My first day at Rosebank Primary School is a vividly etched memory, due mainly to the itchy vest. Grandad was one of the old brigade who positively believed in the ‘knitted garment next to the skin’ policy. Unfortunately, because of the war, there were shortages of every commodity, wool included.
Women were becoming more depressed by the never-ending struggle and Mum was no exception. ‘Honestly, if it’s no queuing for this it’s queuing for that,’ she complained loudly after one particularly frustrating day. ‘You get all this advice to mend everything but what if the thing is full of holes or falling to bits? What do you do then? Stitch up all the holes?’
Grandad could see no problem in the wool shortage. ‘What about rattling down that pink jumper you’ve had in the drawer for years? That would give us a big ball of wool that would maybe knit two vests.’
This suggestion was met with stiff opposition from Mum who owned and liked the jumper and could remember with great fondness the far-off days before the war when she had swanned around in it. But as usual Grandad was adamant and he got his own way. Mum was miffed for a few days but the vests were duly knitted, much to my disgust because what they had both overlooked was the sharp metallic thread that was interwoven with the wool. The garments looked lovely, glinting softly in the gaslight when held up for inspection, but wearing one was another matter. I squirmed as he placed the scratchy garment over my head but he had little patience for my gyrations.
‘Will you stop jumping about? Folk will think you’ve got St Vitus’s Dance or something.’
To make matters worse, Mum had also knitted a pair of knee-length stockings. Goodness only knows where she found the wool for these. It was one of life’s little mysteries but I had my own suspicions. Judging from the texture I was convinced the yarn had originally belonged to a horse.
Then over this delightfully abrasive ensemble was the nap coat that almost reached my ankles. This was the result of Mum’s insistence on having a garment with growing room incorporated in the design. In fact, nothing was ever purchased from McGills or the Star Stores unless the assistant assured Mum, ‘Oh yes, Madam, this coat has loads of growing room. Just look at the hem. It’s at least three inches.’
This flowery phrase guaranteed that the coat would swirl around my ankles for about four years. Then, when it finally fitted perfectly, the only serviceable part was the buttons. In my case, because Mum had insisted on the word ‘plenty’, I was unlucky enough to get another year’s wear.
On the first day of term Grandad inspected the finished result. ‘That’s grand. You’re happed up for the school,’ he said, quite chuffed at the horrible apparition in front of him.
I was certainly happed up. In fact I could have gone on an expedition to Everest without so much as another glove but that was neither here nor there as far as Grandad was concerned. Mum came with me on that first day and we met up with a little army of mothers and their offspring. We all trooped into Miss Drummond’s infant classroom.
There was quite a bit of clinging and crying which, strangely enough, came from the boys but the teacher beamed at the worried women, assuring them in her authoritative manner that they had nothing to worry about. She would soon sort us all out. We sat at small desks, looking like a clutch of perky, inquisitive chipmunks, our eyes shining brightly like well-polished boot buttons and filled with an eagerness to ingest our first taste of learning.
At least that was how I should have been. I’m sure I would have enjoyed that first day at school if it hadn’t been for the itchy vest. Sitting still at my desk was almost impossible but I tried hard not to fidget too much. After all, I didn’t want the class to know about my bright pink – with added glitter – undergarment. At playtime I was glad to escape to the playground shed where I was soon in ecstasy rubbing my back against the rough stone wall. The stockings were equally bad and my legs had thin red weals where my nails had scraped the skin.
I asked Grandad the following morning if I could go to school minus the two offending items. He was shocked. ‘What? Go to school without your cosy vest and stockings? Heavens lassie, you’ll catch your death of cold!’
Because I knew his decisions were always final I had no option but to put my plan into operation. Before the school bell rang I made my way to the freezing cold outside toilets, nipped into a cubicle and quickly whipped off the vest. I then folded it away in my utility compressed-cardboard schoolbag with the imitation-leather look. I could do nothing about the stockings except roll them down as far as they would go. That way I had only three inches of irritation to cope with.
