A little story here, before I finish with Woodside School. Bear with me – it is relevant. Not long before I retired, it must have been around April or May of 1982, I had an appointment with my dentist for four o’clock. To get there from where I’d parked the car, I had to pass a small charity shop and, because I was a few minutes early, I was drawn in to have a look at the books. The place was so packed with people that I couldn’t get near the shelves. I didn’t buy anything, but I did get quite a shock. There, behind the counter, one of the volunteers, was Miss Deans – the only time I had seen her since I was eight – fifty-two years earlier. She was busy serving, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t get near enough to speak to her, but guessed that she wouldn’t have known me, anyway.
Half an hour later, face numb and feeling sorry for myself, I was on my way back to the car when who should I see again but Miss Deans. She was standing on the pavement at the corner of a street – shades of George Formby – obviously waiting for someone. Nobody else was about, but I felt so shy suddenly that I just smiled and said, as best I could with my mouth full of tongue, ‘Lovely afternoon’, or something like that and walked past.
She grabbed my arm to stop me. ‘Wait. Don’t I know you?’
‘You taught me at Woodthide Thchool when I wath about theven, Mith Deanth,’ I mumbled. ‘A long, long time ago.’
‘Yes, of course. Doris Forsyth. I never forget any of my star pupils. Did you make good use of that brain of yours?’
‘I’m jutht about to retire from teaching at Hathlehead Primary,’ I told her proudly, if not altogether clearly.
She beamed at me, a truly radiant beam, making me feel like a tiny tot again, being praised for something well done. ‘Ah, here is my lift. My neighbour collects me on the days I take my turn in the shop. Goodbye, my dear. I’m so glad to have met you again.’
As the car drew away, I stood for a moment, thinking. She hardly looked any older than I remembered her from my childhood, yet she must be a fair age now. Then, feeling so much better for the encounter, uplifted in fact, I crossed the road to our Datsun Sunny.
Only about two weeks later, her death was in the evening paper. It was the surname that caught my eye, then the little notice said ‘retired teacher’, and although I had never known her Christian name, I knew instinctively that it was my Miss Deans. No age was given, so I tried to work it out. She had seemed fairly old to me when I was in her class, but anybody over twenty is ancient to a seven or eight-year-old. She may have been newly graduated, which would have put her in her early to middle twenties then . . . but no! There had been no raw edges about her. She was too mature, too experienced and had too much self-confidence . . . she had definitely been teaching for years before 1929. Say she’d been thirty then – that made her eighty-one when she died. I strongly suspected, however, that she was nearer ninety . . . if not over it, yet she’d still had all her faculties.
I was a week late in starting at Rosemount Intermediate School in 1934, which I will explain in a moment. We had moved from the house in Hilton Drive in 1933. The Housing Department had decided to carry out a Means Test on all its tenants, and had issued the forms necessary to get this information. My father wasn’t the only man who refused to divulge his income, with the result that there was a large influx of families to the new estates of private housing springing up in all suburbs of the city.
I was still at Woodside School when we moved into the villa in Mid Stocket Road in October 1933 (bought for £640, with a deposit of something like £25 and the balance, plus interest, payable over sixteen years). Because I was just a few months away from sitting what was known in Aberdeen as the Control examination, which had to be passed before going on to a higher school, be it a Secondary or the stage in between, called an Intermediate.
Those who didn’t pass had to remain behind, to try again the following year. One girl in my class had failed three years running and left school altogether at fourteen, never having got beyond Primary 7.
Dad hoped that I would do well in the Control, because he wanted me to go on to the Central Secondary. I wasn’t keen on this; Doug, Mum’s youngest brother, was already a pupil there and was slaving at homework every night until the early hours.
