Gift from the Gallowgate (34 page)

What did surprise me was their lack of interest in the Museum of Childhood. They raced through all three floors within ten minutes, while I was still on the first floor recognising toys
I’d had as a child but which had been thrown out years before. My nostalgia was brought to an end by the pounding of feet on the stairs and the cries of, ‘Can we go to the Pancake Shop
now?’

The Castle got a mixed reception, but the Zoo was more to their liking, and taken all in all, our visit to Edinburgh was quite worthwhile. As a last treat, we took them to St James’
shopping centre to buy something for their mums.

I had the same class in Primary Seven, and the trip was more adventurous – seven whole days in Belgium. This time, Mr Robertson came with us, taking a final
responsibility before retiring. Our hotel was a tramride out of Ostend, thoroughly equipped for parties of children. There were two buildings, one old and one new, round a covered quadrangle lined
with slot machines. This was ideal for wet spells, but we spent most evenings on the beach. We also had a two-hour bus run into Holland one day to a theme park, which was a great success –
before such pleasures were made more available by Disney. On the very last forenoon, we went shopping in Ostend, the headmaster gave both children and teachers free rein to go where they liked as
long as we all met up at a certain time.

There were fifteen boys and fourteen girls on that trip. Mr Robertson split them up thus: five boys each to the three men (himself and two fathers) and the fourteen girls to me. Most of the
party was in the new building, but I was in the old part with only two of the quiet girls next door, so my nights were undisturbed. The men, however, didn’t get off so easily. By this stage,
with most of the kids eleven or twelve years old, the boys (and some of the girls) were up to all kinds of tricks. As one of the fathers said to me one morning, ‘Some of the little blighters
are like dogs after bitches on heat. We hardly got a wink of sleep for making sure there were no shenanigans.’

Even with unbroken nights, it took me all my time to keep watch over the fourteen girls during the days. There was a small nucleus of them who flirted with every boy who passed, and the Belgian
youths would have been delighted to make merry with them . . . if I hadn’t intervened.

The next three years followed the same pattern – Stirling in Five, Edinburgh in Six and Belgium in Seven, and there were upsets of some kind during each trip. I’ve
heard people saying that teachers are lucky being paid for going abroad with pupils, but they have no idea of the stress involved. These trips are no picnic, and take that from one who knows. I
also heard, while standing in a queue at a baker’s van, two mothers talking to each other during the first week of summer holidays.

One said, ‘My two kids are driving me mad already.’

The other agreed. ‘My two are the same. I wish it was time for them to go back to school.’

If they found their own two children too much of a handful, how did they think teachers coped with well over twenty of other people’s?

In spite of all that I’ve said, I look back on my days in both Smithfield and Hazlehead Primaries very fondly. For every troublesome child, there were usually ten or more
who posed no behaviour problems. On the other hand, as far as learning was concerned, quite a few in every class had difficulties with one aspect or another, and it was a wonderful feeling when,
after struggling for weeks, even months, to get a child to understand something, he or she suddenly saw the light. That, I would say, is why teachers teach. That is their reward.

Because of the amount of preparation for lessons that needed to be done, I had given up all thought of writing, but promised myself that I’d give it another go once I
retired. My sixtieth birthday, 30 June 1982, meant I could stop working, but I spent the next twenty-one months helping my sister to care for Mum, who had suffered a stroke in 1981.

Sadly, she died in March of 1984, something I took many, many months to get over. I often thought back to the stroppy youngster I’d been, spoilt rotten until Bertha came on the scene and
put my nose out of joint. I had given my mother much stress in my time, though we became very close as she grew older. Bertha and I have also grown closer, time has narrowed the gap between us. A
woman of thirty-one had more in common with a woman of twenty-one than a woman of twenty-one had with a girl of eleven, for instance. At one time, I resented being saddled with a little sister when
I wanted to be speaking to boys, but, since our own children grew up, we’ve had many lovely weekends away together with our husbands, in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Coylumbridge and so on, staying in
hotels that would have seemed like palaces to me when I was younger and having to count every brass farthing. Some of them still did, even when we were seasoned travellers.

