Chapter Two
1924
Willie kept everyone on their toes. Nobody knew what he would do next to upset the household, and Emily learned that not only could she not trust anyone else to keep track of him, she couldn’t even trust herself. There were lines across her brow, her waist had thickened a little, her fair hair had several strands of silver through it and she was forced to admit that bringing up Willie was fast putting years on her. Jake didn’t have any of the worry; he never seemed to notice anything and his sandy hair, always brushed straight back, was still the same colour as when they had married.
Brought up in Balmedie, only a few miles from Aberdeen, she had privately felt herself slightly better than her cottared neighbours. It was a comforting thought for her, but, no matter how hard she had tried to made Jake stop using the Doric – something her mother had always told her was common – he carried on in his own way. Connie nearly always remembered to speak properly, but Becky sometimes forgot and Willie, being Willie, was speaking fluent Burnton. It was a hard life for a woman trying to better her family.
In May, Emily seemed to have caught a really bad summer cold and was feeling quite unwell one afternoon. Two and a half years old, Willie was playing outside and when she looked out of the window, he was engrossed in trying to kick a ball into a toy fishing net that Jake had found in a rubbish dump some weeks before, but his son had lost interest in fishing after standing for some time at the edge of the Bandy Burn without even catching one bandy. So his father had jammed it up against the wall of the coalshed, and Willie spent a lot of time counting how many times he could kick his ball into it. Since his aim was not particularly good, nor his ability to count, it was sheer rugged determination that kept him going at it, so his mother knew it would occupy him for some time. For long enough at least for her to have a wee sit down before making the supper. How was she to know that the boy’s luck had changed and that he’d had a run of what he felt were twenty consecutive goals?
Having reached his target at long last, Willie kicked the ball around the backyard for a few minutes until he spotted the hens foraging around at the far end and wondered how many he could hit if he aimed for them. Still not three, it didn’t occur to him that he might hurt the poor creatures, so he set about this new game with gusto. The hens, naturally enough, took exception to their space being invaded by a young hooligan, and ran hither and thither, flapping their wings as they squawked their heads off. This reaction made Willie whoop with delight, and fortunately his control of the ball had reverted to practically nil, so none of the fowls were harmed.
He must have been at it for almost half an hour before the noise penetrated his mother’s senses and she came running out to see what was what. ‘Willie!’ she yelled. ‘Stop that this minute. You’ll put them off laying.’ Her forecast later proved to be true.
His wide blue eyes regarding her curiously, he said, ‘Mam, why does hens lay eggs?’
‘Because they do,’ his distracted mother replied, trying to fob him off.
He did not accept this as a proper answer. ‘The eggs come out of their backsides, I ken that.’
Emily ignored him in the hope that he would give up and go out to play again, but his next question made her recognise the direction his brain was taking, and she prayed that he wouldn’t, but he did.
‘Mam, have we got a hole in our backsides like the hens?’
What could she say? ‘Yyyes.’
‘So fit wye can we nae lay eggs and all?’
She decided it might be a good thing to correct his speech and make him forget the question. ‘It’s not “fit wye”, Willie, it’s “what way”. Or better still “why”. “Why can we not”, that’s what you should have said.’
‘Well, why can we not lay eggs like the hens?’
Thoroughly exasperated now, having driven herself into this corner, she snapped, ‘For goodness sake, go and play at something else and leave the hens alone.’
As usual, she left her husband to dish out the boy’s punishment, but when Jake heard what had been happening, he could do nothing for laughing
‘It’s not funny!’ his wife said, sharply. ‘You let him off with everything. He’s needing to be held in about.’
‘Ach, Emmy, he’s only a bairn – nae enough sense to ken what’s richt and what’s wrang.’
‘Well, it’s time you learned him the difference. He’ll never ken if you never tell him.’
‘I will, Emmy, lass. I will, when he’s a wee bit aulder. Afore he starts the school.’
‘That’s years yet, Jake, and he’ll need to know how to behave before that.’
The subject of their argument was listening with a smile. ‘Am I gettin’ a real schoolbag when I start the school, Dad?’
