Of Different Times

By Agnes Kirkwood

When Nan accompanied her son taking her five-year-old grandchild to school one day, she was mesmerised by all the changes since she started school over seventy years ago, just after World War Two: the way people work and the opportunities then and now. Looking back at so many changes and progress inspired her to write a book about her memories of her younger and teenage years right up to getting married in the 60s. The progress, in education and the new technology, has created a different lifestyle as we know it today. Follow the memories of Nan through her childhood and relive the life of a young girl growing up in a Scottish pit village in the 40s with her family and experience the love, pain and laughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912850716

Agnes Kirkwood

Agnes Kirkwood looks back on her life in this memoir exploring family ties and social change.

Book preview

My Younger Years

On visiting my son, I walked with him as he took my granddaughter to school. Being her first year she was excited to show me her classroom. We hung her coat on the peg with her name, then proceeded to her classroom. As soon as we walked through the door, she ran to a seat at a row of small computers especially for children.

The cheery atmosphere showed all the infants were excited and glad to be there. As I looked around the classroom I understood why, and couldn’t help but compare it to the forties when I first attended school.

Gone were the desks and chairs in rows, replaced by a long table and chairs situated as if waiting to be set for a wedding. No rough floorboards full of splinters from constant shuffling of chairs in and out of desks, instead, a colourful carpet covered the floor making the room look homely. Inset lights shone from the white ceiling, where as in my classroom the ceiling was painted dark cream; probably six shades lighter at one time, and high enough to hold another storey above. The lights that dangled above us had thick twisted cable that looked like heavy rope, and probably needed an extension ladder to clean them.

A small wooden kitchen suitable for five-year-olds stood in the corner of the room, complete with pots, pans, fruit, vegetables and foods, all made from plastic. No sign of the old school blackboard which was a dominant item in every classroom for hundreds of years. It had been replaced with a shiny white plastic board which used felt tip pens instead of chalk. The classroom walls were a mass of colour from the children’s drawings and paintings. A list of every child’s name hung on the wall with stars in gold and silver stuck on various names. The sound of happy children brought music to my ears as they chatted whilst working in little groups doing different things. Some of the children played games on the computers, some were busy in the little kitchen cooking and cleaning. The rest were around the large table busy painting, drawing or building models from all sorts of packaging. The teacher moved among them keeping an eye on what they were doing. Every child looked happy and content, and glad to be there.

Unlike the kids in my class. We were frightened to even whisper. The whole class sat at our desks in complete silence whilst the teacher was talking. This in my opinion led to boredom and daydreams, which caused some of us to nod off. Consequently when the teacher noticed, she’d carry on talking as she crept up to the sleeping pupil with the eyes of the whole class following her, then, bang, as the ruler came crashing down on the culprits knuckles. Very painful, I know because it happened to me many times.

I remember taking my children to school on their first day, and although their classrooms were very different from my grandchildren’s, they were nothing like the classrooms in the forties.

Let’s face it, the way we live now is completely different as to what it was then.

This was the modern way of teaching infants. As I looked around the classroom, it dawned on me that play proved to be the most natural way of teaching children. It’s amazing what over seventy years can achieve. Even the way we live has improved enormously. Yes, things are certainly changing for the better. What I saw that day, inspired me to write this book.

It was just after the war and the whole of Britain was still suffering from shortages of food, clothes, housing, etc. To make matters worse, lots of our tradesmen were sent to war and never returned. I lived in a pit village that nearly every man and boy over fifteen was a miner. The whole country depended on coal then, for industry, haulage, ships, furnaces, I could go on and on, but it would probably take a full page to mention everything coal was used for. It certainly wasn’t just to keep the home fires burning, not in our pit houses anyway. We depended on our coal fire, even in the hottest of summers the fire had to be lit for cooking. Also, there was only one tap in the house and that only supplied cold water, so we depended on the fire for heating water for all the families needs.

