Shoes Were For Sunday (2 page)

All our neighbours were a source of great interest to me. I didn’t see them as an assortment of shabbily dressed women struggling against heavy odds to make ends meet, and keep dirt at bay. I was vividly aware of their peculiarities, and absorbed in their lives. There was our red-faced upstairs neighbour, with her five pale children and her dull quiet husband, who hardly opened his mouth. She was the terror of the stair. We could tell at a glance when she was in ferocious mood, as likely as not to give you a swipe in the passing just for staring at her. She was a huge woman, and I used to shiver with fright when the sound of yelling and screaming in her house above our head told me she was giving the children another walloping. Her violence terrified me, and I never dreamed the day would dawn when she would become a semi-paralysed invalid, worn out by her own wild temper. Maybe she had high blood pressure or some awful secret illness, for we never associated health with behaviour. You were either a targe or you weren’t, and there was an end of it.

There was a dirty woman in a nearby close, quiet and self-effacing, who stank to high heaven and we took the smell with the personality, but gave her a wide berth just the same. I was sternly forbidden ever to borrow a comb from any of her children in case I’d borrow a few beasts at the same time. My mother had vowed that when she had been speaking to her she’d been horrified to see the beasts running round the wool which tied this woman’s specs to her ears! I made an excuse to go to her door, and, staring fixedly at the wool holding the specs, noted without as much as a shudder that my mother was right. It was no exaggeration.

I was usually far too wise to repeat any of the remarks overheard in our kitchen, but once I got carried away by what I thought was Grannie’s praise of a chum’s mother who had a particularly explosive laugh. I burst out admiringly, ‘Oh, Mrs D., laugh like that again. My grannie says you’ve a laugh like a hen cackling.’ Grannie seized me by the ear the minute I came in from play and demanded to know why I’d been so silly as to cause trouble like this, for of course Mrs D. had been furious. Somehow I just couldn’t make Grannie understand that I thought it was a compliment. If I had been able to laugh like a hen cackling I’d have been delighted with my cleverness. Grannie sighed, for she knew that one of my proudest party pieces was imitating a chimpanzee, walk, grimace, shrieks and all, and I had to be threatened with walloping before I’d promise never to do it again.

There was even a dandy in the tenement, who donned yellow chamois gloves when he went out courting another woman, not his wife. She, poor thing, couldn’t stop his amorous ways, but his mother-in-law told me fiercely, ‘He’s a rotter. He’s lived on the steps o’ the jile a’ his life.’ How could he live on the steps of the jail, I wondered, and still live up our stair? She also told me darkly that he’d even broken into a harem during the war, and had been lucky not to have been shot for it. A harem! What was so terrible about that? I would have liked to have seen inside a harem myself, and gazed upon all those concubines, a word which had intrigued me ever since I first read it in the Bible.

There was a wee skinny woman, so poor that she actually was glad to do our washing for us for half a crown, for my mother was too exhausted after her heavy work in the Railways to do this herself. This wee creature crept down to the warmth of our fire every single night in life. She never opened her mouth, but rocked silently back and forth, sipping the tea Grannie always had ready for her. Once when my auntie came to stay with us on a visit from Australia, and could stand this woman’s silent presence not a minute longer, she jokingly sprang up and shouted to the wee washerwoman, ‘What the devil are you making all the noise about?’ The wee creature got such a shock she leaped to her feet, spilling tea all over the fireside, and rushed from the house, and never came back until Auntie had safely left for Australia again. My mother was mad, because we
got no more washings done for us all the time Auntie was with us.

But our very favourite neighbours, for us children I mean, were the newly married ones. When they came to our tenements they seemed so fresh, and lively, and young, after all the workworn mothers we knew. They sang at their work in their newly furnished kitchens. They didn’t mind us perching on the window-ledges of their ground-floor tenement rooms and watching their every move. They showed off a bit as they worked, and we loved their exaggerated movements as they lifted kettles and polished their brasses. And they always had babies for us to take out in the big enveloping shawls which wrapped baby and baby-minder in a safe, warm cocoon. There were no prams in the tenements. A pram was as impossible in our economy as a Rolls-Royce. But if babies didn’t always get enough to eat, they always had the warmth and comfort of being wrapped close to a loving body.

