To save leaving anyone left wondering, the match that I managed to light had gone out when I dropped it. Thank goodness.
Just a week or so after this, Mum presented him with another daughter. She wanted to call the baby Roberta after him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. She suggested Bertha next, and although he said it reminded him of the German gun ‘Big Bertha’, he agreed. I think Bertha got quite a lot of teasing about the gun when she was older.
*
At Mid Stocket, my pastimes changed to a certain extent. There were not so many children around for a start and most of those who were there attended private schools. The girls went to St Margaret’s or the Girl’s High, and the boys to Robert Gordon’s College or the Grammar School. We did play together sometimes, the surrounding terrain more suitable for hide-and-seek and that kind of thing. At the other side of the road from our house there was a market gardener’s place with dozens of places to hide; places where today’s youngsters could let their budding passions loose, but, at the same age, we weren’t interested in anything like that. Oh yes, there was the odd little crush on one of the opposite sex, resulting in some innocent teasing, but nothing more than that . . . not until we were a good bit older, anyway.
Mostly we girls stuck with our own type of amusements, skipping, bouncing a ball against a wall and doing all sort of things (clap your hands, hop on one leg, touch the ground etc.) before it came back . . . unless you fell over or couldn’t catch it. Then you were out and it was somebody else’s turn.
We could enjoy ourselves without having to break rules, although Betty, one of my two best friends, and I did fall foul of the law one Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have a bike – I had a fairy cycle with solid tyres at one time, which Bertha fell heir to, then Sheila, then Alan – so we used to whizz down the long hill with me sitting on the carrier of hers. Great fun, most exhilarating . . . until we narrowly missed running into a bobby pushing his bicycle up the steep slope. Cowed by his angry shout, Betty jammed on her brakes and we waited until he came back down to deal with us.
He pulled out a notebook and pencil. ‘Don’t you know it’s against the law to ride two on a bicycle?’ he growled.
‘Y . . . yes,’ we whispered, our knees knocking at the thought of what might happen to us.
‘Do you make a habit of breaking the law?’
‘N . . . no . . . no.’
‘Well, I need both your names and addresses.’
In those days, nobody thought of lying to the police (perhaps an odd one or two villains, but not the general public) so, heads down in shamed disgrace, each of us told him where we lived. Having noted the information, he said, ‘I’ll be talking to your parents about this.’ Then he went back, retrieved his own bike from the side of the road and continued on his way.
Without saying anything to each other, Betty and I turned round and went back up the hill, she pushing our ‘steed’ and me trailing dejectedly along beside her. He had put an end to our fun and we had the worry of having to admit to what we had done. I had only my mother’s reactions to fear, although she could deliver a fairly substantial wallop, whereas Betty had both a father and mother to tell, and her father was a tall, well-built man known to have quite a temper.
When we came to our house, I went inside leaving Betty to carry on round the corner to hers, and sat down quietly, making Mum instantly suspect that something was wrong . . . as mothers usually do. So I had to tell her, but just as I finished, the doorbell rang. It was the policeman.
‘Is this where Doris Forsyth lives?’ he asked, in his most official manner.
‘Yes,’ Mum nodded. ‘What’s she done?’ I had just told her, but she thought I’d been keeping something back . . . again, as mothers do.
‘Two on a bike. Has she not told you?’
‘Yes, she was telling me when you came to the door.’
‘Good for her. Now, nothing more will be done about it. I wanted to make sure they gave me their right addresses, that’s all, and give them a bit of a scare. It usually stops them from doing it again. It’s quite dangerous, you know.’
My mother was actually smiling when she came back to the living room. ‘I’m glad you told the truth, anyway,’ she said, lifting a ten-ton weight off my shoulders. ‘I suppose you heard what he said, and he’s right. It is dangerous, so don’t do it again.’
