Tears for a Tinker (10 page)

D
avie and Daddy found the painting-jobs drying up—in both senses of the word—so what did my water-hating husband do? He took a job on a
fishing-boat, and boy, did he learn the hard way that it’s not an easy life on the choppy sea.

He looked terrified out of his skin standing on board that first day. We had walked the few hundred yards with him from our house to the harbour. Johnnie said, ‘Daddy has a green face,
Mummy.’ And that he did, as the waves almost swallowed his vessel. My poor man, what he did to put food on the table. The boat was a trawler, with a crew of grand lads, especially the cook,
who had his own ideas of the best way of filling my man’s belly, and just as odd a way of causing him to empty it over the side of the boat.

Yet not being there out on the briny I have only what Davie told me to go by. In his words, ‘it was a hard life, catching wee fish, big fish, and giants o’ fish’. So
let’s leave him to the ocean for a while, and I’ll tell you how that blasted weight problem of mine left me with more than a fleeting resemblance to the biggest fish Davie was netting
on his trawler. I will take you on some of Davie’s trips as a fisherman later on, but firstly we’ll go through the tale of a fatty.

The Macduff folk were right proud of their swimming pool, Tarlair, a mile from town and lying on the brink of the ocean. Everybody from nine months to ninety swam in this man-made dam. The only
problem was when the tide came in—there sometimes came with it an odd fish or jellyfish, you know the kind of thing. Not many big ones got in, because local lads were employed to clean the
pool regularly. ‘Nothing gets past us,’ I once heard a guy say, and he wasn’t kidding. Parents would sit about sunning themselves; picnics were enjoyed as the wee ones ran in and
out of the sea-green water. My boys loved it, and so did I.

However there was a difficulty, not a big one, but a difficulty nevertheless: where would I purchase a swimming costume to accommodate my massive frame, all fourteen-and-a-half stone of it?

You might ask how I knew I weighed this amount? Well, one morning as the boats were unloading, I went down to the harbour for some free fish. It was usual for the man weighing in the catches to
give a freebie to whoever was there. ‘You’re an awfy breadth for sic a wee quine,’ the weighman said looking me up and down. To be honest, I’d never given my weight-gain
that much thought, because my man said he loved me no matter how fat I got. He’d laugh and add—‘more of you to cuddle.’ So imagine my horror when the weighman told me I was
too heavy for his scales. Of course he was kidding, but when I stood on them the needle did a jig.

‘Fit are ye scoffing tae mak a bonny quine like yersel sae swelt?’

‘Pavement, swallow me up,’ was all I could think as I walked away. Suddenly I thought all eyes were on me, what a shaming it was. I turned and pushed my children back home, feeling
every cursed pound of unwanted flesh.

‘Get some exercise done, lassie.’ This was Mammy’s remedy for fatties.

Yet I seemed to walk miles every day, and although we’d a telly it only got switched on for Johnnie’s programmes. But how could I bear to stay this weight? From that moment I decided
I would lose the unnecessary flab.

‘I saw some swimming costumes, Jess, there’s a sale of them in the Co-op,’ said my wee sister Babsy. ‘All sizes, even ones to fit you.’

How awful she sounded, but she was only trying to help, I knew that. So I bought a Speedo, a nice black number. ‘It slims one, they say,’ said the assistant—who was three times
fatter than me, cheeky imp.

Well, summer was upon us, and off I went with my laddies to Tarlair, Johnnie toddling by my side, Stephen in his pram which was loaded with goodies to eat, buckets and spades and swimming gear.
Just in case I got stuck undressing, my Speedo was on under my clothes. Mammy came along too. Everybody from Macduff was of the same mind, and the place was heaving. ‘God,’ I thought,
‘of all days to introduce my body-filled Speedo to the Moray coast, I have picked the worst.’

For ages I watched Johnnie paddling and splashing, running over to Mammy and me for a digestive biscuit, only to drop it into the water and cry for another one. Since his close escape with
illness I would have given him the world, and he knew it, the fly wee devil. So after handing him a few digestives I gingerly stepped out from under a rainbow-coloured beach towel (another Co-op
bargain), and while Mammy sat doing a word puzzle next to sleeping Stephen, I slid under the water at the deepest end.

