Jessie's Journey

by Jess Smith

  Now, to be honest, the water level would only have come as far as his oxters, but when she came running and saw her precious laddie, who by now was standing on the rock, my Auntie Jessie, without a thought for herself, belly-flopped into the sea! Boned corsets and all! ‘All’ being long-legged satin bloomers, tweed skirt, mother-of-pearl buttoned blouse and Fair Isle cardigan. Down she sank like a ton of tatties, then gurgled to the surface, calling, ‘Mammy’s coming, son,’ only to sink as fast again.

  Now, what do you think happened next? Auntie Jessie’s wee fat legs came up first, buoyed up by her ballooning, knee-length, peach satin bloomers. Her upside-down body was cocooned inside her corsets. The knickers filled like a parachute. She was in deep trouble to say the least.

  Thanks be to God, though, we managed to save her from Neptune’s watery grave. By ‘we’ I mean Daddy, Mammy, Uncle Wullie and Cousin Carol, sister Shirley, oor Janey, Anna, two wide-eyed Yanks and me. Oh, and the village bobby as well.

  Wullie, holding his guitar above his head, managed no bother to get it successfully home. This was a waste of his time, though, because when we told her he wasn’t shouting ‘I’m getting choked’, as she thought, but ‘It’s getting soaked’, his musical instrument was hurled into the sea in a wild rage, with a scratched fingerboard and six snapped strings.

  That night after the tempers were quietened, we all had a good laugh, sitting round a braw fire as two sets of boned corsets twanged and curled within the flames.

  From then on my wish was granted, as our mothers enjoyed a grand daily ‘dook’.

  Apart from a turbaned Pakistani trying to sell us the contents of his suitcase of multi-coloured cardigans and elephant-patterned head-squares, we saw no-one else to speak of, and continued to enjoy our ‘little Scotland’ holiday.

  Too soon it was packing-up time, and our return journey by the Glen Sannox ferry was a great deal quieter as we watched our haven disappear into a thick sea haar. I shall always be grateful to Arran and its folks for such a lovely summer.

  Now come back to smelly Kirkcaldy with me and I’ll tell you another tale or two.

  28

  SCHOOL BULLIES

  While at Kirkcaldy, Daddy made big changes to our winter homing ground. He built an extension onto the bus in the form of a wee prefab. A front door led into a small kitchen area with sink and worktops. Later, as a Christmas present, he added a very Modern Milly contraption, a washing machine with hand-wringer attachment, a cooker and cupboard space. There was a chest of drawers, a pull-down bed, settee and, positioned in a corner, the ruination of mankind—a television set. To enhance the small house, there was a cosy ‘burn anything in me’ stove with two doors. Fitted carpet covered the wooden floor. The bed was my parents’, giving them much-longed for privacy and us more space in the bus, which incidentally was conveniently accessible via the kitchen area. Daddy, the handyman, had excelled himself. Relatives flooded in to admire his handiwork, and Mammy, for the first time since losing out on her ‘house that never was’ back in Crieff, was pleased as punch.

  I too was delighted with our expanding home, but only when Daddy reassured me the prefab was easily sealed and left intact while we went on our travels in the bus.

  So then, as winter tightened her grip on Kirkcaldy, we lived in relative comfort, enjoying the extra space our new awning provided.

  Daddy had discovered a factory in the north of England which sold Formica cuttings. This was the trendy new hard covering everyone was using to cover kitchen worktops. He rented a small shop in Rosslyn Street, and soon the stuff was selling like hot cakes. A drive down to the factory every month made certain his supply didn’t run out. So over the cold winter months, as he and Mammy both ran the shop, we all enjoyed our comforts.

  Changes were taking place, not only in how we were making a living, but within our ranks. Janey had been working on the buses. Mona left home to work and live independently, eventually marrying a second cousin of my father’s. Shirley worked in a fishmonger’s shop in the High Street, and it was whilst travelling there on the number 1 bus that a certain handsome six foot-something lad fell madly in love with my favourite sister. This later led to a blossoming romance followed by a lovely wedding. When Shirley left home she took much of its fire with her. I missed her more than anyone else. Janey was later to follow by marrying a traveller lad. Daddy had little time for this roguish lad, but he was to prove a grand provider. I liked him, he made me laugh. Chrissie pleased Mammy when she and her curly-headed laddie, plus two sons, moved to Kirkcaldy. They lived to the south of the town.