Although miners were exempt from being called up to go to war, statistics show that more miners joined up than any other man to fight for their country. Of course that meant a shortage of coal workers, so, to compensate for the loss of the fit and able miners who went to war, the women, old miners and young boys worked alongside each other.

I will never forget the first seven years of my life living in that pit house. It was a very small community which consisted of a few long terraced blocks of pit houses along the main road two miles outside Stirling. Each Block had twelve houses on the bottom floor with concrete stairs to the twelve houses above on the top floor. Each house consisted of a main living room with a large bed reset with curtains that concealed it during the day. In this room we ate, slept, washed and lived. It had one small bedroom at the back that faced the main road. A bare electric lightbulb hung from a twisted cable in the middle of the ceiling was the only electricity in the house. It was run off the pit’s generator; so the busier the pit the less the light. All our meals, mum cooked on a huge cast iron black leaded fire range in the living room (which needed polishing with black lead polish otherwise it would go rusty). It had a hob at each side of the fire with ovens underneath them, one for baking one for keeping things hot. A white porcelain sink sat under the only window in the room, with a brass tap fixed on the wall which ran cold water only. The only door in or out of the house took you onto a concrete landing shared by another household complete with an outside toilet in the middle also shared. Iron railings went all the way around the landing and down to the bottom of the concrete stairs. The houses underneath were a replica of the ones above. The yard that ran from one end of the blocks to the other consisted of muck and pit dust hardened to a consistency of black concrete which when rained on turned into a stodgy black slime. The washhouses, little square buildings, in the yard had four washrooms in each; two at the front and another two back to back. Every wash room had a sink, mangle and a large cast iron boiler heated from below with a coal fire. Each washroom was shared by two at a time and all the housewives had their own day to use them. When it rained it caused many an argument over swapping and changing. The drying greens were grassy areas where the women hung out their washing to dry, Beyond the greens in all its intensity stood the pit, its huge wheels silhouetted in black against the sky. The huge coal Bing slag heap looked like a black version of an Egyptian pyramid which dominated the sky.

Of all the places I have ever lived, the Blocks will always be in my memory. Not because of the houses with all their rodents and the insect infestations, but for the close community atmosphere they created. Everybody knew one another, and although there were the occasional falling out, they were there to help one other in their times of need. Nobody locked their doors, maybe that’s because no one had anything worth stealing. My mum always left the door unlocked, even at night when dad was on nights. I hadn’t heard of any burglaries all the time I lived in the Blocks.

When women had their babies delivered at home it was usually by one of the community women who people relied on to be there at the birth. The only time the doctor got involved was when any complications set in, of course he’d want paying and people were hard up as it was. That was about to change because in July 1948 the Labour Party brought in the NHS, and things were about to improve for the working class.

When we ran out of milk, which was nearly every night, I had to walk with the milk can to the farm, which was only about two hundred yards from the Blocks down a country road. The farmer’s wife used to take me into the cowshed and scoop out a measured amount of milk into my can with a long ladle. It was still warm as if it had come straight from the cow. I never failed to drink some, because it was so lovely and creamy; I can still remember that taste. When mum looked in the can she said the farmer was giving her less and less every visit, but I think she knew it was me who was drinking it. I could always tell what mood mum was in, if I got a clout around the head she was in a bad mood, otherwise she’d smile and say she needed a cow to keep me going in milk. To this day I still go through a lot of milk.

The area around the Blocks was like an adventurist playground for us kids. It was every child’s paradise; especially around the pit area, which will always stay in my memory as being the best days of my life. It certainly didn’t include my early schooldays.

People say the best days of your life are your schooldays, but I beg to differ. When you think about it, we only had ten years maximum at school then. From five years old, until fifteen, that was the age for leaving school then, unless you were extremely clever and your parents had money to let you go to college, which I’m afraid I never had any of the two.

My first two or three years at school were the most hateful of my life. I remember them well, especially the first year; with the coloured plasticine that ended up a yucky khaki colour, the little blackboard with the square duster made of wood with a felt top, and every time you used it, you were covered in white chalk dust.

