by Sandra Brown
He fantasized about having a sideline that would make him money and lead to the kind of lifestyle to which he felt he was entitled. He thought of inventing something, and set up the small back bedroom as a workshop, which fast degenerated into a Steptoe-like room full of objects such as radios or clocks, which he was always in the middle of taking apart. My mother gave up trying to tidy this mess and simply closed the door on his domain. I can recall her muttering that she hoped one day they would have a place where he could have a workshop outside.
I started school in January 1954, aged five. I began at Whifflet Primary, in the days when there were two intakes a year. I loved my first day there, and was only slightly disconcerted by someone sitting next to me leaving a steamy puddle directly below our joint desk, which with great empathy I ignored. I came home amazed to have made the discovery that I shared my Christian name with another little girl, Sandra Corbett. Thrilled by all the new experiences I had encountered, I regaled my mother with the letters of the alphabet I had learnt, and tested her thoroughly, checking that she understood.
‘I already know my ABC,’ she explained, with a laugh. ‘You’re the one that’s started school to learn all your letters, and it’s going to take a long, long time. I hope you manage to stay at school longer than me – I had to leave at age fourteen even though I got medals, to work in Coatbridge. You won’t have to leave early, but you’ve got to go back tomorrow, young lady, and stick in at your lessons. At this rate, you’ll never get up in the morning.’
‘I’ve got to go back?’ I was horrified. Like many another child before me, the realization that school stretched ahead for years was incomprehensible. I went off to bed in a grumpy mood.
I stayed at Whifflet Primary for a year, but in 1955 two milestones disrupted my scholarly routine. One was the birth of my younger brother, of whose impending arrival I had been told nothing. I was sent on holiday to Granny Jenny’s and the first I knew of Ian’s birth was after I came home and spotted a cot beside my parent’s bed. I was captivated by a tiny hand waving in the air. His birth meant that we needed a bigger home, and this is how we came to be offered what we regarded as a step up in the world, the house at 51 Dunbeth Road, Coatbridge, about a mile and a half from Whifflet.
My mother was thrilled. It was downstairs, instead of upstairs on a landing, it was near all the shops in the town centre, and was opposite the town hall and the police station. The smaller number of people in the building meant the wash houses did not need such a strict rota, and drying greens would be more flexible, a boon for someone with a young baby, but we had inherited yet another shared outside toilet.
Number 51 had a small kitchenette, a living room with two bed recesses and a separate room for my parents. There was even a tiny garden, which my mother enjoyed filling with wallflowers and Virginia stock and Tom Thumbs, teaching me how to plant the tiny seeds.
In our main living space, one bed recess had a double bed fitted into it for the children, while my father set about converting the other to a dining area, with makeshift bench and table.
My father was by now working on the buses: he did shifts with sometimes unsocial hours. To compensate, his wages rose remarkably from sixteen shillings to several pounds per week, which in the 1950s represented good money. So much so, that he began to look out for a family car. Mr Allison, the butcher, had allowed him to use the van at weekends, and my father missed it.
After trying to resurrect one or two old bangers, he purchased a shiny black Baby Austin car from a Mr Cowie, who was retiring from his hairdresser’s shop in Coatdyke. We were all excited at the arrival of the new addition to the family – especially me, when my father drove me to my new school.
Gartsherrie Academy was a large, handsome Victorian building, which dominated the top of the highest hill in Coatbridge, vying for position with Mount Zion, the local name for the kirk with its clock that even today presents four slightly varying faces of the hour to the town.
My father now had two main obsessions outside his work: taking things to bits, and his Baby Austin, which became his pride and joy. He lavished all his spare time on it, polishing and cleaning its bodywork, painting the black mudguards, and treating any signs of impending rust. Anyone laying a finger on the gleaming surface of the bonnet or boot was shouted at, and I was horrified when Ian, my little brother, who had just turned two, was soundly beaten for daubing it with white emulsion paint. Children of all ages, but in particular my friends, were attracted to this vehicle like bees to a honey pot, and it was regarded then as a great treat to be taken even a short distance in someone’s car.