  Granny Power became frail and lonely in her little cottage in the Bobbin Mill at Pitlochry, so the family clubbed together and bought her a ground-floor flat in Kirkcaldy’s Overton Road. This meant she would seldom be alone, especially with Auntie Lena’s cheery bunch popping in and out. Apart from the smell of the nearby linoleum factory she enjoyed her new home.

  For the first time in my life, school was fun. It was a massive place with hundreds of pupils from different areas. I made a few friends. One day a girl in my class invited several of us to her birthday party. Seldom had anyone apart from travellers offered me hospitality. ‘Perhaps scaldies aren’t all bad,’ I remember thinking, as she said her Dad would pick me up. When he drove round into Oswald Road where I stood waiting, I recall the puzzled look on his face. ‘Where do you live, lassie?’ he enquired.

  Thinking little of it I pointed to the yard. He said nothing, picked me up and then collected the other girls.

  Shirley had given me a present of a new dress she bought specially for the party. It was gingham blue, my favourite colour. That Friday night I made new friends, both girls and boys. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the company of kids other than travellers.

  Come Monday morning, I could hardly wait to join them and be part of the crowd, but no-one prepared me for the treatment my so-called ‘friends’ were about to dish out.

  Mammy had bought me a new satchel because of the extra books I needed for exams. It was real leather and one she really could not afford. I proudly hung it over one shoulder, showing it off to my friends. ‘Where did you steal that then, Tink?’ hissed one lad, wrenching my new bag from my hand and throwing it over by the gates, where a row of metal dustbins was lined up. Everyone else laughed, and as I retrieved my precious satchel it didn’t take long for the bubble around me to burst. The father must have told his daughter she had invited a tinker to her party, the one who lived behind a high wall in Lennie’s Yard.

  From then on, I hid until morning bell sounded, and left as it rang for school’s end. My school life became a nightmare. Nobody would be seen talking to me. One lad named Derek did, and got a bleeding nose for his trouble.

  I didn’t bother my parents with bully worries, because they would have told me to get them sorted out, but I did mention things to big Joe Macallum. He was the husband of Auntie Maggie, my father’s sister. ‘Jess,’ he said, ‘you’re a wee lassie who shouldn’t be worrying about useless cowards with drunkards for parents. Here’s how to deal with them.’ I listened, desperately hoping he’d banish these cruel kids from me by saying he’d wait on them and pull a few ears in a side alley or something. But no such solution; there was a better way. ‘Ask one of them to come to your party. Not a birthday, but a coming-home one. Get closer and make sure he or she hears clearly. Say Uncle Axie is getting out. If they ask you who he is, look puzzled, then say, “Have you not heard of the Axe Murderer who chopped up three woodsmen after one of them cheated at a card game?” Go on to say he is your favourite Uncle and will be happy to meet your friends.

  After a week of sleepless nights I eventually found the courage to approach a bully, asking him to come to my uncle’s coming-home party. Imagine my surprise when he ran off goggly-eyed to tell his mates. Lo and behold, it worked. They believed me, and for the duration of that year I was left in peace. The autumn would bring them back, but that was a spring and summer away. Perhaps I’d find another way to war
d them off?

  Daddy didn’t mean to leave for the road so soon, but a visit from two council officials hastened our departure. They insisted he dismantle our prefab because there wasn’t the necessary planning permission—not to mention the water and waste pipes he’d added to the already overloaded Gallatown football club’s changing hut. Mammy was glad to be going, because she’d spent all winter cooped up in the wee cold shop, fingers swollen and sore from cutting the sharp-edged Formica.

  Daddy carefully dismantled his makeshift home, storing it in a warehouse within the yard. Several days of maintenance followed on my old bus before he coughed and spluttered back to life. It was a warm April and already little heads of apple blossom were pushing out from their branches on the trees in the park, scattering a hint of spring fragrance. A stirring in my belly of tiny butterflies brought an excitement only a traveller would understand as I positioned myself near the front of the bus.

