Tag Archives: 1930s

My first five years

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The following photograph, taken in September 2015, shows 15 Cathcart Place, a residential tenement in Edinburgh.  It has eleven small flats (apartments) and I was born in flat 8 (on the floor below the top floor).  That was my home from 1929 to 1934.  The three windows on the left side of this shot belong to flat 8, including the one with a white blind.  (I’m standing in the street level entrance door that leads to the internal stair.)

Outside Dalry Road with JBM in doorway

The flat has two rooms looking out over the street.  The two narrow windows on the left of the photograph are in what we called the parlour, a room used mainly when we had visitors.  The wider window with a white blind is in what was Granny’s bedroom.  The other windows of the flat are on the far side of the building.

The next photograph shows the internal stair.  The property now has mains electricity but when I lived in it there was none.  At night, especially in winter, the stair was dark and a battery-operated torch was often in use.  A grassy communal area at the back of the building was formerly used for hanging out the washing but there was none there when I visited.

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There are twenty or more steps between floors.  The next photograph shows me two flights up, outside the door of flat 8.

JBM outside front door

The busiest room in the house was the kitchen.  It has a wide window that faces northeast, looking out over the city of Edinburgh towards the Firth of Forth.  When I lived in this flat the kitchen had a cast iron range with at least one built-in oven heated by a central coal fire.  An iron kettle could be hung over the fire to boil water.  Heavy iron pans could be balanced above the fire.

The kitchen had a large central table where meals were prepared and eaten.  In the window recess there was a large kitchen sink with one cold water tap.  When hot water was needed it was transferred in a kettle from the range.  In a corner of the room away from the window there was a bed recess, an area large enough to take a double bed, and it may have had a curtain that could be drawn across to make the area into a little bedroom.  That was where my parents slept.

Coal fires were the only form of heating in the house when I lived there.  The fire in the range was kept burning most of the time, and there were fireplaces in Granny’s bedroom and in the parlour.  The house had no mains electricity.  It did have mains gas but that was used only for gas lamps, suspended from the ceiling in each of the three main rooms.  A fanlight over the flat door did allow some daylight into the hall.

There was no bathroom in the flat – only a small toilet opening off the hall.  This small room had no window, but it did have an electric battery torch fixed to the wall.  When I was small I was probably bathed in the kitchen sink or in a large zinc tub placed near the range in the kitchen.  When I was older I remember my father taking me on a short walk to the nearby public baths where he paid for a bathroom that had a very large bath with lots of hot water available.  I think we had the choice of taking our own towels or of hiring towels there.

JBM standing in doorway

I left 15 Cathcart Place after this brief visit to my childhood home still struggling to remember how life had been for me all those years ago.

Thousands of mornings

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It was a frosty morning at the end of January 2012.  An old man sat comfortably in his house, with a mug of tea in his hand.  As he looked out over the white roofs of the houses nearby, he thought about how many mornings he had experienced in his life so far.  A rough calculation showed that the number had already passed thirty thousand.  He was relieved that he did not have detailed memories of all these mornings, but he knew that they had all happened, and that the events of the thirty thousand days that followed them had been woven into the tapestry of his life.

What was his earliest memory?  He had seen photographs of himself as a toddler, including one taken in a photographer’s studio where he was standing with his hands on a small stool, possibly because he would have fallen over without its support.  He was warmly dressed in a fluffy woollen coat and hat, corduroy leggings, and thick mitts.  He had no memory of the photograph being taken, but he had no doubt that he had been in that studio and that this picture was evidence of a day in his life that had probably been as frosty as today was.

Bennet McInnes aged 1 in 1930 - cropped

In 1930 I was the toddler in that photograph, wondering what the photographer was doing.  In 2012 I was the old man with the mug of tea, thinking about my past life, more than eighty years long so far.

As I rack my brain to recall early memories I remember something that happened when I was about three years old.  My uncle James, my father’s brother, had been showing me how to produce the domino effect, setting up a row of wooden bricks on their narrow edges so that when the first one was tapped to make it fall over it knocked over the rest of the row.  I have a definite memory of that event, and can almost hear again the clatter of the bricks as they tumbled down in a long line.  But it’s only a partial memory and I cannot visualise the room where it happened.  My uncle died on 9 May 1932, aged 35, ten days after my third birthday.

In writing this blog I want to explore some of the ways in which my life has developed.  In particular, I should like to review those times when I made choices that had significant consequences for me and for other people.  I believe that I’m accountable for my actions, in this life to my family and to society at large, and beyond this life to my creator.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived with my parents from their marriage in 1926 for the remaining seventeen years of her life.  She died in 1943, when I was fourteen.  Among other memories that I have are those of her sitting quietly in her room reading from a large-print Bible.  Was she swotting for her finals?