Shoes Were For Sunday (15 page)

Then one day of heart-stopping drama there was a
squeal of brakes, and the cow-catcher of a tram swiftly and neatly scooped up little Annie Brown, who had fallen right across the path of the tram as she tried to retrieve her ball. Her mother had seen the whole thing from her top-floor kitchen window where she was performing her toilet. In her fright she dashed down and into the street, wearing no more than a camisole and skirt, to find that Mrs MacFarlane, her feuding neighbour, had already taken wee Annie into her house and was gently crooning and comforting the sobbing child. The whole street found the reunion most impressive, but almost greater than the relief that things were back to normal was our shocked amazement that Mrs Brown hadn’t even realized she had been standing there in the middle of the main road in her camisole! Half-naked, for all to see!

Our own feud started when the neighbours across the landing acquired an Airedale dog. This beast had only to see a child and the staircase would echo with its furious barking and snarling, and the sight of its lip drawn back from long sharp teeth filled me with terror. It was no good Grannie telling me a barking dog couldn’t bite at the same time. I didn’t intend to give it the chance, and I’d run like the wind past their open door.

Neighbourly relations were undisturbed nevertheless, until the night I was sent down to the local fish-shop for fish and chips, a great treat which was provided by a visiting auntie. As I reached our landing, the Airedale, scenting the delicious aroma leaped at me.
In spite of my terror, I clung to the precious parcel, but my screams opened every door on the stair. There was a furious row, for fright made me so sick that I couldn’t touch food that night, or all next day, and Grannie had told Mrs Petrie, the dog’s owner, that she would report her to the factor of the property for keeping a dangerous animal.

This was
far
worse than the wash-house-key rows. To be reported to the factor was as bad as being reported to the police. Worse, in fact, for the factor could turn you out of your house and could certainly make anyone get rid of a dangerous dog.

No word was exchanged between the families as they passed each other on the stair. The Petries’ door was kept closed at all times, so the Airedale was heard but not seen, thank goodness.

When it was their turn for the washing-house the key was slipped through their letter-box, not handed over as was usually the case. When it came round to paying their share for washing the staircase window their few pence were wrapped in a twist of paper and put through our letter-box. Goodness knows how long this feud would have lasted, but I took a very bad dose of gastric flu, and my appetite vanished completely for nearly a fortnight. Grannie and my mother tried to tempt me with everything within their modest means, but listlessly I refused the lot. I grew thinner and whiter and they were at their wits’ end. Then one day a delicious smell of chicken broth drifted across the landing. We
all knew the Petries were quite well off, for weren’t they all out working, with four pay-packets coming into the house? We only saw chicken soup at Christmas, and not always then, so my passion for it could only be satisfied once a year at the very most. When Grannie came over to the bed to ask, ‘What would you like to eat?’, I whispered, ‘Some of Mrs Petrie’s soup.’

Grannie stared at me. She was a marvellous cook, and at any other time would have felt outraged to go to anybody and confess I fancied something I couldn’t find in her cooking. But now it was the first food I’d fancied for two whole weeks. And yet they weren’t on speaking terms. It was impossible. My mother, who was in from her work for lunch, said, ‘I’ll go. I’ll ask.’

Bravely she knocked at the Petries’ door. She was met by an icy glare, and a dry ‘Yes, Mrs Weir? What is it?’

My mother swallowed her pride. She explained how ill I’d been. That I’d eaten nothing sustaining for a fortnight, but today had smelt Mrs Petrie’s soup, and if only she could spare a bowlful it might start my recovery. My mother told us later that Mrs Petrie’s face broke into a smile as if she’d come into a fortune. In our poor community about the only thing anyone could afford to give away was a share of their food. But to be asked for soup by her feuding neighbour, when Grannie was herself known for her fine cooking, was the perfect compliment, and a sweet revenge.

Mrs Petrie brought in the bowl with her own hands, and watched me sup every drop of her fine soup. Later
she claimed, ‘It was my soup that saved Molly Weir’s life.’ We didn’t argue about that exaggerated interpretation of the situation. We felt we had truly exchanged a feud for a mess of potage.