Going home at dinnertime posed no problems because I left my bag in the classroom. Grandad was a good cook and his home-made kail was so thick it was possible to stand a spoon upright in it. He always made a big potful, enough to last the week.
‘Eat it up. It’ll put meat on your ribs,’ he would say.
The soup was always followed by a milk pudding. George was now old enough to sit at the table even though he needed a couple of cushions on his chair to lift him to the height of the table. He was also learning how to use a spoon instead of being fed by Grandad or Mum. Because of this I always kept a watchful eye on him in case he splashed my gymslip with splodges of Creamola. If that happened, and Grandad insisted on its removal for sponging, then my secret would be out. He would notice the missing vest and I really would be in trouble.
Meanwhile, back at the school the teacher had sorted us out according to our abilities. The two cleverest girls, Ann Roy and Elizabeth Wilson, were at the top of the class while I was further down the row with my friend Janie Gibb.
Rosebank School was a large grey stone building situated at the foot of Tulloch Crescent, a mere stone’s throw away from McDonald Street. The janitor’s house lay at the foot of the girls’ playground but because it faced the grim side wall of the Hillside jute mill it was always cast in a gloomy shadow. If, as the name suggested, it had once been a bank of roses then this rural idyll no longer existed. Any flowery bower had long since vanished under an acre of grey stone.
Our classroom was large and had tall windows that stretched almost to the ceiling. The walls were painted in a depressing sludge colour but were brightened slightly by a colourful alphabet frieze. Printed in yellow splendour on the ‘B’ section was a beautiful plump and ripe banana. It was indeed fortunate that we had the picture because no one in the class had ever seen a banana, let alone tasted one.
We were all issued with reading books. The storyline consisted of a family appearing to spend their entire day taking cans of tea to their father. Even on schooldays if the children spotted him through the classroom window then their sole aim was to get permission to take him his tea. This was a totally different world from the one familiar to most of us and a thousand light years away from mine. My father was a blurred photographic image and I couldn’t ever recall seeing him in the flesh. Still, maybe it was just as well because I couldn’t see Miss Drummond letting us all pop in and out like the fictional family.
In any case, I had other things on my mind at that moment, namely Elizabeth Wilson’s shiny black patent shoes. Out of the motley bunch of classmates, she was the one I admired and envied the most. She was completely different from the rest of us and especially me, mainly because her school clothes fitted perfectly. There was no growing room attached to her navy nap coat, which had been bought with a total disregard to permanence. She was the fashionable epitome of juvenile elegance.
During that first week I watched her every move so intently that her dainty ways were almost imprinted on my brain. She never got dirty or rumpled. Even at playtime, when the rest of us were running around screeching like banshees, she stood on the sidelines like some fragile porcelain doll. She was a model of perfection from her shoes and snowy white ankle-socks to her lovely teddy-bear-shaped hair slides that held her long fair hair away from her forehead. Even something as prosaic as her mitts were beautifully knitted with colourful clowns prancing over the surface.
What was worse was the fact that I just knew instinctively that her vest would be made from the softest white interlock cotton – a complete contrast from my itchy pink monstrosity which I was still pushing daily into my schoolbag. My dark hair was cut in the short Eton crop style and it was sometimes clipped back with a huge ugly kirby grip. Then there were my knees, permanently grubby and sometimes covered with big squares of tatty Elastoplast. I was neither dainty nor elegant and my envy knew no bounds. But it was her patent shoes I envied the most and I began to include a request for a similar pair in my bedtime prayers. I was careful not to let Grandad overhear this plea. He was very strict about asking Jesus for personal pleasures.
‘Make sure you pray for the poor folk bombed out of their houses. Some bairns are no so lucky as you,’ he would say. ‘A lot of bairns are evacuees and away from their mothers and their houses, the poor wee souls.’
