Gift from the Gallowgate (19 page)

‘That’s funny. I work in Cordiner’s. It’s my dinner hour, and I wouldn’t have seen you if we hadn’t . . .’

It turned out that he had been at the main branch in Menzies Road, so he wouldn’t have seen me anyway. Then I recollected something I should have told him straight away, but I’d been
so taken by surprise. ‘Sandy
did
divorce me, after all. I got the notification months ago.’

He took my hand at long last. ‘I wish I’d known, but . . .’ He broke off with a long sigh, then brightened. ‘D’you think we could make a go of it this
time?’

Absolutely certain that we could (and we have) I arranged to meet him that evening, and giving my hand a long squeeze, he ran back to his van and roared off, while I took my time about covering
the last few hundred yards I still had to go. I couldn’t get over it. If I hadn’t taken an earlier bus, if I hadn’t spent that two or three minutes in the shop putting on a bet,
if he hadn’t been sent to Menzies Road and come across the Suspension Bridge at that particular time, we might never have seen each other again.

When I went into the office, Irene, the manager and all the garage staff were gathered round the small wireless set, and I was just in time to hear the result. Pinza had come in first. A
foregone conclusion, really. Hadn’t I known all along that this was my lucky day? My winnings couldn’t have been more than a few pounds but, even so, they’d have been as much as
my weekly pay.

Mum didn’t seem all that surprised to hear my main news at teatime; she must have guessed that it would happen sooner or later. Jimmy was waiting for me on the outside road when I went
out, probably a bit timid of coming to the door, and we walked up to the top of the hill, crossed the Ring Road and went along the Lang Stracht. The council had not long begun to build houses
there, and what had once been a lovely country road would soon be the division between the vast housing estates of Mastrick – so named because the original owner of the land had traded with
Maastricht in Holland – and the smaller Summerhill.

At this particular time, there were still some stretches of the dry-stane dykes enclosing the fields, still some secluded spots to sit and talk. Which we did! We talked and talked, about what
had happened to us in the intervening years, of how we had felt when we had to stop seeing each other, of how ashamed we were at what we had done to cause the ban. We also vowed not to repeat
it.

To prevent this, we started to plan ahead. What would have to be done? He said that he’d have to make peace with my mother, and prove that he had been serious about me. I said he would
have to tell his folk, too; they might not be happy about him marrying a divorced woman with a nine-year-old daughter.

Then we discussed the financial side of things. He said he didn’t want his wife to go out to work (this was frowned on, suggesting that the man couldn’t earn enough), but I said that
was silly. We would be glad of the money until we got on our feet.

When I went home and told Mum we were definitely going to marry, she said, as she had said about Sandy, ‘He’ll have to come and ask for my permission first.’

I was just a couple of weeks short of my thirty-first birthday, but I didn’t want to throw a spanner in the works by denying her that privilege, old-fashioned and uncalled for though it
was.

On my first visit to Laurencekirk to meet his father and the aunt who had brought him up – his mother had died giving him birth – I was amazed at how much older
they were than my fifty-five year old mother. Auntie Ann, the elder, was over eighty, had once been a tailoress but had given it up to look after her brother’s two children. Daniel was almost
seventy and had worked in a linoleum factory in Kirkcaldy until his wife died in November 1919. That was when he had given up his job and his house and returned to his childhood home. He was a very
quiet man and I never really found out anything about him.

Auntie Ann reminded me of my beloved Granny, the same couthy way about her, the same aversion to hurting people. She welcomed both Sheila and me into her house, and said how pleased she was that
Jimmy was getting married at last. It was clear that she had always looked on him as her blue-eyed, blond curly-haired boy, which she did until the day she died. Jimmy could do no wrong in her
eyes. He had hated the curls when he was a teenager, brushing his hair flat and plastering it with brilliantine until a slight kink was all that remained of them. His sister, Minnie, had always
been jealous of his hair – hers was dead straight.

I’ll jump ahead briefly, here. In October of 1955, I stayed in Laurencekirk for a week to nurse Auntie Ann, and even when she was obviously at death’s door she
lingered on, unconscious. When Jimmy turned up on the Saturday afternoon, it became clear that she had been waiting for him. The moment he spoke to her, she opened her eyes and whispered
‘Jamie’. Now she could go.

