Who were my parents? A question I never asked myself as a child. They were just Mum and Dad – it was always that way round. My mum and dad – same as they had ever been. Each with their own characteristics, their own little foibles. Each a vital part of our family unit.
At an early age I could never conceive of anything different. Gilbert and Bea as children – impossible to imagine. Having any sort of life before they were married – equally beyond conception. This sense of disbelief can only have been enhanced by the fact that neither of my paternal grandparents was alive, so there were never any visits to my father’s old family home; in fact, in my early childhood, I didn’t even have an inkling of where it had been located. On top of that, my one surviving grandparent, my grandmother, no longer lived in Bea’s childhood home, so that connection had also been broken. Grandma, bent double with rheumatoid arthritis and walking always with a stick, was visibly a much older person. So the generations appeared to be immutable to my infant eye, set in stone since the dawn of time.
Equally impossible to my child’s mind was conceiving of any part of the family unit as having an existence independent of it. But differences within it became apparent early on. Hierarchies were recognised and pecking orders established. Seniority was acknowledged.
With my father being away on week-long business trips every month or so, and my mother being the traditional stay-at-home housewife of the period, she was the one who mattered. Mum was always there to greet my brother and me on our return from school; always ready with the tea on the table each evening; always there to get us up in the morning. Everything in the house was my mother’s realm – the house being the Woman’s Realm, as the magazine of the period proclaimed.
There were rarely any ‘wait till your father gets home’ deferrals. But when Gilbert was at home, Bea would occasionally be forced to call on my father if the jockeying for position between us boys got out of hand.
‘They’re fighting again, Gilbert! Stop them, quick!’ she would cry, and Dad would rush in to prise us apart.
But most of the time as pre-teens we were biddable to our mother’s will, even protective of her, especially when Dad was away on business. The family home ran on smoothly, with any potential disruption to standards or routine largely under control. And never, in my experience, was there any disagreement between my parents as to a course of action. No, that was for later – much later.
* * *
To Bea, politeness was the ultimate virtue. Rudeness, or simply the neglect of courtesy, was another thing she couldn’t – and wouldn’t – tolerate. Irksome though they were to us as boys, we were trained in the accepted norms of politeness – always to use Mr and Mrs when addressing our ‘adults and betters’; to use Uncle or Auntie for those so-called ‘borrowed’ relatives my parent’s friends were held to be – it being unacceptable for children to refer to adults by their Christian names; at all times to say ‘please’ and ‘thanks’ – and to say them in a sincere manner; always to write thank-you letters after receiving Christmas or birthday presents; and, when all others were taken, to offer our own seat to a grown-up on the bus or the tramcar.
Holding the door open for an adult, especially for a lady or an elderly person, was another of these norms. So insistent on this was my mother that on occasion I would see her take revenge on those who didn’t come up to her rigorous standards. Leaving a shop, she would defer to those coming in, particularly older or more obviously harassed shoppers. Seeing such a person approach, she would step back from the door and politely hold it open for the other customer, anticipating a courteous, ‘Thank you.’
More often than not, this was forthcoming. But when it was not, Bea would say loudly to the customer entering, ‘I beg your pardon!’
‘Sorry… but I didn’t say anything,’ was the usual response.
In a flash Bea would come back with, ‘Oh, I thought you said “Thank you” – I must’ve misheard.’ And she would sweep out of the shop having taught another ingrate a sharp lesson.
The antithesis of politeness for her was vulgarity – being ‘common’ as Bea would have it. My mother abhorred vulgarity of any sort. This extended all the way from dubious jokes to slovenly speech. She would cringe at any incidence of blue humour, looking pained when my father guffawed at the frequent double entendres of Round the Horne and The Navy Lark escaping from the wireless.
