~ The Window ~
The landlady lived in the Morningside area of Edinburgh. Middle-aged, heavily made-up and elaborately coiffured, she was wearing a fur coat and probably nae knickers. She was showing me round what would turn out to be my first rented flat on the third floor of a tenement about halfway up Dalry Road.
Not that there was much for her to show. The front door led into a longish, darkish corridor. A clothes pulley ran the length of its ceiling, giving it an even darker appearance. There was a tiny, windowless WC at one end of the corridor, a living room-cum-kitchen at the other end and a small bedroom in-between.
Nor was there much in the way of furnishings. The bedroom contained a big old-fashioned double-bed and a substantial mahogany wardrobe that would have been someone’s pride and joy many years before. And all that was to be found in the living room was an upholstered armchair that had seen better days, a dining table of sorts, a couple of chairs, a gas cooker and an electric fire mounted on the wall.
That was it, really. No bath or shower, no central heating, not even hot water. And there was no sign of any crockery or cutlery or pots and pans or bedding. In fact, the only items left by the previous occupant were a quarter-full tea caddy and a half-full bag of sugar in a cupboard under the kitchen sink.
“I’m sorry there’s no’ much in the place,” sniffed the landlady. “When he absconded, the former tenant appears to have taken everything that wisnae screwed down. But to be honest I was glad to see the back of him. An undesirable type. A drug-dealer, apparently.”
Which probably explained the big dent in the front door from someone trying to kick it in.
“I’ve seen a lot worse, mind you,” she continued. “Just last week I discovered that the couple living in one of the other flats I rent out had sawn the legs off aw the furniture. Would you believe it? The pair o’ them sitting on the flair – like natives.”
I think she was pleased that I was neither a druggie nor a hippie, but she wasn’t offering to replace the items taken by the former tenant.
“Anyway,” she smiled for the first time, “I’m sure you’ll be able to turn the place into a cosy wee home in nae time at aw.”
She said it sweetly enough, but even at my tender age, having recently turned twenty, I had enough savvy to detect the “take it or leave it” tone in her voice. Common sense was screaming at me to leave it. This was my first go at flat-hunting, and other, better places were bound to turn up. But I was desperate to have my own independent space. Besides, the flat was only a ten-minute walk to Haymarket where the office I worked in was located, which would mean no more commuting from the Ferry. Even closer than that were a Co-op and a Woolworths where I could get everything I needed for the flat. So, ignoring the screaming, I took it.
I paid the landlady in cash for the first month’s rent and promised to send her future monthly payments by Bank Giro Credit. She gave me a note of her Bank details and handed me a key to the front door. And that was it. No receipt, no rent book, no tenancy agreement, no meter readings. It was the summer of 1970, and I had become the dubious tenant of a decidedly unfurnished furnished flat.
Carrying what few clothes and other possessions I had in a small, battered, cardboard suitcase, I moved into the flat on the following Saturday morning. The tenement I now lived in stood on Dalry Road. It formed the short leg of a tick-shaped block of tenements, with the long leg consisting of a series of tenements running along a narrow lane round the corner. My flat was located at the rear of the tenement. From the windows in the kitchen and bedroom, I could see across to the rear of the other tenements in the block and look down to a walled drying green. Beyond the wall lay a series of good yards that were part of Haymarket Station.
At the front of the tenement, sandwiched between the entrance door on the left and a car rental office on the right, was a newsagent shop run by a friendly elderly couple called Ian and Jean who seemed to know everything about everybody in the block. That Saturday, before heading down to the Co-op and Woolworths for groceries and other essentials for the flat, I popped into the shop for the first time to buy cigarettes. The pair sussed immediately that I had just moved in.
“There’s an Irishwoman, a widow, who lives in one o’ the stairs roond the corner,” Ian explained to me. “She can clean the stair for you when it’s your turn. And she only charges a few bob. She does it for near awbody else. Save you the bother, eh? And she’ll also dae your laundry if you want.
