Jimmy gaped at me, appalled. ‘Did he say what I thought he said?’
‘Let it be,’ I cautioned. ‘He doesn’t know what it means. I’ll have a quiet word with him when I’m putting him to bed.’
We had finished all the food and drinks by just after our normal lunchtime, and I was on the point of asking the two little boys – they couldn’t have been more than four at the time – if they wanted to go home, when the heavens opened . . . with no warning whatsoever.
We had no choice but to put all our rubbish into one of the paper bags to take home with us, there were no litter bins then, and trail our tired, sodden bodies along the road past Girdleness Lighthouse to the bus terminus. We had some time to wait, but there was a shelter, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. On the way home, it occurred to me that my washing – my greenful of sheets, pillowcases and towels as well as lots of clothes – was hanging outside in the downpour. They’d have been dry before the rain came on, and now I would have to wash the lot again.
Not taking time to do anything when I went into the house, I ran straight through and out of the back door – front and back doors were directly opposite each other – stopping in astonishment when I saw the four poles standing forlornly with no ropes, no washing near them. Guessing that Mrs S. had taken them in, I knocked on her back door. (For as friendly as we were, we never got into the habit of walking into each other’s house unannounced.)
She handed me a basket full of beautifully folded clothes, sheets and whatever else had been out. ‘I took them in as soon as I saw spots of rain on the window,’ she told me. ‘There wasna a soul left in the cul-de-sac except us, and I was that fed up, I ironed the lot for you, an’ all.’
My thanks were heartfelt, and Jimmy could hardly believe me when he saw what she had done. The other families had all taken a day out because it was a local holiday, but her husband, a stone mason, had been sent to Perthshire on a job, and hadn’t had the weekend off.
I should explain here that, although Mrs S. and most of the neighbours called it a cul-de-sac, the fourteen houses (blocks of four, six and four again) were actually built around a half circle of grass, with entry and exit from both ends.
This incident, however, also had a sting in the tail. As I had promised, I had told Alan quietly that evening that he mustn’t use that word again; it wasn’t a nice word, and that was the finish of it, as far as I was concerned. On the Wednesday following this, I took him to visit one of my cousins, who was in Woodend Hospital recuperating from an operation. It was an easy walk from our house, and like all small boys, Alan’s tongue never halted as we strolled along. Visiting time was from three o’clock until half past, so he managed to keep reasonably quiet by watching all the comings and goings of staff and visitors in the ward.
We said our goodbyes and emerged into the fresh air again (hospitals always give me a queasy feeling) and set off for home. I had noticed Alan glancing behind a few times, but we were within sight of our house, walking along Ythan Road (the streets in this part of the scheme were all named after Scottish rivers) when he said, ‘Mummy, that f - f - f - f . . .’
He broke off, obviously searching for a word to replace the forbidden word he had almost used again, but when I turned to see why he’d kept on looking round, I could see only a small dog, nothing beginning with ‘f’.
His furrowed brow cleared suddenly as he smiled, ‘That f – feathery dog’s been following us all the way from the hospital.’
He had taken note of my little lecture – and nothing of the kind ever happened again. But Jimmy and I had a good laugh about it. Mind you, I’d hadn’t known myself what the word actually meant until he explained it to me a year or so earlier, which just shows how sheltered my life had been before we moved to Mastrick. None of the men I’d ever worked with would have dreamt of using bad language in front of the female sex. Yes, they told risque jokes, but swearing was taboo, whereas in our little ‘cul-de-sac’, even one or two of the women swore like troopers, which is how Alan had picked it up.
Unfortunately, it had to be that word, which was the most vile of all in those days; not like today when it is sprinkled liberally throughout almost every programme on television. I can even see it eventually becoming accepted as just a normal everyday word.