I was so small, nobody would entrust me to carry their baby in this way, although I was occasionally allowed to hold one on my lap. It was my life’s ambition to be trusted to take one of those babies out in a shawl. At last one newly wed mother yielded to my non-stop coaxing. Trembling, I took the baby in my left arm, while the mother wrapped the big grey shawl firmly round the baby, then across my back, under my right arm, and tucked the ends safely below my right hand. Alas, she didn’t notice she’d left an end of the shawl
hanging down at the back, and I’d not walked a dozen yards into the back courts proudly carrying my precious burden when I tripped and went rolling over and over in the dirt. I never let go the baby, I’m proud to say, and it didn’t seem unduly disturbed as it rolled over and over with me. But the mother nearly had a fit and came screaming from the house, seized the baby from me, and had a terrifying bout of hysterics with the sheer relief of finding it was still alive and no bones broken. That ended my career as a baby-minder. The whole back court had seen me, and I was disgraced. I rushed up to the swings at the top of Springburn to forget my misery, and was soon able to stop my trembling unhappiness as I flew round and round on the joy-wheel, and soared higher and higher on the big swings.

And yet, much as I enjoyed the excitement of the young neighbours, the face which comes and looks at me gravely through the years is the face of Mrs McCorbie.

How is this? I wonder. I’ve a feeling that some people have a quality about them which singles them out for attention wherever fate chooses to place them, and however humbly they work out their destinies. They’re the sort of people whose lives fascinate novelists, for they’ve an out-of-the-ordinary ambience which makes their slightest action memorable.

Born into an artistic background, they’d attract painters and poets to sing their praises, but even when found
among the working classes they somehow manage to triumph over the drabness of their surroundings and find a dignity which lifts them above the commonplace.

At least, that’s how it strikes me. For why, among so many, should I remember Mrs McCorbie with such an anguished pang?

We were very proud that she should have singled us out for her friendship, because she had the stiff reserve of the very poor who can’t mix freely for fear of getting caught up in an expenditure which was quite beyond her. There wasn’t the tiniest margin in Mrs McCorbie’s budget which she could spare for all the hundred and one little social occasions which made up our lives. A penny for the hospitals, a penny for a wreath, a penny towards a present for wee Cathie who was dying in hospital of tuberculosis, and so on, and so on. Each sum minute in itself, but quite beyond the reach of Mrs McCorbie, whose every penny was painfully earned and had to do the work of three.

She was only too aware of her poverty, and the easy-going ways of others in the same state were beyond her, and we were her only friends.

It was never mentioned, but years later I understood that her husband, who had brought Mrs McCorbie from the Highlands to the big city where work was plentiful, had later deserted her and their children for another woman. I don’t suppose he’d ever seen blonde dyed hair or make-up before he came to Glasgow, or been aware
that his own splendid physique was so attractive to women. Wife, children, responsibilities, were forgotten and he vanished to be seen no more.

Mrs McCorbie, stunned and bewildered, had been too proud to try to trace him to make him provide for the children. Instead, after the first numbness had worn off, she faced the grim necessity of providing food and clothing and, most urgent of all, of meeting the monthly demands for rent. They could survive most things if they could just keep the roof over their heads.

She couldn’t leave home to look for work, for the children were still very young and needed constant attention and nobody in our tenements had time to take another family under their wing; they had children of their own which took all their energies and patience. No, it had to be something she could do within the four walls of her own living-room. Her eye, I imagine, fell on the sewing machine she had brought from her Highland home, and she had an inspiration. She would take in sewing. But not for the neighbours, oh no. She wouldn’t be dependent on them for her livelihood. Anyway, she had to be paid as the work was done, and she knew she could never ask neighbours for payment if they were careless about their debts.

She had heard somewhere that factories sometimes employed home workers. So, dressing in her neat black coat, and pulling a felt hat over her mass of coiled black hair, she went to the only factory she knew, a large ware
house in the city where her husband had occasionally bought shirts. They were willing to let her stitch the collars and cuffs on their shirts for the handsome sum of a farthing per shirt. She was to collect a pile of unfinished shirts, loose collars and cuffs each morning, and return them the following morning, when she could collect a fresh batch. There was no limit to the amount she could have – it was entirely up to her how much she earned.

So her life of slavery to the machine began.