“She doesnae communicate very well,” he added, “so we make aw the arrangements wi’ her and collect the money oan her behalf. The pair woman would be penniless otherwise.”
I paid Ian in advance for the stair cleaning and told him I was unlikely to want any laundry done.
When I returned to the tenement with my shopping, the Irishwoman was already in the stair. On her hands and knees scrubbing the steps leading up to my landing, she was enormously fat, red-faced and sweating. I said hello as I squeezed past her, but she only grunted in reply.
Once inside the flat, I set about organising things. I had decided that I wasn’t going to use the bedroom – and certainly not sleep in it. There was something cold and unfriendly about the room that wasn’t helped by a sizable hole in one of the windowpanes, which for all the world looked like a bullet-hole. No, there was a large recess in the living room that I would move the bed into. There was also plenty of space in the living room for the big wardrobe.
Shifting the mattress from one room to the other was easy: I simply slid it along the corridor on its side. Stupidly, I tried to do the same with the massive bed frame. With its iron headboard and legs still attached, it was too wide, of course. It stuck halfway along the corridor, wedging me between its side and the floor. I was trapped. I thought about calling out to the Irishwoman for help, but when I realised that the door to the flat was locked and would have to be battered down, I decided against that course of action. Instead, slowly and painfully I squeezed my skinny body out from under the heavy frame. Once I was free, I sat with my back to the corridor for a while to recover from the ordeal. Then I unlocked the door and set off down the stair to the newsagent’s. The Irishwoman had gone by then.
When I described my predicament to Ian, he said “Nae bother” and disappeared into the wee room at the back of the shop. He returned a few seconds later brandishing a spanner – what we called a “bed key” back then – as if he had magicked it up. I was able, therefore, to dismantle the bed frame, shift the parts into the living room and reassemble them in the recess, all without too much difficulty.
Fortunately, the solid mahogany wardrobe could also be dismantled into two parts – a base, which consisted of a couple of drawers, and the remaining main body. I hauled the base along the floor and into place in the living room with relative ease. But the main body was much heavier and couldn’t be dragged in the same way, so I had to “walk” it, inch by laboured inch, into the other room and then lift it on to the base. Given that I weighed less than eight stone at the time, I’ve no idea where I found the strength to do the latter.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and all evening scouring and scrubbing the place with Vim and bleach. By the time I was finished, it was hardly the “cosy wee home” predicted by the landlady, but it would do. After cooking and eating something, I climbed wearily into the big bed with its brand new pillow and sheets and blanket, all purchased that day at Woolworths. Lying on my back in the bed recess, I had a clear view across to the uncurtained window above the draining board and sink. It was still light outside when I fell asleep.
I’ll never know what disturbed me, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning, still on my back. Through the window, I could see a ribbon of lights twinkling and pulsing across the north of the city. The collective glow from the lights meant that the room was only in half-darkness. Then I noticed that one of the lights was pulsating more frequently than the others. I watched mesmerised as that particular light grew bigger and brighter. Now it was moving rapidly towards the window, towards me. Now it was at the window. Now it was inside the room. I could hear it throbbing. Now it was inside me. My whole body was rigid, buzzing, paralysed, as if I was receiving an electric shock.
I lay transfixed like that for only a short time, during which I don’t think I was frightened; I was certain that whatever had invaded me – the presence – wasn’t malevolent or threatening. Then it was gone and everything returned to normal. I could see that ribbon of lights again, twinkling gently in the distance. Feeling spent, I fell back to sleep.
By late the next morning, I had convinced myself that the paralysis I experienced during the night had been a physical thing, a manifestation of the exhaustion caused by the previous day’s hard work. There had been no “presence”. And no bright, throbbing light preceding the paralysis. What I had seen was a distortion of the light coming through a window that was streaked by years of grime and bird droppings. Thus convinced, I resolved to clean the window, both inside and out, that day. It was something I had planned to do anyway and had bought a shammy at Woolworths for that purpose.