She had a particular dislike of the Scottish comedian Lex McLean and would rail against his popularity. She would insist on us only watching BBC television in case we stumbled upon his regular show and were corrupted by his ‘filthy mind’. This was easy for her to do when we were together in a house with a television – on holiday or visiting relations. But, not having a set at home, we would visit neighbours to watch there. Bea even asked the aging spinsters, who were happy to give us access to their TV almost anytime, to ensure that we only saw BBC programmes. It was a constant worry to her that we would be exposed to the degraded standards of STV and thus the twin evils of dirty jokes and ‘bad English’ – her received opinion of Scots vernacular.
Although she wouldn’t have called it that, Bea was an early exponent of recycling. Either that or she was an avid upholder of the ‘make do and mend’ approach of the wartime years – take your pick. Jam jars were scrupulously washed out and reused, plastic tubs the same; string and wrapping paper were hoarded; vegetable scraps were saved up for the pig swill lorry – still calling regularly in my childhood. Elbow patches were sewn onto jerseys and jackets; socks were darned; and old pullovers were ripped down and reknitted.
As she got older, familiar items around the house would be dropped or knocked off surfaces. None that could be repaired, however ineptly, were ever discarded. Others suffered from age and wear. Dickey window catches would be secured with clothes pegs, broken handles with bits of old flex. But her favourite kitchen cabinet refused to conform.
Never taking to fitted kitchens, Bea had stuck with her own take on a Utility brand style, particularly evident in her 1950s metal storage cabinet. She was wedded to its fold-down shelf for mixing baking ingredients, to its ventilated doors to keep foodstuffs fresh and its twin drawers overflowing with cutlery. The move from the flat in ’57 had prompted a repaint by my dad to bring the cabinet up to date with ‘modern colours’. Since then, resplendent in pillar-box red and buttermilk magnolia, it had stood its ground in the centre of the kitchen wall. The room itself, always referred to by Bea – but Bea alone – as the ‘breakfast room’ adjoined the former scullery, recast in the same spirit as the ‘kitchenette’. The latter – a working space with cooker and sink – was more traditionally decorated in green and cream, while the former featured Wedgewood blue walls and a lemon yellow ceiling to offset the red faux-leather chair covers, the red Formica table-top and the red Fablon-covered windowsill. The cabinet was essential to the overall effect. But now its drawers were collapsing and the complicated system for opening and supporting the fold-down shelf was giving out. Mum tried various things as wedges and packing to keep it in service but eventually the whole cabinet gave way to creeping metal fatigue.
She was distraught. Nobody made anything comparable in the 1980s. She wanted her kitchen to stay the way it had always been. It was sheer good fortune then, that an almost identical cabinet turned up in what we would now call a retro shop. I was able to source the same shades of red and cream and paint it up to match the old one. Mum was delighted. And again ahead of her time – retro, before the term was current.
* * *
My father was a man of less definite opinions. But a man of regular habits and preferences nonetheless. In common with so many who had seen wartime service in the forces, a sense of normality and an almost staid daily existence were what he valued most. He had lost many friends and comrades in action. His way of life and family relationships had been hugely disrupted. On top of which he had lost his closest RAF comrade in a car crash – and that shortly after this friend had acted as his best man. It is easy to see that a tranquil and unruffled life was what he needed. Easy also to see that having two boisterous young boys roaring about the place would have tried his patience at times. At many times.
Normally placid, my father would ‘put his foot down’ when he felt things were getting out of hand. Prone to sudden explosions of temper, he could react with fury if his authority was challenged by either of his sons. This could be over trivial things like not wanting to eat something we’d been served at table, or more serious infractions such as fighting over toys, or arguing about whose turn it was to sit in the front seat of the car.
But the unpredictability of his explosions meant it was difficult to be sure of anything. This, it seems, was common in men returning from the pressures of war. Quoted in Turner & Rennell’s When Daddy Came Home are wartime children who remember that family relationships ‘could not withstand even trivial anxieties’ and that ‘upheaval and disruption’ tended to cause ‘arguments and anger’. While I don’t wish to overplay this aspect, it is true that we were never disciplined in a calm, serious manner, but always in the heat of temper, on the spur of the moment.