Even now, when Jimmy and I are not fit enough to be going far from home, we have many days out with Bertha and Bill, and also with Sheila and John, who moved from Surrey to Cruden Bay a few
years ago. Alan doesn’t like driving and has never bought a car, but he has been roped in over the past two or three years, to drive his dad around a bit if the weather is good. I am quite
content to enjoy the peace at home, to get on with some writing while I know Jimmy is being well looked after.

It was 1986 or into 1987 before I felt the urge to write again, but this time, my sights were set much higher than short stories.

I wanted to write a novel.

The interwoven initials on the pendulum of our grandfather clock had always fascinated me. JT and WD. The story goes that William Davidson, Jimmy’s
great-great-grandfather, had the magnificent Spanish mahogany clock made as a gift for his bride, Jean Tawse, on their wedding day. It has been passed to the eldest son down through the generations
and Jimmy, an only son, fell heir to it when his father died. The weights, unfortunately, had become entangled during the transportation from Laurencekirk to Aberdeen, and we thought it best to
have it thoroughly checked and overhauled. We chose Jamieson and Carry, one of the city’s finest jewellers, and it cost us £9 10 shillings (in 1957) to have the innards made like new
again – fully three weeks of the average weekly wage.

‘It’s over 150 years old,’ said the man who brought it back, ‘and the new plates we put in should keep it going for as long again.’

I have no hope of living long enough to learn the truth of that prediction, but it was made almost fifty years ago and our ‘old friend’ is still sending its comforting ‘tick
tock’ along the hallway. Sadly, we had to stop it marking the hours when we moved into the flat, because we didn’t want it to annoy the neighbours. Not that any of them had complained,
but it sits very close to the door to the landing, and its chime, despite being elegantly sweet, was also fairly loud.

Mind you, it used to sit in the living room at Mastrick, next to the fire, and I can remember times when I sat down of an afternoon for half an hour’s rest before getting ready to go to my
evening job, sure that I’d hear the clock striking four. My chair was practically rubbing against the long-case, so how could I fail to hear it? Believe me, I could and often did! You can get
used to anything . . . as the auld wife said when her bosom got caught in the mangle. Oops, sorry!

I regarded the pendulum’s duogram – if that’s the correct word for two sets of initials – as the absolute epitome of romance and often wished that I knew the whole story
of that long-ago love affair. With more time for thought after I retired, it eventually dawned on me that I could invent a story, and that is how I came to write
Time Shall Reap –
my
very first attempt.

In the late sixties, I had attended a Creative Writing class in the evenings; following this, I became a member of a Writers’ Circle. The highlight of each year for me was the
Writers’ Conference held in Pitlochry, which most of our group attended. There were competitions for short stories in the different genres: love, children’s, mysteries, etc., and
although there were almost 100 people from all over Scotland in the same hotel, we could talk comfortably with anyone we met in the corridors. They were all, like we were, aspiring to be
published
writers. There’s a great difference between saying, ‘I’m a writer’, and being able to say, ‘I’m a published writer.’

One of the carrots dangled in front of us was that whoever wrote the winning first chapter of a novel would have the finished book accepted by a well-known publishing house. At that time, of
course, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel and entered only the short story competitions . . . with no luck, let me add.

Over the course of perhaps four or five years, however, I did have a couple of short stories published – one in the
Sunday Mail
, one in
Women’s World.
The latter, a
weekly magazine, folded up shortly afterwards, but I don’t think that my story was the cause of its demise. I hope not!

I also had a couple of articles accepted: one by
Woman’s Own
about choosing the quickest-moving till queue in a supermarket, and the other by
Education in the North,
produced by Aberdeen City Education Authority. I had been asked to write about my experiences with John Wallace, concentrating on how hard he had worked. The final showdown hadn’t then
occurred, worse luck, for it would have made for much more interesting reading.

