Gift from the Gallowgate (7 page)

Not yet capable of rational thought, my mother gave him the keys to the car and accepted the tissue-thin white Bank of England fiver. He was lucky. If Granny and Granda had only arrived sooner,
Uncle Jack wouldn’t have got off so easily.

Mum spent the afternoon discussing with her parents the options open to her. Dad had left no will, and in Scottish law at that time, any moneys belonged to the widow, but property had to be
divided between any children of the marriage. There were no ‘moneys’, of course. In addition to the deposit on the house, Dad had spent quite a lot in doing up the garden, making steps
up from the gate (a task that my granda and one of their lodgers finished), and making alterations to the house. The upstairs bedroom had a box-room, a walk-in cupboard that he had transformed into
a sort of workshop for himself.

Mum had been bemoaning the fact that Dad’s had been a butcher’s shop. ‘If it had been anything else, I could have gone and served in it,’ she said a few times to her
parents, and Granny had to remind her that she had an infant to look after – Bertha had not yet reached the age of two. It was Granda who came up with what seemed the perfect solution to her
problem of making enough money to live on and also pay the mortgage. ‘You could mak’ the hoose work for you?’

She wasn’t too happy with his suggestion that she take in lodgers, but it was the only way round a thorny problem, and she eventually answered a few advertisements in the
Evening
Express
put in by men looking for lodgings.

I had better continue with my schooldays. I turned up at my new school a whole week after the other pupils. Dr Cormack, the headmaster, had been notified of the reason but, as
I was to find out, had told only some of the teachers. I was to have a different one for each subject, and during the morning, not one asked why I had not attended the previous week. I was also
very grateful that no mention was made of my bereavement. It was still much too raw to talk about.

On that first Monday afternoon, we had to go to the Cookery Department, a separate building at the other end of the tarred playground. I can’t remember what the Cookery teacher was called,
though maybe it’s just as well, for we started off on the wrong foot. She glared at me once we were all seated. ‘You’re new!’ she barked. ‘Name?’

Her tone flustered me. ‘D . . .Doris,’ I quavered.

‘Stand up when you speak to me, girl! Do you not have a surname?’

I got to my feet. ‘Forsyth.’

‘Your address, Forsyth?’

Gathering that she needed this information to make up her register, I gave her the number in Mid Stocket Road.

‘What does your father do?’

Not expecting this question, I mumbled, without thinking, ‘I haven’t got a father.’

Her hand crashed down on the table in front of me, narrowly missing my thumb. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl! Everyone has a father.’

By this time, I could sense a wave of sympathy coming from the others, none of whom I’d got to know yet, and who were obviously too scared of the dragon to say anything in my defence.
‘My father died last Monday,’ I whispered, struggling to keep back the tears, ‘but he was a butcher.’

This clearly rattled her. In other circumstances, I believe she would have passed some derogatory remark about butchers, but I think she realised that she had pushed me far enough.

I never got to like her any better in the three years I had her . . . nor she me. Any time I opened my mouth to ask something, she pounced on me for talking, giving me hundreds of lines to write
– ‘I must not talk in class’ – keeping me behind after school, to tidy up what had already been all washed and cleaned, and so on. Luckily, I got on well with all the other
teachers, ‘Fatty’ Copland for Maths (self-explanatory) and ‘Patchy’ Ross for English (she had black hair with a white patch sweeping back from her forehead – most
unusual then). Our Music teacher was Mr Innes, who introduced us to many of the classics and endeared himself to us by pirouetting around while a record was playing on the wind-up gramophone. He
was really fat yet he did very well as the Sugar Plum Fairy.

We had a Sewing teacher who taught us how to make several different kinds of seams (by hand, no sewing machines yet) and different ways of finishing hems. The first item we made was a lapbag,
with our initials embroidered on, where we would be keeping the sewing and knitting we were working on. It was made of good strong cotton, calico maybe, and I used mine for years after I was
married to keep my clothes pegs in.

