School dinners

I asked granda how they managed in a room and kitchen.

‘There was mum and dad eight children. I’m including myself. Although, I know it’s hard for you to believe I was once a child too. I’m also counting my dad, but he wasn’t there much. He was usually at work, or the pub, but he did come home to eat a meal and sleep. Dad only had one piece of advice for us. But I forget what it was.

I know you think we slept like bats, but like everybody else, we slept in beds. When you close your eyes it doesn’t really matter what kind of bed it was. We learned early, without looking. So if you grabbed a hold of a corner of a blanket, you learned how to protect it with parries and thrusts and slaps, if need be and in that way you protected sleep. You learn how to distinguish between the roar of rumbling engine slurping and shushing in your ear and the hush of a caterpillar slowly moving towards its blanket prey. You learn about contagion not from medical books, but from the raised welts of scratching and not being allowed to scratch. There were some attacks we had to sleep through: sneak attacks, squeezed out small farts, or full frontal, raspers, like beach balls, hitting you square on the noses. Worse than that was my dainty little sister Anne’s jobby breath and my brother Paul’s size 9 feet that should have been encased in lead boots and not bed socks. But above all there was laughter. We were safe. The world was outside. And we were inside, mocking it.

We had meals in shifts. The big boys and the little boys. The little girls and the big girls. You learned to chew and swallow, chew and swallow and to protect your plate like an American quarterback, before you sat down. Throughout the meal, there was a gently background whine from the younger ones. False rumours of second helpings grew with each watched mouthful. Helpful advice was often given that you didn’t like that, often with a hand snaking towards your plate. We ate normal things like porridge and cornflakes and eggs and sausages and fish. Potatoes were the main meal, apart from when we had the luxury of chips.

Mum would buy a small portion of chips out of Fellonis on Friday and try and sneak it into the house when we were in bed. But our ears were attuned to the closing of the door on that night. And we had noses like a cocker spaniel, just to make sure our hearing wasn’t throwing us. Chips were the food of the Gods. And bought chips, out of Fellonis, were even better than that. I usually got the task of licking the paper. I can still chew it now. I didnae know what was better the chips or the paper.

There were two sinks facing the kitchen window: a big sink for steeping and washing in and a wee sink for scrubbing. Mum made sure we brushed our teeth regularly, in the wee sink, before we went to the dentist on Apsley Street. He was a little baldy man always laughing and showing you how to smile with big teeth. He gave you a lollie and a filling for being so good at cleaning your teeth. The red ones always went first from the jar. After that yellow. If you were really stuck you had to take the green one.

The smaller kids had a bath in the wee sink, growing up, into the big one. Us older children had to make do with a rub down. We went the Public Baths at Hall Street for a swim or a real bath, when we could afford it. The Public Baths were a family day out. The baths in them were as big as a liner and had enough hot water to do a pile of washing. There was always the wee old guy, Sammy Soapwash, banging on the door, with his long pole, who we thought lived their. The pole had a brass hook on the end and was pointed, for pointing at you. . It was also used for opening the windows at the top, to let steam out, but it gave the wee man some kind of authority over the lippy kids when he asked: ‘Are you alright in there?’I don’t think he was that concerned that you drowned, just scared that you’d smuggled in another brother of sister for a wash, without paying a penny.

You went to Primary school when you were about five. One of the good things was that you got a wee pint of milk in the morning. Some of the wee boys were roaring and greeting there heids aff the first day. I couldnae understand what aw the fuss was about. I was that excited to be finally going to school that I was out the door first, not even waiting for my brothers and sisters. I was half way across Dumbarton Road before they even caught me. They didn’t know that I was actually the best runner. My legs kept pumping away, but they caught me taking a breath, like an auld lum, half way up the Cressie Stairs. But I was just letting them catch me. All the way below me, strung out as far as the eye could see, were little boys and girls all in their new school blazers and ties getting pushed reluctantly forward by mum’s corralling them with big wheeled prams and big sisters prodding them in line like cattle.

Later mum asked me what my first day was like and who my teacher was.
I told her, trying not to be to keen to show what a big boy I was that knew something she didnae, that it was Mrs Boyle. I waited for mum to smile back at me and get excited, and to say something like: “how is she?” Mum always said that when I’d seen some adult she knew, even if they were just hanging out their washing. As if I would know from a ‘hello’ how an adult was. Mrs Boyle had been Stephen and Joe and Phyllis’ teacher too. So I didn’t think Mrs Boyle would miss me. Mum hadn’t smiled when I said I’d seen her and she didn’t ask “how is she?” Anyway, I’d really need to stay with mum now to give her a hand with the babies. But mum spoilt it. She told me I had to go to school to help the old Lollipop man across the road. Mum had brought us up to have manners, so I couldn’t let him cross the road himself, could I?

We got free school meals. I didn’t know that was meant to be a bad thing until we were continually pushed to the back of the line, clutching our half tickets, by sneering girl prefects from big Primary 6 and 7. I wasn’t one to take these things without a fight, especially from a girl, but one of them was my sister Rosie and she would just have punched me hard in the stomach. And she could punch harder than me. I got my own back by calling her “Clarence,” after “Clarence the Cross Eyed Lion” behind her back.

