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The Scottish Childhood of an English boy.

'Are ye wantin' a jeely piece, Eric?' asked Mrs. MacInnes. Mrs. MacInnes was lovely. She lived downstairs in the close, right underneath our flat. We lived at 'one up' in a tenement block. In Glasgow, tenement blocks seemed to be everywhere. The time was just after World War 1, in the early 1920's.

In fact, so far as I knew, there were no such things as bungalows, semi-detached houses, or cottages. My whole world was bounded by the place where we lived. And it was populated by cheery, friendly Scots people like Mrs. MacInnes.

Aberfeldy Street is just south of Alexandra Park. At the bottom of the street, I remember seeing the beautifully coloured tramcars trundling by, one every minute or two. Alexandra Park was on the far side of the tram tracks. Huge iron railings separated its football pitches from the footpath of Cumbernauld Road. In between the tram-lines were the granite, stone setts; cubed lumps of stone. They didn't seem to have any top dressing. The setts, however, were very slippery especially when it rained.

Many a time the big hooves of the Shire horses would sluther on them as the friendly animals tried to pull their heavy lorries round the corner from the main road at the bottom, and up into our street.

We lived at number fortyseven.

'Don't forget,' my mother would tell me. 'If ever you get lost... you go straight to the nearest policeman, and say to him...'Please mister policeman, I'm Eric Green. I live at 47 Aberfeldy Street, Dennistoun Glasgow...and I've lost my Mummy'. And the policeman will find your Mummy for you, or will see you safely home.'

The big tenement blocks where we lived... in fact, where everybody lived, were made of blocks of warm reddish sandstone. Four storeys high, there were two flats on the ground floor, one each side of our 'close'. The close was beautifully tiled with a wiggly sort of pattern or design, in green and brown.

Mrs. MacInnes lived in the flat on the left.

My mother had only gone down to the factor's, at the bottom of the street. I always used to wonder what our factor was like. I pictured a hard-faced man with a dirty bowler hat and a demanding, menacing ring to his voice.

He was the man to whom everybody had to pay their rent. Nobody owned their own house or flat.

Some other people's factors used to tramp the streets every week. Up Aberfeldy, along Walter Street, then down Aberdour. Along Cumbernauld Road, and up Aberfoyle. Where they went after that, I never found out. They would be carrying a leather bag with jingling pennies in it. When the factor came, every wife had to answer the door...and pay the rent!

But our factor was different. He had an office, at the bottom of the street. His huge office window was painted with a depressing and sinister dark brown paint. Nobody could see into it. It was like a secret, evil cavern.

That was why I, a youngster, was sitting in the high chair in Mrs. MacInnes' flat, down in the close. Temptingly, the lady was holding out to me a thick slice of bread, covered, almost smothered,...in marmalade.

'Ma mither says I'm no tae eat. She aye says it'll put me off ma tea! Maybe she'll skelp me if I take yon piece?' I ventured hopefully.

With such a marvellous neighbour could anything so serious as a smacked bottom ever blight my childhood? I didn't think so.

But then, it was a matter of knowing my mother!

She was really stern!

'Och away.' The old lady smiled at me,... 'Ah'll tell her that I jist wanted ye to take a wee bite o' somethin' tae eat. Aifter all, are ye no a guest in ma ain hoose?'

I think that Mistress MacInnes must have had some sort of disability. She seemed to be alone, and always sitting in her big basket chair. There didn't seem to be any Mister MacInnes.

'Wull ye get me the loaf outa yon press?' she had asked me earlier. Delighted, I could just about reach into her 'press', a big, high wall cupboard. I extracted the loaf from a Crawford's biscuit tin for her. The bread-board and the knife lay on the table before her. Stainless knives hadn't been invented. So out came her 'steel', and there followed the familiar skish-skash as she used it to put an even finer edge on the already razor sharp bread-knife.

'Keep yersel' away, ma wee man,' Mrs. MacInnes said, as I watched the slice of bread, warm and luscious, detach itself from the rest of the loaf. '...or it'll mebbe chop yer fingers off.'