But this was a time when dozens of hopefuls were starting to write, anything from short shorts of 1,000 words, to 4,000 magazine length shorts, to novellas of around 50,000, to full-blown novels
of 120,000 and upwards, and I collected so many rejections that I wondered whether to paper the toilet with them or give up writing completely. I gave up . . . for many years.

I wrote
Time Shall Reap
in exercise books in pencil and revising in blue biro and then red biro. More or less satisfied with it, I typed it out on a portable Smith
Corona typewriter, giving each chapter to my friend Doreen Cruickshank on the floor above me for approval or otherwise. She was with me on this book from the very beginning and is still my No.1
fan. I selected some chapters of the completed manuscript to show how I dealt with love, tragedy, humour, jealousy (as we’d been advised in the Writers’ Circle) and sent them to one
publisher after another. They homed back faithfully after every outing.

Then I remembered something else that we had been taught in the Writers’ Circle – if a manuscript is sent to a publisher without being addressed to a specific person, it is liable to
be thrown on the ‘Slush Pile’ and returned unread. So I looked in the current version of the
Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book
for a name to put on the packet.

From the names under the heading ‘Collins (William) PLC, 1819’, I chose Kenneth Murdoch – he had a good Scottish name, I was a Scot and the story was set in the northeast of
Scotland. How could it fail?

By return of post, I received a letter informing me that Mr
Rupert
Murdoch was meantime in America, and, in any case, he took no part in the publishing side of the business. Would you
believe it? I’d bypassed all the Indians and gone straight to the chief. Redemption was at hand, though. The letter ended by saying that my manuscript had been passed to the proper
department. I was still in with a chance.

It turned out that the proper department wanted nothing to do with it, so, having had enough disappointments to last for a long time, I finally put the entire story into a box and laid it to
rest under the bed.

I started a whodunit next, as I’m quite partial to a good murder story myself – I’ve got all Agatha Christie’s. I decided to send the whole manuscript out this time, not
just a few sample chapters as I had done before, as I had been taught to do at the evening class and the writers’ circle. How could anybody judge a whole novel from only a few unrelated
chapters – especially a whodunit? I posted the compact parcel to Collins’ Crime Club but had it returned as too long – almost twice as long as was needed. Before I did anything to
cut it, I thought I’d better phone to ask if it was worth my while to spend time on such a task. I was told that it was, and so I went ahead, chopping out as much as I could, but the new
version was returned to me, too.

‘While we enjoyed your humour and thought that your detectives were well handled, the story lost its impact in the shortening.’

Jam and Jeopardy
, therefore, also disappeared under the bed.

I wrote a third book but considered it a bit too autobiographical and never sent it out at all. (I’ve reached an age now when I’m not nearly so easily embarrassed,
which is why I agreed to write a proper account of my life.) This third novel also languished under the bed for years. I’m not sure where the last two are now, kicking around somewhere no
doubt, because I never throw anything out. My family will vouch for that. I could start a secondhand goods stall anywhere at the drop of a hat – if I could bring myself to part with any of my
old rubbish . . . correction, any of my old treasures.

It was around this time that I came across a photograph of my father and his brother in front of their butcher’s shop at the top of the Gallowgate. This made me recall many happy hours
spent in the house above the shop, with aunties and uncles . . . and cousins galore. So this was where I set most of my next attempt. People have asked me if it’s a true story, and I have to
say no. The setting is as near as I could describe the actual house, but my grandfather would turn in his grave if he knew the kind of things I’ve made some of the characters do.

By an odd coincidence, I had just finished printing this out on the word processor I’d bought some time before when an editor from one of the large London publishers appeared on Grampian
television. My spirits rose when she announced that she was looking for Scottish family sagas written by Scotswomen. This was a really good omen; I had exactly what she wanted, hadn’t I?

I packed the whole 700-plus pages into a box and despatched it with high hopes, and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited! It was six months before she sent it back – with a short note.
‘While I enjoyed your book, it is not really the type of story we publish. Good luck.’