I remember sitting crossed legged on the wooden parquet floor in the school hall, where everyone automatically developed a cough. Many a splinter I received there on my backside as I shuffled about trying to get comfortable as we sang hymns and listened to lectures on the Bible from the minister, whose church and house stood straight across the road from our school. When he finished, the headmaster would shout out the names of all the pupils reported for misbehaving after school hours, and sent them to wait in the corridor outside his room until he returned. I’ve been there a few times and believe me it was nerve-racking, waiting to see what you had done and wondering who reported you.

Every year my class would move up one, and we’d have a different teacher who taught us all the subjects, maths, reading, spelling, history, geography. The only time we had a different teacher was for singing, even then we never left the classroom. I loved singing lessons, at least we got away from lessons for a whole hour. The songs we sung were probably over a hundred years old and of no significance to us, but when the teacher got on the old battered piano in the corner of the room it was better than sums any-day. The songs like ‘Bobby Shafto Went to Sea’, ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’, ‘Dae Ye Ken John Peel?’, and many more. Not exactly Top of the Pops but I still remember them to this day.

I couldn’t tell the time in my first year at school, but where I sat at my desk I could see the large gym-hall clock through the window and got used to where the hands were at home time. As the large hand crept up to the twelve I excitedly spent the last few minutes waiting for the bell to ring. That sound brought music to my ears.

Our school stood at the end of the four Blocks of pit houses on the main road. A bricked building with huge windows and a dark slated roof as deep as the one storey building itself. The hard grey playground ran all around the school building encased in a stone wall. The top of the wall showed the stumps of iron railings which had been cut off a few years previously for military purpose during the war. Two large coal sheds sat at opposite corners, one always had coke for the boilers in it and the other always empty, where we sometimes played if it rained.

I remember my first day at school. It was just after the Christmas school holidays. I never slept a wink the night before. There I was, standing in front of my mum with my so-called new clothes on in complete agony having a ribbon put in my hair that looked like a giant butterfly. Mum warned me to get changed as soon as I got home from school, because my clothes had to do me all week. It wasn’t till I went to visit Gran with my new clothes on and my cousin told me I had her skirt on. I called her a liar and we ended up fighting. I hated that skirt after that, but I was made to wear it.

Food, sweets and clothes, were still on rations then as it was soon after the war. Every family was in the same situation, I suppose I was lucky having a few cousins, which came in handy for my mum and my aunties. Usually jumpers ended up with woollen-darned patches on the elbows, and always felt thicker than the rest of the garment. I suppose it came in handy when leaning on the desk as it prevented sore elbows. There was no such thing as nylon socks in the forties, they were all wool and the heels and toes were always the first to wear out, I hated when my socks were darned, especially the heels which they often were. It made them too thick for my heel to fit in the back of the shoe, so it was like walking in stiletto heels. My cardigans usually had all different coloured buttons sewn on. I was always losing buttons so mum would sew the nearest colour she could find from the button jar. The jar was full of all different coloured buttons that she’d cut off old garments that were of no use to hand down and were either ripped down to reuse the wool or cut up for different things like mittens, pixie hats, under jumpers which acted as a liberty bodice to keep you warm in winter. The remainder was cut up and used to make rag rugs. There wasn’t as much waste then as there is now, I suppose our elders could teach us the meaning of the word recycling.

The wind was blowing a gale that first morning as mum and I set off to school for the first time. It seemed as if we had walked for miles instead of a few hundred yards to the end of the Blocks. By the time we got there my hair, that took an agonising half an hour combing out tugs, blew all over the place, I cursed inwardly when mum said,

‘It’s a good job I brought the hairbrush with me.’ Ouch!

When we finally reached the classroom, there was about forty of us kids all dressed in our Sunday best struggling to look inside the door of the classroom. All the women were chatting and smiling. I suppose they were telling each other they were glad to see the back of us. As I looked through the door my stomach fluttered with excitement when I saw the little desks and chairs. Never before had I seen chairs I could just sit straight down on without having to climb onto. The teacher put us in single file and guided us to our desks that was on five levels with eight desks along each row.

