LATE this morning was the big moment of the year for skittery winters.
Although today is their day, most of them have missed it. Skittery
winters?
They were the last people out of bed or into work on Hogmanay.
Once they were celebrated people. They had a rattlingly famous time.
In factory and coal mine they were the focus of attention. Work stopped
when they showed up. Shy people used to lie awake all night for fear it
might be their turn to be skittery winter.
It is a little odd in a world gone dotty about making annual awards
that the prize has been withdrawn from the champions of sleeping in.
Industrial skitteries had rural roots. In the countryside a ''winter''
was the name for whoever brought in the last harvest cart of grain to
the stackyard. Other farm workers lay in wait for the winter. They
chucked water over him, the dirtier the better.
When such rough, bucolic behaviour went to town the ceremony was
postponed from autumn to the end of the year and the start of the only
holiday that many toilers had.
Now skittery winter seems to have been postponed indefinitely. It has
joined in never-never land other hallowed customs of Ne'erday like
dumping out the fire ashes before midnight.
To bring back Hogmanay habits which have gone the way of old fashion
the place to seek the wisdom of ages is in Paisley, where else?
In the former thread town a group of women who remember shillingy
stews and A1 soap powder have pooled their memories to put them in a
book. They were seven members of Elderly Forum, a kind of pressure group
of pensioners who, at weekly meetings for three months, reminisced
together in a wooden hut defiantly painted like a holiday chalet in the
Ferguslie Park housing scheme.
''We fight for the rights of old people,'' Sadie Boyle, the seven's
leader, said. ''We have a dinner club. Now and again we play bingo for
prizes like a tin of beans. When it was suggested that we should take up
dancing, we decided we'd do better with a book. Now we think we could be
as good as Catherine Cookson.''
Their collection of memories is called History on Your Doorstep, a
bountiful, old-fashioned quid's worth of an illustrated album. It is
sound, and sad, about pawnshops. One trick was to pledge his Sunday
trousers but to leave the jacket hanging as if it were a complete suit.
''You were feart to tell him (the book recalls) because you would have
got killed. He was coming hame to a night-out and he had a jacket and
nae trousers! You were always that independent -- you were a good
manager, and you just couldna manage.''
Honourable pawn
Greta McAllister, one of the authors, who arrived in Ferguslie Park 53
years ago when it was a utopia of trim gardens, emphasised that going to
the pawn was honourable compared with trying to tap a neighbour. ''It
was your ain shilling,'' was how she put it.
Among the Paisley peculiarities included in the book, the most poetic
concerns the Diddy Works. It was a cloth-finishing mill, so called from
how the eldest daughters of working mothers would bring the babies of
the family to the factory to be breast-fed during the morning tea break.
''A lot of the women worked in their bare feet as the floor was
swimming in water,'' the book recalls in a living memory that reads more
like a Victorian vignette.
Hogmanay remains just about recognisable: ''You cleaned your house, in
below your bed, and washed the shelves and all your china, and lined the
shelves with new paper tacked down with drawing pins.
''If you had fallen out with your neighbour you spoke to her then. It
was a time for making up.
''You didn't lend or borrow on New Year's Day. If you did it would
take your luck away,'' the authors remember while excluding skittery
winter from their printed souvenirs.
Sadie Boyle recalled how every house wanted a first foot who was dark.
Early callers who were fair did not get across the door. ''And everybody
in your house had to be in by l2 o'clock since you didn't want to be
first-footing yourselves. That was very important. And, despite knowing
better, you always blamed your first foot for any bad luck in the new
year.
''I remember skittery winter, but that was at work. In the flats in
the thread mills they used to watch for the last one to arrive and chap
her in with bobbins, banging them on the machines. It was a hideous din.
And when you got to your place, if you were last, they drowned you with
a pail of water,'' she said. ''It was horrendous.''
So goodbye skittery and, it seems, good riddance. Anyhow, too many
young people are still in bed at noon for the cruel winter game to be
revived as a popular sport.
History on Your Doorstep, #1: Workers Educational Association.
