Of Different Times

by Agnes Kirkwood

  It took me ages to get the hang of using that pen. I’d dip it in the ink, then as soon as I touched the paper the dam split in the nib opened in two and left a big blob of ink which I would blot quickly with a piece of blotting paper. There were more blotches on my book with ink smudges than I care to remember, even my index and middle finger was always dyed blue with the ink. I was always getting told off for messy work. It took me ages to master the use of them pens without getting any ink blobs, and that wasn’t just me the whole class was the same.

  That was a difficult year in which we all studied hard. Even our music lessons got stronger; it was now songs like ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?’, ‘John Peel’, ‘Westward Homing’ and many more old boring songs as old as the hills.

  What I do remember most about that year was when teacher gave us a treat by taking us out to the playground to play rounders. Of course she had to have the headmaster permission, so off she went to his office, and when she came back she was holding a bat and ball. We all cheered and off we went to the playground.

  It was great, my team lost the toss to bat first so we fielded for quite a while, then the exciting part came, we were in the base and raring to win. I remember we were there for some time and needed full runs to get other players back in who had been caught out.

  When it was my turn to bat again I was determined to get a full run, so, I gave the ball a wallop then threw the bat behind me and ran as fast as I could to get around the course back to base. The bat flew in the air and hit a girl on the face. I didn’t know what had happened until I ran all the way round the dens and arrived at the home base to find everyone crowding around the girl. I shrieked and threw my hands over my mouth with shock when I saw the blood all over her clothes. The teacher started shouting at me. The injury was that bad she was taken to the Hospital and had to have stitches. I got sent to the headmaster that day and got two strokes of the belt on each hand, but that didn’t worry me it was the girl’s injury that hurt me more than anything.

  My mum took me round to the girl’s house that night to apologise, it was one of her friend’s daughter I hit. But they convinced me it was an accident, and not to feel guilty. That was the one and only game of rounders we had in the school playground.

  The worst thing about reaching ten is when your mum thinks you’re old enough to do the dinner dishes, maybe because my older sister left school and was now working, so I automatically took over the job of the dreaded dishes at night, and they had to be done before I could go out to play. That might not sound too bad, but with my mum it was a mountain of pots and pans in the sink every night, and that was before we had our dinner. When I asked why she had to pile all the pans in the sink, especially when I had to take them all out again to do the dishes, her reply was, ‘Because they’re easier cleaned if you steep them first,’ but I disagreed. The next night she left them on the draining board without water in them. I guess she was right it took me longer scraping the pans than it did when they had been steeped.

  I hated doing dishes, especially after the type of dinner my mum made, it always had to be two courses, soup and main, or main and pudding, and sometimes it was a three-course. Why couldn’t she be like one of the neighbours who just let their kids make a jam sandwich or give them three pence for a bag of chips from the chippy? Everything in our house was homemade, cakes, scones, she even made her own jam.

  I remember when we used to go bramble picking, to make bramble jelly; it used to be a family day out. We would spend hours picking them, our fingers used to be all dyed blue, and our legs were all scratched to bits by the time we’d finished. When I look back I realise how lucky we were. We didn’t have much money, but we were well fed.

  I remember hearing my dad many a time whistling along the railway line then jump over the back fence into our garden with a rabbit or a hare swinging over his shoulder; he used to lay a trap in the morning on his way to the pit and if luck was on his side pick his catch up on the way home at night. It wasn’t long after that we daren’t eat rabbit, because it was sometimes in the fifties myxomatosis in rabbits came to Britain and people stopped eating them.

  My mum was a great cook and could make a meal out of hardly any food, maybe because she was in service since the age of fourteen as a scullery maid and worked her way up to be head cook before she got married. One of dad’s funny memories was when on his first day back at the pit after they got married, the men sat down in a group to have their sandwiches, and when he opened his tin box and looked inside his sandwiches had all the crusts removed and his sandwiches were cut into little triangles and circles. He quickly shut his tin and pretended not to be hungry, because if the other men saw them he would never have lived it down. I suppose that was how mum was used to doing them for the gentry so she thought she would impress dad by doing his the same way. From then on it was back to normal with his bread cut into what we call doorstops with cheese and jam.

  ‘Why don’t you have a change da?’ I asked him, his answer to that was,

  ‘The cheese stops you being hungry, and the jam prevents heartburn.’ I don’t know if he was joking, or just fobbing me off.

  When I was ten I automatically had to take my little sister everywhere I went, she was only three years old so the places my pal and me could go to play were limited. It was a thing I hated to do. I loved her to bits and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her, but to me it was the end of my freedom. When I tried to sneak out to play without her I’d hear the dreaded words

  ‘Take our wee Catherine with you.’ This continued until she started school, and by that time I was twelve years old. Two years might sound a short time but I was only a child myself and it seemed a long time then to be dragging your little sister everywhere.

