in the High Street. My mother always
forbade us to go near any public houses, guising or otherwise,
but once we were out, all caution was thrown to the wind and we
would go to the doors of the Blackbull and plead with the regulars
to "Please help the guisers". Often we were invited in to "do
a turn" for the punters, but my brother and I had to decline,
as my father might have been inside enjoying his pint, and if
he had seen his own children guising in a pub, we .would have
been ordered straight home, and made to wait until he came home,
so we never went as far as to enter the pub. But we would still
have a share of the money and crisps the others received, so that
was okay.
Our summer holidays from school were
nearly always spent on the beach behind Antonelli's chip shop.
We would either go in the water for a swim or play on the rocks
at houses or shops, or we would go for a walk along the beach.
Heading towards the Cuthill area, we would walk over the top of
the coal bing and cut across the road to Sammy Burn's yard, where
we would play among the old furniture and knick knacks until we
were thrown out.
In the autumn, we would go raiding
the orchards for apples and pears. The one worth raiding was Mary
Eraser's; it was a decent sized orchard in the grounds of Preston
Tower. Mary Eraser was the lady who owned a small tuck shop in
the buildings which adjoined the orchard next to Hamilton House.
She grew plums, pears and apples and a few raspberries. There
was, we believed, an element of danger when plundering here, not
just the danger of being caught, but the fear of a ghost named
the Green Lady who haunted Preston Tower. Indeed on a night when
there was a full moon, and the clouds were racing across the sky,
this orchard took on a very spooky atmosphere with Preston Tower
outlined in the background. We imagined all sorts of evil lurked
behind the trees and didn't we see the Green Lady floating past
the window in the Tower and hear her moaning, when we were stealing
apples. But this never put us off, and the fruit tasted all the
sweeter.
There was an old man who used to come to Prestonpans selling toffee
apples from an old wheelbarrow. He had a long red beard and wore
a long trenchcoat and boots. He would blow a whistle and call "toffee
apples" to let us know that he was there. We always begged our mother
for a sixpence each to buy one, but as she thought it was a bit
expensive (you could buy toffee apples from Tail's shop for threepence
each) we never got to buy one from Ginger as we called him. But
we would go out and tell him we were not allowed to buy one, and
he would turn very abusive and curse and swear at us, whereupon
we would set our black and white collie dog Chico on to him. This
was funny to watch, for our dog would flee at
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