It was, all the cash and all the notes and cheques, so they went off, both grinning like Cheshire cats.
I didn’t think it was funny, especially when I had to work for another two and a half hours with the garter almost stopping my circulation and a knot digging into my thigh. I wished now that I’d let that man make his sheepshank or whatever it was; it would have been flatter. But the experience didn’t make me stop wearing garters, nor did my mother’s dire warnings of, ‘You’ll be as fat as your Auntie Jeannie by the time you’re forty if you don’t wear something to keep you in shape.’
She wasn’t far wrong in that prediction, though. I did start to gain weight in my forties and, try as I would, I never lost the three stones I put on the first time I stopped smoking (for four years), nor the other two I amassed after the second time (six years). But that was all in the future.
. . . AND WAR!
8
When I reached seventeen, my wages . . . sorry, salary was increased to sixteen shillings weekly, paid through the bank once a month. This wasn’t nearly so handy for me, but being able to tell my friends that I was now earning a ‘salary’ more than made up for the inconvenience. After attending evening classes over the winter, I had passed the Royal Society of Arts exams in Shorthand, Typing and Book-keeping at the Elementary stage, and was determined to go on to the Intermediate and Advanced stages, as well. As it happened, circumstances altered my plans, but more of that later.
I was given two weeks off with pay in August, and having saved a few bob, I decided to accept Auntie Gwen’s offer of a free holiday with her. The last holiday I’d had was my week in London with the school, but this was something in a different category. My aunt was far more modern in her views than my mother, and she wouldn’t stop me from doing whatever I wanted.
I made the trip myself by train; I knew about travelling, I’d been in London before. This was, of course, 1939, and there were already barrage balloons flying overhead, Air Raid Precautions stations built, trenches being dug. It astonished me that London was preparing for war, when there no sign of anything in Aberdeen. But on one of my solo outings in Lee Green something else intrigued me and I went running back to tell Auntie Gwen what I had seen.
‘There was a big box in one of the shop windows, and it had pictures on it that moved. Like a film, but not a film, and a crowd of people were standing watching. It was a lady singing into a microphone, and when the manager of the shop came out, he told us this was called television and soon there would be one in every home.’
I was so excited that Auntie Gwen left the pastry she was making and ran with me to see what this new invention looked like. She was equally as impressed as I was, saying, ‘I hope it’s not too expensive when it’s on sale. I’d love to have one, but your Uncle Jim’s a proper Scrooge. Won’t let me buy half of what I want.’
Aware that my mother thought Gwen was a wasteful housewife, I always regarded her with deep affection. She was fun, she didn’t worry about tomorrow like most women. ‘Tomorrow’ll take care of itself,’ she was wont to say. Maybe she shouldn’t have married Uncle Jim. On the other hand, maybe it was a good thing she had him to keep her from being a spendthrift.
The war, of course, put paid to the introduction of television for some time, but I’ll always remember the preparations for war and the entertainment from a box.
On the first Sunday in September, listening to Neville Chamberlain on the radio, we learned that Britain was now at war with Germany. Mum was quite shocked – hadn’t he assured us only a year before that there would be peace in our time? – but it didn’t worry me unduly. Aberdeen was much too far north for German bombers to reach – and we could carry on as usual.
There were changes, however. With petrol and diesel in short supply, all buses became mere shuttles, and we had to transfer to a tramcar at the bottom of Mid Stocket, a staggered junction where four streets met. It was a windy corner, and there seemed to be a competition between the drivers of the two kinds of transport as to which would arrive at the crucial stop first. Our bus service (for the duration) consisted of only one vehicle that went to the crest of the hill then turned and went back, generally in time to see the tail end of a tram sailing down Rosemount Place. With sometimes almost twenty minutes to wait for the next one, this left the passengers going to work in rather a nasty mood.
Soon after the outbreak of war, all the docks were cordoned off by high railings, and those who worked within the area, or had some message there, had to show a pass to get through the gates. This involved inventing some ingenious excuses for not having it with you, but this applied more to the female sex than to the men. Let me explain.
