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  Commodities

  Shopping with my mother was a geography lesson, although she wouldn’t have known it. There were grocers’ shops with their sacks of beans and other products, and price tags stuck into them. Everything in those days came from somewhere. Rice came from Patna. Tea came from the then Ceylon. Bacon came from Ayrshire or Wiltshire. Beef came from Angus (it was marked Angus Beef).

  Lamb and mutton came from Wales or Scotland when it didn’t come from New Zealand.

  Sometimes butter, too, came from New Zealand, but mainly from nearby Dumfries.

  Cream came from Ayrshire, Cornwall or Devon.

  Cheese came from Cheddar. I remember no other in my pre-school days. Later we had Gorgonzola all the way from Gorgonzola.

  Fish came from the North Sea or (for the best herring) Loch Fyne. Besides herrings there were mackerel, John Dory, haddock, halibut, turbot, plaice, flounders and sole.

  ‘Caller herrin” meant fresh herring. The popular ballad went:

  Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?

  They’re bonny fish and halesome farin’.

  Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?

  New drawn frae the Forth.

  Cotton came from India or Egypt. Silk came from Milan and Lyons. Lisle thread (for our stockings and summer underwear) came from Lille (formerly Lisle) in France.

  Straw hats came from Leghorn or Panama.

  Money was pounds (paper notes) or, equally, sovereigns (gold), silver half-crowns (eight to the pound), silver florins (ten to the pound), silver shillings (twenty made one pound), sixpenny bits (silver, half a shilling), tiny silver threepenny bits (half a sixpence), bronze pennies (known as ‘coppers’, twelve to one shilling), and, of the same alloy, halfpennies (pronounced ‘haypnies’, half a penny), and farthings (half a halfpenny). There were also genteel guineas, but there were no notes or coins for these. A guinea merely meant one pound plus one shilling. Doctors sent in their bills in guineas, as did furriers and high-class dressmakers and hatters. The best clothes shops marked their wares in guineas, but children’s clothes were in pounds, shillings and pence, as were food and railway tickets.

  My mother and father were obviously unaware of the custom that furriers were paid in guineas. I remember a local furrier, Mrs Madge Forrester, a large-bosomed lady, had been altering a fur cape of my mother’s for a prequoted price that my parents took to be five pounds but which the furrier insisted was guineas. Mrs Forrester sat in the bow window of our sitting-room, having delivered the restructured fur cape; she was silhouetted against the light, repeating, ‘No, not five pounds, five guineas. I said five. We furriers always mean guineas. I said five.’ I remember my father forking out the extra five shillings in question; and always afterwards my parents referred to Mrs Forrester as ‘I said Five’. They loved to repeat the phrase after each other. ‘I said Five’ lived and worked opposite our house, so we saw her frequently from the window. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Forrester,’ my mother would say, passing her in the street. But later she would tell my father, ‘I saw “I said Five”.’

  Neighbours

  Meeting people in the street meant that you stopped and talked or you said something about the weather and went on. If the weather was good the amiable comment was ‘Good morning, Mrs X. Fine day.’ If it was raining, blowing hard from the north or snowing, the words in passing were ‘Good morning, Mrs X. Seasonable weather.’ First names were never used. Amongst the older Edinburgh women it was not unusual to address a married lady as Mistress X instead of Mrs. All during the ’thirties a very elderly and well-educated friend, Mrs Hardie, called my mother ‘Mistress Camberg’.

  On the ground floor of the block of flats next to ours was a jeweller’s shop, the back premises of which were occupied by the owners, the Page family. On Sunday mornings Mr Page used to go to the Mound, which is the panoramic Hyde Park Corner of Edinburgh, there to set up his box and preach the Bible, or about the Bible. What his message was I do not know. At the Mound on Sundays everyone and anyone was, and still is, permitted to say their say about anything, mainly politics or religion, so long as it isn’t obscene or seditious in a fairly large sense. On Sunday afternoons, his duty fulfilled, red-haired Mr Page would set off with his motorbike and side-car to the country. His red-haired son James, still a schoolboy, rode on the pillion while Mrs Page sat in the side-car with their small daughter, Isobel, on her knee. My brother and I were both red-heads and so I considered it right that there should be some red-haired neighbours. The percentage of red-heads in Scotland is always comparatively high.

