Gift from the Gallowgate (20 page)

‘But you have to return that empty bottle,’ she persisted.

For the sake of peace, we trooped back along the sands to go up the way we’d come down, the bottle was returned to the shop and we finally got a bus after standing for over twenty minutes.
By the time we reached Rosyth again, the sun had started to take its toll on us, and I popped into a chemist to buy something to soothe our scarlet, almost raw skins. We ate our salad tea to an
accompanying lecture on the stupidity of going around half-naked. She wasn’t affected at all, not even her face.

In the morning, Alan came through to our room complaining that he could hardly walk, his legs were so sore. We told him it would soon go away, but when we tried to get up ourselves, we
discovered that it wasn’t just surface sunburn we were suffering from, it felt as though it had burned deep into our bones.

We made it downstairs by going backwards, but Jess was scathing in her remarks about people with no guts.

She used to spend holidays with us, when we got our house, sometimes staying for three weeks without it crossing her mind that it took me all my time to feed the four of us,
never mind an extra, finicky old woman. She did bring half a pound of expensive chocolates with her, handing the bag to Jimmy first, then to me, before taking one herself. When three-year-old Alan
said, ‘Can I have one, please?’ she turned on him angrily.

‘These are far too expensive to give to children.’

I tackled Jimmy about this when we went to bed that night: ‘She could surely have taken a wee bag of dolly mixtures or something for the kids.’

He shrugged. ‘She was the same when I was a kid. Chocolates for the adults, but nothing for Minnie and me.’

I’m afraid my opinion of her at that time was ‘Selfish bitch’, an opinion that never really changed. I had better qualify that a little. I recently heard about a different side
to her. When Jimmy’s nephew’s wife was learning shorthand and typing (she later became a school secretary), Auntie Jess read out passages from books to help her to gain speed. What is
more, Adele says she was very patient and helpful, yet I can’t really imagine her having these qualities. They must have been well hidden under her thick layers of clothes.

Although I enjoyed working as cashier at Cordiner’s Garage, the Esplanade was rather a long way to travel four times a day, so I kept an eye on the Situations Vacant
column in the evening paper. It wasn’t long until I saw that the SCWS was advertising for a cashier/book-keeper for McDonald’s Garage. It was much nearer home, only one short bus
journey, so I applied straight away to the Area Manager, who was pleased that someone who knew the work would be taking over again.

Unfortunately, the manager had also changed, and the new man, who shall remain nameless, was a retired tea planter and knew little of office procedure. This was a mixed blessing, in a way,
because I was left to my own devices – good – but I also found myself responsible for making sure that the mechanics’ work was being properly recorded, and that any complaints
from customers were dealt with sympathetically – not so easy.

There were no other clerkesses, either – I never discovered why – and it was as it had been when I started there back in 1948. It was just this new man and me, and we got on
reasonably well, although I think he did have a problem being taught his job by a much younger person, particularly a woman.

I’ll tell you of one day in particular, back in my first stint, and when I was also the only clerkess. Mr T. often came back from lunch in a foul temper, and I used to suspect that
he’d had a row with his wife and was taking it out on me as the first one he came in contact with. I forget why he actually chastised me, but it was for something that was not my fault, and I
was still seething with righteous indignation when I prepared his coffee – so indignant that something had to give.

When I carried through his cup and saucer, I banged them down on his table and snarled, ‘There’s your coffee and I hope it chokes you!’ I brought my little display of protest
to a suitable conclusion by slamming the door as I went out.

There was absolute, deafening silence and I sat down with legs trembling. I’d done it now. I’d get the sack for sure, thrown out on my ear for speaking back. At last, after perhaps
ten long minutes of guilty apprehension, I took a sip of my, by now, almost ice-cold coffee, and practically jumped out of my skin when Mr T. burst out of his office. He strode over to the counter
and riffled through the taxi order book, not something he often did, before turning to face me. This was it! This was the pay-off! And I’d only myself to blame!

