Gift from the Gallowgate (15 page)

‘There was an alert on from two till four,’ she said sarcastically. ‘A couple of fine fire-watchers you are.’

Hazel and I looked at each other, ashamed that we had slept through the crucial period, but Mrs Logan laughed suddenly. ‘I’d have come up and wakened you if anything had been going
on, but there wasn’t a sound.’

Safe in the knowledge that she would keep us right, we went to sleep every time after that.

Hazel and I were on duty on Hogmanay, would you believe, but we didn’t really have anything to celebrate and we went to bed as usual. When we went down to the basement
the following morning, however, Mrs Logan said, ‘Peggy and her sister came to first foot you about half past twelve, and they threw gravel up to the window but you must have been sound
asleep. The noise got me out of bed to see who it was, but they wouldn’t let me go up to waken you.’

We had been caught out again, but that didn’t make us change our ways.

Still on the subject of fire-watching, we did have one very interesting evening, but I will have to give you the lead up to it first. Granda, heartbroken at his wife’s
death and with his health going rapidly downhill, developed pneumonia and was sent by Dr Agnes to Woodend Hospital towards the end of January 1943. It wasn’t too far from Mid Stocket and Mum
went to see him on the Wednesday afternoon.

When I went home at teatime on the day of her first visit, she told me about a poor Norwegian sailor who was in with appendicitis and had missed his ship. ‘Your Granda says he can hardly
speak any English,’ she went on, ‘and he can’t read it at all, and he doesn’t get any visitors.’

I didn’t need much persuading to accompany her on the Saturday afternoon. It was exciting to think I would meet a real Norwegian – they were always tall, blonde and very handsome,
weren’t they? Besides, I had managed to get some books and magazines for him from the Norwegian Reading Room in Bon Accord Terrace, which I passed on my way to and from work every day. Quite
a number of Norwegian ships called at Aberdeen then, and the council had set up this facility for them, a library with everything they could wish to read, in their own language.

Fridjof Hougland (I used his name in
Time Shall Reap
) was even better looking than I had imagined, and although we did have a problem understanding each other, it soon became obvious
that he understood more English than he could speak or read. He did manage to tell me his name, and I told him mine (I was married by then but I’ll come to that later), about the Reading Room
and where I worked. I also gave him a humorous account of the fire-watching activities . . . or non-activities, as they were.

He hadn’t been able to tell me anything about himself, so I was quite unaware that he had been in hospital for some weeks and was almost ready to be discharged. I got a shock, therefore,
on my way back from lunch on the Monday, when I turned into Bon Accord Terrace and spotted him standing outside the Norwegian Reading Room. I eventually understood him to be saying that he was
returning the magazines and books, but he had wanted to see me to thank me. In fact, he wanted to thank me by taking me to the pictures, and I was tempted to accept.

I knew that my mother would go off her head if I, a married woman, as much as thought of going out with a foreigner and I did have a legitimate excuse not to go. ‘I’m sorry, but this
is my night for fire-watching.’

This was double Dutch to him, and I tried to explain while he accompanied me down to the office, but I knew he didn’t understand. He had just taken my hand in his to say goodbye when Hazel
came round the corner, her eyes popping as she watched him walking away.

‘Who’s he? Oh boy, I could go for a gorgeous hunk like that, Doris, and you don’t need him. You’ve got a man already.’

Despite this being so, I must admit that I did wish I hadn’t been duty-bound that night, but, on the other hand, I felt proud of myself for refusing him.

Hazel kept on asking me about him that night, and I was telling her as much as I knew when we heard a low whistle coming from the street below. We both ran to the window, defying the blackout
regulations by opening the wooden louvered blinds to look out, and there he was, looking up and smiling his thrilling, heart-stopping smile.

‘We can’t let him in,’ I told Hazel. ‘What would Mrs Logan say?’

‘’I don’t think she can say anything,’ Hazel laughed, desperate to get to know him. ‘Anyway, she doesn’t need to know.’