One of the worst instances of this was understandable. And Gilbert’s anger must have been building as he drove up the quarter mile of main road, the full view of our end-terrace house getting closer with each yard travelled. As he approached the turn into his parking space at the front door, the cause of his irritation would have become increasingly visible. Its location proved beyond doubt that I had disobeyed his strict instructions. For my part, I had convinced myself that I was merely interpreting his injunction – even if I was not quite obeying it to the letter.
My brother and I had recently learned to climb drainpipes. For some time, I had been obsessed with running along the high walls of our garden and climbing onto the shed roof, so the drainpipes were an obvious next step. Once again, it would have been me leading my brother astray that was blamed for his tackling this too. But how much more interesting was a house roof than a shed roof. Even more so as, behind the sloping slates of the façade, our roof was flat. Flat all the way to the top of the terraced street. Once up there we could run up and down the street at our leisure, waving and shouting greetings to our earth-bound chums, peering into everyone’s back gardens and ‘spying on’ the inhabitants of the next street over.
This practice had already been put a stop to. The aged sisters who lived next door had complained to our father of being alarmed by the thump of our footsteps overhead. So we knew we weren’t supposed to run up and down the terrace roofs any more. But Dad had only instructed us to cease that activity, not thinking to specifically ban us from the rooftop.
‘So, why not just stay on our own roof?’ I suggested to my brother. ‘That wouldn’t annoy anyone.’
‘Sure thing,’ he responded, ever keen on another wheeze. Setting a ‘bad example’ was so easy.
As our house, being an end terrace, had a pitched section of roof on two sides, my idea was to treat the central enclosed area as a sort of courtyard. A roof garden, even. I’d seen these in magazines. They looked alluring. All the range, too. Shinning up a back drainpipe carrying a rope, I lowered this down to my brother and hauled up two or three pot plants and a couple of saplings in containers to our new garden. A pair of deckchairs next, and a bottle of fizzy lemonade. Settling down for the afternoon with some comics in the sun, we thought we were set up. Our own roof garden – the height of fashion.
It was the potted saplings that gave us away.
Driving up towards the house, Gilbert had immediately spotted that, where before there had been a clean line of grey slate, the profile was now broken by a bunch of spindly branches swaying in the wind above the apex of the roof. He was through the front door, into a rage and out the back to the garden in seconds. Nothing would persuade him that our wonderful roof garden was a good idea. Nothing would have persuaded him of anything in that mood. We were peremptorily ordered to climb back up – under supervision – and remove all items from the roof right away, ourselves included.
‘You are never to go onto the roof again!’ Dad commanded, ‘and you are never to climb drainpipes again! Do you understand!?’
We did – of course. Stupid idea anyway…
‘And don’t you ever indulge in any such tomfoolery ever again,’ he fumed. The matter was closed.
But this was a side of our father that we saw rarely in our young days. It would grow more pronounced as we grew into the fractiousness of teenagers. As we challenged his authority, took advantage of our adolescent cockiness. As we ‘argued the toss’ – his stock phrase for any disagreement. But as younger boys, we generally did as we were told, and felt we had a friend in Dad.
We knew not to disturb him when he was ensconced in the dining room using the table as his work desk. He would be in there for an hour or more each evening ‘doing his writing’, as our mother called it. I imagined this as some sort of homework for grown-ups – which, of course, it was.
As a commercial traveller working from home, my father had accounts to complete, orders to process and so on. In all his own papers, he was always represented as a very formal A.T.G. Johnstone Esq. His neat handwriting or business-like printed script would be in evidence on all sorts of documents – file covers, envelopes, letterheads, invoices, accounts. So neat that I would also ask him to put my name on my school jotters and covered textbooks just for the look of it.
Car-bound for a living, my father was a natural driver. At least that’s what people always said.
Does such a thing exist? If it does, my brother is one too. But it is true that Gilbert drove with skill and tenacity all his life. I can never recall him having an accident of any sort. He was always a tolerant driver although apt to complain when he was being held up by anyone of less skill or a lesser sense of urgency.