It had been a long time since I swam, and in no time I was in my element. I always was a good swimmer, and could keep up with many a powerful travelling laddie with frog arms and lizard legs.
Ever since my uncle threw me in one year at the Lunan burn pool at Gothans outside Blairgowrie, I have had the water powers of a mermaid.

At first I swam like a butterfly down the length of the pool, until a baldy man with the body hair of an ape began doing dives under me, emerging to smile into my face. ‘What a
show-off,’ I remember thinking. Suddenly after his umpteenth dive, it dawned on me that this twit of a water zebra was having a good look at my bulk. And everybody knows we look twice as big
under water as above it. That old cliché, ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ came to mind, so I too took to diving and soon felt a lot more comfortable. The
hairy one, obviously exhausted, left the deep end to me and one old woman. She also got out of the pool and my happiness returned when it was apparent I was the only one left in. Not so at the
shallow end, it was filled with squealing weans. As I threw everything into my swimming the crawl, diving, floating, backstroke and butterfly, I spoke to my bellies wobbling buoyantly under the
fabric of the Speedo. ‘I shall come up here everyday,’ I told each pound, ‘until every ounce is shed. Oh aye, you’re for the chop, nothing surer.’

‘One more length, then I’ll call it a day,’ I thought, swimming into shallower water. Suddenly the pitch of kids’ noise grew louder and louder. I stopped swimming and
stretched my head above water to see what alarmed the wee ones. My heart skipped a beat, thinking my lad was sick again, but when I saw Johnnie sitting beside Mammy my anxiety diminished. I took
one more dive, then headed towards where my mother and kids were. Even under the water the screams were deafening. As I emerged onto the grassy bank, a pool attendant approached me. ‘Thank
God,’ he said, ‘the weans thought you were a basking shark. I’d get rid o’ that black costume and wear a coloured yin, quiney!’

Well, definitely slimming was the order of the day after that awful experience. But a wee word of warning: if you too are feeling the effects of being overweight, then seek professional help. I
didn’t, and here’s what happened.

Round the corner from where we lived was a chemist’s shop. It had just received a batch of so-called slimming biscuits. These tasty treats had just entered the world of dieting. Women were
scoffing them like hot cakes, they were flying off the shelves. A friendly assistant said that, if I wished, she’d sell me at a big discount a box of the biscuits which had come in wrongly
coded. I bought the whole lot, and if memory serves me right it contained four months’ supply. One biscuit instead of a meal, and the weight problem would disappear. Within six months I would
see quite a visible difference. Aye, right!

What did greedy me do? Well, these tasty treats went down no bother with a cup of tea. Then, after a plate of my favourite stew and tatties, I enjoyed one as a pudding. Also, I’d better
confess to you about something else. There was a chippy down a flight of stone stairs at the rear of our house, and if one bought anything after ten o’ clock at night they got it half price.
You must know by now I’m not one to snub a bargain, and my favourite was a ‘polony supper’. Yes, I know, I know.

Another stone later, I was so depressed I could hardly put a foot over the door. My wee boys also were suffering, not getting the fresh air growing children need. Davie still never complained,
not even when he came home one day after three weeks at sea and I threw myself into his open arms. The result was, he spent four days in bed with a strained back and sported a thick lip after
coming in contact with my podgy nose. Ochone, ochone, what a mess I was in; totally out of control.

As I rolled from my bed one morning, I suddenly had a clear idea what to do. A visit and a chat with nice Doctor Mackenzie was what I needed. If anybody could help, it was him. Blood tests were
taken, my weight properly monitored, and he prescribed for me a diet that would guide me back from the abyss. Did it heck! Along with watery chicken soup and butterless toast, I was still downing
the slimming treats and going out to get late night polony suppers. I was a lost cause, with a mouth sucking in every morsel.

My young sisters gave me makeovers and hair-dos, but nothing could disguise the four chins all fighting for space somewhere in the region where I knew there was a neck. The only way to find my
waistline was by running a finger inside my knickers and feeling for the elastic. Those were a laugh, those knickers. Mammy bought me some—yes, from the Co-op again; they were designed for
elderly ladies who had ‘difficulties’. I don’t know what kind of problems these were meant to be, but if the Boy Scout movement had needed extra tents, then a visit to the Co-op
for these knickers would have met their needs. Constant headaches were also plaguing me.