Women and girls are prone to changing their handbag to match their outfit, so if we had been out somewhere the evening before, it would be ten to one that we grabbed the bag we had been using then . . . but our permit was inside another. The harbour police were very efficient, but I discovered, after weeks of passing the two men who took alternate shifts, that it was quite safe to flip any old envelope at whichever was on duty that day, and he would let me past because he recognised me.
This was a bad practice, of course, and encourage me to be quite careless. Standing at the gate one morning, inevitably, was a strange policeman, who demanded a proper look at my pass.
The lie came automatically to my lips as I looked down at the envelope I was holding out. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is a letter from my cousin, and I thought it was the envelope I keep my pass in.’
‘You’d better find the right envelope, then,’ he said, sharply, ‘and be quick about it. I haven’t got all day.’
I glanced along at the clock on one of the buildings on Regent’s Quay. Five to nine! Time for desperate tactics. ‘I left it in my other handbag,’ I pleaded, ‘but you’ll have to let me in or I’ll be late for work.’
‘That’s your lookout,’ he . . . snarled, I think, would be the best description.
‘Please, I’ll get into trouble.’
‘You can’t come in till I see your pass.’
‘I told you . . . it’s at home.’
‘So? The quicker you go and get it, the quicker I’ll let you through.’
In tears now, I ran back up Market Street, had to wait ages for a tram in Union Street because it was past the rush hour, and then wait another ten minutes for the shuttle bus at the foot of Mid Stocket Road. It was almost ten o’clock before I arrived home, and, while I retrieved my other bag from where I’d thrown it the previous evening when I was dressing to go out, I had to suffer my mother’s sarcasm about not paying attention to important matters.
‘The only thing in your head now is the boys you meet,’ she added, hitting the nail squarely on the head.
Thankfully, the problem bobby said not a word as he glanced at my pass before letting me through – he likely didn’t even remember me – but it was still quarter to eleven before I raced into the office and had to undergo another lecture from Miss Murray.
None of this taught me a lesson, I’m ashamed to say. I left my permit at home several other times but never again came up against the policeman with no heart.
One day in the spring of 1940, I was one of a tramload of passengers on our way back from lunch. I was on the top deck chatting to a neighbour when a peculiarly staccato rat-a-tat-tat noise started, growing louder as it came nearer. We craned our necks to find out what was happening, but before we had time to see anything the driver rammed on his brakes and yelled, ‘They’re machine gunning us!’ He sprang off the vehicle and ran inside a shop for shelter. We had just rounded the corner into Union Terrace, with sunken gardens along the left side, a few shops and offices at the other side, not forgetting the Caledonian Hotel, the most prestigious in Aberdeen at the time. We could see the tracer bullets now as well as hear them, and as everyone else seemed paralysed in horror, my gallant companion leapt to his feet to take over the duty that should have been the driver’s.
‘Keep calm, everyone,’ he said, his voice
as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar, ‘there is no need to panic. The gunfire’s not so near now, so I think we should take the chance to get off the tram . . . in an orderly fashion!’
Knowing Freddie quite well, I could recognise his inner tension, but his quiet assumption of authority did the trick, and in a few minutes all passengers had been safely evacuated. We could see a German bomber being chased by several Spitfires, from Dyce Aerodrome we learned later, and what turned into a dog-fight was far enough away for us to stand on the pavement and watch.
A cheer went up when smoke started belching from the huge Heinkel, yet every person there was conscious of what could happen if it crashed. Its direction suggested an area of dense housing near the Bridge of Dee, with a probable high death toll. Word soon came out that it had actually landed – whether by some miracle or due to the pilot’s expertise – on a partially built ice rink, and there had been only one fatality . . . the pilot himself.