  Only a few people in our street had a television, so as kids we used to knock at the door of one of the neighbours who had one and ask if we could watch children’s hour on TV, sometimes it was Hop along Cassidy, or The Lone Ranger, my favourite was Champion the Wonder Horse. There used to be about six or seven of us all sitting behind the couch cross-legged engrossed in the telly. I remember vividly the day we got our first new television, we got home from school and there it was, sitting in the corner as if it had been there for years. The next day at school my brother and me must have invited half the kids in our street to watch our new telly. Looking back, I often wondered why they let us children invade their privacy, maybe people were a bit more sensitive then than what they are now. Can you imagine in this day and age, knocking at someone’s door and asking them if you can come in and watch telly, or anybody taking a load of kids off the street, into their house to watch TV?

  One of the best days of the year in our village was the Miners’ Gala Day. That was truly a day to remember. For weeks before we’d get all excited and pray for a nice day. All the children had new clothes on when the big day arrived. We all had to meet up in the playground at school at a given time, probably the only day of the year nobody was late. We would form queues of four abreast from the youngest up holding hands. The village Pipe Band would lead the way and off we’d go to the tune of ‘Scotland the Brave’. We marched all through the entire village, with the grownups standing at each side of the road cheering us; what a feeling that was. We’d march all around the village before making our way to the field the Gala was held in.

  On entering the field each child received a little bag with a sausage roll a little pork pie, a cake, a little bottle of milk and a sixpence. There were races for every age group, I used to love them and went in for them all, the flat, the egg and spoon, the sack, the three-legged and one that had someone on your back cully code as we called it, every winner got a shilling, second got sixpence and third got a threepenny bit. Even mums, fathers and grandparents raced, it was a great day for the whole family.

  There was a big stage in the middle of the park where Highland dancers would dance the Highland Fling, The Sailors Horn Pipe, The Sword Dance and many more. Afterwards they’d ask for childr
en to volunteer to sing. I remember going up and singing a song called ‘The Worm At The Bottom Of The Garden’ what was only about four lines long, but I got a shilling for singing it. That was the easiest money I have ever earned. The fairground and side shows were there with the music sounding all the modern tunes, the atmosphere was electric.

  One Gala Day that sticks in my mind was when mum came to me and asked if I had seen my little brother who was about five years old at the time. I hadn’t so we all went looking for him all around the park. Mum was getting worried but then one of our neighbours said she saw him heading home so we all ran home and found him sitting in the sink with his white trousers and silk blouse on. When mum asked him why he came home, he said he had diarreha and couldn’t get home in time.

  At school it was time to get ready for the dreaded eleven plus as it was important for your future, so the teacher told us. Little did I know then it was a waste of time for me as my future seemed to have been all planned out for me anyway. The build-up to the exams was very extreme, the extra homework, the long and tedious lessons. By the time it was due something happened that even I had no control over. Days before the exams I woke up with a very sore throat, and spent the night sleeping in the middle of mum and dad. Next morning I felt as if I had swallowed a cactus. There was no way I could have gone to school that morning. When mum took me to the doctor he organised me to go straight to hospital. Two days later I was in hospital having my tonsils out. I spent two weeks in hospital, which after two days of agony after surgery I seemed to enjoy being there where you got pampered and most of all I was given ice cream every day for cooling my throat down. I remember the nurses were all very nice and used to bring me books to read, that was where I read the book Anne of Green Gables, a book that remains in my memory.

  When returning to school, the exams were well and truly over by two weeks or so. I never got the option to redo the exam. I felt all the pressure of extra work and homework seemed a waste of time. I must admit then I was glad to get out of it.

  There were lots of women in our village who went potato picking or, tattie-houghkers as we call it in Scotland. Kids over a certain age were allowed time off school to go and pick potatoes as well for the farmers.

  Mum was one of the women that went potato picking every year, she seemed to like going and always looked forward to it. It was funny to see mum with a turban on her head, a pair of my dad’s old trousers on and a pair of wellies on her feet. That was the only times in my mum’s life, I ever saw her wearing trousers.

  She’d leave about seven o’clock in the morning and walk to the bottom of the street with a few of the neighbouring women to wait for the farmer coming in his tractor and trailer to pick them up and take them to the field. There they’d stay till the farmer brought them back home about half four with a few sores and aching bones, a few shillings in their pockets and a bag of potatoes, which was part of a good dinner at night.

  What a great feeling the summer holidays were, especially when I had finished with the only school I had ever attended. I hated all six years of it. The excitement of starting a new one after eight weeks holiday, and allowed to travel wider afield excited me no end. Wow!

  The trouble with girls at the age of eleven, you’re too old for dolls and prams, and girl’s games seemed to go out the window. It was a funny age, never knowing what you want to do. In the heat of the day we would take a jam jar and go catching wasps to see how many we could catch, we’d wait until they landed on the flower then strike with our jars snapping them in the jar then hurriedly put the lid on. I have seen us with about ten wasps in the jar before we opened the lid and let them fly away. That just shows you how bored sometimes we used to get. But to be honest my pal and I seemed to like boy’s games best, we’d make bows and arrows out of branches, and would have contests to see who could hit the targets. We played football, cricket, marbles which we loved, and conkers when they were in season. We would spend hours in the wood making dens and tree houses, and swinging from trees like Tarzan.

