Gift from the Gallowgate

by Davidson, Doris;

  As instructed by Jimmy’s Auntie Jess, I usually made the Christmas pudding a few weeks earlier, and it only had to be simmered for an hour or so to heat it. Then there were the vegetables to prepare and cook, the custard sauce (no brandy, so no brandy butter) to be made and the mince pies to be baked. As you can imagine, that took me all morning and part of the afternoon, but sad to say, my family scoffed the lot in little over half an hour. They were very appreciative, though, so I didn’t mind.

  Now came the worst time of the year, for most Scottish women, at any rate. No matter how clean a wife kept her house over the other 364 days, everything had to be absolutely spotless by midnight on Hogmanay. She could not go peacefully into the New Year if she hadn’t cleaned and polished everything to within an inch of its existence. Blankets and quilts had to be washed, all cupboards emptied and scrubbed before their contents were replaced. The chimney had to be swept, a chimney sweep was regarded as lucky, but it also meant that the living room walls had to be brushed down, the curtains had to be washed, also every soot-covered ornament.

  To be honest, I often didn’t get my own face washed and clothes changed until a few minutes to the witching hour, by which time I was too tired to enjoy myself amongst the many neighbours who first-footed us and to whom we usually returned the compliment.

  This custom has its drawbacks, depending on where you actually live. In our little group of fourteen homes, if you went to every house, as Jimmy was often determined to do, you would be hard pushed to walk home, plus . . . it took all night to get round them. We didn’t start until midnight had struck, of course, not like south of the border where they celebrate during the evening, and I’ve seen it seven or eight in the morning before we got to bed.

  In fact, one earlier year I was pushing Jimmy upstairs at five minutes to nine (he did need some help) when the doorbell went. The doctor had come to see Sheila, who had been suffering for some time with an unexplained illness. He was on his way to see another patient, he explained, and had just popped in. While I took him up to see her, Jimmy went back to the scullery to give the doctor his ‘New Year’. He has never been very good at distinguishing whisky glasses (tots in those days) from sherry glasses (the only other drink we could afford for a long time), but I was still mortified when I saw what he had used . . . a thick glass eggcup. For the doctor, of all people.

  Mind you, the doc didn’t mind. He was very partial to alcohol and was most likely well-oiled before he reached us. By the way, this was not the doctor who ran me home from the garage many years before.

  His verdict on Sheila? ‘Keep her in bed until I come back.’

  He didn’t come back, so after a couple of weeks, when she said she felt better and wanted to go back to school, I let her go.

  I’ll never forget something that Dr C. said when Alan was still an infant. Jimmy and I had been kept awake by his screaming for nights, but we had to go to a wedding on the Saturday afternoon. Sheila had been invited, too, so my mother had offered to stay with the baby. When we got home about 9 p.m., Mum told us she’d had a terrible time with him. ‘You’ll have to phone the doctor.’

  This was a time when very few people had such a thing, and I had to run a good bit to find a phone box. I explained what was wrong and Dr C. asked, ‘Have you given him any whisky?’

  When, horrified, I said no, he went on, ‘Try him with a teaspoonful and if that doesn’t work, drink the rest of the bottle yourselves, and you won’t hear him.’

  It would have been round about this time that my mother’s Uncle Alex (Granda’s younger brother) died, and Jimmy was given his motor-assisted bicycle. This was a great help to him. He didn’t have to leave so early for work in the morning, and he was home a little earlier than before. Now, the peculiar thing about this was that his driving licence didn’t allow him to take his ‘gift’ on the road without L plates. He could drive a motorcycle, a ten-ton lorry, an ordinary motor car, even a tractor, yet it was no to an ordinary two-wheeler with a little engine inside a square box on the rear carrier. I ask you?