The house, on the High Street, was an old building, brick-built with harling on top. Kitchen and parlour downstairs, one bedroom and an attic room upstairs. At one time there had been an outside
privy and water tap, but by this time, a lean-to scullery had been built on (they called it the back kitchen), with a tiny lavatory off it. Auntie Ann slept in the bed recess in the kitchen and
Jimmy’s father had a wee room somewhere between the kitchen and the back-kitchen. I never saw inside it.

With no electricity or gas, they were still using oil lamps; small ones for carrying to bed, but a tall brass lamp on the kitchen table. All the cooking was done on the wide, gleaming range.
While I was still working, Jimmy and I saved up enough to have electricity installed, but the two old people were never very happy with it.

Our wedding took place in the registry office on fifth December 1953, with a reception in the Bon Accord Hotel in Market Street. I say reception, but it was actually only a
meal with enough time to linger over the coffee so that both sides could get acquainted. Sixteen of us sat down at the table and everything went very well. I was wearing a powder-blue, woollen
two-piece suit, while Jimmy had bought a new navy suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors. The only other suit he had was too easily recognised as demob issue, and he considered it unsuitable for such
a special occasion.

The repast over, Jimmy and I took a taxi to the Joint Station – an extravagance since it was just round the corner from the hotel. We were bound for Rosyth, where Jimmy’s other aunt
lived. Auntie Jess was present at our wedding, and she was spending a holiday with Auntie Ann in order to let us have the use of her house for a week’s honeymoon.

We had to leave the train at Kirkcaldy – the first time Jimmy had been there since he was just days old – and take a bus to Rosyth. It was roughly nine o’clock by the time we
reached the house where we were to be alone for the next seven days – a marvellous feeling! I made a pot of tea, then we went straight to bed, I too tired and Jimmy too under the weather to
do anything other than sleep.

The following morning was Sunday, we made good use of our ‘long lie’ and after a breakfast of tea and toast, Jimmy went out to buy a newspaper to give me time to organise the lunch.
Auntie Jess, a very good cook, had left some pies and tarts for us, and with no fridge available, they had to be eaten quickly. For that first meal, I chose a steak pie and a rhubarb tart –
perhaps too much pastry, but Jess’s pastry was melt-in-the-mouth quality.

I prepared some of the vegetables she had bought in, and we sat down to a very appetising first course; the steak pie was magnificent and the veggies done to a T. Then I went into her tiny
scullery to make some custard for the tart – Jimmy meanwhile washed up the dishes and pans we had used so far. The custard thickened the way I liked it, I poured it into a jug for serving,
and we carried tart and jug through to the table in the living room. I allowed my new husband to swamp his helping with the custard and he waited until I helped myself before we began to eat.

If you have never tasted a mince tart swimming in custard, I strongly advise you not to try. My only excuse was that the small amount of gravy that had escaped from the hole in the top looked
like rhubarb juice.

We spent many holidays with Auntie Jess in Rosyth, and I was to discover that, often, she wasn’t as gracious as she had appeared on first acquaintance. She had been
adopted into the Davidson family as an infant, and had turned out to be so clever that, when she was old enough, she had been sent to Mackie Academy in Stonehaven. (This was a bit of a sore point
with Auntie Ann and the sister who had died during the war, because they, too, had been clever but finances at the time hadn’t allowed them further schooling.) I have no idea where Jess
learned her secretarial skills, obviously in a proper college, because she became one of the first typewriters (as they were called in her day) in the Law Courts in Edinburgh. At the age of forty,
she met a sergeant of the Leith Police. Anyway, they married as soon as he retired, he was much older than she was, and, sadly, they had less than fifteen years together when he died.

Even having been married, she was still an old maid at heart, and
her
way was the only way possible for everything. She had no patience with children, nor with other people, come to
that. On one visit, we were in the middle of breakfast when the postman delivered a letter. She took it in and opened it. ‘It’s from Mabel.’