Having done all my washing by hand for a few years, even the bulky, oily boiler-suits, I was delighted when I heard of a man hiring out washing machines at two shillings and sixpence per hour (less than 13p). It was quite expensive at that time, but I didn’t hesitate to jump at it, as did most of my neighbours; anything to cut down the hard labour washdays usually meant. The procedure started in much the same way as Mum’s old hand-worked monster, but once it was filled, it did the washing by itself – worked by electricity.
There was still the same business of rinsing each load, but I now had a wringer attached to the metal parts between my two sinks. That took the graft out of getting the water out of the clothes. An hour, as you can imagine, was a very short time, but it’s amazing how a person can make time fit with her needs. Maybe that should be ‘make her needs fit into the time available’. At any rate, I had the machine emptied, cleaned and dried out before the entrepreneur came to take it to his next customer.
After another few years, I managed to buy a spin drier, which was another great invention.
Minnie, Jimmy’s sister, and her family had visited us on New Year’s Day one year, complete with their ancient spaniel, so when I detected a nasty smell the following morning, I thought that the dog had done his business somewhere in our living room. No matter where I looked, however, I couldn’t see anything, and even after I’d scrubbed every inch of my jaspé linoleum (a step up from our original congoleum) with disinfectant, pulling furniture away from the walls, the stink was still there and getting stronger.
It grew so bad that I had to telephone the clerk of works, who had a sniff around and said, ‘I think there must be a dead mouse under your fireplace.’
He sent in the health inspector, who shook his head. ‘It smells more like a dead cat to me, and we’ll have to take your whole fireplace out.’
Thankfully, before he issued that order, he lifted the trapdoor under the stairs to see if anything else would suggest itself. It did! Instead of a drop of some ten feet to the ground, there was water almost up to the floorboards, dirty, filthy water that I’m not even going to try to describe.
‘That’s sewage,’ he informed me, dolefully. ‘Something’s blocking the drain. It could be anywhere along this block, but because you’re in the middle of the row, it’s your pipe that’s burst.’
The upshot was that I had to take Alan to Mid Stocket for the day, to let the workmen have free rein with whatever they had to do. When I returned about five o’clock, they had gone, the whole house was reeking of some extremely potent disinfectant, the kind that catches your throat, but at least there was only a slight trace of the awful stench there had been before.
The neighbours told me that the men had connected a hosepipe to drain off the sewage and it had run down the brander in the street outside for hours. When that dried up, dozens of barrow loads of ‘hard core’, like pebbles, were tipped down to prevent a recurrence of the problem.
It was some time, though, before I stopped getting the occasional whiff of what, until then, had been the worst smell I had ever come across in my life.
This wasn’t our only acquaintance with a sickening smell, however, and the second was even more revolting than the first – horrifying in itself and with even more appalling aftereffects. I think it would have been in the spring of 1961 or ’62 that a bad outbreak of foot and mouth disease affected cattle in Aberdeenshire. We townsfolk had little idea of the devastation this could cause, and when we learned that all herds open to infection were to be slaughtered and buried, all we felt was a slight pity for the farmers. Pity turned to dismay and then horror when the chosen burial ground was named – the grounds of the ruined Springhill House, an area we could se
e from the windows of our little crescent of houses.
There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of carcasses to be put away, and we were deafened for days and days on end by the noise of diggers and the thuds as each cow was tossed into the mass grave. When, at last, it was over, we settled down to enjoy what promised to be a glorious summer.
Some weeks later, I heard a van tooting and on looking out of the window, saw it was the butcher. At that time we had no shops near us, and we depended on vans for most commodities – groceries, butcher meat, bakery, vegetables, fish. They were really handy. I couldn’t help wondering why the two women already forming a queue were holding hankies to their noses. I soon found out. When I opened the door, I recoiled at the stench that assaulted my nostrils, and whipped out my own hankie. The summer had indeed turned out to be glorious . . . too glorious for what lay underground just a few hundred yards away.