And we felt
our
feud had been on a far more dramatic scale than the usual petty squabbles over washing-house keys. The wash-house was in the back court, and each one served the twelve families in each tenement close, so a strict rota system operated for all the days of the week. As nobody wanted to wash at the weekends, each person’s turn came round every twelve days. Domestic circumstances often led to the mothers swopping days with each other, and that was where the trouble started. If Mrs Brown swopped Tuesday for Thursday, then the woman who was entitled to the key after Mrs Brown had to be alerted, so
she
would know from whom to expect the key. But sometimes the woman who normally followed the exchanged day pretended she was entitled to the key following the swop day, and that was when the arguments started. With the meagre wardrobes we all possessed it must have been a nightmare trying to keep families in clean and dry clothes for twelve days between washing days, so an earlier washday was a blessing, and a wet day a tragedy. One couldn’t blame them for trying a bit of cheating to get the key ahead of their turn.

There was never the same fierce competition to use the wash-house at night as there was in the daytime. Some of the night washers were younger women,
daughters of those too old to do their washing during the day. They had the time, those elderly mothers, but not the strength, so the daughters had to tackle the household washing when they’d finished their day’s work in shop or factory. Other women preferred to do their washing in the evenings for their own private reasons. My mother tut-tutted over this, for she felt washings ought properly to be done during the day when there was some chance of clothes being hung out in the fresh air and the wind, to dry, and acquire a fine fresh smell. Grannie would purse her lips and shake her head at the thought of pulleys in the kitchen, laden with steaming clothes, flapping in folks’ faces as they moved back and forward to get the kettle from the range or put some coal on the fire. ‘I don’t like a hoose fu’ o’ wet cloots,’ she’d say. ‘It canna be good for thae lassies efter bein’ oot at their work a’ day.’

My mother would say of a neighbour who could easily have done the washing during the day, ‘Aye, she must be awfu’ glad to get away from her man and her weans when she’d put up with the damp cold of that wash-house instead of sitting at her own fireside.’ And then she’d soften when Grannie would reply, ‘Och well, maybe she’s better off at that, for her man’s a surly blackguard and gey poor company.’

Grannie’s use of the word blackguard, which she pronounced ‘blaggard’, always sent a shiver down my spine, and I thought she’d invented this damning description herself. I was astounded in later years when
I came across the word again and again to describe the villains in the romances I devoured, and realized that Grannie’s blackguard was a well-known character to many authors.

Far from sharing my mother’s condemnation of the night washers, I used passionately to hope I could coax her to become one of them. There was a theatrical air about the whole scene which made a great appeal to me. The ordinary grey-stone wash-house of the daytime was transformed, as though at the wave of a magic wand, and I couldn’t imagine that I had ever played shops on its window-ledge, or jumped from its roof on to the wall which divided the back courts.

Guttering candles, stuck in the necks of bottles and ranged along the window-sill, provided the only illumination in what now seemed a vast cavern. Mysterious shadows flickered in the far corners, and the foaming suds in the tubs took on a romantic radiance. When the lid of the huge brick boiler was raised to see how the ‘white things’ were progressing (the ‘white things’ was our name for all the household linen), swirling steam filled the wash-house, the candles spat and flickered through illuminated clouds, and the scene became fearsome as pictures of hell. The washerwoman bending over her tub changed from her everyday self too. Hair curled round her ears with the damp, cheeks flushed with the heat and the work, and eyes glowed in the candlelight, and she revealed a beauty I’d never noticed before.

Like animals attracted by the light, other women would drift from their tenements into the back court, and pause at the wash-house door. ‘Are you nearly done noo?’ was the usual greeting. The patient figure at the tubs, or ‘bines’ as we called them, would pause from her vigorous rubbing of the soiled clothes against the wash-board, charmed to be the centre of interest for once, and say cheerfully, ‘Just aboot half-way through. I’ve juist the dungarees to dae, and then the white things will be ready for “sihnin” oot.’ I once asked my teacher how to spell this word ‘sihnin’ which we used when we meant rinsing, but she’d never heard of it, for she was from the north, so I just had to make a guess at the spelling and hope I was right.

