It was two days before I saw Dr Fraser again. He slouched into the office from the street door just after midday, nothing like his usual bouncy self, and bent over the counter to rest his head on his arms. ‘Christ, Ginger, I feel bad.’
Guessing that he was suffering from a hangover, he’d likely been drinking since I saw him last, I said, sympathetically, ‘I hope you didn’t catch the cold when you took me home the other night.’
His head lifted a little, and he looked at me with bleary eyes. ‘Did I take you home? I can’t remember.’
‘You did, and I was really grateful. You saved me having to hike up the hill in the pitch dark on my own.’ I have never lost my fear of the dark.
He was frowning now, apparently dredging his memory. ‘I’ve been having this queer picture of me driving through trees – like I was going in and out the dusty bluebells. Would that be right?’
‘Yes, just after Richmondhill Road there are three old houses . . .’
‘On a side road. Was that where I was . . .those trees?’
I couldn’t help giggling at him. ‘You shouldn’t be working today. You should be in bed.’
Another groan. ‘I’m just out of my bloody bed, Ginger. There’s nothing wrong with me that a nip of whisky wouldn’t put right . . .’ He broke off, shaking his head.
‘No, I couldn’t even face a hair of the dog that bit me. I was paralytic last night, and the night before, but never again. I swear to you, Ginger, never again.’
He heaved himself up as nearly erect as he could. ‘I’d better go and get the jalopy out. I’ve patients to attend to, and I can diagnose just as well drunk as sober.’
‘You’re not fit to attend . . .’ I began but he was on his way into the garage. I opened the hatch into the washing bay where one of the drivers was hosing down his Rolls. ‘Bill, get round and stop Dr Fraser from taking his car out. He says he’s got to attend to his patients, but he can hardly stand, he’s so drunk.’
Fortunately, Bill was able to persuade him to get in the passenger seat to be driven home, and it was another two days before he came in again, stone-cold sober.
There was one mechanic in the garage and one apprentice, as well as six drivers and a garageman, and Ian, of course, so I was the only female among all those men. Most of them teased me, but not one made any advances, for which I suppose I should have counted myself lucky. The thing was, we all got on very well together. Then Mr Thomson engaged another girl for the office. Kathleen was a great help, a cheery well-built girl who also had the gift of the gab, and we became really good friends.
When Jimmy Balfour offered to teach her to drive, she talked him into giving me lessons as well. He had an old Morris, with the starter button on the floor, and I never felt easy with it. It became the routine that I drove myself home and Kathleen then drove herself home . . . to Rosemount Place. I was a nervous wreck each time I’d to take the wheel, but Kathleen wasted no time before she applied to sit a test. The day before she was due to try, Jimmy B. asked me if I would mind letting her drive me home as well, and on the way up the hill, he barked at her to stop.
This ‘emergency stop’ almost had my head going through the soft roof and Jimmy B. flying through the windscreen. Then, as my house was also on a side road apart from the main thoroughfare (another part of the original road), he told her to go in from the upper end and face downhill. This meant that she had to manoeuvre the small car round a hairpin bend, and both her passengers had their hearts in their mouths when she almost didn’t make it, stopping within half an inch of a low garden wall – a neigbour’s, not ours. There had originally been railings on top, but they had all been removed to make munitions during the war. The promise to replace them when the war was over was never kept.
Despite those near mishaps, Kathleen sailed through her driving test, while I decided to put an end to the lessons that scared me out of my wits . . . and, I’m sure, had the same effect on Jimmy B. As a matter of interest, he emigrated to Australia not long after that. Two mechanics were taken on in his place, coincidentally both called Bob, and then, to replace Kathleen, who found a job with better pay, another two girls, Annie and Priscilla, known as Pat. In our teabreak one morning, I discovered that Annie’s father knew most of the Forsyths and wanted to meet me.
I was invited to her home for tea, a quaint, round, little building that had once been the lodge to Woodside House. It turned out that her dad had practically been brought up by my father’s sister Maggie, and I became a regular visitor there, with Sheila.