Just as a matter of interest, that same part of Mid Stocket Road, a long, very steep hill, was superb for sledging, we discovered not long after this, and as far as we knew, there was no law forbidding it. The older boys, from about fourteen up and from all nearby streets, each packed five or six of us younger girls at their backs, and with a push of their feet, off we went. It was the most exhilarating, hair-raising experience, whizzing down and down with nothing to stop us. That’s what made those ‘joy-rides’ all the more memorable. There was no way to stop – no brakes, no nothing . . . except feet, and it was too dangerous to go right to the bottom, more than twice as far again. I’m talking about the middle thirties here, and although there were no Corporation buses in this area, Rover buses ran a service that came up Rosemount Place and King’s Gate then turned into Richmondhill Road to join Mid Stocket on its way back to Rosemount Place.
You can understand why we couldn’t chance going beyond Richmondhill Road. The air was whooshing through our ears and we were making too much noise ourselves to hear if there was a bus anywhere near, and if it came out of that side street right in front of us, there was nothing we could do except run into it. This is why we (the youths) perfected a way of pulling one side of the reins (a piece of rope) and broadsiding before we reached this point, usually resulting in bodies hurtling off and skidding to a halt in a gutter, hopefully out of any vehicle’s path.
Then we had to pick ourselves up, thump ourselves free of ice and snow, check for any broken bones and set off on the long trudge back to the top of the hill to repeat the procedure . . . over and over again in the pitch blackness of the winter nights. These thrilling, daredevil, addictive adventures were brought to an end when the Corporation decided to create another bus route to cater for the private houses that had sprung up around the top end of Mid Stocket Road.
Betty and I compared notes the following morning on our way to Sunday school. She hadn’t got off so lightly as I had. Terrified of what her father would do, she didn’t tell her parents anything, and they only heard it from the policeman. He could see that her father was really angry and tried to defuse the situation by saying, ‘It’s nothing to worry about. I’m just checking that she gave the right address, so that’s the end of it. Don’t be hard on her.’
Her father didn’t take that advice. He gave her one good wallop for not telling him about it, and another for doing it in the first place.
I had started going to Sunday school with Betty at Craigiebuckler Church. That began at 10 a.m., then we joined our Mums and Dads in church at 11. Going home, my parents and I went to see Granny and Granda and collect Bertha – Ord Street was about halfway between the church and our house, and Betty and her parents carried on by themselves.
Once she took in lodgers, of course, Mum was too busy cooking lunch to come to church, and I went to Ord Street on my own after the kirk service. Granny had lodgers, too, so I enjoyed myself there just as much as at home; more, really, because the maternal eye wasn’t frowning at me for speaking too much, chatting up the young men. Mum was a great believer in the ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ maxim, but Granny wasn’t so strict. Perhaps she hadn’t been so lax with her own children, but grandchildren are usually given more leeway.
A rather humorous experience springs to mind here. I was thirteen or so when two of Granny’s lodgers took me to see a menagerie in the Tivoli in Guild Street. Maybe in their late teens or early twenties, Jimmy Collins and Wattie Donald worked in Rubislaw Quarry and were probably not very well paid. They took the cheapest seats, in the Balcony, and ‘Way, way up a ’ky’, as Dave Willis, the well-known comedian used to sing. To r
each them, we had to climb and climb and climb what seemed like endless flights of stairs, then, after we reached the top and got our breaths back – even before that, because there was a queue of people behind us – we went cautiously down the steps between the tiers of seating. This was an almost vertical descent, causing me much worry in case I fell. There was nothing to stop me catapulting over the balcony rail and landing in the orchestra stalls.
Luckily, none of us did, so we settled onto our not-very-comfy seats just one row from the front. Wattie had bought a bag of Soor Plooms, boiled sweets that last a long time, adding to our enjoyment of all the different animal acts. During the interval we remained where we were, observing the people in the stalls squeezing past the others in their row in order to get to the bar. The orchestra, too, took a break here, so we had loads of time to look around us. Then a bell rang, the drinkers came back in twos and threes, the lights dimmed and the orchestra struck up the introduction for the first act of the second half. I’m ashamed to say that I can remember only one from the whole show, the one the entire audience was waiting for, the finale, the pièce de résistance – the one that will never fade from my memory.