This all happened before I was born, and by the time I was toddling up and down the tenement stairs I accepted as part of the pattern of my life the whirring sound of the machine, like a gigantic bumble-bee, constantly buzzing in the house of Mrs McCorbie.

Her one treasured relaxation was the early-morning visit to our house to see my grannie. We lived immediately above her and it was my mother’s furious denunciation of the scoundrelly Mr McCorbie that drew this wordlessly suffering woman to us in the first place. She herself didn’t utter a word in self-pity or anger against her husband – her hurt went too deep for that – but in my mother’s rage Mrs McCorbie sensed a warmth and a friendship for herself that she needed desperately at that time. Her reserve melted. She crept out from behind her shut front door and the morning visits helped her face her daily struggle. It was quite a little ritual. She would wait until the light tread of Grannie’s footsteps overhead assured her that she wasn’t too
early, and her soft tap on the door was hospitably answered by Grannie’s half-surprised, ‘Oh come in, Mrs McCorbie,’ as though the visit was a delightful impulse. She never accepted Grannie’s invitation to sit down – that would have implied a real call – but always stood by the dresser, almost silent, listening with a quiet smile to Grannie’s chatter and watching her brisk, busy movements as she made the porridge for us children and set the table for breakfast. As she watched and listened, she subconsciously swung her house keys round her finger on a ring, and it’s one of the most vivid memories of my early childhood, slowly emerging from sleep to the accompanying tinkle of Mrs McCorbie’s keys, and then, as awareness grew, enjoying the steady murmur of the voices, pitched on a comforting low tone so that we might not be disturbed before it was necessary. I would glance through sleepy lashes, noting with pleasure the heavy coil of jet-black hair at the base of Mrs McCorbie’s neck, the soft brown eyes and the pale skin, and become slightly hypnotized by the firelight winking and dancing in rosy reflection off the jingling keys she held.

By the time I was about six years old, her children were all out at work, but still she sewed eternally at those dreadful shirts. My mother was bitter in her denunciation of the three ingrate McCorbie children. ‘Take after their father, every one of them,’ she would exclaim. ‘They’re not fit to brush their mother’s shoes, and look at them!’ I looked, and saw two haughty girls
and a strapping boy. Each went their separate ways, neither helping with the housework nor giving their mother enough money to make life easier for her. Now that they were grown up, all their meagre wages were required for dress and amusement.

As the whirr of the machine reached us during supper, my mother would start up in indignation. ‘Listen to her, slaving away at that machine, and it’s nearly ten o’clock at night.’ I was startled by the word ‘slaving’, because Grannie was reading
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
to me, and I thought slaves were all black. ‘Maybe it’s her black hair,’ I thought to myself, ‘that makes her a slave.’

Now that her family were out all day, Mrs McCorbie had nobody to run messages for her, and one day I heard her asking in her soft Highland voice if Grannie thought I might be willing to do this for her. ‘Willing!’ said Grannie at once. ‘Of course she’ll be willing.’ There was no question of consulting me, for laziness was something which was simply not recognized in our family. The simple facts were that Mrs McCorbie needed a messenger, and I had plenty of free time after I’d got Grannie’s messages in, so I might as well be useful as idle. Grannie knew that I was a bundle of energy, and if that energy could be used to help poor Mrs McCorbie, so much the better for everyone.

I presented myself at Mrs McCorbie’s door after school, and we had a thrilling consultation about payment. It had never entered my head that I would be paid, but she gravely said she was willing to pay me a
penny a day for full use of my shopping services when Grannie had finished with me. ‘Full use’ meant the shopping hours weren’t to be confined to after four o’clock school, but I might be asked to go in the morning, or even at lunch-time in emergency. I eagerly accepted, and then there was the delicious choice of having my penny each day, or sixpence on a Saturday. I considered the matter carefully. There didn’t seem much point in having a penny each day unless I were going to spend it, and that wasn’t really fair to my other chums, for nobody else could afford sweeties during the week. The total wealth of the others seldom went beyond threepence or fourpence. If I took the whole sixpence on a Saturday, why I’d be able to save. I could put something past every week for Christmas and birthday presents and for the summer holidays. I felt dizzy with power. It was the start of a fortune. A silver sixpence weekly it was.