Voices in the Street

by Maureen Reynolds

  The fireplace men spent a whole day just plastering the wall before installing the fireplace, such was the damage that had to be repaired, and I was told this would have to be added to the bill. In fact, the men said they had never seen anything like it. I held up my hands and said, ‘Not guilty. It wasn’t me.’

  Every Wednesday, I went to see my in-laws after visiting Mum at the hospital and it was lovely to arrive and sit down to a great, hot, home-cooked meal. Peggy was also counting the days to her son’s homecoming but, unlike me, she would score the days off the calendar until the end of May. She said one night after my weekly visit, ‘If you need a help with papering or painting, just give me a shout and Eh’ll help.’

  By the middle of February, the fireplace and cooker were installed and, just as predicted, the room took on a different aspect. One night Peggy, Ally’s sister Ann and I set about stripping the old wallpaper from the kitchen walls and she couldn’t believe her eyes when she now saw the neat room with its creamy-coloured tiled fireplace with the brown trim. The gleaming white cooker stood beside the newly scrubbed kitchen cupboard and everything looked shipshape.

  ‘Eh never thought this room would ever look like this,’ she said in a surprised voice.

  I tried hard to suppress a slightly smug feeling, knowing full well how smugness always led to some catastrophe in my life. I just looked pleased. We set to work with wallpaper scrapers and, although we didn’t know it at the time, this job would take a whole week. There was layer after layer of different wallpapers on the walls, each one showing elusive snatches of the various tastes over the past hundred years by the look of it. Ann was busy scraping and suddenly uncovered a sheet of newspaper showing the death of Marie Lloyd. The room had obviously been papered with newspapers in 1922.

  We eventually reached the virgin plaster and it had been painted in a dark green which must have made the room appear like the inside of a bottle. Then I heard through the grapevine that the small ads in the paper were full of handymen who papered rooms for thirty shillings a room, with the owner supplying the wallpaper of course.

  The man arrived on a Sunday and I left him with the six rolls of lovely cream-coloured paper which had a gold leaf spray printed on it. When I returned in the early afternoon with sandwiches and tea, he was almost finished. It was very well done and I was delighted. However, when Peggy arrived later, she said, ‘Should the spray no be sitting up the way instead of drooping downwards?’

  ‘Eh don’t think so. Eh think it’s been put up the right way,’ I said emphatically.

  Right up to the time we left the house in the early 1960s, I was never sure who was right – Peggy or me.

  By now it was approaching D-Day, as in Demob Day. Determined that one room in the house should be perfect, I spent a Saturday afternoon in Grant’s furniture shop in the Murraygate. I chose a dining-room suite in dark oak. The salesman showed me the latest in a sideboard, namely a cock-tail cabinet. Apparently this innovation was extremely popular and highly sought after by the good folk of Dundee. Why this should be was a mystery. I doubted if a tiny minority in the city had ever tasted a cocktail, let alone have the expertise to mix one, but I was impressed and planned to put fancy tumblers in it.

  I also bought twelve yards of red linoleum (which was fitted by a workman from the shop), two red, uncut moquette fireside chairs and a large grey rug. I can recall how thrilled I was when everything in place, including the wedding presents and the small radio and Dansette record player which we bought before Ally went into the army, paying it up at a few shillings a week.

  It was now twenty days and counting and I think his parents were more worked up than I was. It also looked like Mum would be coming home not long after Ally so events were moving fast. There was still trouble in Cyprus between the Turks and the Greeks and I hoped that this wouldn’t flare up again like Suez. George and I had another six-monthly check-up but once again this proved negative. It would appear that Mum’s infection hadn’t spread to her family.

  At work, Hannah was my confidante and she listened to all my fears regarding Ally’s return. I was so sure that something would happen to prevent this.

  ‘Of course it’ll no,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s conscripts being demobbed every day. In fact, there’s been three in my street in the last couple of weeks.’

  ‘Eh expect Eh’m worrying over nothing,’ I admitted.