There were two sections to the window. The upper section could be slid down a couple of feet and the lower section slid up by the same distance. I knew that cleaning the inside of both sections would present no problems. I could lean over the sink to do the lower one and then hop up on to the draining board to do the upper. But cleaning the outside would be much more tricky – dangerously tricky. First, I would have to sit on the draining board and push myself backwards out of the open lower section until I was sitting on the windowsill. Then I would have to pull the lower section down on to my thighs before I was able to clean it. I wouldn’t be able to reach the upper section from that position, however, so I would have to stand on the narrow windowsill to do that. One slip and I would be in danger of falling backwards and cracking my head open on the drying green three storeys below. Fortunately, there was a sort of safety device in place to prevent such a fall. About halfway up the window and on either side of it, a cast iron hook was embedded in the wall. A rope had been strung between the two hooks, presumably for hanging washing on. When I reached out to test the rope, it appeared secure enough; I prayed that it was.
So I went ahead and cleaned both the inside and the outside of the window, the latter with enormous trepidation, slithering back into the flat unscathed. My heart was pounding and my legs shaking, but it was a case of mission accomplished.
I was still feeling shaky about half-an-hour later when there was a loud knock at the door. My first visitor. Someone after a bit of weed from the former occupant, perhaps. Or maybe the CID looking for said occupant. Those were the thoughts running through my head as I answered the door. It was neither. A short, dapper-looking, older man wearing a cloth cap stood there.
“I’ve been watching you fae across the way,” he said, smiling. His voice was soft with the hint of a lilt. “I’ve come tae show you how tae clean your windaes withoot killing yourself intae the bargain.”
I invited the man in and followed him through to the living room. He went straight to the window, produced a screwdriver from the top pocket of his jacket, leant over the draining board and proceeded to unscrew the baton running up the left-hand side of the window.
“You obviously dinnae ken aboot sash and case windaes, son,” he chuckled as he pulled the baton free to reveal two folded brass hinges underneath. After unfolding the hinges, he slid up the bottom section of the window and pulled it towards him. The whole section came away, but was still attached to the window frame by a cord on the right-hand side. The end of the cord was tied to a round lead weight that was embedded in the wood on that side. Protruding from the left side of the frame were the heads of two screws, which the man hooked into the tops of the hinges. Then he pulled the weight with the cord attached out of its resting place. Suddenly, the whole of the lower section swung on the hinges across the sink and draining board until its outside was facing into the flat.
“A wee bit easier tae wash it this way, eh?” the man chuckled again.
Next, he reached over and pulled the upper section all the way down to the bottom of the window.
“And you just need tae bend ower the top o’ this tae wash the ootside o’ it,” he said, adding: “Withoot climbing oan tae the sill and risking your life, eh?”
Just as quickly as he had dismantled the window, he put everything back together. I had begun to say how grateful I was to him for taking the time to show me how to clean the window safely in future, but he didn’t seem to be listening to me. Instead, he was gazing down at the drying green. I followed his gaze to see the Irishwoman in the midst of hanging out a large bundle of washing. The poor woman, I thought, still slaving away on a Sunday.
“She never used tae look like that,” he remarked wistfully, more to himself than me. “Aye, she was a bonnie colleen at one time, a real Irish beauty.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I simply smiled and nodded.
I slept soundly that night, with no repeat of the strange experience of the previous night. Before I set off for work the next morning, I nipped into the newsagent’s to return the bed key to Ian. I told him and Jean about my visitor and the sash and case window demonstration.
Ian was puzzled. He repeated what I had described to him: “So you reckon this chap came fae roond the corner? Aboot your height and ma age? Wearing a bunnet? And wi’ a bit o’ a lilt in his voice? Naw, I cannae seem to place him, son. What d’you think, Jean?”
“Naw, he doesnae ring a bell wi’ me eether,” replied Jean. “Oh, but wait a minute. Is he no’ awfie like Jimmy, the Irishwoman’s man? And did he no’ hail originally fae somewhere up North – Stornoway or something like that? It couldnae have been him, though, son. That wee man died years ago. In his sleep, it was. Aye, the Irishwoman woke up one morning and there he was, stiff as a board aside her. She’s never recovered fae the shock. The pair lass hasnae been able tae speak properly since.”