A car meant outings for all the family. Going off on a day trip, bags stuffed with sandwiches, was a welcome event, especially as going off on a fortnight’s break, perhaps ‘doon the watter’ to Millport or Rothesay, was financially out of the question. In the Baby Austin, we would set off to places like the East Neuk of Fife, particularly the Silver Sands at Aberdour, and Culross, Pittenweem and Burntisland. Our other favourites on the West Coast were Largs and Ayr, and inland, if it was too cool for the seaside, we headed to Loch Lomond, where Balmaha was a well-loved spot.
On these family outings, I have no recollection of my father doing anything other than driving us there and back, and joining in the picnic lunch. He would disappear with his car after he had eaten, leaving us playing and my mother reading or chatting to one of the grannies, whom we often squeezed in. We assumed that he was meeting fellow bus drivers, familiar with the billiard halls and other social haunts popular with those who had brought busloads of trippers.
At first I loved it when my new friends who lived around Dunbeth Road came to play and we were offered the chance to go for a short trip by my father. I felt special as they ran to ask their parents if they were allowed to go with Sandra and her daddy. Laughing excitedly, we would all pile in. There was Joy, who lived beside the Maxwell church, which had a drama club for youngsters that she was desperate for me to join. You had to be over seven, so I had a little while to wait, but with her I went to see a show put on by the Maxwell church kids. The two Anderson girls, Moira and her sister Janet, and Moira’s pal, Elizabeth Taylor, were all in this club, and Joy and I saw them on stage. We could not wait to be up there singing and dancing too. Joy and I went to Brownies together too. I became friends with two ‘sisters’, both called Elizabeth. One had long dark ringlets and was called by her full name, the other was fair, with identical ringlets, and known as Beth. They were cousins, in fact, being brought up together. Another pal who sometimes tagged along was Elizabeth Bunting, who lived further down Dunbeth Road, a few doors away. A bubbly redhead, who often had uncontrollable fits of the giggles, she was in my class at Gartsherrie Academy. Elizabeth’s father was the manager of our local Co-op store. There were other girls, too, Jean and Beryl, the inspectors’ daughters from the police houses.
My father would take me and a group of my friends to local beauty spots, like the lochs at Coatbridge, now a country park. Then there was only a rudimentary car park – used at night by the odd courting couple – a dilapidated toilet block, set among a clump of rhododendron bushes, and paths for walkers. One hot day in 1956, he took some of us away to this remote area. The eldest of us would have been eight or nine, the others just seven. When we got there I was sent for ice creams from a van we had passed. It was a fair distance away and I returned with ice cream cones dripping up my arms to find the doors of the black Baby Austin locked, the windows misted. I could, however, make out that clothing was scattered about inside before everyone got out. What, I puzzled to myself, had been going on? Had he been playing the horrible Beardie game or what?
Once, in the same place, we had all got into the car to escape a shower of rain. I was in the front passenger seat, and my father began a tickling game. As usual, when he gripped my knee and tweaked it, I let out a cry, then laughed as he went for my ribs. Two of my playmates in the back giggled at his antics, then he turned his attention to them. My head swivelled round over my
right shoulder, and I saw that while I had got underarm and rib tickling, he was tugging at my friends’ knickers and groping at their chests. I turned away, feeling sick. I pulled up my knees and hunched over them, staring straight ahead, trying to ignore the noises. Something told me that what was happening was wrong. Two of my chums had no father figure, so it may be that they thought this was how a loving father behaved. Perhaps they felt reassured by my presence that all was well.
I remember at that same lochside spot, my friends giggled when he played with us in the rhododendron bushes, but it struck me as odd that a grown man would want to join in hide and seek with wee girls. He took turns at coming to look for us, and said he knew good places to hide if anyone wanted to go with him. My confusion grew as I played through that summer, and I found excuses not to be near him. He only laughed at my discomfort.
One day, I was told by Elizabeth, the redhead, that she was not allowed to play with me any more, and no reason was given. Beth and Elizabeth, too, came to say that they were not allowed to play with me any more or to cross the doorstep of 51 Dunbeth Road. ‘We’re just not to, and we’re not allowed to say why,’ they murmured in unison, shaking their ringlets disconsolately. Their cheeks were pink.
