Gift from the Gallowgate

by Davidson, Doris;

  ‘They were giving me a party,’ she explained.

  ‘They’ were the wardens of her sheltered accommodation, and apparently there had been sixty people present. Her daughter had helped, and she had obviously enjoyed herself, although she didn’t seem to be quite her usual jolly self. I suspected that she was very touched by the kindness shown to her, but the next time June came to me, she said that Hilda had had another stroke and was in hospital. She was there for some weeks, and I assumed that they couldn’t let her out because she lived alone, but the next I heard was that she had died. Poor Hilda – a truly genuine woman. I’m glad that we were able to renew our friendship even for such a little while. It meant a lot to me . . . and to her, I’m sure.

  *

  The grant I was awarded meant that I could not leave school at fourteen as the law allowed, but had to stay on for a third year. I had passed the Day School Certificate (Lower) in second year, and this gave me the chance to get the Higher version. I don’t know how these exams compare with today; perhaps the Higher Day School Certificate would have been on a par with the ‘O’ level, or what is now called Standard Grade. On second thoughts, perhaps not.

  At that time, all pupils, except me, could leave at the end of the term after their fourteenth birthday, unless they were intending to get the qualifications needed to go on to a Secondary School, so some of my class left at Christmas 1936, some at Easter 1937. Few were left of our original class of thirty plus for the summer term, and I supposed no one knew what to do with us now that the exams were past. At any rate, a school trip to London was arranged by the Education Authority in May. Mum couldn’t afford to let me go, but Miss Ross, who was accompanying the ten girls, told her that one person could go free for every ten who paid. She managed to persuade my mother, who wasn’t keen on the idea of accepting charity, to let me get the benefit of the free place. (I didn’t realise until I was teaching myself that the free place was actually meant for the teacher accompanying the party, and that Miss Ross must have paid for herself.)

  We had a lovely time, staying in a small hotel, a first for all of us, and going to see the sights on foot, by bus or by the underground railway. The tube was a number one favourite. One of our days was spent at Regent’s Park Zoo, and we got special treatment, being allowed into several of the enclosures. When we were walking round inside the penguins’ area, along with our penfriends from a London school, a great shout of laughter came from the people standing looking down on us. Looking round to see what was so funny, we discovered that the penguins had lined up in twos like us, and were following on behind. But, when we came down to the pool, they sidled past us and jumped in.

  Inside the Reptile House, the keeper took out a huge snake (python, I think, but I’m not sure) and said we could handle it. We were all too terrified to touch it, but he made us stand in a row and placed the huge creature along our shoulders. If there had been such a thing as a video camera at the time, this would have made a hilarious film, because when we realised that the animal wasn’t cold and slimy as we’d thought, one by one we let ourselves touch it. It was quite warm, actually.

  All too soon, the day came for us to go home, and we were all packed and ready to leave just after breakfast. A small bus had been booked to take us to King’s Cross Station, but someone phoned the hotel to say that it had broken down and that all other vehicles were already in service.

  Miss Ross, unflappable as ever, said, ‘There is only one thing to do, girls. We must use Shanks’ pony.’

  The expression had to be explained to us, and we set off reluctantly, each lugging quite a heavy suitcase, and moaning about the weight. Our chaperone merely said, over her shoulder as she hurried along in the lead, ‘Just be thankful that we do not have very far to go, but we have no time to spare.’

  Tired out after a week of constant walking around, we had to lay down our cases quite frequently, otherwise we’d have collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Don’t think we were lily-livered or shy of hard work; we were nothing like most of today’s delicate maidens. We had stamina, as a rule, but stamina can only go so far, and we had reached the end of ours.

  As Miss Ross waited for the umpteenth time for us to move on, she suddenly had a brilliant idea. It was 1937, remember, but there were few motor vehicles about, mostly small cars. There were however, dozens of . . . horse-drawn carts. Stepping into the street, she held her hand up to a leather-aproned man sitting at the front of a canvas-covered wagon. ‘We are stranded,’ she began, softly, fluttering her eyelashes a little, although she must have been well over forty. ‘The transport we had arranged failed to turn up and my girls are so exhausted, as you can see.’