The curtains opened slowly. The stage was filled by a huge cage, with a low tunnel-like entrance from the side. The drums began to roll. A united gasp of admiration came from the enrapt audience as the lion (or lioness) appeared. We had to crane our necks to see properly, and the magnificent animal had only padded a few steps when the tumult began. It was some seconds before we three realised why the orchestra and everybody in the stalls were running out shouting. Then we saw that the tunnel had come adrift from the cage itself, and the beast was not inside either of them. He (or she) was going across the front of the stage, stopping occasionally to look into the auditorium as if wondering whether or not it would be possible to jump the gap.
The Dress Circle was also emptying, and the Upper Circle, but we in the Gods sucked our Soor Plooms smugly as we looked down on the panic-stricken activity below. No lion, or lioness, however well trained, could climb all those flights of stairs to get at us. The safety curtain had come down almost immediately, but there was no real danger in any case. Those responsible for looking after the animals had managed to coax him, or her, back to the side, while other workers were making sure that the tunnel was securely attached to the cage this time.
The act went on. The tamer cracked his whip. The lion leapt on and off various sizes and shapes of stands, giving a loud roar occasionally to prove that this was no mean feat. Then the trainer put his head into his charge’s mouth. All hearts almost stopped, then picked up speed in horrified expectation of what could happen. Dare I say that at least one of the spectators actually felt a little let down when the possibility didn’t happen and the curtain came down with no further mishaps? That was my first, and most exciting, visit to the Tivoli, giving me much to boast about on the Monday at school.
I’d have been around fourteen when I started taking an interest in boys. This had to be kept secret from my mother, still she couldn’t keep tabs on me every minute of the day, especially when I was at school. So Betty and I would stand chatting to our two Romeos at the corner of Wallfield Crescent and Rosemount Place nearly every afternoon. Mine was called George, hers was Patrick.
We were making good progress one day, laughing and joking and getting to the stage where we had more or less paired off. It was Betty who spotted them – my mother walking towards us holding Bertha by the hand. They were quite a distance away but had already seen us, so it was no use trying to avoid Nemesis. I had been caught redhanded and I would have to face the consequences. She would go on and on at me as if I’d committed some terrible crime . . . in front of George. In actual fact, the degradation was even worse than that. She took me by the scruff of the neck and yanked me to the bus stop. Betty, staunch friend that she was, ran to catch up with us, and the last we saw of the boys, through the rear window of the double-decker, they were doubled up with laughter. So ended that little liaison.
I was never allowed out on my own after that. I had to take my little sister with me. I wasn’t exactly at the stage of making a date with anybody, but one day, when we were out for a walk, we met a boy I knew who walked nearly all the way home with us. Now, Mid Stocket was originally a country road, and just down from our house there was still a romantic trysting place, known as Lovers’ Lane. There were well-worn stone steps up to the path that wound amongst the trees, and steps down at the other end – or vice versa, depending on the way you came. There were also a few wooden benches, presumably for lovers to rest . . . and perhaps have a few kisses, not that Philip and I were on those terms. We sat down for a wee while, with Bertha squashing in between us, a plump four-year-old, and that’s when it dawned on me that she presented something of a danger to me. Then I remembered the pennyworth of pandrops (mint imperials) I’d managed to buy by saving a couple of bus fares. Surely there was one left? Ideal for a bribe.
‘I’ll give you a sweetie if you promise not to tell Mum about Philip,’ I said, after he left us and we were almost at our gate. (By the way, the railings and the gate were removed during the war to be made into munitions, and were never replaced.)