‘Whenever you enter this classroom you will quietly go straight to the seat you are now sitting in. This will be your desk and chair as long as you are in this class, so look at the person next to you and remember where it is. Does everyone understand?’

We all nodded our head and replied ‘Aye,’ in a broad Scottish accent. She turned and looked at all the mums standing around the doorway giving them a false smile.

‘Now children, my name is Miss Watson, and when you address me it will be Yes, Miss Watson or No, Miss Watson, understood?’ We all looked around at each other again and smiled then in a slow broken shyness answered, ‘Yes-Miss-Wat-son, followed by a giggle that seemed to amuse all our mums. I thought she was lovely, I even remembered thinking Wow this is my teacher, am I really at school at last?

‘Now children, if you lift the lid off your desk you will find a plasticine board and some coloured plasticine. What I want you to do is, make a model of anything you like, and the one that does the best will get a bar of chocolate. So eyes down and away you go.’ She then walked over to the mothers peeping in from the doorway with smiles on their faces. I grinned at mum then got stuck into my masterpiece thinking that bar of chocolate was as good as mine.

Although the war had ended, sweets were still on ration stamps then, so to win that bar of chocolate would’ve been a real treat. I remember thinking school wasn’t as bad as my big brother William made it out to be. How wrong I was. I soon changed my mind in the next few minutes when I looked up and saw that all the mums had gone. I panicked and hurriedly picked up the plasticine and rushed to the teachers desk. I placed the plasticine on the desk in front of her, and with a quiver in my voice told her I wanted to go home now.

Teacher just stared at me with a face like thunder. Gone was the kind expression on her face, exchanged with an angry frown, she pushed the chair behind her with the back of her legs creating a sound like rumbling thunder and stood up.

‘Get back to your seat at once.’ she shouted pointing to my desk and banging on the huge table with her hand. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let me go; I ran back to my desk in shock and started to cry. All the other kids joined in, before long the class was in an uproar.

The gently spoken teacher was gone, replaced with an angry dictator standing behind her long desk, banging on it with a ruler as if she was hammering a six inch nail into a plank of wood. That ruler was about to be our worst fear as the year went on.

‘You are all at school now, so you’d better get used to it,’ she shouted, leaving her desk and marching up and down the rows, as we kids cringed in fear with every step she took.

‘One thing I won’t tolerate in my classroom is spoiled brats. You are here to learn, and learn you will, do you all understand?’ We didn’t dare look at one another, but shouted with fear. Yes-Miss-Wat-son.’

‘Good, now it’s up to you whether you love it or hate it, but one thing is definite you are here to stay.’ We all sat like petrified statues until playtime when the teacher marched us outside to the toilets to show us where to go and said we must go during playtime because we could not go through lesson time. The toilets were the smallest I had ever seen, no more had I to climb up to sit on the toilet for a pee, and a real toilet roll that looked like tracing paper hung on a holder fixed to the wall. Now that really was luxury, because in our toilet we shared with the next door neighbour, we had a hook on the back of the door with cut up pieces of newspaper stuck through the point. Along the wall there was a row of little hand basins with a slice of soap cut from a large bar. The basins were just my level for washing my hands. I was intrigued with them because at home we didn’t have wash basins in our outside toilet, we had to go indoors and wash our hands there; which for me meant dragging a chair over to be able to reach the sink. During playtime the janitor brought in crates of milk to the classroom and laid them in front of the teacher’s desk, we were told to take a bottle and a straw then walk quietly back to our desks to drink it. The little glass bottles held quarter of a pint and had a cardboard top with a hole that you pushed through to fit your straw in to drink. Because I love milk, that to me was the only highlight of my first day at school, which is unforgettable one way or another. I seemed to have spent my first day looking around the place in complete shock. The classroom was like sitting in a huge disciplinary military school, with its huge windows facing the playground, which reached from the ceiling to the top of three large radiators along the wall. A large rotating blackboard hung on the front of the wall behind the teacher’s long table that was her desk. In the corner of the room sat a tattered old piano that was full of scratches and looked as if it had seen better days. Yes I remember every square inch of that classroom