Dad and I had a bit of a squabble, but I remained firm, so my name was entered for Rosemount Intermediate, where, after three years, a pupil could transfer to a Secondary if he or she proved capable of it. I suppose Dad thought I would see sense by then . . . and I may have done, if fate hadn’t intervened. I was sent to Gowanhill again in that summer when I was to make the transition from one school to the next. It was, if you remember, my last visit there. Dad was killed in the early morning of the day after I came home; killed on his motorbike on his way to the shop to make the mince and sausages ready for opening at eight. The only other vehicle on the road at that time of day was a newspaper van, and it must have been a million to one chance that they both came to the same crossroads at exactly the same moment – no road-marked warnings then, no traffic lights.
Two policemen rang our bell about 7 a.m. on 23rd August to tell my mother that her husband had been involved in an accident. They asked her if there was a man she could ask to accompany her to the hospital where he had been taken, and she told them to ask Mr Forbes, a neighbour and friend. His wife came round with him and volunteered to take me to Ord Street to be with my grandmother. Mum wouldn’t let her take Bertha.
Only then was I shaken awake and told to dress quickly – still not washing off the dirt from my holiday. I put on the school uniform Mum had laid out for me – navy gym tunic, square-necked and with three box pleats front and back, square-necked white blouse, navy interlock knickers with elastic in the legs and a pocket for a hankie. Under that, of course, a Chilpruf vest, a hand-knitted vest and fleecy-lined liberty bodice with suspenders to hold up my long black woollen stockings. (Yes, it was summer, but my mother had little regard for changing seasons, and this naturally became a bone of contention between us as I grew older.)
Mrs Forbes walked me to Ord Street, not very far, where she explained what had happened (a few whispered words) and left me, too young to understand fully what was going on. Mum came there in the afternoon to say that the police hadn’t been strictly honest with her. Dad had been dead on arrival at Woolmanhill Hospital, and she had been sent to identify his body.
Granny and Granda took me home on the late forenoon of the funeral day – shining with cleanliness, Granny made sure of that – where some of the Forsyths had already arrived. I was glad to see my cousin Isobel Mackay, my Auntie Jeannie’s daughter, because she was only a few months younger than I was. Before I could think of what we could play at, or amuse ourselves with, Granny ordered us to sit down and not make nuisances of ourselves. All the seats were occupied, even the wooden, padded-topped stool where we kept our slippers, so we sat on the floor between the sideboard and the window, not really a very comfortable place. There was only a square jute carpet in the living room, the cheapest until Dad could afford something better. (It remained there for many years.) The wide surround was varnished wood, but that cold surface was all that was available to us, the only two children amongst a whole houseful of adults.
We sat quietly, watching the stir as people moved around getting the table set and so on, until I remembered that there was a pile of Children’s Newspapers in the lounge. Thinking that they would keep us quiet and save anybody accusing us of being nuisances, I rose quietly and tiptoed through, only to be brought up short at the sight of the coffin. No one had told me it was there – I hadn’t thought about such a thing – and I stood, paralysed in horror, looking down on my beloved dad, his eyes closed and his hands crossed over the satin shroud that covered the rest of him, although I didn’t know then that it was called a shroud.
It was some minutes before the great band of steel that had clamped round my ribs and was constricting my breathing snapped as suddenly as it had appeared, and I ran into the narrow lobby sobbing hysterically, straig
ht into Granny’s arms. I could understand now what had happened and she was the one person out of all the people there who had the time and the experience to comfort me properly. Hers was the next coffin I saw, in 1942, of my own free will when I went to pay my last respects to a wonderful old lady.
Uncle Jack turned up on the morning of the Sunday after his brother’s funeral. From what I took in, he was worried about what would happen to the shop. He would have to take on a man to replace Bob, so Maisie would get less than before, because she would be a sleeping partner, not contributing to the running of the business. That agreed on, he offered her £5 for the Erskine sitting in the garage that had come with us when we flitted in, only ten months earlier. ‘I’m doing you a kindness, Maisie,’ he murmured. ‘You wouldn’t get anything if you tried to sell it anywhere else.’