In spite of all this sobering knowledge I couldn’t stop chattering on and on about the wonderful shoes. In the end, Mum and Grandad were sick of it all, having heard enough on the subject. Grandad was most displeased.
‘There is something you’ve got to realise, young miss. There’s more to life than a pair of shiny shoes.’
I stared at him in blank amazement and I couldn’t honestly imagine what could be more important in life than pretty shoes. But as usual he was right. As the weeks sped by I soon forgot about Elizabeth and her haute couture. If my knees were forever adorned with grimy plaster then my coat with oodles of growing room and a three-inch hem was long enough to cover them.
At the end of the month it was announced that a medical examination would take place for all new pupils. On the appointed day Mum arrived at the school along with a dozen or so other mothers. They were ushered into a small side room where they sat side by side on narrow chairs, all dressed in their sturdy thick coats and sensible if somewhat shabby shoes.
‘Aye, it’s a hard job keeping a family dressed these days,’ said one woman morosely. ‘The coupons don’t seem to stretch to everything they need. As for us poor mothers, we have tae take a back seat and resign ourselves to wearing the same old coat day in and day out.’
The group of women were sympathising with this philosophy when Mrs Wilson appeared. Later that night Mum related the incident to Lizzie.
‘Speak about being dressed in the height of fashion! Eh wish you had seen the woman’s coat, Lizzie. Musquash by the look of it, and she was wearing a wee round pillbox hat with a spotted veil. She also had a pair of real leather gloves. Real leather gloves!’ said Mum, emphasising the words in case Lizzie hadn’t got the picture. ‘And to complete the look and finish off the outfit, she was wearing a pair of suede booties trimmed with astrakhan fur. Compared to her the rest of us looked like we had just fallen off a bus. We were just saying that if her man’s a soldier then he’s got to be a general or major at least.’
While Lizzie listened open-mouthed to this story, Grandad was trying to read his evening paper. Being totally unimpressed with female fashion and wanting a bit of peace, he said gruffly, ‘Heavens, Molly, you’re as bad as your daughter! Going on about fur coats and booties when there’s more important things going on in the world.’
But Mum wasn’t listening. She had a bee in her bonnet about Mrs Wilson’s outfit and she wasn’t prepared to stop her narrative now she was in full flow. ‘Eh’m telling you this, Lizzie. If a braw fur coat like that ever came within my reach Eh would grab it,’ she said unrepentantly.
However, as things turned out, I never did discover what Elizabeth’s father did for a living as she left school at the end of that term. I mentioned this to Mum.
‘Och, maybe she thought her lassie was mixing with tinkies,’ she laughed. ‘Come to think about it, Eh remember her look when she came tae that medical. Her face changed colour when the doctor mentioned the problem of head lice, saying we had to check every week for nits. Maybe Elizabeth is now a pupil in the high school or somewhere suitable for their social bracket.’
Whether this was the case or not, I don’t know. By now most of the class were falling prey to the usual childhood illnesses that beset every infant class when they are all lumped together. It was just my luck that Grandad had a homespun remedy for everything. I was no sooner in the door complaining of a sore throat than he was heating salt in pan, tipping it into one of Mum’s discarded lisle stockings and tying it tightly around my neck Trying to breathe with this contraption under my chin was difficult, not only because of the tingly heat against my skin but also because of the weight of this unwieldy salty lump.
Another homely remedy was the bowl of saps. This gruesome gruel of bread and hot milk was Grandad’s staunchest ally in the case of an upset stomach, a bout of sickness or just simply feeling off colour. He would soak a huge slice of bread in the steaming milk then put this obnoxious mixture under my nose. Needless to say I had no option but to eat this pappy delight. His word was law and had to be obeyed.