Why didn't sharp knives cut grown-ups fingers off? At what age would a wee boy like me entitled to cut a slice of bread for himself?

A few moments later I was happily munching away on the glistening marmalade 'piece'.

Mrs. MacInnes' downstairs flat looked out over the back green. Aberfeldy and its adjacent three streets made a sort of enclosed square of those four-storey flats. Enclosed within the square were many of these back greens; patches of green grass, surrounded by spiked iron railings. One back green to every 'close'.

Down at the far end, beyond the clothes posts, was a set of three big square dustbins, 'middens' we called them. They with all their flies and stray cats buzzing and scraping around in them, were hidden under the overhanging concrete roof of the wash-house. The wash-house itself held a clothes boiler, plus a dolly-peg for pounding the muck out of the clothes. My mother, being English, considered herself to be in a class above. She had a 'posser', a copper vacuum device on the end of a long handle. Every Tuesday she was allowed the wash-house key.

I loved the familiar sucking noise of the posser as she pounded it into Dad's shirts and the household sheets.


A heavy knock pounded on the door. 'Pom-tiddley-om-pom...pom-pom.'

The unmistakable code that mother always used.

She poked her head inside the door.

'Has our Eric bin a good lad?'

The outer door of Mrs. MacInnes' flat was usually on the latch. The old lady couldn't get to it without her crutches. And there weren't any intruders in those days. Most neighbours kept popping in to see if she was all right.

'Are ye needin' onything the day, Mistress MacInnes?' was the sort of neighbourly kindness, Ah'm away tae the dairy and the bootcher's. Wull ah bring ye a wee bit mince?'


Mrs. MacInnes turned round in her seat; faced my mother.

'Ah couldnae hae wished for a better wee boy fer maself.'

Her lovely Glaswegian tongue wrapped itself charmingly around the words, contrasting strongly with my mother's Derbyshire English.

Mother wagged an accusing finger at me.

'I told you to say 'No Thankyou' if you were offered anything to eat,' she chastised. 'I'll bet it'll put you off your tea.'

The old Scotswoman defended me with one of her gorgeous smiles.

'Och away, Mistress Green. In fact, he did say 'no thankyou', but mebbe ah did a wee bit o' persuading. Ye'll need tae blame me. He's been awful good.'

With luscious marmalade all over my mouth, my mother, 'tut-tutting' mildly, took my hand and led me back upstairs to our house.


'Right, young man,' she took off my jersey, and shoved my hands into a new jacket she had bought.

'Get hold of your sleeves...and don't let go of 'em,' she warned. 'Let me have a look at you. Aye,' she said, '...I suppose that'll do.'

She twisted me round; looked at the back and front, and nodded, satisfied with what she saw.

Then, onto my head she stuck a tiny peaked cap with a badge on the front. Quite a nice badge, but being only five years old, I wasn't yet able to understand what all the fuss was about.

There was the sound of a key fitting into the door-lock from outside on the stairway. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed five. I left mother's clutches and ran towards the hallway.

'It's my Daddy,' I cried. 'It's five o'clock!'


'By gum,' said Daddy. 'You look proper posh. D'you know what it's for?'

He gave mother a kiss, then knelt down before me.

'Your mother's going to take you to school tomorrow. You're to join the babies class at Haghill School.'

'The babies class? But I'm a big boy,' I told him. 'I'm five!'

Mother pulled me onto her knee.

'Aye. But they just call it the babies class. Because the other children will be like yourself. They'll all be five years old. So you've all got to start learning just like we teach babies - right from the beginning.

By half past five, it was tea-time. A boiled egg, a slice of bread and jam, and for tonight, in some sort of celebration, an Empire biscuit. A big, crumbly disk, covered with icing and a cherry, right in the middle on top.

Babyhood was at last to be left behind. Tomorrow, that exciting time that I had heard about from other children round about, was to begin.

But although I didn't yet know it, in tomorrow's first day at school, my parents had something decided for me.

Something that was to change my life, although it had hardly begun.

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