‘We’ll have to get something straight, Doris,’ he said, his face grave, his tone very, very serious. ‘There’s no room here for two people with tempers, so
there’s nothing for it but . . . well, we’ll have to take it one at a time.’ Then he burst out laughing and apologised for his own behaviour.

That put us on a different footing, and it was shortly after that when he took on the second girl, Annie.

Back to the tasks I had to do when Mr X. was my boss. As you have no doubt noticed, wedding cars always have lovely white ribbons on the front, and someone has to keep them in
pristine condition. Yes, I’d to take them home, wash and iron them and put them in a drawer until next time they were needed, which was fairly often. Most weddings took place on Saturdays,
and we sometimes had more than one booking for the same day. We kept spare sets of ribbons for the occasions when times overlapped.

The charge at that time for both weddings and funerals was 12/6 an hour (twelve shillings and sixpence, or, in today’s funny money as I still consider it, sixty-two and a half pence). A
full service to a private car cost fifteen shillings (seventy-five new pence). Of course, a weekly wage was around £4, so on that basis, a service cost about one sixteenth of a man’s
average income. I’m not sure how that compares with the present time.

Less than six months after I returned to McDonald’s, I discovered that I was pregnant. Jimmy, of course, was delighted, and wanted me to stop working, but we needed to
save for when we got a house of our own, and this job was perfect for camouflaging my condition. I stood behind a counter when people came in to pay bills or book a taxi, and I was dealing with
petrol and oil sales through a hatch, so nobody actually saw the whole me, a whole that steadily grew larger and larger.

I was well into my pregnancy when I got quite a pleasant surprise. As a customer handed me the money for his petrol through the hatch, he said, ‘Don’t you recognise me,
Doris?’

I hadn’t looked up, but when I did, he was smiling broadly. It was Bob W., one of the two mechanics who had gone to Australia around 1950. He opened the door from the garage and came into
the office to have a chat. ‘I see you’re in the best of health,’ he grinned, looking at the bulge I was trying to hide with a smock.

‘You’re looking the picture of health yourself,’ I grinned back. He had put on a lot of weight in the six years since I’d wished him good luck in his new life.

‘Ah, well,’ he replied, brown eyes twinkling mischievously, ‘you’ve got me beat there, haven’t you? In a month or so you’ll have got rid of your excess
baggage, but I’ll still be stuck with mine.’

We chatted companionably for a short time, learning that we had both married and were easy with each other as a consequence. He told me about his wife and two children and asked me about my
husband (also a motor mechanic, remember), but we were constantly interrupted by customers wanting to pay for something. Why did they need to be buying petrol, or oil, or Upper Cylinder Lubricant?
(This last had been a source of knowing winks and lewd jokes amongst the men at one time.) The phone was shrilling constantly, making a conversation really difficult to sustain, so Bob eventually
took himself off, saying that he hoped everything went well with me. I was glad he’d come to see us, although the only other people he knew were two of the drivers and John Fraser, the
garageman, a sort of general dogsbody, who served petrol, repaired punctures and stood in if we were short of a driver.

Tall and upright, John was an enigma, an educated man whose entries in his timesheets included ‘To access and egress of cars . . .’ I hadn’t known that the opposite of access
was egress, and I wondered how
he
knew. His manner of speech, quiet and grammatically correct, suggested that he’d held a position of importance at some time, but I never found out
if that was so.

He was occasionally ordered to do something that he was reluctant to carry out, but he obeyed without question. I was actually involved in one such incident. My duties included working out how
many miles each taxi got from a gallon of petrol (the number of miles done per week divided by the fuel consumed.) Rolls Royces generally averaged about ten to twelve mpg, so I was shocked to find
that one car we had got only managed four one week. It was such a drop that I reported it to the manager. Poor John Fraser was instructed to make sure that the driver (let’s call him Bruce)
was accurately recording the fuel he was putting into the tank of his vehicle.