  It was the year of the Suez crisis, so although he applied for a licence right away, he had to wait many months before he was allowed to have a test. Fifteenth September at 10 a.m., it said on the card, so he had to ask time off work. When he left the house, the big L plates on the front and rear mudguards proclaimed that he was a mere novice, yet he’d been driving since he was seventeen . . . and over five years in the war, on all kinds of vehicles.

  ‘You’d better have got rid of them before you come back,’ I warned him, in fun, naturally. He couldn’t fail, could he?

  Imagine how I felt – and how he must have felt – when I saw the bike coming round the corner into the cul de sac with the white square of celluloid still there, and the red ‘L’ still to the fore.

  ‘I didn’t fail,’ he said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘They said I was two weeks late, so I’d missed the test.’

  I couldn’t credit this. The card had said the fifteenth, and this was the fifteenth, so how could he have been two weeks too late? When we studied the card, however, we realised what had happened. Whoever had filled in the date on the printed card had written what we thought was a one and a five with a little squiggly ‘th’. What it turned out to be was a one and a big S with a little squiggle for a ‘t’. Not fifteenth, but first. Fortunately the Licensing Officer got him another test two weeks later, so he didn’t have too long to put up with his workmates’ jibes.

  A SECOND CAREER

  16

  When Hilda Glennie, née Mathieson, walked into the shop one night in 1963, she was surprised to find me working there. I hadn’t seen her for a few years – she was the school friend who had later worked in the Co-op haberdashery department in Loch Street – and remembering what she had once told me, I asked, ‘Are you on your way to practise with your opera company?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m going to evening classes. I want to be a teacher, but I need qualifications to get into the Training College, and here are you, Dux of the school, behind a counter serving sweeties. What a waste of a brain.’

  Before I could ask any questions as to how or where or when, a man pushed his way in front her. ‘Twenty Benson and Hedges, please.’

  Hilda left with a smiling, ‘Think about it.’

  I was preoccupied for the rest of that evening. As a teacher, I’d have the same holidays as Alan – by this time Sheila was married and living in England – so that would be a bonus to add to the dangling carrot of the salary. When I went home I asked Jimmy what he thought, and as usual he was cautious, ‘There’s no harm in going to find out about it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, if that’s what you want.’

  After a sleepless night, I waited until my little brood had left for work and school, then dressed carefully to go to the College of Education, better known as the Training College or more familiarly T.C., to enquire how to gain entrance. I was told that I’d need three Highers (the Scottish equivalent to ‘A’ levels) and two Lowers (‘O’ levels) and the entrance date was the first week in October, also that I should attend classes at the Commercial College to gain these qualifications. ‘There is no grant for your first year of study,’ the man continued. ‘You have to prove yourself capable of carrying on, but a grant will be paid for your second year, provided, of course, that you have passed the first exams you sat.’

  I went home somewhat bewildered. If I wanted to be a teacher and earn a decent salary, I’d have to attend evening classes. That would mean I’d have to give up my part-time job and there was no grant for a first year of study. I explained the position to Jimmy that night, and he was more optimistic than I was. ‘You’ll definitely get a grant in your second year.’

  ‘Only if I pass what I sit in the first year,’ I almost wailed. ‘I’ll be forty-one in June, and it’s nearly twenty-six years since I left school. How do I know I’ll cope with lessons again? My brain likely won’t take things in.’r />
  He was exasperated with me now, I could see that. ‘Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing wrong with your brain.’

  I left it at that, and the next day saw me applying to the Commercial College for more information. Imagine my surprise to learn that the entrance exams were taking place that very evening. The clerk noted my name and address before saying, ‘You won’t be thinking of trying tonight’s exams, though?’

  When I nodded, he said, ‘There are only two. English for the first hour, then Maths, just enough to let us see if you stand any chance of passing.’

  I thanked him and walked out into the lovely May sunshine. He obviously didn’t think much of my chances. He had likely been wondering how an old hag like me could hope to pass one, never mind two. I sat down when I went home, trying to think what I could do. I could pass English, I’d no doubt about that, but Maths was a different matter. I’d never been exactly happy with numbers, and I had forgotten most of what I’d learnt.