  I remember when we made a raft. It was made from two old coal cellar doors we picked up at the Blocks as they were empty and ready for being demolished. We gathered old logs from around the pit and sandwiched them in the middle of the two doors, then launched it in the pit pond. All seemed to go to plan and away we sailed into the middle of the pond me at one side of the raft and Betty at the other.

  We were happily singing a Zulu type song when my pal came to the same side of the raft as me, that’s when our troubles started. The two doors opened up like an alligator’s mouth and all the logs seemed to separate and float away and we found ourselves in the water. I immediately swam ashore in the best way I could, but my pal was still in the middle of the pond panicking, she kept going under. I frantically shouted for her to swim ashore, but she never took any notice. There was nothing else to do but grab a branch that was lying on the ground and jump back in to her aid. As I got near to her I held out the branch and she grabbed it. I don’t know how I managed to get her to the banking but I did, and to this day cannot understand why she panicked, because she was a much better swimmer than me.

  As we sat on the grass at the edge of the pond, faces white as a sheet with fright, we decided to go along the train line and make a beeline for our back garden and try to smuggle into our house and get cleaned up. Running along the railway line in our bare feet and clutching our wet shoes we reached our back garden and jumped over the fence. We hid at the at the back of my dad’s shed until the coast was clear then sneaked over to the bathroom window and climbed in and crept upstairs to my room which I shared with my two sisters at that time, and changed into dry clothes so my mum wouldn’t find out we’d been to the pit pond, a place I was warned over and over again not to go near.

  My friend put on my old school skirt so her mum wouldn’t notice because she had one the same. We then retraced our steps and climbed back out the bathroom window and happily made our way into the house to grab a jam sandwich as if nothing had happened. I really thought we had got off with it, but not a chance in hell.

  When my dad came home from the pit the next day, he looked at me and pointed upwards ‘You get up them stairs lady, and I’ll be up in a minute.’ he shouted angrily. I knew by the look in his eyes something wasn’t pleasing him, but couldn’t think what it could be. I sat nervously upstairs on my bed for nearly an hour listening to him telling my mum about how some men working at the top of the Drossy Bing watched us in horror playing on a raft in the pit pond, and how we nearly drowned, but they were too far away to help us. I could hear mum getting angry and shouting, ‘That lassie’s going to be the death o’ me one o’ these days.’ And my dad making things worse, by saying, ‘Christ, there are pumps under there that could suck a double-decker bus down. I’m going up there and I’ll give her the biggest hiding of her life, I’ll make sure she’ll never go back there again in a hurry.’

  Well let me just say I never did. That was the only time in all my life my dad hit me. He never had to; maybe it was the masterly way he threatened us that made us do what he told us. Now mum was a different kettle of fish, although she never actually gave us a good hiding like some mums did she was mainly all mouth, but she was quick with her slaps and never missed. Her slaps were what she called a good hiding.

  Another dangerous adventure we had was a huge swing up a tree that overhung the River Forth. We got the idea whilst playing in the wood near the pit, where we found a huge rope that was about an inch diameter. We decided to take it to another sight, because the trees in the wood were too close to each other to have such a tall swing. The area we chose was a favourite for kids playing, and the tree we decided on sat at the top of the banking alongside the River Forth, and had been climbed a thousand times by children through the years. Just getting the rope over the branch was the hardest, but once that was in place the rest was easy, a double knot at the bottom to sit on. I was the first to try.

  Getting a hold of the rope I took it as far bac
k as I could and jumped on the knot, wow! It took my breath away, I hung on like grim death as I swung right over the edge of the river banking, and when I looked down all I could see was water. What a feeling, all the kids queued up to have a go. The next day we couldn’t wait to go back to our swing, but when we got there, it was gone, someone had removed it. We only had it for a day, and we were so disappointed. When I look back I cringe at the danger, if anyone fell off, they’d have sunk in the slimy mud left by the tide, or in the water itself. There would be no getting out. Now I know why it mysteriously disappeared.

  Mum made her own jam every year, apple, gooseberry, rhubarb and ginger, and not to forget my favourite bramble jelly, which we all spent days picking the brambles down the edge of the wood. One time in particular I remember was the year she ran out of jars. She sent us kids to different houses to collect the jars they had saved for her. We ended up with about twenty jars. Mum washed them in soapy water and placed them on a tray to put in the oven to heat before filling them with the hot jam. When I asked why she had to put the empty jars in the oven she told me it sterilised them and prevented the jars breaking when she poured the boiling jam in them.

  After a certain time they were taken out of the oven and placed on the draining board in rows ready for mum filling them with jam. The pot of boiling jam was gently carried over and placed behind the empty jars. Just as she placed the ladle in the pan, my little brother came running in from outside looked at the jars all lined up and smiled.

  ‘Have you got enough jam jars mammy?’ he asked,

  ‘I have son thanks to you,’ she answered. Just as she was about to pour in the jam he added, ‘Isn’t Mrs McPherson a really kind woman, she even took her false teeth out o’ the jar to give it to us.’ He added with a big smile on his face.