It turned out that he had been on a lone spree of destruction, starting an hour or more earlier. Having lost sight of the rest of his squadron, or whatever they call it in Germany, and still with his load of bombs intact, he had swooped in from the sea, dropping one after another. His first few fell between the Torry Battery (a fort built to repel the French during the Napoleonic Wars) and the house of one of the civilian workers there. The blast caused much damage to the house and its inhabitants, and killed several soldiers.
The next stick of bombs he released landed on and around the Boiler Room in Hall Russell’s shipyard, where many of the men were sitting out in the sun enjoying their dinner ‘pieces’. Nearly all were killed, and there were many casualties in other areas of the yard, too. All this had taken place with no alert sounded and no defence mounted.
Only then, it seems, did the enemy pilot come farther inland to avoid the ‘Spits’ that he knew would soon be after him. He reached the very outskirts of the city before turning and trying to make for the open sea again, but he’d been spotted and attacked by the Spitfires in the Rosemount area somewhere. There were many casualties, dead and wounded, on that, our first taste of real attacks.
The sting in the tail of this incident came, for my family, later that same day. No information was ever given out on the wireless, for obvious reasons, but the news was circulating throughout the city in no time, embellished each time it was passed on. The woman who shared a landing and a lavatory with my granny had been shopping in the town and when she got home, she couldn’t wait to tell the things she had heard. According to her, half of the harbour had been flattened and Hall Russell’s had been blown to smithereens.
She pulled herself up short. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs Paul. I forgot your Doug worked there.’ She tried then to undo the harm she had done. ‘Ach, it’s maybe just a rumour. I ken there was bombs, for I heard them, but maybe there wasna as much damage as folk say. Dinna worry, Mrs Paul. Doug’ll be fine. You’d have heard by this time . . .’
She left it at that, but she had said enough to make Granny sick with worry – for her son, an apprentice draughtsman with Hall Russell (he eventually rose to become Managing Director), and also for me, her granddaughter who worked in the harbour area.
Thankfully, all Hall Russell’s workers, blue and white collar, were allowed to go home once a check had been made on who was still all in one piece. Doug was in a somewhat dazed state but he was able to tell his mother that, as far as he knew, the harbour had not been bombed. He also reminded her that I’d have been on my dinner hour at the time, and well away from the harbour.
Relieved that her worry had been for nothing and with her mind completely at rest, Granny packed Doug off to bed and lit her gas iron to get on with her ironing before making the tea.
When Granda went home around five, she told him how worried she’d been and how good it was that neither Doug nor Doris had been harmed.
‘Oh, aye?’ he said quietly. ‘So you was worrying about Doug, and you was worrying about Doris, but you never gi’ed a thocht to the poor auld man.’
It turned out that he and his fellow gardeners in Ben Reid’s Nurseries at Hazlehead had also been machine-gunned. This must have been on the farthest point of the orbit the German pilot had made. ‘We’d to jump the dyke,’ he went on, ‘or the beggar would’ve got us.’
In late 1939, when one of our ‘boys’ volunteered for the RAF, Mum was left in something of a financial quandary. As she once observed, ‘I can’t even buy a thruppeny raffle ticket at the door.’ Worse was to come. My darling Granny suffered a stroke.
I must say something here about our family doctor, who passed away many years ago. Agnes Thomson was, I suppose, fiftyish – or looked fiftyish to me. She was a tall, mannish woman who always wore a grey tweed costume and could scare the living daylights out of me, but she had a heart of gold. There was no National Health Service then, and doctors charged 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence or twelve and a half pence in today’s currency) for each consultation or call-out . . . and these did not mean the five or so minutes like we’re allowed nowadays.
It must have been quite late at night when they discovered something was wrong with my grandmother. Besides Granda (who was absolutely lost and didn’t know where anything was kept), and Doug (at twenty-one, he was useless, too) there were three other men in the house. Of these three lodgers, it was Forbes Copland who took charge. Not one of the others would have known how to use a telephone supposing there had been one anywhere near, so I don’t know who was sent for the doctor – Doug, probably, on his bike.