  We took the hint, and I’m sure that carter had never seen a set of ‘so exhausted’ girls, their heads lolling, their eyes regarding him pathetically. Miss Ross pressed on hopefully. ‘Would it be asking too much of you to take us to King’s Cross?’

  Doffing his flat bonnet, he ran his hand over his balding head. ‘Our train leaves in forty minutes,’ she urged.

  She, or we, must have appealed to something of the chivalrous Olde English Gentleman in him. Slapping his cap back on, he laid the reins down and jumped on to the pavement. ‘Come on, then,’ he smiled, going round to the back of the cart and holding back the canvas flaps. ‘’Eave yer cyses up first, young lydies, then ’op in yourselves.’

  With his help, we didn’t take long to get on board, placing our cases so that we could sit on them – by good luck the cart was empty. Miss Ross had to rely on help from the man, and sat down beside us, looking more flustered than we had ever seen her . . . looking more attractive than we had ever seen her. ‘This will be something to tell your parents,’ she smiled. ‘We have travelled by all the usual means of transport, but I should not think that any of them have ever been taken to their destination by a horse.’

  Then her expression changed. ‘Oh, dear! I do hope all this weight is not too much for the poor animal.’

  To our relief, the man shouted back to her. ‘Nao! Ivy’s used ter ’eavy weights. We work fer a brewery.’

  We reached King’s Cross in plenty of time, and although Miss Ross tried to press a ten shilling note into the man’s hand, he wouldn’t take it. ‘That’s me good deed done fer todye,’ he grinned.

  Our last three weeks at Rosemount were spent in a furnished flat at the top of Skene Square Primary School. The model ‘house’ was used by many of the primary schools for Housewifery Courses, which I must say, did me the world of good. There were only eight of us, the other two must have been off ill, or on holiday, perhaps, and we had to be there at half past eight (half an hour earlier than school) and we would finish at half past three (half an hour earlier than school). The teacher was called Mrs Sheriffs, a dainty, cheerful person who made us feel as if we’d known her for ages.

  The first thing she did was to pair us off and explain how her course worked. ‘Each pair will take turns of every task. We’ll give them numbers. 1. Clean bathroom and outside stairs.’ Our exchanged looks of horror at this made her smile. ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll have to keep your bathroom clean when you are married, so now is the time to learn how to do it. 2. Strip bed, remake, clean bedroom. 3. Clean out and light fire, clean living room. 4. Make breakfast and lunch for yourselves and rest of pupils, leave kitchen as you would wish to find it.’

  Now we had to draw lots to see who would do what first and then set to the task. Mrs Sheriffs came round to inspect and advise each pair on what they were doing, rightly or wrongly, and we could talk to each other as much as we liked, provided we did it quietly. There was a comfortable atmosphere, and when we were having lunch, which was sometimes not as appetising as it should have been, we could speak to Mrs Sheriffs herself.

  I got very friendly with her – no, I wasn’t one of those who tried to ingratiate themselves with their teacher, and come to think of it, she was equally friendly with all of us. There were two who were inclined to be shy, but she got through to them as well. She ask
ed us what we wanted to do when we left school, and gave suggestions to those who hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t really thought about it myself, but Miss Ross had inspired me towards creative writing, so I took in some of my stories for Mrs Sheriffs to read; short schoolgirl-type plots. She told me I should think of taking up writing as a career, but it would be over fifty years before I was able to take her advice.

  Whoever was finished their allotted task first had to clean the silver with bathbrick or some other little job that only needed doing occasionally, but after lunch, we had to sit down in a circle and add a bit to the large rug that several schools had taken a hand in. The design was stamped on the canvas and the rug wool was cut into the appropriate lengths – I found this activity quite soothing.

