225

The flat, bottom right in this building, was my parents' first matrimonial home in which I spent the first six years of my life.

Mum’s grandfather started work as a message boy for the Clark Hunter Cooperage before taking over the reins, literally, of their horse and cart and, through sheer determination and will-power, delivered barrels through hail, rain and snow, before becoming their foreman for many years. He was primarily responsible for driving the business to a dominant position in the local market. Of course, this was not recognised through share grants, or such like, in those days, but it did pay dividends later.

In 1953, as my parents were getting married, Mum heard that an apartment at 225 Neilston Road, Paisley had been put on the market for sale at three hundred pounds by the Clark Hunter family. She wrote a letter to the matriarch, Mary Williamson, saying that she was the granddaughter of John Murray and was interested in renting the flat. No sooner was the letter received than the property was taken off the market. Mum was called into the office and given the keys in return for a rent of ten shillings a month. Mum described how she and my dad came out of the office with the keys held aloft and almost danced up the street to the flat.

They had no idea how big it was (tiny, in fact) but only that it was, unusually, situated in a stand-alone tenement building in the prime residential area of Paisley, backing onto Thornley Park Road. None of their family or friends could believe that they had pulled off such a coup and, indeed, they were granted these special terms for the next thirteen years until our family grew too big for it in 1966 and moved down the road to a bigger house . . . No. 183.

225 was a standout home, too, in many ways, though very much of its time. It comprised a ‘room and kitchen’ (or ‘butt and ben’ in local parlance). Mum and Dad slept in an recess in the kitchen, my sister and I shared a sofa bed in the (sitting) room and my younger brother, when he arrived in 1964, occupied a cot in the alcove of that same front room, whose orial windows you can see here. How many home movies of birthdays and Christmasses were taken behind those window panes!

Unusually, the building only had four apartments, stacked on top of each other and sharing a common entrance way or close, and common stair. Each apartment had a separate toilet at the end of the close, in our case, or on the landing of each of the upper floors. There was no bath or shower facility inside the flats.

A brick-built washhouse stood beside the common clothes-drying green, out back. Mum’s day to use it was the much-coveted Monday, when she would light the fire under a vat of water to boil the clothes. They were then transferred to the ribbed, scrubbing-board sinks before being rinsed in another vat, this time of cold water, and then wrung through the enormous hand-operated wringers, before being hung out to dry. If it was raining, everything including the Terry-towelling nappies would be hung high on the ceiling-hung pulley above the kitchen fire. Mum switched to an Indeset automatic washing machine in 1964!

Beyond the common green and, again, most unusually for a town tenement, each of the four apartments had a private garden area, all different in character. Ours had a rowan tree and large garden shed . . . I can still smell the muskiness of its interior, today.

We were the only kids in the building and I, especially, was the apple of all the old ladies eyes! Miss Russell, Mary Duguid (and her husband, David), Miss Lees - in that order above us - and Miss Leggat and Miss Arnott over the wall, to the right, in their posh quarter-villas.

Those summer mornings playing or painting on the green or roller skating down the close were truly magical - the happiest memories I have of childhood.

I took time today to get into the close and then the garden - much has changed but the sense of at-one-ness was as strong as ever.

In other news we visited my cousin, Ann, in a palliative care ward in the RAH, Paisley (her consultant is my closest boyhood friend) and, later, Helen Tannahill, in her new care home. Time marches on for everyone. I will savour 225 and all it still gives me for as long as I can.