  Hannah was annoyed at Millie for palming her off with three well-known non-tippers while keeping her table for a party of good tippers. It has to be said that people couldn’t always leave a tip and I often thought it very unfair of the management to expect the public to finance our wages.

  ‘Did you see madam showing folk to my table?’ said Hannah, looking cross. ‘That’s no her job but the manageress never seems to notice it. Eh need my tips as much as her. Eh’ve a family to feed as well.’

  Although I agreed wholeheartedly with Hannah, ever since the episode of the house I tried to forget Millie’s manipulative behaviour. I still couldn’t understand why she had given me the information about the returned key but she had, and I would be ever grateful to her.

  Ally was due home about the end of May and, although I didn’t know the exact date, I was aiming to have the house finished for around the 23rd of the month. Suddenly, on 14 May he appeared at the door early in the morning. George, who was getting ready for work, answered the door in such a nonchalant, laid-back way that I had to laugh.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Ally. Come in,’ was his response to someone who had been away for almost two years, which to me seemed more like a lifetime.

  We went to see Mum in hospital and she teased him over his super suntan. ‘Eh’ll have to join up in the army if it gives me a great colour like you!’ she laughed.

  The entire week was spent visiting relations and friends. Then we spent time at the house, papering the two bedrooms. To begin with, I decided to help with this job but as I approached a section of wall with a strip of pasted paper, an enormous spider scuttled up the wall in an effort to escape possible death by decoration. In a panic, I dropped the long strip of paper all over the floor, my feet and the entire front of my frock, leaving a sticky gunge that took ages to clean off. After that little disaster, I stuck to painting rather than being stuck to the wall.

  Within a couple of weeks of Ally returning to work, Mum was discharged from the hospital as fit and cured. This was a far cry from her first day there. She wasn’t allowed to go back to work until her all-clear X-ray which would be in a month’s time. She really missed the company of the hospital and as they had all been long-stay patients, friendships had been formed.

  Nellie was a constant visitor and Bella made the journey every fortnight from her new house in St Mary’s Woods. It was also at this time that I heard of a job in the DECS (the Dundee Eastern Co-operative Society – part of the Sosh) shop at the corner of South George Street. The wage was far in excess of the one paid by Draffen’s and I was thrilled to get it.

  It was as if I had been transferred back to my childhood days with Cathie and her daughter, Sylvia. During those days, we paid many a trip to the Sosh in the Hawkhill and I was now working in a branch of this great institution. I noticed that the procedure hadn’t changed over the years. The customers still placed their books in the narrow wooden compartment on the counter and an assistant would pull the bottom book through. They would then call out the name loudly in the direction of the crowd of waiting women who stood patiently with their shopping bags.

  It was like a time capsule from Cathie’s era except that the shelves were now stacked high with grocery items while huge mounds of butter sat on the marble slab and gigots of ham hung from hooks. The bacon slicer was still in the expert hands of one person, namely a Mr Allen, who was also the under-manager. I loved this job with its variety of tasks and the customers who always had time for a chat over the purchases of their bacon, eggs and butter.

  One morning I was watching Mr Allen slicing his bacon when I suddenly fe
lt unwell and had to hurry out to the back green which lay behind the back door. I felt better after a few minutes in the fresh air but couldn’t bear to think about any fatty foods like the butter, margarine and the cooking fats. A week later, I was at Mum’s house doing the washing. We had treated her to a washing machine, which was a great boon to her. I also got to use it, which was a great boon to me.

  Aggie appeared in her usual good form. ‘How are you keeping, Molly?’ she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she immediately leapt in with her chatter, her face beaming, ‘Wait till Eh tell you the latest news. Eh’m to be a granny! Babs and Ritchie are expecting their first bairn. What do you think of that? It’s due in August next year.’

  Mum just looked at her over the top of her glasses. ‘That’s good news, Aggie. Do you want to hear mine? Eh’m to be a granny as well – in July next year.’