  On my way home, I went in to R. S. McColl’s to tell the manageress that I wouldn’t be in that night, and then agonised all afternoon over the ordeal in front of me. I had quite enjoyed using algebra at school to solve problems, but I wouldn’t know where to start now. Neither could I recall what the formula was for finding the area of a circle. A square was simple, length times breadth, and the same for a rectangle, but that was as far as I could go . . . and as for solids and cubic measurements, that was a blank page. I’d never been able to master logarithms, but surely – oh, surely – there wouldn’t be a question on that in the exam?

  As soon as he came home, Jimmy could see how upset I was, and bless him; he did his best to cheer me. ‘You’ll easily manage, don’t worry. Look, I’ll give you a run down to Holburn Street so you won’t have to scutter about taking two buses. And never mind about the dishes, I’ll soon clear everything up.’

  About three quarters of an hour later, I stepped out of the car, the A40 I think, and tried to pull myself together as I trembled up the stairs. There were about thirty boys and girls already seated at the desks, and they all looked as if they had just newly left school. I stood out like a sore thumb, but I told myself that there was no point in coming this far and copping out now. As soon as the invigilator told us to turn over our papers and begin, I bent my head to concentrate on the English paper.

  There were questions on grammar, on punctuation, on changing sentences from past to present tense and singular nouns to plural, that sort of thing. Kids’ stuff! Then we came to the business of writing an essay, something I’d always loved. There were about five choices of theme, and I chose: ‘Describe a regular ritual or event peculiar to your own town or village.’ That may not have been the exact wording, but it’s as near as I can remember, and as soon as I read it, I could visualise Aberdeen’s ‘Timmer Market’.

  This was held yearly on the last Thursday of August, and had been a milestone in my life for as long as I could remember. It was held in the Castlegate, a marketplace which, every Friday and Saturday, held stalls selling secondhand furniture, books, clothes, plus my favourite, the fabric stall. There were also the glib quick-sell men with their dishes and gadgets for the house.

  The Timmer Market of the twenties to the fifties and sixties mostly sold items made of wood (timmer being the Doric for timber). There were many stalls selling wooden toys, some selling candy, plums, monkey nuts, locust beans or other eatables that children liked. During the morning and afternoon, therefore, it was mainly mothers and children who wandered around, and the kids were soon clutching a monkey climbing a stick, or an acrobat doing somersaults between two sticks, or a handful of balloons. I don’t think helium was on the go then, just ordinary blow-them-up-yourself types.

  In the evening, though, there was only a scattering of older children, and the rest of the throng consisted mostly of men buying wooden guns or large lorries for their sons, dolls for their daughters or little trinkets for their wives. Because it was pay night, most had already paid a visit to one of the drinking establishments nearby and were in a generous mood, so the stallholders had found business pretty brisk. This was the most impressive time. The stalls were illuminated by naphtha flares, the smell of which – mingled with the sweet aroma of candy and the stink of the rotten plums that littered the ground and made you watch your step – was something I have never forgotten. As soon as you came round the corner from Union Terrace into Union Street, whether in a bus, a tramcar or on foot, your nose could pick up the smell, your eyes were haunted by the flickering flares. It always excited me, even when I was a mother myself and had little to spend.

  A Timmer Market is still held every year, but few wooden items are on sale, just the usual type of cheap-John ornaments and tat . . . at least from what I hear. I haven’t gone for years.

  From what I’ve written about it, you can perhaps understand why I picked that as a subject for my essay, and I’ve always believed that what I wrote about the Timmer Market that night won me my pass in English. I was very glad that this came first. If Maths had been first, I’d have panicked, but having successfully handled the English part, I felt more confident. The Arithmetic paper was fairly straightforward, but then came the very things I had dreaded: the formulas that I couldn’t remember. Worse, when I let my eye run down to the last section, dotted with a’s and b’s and x’s and y’s, I laid down my pencil. There was no point in going any further, so I took my jacket off the back of the chair, handed in my unfinished paper and walked out. Being the very first to go, I could guess that the others were wondering how I had managed to answer all the questions so quickly. Little did they know.

