Shoes Were For Sunday
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Authors: Molly Weir
Shoes Were for Sunday
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Molly Weir was born in 1910 and grew up in Glasgow. Best known for her role as the character Hazel McWitch in the BBC TV series
Rentaghost
, she appeared prolifically on TV, radio and in film.
Shoes Were for Sunday
received great acclaim when first published in 1970, and became a bestseller. She died in 2004, leaving the proceeds of her estate, including the royalties from sales of this book, to the poor and elderly of her beloved Springburn in Glasgow.
Dedicated to Grannie, and to her daughter, who was my mother
‘What strange, mysterious links enchain the heart, to regions where the morn of life was spent.’
JAMES GRAHAME
Somehow I was never awake at the precise moment when Grannie came into bed. One minute I was drowsily gazing at the gas mantle, blinking my lashes against its soft radiance and making rainbows with my flickering eyelids and its glowing globe, and the next moment it was dark and Grannie was pulling the blankets round her, and easing herself into the hollow in front of me. As I cooried in closer, to keep my share of the bedclothes, she would reach out a hand to push my knees down. ‘Your banes are like sticks,’ she would complain. ‘Streetch them doon noo. They’re that sherp, they’re cuttin’ intae auld Grannie’s back.’ Sleepily, obediently, I would straighten out my legs, and I would drift off with a drowsy smile as I prodded with a small hand my offending knees. How could Grannie think they were sharp enough to hurt her? I wondered. They felt soft and ordinary enough to me. But then I was only three years old and Grannie was, oh maybe a hundred, for, after all, she was my mother’s mother, and my mother was twenty-one, for she had told us so when we asked her.
I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t slept in the hurley bed with Grannie. This was a bed on casters, which
‘hurled’ under the big recess bed out of sight during the day, and was hidden tidily out of sight behind the bed-pawn, ready to be pulled out at a touch whenever it was my bedtime. It was only about a foot off the floor, so that it could be hurled away fully made up with its sheets and pillows and blankets, and was probably made by a neighbour who was a handyman joiner, and who grasped at once the necessity for using every inch of space in a room and kitchen which had to accommodate five people.
There was my grannie, my mother, my two brothers and myself. Away, way back I had a dream-like memory of a man who refused to pick me up and carry me when we had been out visiting one bitterly cold Sunday, and it was very late, and we couldn’t find a tramcar. ‘Give her a carry,’ my mother’s voice said. ‘She’s only a baby.’ ‘She can walk,’ came the man’s voice. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her legs.’ There was no spoiling for me. That must have been my father. A father who lived only long enough to sire three children. Four if you count the little sister who died in infancy, and whom he quickly followed, leaving my mother to bring the three of us up without anybody’s help except that given by Grannie. Grannie gave up her own wee single end, and came to live with us. I never missed my father. For, filling every corner of my world was Grannie. From the minute I opened my eyes in the hurley bed in the morning, she tormented me, disciplined me, taught me, laughed at me, loved me, and tied me to her for ever, although I didn’t know it at the time.
We called our room and kitchen a ‘house’, for we’d never heard of the word ‘flat’ when I was a wee girl. It was in a red sandstone tenement, which we thought far nicer than the dull grey tenements farther up the road. In some mysterious way some closes were smarter than others. The Cooperative close at No 290 was considered really classy. For one thing there were no children, and instead of painted dark green walls inside the close, like the other tenements, this one had tiles which were the envy of every other tenement wife, for they could be wiped clean at the touch of a cloth, and this sparkling cleanliness awed us with its rich look. This back court, too, was different from our ordinary earth one, for it was concreted all over, and the wall which divided it from our lesser courts was higher than ours, and not a railing was missing. This rigid iron barrier was useless in keeping out the rest of us children from the teeming tenements. Although we were fully aware it was forbidden territory, every now and then, just to test our courage, we would go tearing through the splendid tiled close and invade the concreted back court. We would stot our balls in an ecstasy of delight to see how high they would bounce off this marvellous concrete, then throw them against the walls of the posh tenement itself. Then, freedom from punishment going to our heads, we would go mad and start yelling at the tops of our voices, without rhyme or reason, ‘Come up for yer dinner, ya red-heided sinner, cauld totties an’ herrin’.’
At that a window would be thrown up, and an
outraged face would appear. This was the policeman’s house, and we shivered at our own daring in arousing his wife’s wrath. ‘Go back to your own back courts,’ she called out furiously, in a much more polite accent than our own mothers’, we noted, ‘and stop yelling.’ Yelling? Who was yelling? We were only singing. We were intensely curious about this woman, who had no children. We gazed at her, mesmerized, trying to imagine her quiet house with only herself and the policeman to keep her company.
