The Magic Biscuit Barrel

My mother used to drag a reluctant me up Great Western Road every so often to visit an old neighbour from her Bath Street days. Nice auld biddy, a Mrs Purves: no family and left all alone in the world. They’d talk about old times and share funny stories. I’d sit sullen and emotionally cauterised by life (a posture I may well have maintained well into my forties). She’d give us tea and shortbread on fancy china crockery but she wasn’t a snob, she just had nice things (her husband had been a successful photographer).

One day, when we were making ready to leave, and my mother left the room to go to the toilet, Mrs Purves presented quite a snazzy looking biscuit barrel. It looked all gilt and gold and had frosted glass. It was the fucking snazziest looking fucking biscuit barrel I’d ever seen or ever would.

She beckoned me over to where she was seated on a comfy big chair like a throne and said ever so quietly..

“Listen ye wee scunner! Yer Maw’s good enough to bring you all the way over here to eat yer weight in ma shortbreed and aw ye can do is sit there looking as if yer gonna burst oot greetin’”

I was taken aback by this woman who’d suddenly turned into Big Annie fae the steamy. She had a look on her face that would have made a Clydeside docker gulp and apologise for breathing.

“Now I’m gonna gie you this biscuit barrel and tell you how it works”

What did she mean ‘how it works’? I was confused. You opened the lid and took a biscuit out if there were any. Maybe the auld yin was losing the plot.

She saw the doubt in my eyes and went on..

“It’s no’ any old biscuit barrel, stumur. Ye don’t think I’m givin’ ye any old biscuit barrel, do ye? This is a magic biscuit barrel. A magic biscuit barrel”

I was beginning to get really feart now and wished my mum would hurry back from the toilet. Her auld pal was talking shite about magic biscuit barrels.

“Me and ma Harry used to have great fun with this biscuit barrel”. Auld Mrs Purves was looking into the near distance and licking her lips at some memory that I really didn’t want to know about.

“All ye have to do is open the lid and make a wish into the barrel. But it can only be for good things for other folk, not for yourself. Harry would make one for me every Friday night and I’d make one for him. That’s the way it works, do you understand? Never for yourself, but what you wish for others might be good for yourself as weel. That’s all you need to know. Maybe you can think of some way of taking that peely wally look aff yer…O hello Jean, just havin’a chat with wee David here. My he’s a right wee blether”

My mum, having re-entered the room, looks at me quizzically and I revert to silent and morose mode.

“Why was Mrs Purves giving you a biscuit barrel, anyway?”

This is on the bus into town as we wend our way back home.

“Erm, I said I liked it and she said she didn’t want it anymore, so she gave it to me”

“You said you liked a biscuit barrel?”

“Aye…I mean, yes”

“David, if we won the pools, it would be hard to even get a murmur from you these days, but you liked Mrs Purves’ biscuit barrel’

I decided I shouldn’t, and didn’t want to tell her it was a magic biscuit barrel.

That night and fed up with a new game show on the telly, Probe My Anus with Bruce Forsyth, I crept away into my room in search of my new toy: the magic biscuit barrel. It was indeed magic, as every time you finished the last biscuit it would immediately replenish itself with Mint Viscounts, Caramel Logs, Tunnock’s Teacakes and Blue Ribands. Or, this may have been my mother’s doing. But, while it was empty, you could ask it to do anything.

“Go get the coal from the bunker” The bunker was away at the end of the block and one had to brave the cutting winds coming in from the Fenwick Moors while you heaped the family coal-bucket full of the jet black sleet stones.

Of course….fuck all happened!

Stupit auld cunt!