"A View From My Window" ~ the ploughman’s daughter in the big house

 As a child of 13 I drew a picture for my mother and called it "A View From My Window". I had a room in the "big house" where I went to work "in service".

No, we were not Victorian; by this time it was mid 20th century ’modern’ days but the War came and, in 1940, we were wrenched from our ’home’ in London. Most London evacuees were sent ’down the country’ to strangers but my dad, being Scottish, sent us back home to granma’s house at the Bonny Banks (of Loch Lomond), in a little village called Gartocharn which means ’village of stone’. When we first went, I was just 11, going on 12 and I was enrolled in the village school for one year, followed by a year in the Alexandria Academy. From there I went to work in the big house, a little maid of 13.

I wanted to be a dressmaker but no chance in such  troubled times. My mum was a tailoress, trained by her father. Grandfather’s tailor shop was in Glasgow, close to the Fairfield shipyards, and that is where my mother went back to work during the war. Cities were no place for children with the nightly bombing raids so we all had to stay far away, in the country. I was never back with my mother and father. The War delivered me into the world, a young woman of 16.

Anyway, my mum was pleased with my picture but also somewhat dismayed that a child of hers should be ’put in service’, as her own father had worked hard to save the family from poverty by making sure, to the best of his ability, that they all were educated.

I didn’t mind the work and it was luxury indeed to have a room of my own. Granma’s wee cottage was bursting at the seams. She had had a stroke and was no longer able to work. There were 5 of us evacuated into her care, and there was my aunt, granma’s daughter, who had to give up her work outside the home to take care of her mother and then all of us too! She of course carried the brunt of the workload. Most women of my aunt’s age group were in uniform with the forces and she would have loved more than anything to be with them. It was a big adventure for ’girls’ to be in the WRENS or the NAAFI (Navy, Army & Air Force service industries).

Up at the big house there were children and, it was a riding school so there were horses too. Father of the house was a "Yorkshire Hussar" or to give them their full title The Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Yeomanry (Hussars). Whatever happened to that prestigious force after the War?

My own father, no more a ploughman, was a modern-day truck driver by the time I was a schoolgirl. He was well-clad in heavy cotton shirts made by mum and he reckoned that "no matter how cold, wet and dirty it may be..." in those blue shirts, he’d always be clean, warm and dry. "Irish wit" that was, to our great amusement.

My mother’s brother James, were they Moors way back is my big question - their father, my maternal grandfather, was from Ireland but his name was Hassan(!) James Hassan, his son (also James) was training to be a doctor at only 16. He was the eldest. But Scarlet Fever swept through Glasgow and took both James and his sister Alice, leaving my mum, now the eldest, and her parents (my grandparents) broken-hearted. The younger children all did well; George a banker, Janet, an Edinburgh psychiatrist, Esther, a school teacher, and Wyn joined the NAAFI.

To understand the forces at play, it is important to say that we were Pentecostal Fundamentalists. Education, in those early days, was frowned upon, so I had to admire my grandparents for the strength of their convictions in relation to their children; to see them all "well set up in life" was to fulfil a life vow: that this new generation would never know the deprivations my grandfather had known.

My own mother and father left their native land to join the work of the Mission in London. My dad, Guy Browning, working in the fields, ploughing with the old Clydesdale horses, got ’the Call’; to help with the Mission work in London’s Docklands, that the Evangelist, Duncan McFarlane, had been led to open by Faith. These two Scottish couples were firm friends who from the early days had had the same spiritual Teacher back in Scotland; John Reid, but they were quite different in age.

Duncan McFarlane was born in 1875, and his wife, Agnes Robertson, was born at the turn of the century, while my mum and dad were a young couple just starting out on life’s journey. So we were born there, all 5 of us, in the Mission, and the other 5 children who were born right there in the London Mission Hall were the McFarlane Boys. Agnes Robertson was their mother. It was the 1920s, so you can see that Duncan McFarlane was having these children in his 50s, and you can see how, over the years, everyone came to refer to him as ’Grandfather’. He was our spiritual Leader.

