Ir you up there, Mrs. Haston&;#063;

Ir you up there, Mrs. Haston?

One autumn night when I was seven, my granny came to meet me from
school. This was surprising, for I always walked home on my own, even
at this tender age. School was North Berwick Primary in Scotland and
was a hearty mile or so from our house in Tantallon Terrace on the sea
front. Every day at three-thirty p.m., I would walk through the park
called the Lodge and along the beach if the weather was fair. Otherwise
I avoided the choppy seafront and took the path past the puttings
greens.

My granny, Pip, was a dear old soul, who'd led an eventful if naive
life. Whenever I think about her I consider the fact that she was out
of kilter with the time she was living in. Much wackier than my boomer
mother, Granny was born in Wallington, Surrey. She was one of four
children - three girls, one boy - whose parents hailed from the Celtic
Fringe. My great-grandfather had renounced his Catholicism to become a
mason, and this propelled him towards becoming a successful local
landlord.

But as a man of his time, William Jordan forbade his daughters to work,
and Pip often said that despite personal heartache, the war years were
her freedom years. She spent time in the Women's Air Force and the Land
Army, where she chased boys and drove a tractor. She had a few years as
a single woman where she discovered that she was quite capable of
looking after herself. Her boyfriend Ken was killed in the war and she
watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain, wondering if the men
inside the planes fighting were only boys like Ken.

When she met Harry Haston towards the end of the war, I wonder if the
term opposites attract cropped up. For my grandad was a sensible
Scottish Protestant who'd been forced into the man of the house role
when he lost his father at a young age. Grandad too had had a first
love, a lovely lady named Mary with whom he remained friends until his
death. Why didn't they get married? Euphemia Haston, Harry's ma. She
gave a whole new meaning to the concept of 'no-one's good enough for my
son'. Mary, who came from the Isle of Skye, cut her losses and married
another.

My grandad was a very handsome man, whose traditional good looks were a
contrast to Pip's sharp beauty. They were indeed, a good looking couple
who had two good looking daughters.

***

The day that Granny appeared at the school gate, she was wearing the
smirk she always wore when she'd done something awful, and she did
something awful pretty often Her whole family thought that she was
ridiculous and my mother said that she spent most of her childhood
cringing at her parents' behaviour. (For although both my grandparents
seemed so different, deep down they shared an
let's-embarrass-our-children gene.) And so Pip's only option was to
operate within a world of her own. Funnily enough, familial disapproval
didn't seem to affect her and she kept on doing silly things as they
took the urge. If there's anyone I could liken Granny to, it would be
Frank Spencer, who always blew it so spectacularly on 'Some Mothers Do
'Ave 'Em.' Like the hapless Frank, my granny was optimistic and never
gave up if something wasn't working. Consequently, she was rarely
unhappy.

And so back to her chattering aimlessly with the other parents and
guardians at the school gate.

"Oo-er Emily, we're locked out of the house" she smiled. "We've got to
climb through a window." My grandad worked at the Royal Bank of
Scotland, an hour's drive away in Edinburgh, and would surely not be
home for a good long time yet. Musing over the word 'we', I sincerely
hoped that it would become 'I' by the time we got to our house.

By the time we'd walked through the Lodge and the past the putting
greens, the Scottish evening was rolling in. The light house on the
Bass Rock had begun to wink as we stood and wondered how we were going
to get in to the relative warmth of our huge seaside house. The house
we lived in was a three-storey grey granite affair on the end of a
terrace which faced the Firth of Forth. The ground floor was owned by
an English family, who used it as a holiday home, and the top two
floors were ours, entered into by stairs leading up from a little
garden. Beyond the garden wall lay a field, which Tantallon Terrace's
children would play on, and past that there was a gentle slope that
lead to the woods.

So immediately Granny was at a disadvantage. There were no windows that
were accessible to her, for climbing through a ground floor one would
only bring her into the downstairs flat. The door had been snecked shut
with the keys safely on the kitchen table and all our windows were out
of Granny's reach.

"Emily" she said to me. "I'm going to have to climb onto the
roof."

And so, employing the skills that she'd learnt in the Land Army some
decades earlier, Granny found a few footholds and pulled herself onto a
flat piece of roof. She inched herself up further still, until she
could reach the sitting room window. At last, I thought, hoping that
we'd be in there in time for the Clangers. Granny reached up to find
the window locked! By now the sky had deepened a shade and I knew that
sitting in front of the fire with a plate of spaghetti hoops on toast
was a fantasy. Still, at least it was light enough for Granny to jump
back down safely so that we could come up with something else.

But it was not to be.

"Emily" she called. "I can't get down any further. I'm stuck!" Her tone
of voice was anything but distressed. If anything, there was a hint of
enjoyment that she was going to cause trouble. But time was getting on
and if Granny was enjoying her rebellious streak, I wasn't. It was time
to get professional help.

Never mind I thought, for there was a skylight in the holiday flat's
kitchen. And if the lady who was living there was in at least Granny
could follow her trail back to dry land. The lady who was renting the
flat below was someone I knew well, for she was my form teacher, Mrs.
McNab.