‘Blooming pintle,’ he would mutter, not quite under his breath, as a car in front of him crawled along.
Where that term came from I never knew.
He was always in the car – for his work, to drive my mother to the shops, to fetch and carry for my grandmother, to drive my brother and me to Cubs or Scouts, and to take us all for runs at the weekend. Attractions were legion in the vicinity of Edinburgh: Queensferry to view the Forth Bridge; Carlops to visit our great-uncle’s farm; North Berwick for the open air pool; even Dunfermline for a visit to the abbey, once the new Forth Road Bridge had been opened.
Although he must have had his fill of being behind the wheel on his weekly business rounds, he never seemed to mind the Sunday runs that my mother – house-bound for her working week – loved and looked forward to.
Until, that is, the invention that transplanted the wireless – the ever-so-portable transistor radio and its ready access to chart hits.
Wild Thing
Slap it hard with every beat, play
percussion on the back seat of the car
until the driver gets the notion
that it’s time the radio was off, time
he drew the line, his fatherly concern
for welfare more towards the leather
of the vehicle’s upholstery
than distraction from the road
he’s steered down many times before
taking the ’60s family for runs
he’d sooner have declined, since
he’s driving every working day for pay
to keep the wolf he’d spotted lurking
at the corner of the street as far
from his own door as effort can, only
to find the wild thing howling in his ears
from pirate stations sons insist upon,
his two boys loudly baying for the chase.
While he would frequently insist that the radio be turned off, our father would only ever complain when my brother or I were ‘playing up’ in the back seat. But, more often than not we were urging him to speed up over hump back bridges so we could ‘feel the bounce’ or to ‘race the train’ where the road to the seaside ran parallel to the main east coast line.
When we got too fractious or started to fight over some toy or comic, Dad would pronounce, ‘If you don’t stop that you can just get out and walk.’ This regardless of where we might be.
It was a threat never carried out, of course. We would generally manage to calm ourselves but, on occasion, it was a case of the car being drawn into a layby or a road end and the two of us being given a general dressing down – even more mortifying if we were ordered out of the car first and had to endure the humiliation of a row on the roadside.
* * *
The ‘new house’, as my mother would still often refer to the suburban end-terrace villa we had moved into in 1957, had appealed to me at the age I was then mainly for its garden, and for the many parks and open spaces in the neighbourhood. By the time I was ‘into long trousers’ – a coming of age ritual at fourteen – the place had begun to feel stultifying and vapid. As the pretentions of the teenager grew, so the alienation of this house bore down on me.
The ‘best room’ was a case in point. Rarely used, that was perhaps just as well since it was dim and oppressive at the best of times. East-facing on the ground floor, its view was interrupted by a dense, light-excluding privet hedge which, at night, was bathed in the eerie glow of an amber street lamp right outside the window. The presence of the hedge gave rise to another consequence of wartime exigencies. Previously bounded by railings, since wartime had found the front garden also hedged in, the railings were summarily removed. Like others in a similar situation, they were fated to be melted down for the war effort.
When the house was built in Edwardian times, this room had been conceived of as the dining room, with the much brighter drawing room above it on the first floor. My parents, however, used it as their lounge, having the upstairs room as their bedroom. This used to depress and frustrate me as the first floor room, with its generous oriel window, commanded a panoramic view taking in several of the local streets and, in the distance, Edinburgh Castle, Blackford Hill and a broad swathe of cityscape. How much better it would have been as the ‘best room’.
But Mum couldn’t countenance that. ‘No-one else has an upstairs lounge, so we can’t,’ was her take on the matter.
The boredom of the house was best exemplified for me by another view, that from the actual dining room, which perversely my parents used as a family room. Here was where Gilbert and Bea sat of an evening, where they listened to the wireless, read the newspaper and chatted. It was where the television, bought only when I left home for university, was placed. And it was where I would listen to jazz concerts, poetry readings and drama productions on the BBC’s Third Programme. My problem, though, was what faced me from the chair next to the wireless. With my eyes unoccupied, I couldn’t help staring out of the window as I listened intently. This window framed the opposing halves of two identical beige coloured semi-detached villas; the gap between them filled by the bland face of a tenement, and a tiny strip of sky visible above its rooftop. Not a single tree or any natural feature was visible. The sheer sterility of the view came to symbolise what I saw, in the smug certainty of my youth, as the vacuous conventionality of life in that house, a sterile environment I was increasingly determined to flee.