Not that there was much for her to show. The front door led into a longish, darkish corridor. A clothes pulley ran the length of its ceiling, giving it an even darker appearance. There was a tiny, windowless WC at one end of the corridor, a living room-cum-kitchen at the other end and a small bedroom in-between.
Nor was there much in the way of furnishings. The bedroom contained a big old-fashioned double-bed and a substantial mahogany wardrobe that would have been someone’s pride and joy many years before. And all that was to be found in the living room was an upholstered armchair that had seen better days, a dining table of sorts, a couple of chairs, a gas cooker and an electric fire mounted on the wall.
That was it, really. No bath or shower, no central heating, not even hot water. And there was no sign of any crockery or cutlery or pots and pans or bedding. In fact, the only items left by the previous occupant were a quarter-full tea caddy and a half-full bag of sugar in a cupboard under the kitchen sink.
“I’m sorry there’s no’ much in the place,” sniffed the landlady. “When he absconded, the former tenant appears to have taken everything that wisnae screwed down. But to be honest I was glad to see the back of him. An undesirable type. A drug-dealer, apparently.”
Which probably explained the big dent in the front door from someone trying to kick it in.
“I’ve seen a lot worse, mind you,” she continued. “Just last week I discovered that the couple living in one of the other flats I rent out had sawn the legs off aw the furniture. Would you believe it? The pair o’ them sitting on the flair – like natives.”
I think she was pleased that I was neither a druggie nor a hippie, but she wasn’t offering to replace the items taken by the former tenant.
“Anyway,” she smiled for the first time, “I’m sure you’ll be able to turn the place into a cosy wee home in nae time at aw.”
She said it sweetly enough, but even at my tender age, having recently turned twenty, I had enough savvy to detect the “take it or leave it” tone in her voice. Common sense was screaming at me to leave it. This was my first go at flat-hunting, and other, better places were bound to turn up. But I was desperate to have my own independent space. Besides, the flat was only a ten-minute walk to Haymarket where the office I worked in was located, which would mean no more commuting from the Ferry. Even closer than that were a Co-op and a Woolworths where I could get everything I needed for the flat. So, ignoring the screaming, I took it.
I paid the landlady in cash for the first month’s rent and promised to send her future monthly payments by Bank Giro Credit. She gave me a note of her Bank details and handed me a key to the front door. And that was it. No receipt, no rent book, no tenancy agreement, no meter readings. It was the summer of 1970, and I had become the dubious tenant of a decidedly unfurnished furnished flat.
Carrying what few clothes and other possessions I had in a small, battered, cardboard suitcase, I moved into the flat on the following Saturday morning. The tenement I now lived in stood on Dalry Road. It formed the short leg of a tick-shaped block of tenements, with the long leg consisting of a series of tenements running along a narrow lane round the corner. My flat was located at the rear of the tenement. From the windows in the kitchen and bedroom, I could see across to the rear of the other tenements in the block and look down to a walled drying green. Beyond the wall lay a series of good yards that were part of Haymarket Station.
At the front of the tenement, sandwiched between the entrance door on the left and a car rental office on the right, was a newsagent shop run by a friendly elderly couple called Ian and Jean who seemed to know everything about everybody in the block. That Saturday, before heading down to the Co-op and Woolworths for groceries and other essentials for the flat, I popped into the shop for the first time to buy cigarettes. The pair sussed immediately that I had just moved in.
“There’s an Irishwoman, a widow, who lives in one o’ the stairs roond the corner,” Ian explained to me. “She can clean the stair for you when it’s your turn. And she only charges a few bob. She does it for near awbody else. Save you the bother, eh? And she’ll also dae your laundry if you want.
“She doesnae communicate very well,” he added, “so we make aw the arrangements wi’ her and collect the money oan her behalf. The pair woman would be penniless otherwise.”
I paid Ian in advance for the stair cleaning and told him I was unlikely to want any laundry done.