Not yet capable of rational thought, my mother gave him the keys to the car and accepted the tissue-thin white Bank of England fiver. He was lucky. If Granny and Granda had only arrived sooner, Uncle Jack wouldn’t have got off so easily.
Mum spent the afternoon discussing with her parents the options open to her. Dad had left no will, and in Scottish law at that time, any moneys belonged to the widow, but property had to be divided between any children of the marriage. There were no ‘moneys’, of course. In addition to the deposit on the house, Dad had spent quite a lot in doing up the garden, making steps up from the gate (a task that my granda and one of their lodgers finished), and making alterations to the house. The upstairs bedroom had a box-room, a walk-in cupboard that he had transformed into a sort of workshop for himself.
Mum had been bemoaning the fact that Dad’s had been a butcher’s shop. ‘If it had been anything else, I could have gone and served in it,’ she said a few times to her parents, and Granny had to remind her that she had an infant to look after – Bertha had not yet reached the age of two. It was Granda who came up with what seemed the perfect solution to her problem of making enough money to live on and also pay the mortgage. ‘You could mak’ the hoose work for you?’
She wasn’t too happy with his suggestion that she take in lodgers, but it was the only way round a thorny problem, and she eventually answered a few advertisements in the Evening Express put in by men looking for lodgings.
I had better continue with my schooldays. I turned up at my new school a whole week after the other pupils. Dr Cormack, the headmaster, had been notified of the reason but, as I was to find out, had told only some of the teachers. I was to have a different one for each subject, and during the morning, not one asked why I had not attended the previous week. I was also very grateful that no mention was made of my bereavement. It was still much too raw to talk about.
On that first Monday afternoon, we had to go to the Cookery Department, a separate building at the other end of the tarred playground. I can’t remember what the Cookery teacher was called, though maybe it’s just as well, for we started off on the wrong foot. She glared at me once we were all seated. ‘You’re new!’ she barked. ‘Name?’
Her tone flustered me. ‘D . . .Doris,’ I quavered.
‘Stand up when you speak to me, girl! Do you not have a surname?’
I got to my feet. ‘Forsyth.’
‘Your address, Forsyth?’
Gathering that she needed this information to make up her register, I gave her the number in Mid Stocket Road.
‘What does your father do?’
Not expecting this question, I mumbled, without thinking, ‘I haven’t got a father.’
Her hand crashed down on the table in front of me, narrowly missing my thumb. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl! Everyone has a father.’
By this time, I could sense a wave of sympathy coming from the others, none of whom I’d got to know yet, and who were obviously too scared of the dragon to say anything in my defence. ‘My father died last Monday,’ I whispered, struggling to keep back the tears, ‘but he was a butcher.’
This clearly rattled her. In other circumstances, I believe she would have passed some derogatory remark about butchers, but I think she realised that she had pushed me far enough.
I never got to like her any better in the three years I had her . . . nor she me. Any time I opened my mouth to ask something, she pounced on me for talking, giving me hundreds of lines to write – ‘I must not talk in class’ – keeping me behind after school, to tidy up what had already been all washed and cleaned, and so on. Luckily, I got on well with all the other teachers, ‘Fatty’ Copland for Maths (self-explanatory) and ‘Patchy’ Ross for English (she had black hair with a white patch sweeping back from her forehead – most unusual then). Our Music teacher was Mr Innes, who introduced us to many of the classics and endeared himself to us by pirouetting around while a record was playing on the wind-up gramophone. He was really fat yet he did very well as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
We had a Sewing teacher who taught us how to make several different kinds of seams (by hand, no sewing machines yet) and different ways of finishing hems. The first item we made was a lapbag, with our initials embroidered on, where we would be keeping the sewing and knitting we were working on. It was made of good strong cotton, calico maybe, and I used mine for years after I was married to keep my clothes pegs in.