However the doctor was told and she arrived at Ord Street in no time at all. I can’t give you a blow by blow account of what went on, but I can remember Granda saying, the next afternoon, ‘That woman’s an angel. She sat and held my Nell’s hand for hours. It was her that pulled her through.’
I can well believe that. Dr Agnes was sharp, abrupt and seemingly unfeeling when there wasn’t much wrong with you. She slapped my thigh once because I drew back my leg when she was pulling a verucca out of my foot. I can see her point, though. I did bleed all over her carpet. But she was an anchor to cling to if you were really ill. Plus, I know for a fact that she didn’t charge for her all night vigil with my granny . . . and probably not for many of her other patients in similar circumstances.
It took Granny a while to regain her power of speech that first time, and the use of her hands. What she never recovered was the use of her legs. For a few weeks, Forbes, with my Granda press-ganged to help him, made a pretty good job of providing breakfasts. My mother went there every day to do what she could and to make something for the tea. At last, Granny was forced to admit that she’d never be fit enough again to look after her lodgers, and asked Mum if she would take over.
At that time, before the National Health Service, if one member of a family was unable to look after herself, another member was expected to step in and do the needful. With Granny’s other daughter living sixteen miles off, the duty fell to my mother, a mere twenty-minute walk away.
This meant, of course, that she had to be with Granny until Granda came home at five. Doug – I only called him Uncle Doug when I wanted to annoy him – like all office workers, didn’t finish until six. So, for the best part of three years, my mother looked after two houses, doing all the cleaning, the laundry and the cooking for her parents and young brother, and her own lodgers (two originally Granny’s).
I had been going out with more than one of these young men – not at the same time, of course and nothing serious – but I was especially attracted to one of Granny’s, an apprentice mechanic with William Tawse, Contractors. Jimmy Davidson was two and a half years older than I was, a month older than Uncle Doug, who was born on the last day of 1919. If I remember correctly, Jimmy first came from Laurencekirk to work in Aberdeen when he was seventeen, but he was twenty when he was called up in February 1940. He did his training in the RAOC at Chilwell, then was attached to the Seaforths as a fitter and we corresponded all through the war. He also came to see us
every time he was home on leave.
Johnnie, another of Mum’s lodgers had volunteered for the RAF not long after war was declared, and then, some time after Jimmy left, Bill was called up and Forbes, twenty-eight years old by this time, also had to go. And so we were left with Jock, a man in his fifties, who had been one of Granny’s longest residents. One lodger, of course, was not enough to keep the household going, although I was able to give my mother a bit more board money by now.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but two problems were solved at one stroke when Granny, Granda and Doug moved into our house. Mum didn’t have to run back and fore to Ord Street any more, and had three new lodgers to replace those she had lost to the war.
The many men who were being called up had affected me too. Because there were not enough teachers available, the evening classes were stopped after my first year. Thankfully, Lever Brothers (the parent company) still honoured the age-related salary scale, even though I couldn’t continue with my studies.
Another little true anecdote here. A coal company called Adam Brothers was next to the Coast Lines in Jamieson’s Quay, and I got quite friendly with a young clerk there. We had the same lunch hour, and sometimes found ourselves walking along the quay together. Andy was tall, slim and quite good looking, so when he asked me out, I agreed to go to the pictures with him. (On a Friday night, the day he was paid, because there was no ‘going Dutch’ in those days. If a boy asked a girl out, he knew that he’d have to pay her into the cinema or wherever he took her.)
I was eighteen now, but my mother still considered me too young to be going with boys. I had always got over this by saying I was meeting Betty and Kitty, so I did the same this time, too. The date went off quite well, and I enjoyed it up to a point, but there was no magnetism between us, and I didn’t want to let him believe that there was. I was trying to let him down gently when I saw him on the Saturday morning – we just got Saturday afternoons off – and said my mother had given me a row for coming home so late the night before.
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 9