  Isobel was exactly my age, and my first playmate. The back windows of our flats looked out on a pretty stretch of greens which formed a large grassy courtyard within four sides of a street block. And there we could play safely under the watchful glances of our mothers from their respective windows. Isobel and I played with our dolls, pitched a rudimentary tent or embarked on digging a hole to Australia until it was time to be called in to tea. Scottish summer days are long. The weather cannot always have been good enough for us to play outside, but when we did the sunlight went on for ever. On miraculous days Mrs Kerr, our upstairs neighbour, would open her window at about three in the afternoon and let down a picnic in a basket. I don’t remember what exactly this picnic consisted of, except that we were always delighted with it and ate it all up.

  Mrs Kerr was a good deal older than my mother. Her daughter, Maudie, was already in her twenties, training to be a singer. She had a job in the Civil Service, but a career as a singer was her ambition, testified to night after night from the flat above. We never complained, even amongst ourselves. It was accepted that Maudie was in a destined category. Mrs Kerr told us about Maudie’s training in legendary tones meant to impress us as much as they actually did. Maudie was to sing in a concert: ‘Of course she has to eat liver for her voice.’ Great bouquets of flowers were ordered to be made up, so that they should be handed to blonde, blue-eyed Maudie on the stage. ‘They all do it,’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘All singers get their own bouquets sent up to them on the stage.’

  It was Mrs Kerr who taught my mother to make soup. ‘Three brees to a bane,’ said Mrs Kerr, which sounded shivery and poetic to me, like a line from a Border ballad. But I quickly realized what she meant: you got three brews out of every bone.

  I seldom had difficulty understanding what people meant. Later, when I went to school, the kindly policeman who took me across the road didn’t ask me what I was called, he said, ‘What do they cry you?’ We never used this idiom ourselves but many people around us cried a spade a spade. Our next-door neighbour, poor bedridden Miss Peggy Moffat, who was arthritic and had once been a painter, spoke plain English with a Scottish accent, but her housekeeper, Miss Draper, a wiry and scornful sooth-sayer, spoke much of the dialect; so that, when I won a prize at school, Miss Draper’s disconcerting comment was ‘The Deil aye kens his ain’ which I well knew to mean ‘The Devil always knows his own.’ I would have been horrified if Miss Moffat herself had said anything like this, but as it was only Miss Draper being her true self, I bore no resentment at all. One of Peggy Moffat’s oil paintings, of a glade in the botanical gardens, adorned our walls. That she would never wield a brush again had been her destiny before I was born. I liked to go to visit her and stand by her high bed which I could just see over the side of.

  Downstairs, next door on the right, was Miss Morrison’s sweet shop, where she stood with tall authority, her side of the counter having been built up higher than the customer’s side. If you went there without your mother to buy a pennyworth of chocolate drops, of liquorice all-sorts, or a ha’pennyworth of hundreds-and-thousands, or a swirling barley-stick, Miss Morrison would enquire closely as to where you got that penny or that ha’penny, who gave it to you; and she would further interrogate you as to whether your mother knew you were spending those coins, held between your fingers, on sweeties. Only after satisfying herself on these and other deeply moral points would she take down the sweetie jar and weigh out the just port
ion; and even then she cautioned us to go straight home with our purchase and not eat it all up out there in the street. It was generally considered ill-mannered for parents to give money to young children to spend willy-nilly.

