Gift from the Gallowgate (8 page)

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 asked 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.

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.

To save leaving anyone left wondering, the match that I managed to light had gone out when I dropped it. Thank goodness.