  Aggie gave me a look as if to suggest I should have waited till Babs had announced her condition before spoiling her mother’s big announcement.

  ‘Well, imagine that,’ she said without feeling. ‘Still, maybe Babs will be early and Maureen will be late and we’ll have our grandchildren at the same time.’

  The woman was impossible, I thought, as I turned back to the week’s pile of dirty clothes.

  What Mum and I hadn’t told Aggie was the fact that this was my second pregnancy, The first had resulted in a miscarriage six months earlier. I can still recall the smell and atmosphere of the ward in Maryfield Hospital and the different symptoms of the various women who were in for one ailment or another in their pregnancies. All were as worried as I was.

  Afterwards, the nurse, who was obviously trying to be sympathetic, said the baby had been perfectly formed. I’ve never forgotten that distressing news and wished I hadn’t been told. I thought what I had lost was a bunch of cells and now it hit me hard when I realised I had lost another human being. I mentally gave the baby a name, Charlie, after Uncle Charlie, a name I thought would have suited either a boy or a girl.

  But I was now expecting again and the sick spells were becoming worse. I was finding it very difficult to hide these from the manager, who normally sat in his glass-fronted office every day. I sometimes had to leave a customer standing in mid-order while I rushed outside. After a couple of minutes I would return as if nothing had happened. Although I can laugh at this behaviour now, at the time it wasn’t so funny. The strange thing was that not one customer ever complained or even mentioned their runaway assistant – this Houdini of the Sosh.

  Then the sickness passed as suddenly as it began. I was now feeling great, which made the manager’s conversation all the more annoying. I knew my overall was getting tighter every week but I didn’t think it was that bad until he asked me into his office to ask if I was expecting.

  I had to tell the truth: ‘Yes I am.’

  He looked quite apologetic. ‘Eh’m afraid you’ll have to put your notice in. The company has a strict rule that once a pregnant woman starts to show, she has to leave. We think it offends the customers, and, another thing, this job can be very heavy with lifting boxes and that would be a worry for us.’

  The strange thing about this sex discrimination was the fact that I accepted it, just as thousands of women had done before me and would do for a few more years to come. In fact, I was lucky because, if I had been employed in any of the professions like nursing, I would have had to give up work when I was married, let alone on becoming pregnant.

  I went to Doctor Jacob Junior, who was now in practice with his father and he put me on the insurance until the birth, which was five-and-a-half months away. It was just my hard luck that my bump had been noticed.

  Aggie arrived for tea one afternoon. She had been harping on about never being invited to the house. We had furnished the big bedroom with a suite taken on hire purchase but the small bedroom was still unfurnished, except for the pram. This was a situation that bothered Mum because she was superstitious about the pram being in the house before the baby was born. But I had no other place to put it. I could hardly ask Mrs Ririe and her son David to store it in their tiny flat and Mum didn’t have the room either.

  The reason the pram was there early was because it was second-hand. I saw an advert in the Evening Telegraph newspaper and I hurried to see it at an address in Dura Street. It was nothing special, just an ordinary grey Tansad pram, but it was almost new and selling for six pounds. I snapped it up right away, much to Mum’s dismay.

  Of course Aggie spotted it. ‘Oh, Eh see you’ve got your pram. Should it be in the house before the baby’s born?’ she wondered, giving me a quizzical look.

  I pretended I hadn’t heard her. Mum just nodded her head as if to say, it’s not just me that thinks it’s unlucky.

  ‘Our Babs has picked her baby carriage,’ Aggie informed us, ‘that’s what they’re called in California. Well, she’s picked it and she says she’s got her cot with the bumper pads around it.’

  Mum stopped her. ‘What on earth are bumper pads?’

  ‘They’re fancy padded bits that go round the sides of the cot to stop the bairns banging their heads off the bars, Eh suppose,’ she said lamely. ‘Well, that’s the pram and cot sorted out. Babs had her baby shower the other night and she was inundated with baby things.’