When I returned to the tenement with my shopping, the Irishwoman was already in the stair. On her hands and knees scrubbing the steps leading up to my landing, she was enormously fat, red-faced and sweating. I said hello as I squeezed past her, but she only grunted in reply.
Once inside the flat, I set about organising things. I had decided that I wasn’t going to use the bedroom – and certainly not sleep in it. There was something cold and unfriendly about the room that wasn’t helped by a sizable hole in one of the windowpanes, which for all the world looked like a bullet-hole. No, there was a large recess in the living room that I would move the bed into. There was also plenty of space in the living room for the big wardrobe.
Shifting the mattress from one room to the other was easy: I simply slid it along the corridor on its side. Stupidly, I tried to do the same with the massive bed frame. With its iron headboard and legs still attached, it was too wide, of course. It stuck halfway along the corridor, wedging me between its side and the floor. I was trapped. I thought about calling out to the Irishwoman for help, but when I realised that the door to the flat was locked and would have to be battered down, I decided against that course of action. Instead, slowly and painfully I squeezed my skinny body out from under the heavy frame. Once I was free, I sat with my back to the corridor for a while to recover from the ordeal. Then I unlocked the door and set off down the stair to the newsagent’s. The Irishwoman had gone by then.
When I described my predicament to Ian, he said “Nae bother” and disappeared into the wee room at the back of the shop. He returned a few seconds later brandishing a spanner – what we called a “bed key” back then – as if he had magicked it up. I was able, therefore, to dismantle the bed frame, shift the parts into the living room and reassemble them in the recess, all without too much difficulty.
Fortunately, the solid mahogany wardrobe could also be dismantled into two parts – a base, which consisted of a couple of drawers, and the remaining main body. I hauled the base along the floor and into place in the living room with relative ease. But the main body was much heavier and couldn’t be dragged in the same way, so I had to “walk” it, inch by laboured inch, into the other room and then lift it on to the base. Given that I weighed less than eight stone at the time, I’ve no idea where I found the strength to do the latter.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and all evening scouring and scrubbing the place with Vim and bleach. By the time I was finished, it was hardly the “cosy wee home” predicted by the landlady, but it would do. After cooking and eating something, I climbed wearily into the big bed with its brand new pillow and sheets and blanket, all purchased that day at Woolworths. Lying on my back in the bed recess, I had a clear view across to the uncurtained window above the draining board and sink. It was still light outside when I fell asleep.
I’ll never know what disturbed me, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning, still on my back. Through the window, I could see a ribbon of lights twinkling and pulsing across the north of the city. The collective glow from the lights meant that the room was only in half-darkness. Then I noticed that one of the lights was pulsating more frequently than the others. I watched mesmerised as that particular light grew bigger and brighter. Now it was moving rapidly towards the window, towards me. Now it was at the window. Now it was inside the room. I could hear it throbbing. Now it was inside me. My whole body was rigid, buzzing, paralysed, as if I was receiving an electric shock.
I lay transfixed like that for only a short time, during which I don’t think I was frightened; I was certain that whatever had invaded me – the presence – wasn’t malevolent or threatening. Then it was gone and everything returned to normal. I could see that ribbon of lights again, twinkling gently in the distance. Feeling spent, I fell back to sleep.
By late the next morning, I had convinced myself that the paralysis I experienced during the night had been a physical thing, a manifestation of the exhaustion caused by the previous day’s hard work. There had been no “presence”. And no bright, throbbing light preceding the paralysis. What I had seen was a distortion of the light coming through a window that was streaked by years of grime and bird droppings. Thus convinced, I resolved to clean the window, both inside and out, that day. It was something I had planned to do anyway and had bought a shammy at Woolworths for that purpose.