It was almost six on the second evening, just as John was finishing for the day and Bruce was making his taxi ready for the night shift, that the scam was discovered. He was siphoning petrol out
of the Rolls Royce into a large petrol tin, for use in his own car (or perhaps to sell without coupons at an excessive price.) I remember that he was fired there and then, but I can’t recall
if the theft was reported to the police. I don’t think so, yet he was such a nice lad that John and I both felt really bad that we’d been the cause of him losing his job. If I
hadn’t involved the boss, a warning from the garageman might have been enough. Oh well, I was only doing what I was paid to do, after all.

I worked on until my eighth month. For the last few weeks, I felt like a mother elephant, I was so huge . . . but I knew that living on one wage would mean struggling to
survive, and I was putting it off as long as I could.

I had applied for a council house not long after we married, only to be told that we did not have enough points. There was a long queue and we were at the very bottom. I
pointed out that we had a daughter of nine, and that she had to sleep in the same room as her grandmother, but that, apparently, counted for nothing.

Soon after Alan was born on the sixth of March 1956, I went to the Housing Office in Broad Street again, to update their records. The baby, unfortunately, made no difference, according to the
clerk who dealt with me.

‘Points are given for each child you have,’ he said, heaving a sigh and rolling his eyes heavenwards as if he thought I was trying to jump the queue, ‘but your present
accommodation is also taken into account, and judging by your address, you are certainly not overcrowded.’

I don’t know about the people who deal with housing applications today, but I felt insulted by that man’s supercilious manner. How many offspring would I need to produce before
I’d have the necessary points? Should I tell a barefaced lie in order to get a house? Pretend that my mother didn’t want her granddaughter sleeping in the same room any longer? But no
doubt they would ask my mother to verify that.

Actually, we were quite comfortable where we were, but Jimmy and I would have felt freer if we had a place of our own. Not that Mum ever said anything. It was just . . . I couldn’t explain
it – the aura of disapproval?

Astonishingly, just a matter of weeks later, we got a letter saying that we had been allocated a house in Mastrick, and if we refused it, we would be relegated to the bottom of the queue again.
So strongly did I feel about having a place to ourselves that I’d have taken up the offer whatever the state of the house, but Jimmy was more cautious. ‘We’d better see what it
looks like before we commit ourselves,’ he warned.

We could have taken a bus – our route had been extended to include this new housing scheme, its population increasing by leaps and bounds and eventually reaching over 80,000 – but it
wasn’t too far to walk.

We had been given a small map to guide us, and when we turned off Mastrick Drive into Ness Place, leading to Deveron Road, my spirits sank at the sight of the tenements. I didn’t want to
live in a tenement, even a brand new tenement, yet if we refused this, it could be years before we got another chance. Fate, thank goodness, was on my side. Deveron Road, a continuation of Ness
Place, had no tenements, and ‘our’ home was fourth in a row of six terraced houses.

We wouldn’t get the key until I signed the Missive of Let, so we had to content ourselves by looking through the ground floor windows, going round the end of the block in order to see into
the scullery and discovering that the living room had a window at the back as well as the front. Two windows in one room? We would have sun coming in all day, and even if it wasn’t sunny, it
would still be light and airy. We were quite impressed with what we had seen so far and decided to take it . . . to be perfectly honest, we jumped at it.

I signed for the key the following morning, and in the early evening all five of us (Alan in the pram) went to inspect the inside of our domain. The living room was a fair-sized rectangle with a
recess at each side of the fireplace. A water pipe ran up the left hand side, which we discovered was to enable the fire to heat the water. During our entire tenancy, we were to be bothered by
irritating gurgling noises from this pipe, especially in the evenings, as the water came to the boil. In the wall opposite the fire was a hatch from the scullery, ideal for serving meals.

The scullery itself was well fitted: a large cabinet that would hold dishes and loads of other items, with a drawer for cutlery. It also had a walk-in larder with a cool space (actually over the
coal cellar that entered from outside); a new cooker, with one solid round ring, one rectangular flat plate and a grill; a shallow sink and a deep sink, with a division in the middle for attaching
a wringer. I was pleased to see the cooker. At least one appliance that I wouldn’t have to buy, but thereby hangs a little tale.