Sometimes, if I was unlucky enough to suffer from a really sore throat with a high temperature, he would produce, like a rabbit from a hat, another precautionary treatment from his Dwyer’s Homely Cures Almanac, in this case a lump of margarine rolled in sugar. Seemingly, before the war it had been a lump of butter but the rationing had put a stop to this bit of luxury. This was another cure I detested and I could never understand why his remedies had to taste absolutely revolting. I soon suspected that this was the secret of his medicine. It was a case of the remedy being worse than the pain, and after a while I learned not to mention any feeling of illness. Grandad was also a great believer in ‘Friday night is syrup of figs night’. According to him, this gave the medicine the entire weekend to clean out your insides. Another boon was malt extract with cod liver oil, a big spoonful of which had to be taken before facing the hazards of the day.
Sunday night was bath night, with the oval tin bath being brought out of the cupboard with a great deal of clanking and banging before being filled with endless kettles of hot water. Because he was the younger and presumably the cleaner, George was bathed first. The bottle of camphorated oil was placed by the side of the fire to make sure it was warm when Mum spread it liberally over George’s chest and back. My treatment after my bath was Vick’s ointment. I could feel its warmth penetrate my skin like an internal hot water bottle.
As a finishing touch Grandad would put a thick smear of this balm under my nose. ‘To keep the cold snuffles at bay,’ he would say but, as I lay in bed, almost passing out from the pungent vapour fumes that assaulted my nasal passages I felt the balm wasn’t so much clearing my nose as blasting a huge hole through the top of my head.
It was at times like these, when confined to bed with the salty sock, the awful saps or the margarine and sugar ball, that I used to think darkly about Elizabeth Wilson. In my imagination I could picture her lying ill and pale and ethereal in her elegant bed, eating deliciously cooked morsels especially prepared for her and receiving pleasant tasting medicines from an attentive doctor.
But doctors cost money.
‘Where would we get the money for a doctor?’ was Grandad’s theme tune. ‘No, you mark my words, my medicine is better than any doctor’s. We’ll see what you’re like in the morning and if your cold’s no any better Eh’ll go along to Young’s the chemist and get you a bottle of glycerine, lemon and epickeky (ipecacuanha) wine. If that doesn’t cure you, nothing will.’
In the classroom one day Miss Innes, the sewing teacher, produced skeins of the same coarse wool as my stockings were made from. She also handed each of us a set of four sharp knitting needles and announced that because of wartime shortages we were to knit a pair of socks for our own use. My heart sank at the thought of a twin for my dreaded stockings and maybe it was this thought that made me hopeless at knitting. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the hang of the four needles. It was like playing an imaginary set of bagpipes. As a result of this ineptitude I spent many afternoons rattling down and picking up stitches till at the end of the week my sum specimen was an inch of sludge-grey knitting.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the worst knitter in the class because, in her wisdom, the teacher had included the boys in this recreational pursuit and they were marginally worse than me. Still, I struggled on painfully with my tube of puckered-up greyness until it came to turn the heel. In an effort to help the stragglers, namely the boys and me, she drew a diagram on the blackboard, but I couldn’t transpose her drawing to the three sets of stitches on my needles. This sorry state of affairs lasted for a couple of weeks, until one wet and miserable afternoon she announced that the socks had to be finished by the following Monday – a mere few days away.
This statement threw me into a situation bordering on panic because I was still on sock number one and what a sorry sight it was. After class I pushed my lap bag in beside my books and rushed home, almost knocking Grandad over with my haste and my tale of woe. ‘Grandad, these socks have tae be finished by Monday. Do you think you can turn the heel for me?’ I asked, more in desperation than hope.
He surveyed the snarled-up bundle with amazement. ‘Heavens! Eh’ve never seen such a mess before. You’re obviously no one of life’s natural knitters,’ he said in that superior tone often used by people who know they are good at something.
And I knew Grandad had a talent for knitting. After all, I had the vests to prove it. Mum was also critical when she saw the sorry mess, but in spite of this they each took on the task of a sock apiece. Grandad unpicked my work and started afresh.