My teenage years had seen me move out of the bedroom I had shared with my brother since we had moved from our tenement flat in 1957. As we tried on our different adolescent personas, getting along with each other was becoming more and more vexing. I begged my parents for a room of my own.
There were two possibilities. One room, fancifully called the study on the sole basis that I had swotted for my exams in there; or another, the playroom, which still held a cupboard full of our childhood toys. My preference was for the latter. It was away from all the other bedrooms. It was close to the back door. It was an interesting irregular shape, unique in our house. It had its own internal staircase leading up from the kitchen. This and the coomb ceiling gave it a rather ‘groovy’ attic look. I would be able to decorate it in a ‘cool’ contemporary style. After much pleading, it was agreed. The toys would have to go. The tin soldiers, the toy farm, the plastic cowboys and ‘injuns’, the clockwork railway and its station were all out to the bin in an instant. The old playroom would be my new bedroom. Away from my brother who, now that I saw myself as a sophisticated teenager, was driving me crazy with his immaturity. As doubtless I was driving him crazy with my pretensions.
The new room was the only major project I ever undertook with my father. Together, we sanded and painted the staircase, then emulsioned the walls – one feature wall a bold terracotta, the others a stark contemporary white. We laid new carpet and hung the curtains. But something was missing. Already an avid reader and an embryonic jazz fan, I had to have shelves for books and records, with space for a radio and a record player.
Dad and I headed into town to Lawson’s Timber Yard to secure the material. Lawson’s of Lady Lawson Street (was that a coincidence?) was a warren of interconnected spaces stacked with battens, planks, beams and sheets of hardboard and ply in any dimension imaginable. Huge saws would cut the timber to whatever shape and size was required. The whole place reeked of sawdust and wood shavings, resin and glue. Slotting the planks for the new bookcase into the boot of Dad’s Cortina and tying the regulation red duster onto the protruding ends as a hazard warning, we turned for home. Over the next weekend, we worked together in the garden to stain the wood with a solution of potassium permanganate – a neat trick Gilbert had learned in the RAF – and to varnish and assemble the shelves ready to set them up. Within a month, I was in my new room – my own room, for the first time ever. Grown up at last, I thought.
What I hadn’t foreseen was the hilarity – at my expense – this room would cause. It was the former maid’s room of the Edwardian house, hence its back stair and proximity to the kitchen. When later I stared bringing girlfriends home to spend hours listening to records in my room – with luck, punctuated by the angled-for snogging sessions – Dad would never miss a chance for a joke. Cracks about the maid’s room ‘not being short of maids’, about ‘old maids not being what I was after’ and so on would reduce me to silent fury and cringing embarrassment.
Another hitch I hadn’t anticipated was the stair up to the room opening off the kitchen. While this was handy for the back door, and was close to giving me my own private entrance, it also put me just upstairs from the most frequently used room in the house.
When the snogging progressed to stronger stuff, my mother, knowing full well what was going on I now realise, took her turn at embarrassment. She would claim to be anxious about strange noises coming from up the stairs and pose leading questions.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ she once asked a girlfriend, ‘I thought I heard you crying or something.’ Cue more cringing on my part.
But luckily, pumping up the volume on the stereo system I had upgraded to by then would usually muffle anything too audible from those down below.
* * *
In my mind, I was out of there already. Our ‘four of a family’ was what I had known all my life, but moving on, moving out, ‘moving on down the line’ was what I wanted now. My parents were part of my past. I gave them no further thought. By eighteen I was off to university. By twenty I had moved out. By twenty-one I was married. We could make as much noise as we wanted now.