyche and continue to wreak havoc in adult of life, and so it would appear to have been for Orr, who evidently acquired a dual identity, one public and the other concealed deep inside herself.

The word which recurs in descriptions of her personality by colleagues in journalism is “intimidating”, yet in her own eyes she was vulnerable and malformed, a mess of self-doubt and self-loathing. At some point well into adulthood she went into psychotherapy, and was introduced to the concept of narcissism, which becomes the dominant touchstone in her analysis of everything and everyone, particularly of her parents, Win and John. A further complication is that Win was

English, highly conscious of being an outsider in Motherwell and dismissive of Scottish ways, especially of Scottish food.

Not the least of the strengths of this book is that it gives a picture of the complexities of mother-daughter relationship in Scotland. There are several authoritative portraits of father-son relationships, such as that by Thomas Carlyle, the Red Clydesider David Kirkwood and even by RL Stevenson, but Orr breaks new ground, and does so with heart-breaking truthfulness, some subtlety of insight but also some brutality of memory. After the death of both parents, she and her brother broke open a bureau which had been the domestic holy of holies, inaccessible to them and to their father, where her mother kept mementos of stages of family life. In this bureau, Orr finds to her mingled delight and dismay that her mother had kept reminders of her daughter’s successes from schooldays until her time as senior journalist on The Guardian, but it was a feeling she had been unable to convey to young or middle-aged Deborah.

Orr craved her mother’s approval, but received multiple evidence of the opposite. ‘‘My parents were the gaolers I loved,’’ she writes poignantly. At times, she comes close to Gorki’s description of his own ‘‘lower depths’’.

She was closer to her father, but here too Deborah emerges as a Cinderella with no fairy-godmother. She took refuge in books and in a study of nature which was facilitated by living in the vicinity of the Dalzell estate, but her focus in her life-story is on the hurts and humiliations she received in her family.

She tells of the theft of a cherished bracelet by a girl of her own age and her father’s inability to recover it even after they went to the home of the juvenile thief and could see it on her wrist.

She recalls being belted at school, being bullied in the playground by having half-bricks hurled at her and being compelled to go into the town centre wearing a badge marked “cheat” after her mother had found her peeping at the wrong squares in scrabble.

Above all she admits to being seared by an incident when she took her mother’s nail varnish to draw macrame designs and lied about the disappearance of the little bottle. It will seem to observers a minor incident, a piece of childhood naughtiness quickly forgotten but being shamed for her theft was the decisive event in the formation of character, the “single thing that means that when someone tells me I am defective, it always sounds like the truth about myself”.