It took the council, or whichever body was responsible, weeks to come to that conclusion; all sorts of other, ludicrous reasons for the smell were offered first. Meanwhile, we poor residents had just to put up with it. To this day, Sheila says she can still remember what it smelt like, and so can most of the people living there at the time, I’ll be bound. At last, it was decided that the mass grave would have to be opened again, and proper lime used instead of the quicklime (probably cheaper) that had originally been tossed over the carcasses to dissolve them.
Even so, the smell hung around for another eternity, but thankfully, no one suffered any other ills.
The mention of the butcher’s van has brought back some other memories. Our cuisine at that time, and for all the time we lived in Mastrick, was fairly limited. Good plain fare, but still quite limited. Mince, of course, was a staple dish. At a shilling for three-quarters of a pound, it was cheap as well as nourishing. Another favourite was stovies (stoved potatoes). For the benefit of those who are not acquainted with this delicacy, it consists of potatoes, a little meat of some kind, and a sliced onion or two.
The meat, of course, depended on what was left in my purse. Quite often, it was corned beef – a quarter pound was enough to make a big potful, and only cost a few pennies. A quarter of mince would do, but sometimes I was reduced to using a couple of sausages that had been kept back especially for this purpose. If they were sliced thinly, they gave the impression of more meat than there actually was.
Macaroni and cheese, in fact any dish with cheese, was acceptable, but the mainstay of all households at that time was homemade soup. A piece of boiling beef, plate sometimes, or rib, along with whatever vegetables you had (home grown mostly) would make enough for three or four meals – lentil soup, tattie soup, broth – thick enough to stick to your ribs. A fish-and-chip van parked not far from us every night, but this was a luxury, only to be bought when finances could stretch to it, and enjoyed all the more because of that.
Salads were not very common, in our house, anyway. Jimmy didn’t think they were filling enough, and neither were boiled eggs. ‘Not enough for a working man,’ he’d say, and I suppose he had a point.
There was always a pudding to follow. No fancy desserts, though. Rice baked in the oven, custard with raisins, sago or tapioca with a spoonful of jam, seven-cup-pudding if I was flush, roly-poly, sponge. On someone’s birthday, I always made a dumpling. This was fairly expensive, but I couldn’t let a birthday go past without a dumpling, with tiny three-penny bits in it, or little metal favours, like a motor car, a top hat, a boat. These were, naturally, wrapped in greaseproof paper in case the consumer choked on them, and the same ones were used every year. The Christmas pudding had no metal additions, but was much, much richer.
These dumplings and puddings were usually cooked in a steamer, but the most delicious of all, a clootie dumpling, was boiled in a cloth for hours and hours. Eaten as it was on its first outing, it might be eaten cold the next day with sugar sprinkled over, sliced and fried the day after . . . a clootie dumpling was the most versatile of all.
When we could afford it, we ate quite a lot of fried food – bacon and eggs, sausages, fish. No one worried about calories or cholesterol – they’d never been heard of. If you were meant to be fat, you were meant to be fat. That’s what I told myself, and bearing in mind my three colossal aunts, there was every chance that I would grow like them . . . which I nearly have. I did mention my aunts once to the doctor when he said I should watch my weight. I excused my size by saying that fat ran in our family.
He laughed that off, of course. ‘Bad eating habits are what run in your family.’
Maybe he was right.
14
Back to everyday life in Mastrick. Having a continual struggle financially, I became an adept needlewoman, creating new trousers for Alan out of old material (no front openings), making skirts for Sheila with new material bought from the fabric stall in the Castlegate Market. This was sold cheap because it was flawed, but the defect was never so big that it couldn’t be avoided. I just had to move the paper patterns around a bit – bought in Woollies for sixpence each or made by myself on newspaper – until they would fit. Some years on, I was confident enough to make myself a coat from blanket material and, although I say it myself, made a pretty good job of it. But that was after I took a part-time job and could afford it.