  On the left was a large shoeshop, Lauders’, now a Chinese restaurant. We never bought our shoes at Lauders’, but I remember a pale daughter, a girl of about fifteen, very thin, green and grey, who stood by the window looking out. William Todd, the grocer, was at the end of the block, as it turns into Viewforth. He was important, because he had a licence to sell wines. Gilbey’s port, four shillings and sixpence a bottle, was the great favourite with my mother; she sipped it throughout the day: ‘my tonic’. Mr Todd gave a penny back on each empty bottle. And round the corner from Todd’s was the home of the two ladies to whom my brother and I were sent to learn to play the piano, for although my mother had been a music teacher she didn’t feel equal to teaching her own children. Among all the names of my infancy, those two sisters’ names are among the very few that escape me. I know their house had a funny smell and that one of them had her stocking always twisted. My brother attended assiduously to his piano lesson. I much preferred to play with the parrot, which fascinated me, both at the time and later, in my thoughts. At first my hand could not yet quite stretch an octave. I did a five-finger exercise. Eventually my brother and I learned to play a tinkling duet, to my mother’s pride.

  In the next block, in Bruntsfield Place, was William Christie’s butcher shop where gruesome carcasses of animals hung on hooks, the floor covered with sawdust, and jellied meats were displayed in the window under fearful names like ‘potted head’. But Bill Christie was a sweet man, who became an important part of my mother’s life many many years later.

  The main feature of interest in the large draper’s shop on the opposite side of the street was a system of overhead pneumatic tubes that carried containers of money from the customer, via the assistant, to the counting house, and sent back the change. The shop assistant wrapped our money in the invoice and packed it into an egg-shaped receptacle that she pulled down from a wire dangling above her head. This would then shoot up and away. On its return a bell would ring and the assistant would reach up and pull down our change wrapped in its cocoon. I used to love to watch these money-containers whizzing between the various departments and the glassed-in office.

  Next door to this draper’s shop was glamorous Rudloff the hairdresser, with a model bust of a beautiful, blushing lady in the window, her short hair waved incredibly.

  Just round the corner in Viewforth lived Nita McEwen, who resembled me very much. She was already in her first year at James Gillespie’s School when I saw her with her parents, walking between them, holding their hands. I was doing the same thing. I was not yet at school. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, when children used to walk with their parents. My mother remarked how like me the little girl was; one of her parents must have said the same to her. I looked round at the child and saw she was looking round at me. Either her likeness to me or something else made me feel strange. I didn’t yet know she was called Nita. Later, at school, although Nita was in a higher class and we never played together, our physical resemblance was often remarked upon. Her hair was slightly redder than mine. Years later, when I was twenty-one, I was to meet Nita McEwen in a boarding house in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. There, our likeness to each other was greatly remarked on. One night, Nita was shot dead by her husband, who then shot himself. I heard two girl’s screams followed by a shot, then another shot. That was the factual origin of my short story ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead’.

  Myths and Images

  I must have been very young when I made furrowed fields and ditches out of my dinner, with a fork, before eating it, but I well remember doing so. I used to like to have green spinach, yellow turnips, mashed potatoes and brown minced meat on my plate to produce the full pictorial effect. The fork made the ploughed furrows, and spaces between the food made ponds and rivers. It made eating more interesting, it added another dimension, as in nouvelle cuisine.

  Sometimes I would be out with my parents when darkness fell, probably on a Saturday, when my father didn’t go to work. In winter it was dark between three and four in the afternoon. We came home by tram-car from whose windows I could see the lights of the city making patterns in the distance. If we were walking I might get tired, and my father would carry me the last part of the way home; then, the lights of the city bobbed up and down against the dark blue sky.

  Electricity had come to the principal streets of Edinburgh long before I was born, but in our Bruntsfield Place the street lamps were still lit by gas. We had progressed from the days of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lamp-lighter (‘With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street’); our gas-lamps had pilot lights, so that the lamp-lighter who passed by at dusk came posting with a long pole in his hand, with which he deftly turned on the lamp-light. Like Stevenson, I used to wait at the window to witness this performance, and a few years later, when I came to possess A Child’s Garden of Verses, I felt a close affinity with our long-dead Edinburgh writer, on the basis of more than one shared experience. The Braid Hills, the Blackford Hill and Pond, the Pentland Hills of Stevenson’s poems, his ‘hills of home’ were mine, too.