  We got out half an hour earlier than normal, and there was a large grocery shop across the road, which, I discovered, sold a pennyworth of soft brown sugar in a poke. Now, I’m not too sure about this, but the bus fare from where I lived to get me to Skene Square School was either a ha’penny or a whole penny. Whichever, I bought a poke of the delicacy (if I have a bag of this in the house nowadays, I still dip my finger in like I did as a child) and then I walked all the way home, revelling in the sweetness and making sure that I wiped off all evidence of it from hands and mouth before going into the house.

  The two in the kitchen were always last, of course, because they had to clean up after the meal, but we all had to take our turn at that. On the whole what we were served was quite palatable and I don’t know how the others felt, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my time in that flat . . . well, maybe not so much when it came to cleaning the bathroom.

  My ‘housewifery’ course prompted my mother to shanghai me into helping her with the washing. ‘You’ve got a washing machine,’ I objected, not that I ever paid much attention to this side of things.

  ‘It still needs somebody to turn the handle,’ Mum said, firmly.

  And so I was initiated into this weird and wonderful – and back-breaking – chore. The cumbersome piece of apparatus – bigger than a modern automatic, and much, much heavier – was dragged out on its sturdy legs from its hidey-hole under the sink and the procedure began. First, a hose had to be attached to the hot tap; the water was heated by the coal fire but it never came anywhere near boiling point. Then Mum went down on her knees to light the gas ring underneath the monster. I was terrified of matches and gas rings, so she didn’t even think of asking me to do it.

  While the water was being brought up to the necessary heat, the dirty clothes were sorted out; whites in one pile on the kitchen lino, light colours in another, dark colours well apart, otherwise sheets and towels would be liable to turn blue, or red, or whatever got in with them by mistake. The piles were quite big; one or two of the lodgers put their things in too, although some took their laundry home to their mothers at the weekends. Then the ropes were put out, starting at one of the four poles on the drying green, continuing round the square and then diagonally across.

  Now began the actual washing. The lid had been placed on top of the clothes, and the handle was ready for turning, its wooden knob at the end of the agitator that came up through a hole in the middle and lay across the top in an L shape.

  The process wasn’t as simple as turning a handle round and round, unfortunately. I had to push my hand forwards and back, forwards and back, ad infinitum, which moved the bottom part of the agitator through the clothes, churning them hither and thither. After less than five minutes, my right arm was so sore that I had to turn round and use my left arm, and so on until the slave mistress deemed that the clothes would be clean enough and I could stop.

  But this wasn’t the end! Oh, dear me, no! With a pair of wooden tongs, white with so much immersion in water, I had to take out each article, let it drip for a few minutes, then put it in a pail to be emptied into the deepest sink. The old tenements only had one sink because the washings were done in an outside washhouse, but houses built in the thirties, forties and fifties usually had two, one much deeper than the other. This one was used for the first rinsing in cold water and left until the second load went into the machine. I won’t go into every little detail, you’ll surely have got the idea by now. After each load was taken out, some more water was added to the receptacle until the final load must have been put into almost lukewarm water. The originally boiling water was too precious to empty out and gas was too expensive to light the ring again. The miracle was that, even using the same water over and over, which must have resulted in it being decidedly murky, all the clothes came out spotless.

  I can laugh about it all now, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t carry out this operation very often. I was never a great lover of housework of any kind.

  I left Rosemount School (with a Dux medal) on my fifteenth birthday, but I didn’t go on to the Central where my Dad had wanted me to go and where Dr Cormack, the headmaster, advised my mother to send me. I had to start work in order to bring as much as I could into the household coffers.

  LEISURE TIME

  6

  In writing about my schooldays, I completely forgot about what I did when I wasn’t at school. Until we moved to Hilton Drive when I was seven, it was a case of reading Fairyland Tales, an upmarket booklet for teenies, then progressing to Rainbow. At Hilton, with other children as companions, I didn’t read so much, though being that bit older, I did read the Children’s Newspaper when Dad started buying it for me.