Aged seven and eight, I could not form my doubts into questions, and something would not allow me to talk to anyone, particularly not my mother. However, I worked out ways of keeping my friends clear of my dad. I could not have forseen that Alexander would shift his attention from my friends to young girls he lured into his bus cabin.
His behaviour was witnessed by a number of his colleagues, who might have found it distasteful, but not one reported it to the authorities.
Chapter Six
From the age of about seven, when my friends were turning away from me, I began to escape into the world of books. If it was too cold to be out playing, I would either be found in the tiny branch library, a few doors down Dunbeth Road, where I exhausted their supply of Enid Blyton and Bobbsey Twins books, or curled up in a corner of the house, my back to the wall and a book inches from my face. ‘Get your nose out of that book, you lazy wee bitch!’ my father would roar if I shut out his constant demands – he was the type of man who refused to wash a cup, and preferred to leave a row of dirty ones along the mantelpiece for others to deal with. ‘It isnae healthy a lassie reading all the time the way ye do. Ye’ll end up wi’ glasses, then a’ the lads will ca’ ye Specky – d’ye hear me? Ye’ll wear yer eyes oot!’
I would ignore him and my mother would try to pacify him.
‘Who d’ye think ye are? Miss High and Mighty, that’s you!’ he would yell, ‘Think ye’re better than all of us, don’t ye? Well, ye’re nut, Miss Prim. Ah’ll show ye who’s boss round this hoose! Ye’ll get ma hand over yer arse in a minute!’
‘Leave her alone,’ my mother would implore. ‘She isn’t doing any harm.’
She would step between us, or send me off on some errand until he was setting off on his next shift. The two of us had our own strategies for coping with my father.
Yet he had another side and I can remember him too as a loving father, good-humoured and joking, swinging me up in his arms and calling me his princess. Around my seventh birthday, he took me with a crowd of his mates from Baxter’s to see The Dancing Years on Ice. The trip to Murrayfield in Edinburgh was exciting enough, but I was entranced by the spectacular show, and returned shining-eyed to Dunbeth Road, describing every moment to my mother and treasuring the special programme he had bought me.
Once or twice I tested the ground with my mother by telling her tentatively that my father ‘acted funny’ with my friends, but I got nowhere. ‘Oh, he’s just playing with you all,’ she said dismissively. ‘He’s just a big wean himself. Learn to ignore it.’
That summer of 1956 was warm and my father took me off on a Baxter’s outing, while my mother and brothers were at home. It was an all-day excursion to the Trossachs of Scotland, a beautiful area to visit on a sunny day. On the bus, my father indulged in his favourite shenanigans with a group of three or four young women right at the back, while an older conductress I didn’t know was requested to take charge of me.
What should have been a glorious day, spent paddling in the river that runs through picturesque Callendar, was spoilt. With my bright blue cotton seersucker dress tucked into my knickers, I surveyed him kissing and cuddling the giggling females. I tried in vain to ignore him, but tears stung my eyes as he spent the afternoon rolling around on the grass, putting his hand up the women’s skirts and every so often openly departing into the bushes. Other adults in the large party took pity on me and helped me to catch minnows to put in my jar. In between all the hilarity, they posed for snaps taken with the little box Brownie my father had brought.
My father must have noticed eventually how quiet I had become, for I was suddenly taken to a café in the town for a special treat. I was only slightly cheered by the huge knickerbocker glory, my first, which he put before me.
My father knew I would never tell my mother the brutal truth – that I, her child, knew that he was unfaithful to her. And he knew that she was unlikely to see his faults for herself. She would stick by him through thick and thin. I puzzled over this endlessly. Why did she seem to admire him, even look up to him? He was a reliable worker: he provided for his family and was the main breadwinner, though money always had to be augmented by a series of part-time jobs taken by my mother. He was also inordinately proud of being a teetotaller: terrified of losing his PSV licence, which in those days was difficult to obtain, he refused to touch a drop of alcohol, and adhered to this strict code even at Hogmanay. He almost always volunteered to do overtime, would not take even a sip of Grandpa Frew’s famous elderberry wine, and refused to venture into a pub.