The following Monday, the look on Miss Innes face when I produced the pair of perfect specimens was a joy to behold. Grandad had made me promise to own up to the conspiracy, and although she gave me a long hard look she said nothing and neither did I. I would like to think I tried to own up; I even got as far as opening my mouth, but obviously the socks were now past history because she was placing small squares of material in front of us in order to practise some sewing stitches. So I shut my mouth and said nothing.
Apart from this sewing and knitting, most of our learning was done in a collective and chanting sing-song manner, especially the multiplication tables. In fact, on warm sunny days this synchronised hum was almost hypnotic enough to send you to sleep.
Playtimes were the best part of the day and most of us would run up the steep incline of the playground with our rubber balls. These had all seen better days but they were well guarded by their owners because it was impossible to buy another one. Janie Gibb and I had taken the precaution of gouging our initials into the ball’s rubbery surface with a sharp pen nib. My ball was the result of a fortunate find by Grandad just before the war and he had put it in the drawer, where in my usual rummaging manner I had found it. I’m sure it had belonged to a dog in its previous life because it had deep chew marks pitted all over its surface, but it still bounced and that was all that mattered.
We threw it against the wall and chanted with each movement. ‘Clap your hands, round your back, over your arm, under your legs,’ we sang, making gyrations with each chant. Although I can’t now remember all the moves I do know they required a great deal of agile activity.
Another enjoyable pastime in the summer was playing a game of scraps. This needed a book, the thicker the better. In fact, if you were lucky enough to own some long-winded saga you were indeed fortunate. On our weekly visits to the Albert Square library I always tried to get Mum to choose a book like War and Peace but she preferred the more sensational Crime Club detective novels. And she warned me in no uncertain manner. ‘Don’t let me catch you taking my library book to the school for your scraps. Eh’ll get a hefty fine if the book gets torn.’
Every morning in the warm sunshine we would all line up against the school side wall with our scrapbooks clutched tightly in our hands, looking like a row of midget financial dealers. ‘Show us your scraps!’ was the usual opening gambit and, with a quick twist of the wrist, we would flick through the pages to show the three prized scraps hidden amongst the pages. A deal would be made with the purchaser and, depending on the size and quality of her proffered scrap, a set amount of tries were allocated. The tries consisted of opening the book at random and, if the page it was opened at had the scraps, your reward was to take them and put them with your own. As with all games of chance there were days when you could be on a winning streak, while at other times a stroke of bad luck could see you losing everything in ten minutes. One day this calamity happened to wee Rita who ran home that afternoon, seemingly crying bitterly.
The next morning, to our consternation, her mother was at the school gate, standing guard like some avenging angel. ‘Right then, you lot! Eh want all the scraps you cheated from Rita yesterday!’ she shouted loudly, barring the gate with her plump figure.
I don’t think we did anything to cheat Rita but because we weren’t allowed to give cheek to our elders there was a great deal of searching and scrambling through various scrapbooks, trying to remember which ones belonged to her. Needless to say, she ended up with more scraps than she lost but she had to pay a high price for this. It was a long time before anyone would play with her again.
Quite a few of the mothers gathered every day at the school gate. It was like a social club as they all stood around on the street, praising their children. ‘My Jean is really good at her sums. The teacher was saying she’s one of the best counters in her class,’ said one proud mum to the group but this remark wasn’t going to be taken at face value by the other women.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ replied one stout woman who appeared every morning in her well-worn baffies, with her dinkie curlers peeping out from her floral turban. ‘My Mary is getting ten out of ten for her multiplication tables.’
Because I lived such a short distance from school, Mum and Grandad let me go on my own. Unlike Jean or Mary, whose cleverness was being shouted from the school gate, any talents I may have possessed were not so much hidden under a bushel as buried under an enormous avalanche. Still, this didn’t bother me. What did bother Mum and was to become a big worry on the horizon was Grandad’s health.