‘Aye, my loon.’
‘A real leather ane, Dad?’
‘A real leather ane.’
Emily decided that this just wasn’t good enough. ‘I’ll tell you this, my lad. If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll not get to go to the school. They don’t want ruffians there, you see.’ She turned to frown at her husband as he opened his mouth, presumably to point out that the law said every child had to go to school when they were five years old.
Emily appealed to her mother-in-law the next time she came visiting. ‘Jake was never as bad as Willie? He couldn’t have been.’
‘Oh, aye was he. You’ve nae idea the tricks he got up till, Emmy.’
‘Tricks maybe, but it’s not just harmless tricks with Willie. He could’ve killed some of the poor hens.’
‘He could’ve, but he didna.’
Chapter Three
1925
This episode with the fowls, much as it upset and irritated his mother, did not seem to affect young Willie, who continued to kick his ball into the net, or as near it as he could, without a thought to the hens, who soon learned to stay out of his way. He was growing rapidly now, and was taller even than five-year-old Poopie Grant who lived at the other end of the row of six houses and had had his nickname bestowed on him for obvious reasons. He had taken to coming inside the Fowlies’ backyard to play with Willie after he came home from school, but Emmy wasn’t too happy about it. The holidays were coming up, and she had no wish to be saddled with Poopie for days on end. For one thing, he was still prone to accidents, and Willie often came running in to tell her, ‘Poopie’s shit his breeks again, Mam.’
She wasn’t sure how to deal with these emergencies, and generally just told the boy to, ‘Run away home now, Willie’s supper’s ready and then it’ll be time for his bed.’ She felt quite sorry for the boy when she watched him making his way homeward on legs splayed open in the manner he’d obviously perfected to save them from being absolutely ‘clarted’.
At times, Willie went home with Poopie to play at his house, and it was Tibby Grant who attended to running noses, scraped knees and torn breeks.
‘It’s a good job you twa are nae twins,’ she sighed, one afternoon. ‘I’d never get naething daen for sortin’ the pair o’ you oot.’
The summer of 1925 was a good one – long hot days with a gentle breeze now and then to make them bearable, and cool evenings, light until after ten o’clock, when Jake and his wife sat at their front door and enjoyed the peace; Willie in bed and the girls allowed to go to the ‘moorie’ to play with their chums.
Of course, there was no peace for Emily during the days. Her son seemed to be hell-bent on proving that he was a ‘nickum’, and she had to be on her toes from dawn to dusk. However much she disliked having Poopie Grant seeking Willie’s company, she did realise that he was better to have a companion of some kind. Being too much on his own could make him introverted, as Gramma Fowlie often pointed out to her.
In any case, Poopie seemed to have more or less learnt to control his bowels, and stopped Willie from doing many of the wild things he proposed doing, which was a great boon to her. There were, however, the occasional hiccups, as if her son was making sure she didn’t get too complacent.<
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For instance, there were the two days that Poopie was sick from eating green apples – whether at Willie’s behest or not was never established – and Willie was on his own. Emily carried out all her chores with one eye on him, but there came the time when she had to get supper ready for her family of three, the girls being with their Gramma McKay in her new house in Aberdeen for a week. Willie had not been invited, but in any case his mother wouldn’t have felt happy if he had been. Her own mother was not accustomed to boys of any kind, particularly not of Willie’s kind. Maybe when he was a little older and had settled down.
She prepared all the vegetables, having got her son to help her get carrots, turnips and onions, glancing out of the kitchen window every now and then to make sure he wasn’t doing anything stupid, and seeing him sitting on the edge of the drying green making a daisy chain, she was lulled into a false sense of security. She had just put the vegetables into the pan where the beef was already simmering nicely, when the back door burst open and a strange, horrifying apparition stumbled in.
‘Willie!’ she screamed, after making sure that was who it was. ‘What in God’s name have you been doing?’