As I sat at my desk full of self-pity, willing finishing time so I could go home, thinking I’d tell my mammy and daddy about her, and they’d be down at this school giving her a good telling off, Ha, wishful thinking; what a laugh. No doubt about it the teacher was like a church clock with a different face for each direction, not only two faced, but a split personality like Jekyll and Hyde, nice around our mums, then turning into an old battle-axe as soon as they’d gone. My brother was right after all, school was like hell; with our teacher being the devil.

When the bell rang I was so relieved I ran home all the way without a stop. Mum asked me how I got on. ‘I’m not going back there, that teacher’s worse than Mrs Kelly.’ (The old lady who lived next door, who was always telling us off for making a noise on the landing.) ‘She tells us off for nothing, and makes us sit there on them stupid wee chairs listening to her yapping a load of rubbish.’ Mum just grinned and told me to eat my sandwich. When I’d finished I remembered what mum said, so I ran into the bedroom and took off my school clothes and folded them for the next day. I was ready to run out the door and play when mum grabbed me by the neck of my jumper and frighten the life out of me, ‘Where do you think you’re going, and where’s your school clothes?’ I looked at my brother whom by that time was sitting sniggering at the table with a look on his face that told me I had done something wrong.

‘You told me I had to change my clothes when I got home from school, well I have and I’ve folded them as well, honest.’ I answered with ignorance.

‘Well, you can just unfold them and put them back on again because it’s only dinner time,’ she shouted. Needless to say I was forced back to school that afternoon in tears.

I couldn’t wait for Friday to come, that first week was the longest week of my life, I relished in self-pity, and to make matters worse my brother kept reminding me I had ten years of this hell to face. ‘Why can’t my life stay the way it used to be before all this grief?’ I thought, and I didn’t want to be able to write my name, or to read a newspaper like my dad, or add up my money like my mum, I could quite easy recognise how much I had by the look of the coin, not that I ever got any. It wasn’t fair I thought.

At the weekend mum took me to visit my granny who lived about five miles away in a little village called Airth; situated across the River Forth from Kincardine. My Uncle Jimsie (my mum’s brother) lived across the road from granny, and when we arrived he was in his garden sitting on his garden bench with Auntie Annie waiting for his pigeons returning from a race and was due back soon. It was his hobby and he lived for them birds. My mum stopped to have a chat so I asked if I could wait with them as I didn’t like sitting in the house listening to my mum and Auntie Barbara who lived with Gran; because her husband got killed in the war so she moved back home with Gran and Granddad, and when they got together they’d yap on with poor old Gran sitting in the chair not being able to get a word in edgeways.

‘Your Uncle Jimsie doesn’t want to be bothered with you.’ Mum said, but to my relief Auntie Anne added

‘No leave her here Minnie; she’ll be fine, if there’s anything Jimsie loves is yapping about them birds, she’ll come to no harm here.’ I sighed with relief and sat in the garden with him for ages.

Auntie Annie gave me a glass of milk and a biscuit. Uncle Jimsie showed me all the different types of birds he bred. He had was a massive wire netted aviary with trees inside as well as large sheds with about four windows each with a landing loft. There were bright yellow canaries, all different colours of budgies, and all different colours of beautiful little birds, and he knew the name of every one. When the pigeons were in sight I had to go in the house beside my Auntie Annie and watch from the window because they might be afraid to land if someone strange was there. He had a handful of pigeon peas and was calling ‘peas, peas’ for them to fly into the loft. As soon as they did he got the pigeon’s ringed leg and clocked it in a sort of clocking-in box, to time what time the pigeons got back. The one with the earliest time won. He showed me all his cups and certificates and I could tell he was very proud of them. It was a very interesting afternoon, and I often went over to see them when visiting Gran. Uncle Jimsie was a very clever man; he could recite every one of Robert Burns’ poems, and was booked every Burns Night at different venues to read out Burns’ poems as they carried in the haggis. Auntie Annie asked me if I liked school. I told her I hated it, because the teacher was horrible. She told me not to worry, things would get better once she drummed discipline into us; Auntie Annie was wrong, things never quietened down, and the teacher got worse as the year went on. I hated my first year at school.