  As he drove onto the open road my father laughed as Mammy put her arm on his shoulder, saying her usual ‘Where to now, Macduff?’

  He leaned back into her chest, saying ‘Brigadoon, here we come!’

  With Shirley, Chrissie, Janey and Mona walking their own paths, it seemed so still and quiet without them. Usually, on taking to the road, they’d stand in a circle, holding onto each other for balance, then burst into song. Shirley wrote her own songs, and we’d laugh as she performed one written for that particular journey. We laughed because it was usually full of swear-words and comical innuendos. Yes, of all my sisters, she was the one who I’d say made me happy.

  Come with me; spend the summer, the last one, with what’s left of our family in the old bus.

  29

  MAGGIE-ELLEN

  Daddy said he’d heard that Auntie Jessie and Wullie were heading out from Kelty. ‘We’ll meet up and travel awhile with them,’ he told Mammy, adding that they’d be grand company, seeing as the lassies were away. Before they arrived, this is what happened to us while waiting on them.

  My fascination for ‘midden-raking’ wasn’t a child thing. It didn’t desert me at youth’s birth. No surprise, then, to find our visit to Kelty in Fife had me straining at the reins to join the rats in the nearby coup of goodies.

  Granny Power told me last time we spoke, ‘You’ll catch something rummaging through folks’ discarded muck, my lass,’ then muttered under her breath in Gaelic as she handed me a pair of red rubber gloves Auntie Ina (Mammy’s youngest sister) used. These navvy tools were issued to workers while using the awful-smelling Jeyes Fluid disinfectant, a certainty for ridding germs from the busy kitchens and bathrooms of the Atholl Palace Hotel in Pitlochry where she worked.

  She would say, ‘I’m stumped ye’ve no caught a disease from an auld “yookie” [rat]’. This added comment was followed with a history of the Black Plague and the Grey Plague. She even managed to remember a Red one as well! Then, finally, her parting words were, ‘Dinnae drink your water near a midden burn! That’s where the rats drink theirs!’

  Granny’s problem was she had dozens of grandbairns and loved us all too much. Thoughts of harm to any of us brought out her mothering-hen instinct. If love has a limit, no one told my Granny.

  ‘Jessie, where are you going?’ shouted Mammy, tying a sturdy rope between two silver birch trees growing in the wood by our Kelty campsite.

  ‘To check out the midden,’ I called back.

  ‘That’s what you think, lady. I need eggs, milk, bread and a quarter of tea, so take the basket, get some money from Daddy and bolt down to the wee corner shop, now!’

  ‘Mammy, did we not pass the empty bin-lorry as we came in? That means it was just emptied, so the midden will be full of goodies,’ I protested.

  ‘Full of rotting rubbish,’ said Daddy, positioning the wash-hand basin in its tripod near the bus door.

  ‘Och, there could easy be a treasure sitting on the coup waiting for me to find it.’

  My father pushed a hand into his trousers’ pocket, took out a pound note and said, ‘Your mother asked for tea, eggs, milk and what was it?’

  Grabbing the money I lifted the shopping basket. Before storming off I called back to my father as he poured water into the basin, ‘Bread!’

  ‘Aye, that’s it, bread,’ he called back, ‘food of the Gods!’

  I must have flown down to the wee shop, for, in the flicking of a lamb’s tail I was back—minus the bread.

  ‘Jessie, I couldn’t have been any clearer, and it’s not like I asked for a mountain of messages. I’ve not a slice of bread in the place, lassie!’ Mammy was instantly annoyed.

  ‘I’ll give you a loaf, Jeannie. I bought too much at the baker’s in Cardenden,’ said Big John Young’s wife, Maggie-Ellen, who had moved onto the site a week before us.

  These traveller folks had known our family for as long as I could remember. She hailed from Paisley, and was fairground stock, while Big John was a Fife dealer. They had one son who everyone knew as Joe-Toe. For the love of me I have no idea what that meant, perhaps Joseph Thomas?

  Mammy accepted the kind offer of bread, allowing me the freedom to rake the midden. ‘Take the rubber gloves with you, Jess, better be safe than sorry,’ called my father, waving them in the air.