No answer was forthcoming, but she didn’t really need one. The rotten cabbage leaves, putrefying tea leaves, scraps of all kinds of food, plus the unmistakable splotches of human waste that Jake emptied into the midden from their dry lavatory every night revealed the sad truth. Her stomach lurched at the thought of having to clean him, but there was no one else there to take over the sickening task.
The simplest way would be to strip and scrub him, so first covering the stone floor with an old newspaper, she set about it. Filling the zinc bath with water – hot from the kettle on the hob on the range plus some cold from the pail in the porch at the back door – she then laid out an old scrubbing brush and a bar of carbolic soap. Thankfully, after she got him into the tub the boy stood perfectly still, his big brown eyes fixed on her mournfully, his nose wrinkling as the the varied stinks assaulted it … and hers.
She didn’t give in to his tiny whimpers when she scrubbed a little too forcefully, for it was the only way she could get him clean. Her son’s skin was shining red by the time she was finished, from the roots of his curly brown hair to the soles of his feet, but she felt no sympathy towards him while she rubbed him vigorously with an old towel. She was taking no chances that any dirt would be transferred from him to anything else.
‘Get up to your bed!’ she ordered, giving him the slap on his bare bottom that he so thoroughly deserved. ‘And it’s no supper for you this night.’
Still silent, for he did know he had pushed his mother too far this time, Willie scrambled up the rickety ladder to his attic room, stark naked and looking like a skinned rabbit. With all the mess left behind to clean up, Emily’s anger kept festering away, and by the time that Jake came in for his supper, she turned to him furiously, forgetting her ‘proper English’. ‘You aye manage to bide out o’ the road till all the work’s done!’ she screamed, then burst out crying, through sheer frustration and exhaustion.
‘Oh, Emmy, lass, what’s got you so upset?’ he asked, for it wasn’t often that she was driven to tears. ‘Was it something Willie did?’ That was usually why she was angry.
His wife did not get the support and consolation she was expecting. When Jake heard the story – and his wife had quite a graphic way of describing their son’s misdemeanours – he couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Oh, Em, he’s just doin’ what boys do. I fell in oor midden at hame when I was his age, mair than once, and Ma gied me a hot backside and sluiced me doon oot in the yard wi’ a’ the neighbours getting their kill. Aye, an’ when I was aulder as weel.’
‘But I’m not like your Ma, Jake. She’d two sons, don’t forget, and I’ve never had nothing to do with boys till we had Willie. And surely all boys canna be as bad as him?’
He slid an arm round her waist and pulled her towards him. ‘No, I suppose yer richt there, Em, but a lot o’ them are. D’you nae think he’s better like that than bein’ a cissie? You’ll never ha’e to worry aboot that.’
She gave a watery smile. ‘You’d better tell him to come doon for his supper. Oh, Godamichty!’
Alarmed by her stricken expression, her husband said, ‘What is it, lass?’
‘I havena had time to think aboot makin’ the supper.’
‘Sit doon, Em, for ony sake. You’re dead beat an’ nae wonner. See, I’ll mak’ some scrambled eggs an’ a puckle slices o’ toast, that’ll fill oor bellies.’
When Jake shouted up to give Willie the good news he waited in the tiny lobby for him to come down, almost giving in to the temptation to clap the boy on the back in a proud fatherly manner. That would be like saying he had done no wrong, when he had disobeyed all the tellings his mother had ever given him about the midden. Jake heaved a sigh as he went back to the kitchen. If only he could get a job with a more up-to-date house – a house with an inside lavvy – so there wouldn’t be a midden for Willie to fall into. But he supposed he was lucky to have a job at all; there were hundreds who hadn’t. Hundreds who still had a dry privy in their backyard.
Chapter Four
August 1926
Things in the little end-of-the-row cottage had changed considerably. There was great excitement because Willie was starting school, although he wouldn’t be five until the 21st of September. On the great day, Willie was ready and waiting for Poopie Grant to call in to take him there, as he had promised ages ago. He ran to open the door as soon as the knock came, ushering his friend in to prove he didn’t need his mother to go with him.
Emily had always been embarrassed to call the child Poopie, so she said, ‘What’s your right name, er …’
‘Grant,’ came the instant reply.