I should have known, shouldn’t I? Tell a kid that age not to do something, and it’s the first thing they do – a natural perversity. I had barely closed the door behind us when she piped up, righteously, ‘Doris gave me a pandrop not to tell you she was in Lovers’ Lane with a boy, but it was all fluff from her pocket.’
She got a fond pat on the head. I got a thump on the back. Fate can be so unkind!
A WORKING GIRL
7
Having just had the usual Saturday and Sunday free, I set off on the Monday morning to take up my as yet unknown duties as office girl in a small wholesale confectioner. At my interview, Mr Steel had asked, amongst other things, if I had good teeth. Wondering what that had to do with my ability for the position, I said I had.
‘You won’t have if you work here long,’ he smiled.
This puzzled me. All the boxes and jars in the store would be sealed – it was a wholesale business, not retail – so how would I get a chance to sample anything? I was soon to find out. I may be besmirching characters here, but telling this tale won’t land the people concerned in trouble, because they would be well over a hundred if they were still alive. Let me explain.
The only other person in the tiny office was around forty years old (in 1937), but was really friendly and very helpful. We sat at one long desk in front of the painted-over window – we couldn’t see out, and no one could see in. There were two drawers at each side, one shallow for keeping pencils, pens and their nibs, a round ruler, paper clips and elastic bands, the little necessities, and one very deep, in which Evelyn kept the thick ledgers and an equally thick cash book, plus the large bottle of ink from which, like in school, we filled our inkwells. In mine were the slimmer daybooks (sales and purchases) and a small receipt book for cash sales.
I think a cleaner did come in at six, but if anything was spilled on the floor during the day, or brought in on people’s shoes, I had to sweep it up or wash it off. If I had done all the clerical work I was supposed to do, I was allowed to have a wee shot on the typewriter. I was very slow at first, but with Evelyn’s help, I was soon able to make a passable job of typing out invoices, two-fingered, perhaps, but still passable.
Being office girl and general dogsbody, I had to take the daily takings to the bank every day. This entailed going to the foot of Windmill Brae, crossing the railway bridge into The Green – a dangerous place to be walking at night but not altogether a salubrious area at any time of day then, although it is far more upmarket now – then up the long flight of stone steps at the side of Boots’ the chemist. That took me up to Union Street and the North of Scotland Bank. I might point out here that I was only fifteen all the time I worked for Mr Steel – a child entrusted with sometimes hundreds of pounds; admittedly, mostly in cheques, but there were often quit
e a number of five pound notes, even tenners, neither of which were all that common then. Mind you, I was so young that it never crossed my mind that I could be in danger.
In those days, there were no breaks in the working day. I’d been told to start at nine in the morning, that I’d have an hour off for lunch – only time to wolf something down quickly before I’d to catch a bus back – and finish at six. There had been no mention of time off to have a cup of tea and, accustomed to having fifteen minutes playtime morning and afternoon at school, I was slightly worried as to how I would survive. I’m happy to say that I did much more than survive.
That first day, Mr Steel and the two reps had gone out on their daily round to collect orders from the shops, Evelyn, my superior and mentor, sent me up the brae to an Ice Cream Parlour, it may have been called the Washington Soda Fountain, for two bottles of lemonade. She must have paid for them, because I didn’t have any money. Then, wonder of wonders, she said, ‘Go through to the store and ask Jim for two cakes of chocolate.’
Jim Hay wasn’t my senior by very much, and he went to the end of a shelf, lifted the lid of one box and handed me two cakes of Fry’s Five Boys. I was to find out that he opened one box at a time and used it until it was empty, then started on another. That way, there was only one open box to camouflage. After about a fortnight, we got Cadbury’s Dairy Milk instead (my all-time favourite), and then, perhaps, moved on to Rowntrees. I asked Evelyn how much I’d have to pay for this, and she said, seriously, ‘Ach, pay at the end of the week, a penny ha’penny wholesale price instead of tuppence.’ (In today’s money, that would be roughly a quarter of a penny instead of half a penny, for a two-ounce bar.)
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 7