Free Gift from the Gallowgate by Doris; Davidson Page B

minutes, then put it in
a pail to be emptied into the deepest sink. The old tenements only had one sink because the washings were done in an outside washhouse, but houses built in the thirties, forties and fifties usually
had two, one much deeper than the other. This one was used for the first rinsing in cold water and left until the second load went into the machine. I won’t go into every little detail,
you’ll surely have got the idea by now. After each load was taken out, some more water was added to the receptacle until the final load must have been put into almost lukewarm water. The
originally boiling water was too precious to empty out and gas was too expensive to light the ring again. The miracle was that, even using the same water over and over, which must have resulted in
it being decidedly murky, all the clothes came out spotless.
    I can laugh about it all now, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t carry out this operation very often. I was never a great lover of housework of any kind.
    I left Rosemount School (with a Dux medal) on my fifteenth birthday, but I didn’t go on to the Central where my Dad had wanted me to go and where Dr Cormack, the
headmaster, advised my mother to send me. I had to start work in order to bring as much as I could into the household coffers.

LEISURE TIME

6
    In writing about my schooldays, I completely forgot about what I did when I wasn’t at school. Until we moved to Hilton Drive when I was seven, it was a case of reading
Fairyland Tales
, an upmarket booklet for teenies, then progressing to
Rainbow.
At Hilton, with other children as companions, I didn’t read so much, though being that bit
older, I did read the
Children’s Newspaper
when Dad started buying it for me.
    The Hilton houses, newly built when we moved there, had a patch of grass at the back (a drying green shared by the four tenants) and a small garden each to grow vegetables. In our block there
was usually at least one girl of my own age, probably more, and two or three boys, so the drying green was too small for playing boisterous games. Hilton Drive, however, although a busy
thoroughfare now, was relatively traffic free then; only the odd cart or car could be seen and my father’s motorbike, which he kept in the cellar when he wasn’t using it.
    I can’t say where the coal was kept (I wish I had written this before my memory grew so temperamental); in a separate bunker, I would think. At any rate, there was masses of room in the
cellar for a whole gang of us kids to play there if it was wet. The bigger boys spun ghost stories that scared the life out of the smaller ones and gave me nightmares, or we played card games (no
gambling), or cowboys and Indians – where the Indian braves took great pleasure in tying up the palefaces. There were one or two naughty boys who revelled in leaving us lying on the filthy
ground with our hands and feet tied up, but I think somebody’s mother gave them a good ‘talking to’ – probably threatening to get the bobbies to them if they did it again
– which stopped this practice for a while at least. I must point out here that there was never any real maliciousness in these ‘hooligans’, some of them thirteen or fourteen, and
nothing even bordering on the indecent was ever attempted.
    If it wasn’t raining, we played in the street – games I think I’ve mentioned earlier, and Dad sometimes took his motorbike to bits to clean it. This, as it turned out, was not
only a stupid thing to do, but also very dangerous. Even with the door propped open, it was quite dark down there, but he was never stuck for ideas. He had taken a candle and a saucer down with him
and set them on an old cardboard box. The flickering light couldn’t have been very much help to him, but he was apparently managing fairly well until a gust of wind from outside blew the
candle over. You are probably ahead of me. The fumes of the petrol ignited, setting fire to the old cardboard