Voices in the Street by Maureen Reynolds

Author:Maureen Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845026639
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2013-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Our new house was such a contrast to our old one. The close was situated on a narrow lane that stretched from Canning Street to Moncur Crescent and was always affectionately called ‘the cuttie’. This was obviously a shortened version of ‘the cutting’. Mum didn’t like the large, square kitchen, preferring instead a small, cosy kitchenette, but apart from that it was great to have an inside bathroom and lots of hot water which was provided by the back boiler of the fire.

Each close had six flats and we were on the ground floor. The living room overlooked a tiny, mangy-looking garden with a postage-stamp-sized square of grass enclosed by one of the bushiest hedges we had ever seen. If a square of grass could be described as moth-eaten then that was a good description of our lawn, while the hedge wouldn’t have been out of place in the grounds of Camperdown Park. The view then swept down over a triangle of stunted bushes that looked as if they had given up and died, then down to the high wall of Dens Park football ground.

We loved to sit at the window on a Saturday afternoon when the local team was playing at home, watching the profusion of tramcars, buses and a small number of cars driving up Canning Street to park. Then there were the thousands of supporters who thronged through the turnstiles, from our vantage point looking like purposeful ants.

Compared to the comfortable, well-furnished domain of the Miller family, our flat was spartan, and in spite of the fire, it had a cold appearance. Mum was a bit worried about the rent, which was in excess of what we paid in McDonald Street. Nevertheless, she had to have it ready every Friday night when the rent man called. Because of this extra demand on our resources we had to make do with Grandad’s old furniture, which looked ancient and scratched when viewed in the sunlit room. Because we rarely saw the sun in our old house, the well-worn condition of the furniture had come as a bit of a shock.

Mum had taken out a Provident cheque prior to moving and this had been spent on a colourful square of congoleum, a cheaper form of linoleum. This had been purchased at the City Arcade and three pairs of brightly patterned cretonne curtains bought at Cyril’s textile shop in the Westport completed our outlay. This had to be paid back at a few shillings a week, also on a Friday night.

The new lino was bright but, because it was a square, it left an edge of wooden flooring around the edges. Thankfully, the previous tenants had darkened this edge with wood stain, which was more than could be said for the walls. The decor left a lot to be desired, with tatty, torn wallpaper on most of the walls and a bilious-looking ochre-coloured paint in the kitchen and bathroom. This colour was so awful that Mum often said it made the food look terrible and the room, during those initial few months, was always freezing.

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