David Daiches would stand outside the sweet shops with empty pockets wishing for some penny so that he might be able to get some sweet.
I grew up in the South Side of Edinburgh and I have very varied memories of my childhood particularly the 1920's when I was a small boy. In fact, one of my most vivid early memories was the cattle show in 1919 in the Meadows. This was the Royal Agricultural Show which took place in different cities every year and is now held in Ingliston. I remember how the workmen put large piles of wooden planks down on the Meadows and we sat on them and were chased away by the "parkie" with his whistle and his stick. The cattle show was a most memorable and exciting experience. The whole of the Meadows was covered in canvas and was totally changed from its normal appearance. It was, of course, the centre of our summer time lives. I lived in Millerfield Place just south of the Meadows across Melville Drive and Melville Terrace. It was our playground. Somehow childhood memories revolve around summer more than winter and I remember so often playing on the Meadows - not only on the Meadows; we also played in the streets.
Millerfield Place was a blind alley; there was Sciennes School at the top of it. There was no through traffic; in fact, there was no traffic at all. Not a single person in the street had a car and we played football in the street and we played cricket by chalking three wickets on the wall at the foot of the garden. It was a long wall with railings on the top - they took away the railings during the war and we never saw them again. We used school books as cricket bats and the girls of course would chalk their peever beds on the pavements and play peevers and they had their skipping rhymes - it was a street life of great liveliness and activity. Then along Melville Terrace, which ran at right angles across the foot of Millerfield Place, there was the rumbling of the coal carts; there was a lot of horse drawn traffic in those days. I'm thinking now of the 1920s. There was Leitch's lemonade, great big LEITCH, in great big letters at the back. They would rattle across the streets and wee boys - 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years of age we were in those days - would run behind the carts and jump on the back to get a free hurl as we would call it. This was strictly forbidden by our parents of course, but we used to do it. The coal carts were another great feature of the time, we all had coal fires of course and you'd buy your coal off the coal carts. The coalman would shout "COAL/BRIQUETTES " - I can still hear them - with a loud ringing voice. The housewives would come out and order so many bags and they would tramp through the house into the back garden to where the coal cellar was. We thought nothing of this, the coalman walking right through the house through the back kitchen, out of the back door into the back garden and into the cellar where we kept the coal.
We had back gardens. In the next street, Livingstone Place, they had backgreens. This was an important class distinction - you were very class conscious in those days. Millerfield Place, like Rillbank Terrace and other streets to the west of us, were more genteel, but Livingstone Place and Gladstone Terrace to the east of us were working class. Livingstone Place was flats with backgreens, Millerfield Place was terraced houses with front gardens and back gardens. The backgreens were accessible from the street. You went through the common entry and beggars, there were so many beggars - this was just after the end of the first war, a lot of unemployed ex-servicemen - just took to literally singing in the streets and singing on the backgreens. They would come into the backgreens, some of them with the most appalling apologies for voices, just croaking away just standard old songs like Home Sweet Home and nonsense like that. The housewives working at their kitchen sinks in the flats above would throw out pennies onto the grass and they would pick them up and touch their foreheads in gratitude. It's very interesting; the beggars never came into the genteel middle class streets but they went to the working class backgreens where the people were much more generous to them.