Memories of My Youth

By Jean Black

Read about Jean Black's life as a country girl growing up in rural Scotland, taken from her diary which she wrote in her retirement years in London, Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447604853

Book preview

Memories of my Youth

Part One

My earliest recollection is of the house where we lived in Chester, England. My parents, my elder and younger sister and myself moved from Glasgow, Scotland to Port Sunlight, Birkenhead, North England, where my sister Nora was born and thence to Chester. This city is partly walled, similar to Quebec City in Canada. It had cobbled streets as I recall but everything, I suppose, will be different now. Our house was set in a small mews with a lane leading up to it from the main street. The houses were set all round the square and there was only one toilet outside which all the tenants had to share.

There were two bedrooms and a boxroom upstairs; the lower part of the house seemed to me just one large room that served as dining-living cum kitchen with an open-coal fire where all the cooking was done. We only had the mews for our play area as we were not allowed out on the street except to go to school or the park.

I started St John’s School shortly after my fourth birthday. I remember our sisters and I had quite a bit to walk to school. We had to cross a main street then up some stairs and through a mall-like place with shops on either side then down the stairs on the other side (This, I recall, was called the Rows) then across a park to school. School, to me, was good. There was so much to do and learn. We had trays filled with sand and there I learned my first letters. We drew them in the sand and then, when our teacher examined our work, we just shook the sand evenly over the tray, ready for the next lesson.

(Incidentally, I never saw these trays again until I came to Canada. I saw them in 1971 in the Montessori school when my grandson, Graeme, was there.)

My first reader was a soft-covered book I really prized. There were so many nice pictures and words to learn and spell. School was good. Cards were given to us with holes punched in them and, using a needle and fine yarn, we wove in and out the holes to make a design. My favourite was the card with the dog but we also learned of other animals and plants.

Here I must comment on an incident that comes clearly to my mind. On our way to and from school we had to pass what I am assuming was a toy shop and in the window was a beautiful teddy bear that I so admired. I could never pass that shop without gazing at that teddy. Then one day coming home from school, I stopped as usual. The teddy was gone. I remember just standing looking in at the window. Maybe I cried. Just as I was about to move away, the shopkeeper came out and said to me, Would you like that teddy? and handed it to me. Oh the wings that must have been on my feet getting home to tell my mammy and sisters the teddy was mine. I never knew until years after that as it had been my birthday—fifth or sixth, I can’t recall—my Dad had bought the teddy for me and asked the shopkeeper to give it to me on my way home from school that day. I loved that teddy and years later when it was lost to me, I began to realise this was just one of life’s heartbreaks.

On Sunday afternoons, my mother and Dad would take us to the park and there we would walk along by the River Dee. When I walk by the Thames River here in London, Canada, it reminds me of those days so long ago. On the days we were allowed to go to the park on our own, we were warned never to go near the river and we spent some lovely times there, my sisters, Mary and Lillian, and I. There, an elderly gentleman used to get us to pull tall grasses for him and he wove such nice, little baskets for us.

One day while at the park, we decided to go down nearer the river. Well, I do not remember clearly what happened but my sister Lillian fell in and it was only due to the prompt action of a lady sitting on one of the seats near where we were that my sister was saved. Well, we had to walk all the way home, the water just running out of her clothes. She was put in a warm tub of water and into bed.

Mary and I were beaten severely and ordered to bed for our disobedience. Years later my sister contracted rheumatic fever which resulted in her heart being damaged and I still wonder to this day if it could have been the result of the chill she got that day. She died at the age of 33. That was a tragic time as by this time she was married and had a lovely girl and two boys, the younger one too young to remember his mother. I loved my sister dearly. There was only one year between us and we had so many