The first item of clothing we made was a pair of knickers, beautifully shaped but so big that they would have held two or three of us at a time. Mum had had to pay for the material, of course, so I was forced to wear them . . . most uncomfortable. Then came a thinner cotton blouse, which didn’t turn out too badly, followed by a pair of pyjamas also erring on the large side and which I had to wear. The last thing I made, in my third year, was a dress. We were allowed to use sewing machines at this stage, and we had to provide our own material for this. Somehow, my mother managed to get hold of a piece of navy Grandholm flannel – quite expensive, but made to last a lifetime. If this did not quite last a lifetime, I wore it for many years as a dress, altered it to a skirt and bolero, and years later, cut it down to fit Bertha.
I can’t recall exactly what we knitted, a scarf first I think, then socks, then gloves, but I knitted a vast variety of articles over the years for my family and myself – in garter stitch to begin with, graduating to stocking stitch, Arran, cable and finally achieving the more intricate Fair Isle.
Other subjects were History, Geography, Religious Education and Gym. The Gym teacher was called Miss Marr, who told us that her brother had been with Shackleton on his journey to the North Pole, which made us regard her as something of a celebrity.
I was interested in everything and soaked up the lot like a sponge. Not long into my first year, Miss Ross (a dear soul for whom I’d have done anything to please) put me forward for a bursary. I had to pass an examination to show that I was worthy of this, of course, and was awarded £60, to be paid as £20 for each of three years.
It may not sound much today, but it was quite a help to my financially-challenged mother, who got no compensation for my father’s death because there were no witnesses to the accident so early in the morning. She got no widow’s pension, either. Paying insurance stamps was not compulsory at that time, and being self-employed Dad had opted not to. He had never dreamt that he would be dead at the age of forty, leaving behind a widow and two children. This was also why he had not made a will.
My favourite teacher – I’m sure you have guessed – was Miss Ross. I stopped calling her Patchy, it wasn’t respectful. It was she who taught me to recognise many, many wild flowers, which wasn’t her subject at all. Apart from instilling far more than the rudiments of grammar into us, she also gave many of us a real love of poetry, introducing us to the weirdly enchanting Abu Ben Adam. To prove how much this poem affected us, I must jump to the present day.
Less than a year ago, I was put in touch with the person who had been my best friend at Rosemount. Hilda Glennie, née Mathieson, had a beautiful contralto voice even at the age of thirteen and had been in one of the operatic societies for years and years. I hadn’t seen or he
ard of her since around 1968 or so, but some things come about in peculiar ways.
When my husband came home from his second stay in hospital in 1999, we were asked if we needed help in the house. As a result of osteoporosis, I’m not too steady on my legs and I wasn’t able to do everything that I should, so we accepted the offer. We were allotted a carer to do housework for one hour per week – paying for the service, naturally. After several different ladies had come and gone – through no fault of mine or theirs, let me hasten to say, just a general moving around, apparently – I got a real treasure, who could go through the whole house like a dose of salts and leave each room spotless and shining.
June told me one day that she also attended to Hilda Glennie, who had contracted a debilitating disease some time earlier and needed almost constant care. She had seen her reading one of my books and had told her she came to me, too. Hilda, severely disabled as she was, managed to type out a letter to me on her computer, a long, laborious process. Almost her first words were about Miss Ross – ‘that dear lady we all loved so much’. She said that Abu Ben Adam had been her favourite poem of all time, and quoted it in full from memory. She even quoted bits from essays I had written and been forced to read out to the class . . . none of which I remembered.
I sent her a long reply, still reminiscing about our schooldays and our dear Henrietta Ross, but I was to get another wonderful, heart-wrenching surprise. Hilda phoned to congratulate me on my eightieth birthday – June had told her the date. I had a houseful of people, my family was giving me a party, so I couldn’t talk to her for long, but I rang her the following day, and we spoke for well over two hours. A gift of the gab? Who, me? I’d say that Hilda and I were equally gifted.
She reminded me that she was younger than I was by a couple of months, so I asked our ‘go-between’, June, to find out the exact date. When the time came, I tried to phone her on her eightieth birthday, but got no reply and had to try again the next day.
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 5