  Jimmy tried to console me, but how could I have passed the Maths exam when I’d only answered half of it? But at least I had tried, and as he said, ‘That’s the main thing.’

  We were very busy the following Saturday evening in the shop with the first influx of holidaymakers, and even with five of us working as fast as we could, there were always people waiting to be served. I was giving a woman her change when I noticed that the person behind her was the man who had been invigilating at the examination. My heart plunged until it dawned on me that he wouldn’t have known I worked there and he probably wouldn’t remember me anyway.

  But he’d had time to recognise me – I’d stuck out among the youngsters – and he came forward smiling when I said, ‘Next, please?’ How could he smile when he must think I was an ignorant middle-aged woman who hadn’t a hope of ever setting foot inside a classroom again?

  ‘This is a pleasant surprise, Mrs Davidson, but you will understand that I am not at liberty to tell you your marks.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I was glad that he couldn’t tell me how badly I’d done, especially in front of a shopful of people. I’d never have been able to hold my head up again.

  ‘I’ll just say this, in case you are worrying, you came out on top.’

  I could hardly believe it, but before I had time to react in any way, he added, ‘Half a pound of Chocolate Violets, please. My wife’s favourite.’

  He handed me the correct money in exchange for the paper bag – closed in the way I’d been taught – and said, ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you in August,’ before he turned away and was lost in the crowd.

  My head was in a whirl. I had passed! I had actually passed. After missing out half the questions, I had come top. That couldn’t be right . . . could it?

  The official result, letting me know that although I had done well in English, I had passed Maths by the skin of my teeth, came with a letter telling me to report on such-and-such a date to give particulars of which subjects I intended studying in my first year. Higher English was essential, and I chose Higher Geography and Lower Mathematics. That left just one higher and one lower to sit in my second year, giving me scope for resitting anything I failed in the first.

  These were duly noted, but I discovered that the Higher subjects were all day classes; only the Lower grades were dealt with in the evenings. This put a different comple
xion on things. I had hoped to change my part-time job to mornings or afternoons to let me have the evenings free to study, but this meant that daytime hours were out, too.

  I did wonder if I could possibly manage on Jimmy’s pay when I had textbooks to buy over and above what I’d need for housekeeping. My thoughts went round in a circle – it was only for one year; I’d get a grant for my second year; surely I would manage if I was extra careful?

  Sheila had married and flown the coop by this time, so I had already lost the board money she paid me out of her pay as a trainee commercial artist. I told myself that I couldn’t give up now, and when Jimmy’s niece was accepted at the Hairdressing part of the Commecial College, I agreed to let her lodge with me. Then I was asked to take her friend, who was training as a nurse, and because they got very little in wages, I said I would just charge them ten shillings each, provided they helped me in the house. I knew I’d be pushed to do everything myself, when I would be out so much, plus I’d have to study a lot at home.

  I should have known it wouldn’t work. They were two sixteen-year-olds, had never been away from home before and, coming to the city from the small town of Laurencekirk, they wanted to make the most of their freedom. I won’t go into all the details, but I eventually had to tell them to find somewhere else. This of course didn’t please my sister-in-law, and relations between us were practically non-existent for quite a long time.

  The year flew past, but I found it exhilarating if hard work. There were only five of us in the Higher Geography class, three young lads and a girl who had left school two years earlier and we all became close friends. Things were made more interesting by having to go to different places for the different classes. For instance, we had to go to Marywell Street School for English, quite a distance from the College although under its supervision. Geography lessons were in St Katherine’s Club, even farther away. The ‘O’ level Arithmetic class was in the College itself . . . in the evenings.