My dad may have given up the plough to serve God but he always had a love for the horses. Aunt Agnes would laugh as she told the story of walking along a London street with Guy Browning, and he would say "Now, she’s a beauty!" And Agnes would turn her head, expecting to see a fine young woman, only to see a horse!

My dad, after a stint at bottle-washing (anything to support two families which was his commitment and joy) did get work driving a horse and cart so he was back to the horses but in London Town! For me, as a small child, those big work-horses on the streets of London could be very frightening though. I remember having nightmares of them sinking their enormous teeth into my back!!

We knew as we grew older that aunt Agnes had said in jest: she would have the boys and my mum would have the girls and they would be companions for one another. Perhaps she said this when it was looking that way. Agnes did have all boys, and my mum had two girls, then two boys, then one more girl. As it turned out two sisters did marry two brothers. And, at one time it did look like all three Browning girls would marry a McFarlane boy, but that was not to be!

I loved the old Mission Hall. I remember the atmosphere of the place with great fondness. The many people who came and went through that "Open Door" were good to us as children, and I loved to join in the singing. My imagination ran riot as we sang hymns like

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand...

The Mission Hall, as we called it, was an old pub. The ’Door’ to the Mission was held by my dad’s uncle (his father’s brother) Great-Uncle Tom (Browning). Great Uncle Tom had just recently returned from America "dun-roaming" he would say (an ’in’ joke if you grew up near Duncryne!), made his peace with God and settled down to the same business of helping others. ’Grandfather’ and Agnes gave themselves entirely to ’The Good Work’ among the poor and outcast, and ’Lived By Faith’.

Living By Faith, for them, meant not knowing where the next bite was coming from, let alone the rent for the place. Their lives were a testament to how God supplied their daily need at a time when very few people had much to spare. London Docklands in the 1920s and ’30s was depressed; no work until a ship came in and lucky to get more than a day or two out of that.

So people came in and out, finding solace, finding peace from their troubles and finding consolation in the Gospel. Indians, Africans, a New Zealander I remember, Londoners, people coming off the ships from the four corners of the Earth... And down-and-outs, strays and waifs; lovely people who had lost their way in the maze of life: Come, All ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.. That’s how it was.

To this day I have an old oak table which was given to me by one of those Londoners when we married, when we also opened a door for God’s little wanderers. This particular man had been a petty officer in the Navy. His ship, sailing out East, had run out of water. His name was called to swim ashore and find water. As he swam, a shot rang out from behind a bush. He shot back, and there was silence. But his relief turned to distress and over time his conscience tortured him that he may have shot and killed an innocent person, maybe even someone’s ’breadwinner’. So this was the guilt he felt burdened with when he happened upon our People and found amongst us another man who had lived with a similar distress after his boxing opponent died in the ring.

This old boxer told the story of sitting In the old Mission Hall and hearing about Paul & Silus in the "innermost prison", to which he called out in the Hall "I was in the innermost prison! What must I do to be Saved?!" And of course the answer came back to him "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be Saved!" So now he took this man who had suffered as he had suffered and said "Come along and be my brother and you will be a happy man."  And he was; for that I can vouch! As a child, I loved to hear his stories, to watch him sway as he sang with beaming face:

A little ship was on the sea, it was a pretty sight
It sailed along so pleasantly, and all was calm and bright...

"But Lo; a storm began to rage, the wind blew loud and strong..." that particular hymn went.  Just like our own lives; sometimes we sail along quite merrily too, ’til the storm comes and beats on our house. And the Master still holds out His hand and says, "It is I, Be not afraid." Then, Peace at last! How often people carry great wagonloads of guilt, as if God was Solomon himself with a big stick in the sky, not knowing His merciful, unchanging Love.