He was very quiet when I took him up, and she did most of the talking, but I was conscious of Fridjof’s eyes on me . . . too conscious, as Hazel told me after he had left. Before going, he
said, shyly, ‘You come wiss me tomorrow, Dorees?’

He had obviously learned some new words, but . . . ‘Oh. No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m married.’

‘Yes? You can come?’

‘I can’t. Don’t you understand?’ I pointed to my wedding ring, but oh, how I wanted to go. How could I, though? Anybody could see me.

It was Hazel, bless her, who settled it. ‘Of course she’ll go out with you,’ she told Fridjof, then turned to me. ‘Don’t be so daft. Who’s going to
know?’

I went to the pictures with him the following evening. I also went with him to the room in Forest Road that he had booked for the night. I salved my conscience by assuring myself that it was on
my way home and he was only being friendly. As it was, we sat closely together on the bed, we cuddled a little, we kissed a little . . . and then I forced myself to break away. I wasn’t an
innocent young girl any longer; I knew what this could lead to.

Fridjof saw me home, it wasn’t far, and I could understand from his expression that he was letting me know in his own tongue how sorry he was that he wouldn’t see me again. He had
been ordered to join another ship the following day. I, too, was sorry, but it was probably – most definitely – better this way.

It was some time later before I realised how foolish, and how lucky, I’d been. In that situation, most young men would have tried, and likely succeeded, to overcome the girl and taken
their pleasure. I’d heard other girls saying that foreigners were out for all they could get and were never heard from again. Fridjof, however, had proved that he wasn’t like that, and
although I never heard from him again, I never completely forgot him.

Although Douglas Mackay was now in the Middle East, he still wrote to me. Tommy Duffus, though, had married a girl he met in the south of England and I never saw or heard from
him again. Doug Paul (Uncle Doug) was living with his in-laws in King Street and we didn’t see much of him after his father died. It was only Jimmy, then, who was a regular visitor, at around
three-monthly intervals. We still corresponded, but there were no more walks or outings. That would have been asking for trouble.

Sandy was at sea for long periods at a time, but he also had quite long spells at home, and we sometimes had a week or two in Portgordon with his parents, who were much older than my mother. Old
John Thain, over seventy, had been a sailmaker, and I got on very well with him. He was a couthy man with a droll kind of humour, and he seemed to like me, too. His wife, I don’t think I ever
heard her first name, was anything but couthy. She had no teeth, so her mouth always seemed to be set in disapproval. She was fairly tall, well-built and walked with a straight back, lashed into
her corsets, no doubt. The fisher style of life was different from what I’d been used to, and I never felt fully at ease there.

The Sabbath was a complete day of rest. No work of any kind was done. Sunday dinner had to be prepared the day before, usually a big pot of some kind of soup, often Cullen Skink, a delicacy made
with smoked haddock, milk and potatoes.

Although I knew deep down that I still loved Jimmy, I never once thought of separating from my husband. That would have caused a proper scandal.

Life went on through 1943. One mundane day after another, only lightened by my evenings out with Hazel and the likelihood of being taken home by a young man I wasn’t particularly taken
with and who wasn’t particularly taken with me.

They were brief, platonic relationships in the main, sometimes with just a goodbye kiss, sometimes, thankfully, not even that, but there were one or two who got a bit fresh and could be stopped
with a slap on the hand. There was also the odd one who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and it was quite a struggle to get free.

Things never went further than that, so I suppose I should have counted myself lucky.

With no young men needing lodgings any more, my mother turned to older men – travellers for commodities sold by nationwide firms, or representatives of various companies,
in Aberdeen to check on branches in the area. Dealing with a class above the mechanics, lorry drivers and young clerks, she no longer referred to her lodgers. They were boarders now, or paying
guests, but they were quite happy with the facilities she had to offer . . . and the food. Give Mum her due, she was a good cook.

However, it became more and more difficult to find boarders, and they usually only stayed for a week or two at the most and the next thing I knew was that there were four strapping land girls in
the house.

