I lived with my dad and step mum, followed by my sister in 1969, in the top floor of a tenement, at 61 Gorgie Road, which was located where the Gorgie Farm now resides.
Pushing the huge, heavy front door at the entrance of the tenement, I would enter into a darkened corridor, leading to the foot of the stone stairway. As I neared the stairway, with its thick, wooden banister and iron railings that spiralled up to the top floor, I would look up to the distant skylight at the roof of the building and the distant light that shone through and faded into the dark air or the stairwell.
On each landing there were four doors, each paired and facing one another. You would only have known this by stepping into the pitch black where they hid, because otherwise you would not have been able to see into where they stood. There were no stair lights. The only light was from that skylight.
As I climbed the long, winding stairway to the top floor and the reassurance of the light, I would sometimes peer into those secretive corners, making sure there was no person or creature lurking and waiting to leap out. The return journey was always easier, as it was all downhill.
Once at the top, I would look down between the railings into the void from which I had come. On the odd occasion, I would release spit from my mouth and watch as it disappeared, only to hear the distant splat as it hit the ground.
There were a few other boys who lived in the tenement that I would often play with in outside or in their flats. Frank was slightly older, but I recall playing with toy soldiers on his living room floor, as was popular at that time. We would intently concentrate on where we positioned our men, behind the legs of chairs, cups, table tops and the upturned corners of worn rugs or protected behind other toy cars, buses and tanks while sneakily peaking over to see where your opponent was placing their armies.
Once positioning was complete, we would take turns to flick elastic bands and try to knock down the opposing military with shouts of delight as more soldiers fell or worried looks and sizing up what was left of the adversaries and your own men fell in battle.
We all wished we could buy the giant boxes of soldiers, tanks and artillery that were always advertised on the back of the comics we read, or the American Civil War soldiers, but the prices were in dollars so we felt jealous that we couldn't play with them.
If we couldn't play with toy soldiers, we could always re-enact a multitude of wars and battles from Roman times to WWII. Our imaginations were fervent with swashbuckling, adventures, fighting and exploration with the outside environment our stage for such exhausting epics.
Gorgie/Dalry was a busy thoroughfare that stretched from Haymarket Station eastwards past Tynecastle Football Stadium. By today's standards the roads may not have been as busy with traffic as we are used to seeing, but there was enough traffic to be wary when crossing the road.
Directly across from our tenement stood the Tivoli Picture House. It stood on the corner of Murieston Lane and Gorgie Road and it was often a popular place to go for excitement. It wasn't uncommon to see a long queue wind round from the doorway of the cinema and around into the lane. Double bills were common, but one of my all time favourites was Zulu, starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. When the film ended, I headed over to the back garden, which was a communal area. There were a few wrought iron, four pronged poles for connecting the washing line from one to another, but for us it was the hub of adventure.
To get to the back garden, you could walk through the entrance passageway of the block of flats, pass the stairway to your left and follow some steps down to a wooden door which led outside to a lower path, flanked on one side by the rear of the building and an old stone wall on the other. The top of the wall was level with the garden area. The path ran along the side of the building wall and stone steps led up into the garden area.
Invariably the rear door was locked, so the alternative was to head along the street pavement and take a left turn into a cobbled lane. Walking up the lane, you could turn left, through a walled archway, and into the garden. Stepping through the archway, the stepped path from the rear of the building stood to the left, a rectangular garden ahead an a raised wall and platform to the right, which in turn was separated from the old industrial ground by another higher stone wall.
This enclave zone was one of our many playgrounds. Here, we could escape into our worlds that normally involved fighting Nazis, Indians, Gladiators and Zulus. It didn't matter who the 'baddies' were, it was all about
action and adventure, climbing and jumping walls, finding rejected objects and exploration.
The walled archway which led into the garden, joined the block of buildings adjacent to the tenement, which you could climb up and walk across onto the flat roof of a ground level building which extended from the back of the building. Once on the roof, we could walk over to the window of a flat which stood waist high above the roof.
We often peered in through the brown, weather beaten net curtain, to see inside the flat, where an old woman lived. We didn't know her by name. We never spoke to her and we never saw her in the street. In fact we were always apprehensive of getting to close to her. In our minds she was thought to be a witch. The lady appeared extremely poor, dressed in tattered, discoloured clothes that were bereft of colour. The livingroom of her flat reflected her appearance; dingy, colourless with an overpowering stench of dankness and antiquity.
What furniture there was, was sparse, the wallpaper peeled and not a place any of us would wanted to have lived in. On reflection, it was sad to think of people living in such conditions. We would consider this sub poverty these days.
As mentioned earlier, further afield from the back garden and land which led to it, there was a disused industrial/railway area, scattered with rubble and the shells of old warehouses and tenement buildings. Often we would use this as an extension of our playground. I recall climbing in amongst the ruined buildings, pelting scurrying rats with anything we could lay our hands on. We would gingerly walk along the upper rafters and floorboards, shouting out from the empty windows to our friends. It was the perfect place for Hide-and-Seek.
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| Our playground |
One day a bunch of us were playing in the giant mounds of industrial sand, running up the dunes and kicking the sand in the air. I ran along the side of the mound to friends when suddenly sand rained down on top of me, covering my hair and getting into my mouth. I yelled in astonishment, my eyes burning, trying to shake it off me, while running back to my parents. My dad was raging at what had happened and asked who had done it. The perpetrator was a boy known as "Speedy" and it became apparent how he had obtained this title. At this time my dad was about 30, so he was still in decent shape. He tanked out of the flat and down the stairs to get the boy. Supposedly, he chased him through Gorgie, but couldn't catch him. Speedy in name, speedy in nature. For days after, I endured the scraping of a nit comb, grinding through my hair, as my parents attempted to cleanse me of the beasties that were running rampant on my head.
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| To the left is the lane that led to the back garden |
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