The first item of clothing we made was a pair of knickers, beautifully shaped but so big that they would have held two or three of us at a time. Mum had had to pay for the material, of course,
so I was forced to wear them . . . most uncomfortable. Then came a thinner cotton blouse, which didn’t turn out too badly, followed by a pair of pyjamas also erring on the large side and
which I had to wear. The last thing I made, in my third year, was a dress. We were allowed to use sewing machines at this stage, and we had to provide our own material for this. Somehow, my mother
managed to get hold of a piece of navy Grandholm flannel – quite expensive, but made to last a lifetime. If this did not quite last a lifetime, I wore it for many years as a dress, altered it
to a skirt and bolero, and years later, cut it down to fit Bertha.

I can’t recall exactly what we knitted, a scarf first I think, then socks, then gloves, but I knitted a vast variety of articles over the years for my family and myself – in garter
stitch to begin with, graduating to stocking stitch, Arran, cable and finally achieving the more intricate Fair Isle.

Other subjects were History, Geography, Religious Education and Gym. The Gym teacher was called Miss Marr, who told us that her brother had been with Shackleton on his journey to the North Pole,
which made us regard her as something of a celebrity.

I was interested in everything and soaked up the lot like a sponge. Not long into my first year, Miss Ross (a dear soul for whom I’d have done anything to please) put me forward for a
bursary. I had to pass an examination to show that I was worthy of this, of course, and was awarded £60, to be paid as £20 for each of three years.

It may not sound much today, but it was quite a help to my financially-challenged mother, who got no compensation for my father’s death because there were no witnesses to the accident so
early in the morning. She got no widow’s pension, either. Paying insurance stamps was not compulsory at that time, and being self-employed Dad had opted not to. He had never dreamt that he
would be dead at the age of forty, leaving behind a widow and two children. This was also why he had not made a will.

My favourite teacher – I’m sure you have guessed – was Miss Ross. I stopped calling her Patchy, it wasn’t respectful. It was she who taught me to recognise many, many
wild flowers, which wasn’t her subject at all. Apart from instilling far more than the rudiments of grammar into us, she also gave many of us a real love of poetry, introducing us to the
weirdly enchanting
Abu Ben Adam.
To prove how much this poem affected us, I must jump to the present day.

Less than a year ago, I was put in touch with the person who had been my best friend at Rosemount. Hilda Glennie, née Mathieson, had a beautiful contralto voice even at the age of
thirteen and had been in one of the operatic societies for years and years. I hadn’t seen or heard of her since around 1968 or so, but some things come about in peculiar ways.

When my husband came home from his second stay in hospital in 1999, we were asked if we needed help in the house. As a result of osteoporosis, I’m not too steady on my legs and I
wasn’t able to do everything that I should, so we accepted the offer. We were allotted a carer to do housework for one hour per week – paying for the service, naturally. After several
different ladies had come and gone – through no fault of mine or theirs, let me hasten to say, just a general moving around, apparently – I got a real treasure, who could go through the
whole house like a dose of salts and leave each room spotless and shining.

June told me one day that she also attended to Hilda Glennie, who had contracted a debilitating disease some time earlier and needed almost constant care. She had seen her reading one of my
books and had told her she came to me, too. Hilda, severely disabled as she was, managed to type out a letter to me on her computer, a long, laborious process. Almost her first words were about
Miss Ross – ‘that dear lady we all loved so much’. She said that
Abu Ben Adam
had been her favourite poem of all time, and quoted it in full from memory. She even quoted
bits from essays I had written and been forced to read out to the class . . . none of which I remembered.

I sent her a long reply, still reminiscing about our schooldays and our dear Henrietta Ross, but I was to get another wonderful, heart-wrenching surprise. Hilda phoned to congratulate me on my
eightieth birthday – June had told her the date. I had a houseful of people, my family was giving me a party, so I couldn’t talk to her for long, but I rang her the following day, and
we spoke for well over two hours. A gift of the gab? Who, me? I’d say that Hilda and I were equally gifted.

She reminded me that she was younger than I was by a couple of months, so I asked our ‘go-between’, June, to find out the exact date. When the time came, I tried to phone her on her
eightieth birthday, but got no reply and had to try again the next day.

‘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.’