Mabel was a great friend of hers and we smiled understandingly. After a few seconds she said, scathingly, ‘She’s bought a new blue coat. I can’t understand why she wanted a new
coat, she’s got at least three already that I know of.’

Jimmy, Sheila and I exchanged amused glances, then Auntie Jess snapped, ‘And another thing . . . she doesn’t like blue.’

Her three visitors were sore pressed not to burst out laughing, and Sheila still laughs about it to this day.

On another occasion some years later, we went shopping in Kirkcaldy. She was an avid shopper, and both Sheila and I were quite interested in having a look round although I couldn’t afford
to buy anything. Jimmy, manlike of course, said he’d rather take Alan (our son, born in 1956) to the carnival he’d noticed as we came in on the bus. We arranged to meet up again at a
café for a snack at a certain time.

Sheila and I were exhausted before that time came, but Auntie Jess was still ‘knyping’ on, as we say in the Doric (pronounced ‘k-nyping’). It means striding out doggedly,
and I think it’s a good description. Alan would only have been about two or three, and he was so tired when we started to walk back to the bus station that Jimmy took him up on his shoulders,
so that our progress was slower than it might otherwise have been.

‘Stop dawdling!’ his aunt ordered him. ‘If you don’t put a step in we’ll miss the bus.’

Sheila consulted the new watch we had given her for her birthday. ‘What time
is
the bus?’ she asked, innocently.

The elderly woman turned a scornful glare on her. ‘I’ve no idea, but I know we’ll miss it if
he
doesn’t hurry up.’

She couldn’t bring herself to say, ‘. . . your father.’ She never acknowledged my daughter as a Davidson, although we had to adopt her to change her surname. This is another
incident that Sheila looks back on with amusement, including the little scenario when we did reach the row of glazed shelters, each with the bus destination on display at the front.

‘This is our bus,’ Auntie Jess declared loudly, making for the one marked ‘Leven’ which had quite a queue inside it already. ‘The sign’s wrong,’ she
added, even louder still. ‘This is the bus for Rosyth, not Leven.’

The line of people looked at each other uncertainly. This woman sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, and some of them actually made a move to shift to another queue. One man,
however, stood his ground, fixing Jess with eyes of steel. ‘If you’re going to Rosyth, you’d better stand somewhere else. I’m going to Leven and I’m staying
here.’

The authority in his voice and manner got through to the doubters, who took up their stances again, looking accusingly at the troublemaker. Jimmy, Sheila and I had already moved along to look
for the correct bus stop and, with an ‘I-know-you’re-wrong’, tutting, shake of her head, the old aunt followed us.

On another day out with her, a few years later still, we took the bus to Aberdour. The bus let us off at a shop selling pails, spades and beach balls at ridiculously low prices, so we bought one
of each for Alan. We also bought a bottle of lemonade and a packet of biscuits. Our hostess didn’t think we would need anything to eat, because she had given us a cooked breakfast before we
left. The trouble was, her sparse helpings were never enough for us. (I can remember us having to go out most nights around nine o’clock ostensibly for a breath of fresh air, but really to
look for a chip shop.)

Thus provided, we set off on the fairly long walk from the main road to the sea. It was a lovely beach, but Jess padded along for what seemed miles looking for the best spot. Then we
holidaymakers stripped down to the bare minimum of clothing, while she sat in a deck chair wearing, working from the top down, a close fitting felt hat, a thick woollen twinset with a shawl round
her shoulders, a heavy tweed skirt, thick interlock directoire knickers (she always sat with her legs wide apart, that’s how I know) and woollen stockings. Her face was the only part of her
uncovered.

The sun beat down on us all afternoon, we finished the lemonade and the biscuits (Jess didn’t partake of any), and although we had great fun, playing with the ball, paddling in the sea,
making a big sandcastle, we three were glad when she said, around 6 p.m., ‘I think it’s time we went home.’

We picked up our rubbish and Jimmy deposited it in a nearby litter bin, laying the empty lemonade bottle carefully down the inside. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’ his
aunt demanded. ‘You must take that back to the shop.’

‘We won’t be going near the shop,’ he said, though I could see he was itching to tell her to shut up. ‘There’s another path there, look.’