I remember one day when I was about seven years old she actually called me up from where I was playing in the next back court and asked me to run to the butcher’s and get half a pound of mince for her. I was startled to find she ate ordinary mince like us. When I went back to hand it over she asked me in, instead of keeping me on the doorstep like all the other mothers, who certainly didn’t encourage us to race over their clean linoleum with our dirty feet. I stood stiffly in the middle of the floor, frightened to move in case I’d break anything, and astounded at the neatness and tidiness of it all. No toys. No papers. No shiny American cloth stretched over the table to keep it safe from spilt tea or gravy. Instead, unbelievably, a polished table with a vase of flowers on top. My eyes darted round the room, taking everything in, and I was quite dazzled by its splendour, and I felt a singing in my ears at its quietness. I’d never been in a house before which wasn’t noisy with lively children. She gave me a piece of
gingerbread which was so generously spread with salt butter that the richness was too much for me and I couldn’t eat it. When half a pound of margarine had to last five of us as long as it could possibly be stretched, and the paper scraped to get the last tiny piece, you weren’t used to your teeth meeting a thick layer of butter. But I wouldn’t have dreamt of wasting it. I ran home with it to Grannie and she scraped off the thick top layer and prudently put it aside for her own tea later. She loved this butter, which she seldom got, but I, brought up on the cheaper margarine, thought it had a funny taste and gladly let Grannie enjoy this beanfeast.
Grannie could see I was full of my privileged peep at the inside of the policeman’s house, and I daresay she was quite curious herself, for nobody else on our stair had ever got over the door. ‘Grannie,’ I said excitedly, ‘she’s got a house like a palace. Everything’s shining! Dae ye know whit she was daein’ when ah went in? She was polishin’ the kettle, Grannie. The kettle! No’ the brass kettle for the mantelpiece. The kettle that sits on the range. And it would juist get durty again as soon as she pit it oan the fire.’ ‘Och well, lassie,’ said Grannie comfortably, ‘she’s got nae weans, you see, and she disnae ken whit to be at tae pass the time.’
Ever afterwards in my mind childlessness and sparkling tidiness went together, and when I passed the policeman’s wife in the street after that she seemed to belong to another species, and I’d follow her in imagination into her quiet neat house, with never a raucous
child to disturb its serenity. And I never made a noise in her back court again.
Old Grannie’s down our stair was another house which fascinated me for much the same reason. Her children were all grown up long ago, and the silence and orderliness were such a contrast to our lively, bustling, noisy house that I needed no coaxing to go down to see if she needed any messages. She was a very old lady, even older than my grannie. She had a thin pink face, snow-white hair, was thin as a whippet, and she moved so slowly I felt sure she was frightened her bones would break if she hurried. She came from Ayrshire, and her accent was different from ours, and she called a saucer a ‘flet’, which I found highly diverting. She had photograph albums with pictures which went right back to her childhood, and it was my delight to pore over them by the hour, asking, ‘And was this your husband, Grannie,’ for I knew it only needed that question for her to gaze dreamily into the coals and tell me about how she had gone to her first dance in the country at the age of fifteen, and how this handsome man with the moustache and side-whiskers had come over to her and asked her to dance. At the end of the reel he had thrown his bag of sweeties into her lap and said, ‘You’re for me,’ and they were married when she was sixteen. The speed and directness of this courtship took my breath away. ‘But did you
love
him, Grannie,’ I would ask every time this story was told. I passionately wanted her to have some opinion on the matter. ‘Aye
I suppose I did, lassie,’ she would smile. ‘But, you see, ah wis a ferm servant, and in those days you were only too pleased to get a guid man, and a hoose o’ yer ain, so you didnae speir at yersel’ too much aboot whether or no’ ye liked him. And in oor village it was aye the man who did the seekin’.’ As I gazed at the solemn bewhiskered face in the photograph I found it hard to imagine this dull man had ever done anything so romantic as sweep Grannie off her feet at the age of fifteen. Nevertheless, Grannie was only waiting now to join him in heaven, and under the bed she had a wooden chest containing her shroud and a cotton ‘mutch’, and even the pennies to cover her eyes, and a white bandage to tie round her mouth.
My mother was unwittingly roped in to help to fill this wooden burial chest with the final item. She had spent the whole of one precious lunch hour going into every haberdashery in Springburn searching for a cotton ‘mutch’, which this old grannie had asked her to buy for her, thinking the old lady was feeling the cold and wanted it there and then. When she dashed in in triumph, having found it in the very last shop, she was furious when Grannie pulled out the chest and said with satisfaction, ‘Aye, that’s the lot noo. I can go any time.’ As my mother bolted her sausages before rushing back to her work in the Railways, she said to my grannie, ‘Fancy that old rascal making me flee all over Springburn for something she’ll no’ want till she’s deid. And here was me thinkin’ ah wis doin’ her a good turn,
and keepin’ her heid warm on these cauld nights.’ My own grannie laughed, ‘Weel, so you have done her a guid turn. She’ll sleep faur better noo, kennin’ her burial trousseau is complete.’ In spite of herself, my mother had to laugh. But I didn’t laugh. For I sometimes went down to sleep with this old lady to keep her company in the winter, and I didn’t like the thought of sleeping on a bed with a shroud and burial garments in a fearsome box underneath.