Mrs. McNab was one of my favourite teachers ever. She was a young woman
of around twenty-four and had been given the care of Primary 3b for the
year. Even now she is fondly remembered by those who knew her, for Mrs.
McNab was on the Generation Game with her dad! And for a brief time she
focused the school's attention onto our class. (In fact, Bruce Forsyth
made a cock-up and so Mrs. McNab and her pops got to go on again, but
that's another story.) When she and her husband moved into the absentee
landlady's flat I was pleased, for sometimes we'd walk back together.
One of the tasks she set us in class was to write up our diaries every
morning. We'd write the day and the date and describe that day's
weather. And then we'd always have to write about what we'd done the
evening before, as well as illustrating it. One walk home from school I
told Mrs. McNab that if I hadn't done anything exciting, I'd make
something up. I thought that she'd tell me off for telling fibs but she
didn't, for she was encouraging us to use our imaginations. One day she
wrote 'untidy' in my spelling book and I was hurt. When she offered to
get me down the road I said I wasn't going the same way as she was, and
she looked hurt.

As I walked round the front of the house, she was just coming back from
work. All was pitch black now and I could see the lights across the
Firth of Forth in Fife. The Bass Rock's light house was flashing on and
off and it was small wonder that Mrs. McNab was surprised to see me
sitting on her garden wall.

"Hello Emily, it's a bit dark for you to still be out" she greeted
me.

"But A can't get into ma house, Mrs. McNab. We're locked out ma
granny's stuck on the roof" I explained "Can you help us?"

"Ir you pullin ma leg, Emily Haston?" she asked, not
unreasonably.

"No!" I insisted. "Come round the back of the house and you'll see fir
yirself."

Mrs. McNab couldn't see. The back of the house was even darker than the
seafront, for there were no street lights. Hesitantly, I heard my
teacher ask

"Ir you up there, Mrs. Haston?"

"YES!" came shrill reply. "Do you mind if I climb through your
window?"

Mrs. McNab and I went straight to the kitchen of her flat. She stood on
a chair and opened the skylight, apologising to Granny for the chair
not being a ladder. Alas, the skylight proved too small for her, and so
the chair didn't matter. I wonder if Mrs. McNab laughed about the
incident later on, when her husband got in. If she thought that my
granny was an egit for clambering onto the roof when a call to the fire
brigade would have sufficed, she didn't give any indication that she
thought so. When Granny agreed that we were getting nowhere, Mrs. McNab
and I thought that we'd better go next door and ask the Hughes to help
us.

The next bit would surely be a director's dream, and I imagine the
scene changes going something like this. The audience sees the little
girl and the teacher walking out of the flat before zipping back to the
resourceful old lady, alone on the dark rooftop. She wears a look on
her face which reads that she's not satisfied with standing there doing
nothing and she's plotting. Meanwhile the child and the teacher are
opening a garden gate and walking up the path. Cut back to Granny, who
has spotted a crevice which divides two houses. It's quite wide and she
isn't so young any more, but... she isn't thinking of a spot of long
jump, is she? Oh no Mrs. Haston, PLEASE stay where you are! And then
Mrs. Hughes hears the door and asks her husband to get it, for she's
feeding the baby. But Granny's in no mood for waiting, and with gusto
the have-a-go heroine leaps across the ravine that separates her roof
with that of the Hughes clan next door. And phew, she's made it!

Mrs. Hughes sat in the kitchen feeding her little girl, unaware who her
husband was talking to at the front door. Suddenly Rhoda looked up and
smiled, and her mother followed her gaze. There followed a few moments
of stunned silence as she saw Mrs. Haston standing on her roof, looking
down through the skylight.

"Well, are you going to let me in then or shall I stand out here all
night?" inquired my granny.

"Er yes, of course" agreed Mrs. Hughes.

When Mrs. McNab and I went into the kitchen and saw Granny standing on
someone else's roof, Mrs. Hughes having sent her husband off to get the
step ladder, we were stupefied. What on earth would she do next?

Mr. Hughes got my granny down from the roof and we all breathed a sigh
of relief. But we were still on the wrong side of our front door. The
only person we could think of who may have a long enough ladder -
Granny swore that the bathroom window was open, but we said we'd
believe it when we saw it - was Mr. MacDonald. The MacDonalds lived in
the club house of the golf course opposite our house.

It was a shame we didn't ask him first of all, said Mr. MacDonald,
'cause within moments he'd climbed in through our bathroom window and
had let us into our house. And though things are much multiplied when
we cast our minds back, I seem to remember about twenty folk in our
tiny garden, watching the events being wrapped up.

Next day, however, Mrs. McNab made me tell 3b what had befallen us. I
had a true tale to put in my diary and what's more, the rest of the
class wanted to write about it as well.

I wonder if anyone from my old class has still got their old school
jotters and wonders what that was all about. I'm sorry that I haven't,
complete with the little illustration of wacky Pip Jordan grinning as
she thought about how much effort she was putting everyone to. It
remains a highlight of my childhood, a treasured memory which is stored
in the file marked 'Granny' with many, many others.