Bob C. had taken a shine to Priscilla, and I went out with Bob W. several times, but he, strangely enough, also emigrated to Australia. Why was it that men couldn’t seem to get far enough away from me?
The hectic pressure of work at McDonald’s was beginning to tell on me, even with two girls to help, so I applied for a job in Cordiner’s Garage on North Esplanade West, where I started early in 1952. This was much farther away from home and I had quite a long walk from the bus – down Bridge Street, College Street and South College Street, then under the arches of the railway line to emerge onto the Esplanade itself, a beautiful wide street alongside the River Dee. There was only one other girl in the office and although she was younger than I was, we settled into a friendly, easy relationship. There was only the garage to worry about, no taxis, and we sometimes spent time looking out on to the river, even going outside to watch the university boat crews practising in the sunshine.
There was one blot on the landscape, however . . . isn’t there always? Most of the businesses near us were fish-curing yards, and you had to watch your step because of the fish ‘bree’ sloshing about on the pavements. Not only that, in the summer especially, the stench was terrible. But, like everything else, you got used to it after a while, and the fish girls were a cheery lot.
Irene lived in Torry – once a fishing village on its own separated from the city by the Dee – and she often asked me to walk along to the Victoria Bridge with her, for company really, but as she put it, ‘Just for a laugh.’ It meant that I had much farther to go to catch my bus – along South Market Street, passing Jamieson’s Quay where I had worked at one time, and up the steep hill of Market Street, but I didn’t mind. It was good exercise for me.
I’d been working on the Esplanade for almost a year when I had the biggest (and best) surprise that I could ever have had. A solicitor’s letter informed me that my husband had applied for a divorce and that the hearing was set for such-and-such a day in Edinburgh. I did not need to attend unless I wanted to contest it. Contest? Why should I want to contest it when it was what I’d been longing for since 1947, the action that Sandy had sworn he would never take. (It transpired that he had met someone else – someone he wanted to marry.)
The big day came a month or so later; the wonderful day when I received the actual notification that I was free. The final decree, because there is, or was at that time in Scotland, no decree nisi to come first. I floated on air down the long slope to work that day, and went into the office waving my piece of paper Chamberlain style, wishing that I could tell Jimmy there and then, but suddenly wondering if he, too, had met someone else by this time. The more I considered it, the more positive I became that he had, but there was no way of finding out. I had no idea where he was living.
Life carried on, but I wasn’t interested in anything. What had I to look forward to now?
12
Whether or not Johnny Elphinstone felt guilty for the mayhem he had caused in our household – knowing him, I shouldn’t think so – shortly afterwards he suddenly decided to emigrate to Australia. My mother had now to find two new lodgers. Placing an advert in the Evening Express, she was very lucky in the two young men she chose out of the many replies she received.
Alex and Raymond were trainee dispensing opticians. Clean-cut and well dressed, they were like a breath of fresh air after the strained atmosphere that had been hanging around us for so many weeks. They were nearer Bertha’s age than mine and gave
us ongoing accounts of the girls they met, why they asked certain of them out and whether or not they wanted to continue the relationship. Alex, from Dundee, very musical, joined the Lyric Opera Company, and although none of us were keen on opera, we thoroughly enjoyed their presentations of The Bartered Bride and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
He also played the trumpet, rather loud for our living room but we didn’t mind. In fact, both Bertha and I made an attempt at playing it, but only succeeded in making horrible sounds that had Mum shouting, ‘Stop that row this minute, before you burst my eardrums.’
Now I come to what can only be called a string of coincidences. It was June 1953, a time when the whole country was celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth (Second of England, but only First of Scotland). Then came Derby Day. I always had a wee flutter on this classic race and also the Grand National, the only two I bothered with, and had made my choice from reading one of the storemen’s Daily Record racing page. To be sure that I wasn’t too late, I took an earlier bus back to work so that I’d have time to go into the little newsagent in College Street to place my bet. The buses ran, I think, every fifteen minutes, so I was allowing myself plenty of time. The man looked at me in a pitying way when I told him to put a shilling each way on Pinza – probably the favourite, though what did I know? – but he gave me the betting slip without saying a word.