They were like a breath of fresh air to me, but a headache for my mother. She had to try to remove make-up and nail varnish from mirrors and bedroom furniture, even from the mats and congoleum
on the floors. They were a jolly lot, though and provided lots of fresh vegetables and, even more welcome since they were scarcely available in the cities, eggs.

Breakfasts and teas were accompanied by tales of boyfriends, good and bad, and I avidly listened to what ‘he’ had said and done the evening before. They were certainly not shy, and
some of their accounts left nothing to the imagination. That shocked their landlady but I found it fascinating. I was even a touch jealous that my ‘love life’ had not been so exciting.
If I remember correctly, only one romance was still blossoming when they left, a few months later.

Mum said she wasn’t going to take females again. They were too messy.

Aberdeen’s worst raid came in the summer of 1943. It started when dozens of bombers came across the North Sea from Norway, sweeping into the city like a plague of
locusts. It was around 9 p.m., still dusk as they took different directions to wreak most havoc. Almost every area was affected, churches, schools, hospitals and, of course, large numbers of houses
left in ruins.

Even St Peter’s Cemetery, where Granda Forsyth and Uncle Billy were buried, was hit. Doug and his wife lived in King Street, not far from St Peter’s, and I can remember Reta telling
me that they had been to the cinema and had just gone into the lobby of their tenement building when one of the bombs exploded almost on the doorstep. When they looked out – the door had been
blown off its hinges – they saw that bits of tram rails had landed on the tops of the houses at the other side of the street. In her parents’ top floor flat, a hole had been made in the
roof, probably from similar debris falling there.

Damage was done throughout the entire city, and hundreds of people were killed or wounded in that one night. Because no other attacks had been on anything like this scale before, I had often
ignored an alert if I was already in bed, but this taught me not to be so blasé.

I had been even more foolish on one occasion about a year or so earlier. The siren had sounded early in the evening, and we listened for about half an hour to the distant thuds of bombs, as we
usually did. None of the enemy planes would waste their ammunition on Mid Stocket; there was nothing of any importance near us at all. So we were extremely taken aback when the noises came nearer .
. . and nearer. We could hear the bombs whistling down in quick succession, one very close before the noise grew fainter. Strangely, there was no explosion from ‘our’ one, so we
presumed that it had been a dud.

Granda, who had been taking his life in his hands by standing outside smoking his pipe, poked his head round the living room door when everything was silent again. ‘I’m gaun ower to
see where that closest ane landed. ’Twas jist ower the road.’

Granny, this was just a few months before she died, went mad at him, and did manage to persuade him to wait until the following day. And so, after breakfast, he took Bertha and me across the
road, through the gate into the nearest field but we could see nothing. Positive that he hadn’t been wrong – he was a quiet but very determined man – Granda took us into the next
field, and there, sure enough, was a huge crater. The bomb had sunk into the newly ploughed soil without exploding.

I suppose we three were lucky in our foolhardiness as there could quite easily have been a tragedy, and a bomb disposal squad was soon on the scene to defuse it. Following the path of the bombs,
all of which had exploded except ‘ours’, the experts were able to state that the target had actually been Foresterhill Hospital, not that far from us as the crow (or a bomber)
flies.

Foresterhill Hospital was built to replace Woolmanhill, the old Infirmary in the centre of town. The new site was chosen to allow for expansion and was to be something of a
showpiece. So modern and innovative, in fact, that the king himself, Edward VIII, was asked to open it in the summer of 1936 – a new king, before his coronation, to be forever associated with
the new hospital.

Edward, however, declined the honour on the grounds that he had a previous engagement, and the then Duke and Duchess of York performed the duty. Imagine the resentment felt by all residents of
the city when it came out that the king had actually been in Aberdeen that day to meet Mrs Simpson at the Joint Station and take her to Balmoral. I know that I, who had practically worshipped the
man before, went right off him then. I felt no sympathy when he had to abdicate. He wasn’t fit to be a king, anyway. On the other hand, I admired the Duke of York, a man I had hardly heard of
(I was only fourteen) for stepping into the breach that day. What’s more, he turned out to be the perfect king, especially for a Britain at war.