I went back to the doctor for the blood results. ‘What are you eating?’ he asked, with friendly concern.

‘Along with your food stuff I’ve been eating biscuits, slimming ones.’

He was horrified on discovering the amount of them I was eating, and told me not to take any more.

‘They are full of caffeine, Jessie, that would explain the headaches. Don’t eat anything after six in the evening and forget the chippy suppers. I saw you one night popping out of
the chippy with a great bundle under your arm, but you must stop them!

I blushed red with guilt, knowing that Doctor Mackenzie had seen me sneaking about with yesterday’s newspaper disguising comfort food.

I did lose weight but not in the way I’d planned.

It began with a headache, then a fever, then a horrendous bout of Asian flu. Up and down the country folks were dropping like flies. It was a merciless epidemic, and death followed like a
flooded burn in its wake. Seven days I lay in bed, unable to keep a morsel of food down. Nightmares of drowning in giant middens of polony suppers provided hallucinations galore. Doctor Mackenzie
and his team worked round the clock. The poor creatures were exhausted, working flat out tending flu-ridden Macduff, Banff and all the wee coastal villages scattered along the Moray coast. The
local newspaper made depressing reading; it was terrible to see how many entries there were in the death columns.

I had youth on my side, however, and was soon back on my feet. It was a delight to see how much fat had turned to sweat and drenched itself into my bedclothes, I was two stones lighter, and
liked what looked back at me from the mirror. So when I was fully recovered, I started on the odd day omitting breakfast. Lunch would be ignored and then teatime. I drank loads of water and felt
great. I spent hours walking and exercising, and in time my weight on the freebie weighman’s scales had registered the precious figure of ten stone. No more auld wives’ breeks for me.
My bum was sliding into silkies from then on.

When we skip through our twenties, we humans seem to have a ‘nothing can hurt us’ attitude. It is like we’re superhuman. But some discover to their cost this isn’t the
case. ‘Why am I so tired these days, Mammy?’ I asked her one morning, with baggy eyes and sore bones. I’d a pile of washing to do, sweeping and washing of the floor (I had no
hoover then). I usually took no time doing it, yet lately I could hardly wash a dish.

‘I blame the slimming,’ she scolded me. My food press, when she examined it, had only the bare necessities to feed the boys. When Davie was due home from the sea I’d get enough
food for him. But now I’d just won a serious battle with food, and I loathed it! Never would I go down that nightmare route again. I could hardly look sideways at chips, those horrible things
that piled fat onto my now eight-stone figure. Time for another visit to Doctor. More blood tests and questions. ‘Are you sticking to that diet sheet I gave you, Jessie? You can eat more
vegetables and fruit, it won’t put weight on.’

‘You can take a running jump,’ I told him from my mind, adding to myself as I smiled and left his surgery, ‘I’m beautiful now, and no way will I let so much as a loose
hair live on my body.’

Within three days he came by to visit, saying he was in the area and so to save me a trip he’d brought the results of those blood tests over. ‘Do you know what a normal blood count
is, lass?’ he asked, refusing to leave until I’d put a hot cup of tea in his hand.

‘No, doctor.’

‘It is twelve. Do you know what yours is? Well, it’s six! You, my dear lass, are running on a half-empty tank of energy. Healthy blood cells are not being fed.’

‘Big lumps of fat are not getting to crawl onto my body, doctor and I don’t care a jot for blood-cell counts or anything else. You try being so fat the sheets on the bed suffocate
you, try it, see how happy you are.’

‘I won’t let you kill yourself, lassie, and that’s from a father whose kids love and depend on their mother. You’re eight stone just now, but within three months
you’ll be seven. Let’s see how cold those bed sheets will feel next to bone! And what about other children? Do you think your womb will carry a healthy bairn? No chance, you’ll
not have any nourishment to carry a baby nine months. You’ll abort!’

I watched from the door as Doctor Mackenzie went into his car and drove away. I had visions in my head of a giant nurse with bulging biceps, sitting on my body and force-feeding me. That night
Mammy came round and gave me a right talking to. Changing the subject eventually, she said that Chrissie and her family were moving up to Macduff; Uncle Joe had got them a house beside their
family.