‘I’m sure this is going to be a lucky day for me,’ I told him as I went out.
My business had only taken a minute or two, and it was a glorious summer day, so I ambled the rest of the way to work. It wasn’t what anybody could describe as a perfect setting. College Street continues as South College Street, with a high wall on both sides; Pirie Appleton, Notepaper and Envelope Manufacturers, on the left, and the Gas Works on the right; something to do with gas, anyway . . . or electricity. I was astonished, but quite pleased, that there was so little traffic. As a rule, that stretch of road was very busy – leading to several fish yards and also to the Suspension Bridge over the Dee to Torry. (Less romantic than Over the Sea to Skye.)
Well, there I was, having a slow stroll on my own with nothing to distract me from my drab surroundings, when a small grey van came shooting through the arch. A small grey van? My interest was aroused. A Rubislaw grey van. It must be a William Tawse’s van, the place where Jimmy worked. (I’ve never found out whether the firm called this colour Rubislaw Grey because their yard was in the Rubislaw area of the city, or because it was right next to Rubislaw Quarry, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?)
These thoughts took a mere instant and I was delighted to see that the driver was Jimmy, so I waved my arms frantically to draw his attention. But things never work out that easily, do they? The small van flashed straight past me. My thumping heart took a nosedive as I turned away to continue my journey. Had he honestly not noticed me, or had he seen me and didn’t want to speak to me? Had he found somebody else and got away from me as fast as he could?
So deep in despair was I that I didn’t notice the movement at the other side of the street, and it wasn’t until the vehicle door slammed that I looked up.
‘Oh, Doris I’m sorry,’ Jimmy gasped as he ran towards me. ‘I was thinking about . . . oh, nothing important, and I was well past you before I looked in my rear view mirror. I couldn’t see your face, but I was sure it was you, and I was scared you’d have gone out of sight under the arches and disappeared if I took time to turn round, so I reversed all the way back.’
Thus we stood, saying nothing else for a while, just drinking each other in as if we hadn’t seen each other for twenty years – which it felt like, to be honest. Young people of today likely wouldn’t understand why we didn’t hug and kiss since we’d been apart for a such while, but hugging and kissing in the street was not done in those days, not even if there wasn’t a soul in sight and there were high walls on both sides of you.
He did say, ‘Why didn’t you wait for me after I was called up?’
This question had never come up before. ‘You never asked me to,’ I hedged.
‘I’d nothing to offer you. Not a thing. I was only twenty and . . . we were far too young. Besides, I didn’t know what would happen. I might have been killed.’
‘Thank heaven you weren’t.’
We fell silent again, our emotions too ragged to let loose, but after a while, a clock in the distance struck three. ‘I’ll have to get back,’ he said, ‘or they’ll be wondering where I am. I was sent to Cordiner’s Garage to collect a radiator for a car we’re working on, and they’re waiting . . .’
‘That’s funny. I work in Cordiner’s. It’s my dinner hour, and I wouldn’t have seen you if we hadn’t . . .’
It turned out that he had been at the main branch in Menzies Road, so he wouldn’t have seen me anyway. Then I recollected something I should have told him straight away, but I’d been so taken by surprise. ‘Sandy did divorce me, after all. I got the notification months ago.’
He took my hand at long last. ‘I wish I’d known, but . . .’ He broke off with a long sigh, then brightened. ‘D’you think we could make a go of it this time?’
Absolutely certain that we could (and we have) I arranged to meet him that evening, and giving my hand a long squeeze, he ran back to his van and roared off, while I took my time about covering the last few hundred yards I still had to go. I couldn’t get over it. If I hadn’t taken an earlier bus, if I hadn’t spent that two or three minutes in the shop putting on a bet, if he hadn’t been sent to Menzies Road and come across the Suspension Bridge at that particular time, we might never have seen each other again.