My mother always regarded his temperance as a major saving grace and she watched in horror as other women tried to cope with men who did not hand over their weekly pay packet on Friday nights, but went straight to the pub and drank every penny before weaving their way home. ‘There are worse things,’ my mother would say heavily, ‘than fancying the wimmin.’
Also, however unsatisfactory other aspects of her marriage were, she was from a family to which you could not return if things were not right. Marriage was seen as irrevocably binding and divorce frowned on as against all the teachings of the Church. ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it,’ would have been the response of her parents to any complaints. Divorce then was a social stigma, and just as we accepted that the work chosen by young men would be what they did till retirement, so we assumed that marriage would be with one lifelong partner. In the 1950s we knew no one who was divorced, and the word was only associated with Hollywood film stars.
Even my interest in the printed word led to a puzzling and upsetting discovery about my father. I stumbled across magazines belonging to him while I was looking through a cupboard, and wondering about the existence of Father Christmas – I had spotted some Christmas wrapping and, although I knew I should not be doing it, I had started to rummage. Under piles of Exchange and Mart I found what I now realize were graphic pornography magazines. They were not like TitBits or Reveille, which I had seen high up on the shelves in Mrs Linnie’s little newsagent shop in St John’s Street near the chapel. These magazines showed torture and graphic scenes of women in wartime concentration camps being branded on their naked bodies with hot irons. With a strange mixture of guilt, fascination and shame, I replaced the magazines so that nobody could tell they had been disturbed. Knowing my mother preferred to keep clear of my father’s domain, I was positive she knew nothing of them. She even disapproved of me looking at our family medical book, in which there were pull-out pictures of intestines, and information on the mysterious, forbidden human reproductive system. I had learned to study it when she was not around, but this was different. This was yet another matter on which I knew instinctively that it would be better to remain silent.
Chapter Seven
When I was seven my father was in
volved in two incidents that eroded any remaining love I had for him.
My mother deemed that I was old enough to take my father his ‘piece’ – lunch sandwiches – if he was asked to do an extra shift. This meant walking down to the foot of Dunbeth Road, to the bus stop on Main Street at which all the local buses pulled in. I would look for his usual vehicle, the single-decker Cliftonville bus, which was timed to arrive every half-hour, the crews passing each other or meeting up for mealtimes at the terminus. At busy times as many as eight buses an hour might ply this route, which was popular because it took passengers right through the town centre. The final destination varied: my father’s bus nearly always went to Kirkwood in Old Monkland, and turned at what was then a quiet, rather desolate spot near the cemetery.
Normally I greeted my father, settled on his bus at the front and chattered to him. Needless to say, my fare was not collected by his clippie, who would sit, if she ever had the chance, on the first seat on the right as you walked up the aisle, so that she could talk to the driver. A little door at waist height separated him from his passengers. People always chatted to the driver and eventually a rule was made, and prominently posted up, warning that it was an offence to engage him in conversation.
One day in 1956, I had gone as usual with my father’s sandwiches. My mother decided, because the bus was going to Kirkwood and my dad’s aunt May lived just across the road from the terminus, that I should take some flowers to May’s old mother, rather than having my own sandwiches with my dad and his clippie. I was quite happy to do this, as Aunt May and Uncle Harry, her husband, had a television set. I knew they would let me watch the after-lunchtime children’s programmes, including The Woodentops, which I liked.
My aunt greeted me and waved at my father, who was turning his bus and parking it next to another single-decker. She was fairly used to drivers and conductresses who were friends of my father coming to ask if they could fill up their flasks or pop into her bathroom. She made me some tea, then gave me the sad news that the TV repair man had just departed with the set: it had broken down. After some desultory conversation, I tiptoed with the flowers into my great-grandmother’s room. She did not stir, and I decided to rejoin my father, who was due for a half-hour break at the terminus.