  The Hilton houses, newly built when we moved there, had a patch of grass at the back (a drying green shared by the four tenants) and a small garden each to grow vegetables. In our block there was usually at least one girl of my own age, probably more, and two or three boys, so the drying green was too small for playing boisterous games. Hilton Drive, however, although a busy thoroughfare now, was relatively traffic free then; only the odd cart or car could be seen and my father’s motorbike, which he kept in the cellar when he wasn’t using it.

  I can’t say where the coal was kept (I wish I had written this before my memory grew so temperamental); in a separate bunker, I would think. At any rate, there was masses of room in the cellar for a whole gang of us kids to play there if it was wet. The bigger boys spun ghost stories that scared the life out of the smaller ones and gave me nightmares, or we played card games (no gambling), or cowboys and Indians – where the Indian braves took great pleasure in tying up the palefaces. There were one or two naughty boys who revelled in leaving us lying on the filthy ground with our hands and feet tied up, but I think somebody’s mother gave them a good ‘talking to’ – probably threatening to get the bobbies to them if they did it again – which stopped this practice for a while at least. I must point out here that there was never any real maliciousness in these ‘hooligans’, some of them thirteen or fourteen, and nothing even bordering on the indecent was ever attempted.

  If it wasn’t raining, we played in the street – games I think I’ve mentioned earlier, and Dad sometimes took his motorbike to bits to clean it. This, as it turned out, was not only a stupid thing to do, but also very dangerous. Even with the door propped open, it was quite dark down there, but he was never stuck for ideas. He had taken a candle and a saucer down with him and set them on an old cardboard box. The flickering light couldn’t have been very much help to him, but he was apparently managing fairly well until a gust of wind from outside blew the candle over. You are probably ahead of me. The fumes of the petrol ignited, setting fire to the old cardboard box as well.

  While this was going on, I was in my room – we lived in one of the upstairs flats – trying hard to light a match from the box I had sneaked through from the scullery. It was a task I had never attempted before and I was determined to master it. I had gone through nearly the whole boxful, some breaking, some just refusing to light, when I suddenly struck lucky but got such a shock that I dropped the match, at practically the same time as I heard Dad shouting from below ‘Maisie! The house is on fire! Get out! All of you, get out!’ />
  Panic-stricken, I ran through to the living room, at the front of the house, where Mum, who had been sitting reading with the windows closed because she had let our canary out, jumped up, grabbed her handbag first and then we ran out.

  What follows may sound too far-fetched to be true, but – Brownies’ honour – it’s the gospel truth. It’s a scenario that could well be used in the ‘What happens next?’ part of You’ve Been Framed on TV, and I bet very few would guess correctly.

  There we were, four households standing, white faced, in the small front gardens that were the responsibility of the downstairs tenants to look after. I believe that my face would have been whiter than any of them. My thoughts were running guiltily on the lines of, ‘Dad’s set the house on fire from the cellar, but I’ve maybe set it on fire from my bedroom, as well.’ It was a dreadful feeling, but I was only about ten and too scared to say anything.

  We weren’t left standing for long. Dad had managed to put out the fire in the cellar by closing the door and smothering the flames with an old curtain we girls had been using for dressing up. His face black, his teeth gleaming white, he smiled a smile of relieved pride. ‘Sorry about that, folks. It was my fault, but you can all go back inside now.’

  The other three men – it must have been a Sunday afternoon – wanted to make sure that the danger was over, so they went round to inspect things, while the women shook their heads at each other and made for their own doors. Before Mum and I even got to the foot of the stairs, we came face to face with a sad apparition – well, the apparition wasn’t sad, but we were when we beheld it. The downstairs cat had my canary in his mouth. We never found out if the bird had escaped or if the cat had gone in through the door my mother surely hadn’t closed when we ran out. Whichever way it was, I was heartbroken at the death of my pet. An hour or so later Dad made a little coffin for it, packing it round with cotton wool. I made a little gravestone from a piece of folded cardboard and wrote the one word ‘Beauty’ on it and we had a solemn funeral at the bottom of the garden, laying my dear yellow Beauty to rest under the fence that separated our garden from the next block’s.