When I went into the office, Irene, the manager and all the garage staff were gathered round the small wireless set, and I was just in time to hear the result. Pinza had come in first. A foregone conclusion, really. Hadn’t I known all along that this was my lucky day? My winnings couldn’t have been more than a few pounds but, even so, they’d have been as much as my weekly pay.
Mum didn’t seem all that surprised to hear my main news at teatime; she must have guessed that it would happen sooner or later. Jimmy was waiting for me on the outside road when I went out, probably a bit timid of coming to the door, and we walked up to the top of the hill, crossed the Ring Road and went along the Lang Stracht. The council had not long begun to build houses there, and what had once been a lovely country road would soon be the division between the vast housing estates of Mastrick – so named because the original owner of the land had traded with Maastricht in Holland – and the smaller Summerhill.
At this particular time, there were still some stretches of the dry-stane dykes enclosing the fields, still some secluded spots to sit and talk. Which we did! We talked and talked, about what had happened to us in the intervening years, of how we had felt when we had to stop seeing each other, of how ashamed we were at what we had done to cause the ban. We also vowed not to repeat it.
To prevent this, we started to plan ahead. What would have to be done? He said that he’d have to make peace with my mother, and prove that he had been serious about me. I said he would have to tell his folk, too; they might not be happy about him marrying a divorced woman with a nine-year-old daughter.
Then we discussed the financial side of things. He said he didn’t want his wife to go out to work (this was frowned on, suggesting that the man couldn’t earn enough), but I said that was silly. We would be glad of the money until we got on our feet.
When I went home and told Mum we were definitely going to marry, she said, as she had said about Sandy, ‘He’ll have to come and ask for my permission first.’
I was just a couple of weeks short of my thirty-first birthday, but I didn’t want to throw a spanner in the works by denying her that privilege, old-fashioned and uncalled for though it was.
On my first visit to Laurencekirk to meet his father and the aunt who had brought him up – his mother had died giving him birth – I was amazed at how much older they were than my fifty-five year old mother. Auntie Ann, the
elder, was over eighty, had once been a tailoress but had given it up to look after her brother’s two children. Daniel was almost seventy and had worked in a linoleum factory in Kirkcaldy until his wife died in November 1919. That was when he had given up his job and his house and returned to his childhood home. He was a very quiet man and I never really found out anything about him.
Auntie Ann reminded me of my beloved Granny, the same couthy way about her, the same aversion to hurting people. She welcomed both Sheila and me into her house, and said how pleased she was that Jimmy was getting married at last. It was clear that she had always looked on him as her blue-eyed, blond curly-haired boy, which she did until the day she died. Jimmy could do no wrong in her eyes. He had hated the curls when he was a teenager, brushing his hair flat and plastering it with brilliantine until a slight kink was all that remained of them. His sister, Minnie, had always been jealous of his hair – hers was dead straight.
I’ll jump ahead briefly, here. In October of 1955, I stayed in Laurencekirk for a week to nurse Auntie Ann, and even when she was obviously at death’s door she lingered on, unconscious. When Jimmy turned up on the Saturday afternoon, it became clear that she had been waiting for him. The moment he spoke to her, she opened her eyes and whispered ‘Jamie’. Now she could go.
The house, on the High Street, was an old building, brick-built with harling on top. Kitchen and parlour downstairs, one bedroom and an attic room upstairs. At one time there had been an outside privy and water tap, but by this time, a lean-to scullery had been built on (they called it the back kitchen), with a tiny lavatory off it. Auntie Ann slept in the bed recess in the kitchen and Jimmy’s father had a wee room somewhere between the kitchen and the back-kitchen. I never saw inside it.
With no electricity or gas, they were still using oil lamps; small ones for carrying to bed, but a tall brass lamp on the kitchen table. All the cooking was done on the wide, gleaming range. While I was still working, Jimmy and I saved up enough to have electricity installed, but the two old people were never very happy with it.
Gift from the Gallowgate Page 14