I don’t remember much about the meals. I think it was always mince and potatoes and turnip. Although, sometimes, there would be cabbage. Meals were made in industrial quantities, to save money. The meals were always delivered to Holy Redeemers in big silver bins with a lid on them, that you screwed off. The smaller bins just had a silver lid on them, like a square drum kit. We didn’t always see him, but it was great to be first to claim to have seen the man that delivered the school meals, Mr McGonagle. We pushed and shoved to get close to him, because we wanted to help, wanted to be a big bull of a man, just like him, but we knew we weren’t to touch anything. One of the braver ones would always ask: “what was for dinner?” He liked to moan as he pulled the containers off his truck and stored them in the alcove between the jannies office and the dinner hall. First, he said, he had to go to Dalmuir Primary School. The way he said it made you think that he had to carry every container one at a time, on his back, but he had a big truck for that. Then, he said, he had to go down to Gavinburn Primary School, as if that wasn’t so bad as it was all down hill. Then, he said, with a sneer, looking at us in a way that pushed our tripping feet backwards, he went up Milton Mains Road, up to Filchie’s pig farm. What the pigs couldn’t eat was shovelled back into the containers and sent on to the fucking Fenian schools. We knew that he shouldn’t be swearing, but nobody would ever have thought about telling. He was an adult and anyway who could we tell, but another adult that would probably shout at us?

The janitor, wee Wullie Miller, took over from Mr McGonagle. He reheated the tins in the morning and dinner ladies came in to serve food in the afternoon. By that time we could have ate anything, but what we were served. The dinner ladies were more like a mum than a teacher. Everybody liked them. They could still check you for being cheeky, but they let you away with things. But they knew how to get around you, if you werenae eating your meal.

‘You’ll no get your pudding”

And they’d watch you, just to make sure. No pudding. No custard. They knew that you’d just as well cut your throat than miss that! When we went home mum would make real mince and potatoes.

We weren’t considered a particularly big family in those days. Wee Tommy Henry, who sold the papers outside Singers, for example had about twenty. That was an estimate. They stopped counting after 15. Some of the adult boys, like Stan, were that poor that they started working life at 14 still wearing the shorts that they wore to Secondary school.

But they weren’t really that poor. To be truly poor was to get up on Christmas morning before everybody else and search and search and not be able to find it, not be able to find a size 4 mitre ball. For a boy not to have a ball at Christmas was unthinkable. Even a burst ball was better than no ball. At least that way you could kid on that Santa must have burst it playing with it, before anybody else got a kick and forgot to leave another. Santa never let me down, but some of the other boys weren’t so lucky. It didn’t matter if it was a gale force wind and snow three feet deep you just had to be out there kicking the ball up and down the tenement back courts, the rebounds, like a drum sending out a message to all the other boys, to put down their sweets and stop stuffing their gobs and come down and play with their new balls. I was the best at keepie- uppie, but not the best at counting. Every year we promised to ration the balls to only play with Joe’s or George’s or mine, but we just couldnae. It was too hard.

When the ball got soft you could always find a pump, but everybody knew the wheeze of a dying ball. We tried burning the punctures with a knife heated flame. We tried dripping hot plastic on to the surface. We tried sewing it like a girl, with needles and thread, following the patches, with the skins of dead balls at our feet, but nothing seemed to work. A burst ball was a burst ball. There was no greater tragedy than that. But at least it kept dad happy and saved our shoes.

Shoes had to be shiny and black at all time and ready to be on parade. NO SCUFF MARKS. And if they were new shoes, well, didn’t we know how expensive they were? New shoes were to stay shiny and black as if they were still sitting in a box, instead of on your feet, and they were to stay that way forever. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, didn’t we have old shoes if we wanted to go around kicking god knows what! And dad was always right. New shoes were the best things in the whole world. See, when you had them on your feet, not only were you ten feet tall, but every other part of you that should have been shabby and threadbare, by some strange alchemy somehow also seemed newer. You didn’t even need to wash. Everybody could see what a grand boy you were. Even Mrs Boyle would smile at you in new black shiny shoes.

The thing about new shoes is they’d work to make your heels just as new by scrapping the skin off. They also seemed to have the gravitational pull of a large planet like Uranus, every stone in the world would be drawn towards your feet. And if there was only one bit of dog shit, in the whole world, your old shoes would have missed it, but your new shoes would stand on it, on your way to school. You’re new feet would stab at the joins in pavements. You’d trip up stairs, stubbing the toes and stumble down stairs. Like Fred Astaire, you feet would be constantly tapping, ready to break out and high kick, but you knew you couldnae.

Then it would be first playtime. Usually, you’d run faster than the school bell straight to the sheds, to play heidy kicks with a tennis ball, but you couldn’t, not with your new black Clarke’s, shiny shoes, with a compass in the heel, in case you got lost. But the teams were picked. It was me and Johny Gibbons. Nobody could beat us. No way. So you’d need to compromise and just play a bit. At the end of the first proper school day your shoes would look as if they had been hijacked by a couple of crocodiles at a watering hole and in a couple of weeks your big toe would be pushing through with a sorry sock ready to sniff out the puddles. Your new shoes were your old shoes.