  ‘They’re too big, Daddy. I would need hands on myself like a twenty-stone Irish navvy.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ called my mother, while busy brushing sticky wullies from Renie’s hair, on account of her falling backwards into the offending plants growing near the riverbank, ‘you can forget the midden.’

  With dogged reluctance I took the gloves from Dad and ran off to partake of my greatest pastime—routing amongst other folk’s rubbish.

  Within half an hour I returned, blood dripping from a gaping wound in my right hand.

  Horror upon horrors, I had cut myself while ramming my gloveless hand into a box of broken cups, discarded no doubt from some old biddy’s china cabinet. Three hours later I came back from the cottage hospital, sporting a hand swathed in thick bandages. Worst was the swollen bum where the ancient nurse rammed a thing like my mother’s knitting needle into my poor wee hip. ‘That’s to stop you getting lock-jaw,’ she told me, adding, ‘What the hell were you doing in among midden stuff any road?’ Turning to Daddy, she said, ‘You’re needing a word with this lassie of yours,’ handing him fresh bandages, saying it was a deep cut but not needing stitches.

  Mammy said she was black-affronted at me, and how would she face folk while hawking. Then she broke my heart in a dozen bits by forbidding me to rake a midden ever again! So, readers, that was how my dreams of being the richest scrappy in Scotland came crashing down. All those dreams of owning a fleet of scrap lorries across the land. Lorries with the Queen’s stamp of approval emblazoned on their doors. The trouble with my mother was she had no ambitions.

  Next day I had removed the best part of the bandages from my injury, allowing more freedom to my hand. Saying that, what were my capabilities? Not dishwashing or rinsing knickers, fetching water or messages.

  A voice from an open car door answered my question. ‘Come with me, Jess, I only need a one-handed lass to help carry my swag bag.’ It was Maggie-Ellen. She was going hawking in the country, which meant a lot of footwork. Everyone knew the dear lady had corns and calluses, probably from tramping up and down long farm tracks and telling fortunes for more years than any one could remember.

  Well, I enjoyed hawking, so why not? After getting my mother’s permission, I was sitting alongside Maggie-Ellen in a big shiny Buick, as Joe-Toe drove us away into the countryside.

  This tale comes from that time. The day my friend Maggie-Ellen, a genuine fortune-teller of the highest esteem, cursed a farmer’s prized bull!

  Her swag-bag, the dear lady’s treasure chest of jewellery, was not filled with gold and silver, but cheap tinny baubles that she sold as an added attraction to a punter thinking she was buying a bargain. As I lifted it up one thought entered my head, ‘Ye Gods, what a weight of a thing, no wond
er she needed someone to carry it!’

  Maggie-Ellen and I left Joe-Toe at a farm road entrance. He drove off, saying he’d come back round twelve and would bring mutton pies for our dinner.

  As we walked up the stony track, she asked how my hand was. Apart from a slight throbbing it was fine.

  ‘Well, if the swag gets heavy, carry it over your arm, that’ll prevent you from using the one hand all the time.’

  Who was she kidding? This bag should have been on a donkey’s back, never mind my arm. She told me her Joe-Toe always carried it. But he said he felt like a sissy walking about with a woman’s bag.

  Maggie-Ellen was a mystery. Everybody for miles knew the strange powers my companion possessed. Many a tale was whispered of her ability to tell one’s fortune with uncanny accuracy. No one dared cross her. No one, that is, who knew her.

  As I stopped to adjust my sandal strap I looked at her walking in front, a fairly tall figure, round about five feet nine. Long, black- to-greying hair piled up and secured by gold-coloured combs gave her an appearance of being taller. Unblemished, smooth, olive skin and a once-slender figure meant that, even at my age of fourteen, I could easily tell that, in her day, she was indeed a strikingly beautiful woman. More telling than all her other features, though, was that dark, mysterious look, the look of a genuine Gypsy! At the time of my tale she was over fifty.

  As we turned the umpteenth bend, at long last a farm house loomed into view.

  ‘Thank God for that, I was beginning to think we chose the wrong place,’ exclaimed Maggie-Ellen.

  Making our way towards the house we both turned towards a field on our left. The biggest bull we’d ever set eyes on stood staring and snorting at us from over the gate. ‘Look at the goolies on that beast, I bet there’s a million offspring he could easily count!’, laughed my companion.