  My pre-school dresses were not made of stuff like other children’s. They were knitted in silk and wool by my mother and Auntie Gertie in a variety of colours, among which I remember royal blue, bronze, and old gold. My simple white silk knitted dress for parties had a feather stitch. Many small girls at parties had ballerina-type dresses. The small boys generally wore kilts. We all carried our party shoes in a special bag and changed into them inside the house, something that I do to this day. To make my house shoes more partified my mother would mould a rosette of pink sealing-wax on the front of each one. Parties were for Christmas or birthdays. Christmas was largely a children’s feast in the Scotland of those days. Many shops, offices and factories remained open on Christmas Day; the great day was New Year’s. Friends would come first-footing shortly after midnight on Hogmanay (New Year); for luck, a dark man was preferable.

  At Hallowe’en (31 October) children with blackened faces and grotesque clothes used to come round the doors collecting pennies: ‘Please to help the guisars’ (guisards or mummers).

  But at Christmas, already the English custom of hanging up our stockings had arrived, and I duly hung up mine. My brother Philip, more ambitious, hung up a pillow case. My brother, who was clever with his hands, often made cut-out toys for me which wouldn’t fit into my stocking, and were spread all around it at the foot of my bed.

  The dispenser of presents at parties was called Santie, and was dressed in his traditional uniform. Santie usually spoke with a broad accent, he cried us bairns, like the policeman. I remember only once getting a present out of Santie’s sack that I wasn’t thrilled with. This was a religious, positively Calvinistic, picture book about Baby Jesus and the dire consequences to children who didn’t fit the required standards. My mother, at home, pronounced my hostess a damn fool for giving such books to children, thus shaking any illusion I might still have had about the reality of Santie.

  One party I remember was at the house of my school-friend of many years, Frances Niven. We were still quite tiny. I came to love this house, at Howard Place, adjoining the house where Robert Louis Stevenson was born. At the party of my memory, the children, about twenty of us, were settled at a long table in the large, festively decorated pantry next to the kitchen. We were given some kind of orange mousse, served prettily in half-orange skins, and we ate this with teaspoons. Frances’s mother and aunt, and some other elders, were hovering around. One of them said, ‘Look at them tucking in!’ I seemed to be the only child who heard this, and although I didn’t make any fuss, I was ridiculously affected. I thought it a terrible thing to say, and I put down my spoon, unable to finish my delicious orange sweet. Perhaps I felt that no one would have made such an embarrassing remark at a grow
n-up party. Fortunately nobody noticed that I’d stopped eating.

  My mother used to come and collect me when it was time to go home. Her black hair had been cut short by Rudloff and she wore powder and paint, as make-up was called. The powder was Coty’s, shade Rachel. The paint was carmine, a red powder bought from the chemist in very small quantities, it nestled in the fold of a piece of white paper, and it cost tuppence (two pence). My mother was decidedly out of place amongst the northern worthies who came to collect my friends. My own hair must have been cut about that time, when many small girls had short hair, for I remember people saying to me, ‘Where are your curls?’

  What images return …! My father made rings with his cigarette smoke, he made the shadow of Queen Victoria in profile on the wall, and rabbits out of table-napkins. I learned to tell the time from his pocket watch.

  ‘Coal!’ would come the cry from the streets every morning, and when we needed coal the coalman’s horse would bring his cart to a clicking stop at my mother’s bidding from the window. Then up the stairs would tramp the coal-black man with his hundredweights to tip them into our coal cellar which was built into the flat. How heavy the word hundredweight sounded. Each sack cost half-a-crown. We used coal to heat the water and to burn in the fireplaces. More than once, our chimney caught fire and my father had to go and pay a fine. Sometimes a chimney sweep, sootier even than the coalman, would come and clean the flues. This was done partly inside the house and partly on the roof. Two men were involved, calling up to each other an eerie ‘ooh-whoo’.

  ‘Rags, bottles or bones! Any old rags?’ was another street cry that came wafting up to our windows. Why did he want to buy bones, I wondered, and still wonder. What bones, I thought. Whose bones? The rag-man had no horse. He pushed his cart by hand, and on it were piled old cartons, old pieces of furniture, kettles, tins.