  She stopped when she saw our puzzled faces. ‘A baby shower is just a get-together with your friends and work colleagues and neighbours and they all bring presents with them for the baby.’

  ‘There you go, Maureen,’ said Mum, ‘just organise a baby shower and maybe you’ll get soaked!’

  Although we laughed, poor Aggie didn’t get the joke. ‘Well, Eh haven’t seen a picture of the baby carriage but Ritchie was saying that it’s really big and roomy.’

  ‘What, as long as Senga’s Cadillac?’ said Mum with a cheeky smile.

  ‘No, Molly, it’s no as long as that. Eh told you Senga’s car was as long as your room.’

  Mum was penitent; ‘Aye so you did Aggie.’

  Aggie then turned her attention to our kitchen. ‘Eh see you’ve just got linoleum. Do you no think you should get a carpet for the wee one to crawl around on? We got our carpet square from Henderson’s and it was just a wee deposit and ten shillings a week.’

  ‘No, Aggie, we can’t afford a carpet with all the baby things we need,’ I said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Well, meh man was saying that we should go out to California in time to see our first grandchild and Eh think that’s what we’re going to do.’

  Suddenly, Mum felt so sorry for her, being so far away from her two daughters. ‘Aggie, that’s what you both should do. Have a good holiday and see your family and the new bairn.’

  I saw the two women out and walked down the stairs with them, these two soon-to-be-grandmothers.

  We were in the middle of a heatwave when the baby decided to put in an appearance. Ally had an early morning start in the bakery but Mum had warned me to get in touch the minute I felt the slightest pain and I did, at seven-thirty one morning. I caught the bus across the road from the house and landed at her door. Mum went into a slight panic and said we should make our way to Maryfield Hospital right away. Because I didn’t know any better, I agreed.

  Needless to say, I was far too early and could have put off my admission until that evening but I made a mental note for a future time – if there was going to be another time. This decision was reached mainly because of the castor oil. The young nurse was quite matter of fact about it. ‘We’ll get you ready for bed then give you a dose of castor oil,’ she said, vanishing into a room and appearing with a large glass of the obnoxious oily liquid. ‘Now, swallow this and get into bed.’

  I gazed in horror at the almost-full tumbler and reckoned it must have held a bottle and a half at least. The nurse arrived back and looked at the still full glass. ‘Hurry up and swallow it. It’s tasteless.’

  I felt I had to be honest with this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young woman who had obviously never tasted castor oil in he
r life.

  ‘Eh’m sorry, nurse, but Eh don’t think Eh can drink this. Eh’ll be sick.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, let me put some orange juice in it to make it taste better.’

  She added an inch of orange liquid to the oil where it floated on top of the surface. By now, the orange-layered drink looked repulsive and I thought about heading to the bathroom where I could maybe pretend to swallow it as I tipped it down the sink.

  Almost as if she had read my mind, she said, ‘I’ll come with you in case you throw it away.’

  I gave her a hurt look as if to say, would I do that? I was at the bathroom door with my mentor following close behind me when she was called away. I was almost rubbing my hands in glee when she returned with one of the cleaners. What was this nurse – a clairvoyant? The cleaner was a small, elderly woman who was stuffing her duster in her overall pocket.

  ‘You better hurry up and drink it, lass, because if you don’t they’ll just give you another glass.’

  I was seriously thinking I had entered the Spanish Inquisition by mistake when the cleaning woman said, ‘Hold on a minute. Eh’ll give you something to help.’

  What, I thought, apart from a general anaesthetic, could possibly help? I was on the verge of tipping it away when she appeared with a slice of bread in her hand.

  ‘Well, the old trick that my granny used to do is this – just hold your nose and drink it, then quickly eat this slice of bread. As you swallow it, it takes all the oiliness away.’

  Because there was no escape for me, I did as I was told. It was touch and go whether the bread could be swallowed in time because I felt this terrible retching in my throat. Fortunately, the bread did the trick and the moment passed.