A Clydebank Childhood

All "Bankies" (natives of Clydebank) are proud of their town, and its history, short though it may be, but only a few of us spent the first few years of our life living above the old Fire Station in Hall Street and playing just a few yards from the gates into John Brown's shipyard.

I entered the world in December 1956 in a maternity hospital in Helensburgh, which means that my birth certificate gives Helensburgh, not Clydebank, as my place of birth. However my father, Sam Smillie, was a fireman in Clydebank (as were both of his brothers and his father before him), and he and my mother, Joyce, lived in one of the tied tenement flats over the Fire Station in Hall Street. His "journey" to work consisted of running downstairs. We lived there until December 1962, just after my 6th birthday. By then, the old Fire Station had closed, the new Fire Station (just off the Duntocher roundabout) had opened, and the process of converting the old tenement building and fire station into, initially, offices, then some years later into modern flats, had begun. We had to leave, moving into a council flat in Kirkoswald Drive in far-off Drumry (strange, foreign territory to me then) on Christmas Eve, 1962.

I remember little of the house itself. The flat would have been described as two rooms, kitchen and bathroom. It had a shared balcony at the back looking out over a communal courtyard which gave access to the wash house -- a place of huge sinks (to 5 year old eyes anyway), boilers, scrubbing boards and mangles where the women -- and the firemen -- did the washing.

We used the kitchen as a kitchen / living room. I remember that it had a large black range which was both the main source of heat and where my mother did all of the cooking. My parents slept in one room, and the other room did double duty. Most of the time it was our bedroom (I had one younger sister then --Beth -- while a second sister -- Lynn -- arrived only a few months before we left), but when my parents had guests for the evening it reverted to being a sitting room and my sister and I slept in my parents bed.

There were only a few children living in Hall Street. The only flats in the street were those over the Fire Station, and there can only have been 6 or 7 of these. Not every family living there had children. I think there were 5 or 6 of us at most. We didn't stray beyond the end of the street, so it was a small, self-contained world we lived in. There was the Town Hall and the Police Station across the road, the old Swimming Baths next door, a church on the corner of the main road, and, dominating everything else, the shipyard gates and the shipyard beyond.

Even the onset of schooling didn't take us far from home. After the Second World War, Clydebank High School moved to its new buildings at Janetta Street, and the old High School building became Miller Street Primary School. Miller Street being directly opposite Hall Street, we only had a couple of hundred yards to walk to and from school each day.

Some of my earliest memories are of playing outside in Hall Street. For most of the time, it was pretty quiet, and a relatively safe place to play. There was no through traffic, and far fewer cars in those days anyway. Most of the policemen came and went on foot. We were taught from the earliest age never, ever to play directly in front of the Fire Station entrance, even though the alarm bells gave loud warning when the fire engines were about to emerge.

When it was cold or wet outside but we didn't want to go back inside -- and thus risk not being allowed out again that day! -- we would go into the Public Baths and ask if we could go in and watch. We were usually allowed in. I can't remember now what it was that attracted us there, except perhaps the warmth, but I can remember being fascinated, watching everyone splashing around in the pool. The warm, wet, chlorine smell of indoor swimming pools still brings back memories of those hours spent just inside the entrance, watching.

We gave the Police Station a wide berth most of the time. Our families were, like most people, law abiding, and I think we must have acquired the idea that only "bad people" had any dealings with the police. One day, however, we found an old, broken, plastic toy train in the gutter. As children who didn't own many toys ourselves, it didn't occur to us that it may just have been thrown away -- it seemed obvious to us that it must have been lost, and that someone, somewhere, must therefore have been looking for it. We had a vague notion that lost things ought to be handed in to the police, and decided that that's what we should to do. None of us had ever been inside the police station, though, and no-one wanted to be the first one to walk through the doors! We stood there for several minutes outside the station doors, arguing among ourselves. Then, around the corner from the main road, came a policeman. I happened to be holding the toy train at that moment, so I found myself being pushed forward by the others. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could speak, the policeman, seeing a bunch of small children hanging around the door into the station, told us sharply to stop whatever mischief we were planning and to clear off! We were all, in our childishly righteous way, deeply offended that he should talk to us like that when we had only been trying to do "the right thing". It took me a long time to overcome a sense of having been cruelly and unjustly maligned!

In general, we never went past the end of the street unaccompanied. There was, however, one place we were allowed to go -- the sweet shop just round the corner on Dumbarton Road belonging to the Misses Hogg, two sisters who jointly owned and ran the shop. The shop was an Aladdin's cave to us, crammed full of jars and displays containing every sweet you could possibly imagine. With a penny held tightly in our hand, occasionally tuppence, and on rare occasions following birthdays and visits from relatives a whole thruppence making us feel exceedingly rich, we would go through agonies of indecision as our eyes wandered along the range of sweets on offer. Should we go the route of quantity and buy lots of the smallest, cheapest sweets, or should we spend it all on one grand sweet, going for quality instead? Sometimes the decision went one way and we'd walk out of the shop with a handful of sweets from the "four for a penny" tray. Sometimes it went the other way, and we'd leave with an everlasting gobstopper or a multicoloured, multiflavoured lollipop. The decision was complicated, though, by considerations of generosity and selfishness. Walk out with a handful of sweets and you'd be expected to share them with the others. Walk out with a single sweet, and, while that ensured you would have it all to yourself, you risked the accusation of being selfish. Serious and complicated decisions at the age of 4!

We regarded ourselves as a privileged bunch of children. After all, who else regularly got the opportunity to sit inside the cabin and ring the brass bell on the old "green goddess" (the old auxiliary fire engine) as she was wheeled out to be checked over? A definite treat!

We were also fortunate -- if the flat next door is fated to go up in flames in the middle of the night, you can't ask more than to have it happen directly above a fire station. I'm not sure what year it was -- 1959 or 1960 I think, but one night the flat next door to ours did catch fire. Being right over the Fire Station, it must have gone down as the shortest fire brigade response time ever!

The memory that stands out above all others, though, is of the shipyard. One thing we all learned very, very quickly was that when the siren went off at 5 o'clock, you got yourself off the street and into the safety of the tenement close -- FAST! The gates at the end of the street would slide open, and a solid flood of men would pour out, filling the street from wall to wall, their day's work in the shipyard done, and all of them intent on getting home to their families and their evening meal. It never happened of course, but to us it seemed a foregone conclusion that to be caught out in the middle of the street when "the yard came out" would result in being trampled and squashed flat!

There was a man who used to turn up in Hall Street about 10 to 15 minutes before the gates opened each evening, bringing with him the evening newspapers to sell to the men on their way out. Summer and winter, sun and rain, there he was. I never knew his name, and he didn't say much, but I remember him as a kind man who didn't seem to mind our incessant chatter and questions. He would give us the string off the bundles of newspapers, to play with. To a child, a good length of strong string offered a wealth of possibilities! He often shared his sandwiches with us too -- I particularly remember marmalade ones for some reason. Perhaps he didn't like it, but didn't like to tell his wife? I'll never know, but he is one of my enduring memories of those years, and in a strange way has come to symbolise, for me, the town and its character.

My memories of these early years are bound up with my pride in being a "Bankie", and in what the people of the town have endured and achieved over the years. Thank you for letting me share some of these memories with you.

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/dms/clydebank/childhood.html
© 1999-2005 Donna Smillie <dms@zetnet.co.uk>