Mum froze on the spot, put the ladle of jam back in the pot, and replaced it back on the top of the cooker, gathered all the jars together and threw them in the bin. We ended up having to collect more jars.
My Gran and my aunties also made their own jam, and used to give each other a jar of jam, I think it was more like a contest to see who made the best. We all liked mum’s jam best, it always seemed to get used first.
As there were no fridges in them days all the houses had a little pantry just as you entered through the back door. It was always dark and cold and used for all the perishable foods like milk, butter, eggs, different types of jams, pickled onions, beetroot and chutneys. I can’t remember my mum ever buying anything in a tin, which used to annoy me because we kids used cans for lots of things. We’d make stilts for walking on, which consisted of two cans, each had a hole at the bottom of the can where string was threaded through to make straps to slip your shoe through to keep it tight on your foot. It took ages to master walking on them but, when you mastered it you felt six inches taller, and loved being able to walk on your cans.
Another time that springs to mind whilst mentioning cans was a TV program I watched called Blue Peter where they showed us kids how you can make a telephone with two cans and a ball of string. According to them it worked, so we decided to try it out.
We got two cans out of my pal’s dustbin, her mum must have used one of them old fashioned tin openers that left the top of the can as if it had been chewed open. After washing it out we put a little hole in the bottom with a nail. I sneaked a reel of twine from mums sewing box and threaded it through the hole and secured it.
The biggest problem we had was trying to get a phone line across the bottom of all the gardens from our garden to hers. We couldn’t very well ask all the neighbours if we could put a line through their garden, they’d probably chased us for our lives, so we had the problem of one of us secretly climbing through the gardens without permission.
We put a knitting needle through the hole on the reel of twine so it could run free then held it while my pal sneaked through about seven gardens with the twine attached to the bottom of the other can. When she reached her garden I attached the other can and waited for her call. I must have waited for nearly an hour until I saw her running up our path.
‘Have you not fixed it yet?’ I asked in anticipation.
‘Aye, and I’ve been shouting hello down it for five minutes, did you not hear me?’ she shouted in frustration. So, after many attempts we gave up and cut the twine off the can, threw it in the bin and I sneaked the nearly empty reel of twine back into my mum’s sewing box. I wish I was a fly on the wall when she saw it. We abandoned that idea.
The most popular use of the empty can as far as I recall was using them for playing at shops. Each was filled with different things that we found lying about, mud, etc.
Summer holidays in the fifties lasted eight weeks. We couldn’t wait for them to come, but as it crept on we were bored and didn’t know what to do with ourselves.
My pal and I used to go to the pictures every Saturday morning, called the A.B.C. Minor. Before the pictures started we’d all sing a song then suffer half an hour’s act before the pictures started, like a yo-yo contest or a clown, blowing balloons and twisting them into dogs or some other stupid thing that no one paid any attention to. We watched serials like Flash Gordon, and Dan Dare, which always ended in a cliff-hanger, I suppose to make sure you went back the following week. Then came the main film followed by a cartoon.
I remember a 3-D film one week, and were handed a pair of special cardboard specs on the way in, one lens was green the other red. We were all shouting and laughing like we did every week whilst waiting for the picture house to fill up, when a woman with a torch came over and took our glasses, now there must have been a hundred kids in that picture house making a noise, but we were the only two whose glasses she took, so we never saw the film in 3-D, only a film with loads of green and red lines. That woman deserved a medal for spitefulness.
I got a job delivering newspapers that summer holiday, it was the first money I earned all by myself, which felt great, I thought myself to be part of the working class. It was hard work, I had to get up at half-six every morning as a lot of the people wanted their paper before they went out to work. Nearly every house in the streets had papers delivered then, and the paper bag was so heavy. Halfway through my round I had to go back to the shop to collect the other half of my round. It was the same in the late afternoon I’d go to the newsagents and pick up my night papers comics and magazines. When it was Dandy, Beano, Topper and a few more of children’s comic days I’d find a quiet corner somewhere and have a good read. Sometimes the comics gave free gifts. I remember some of them, one in particular was two pieces of triangular cardboard with a strip of paper inside and when you cracked it downward it made such a bang; all the kids were going about cracking it behind one another’s back to make them jump with fright. Another frightening free gift was a little metal rocket shaped capsule that opened up, you’d put a cap inside it and throw it up in the air, when it landed on the ground it banged like a gun being fired. Sometimes little rings or cheap bracelets were inside some girlie comics, and when I’d finished delivering, there would always be some that had fallen out the comic and fell to the bottom of my paper bag. Of course I’d keep one and take the rest back to the shop, so when people complained they didn’t get their free gift they would collect them themselves, and last one there got none.
I loved Friday nights, that’s when I had to go around the doors collecting the paper money. I had a little book with all the names and what they owed, when they paid I would rip out the receipt and give it to them. It was great because I got loads of tips, especially at Christmas, when I’d get presents like pencil cases, hankies, sweets and all sorts that I cannot remember. The people on my round were very kind, that I do remember.