There were two sections to the window. The upper section could be slid down a couple of feet and the lower section slid up by the same distance. I knew that cleaning the inside of both sections would present no problems. I could lean over the sink to do the lower one and then hop up on to the draining board to do the upper. But cleaning the outside would be much more tricky – dangerously tricky. First, I would have to sit on the draining board and push myself backwards out of the open lower section until I was sitting on the windowsill. Then I would have to pull the lower section down on to my thighs before I was able to clean it. I wouldn’t be able to reach the upper section from that position, however, so I would have to stand on the narrow windowsill to do that. One slip and I would be in danger of falling backwards and cracking my head open on the drying green three storeys below. Fortunately, there was a sort of safety device in place to prevent such a fall. About halfway up the window and on either side of it, a cast iron hook was embedded in the wall. A rope had been strung between the two hooks, presumably for hanging washing on. When I reached out to test the rope, it appeared secure enough; I prayed that it was.
So I went ahead and cleaned both the inside and the outside of the window, the latter with enormous trepidation, slithering back into the flat unscathed. My heart was pounding and my legs shaking, but it was a case of mission accomplished.
I was still feeling shaky about half-an-hour later when there was a loud knock at the door. My first visitor. Someone after a bit of weed from the former occupant, perhaps. Or maybe the CID looking for said occupant. Those were the thoughts running through my head as I answered the door. It was neither. A short, dapper-looking, older man wearing a cloth cap stood there.
“I’ve been watching you fae across the way,” he said, smiling. His voice was soft with the hint of a lilt. “I’ve come tae show you how tae clean your windaes withoot killing yourself intae the bargain.”
I invited the man in and followed him through to the living room. He went straight to the window, produced a screwdriver from the top pocket of his jacket, leant over the draining board and proceeded to unscrew the baton running up the left-hand side of the window.
“You obviously dinnae ken aboot sash and case windaes, son,” he chuckled as he pulled the baton free to reveal two folded brass hinges underneath. After unfolding the hinges, he slid up the bottom section of the window and pulled it towards him. The whole section came away, but was still attached to the window frame by a cord on the right-hand side. The end of the cord was tied to a round lead weight that was embedded in the wood on that side. Protruding from the left side of the frame were the heads of two screws, which the man hooked into the tops of the hinges. Then he pulled the weight with the cord attached out of its resting place. Suddenly, the whole of the lower section swung on the hinges across the sink and draining board until its outside was facing into the flat.
“A wee bit easier tae wash it this way, eh?” the man chuckled again.
Next, he reached over and pulled the upper section all the way down to the bottom of the window.
“And you just need tae bend ower the top o’ this tae wash the ootside o’ it,” he said, adding: “Withoot climbing oan tae the sill and risking your life, eh?”
Just as quickly as he had dismantled the window, he put everything back together. I had begun to say how grateful I was to him for taking the time to show me how to clean the window safely in future, but he didn’t seem to be listening to me. Instead, he was gazing down at the drying green. I followed his gaze to see the Irishwoman in the midst of hanging out a large bundle of washing. The poor woman, I thought, still slaving away on a Sunday.
“She never used tae look like that,” he remarked wistfully, more to himself than me. “Aye, she was a bonnie colleen at one time, a real Irish beauty.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I simply smiled and nodded.
I slept soundly that night, with no repeat of the strange experience of the previous night. Before I set off for work the next morning, I nipped into the newsagent’s to return the bed key to Ian. I told him and Jean about my visitor and the sash and case window demonstration.
Ian was puzzled. He repeated what I had described to him: “So you reckon this chap came fae roond the corner? Aboot your height and ma age? Wearing a bunnet? And wi’ a bit o’ a lilt in his voice? Naw, I cannae seem to place him, son. What d’you think, Jean?”
“Naw, he doesnae ring a bell wi’ me eether,” replied Jean. “Oh, but wait a minute. Is he no’ awfie like Jimmy, the Irishwoman’s man? And did he no’ hail originally fae somewhere up North – Stornoway or something like that? It couldnae have been him, though, son. That wee man died years ago. In his sleep, it was. Aye, the Irishwoman woke up one morning and there he was, stiff as a board aside her. She’s never recovered fae the shock. The pair lass hasnae been able tae speak properly since.”