At the word ‘dungarees’ the women would groan in sympathy. Washing dungarees was a job they all hated, and as ours was a Railway district, most husbands or brothers or sons worked with dirty machinery, and came home with grease-laden dungarees, so this was a task they all had to face. Our tenement women all had raw fingers from using the slimy black soap and soda which was the only way they knew for ridding the filthy overalls of their accumulated grease and workshop dirt.

The women’s eyes would lazily follow the washer’s movements as she scrubbed and rinsed, and put clothes through the wringer ready for the house pulleys, or maybe for the ropes next morning, if the next woman using the wash-house could be coaxed to let her put out
a rope for a couple of hours before her own were ready to be hung out. But the ropes were only put outside if it promised to be a fine day, and the women were expert weather forecasters, for everybody detested getting their nicely wrung clothes wet again. The ultimate in disaster was reached when the weight of sodden clothes on the ropes was too much for the supporting clothes poles, and the whole lot came crashing among the dirt of the back court, and had to be taken in and rinsed through all over again.

I loved when the white things were judged to be ready, for then came the scene I liked best of all. The heavy boiler lid was lifted right off, and leaned carefully against the back wall of the wash-house. Clouds of steam rushed everywhere. Up the chimney, out of the open door, into every corner. The washer, a long pole held in both hands, bent over the seething mass in the boiler, fished out a load, expertly twirling the steaming clothes to keep them safely balanced, and then ran with the laden pole across to the tub of clean water. Quickly and neatly a twist of the pole shot the clothes into the rinsing water. Back and forth, back and forth she went, her figure ghost-like in the rushing steam, until the boiler was empty. I longed to be allowed to help in this exciting operation, but met with scandalized refusal. ‘Do you want to burn yoursel’ to the bone?’ the washerwoman would say in answer to my coaxing. ‘You’ll have this job to dae soon enough, hen, and then you’ll no’ be so pleased. Run away hame to your bed, or
I’ll tell your grannie on you!’ But the women were more amused than angry at my interest in their activities, and they made sure I went nowhere near the steam.

When this final rinsing stage was reached the watching women lingering at the doors couldn’t resist a bit of advice, especially if the washer was a younger unmarried woman. As the tub filled, they’d say, ‘Take oot the plug, hen, and let the clean water run through the claes. You’ll get rid o’ a’ the soap faur quicker that way.’ Or, ‘Jessie, you’re just squeezin’ the soap into them again – you’ll ha’e tae gi’e them another water. You’re putting them through the wringer too soon.’

They were all experts. This was their world. And the young washerwoman would listen to them all, glad of their company and of their advice, for it was a great source of pride to have someone say, ‘Aye, she hangs out a lovely washing.’ And the most disparaging thing a tenement woman could say of another’s wash-house efforts were the damning words, ‘She’s hangin’ oot her
grey
things!’

Another glimpse of the world of washing day could be caught at the ‘steamy’, when we went to the baths. These were tubs and apparatus hired by women who had no proper wash-house in their tenement back courts, or who preferred the community atmosphere of the ‘steamy’ to a solitary session in their own wash-house. I used to pause in the open doorway, on my way out to the street, and watch the women at their work. It was like a scene from a play. The rising clouds of steam,
the bare arms rhythmically rising and falling, the stately tread to the drying cupboards, and the measured walk back, bearing their washing gracefully before them, ready for packing into their prams or bogies for the homeward journey. Again I had a great longing to penetrate these mysteries and take part in the ritual myself, but I never did so, and these tantalizing glimpses were all I ever knew of this enchanting side of the baths.

When we children spoke of ‘the baths’ we meant the swimming pond, of course. Tuesdays were reserved for the girls, the other days for the boys, which seemed a bit unfair, but it was generally conceded that the boys seemed to enjoy the baths more than we did, and used them much oftener. We were quite happy, really, with our Tuesdays, and felt very privileged as we hurried up the road to make the most of ‘our’ day.

In summer, during school holidays, we met in the back court at half past seven in the morning, armed with our ‘chittering bites’. Goodness knows how this habit arose, for nobody particularly liked early rising, but, once out of our cosy beds, there was something exciting and different about walking up Springburn Road when the streets were clean and quiet, and when the air had an unaccustomed freshness.