The older I got the more freedom I had, being age eleven and a half gave me more than I previously had without mum constantly wanting to know where I was going. Not that I ever told her truthful where I was going or where I’d been as they always seemed to be the places I’d be banned from. Did I always obey her orders? No.
My pal and I even had a go at mountain climbing, well it wasn’t really mountain climbing it was more like sliding down the rugged bushes, the rugged rascals slid.
I suppose lots of people know the name William Wallace through the film Braveheart starring Mel Gibson, a story of how Wallace brought freedom to Scotland hundreds of years ago. The people of Scotland built a large monument at the top of a hill facing the castle and looked down on Stirling in memory of him.
One Saturday morning It was such a lovely sunny day my pal and I decided not to go to the matinee pictures, instead we’d visit the Wallace Monument as both of us had never been there before. We got the bus to Stirling as usual with all the other kids going to the pictures that morning. When we arrived in Stirling we found out which bus we needed to take us to the monument. As we boarded the bus we sat on the side seat next to the conductor as he was going to tell us when we arrived at the monument. When the bus conductor shouted ‘Wallace Monument’ we excitedly got off and joined the other people who were also heading there. We followed the flow, but little did we know that from the bus stop there was about a mile spiral path to walk up the hill to take us to the top where the monument stood. That took longer than we planned as it felt we had walked up a mountain. When we reached the top of the hill it was a huge grassed park circulating the monument where families were having picnics on the grass.
As I stood at the bottom of the tower looking up I realised it was a lot bigger that I had thought, but there again I only ever saw it from a distance from our village where it looked like a beacon on top of a lone mountain facing the castle, which I believed up till then was to act as a lookout. I couldn’t believe I was actually standing outside the monument itself.
The feeling I experienced as I walked inside t
he monument was something I will always remember. After climbing hundreds of stairs, visiting many of the rooms on the way to the top. I was fully enthralled with all the history it told.
My favourite room was the museum room that housed swords and shields, and full of the history of William Wallace. As I looked at all the artefacts in the glass cabinets I could actually feel how the people lived then and how they suffered during that horrible time of battle. There were lots of weapons, shields and paintings of how people lived then. How ordinary families must have been thrown apart when losing the men of the house, and how could they ever survive?
What fascinated me was the size of William Wallace’s sword. It was so big and looked heavy, I wondered how on earth he could lift it, never mind fight with it. Looking around all the rooms was fascinating they were full of the history of William Wallace. When we reached the top of the monument we could see for miles. The River Forth winding round the villages, the castle across the view, we saw our village which looked very small compared to lots of surrounding villages.
We spend a good few hours there and time was getting on, our stomachs were rumbling with hunger so we decided it was time to go. Three-quarters way down the ever winding path, we decided rather than walk all the way around to get to the bottom, we’d climb over the fence and slide down the last part, So off we set, it wasn’t too bad to begin with, but then the last part was really steep. We couldn’t climb back up, as it was too hard and dangerous, so we carried on down.
We more or less slid from one tree to another because we couldn’t control ourselves from sliding, I have never been so scared in all my life, we screamed for our mammy and daddy for the last two hundred yards. If it wasn’t for the trees saving us every now and then, we would never have been able to slow ourselves down, and if we over balanced and fell, we were dead. When we finally slid the last few yards and crashed into what seemed to be a twenty feet high wire fence, we had at last reached the bottom. We stood there looking at each other, shaking then started to laugh with relief. Our knickers were tattered and torn our bums were all scratched to bits, our shoes were ruined, the soles were flapping about like a cow’s tongue.
We walked around looking for any gaps in the fence but, there didn‘t seem to be any. We carried on following the fence round looking for ways out and spotted a familiar sight it was a park in the distance, with swings and slides, we recognised it as Causeway-Head Park, a favourite area for picnics and family days out, but most of all, the road back to Stirling.
We sat down and thought of a way to get over the fence but every time we tried to climb it we reached about two feet then slipped off, the netting was too small for us to grip our feet. We were stuck at the other side of a fence built to stop people climbing in, we were now standing at the other side, in danger trying to get out.
‘Right if we can’t climb over we’ll have to dig under,’ I said, so we looked for something to dig with; all we could find was pieces of rock and bits of branches, but after what seemed to be hours we finally managed to get enough space between the fence and the ground to crawl through. We struggled through like a dog burrowing under a fence, finally we both stood at the other side dusting the dirt off ourselves, what a filthy state we were in..
As we made our way across the park the soles of our shoes flapped about like cow’s tongues licking the ground as we walked. Our hands, elbows, bums and knees were all scraped and bleeding. People were having family picnics with their children all spick-and-span in their best clothes out for the day. We could see them staring at us in disgust which terrified us in case our frocks blew up and showed our bare scratched bums. We finally found a bus stop that would take us back into Stirling, where we could get our bus home to Fallin.
At the bus stop, a woman cutting her front garden hedge, saw us and came over to us.
‘My god what have you two been doing, you look as if you’ve been through the wars?’ she said with concern.
We both looked at each other and said, ‘We have Mrs, we’ve just climbed down from Wallace Monument.’ She looked at us and smiled in disbelief, I think she thought we were just joking.