When it rained, the ground outside was turned into a slurry mess of coal dust and muck. I’d amuse myself indoors then by making woollen bobbles out of mum’s left over wool by wrapping it around the cardboard milk tops I saved from my school milk. Mum did a lot of knitting then and I used to help her wind the wool into balls as she ripped it from another garment. In the forties wool was sold in hanks, so when mum bought new wool I’d loop the hank in two hands whilst mum wound it into balls. Any spare left over wool she’d give to me to either learn how to knit or thread and wind through the milk tops to make woollen bobbles. Of course my brother William had to join in and make them too, so that caused arguments over who got what colour. I think it was because he was only two years older than me that we argued a lot. Although we had a sister Wilma who was five and a half years older than me, we never played with her, being the eldest she thought she had the right to domineer us, so I was always closest to William. There was no such thing as privacy or secrecy in that pit house, but what else could anyone expect, there was five of us living in one room where you cooked, ate, washed and slept, which caused us to live on top of each other.

At the end of the Blocks every year came a huge travelling marquee tent where they held a gospel. All the kids in the Blocks used to go there and sing; I suppose it was a novelty then as nothing exciting ever happened in the Blocks. I can remember it clearly, the songs were not our usual church hymns it was a lot more fun than the ones we got in Sunday School. In fact I don’t think us children related it to religion it was like a concert to us as we would mime with our hands as we sung. One I still remember to this day, and used to do the actions running one arm over the other repeatedly, was;

Running over, Running over, my cups full of Running over,

Since the Lord saved me, I’m as happy as can be, my cups full of Running over.

I remember one particular gospel visit when the man who was in charge claimed he could cure people. The only people who stood up for the gospel speaker to cure were complete strangers to the village. Nobody in the Blocks volunteered, and I wondered why; because there were a lot of men who had injuries from the pit or had really bad coughs. It was only when I grew older I realised the people who did volunteer travelled around with the Gospel at the time. Like the man who had a crutch and was unable to walk, then after the speaker put his hand on his head and prayed to God to heal him he all of a sudden threw his crutch down and walked shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ I suppose there are still a lot of groups like that today going around preaching the gospel.

I soon realised that being at school and being at home, was a different kettle of fish. As the year went on, the discipline got stronger and stronger. It never took much to rattle that teachers cage. A little giggle, or look at the person behind, made her bang on the desk with the dreaded ruler making all us kids nearly jump out of our skin.

The equipment was very basic in our school, and left a lot to be desired. There were no computers or calculators; not even as much as an abacus. Our calculator was a tin of coloured counters, and the way they worked was simple. The teacher would stand in the front of the class and ask questions like,

‘If I had three blue and six red counters how many would I have altogether?’

The only sound then was the rattling of the counters as we laid them all in a row and try to be the first to put our hands up with the answer. To me it was a game of tiddlywinks trying to pluck them into the tin in boredom.

I laugh to myself when I think of the first time we ever got gym. None of us were prepared. We were taken into the hall and told to take our shoes and socks off, then because we had no shorts we were asked to take our clothes off down to our underclothes, boys to underpants, girls to knickers. We all looked at each other in disbelief, but the look on her face convinced us she was serious. Not to forget it was soon after the war and clothes were sparser then than what they are now, but we were all in the same boat. Our parents did the best they could as far as clothes were concerned. Boy’s underpants in them days were made of white cotton, and when worn came just above the knees. But, the underpants worn in our class that day had a style of their own. They were long and baggy with little skinny legs sticking out of the bottom. One boy stood crying because he didn’t want to take