As with all houses, old and new, the décor didn’t take long to fade or get dirty, especially as both Jimmy and I were smokers at that time. Of course, cigarettes were far less expensive than they are now (I can remember how worried I was when they rose to one shilling and fourpence for twenty in a Budget one year), but it didn’t cure us of the habit. I bought Player’s Weights or another of the smaller brands for myself, and Jimmy preferred Capstan Full Strength, but more often he was reduced to Woodbines, neither of which did his chest any good. There were no warnings then about smoking being bad for your health, so we gloried on, yet I did sometimes shudder to think what we were doing to our lungs when all our wallpaper and paintwork were some degree of brown, depending on what they had been originally.
I changed the colour schemes occasionally to cheer myself up, but this presented something of a poser since money never matched up with ideas. As soon as Alan had the back bedroom to himself, he wanted wallpaper with aeroplanes on it, the colours ranging from the blue of the sky, to the white of the clouds, to the silver-grey of the planes themselves, to the red of the markings. This was ideal for a boy’s room and quite cheap; the only fly in the ointment was the bright yellow curtains that I’d made to go with the previous paper. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and I got round the problem by using a school paintbox and a sparsely-haired paintbrush to add a touch of yellow to each of the numerous aircraft – hundreds, it seemed like.
On the subject of curtains, I made a proper faux pas one day. I was the only one in all the sixteen houses who had a sewing machine – an old Jones box top model inscribed ‘by appointment to Her Majesty Queen Alexandra’ and inherited from Jimmy’s Auntie Ann – and I was often asked to ‘run up’ some curtains. Not literally, of course; that would have been somewhat beyond my ability, even at eight stone seven. (It’s hard even for me to believe that I was ever as lightweight as that, but it’s the Gospel truth.)
At first, I didn’t mind obliging my neighbours, and I knew they couldn’t afford to pay me, but I got a bit miffed when they didn’t even supply the reels of thread, sometimes it needed two or three and they weren’t exactly cheap when you’re on a skin-tight budget. I felt that was a bit thick.
Anyway, that wasn’t what I set off to say. A lady who lived round the corner came to my door one day to ask if I’d make an apron for her little boy who was starting school the following week. I took her inside until I drew out a shape on an old newspaper, and then measured that against my table, exactly a yard square, to tell her how much material she would need.
While I was thus engaged, she’d been having a good look around my living room. ‘D’you know this, Mrs Davidson?’ she said suddenly. ‘I thought your house would
be like a palace, but you haven’t even got a carpet.’
I was rather put out at this slur, because I knew of at least one other woman in the vicinity who was in the same boat as I was – a couple of mats covering the linoleum on the floor. Anyway, Mrs M. asked me to go back with her to see if there would be enough material in an old dress of hers.
I was still a bit piqued as we walked round the corner to her house. After all, mine might not be like a palace, but it was as clean as a whistle and I had never expected anyone to criticise it. As soon as we went into her living room, though, I could see why she had. A deep-pile, expensive-looking carpet covered her floor, the furniture was much more impressive than mine and included a flashy cocktail cabinet, as she informed me, proudly – not the flashy, just the cocktail bit. Not only that, but there were fancy ornaments and knick-knacks on all available flat surfaces, and even her table was adorned with a wine chenille cover with long fringes. When I told Jimmy all this later, he said that everything had likely been bought on tick, and at least we didn’t have any debts to worry about – which did cheer me a little.
Harking back to the apron, there was enough material in the skirt of the dress to make two, so she produced a large pair of scissors and told me to cut what I needed; she wanted to use what was left for something else. Dusters, I daresay. I smoothed the skirt out and laid the pattern on, using the few pins she could supply to fix it in position. Then I started to cut. Her scissors weren’t as sharp as they might have been, but at last I was back where I had started. I laid the scissors down and lifted up what I thought were two embryo pinnies. I was wrong. There were three! On inspection, I was mortified to find that two were cotton and . . . one was in gorgeous wine chenille – with fringes!
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 17