‘Um … no, I mean your right first name.’
‘Oh, aye, I was gan to tell Willie nae to cry me Poopie at the school. I hinna pooped masel’ for a lang time noo, so it’s better …’
‘What is it, then?’ Emily was a little bit frazzled anyway, having had to make her own son ready, much against his will, in an uncomfortable pair of new trousers and a shirt with a collar that she had starched to make sure it would sit properly.
‘Ma sez it’s efter her granda,’ Poopie hedged, clearly unhappy about it.
‘Aye,’ Emily encouraged, while Connie and Becky could barely keep back the giggles surging up.
‘Cecil,’ he murmured. ‘It’s a affa Jessie-Annie name, in’t it?’
The two girls rose hastily from the table and rushed out, and Emily herself found it difficult to keep a straight face. ‘Um … no, it’s a real nice name for a … laddie. A lot o the rich folk name their sons Cecil.’
‘Is that right?’ Poopie’s back straightened, his eyes brightened.
‘Cecil Grant,’ the woman said reflectively. ‘That sounds real good. It does, really.’
But Willie was impatient to be off. ‘Come on, Poopie, or we’ll be late, and I dinna want to be late on ma first day.’
‘It’s Cecil,’ his friend said sadly. ‘Try an’ mind that, Willie.’
‘I’ll try.’ But being a naturally honest child, Willie added, ‘But I winna promise.’
His mother picked up his satchel. ‘Well, don’t forget this, for your dinner’s in here – a flask of soup, a hunk of loaf and an apple. That should be enough. Now, off you go, and don’t caper about and spoil your new clothes. Just walk nicely, the pair of you.’
She stood at the door and watched them as they walked sedately down the path and along the cart track, knowing full well that the minute they were round the bend out of her sight, they would be their usual rowdy selves. At least Willie would, though Poopie – Cecil – was a good bit quieter. At that moment, her two daughters appeared from the side of the house.
‘So that’s Willie an’ Cecil away,’ Connie grinned. ‘I nearly burst trying not to laugh. I can’t think about Poopie as a Cecil.’
‘You’ll just have to get used to it, but what
a name to give the laddie.’
Emily found the day unusually long. It was the first time for many years that she had been on her own, and it was heaven. She got through her usual housework in doublequick time and, taking an early dinner, she went out to collect the eggs. Her hens were in the habit of roaming around the place quite a bit, and she never quite knew where to look, for they weren’t all that particular where they laid. They had fully recovered now from what Willie did to them some time ago, and they were good layers. After searching all the known places, she had found nearly six dozen of the still-warm eggs and decided to call a halt. She could sell the whole lot of them since there were still over a dozen in her pantry left from the week before. At least she didn’t have to walk to the village for a buyer; the grocer was usually delighted to take them off her when he called. ‘They tell me they’re really good,’ he had told her once. ‘Fine an’ big, wi’ decent-sized yolks. Some o’ my customers winna tak’ ony ither anes.’
After arranging them neatly in the big basket she kept for the purpose, she went out to weed her little kitchen garden. Jake kept her supplied with tatties, carrots and turnips – they were kept in pits in the sheltered corner of the yard, but she grew her own leeks, shallots, cress, parsley and the herbs she liked to use in her cooking. Some of the other cottared wives believed that she thought herself better than them because she put ‘fancy stuff’ in her soups and stews, plus the fact that she’d been born in the town. But her parents’ house had been a few miles from the last houses in Aberdeen, though so many new houses had been built since she left that Balmedie looked as if it would be part of the city before too long.
She went inside when she felt the need of a cup of tea. Half past three. She had time to chop some kindling before she started making the supper. While she had a seat and enjoyed her ‘cuppie’, she wondered what life would have been like without Willie. He was the cause of most of her work, and definitely the most worry. Neither of her girls had been any trouble, just a few coughs and sneezes, and they’d both caught the measles when it had spread through the school a few years ago. Hopefully, though, Willie wouldn’t succumb to any childhood illnesses. He was tougher than his sisters.
The Nickum Page 2