Gift from the Gallowgate by Doris; Davidson Page B

no brakes, no nothing . . . except feet, and it was too dangerous to go right to the bottom, more than twice as far again. I’m talking about the middle thirties here, and
although there were no Corporation buses in this area, Rover buses ran a service that came up Rosemount Place and King’s Gate then turned into Richmondhill Road to join Mid Stocket on its way
back to Rosemount Place.
    You can understand why we couldn’t chance going beyond Richmondhill Road. The air was whooshing through our ears and we were making too much noise ourselves to hear if there was a bus
anywhere near, and if it came out of that side street right in front of us, there was nothing we could do except run into it. This is why we (the youths) perfected a way of pulling one side of the
reins (a piece of rope) and broadsiding before we reached this point, usually resulting in bodies hurtling off and skidding to a halt in a gutter, hopefully out of any vehicle’s path.
    Then we had to pick ourselves up, thump ourselves free of ice and snow, check for any broken bones and set off on the long trudge back to the top of the hill to repeat the procedure . . . over
and over again in the pitch blackness of the winter nights. These thrilling, daredevil, addictive adventures were brought to an end when the Corporation decided to create another bus route to cater
for the private houses that had sprung up around the top end of Mid Stocket Road.
    Betty and I compared notes the following morning on our way to Sunday school. She hadn’t got off so lightly as I had. Terrified of what her father would do, she
didn’t tell her parents anything, and they only heard it from the policeman. He could see that her father was really angry and tried to defuse the situation by saying, ‘It’s
nothing to worry about. I’m just checking that she gave the right address, so that’s the end of it. Don’t be hard on her.’
    Her father didn’t take that advice. He gave her one good wallop for not telling him about it, and another for doing it in the first place.
    I had started going to Sunday school with Betty at Craigiebuckler Church. That began at 10 a.m., then we joined our Mums and Dads in church at 11. Going home, my parents and I
went to see Granny and Granda and collect Bertha – Ord Street was about halfway between the church and our house, and Betty and her parents carried on by themselves.
    Once she took in lodgers, of course, Mum was too busy cooking lunch to come to church, and I went to Ord Street on my own after the kirk service. Granny had lodgers, too, so I enjoyed myself
there just as much as at home; more, really, because the maternal eye wasn’t frowning at me for speaking too much, chatting up the young men. Mum was a great believer in the ‘Children
should be seen and not heard’ maxim, but Granny wasn’t so strict. Perhaps she hadn’t been so lax with her own children, but grandchildren are usually given more leeway.
    A rather humorous experience springs to mind here. I was thirteen or so when two of Granny’s lodgers took me to see a menagerie in the Tivoli in Guild Street. Maybe in
their late teens or early twenties, Jimmy Collins and Wattie Donald worked in Rubislaw Quarry and were probably not very well paid. They took the cheapest seats, in the Balcony, and ‘Way, way
up a ’ky’, as Dave Willis, the well-known comedian used to sing. To reach them, we had to climb and climb and climb what seemed like endless flights of stairs, then, after we reached
the top and got our breaths back – even before that, because there was a queue of people behind us – we went cautiously down the steps between the tiers of seating. This was an almost
vertical descent, causing me much worry in case I fell. There was nothing to stop me catapulting over the balcony rail and landing in the orchestra stalls.
    Luckily, none of us did, so we settled onto our not-very-comfy seats just one row from the front. Wattie had bought a bag of Soor