by Robert Donaldson
Being only six years old at the time of the 1926 General
Strike and obviously too young to know what was happening,
there had to be something that stamped the memory of the soup
kitchen on my mind. Most of my generation recall going along
to Cuthill School to be served with a bowl of soup and a bread
roll. It was several years later before I really understood
why.
When the pits were working I used to walk along the coast
road to meet my father coming home. I would be lifted on his
shoulders and carried home. Like his mates, my father was
black with coal dust but as there were no baths or sinks in
our houses prior to the early nineteen thirties, he had to
make do with a tin bath filled with water heated on the kitchen
range. I often sat and watched him scrubbing the dirt off
with my mother waiting with more water to rinse away any dirty
water left on him.
Ours was a mining community and while life was most certainly
hard for our elders, we, the children, never found life tedious,
except possibly on Sundays. There seemed to be something mysterious
in the way we all started playing the same games at certain
periods during the year. Two such games were marbles and chestnuts.
Everyone played and stopped at the same time. Then the all
year round games would start up again. Boys up and down rows
would be playing kick the can, "leevo", "hunch-cuddy-hunch"
and even with the girls at "peevers". The girls had their
own games too, mainly skipping or "peevers". The variety of
games are too numerous to list or describe. All those games
could be played with very little interference from adults,
who seemed to prefer knowing where the children were simply
by going to the door to check. Any interference was usually
in the form of a call to dinner or to run a message. Life
in Prestonpans now is so different that the housing schemes
are like graveyards, compared to life around the miners' rows
fifty odd years ago.
Football was always the favourite game and the lack of money
to buy a full size ball was not allowed to hinder us. Tennis
balls or rags bound with string would be pressed into service
and it was not uncommon to see heading-the-ball competitions
going on, using the same resources. The area
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