‘Come with me, you can’t go on a bus like that, the conductor will throw you both off.’ she said escorting us into her house. She showed us the bathroom and told us to get washed. When we came out she had a glass of orange ready for us, and a piece of cake.
‘Now you girls, after you have finished your refreshments, get straight home, and get your mothers to get some ointment on these cuts and scrapes, before they go septic.’
We thanked her and made our way to the bus stop. When we reached the bus station at Stirling we hid at the gable end until the bus for our village came in. After all the other passengers got on the bus we made a dash and ran to the first seats available then hurriedly sat down.
On reaching home we made for the railway track again, the track that had saved our lives a few times because it ran along the bottom of our garden which saved us from walking down the street in all our dirt. As usual we hid in the garden behind the shed and noticed the bathroom window on the ground floor open. When all was clear we climbed in and sneaked up to the bedroom and changed into clean knickers and socks.
I daren’t change my frock because mum made me change into the one I was wearing because she wanted to wash the one I had on early that morning, so she would surely notice the change.
We sneaked back out the same way through the bathroom window. My pal went home and I kicked my shoes off at the back door as normal then walked into the kitchen as if nothing had happened. Mum walked through from the living room and stared at me. I stood stock still and tried not to let her see the back of my frock, she took one look at me and shouted.
‘Where have you been to get in a state like that, look at the colour of that frock, get up the stairs and get it changed now, anyone would have thought you’ve been to hell and back.’
I just sighed with relief, and thought if only she knew how near to the truth that was but, couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my grazed bum, or hands, knowing I wouldn’t escape pain either way. I walked out the kitchen backward facing her and made a beeline for the bathroom cabinet looking for ointment. The next day was worse, the pain on my grazed bum, and my hands were burning as if I had ten of the strap off the headmaster. I heard that salt in your bath was a good healer, so I sneaked some into a hankie and rolled it up my sleeve. As I ran the water for my Sunday bath I sprinkled the salt into the water, and couldn’t wait to get in, As soon as my bum hit the water it took all my strength not to scream, so I jumped out quicker than I jumped in. After a couple of days things were at least bearable, so we got down to enjoying the rest of our holidays.
We were always on the lookout for making a few pence, so we decided to go around the doors asking if we could run any errands; we must have run to the shop ten times but only received a thank you or a couple of sweets, we got fed up running back and forward to the shop so then we decided we’d get a list going and do a few errands at a time, but then for some reason we got the list and the money all mixed up and we were giving the wrong change to the wrong people. The final straw was when a woman looked at her change and accused us for cheating her out of her money,
‘You dwindling little buggers where’s the rest o’ my change, away ye go and don’t come back here,’ she shouted. We got ourselves into such a muddle we gave that idea up.
We decided to ask if we could do any odd-jobs just like the scouts, we did get a few, but soon got fed up with that, it was too much hard work for what they gave us. Then we had a brainwave, we’d sneak flowers from different gardens and take them back to our shed and put them in little bunches, then take them to the other side of the village and sell them around the doors. We soon got fed up with that, there were too many women coming to the door and telling us to bugger off. One woman opened her door and stared me straight in the eye and shouted,
‘Does your dad know you’re doing this, I bet he doesn’t. Now; if
you don’t scarper, I’m letting him know.’ That was the trouble with having a father that was the district councillor everybody knew me. We just took the rest of the flowers to a different street and sold them all.
Whatever money we made we bought a lot of penny sweets from the shop and decided to make our own shop in my dad’s shed, we had a long plank of wood on bricks, and got some jam jars that my mum used to store under the sink for making jam, and put the sweets in them and displayed them on the plank of wood, and sold them to other kids for a little bit more than we paid. As soon as we sold half we’d take it in turns to run to the shop for more. Before long the kids were all coming to our shop to buy sweets, I suppose it was a novelty for them, but it was great for us, the more we sold the more we bought, soon we had a fair amount of stock, which I brought in the house at night in a cardboard box. Then the inevitable happened, mum went to visit Gran, and my big sister was minding us alongside her pal. The next morning I went to the box to get our stock, it was completely empty, my big sister and her friend had eaten the lot. This was revenge time, so the first time we had the opportunity, we took it.
When she was at work the next day, we sneaked up the stairs and sprinkled itchy powder in all her knickers and just for luck placed some in the cup of her bra. It’s funny but I never saw her scratch, but I did hear her tell mum she had to go to the nurse at work because she had a terrible rash, and nurse thought she had an allergy to either the material or the soap powder mum used, but to make an appointment with the doctor just to be on the safe side. So to me revenge was fulfilled.
I was the only one in our family that never ever had a bike of my own, but it didn’t deprive me because my older sister had a Raleigh bike that she used to go to work in as she had a job at Bannockburn which was only a couple of miles away down the back road past the farms. At night when she went out dancing which she did regular, I would sneak in the shed and borrow her bike. My pal and I rode all over the place on it, her in the seat and me standing up peddling like mad, and then we’d take it in turns to pedal.
Of Different Times Page 14
