EVERY time she looks inside the old biscuit tin her mother kept for photos and family memorabilia, Bridget Crossan finds something new to rejoice in.

“No matter how often I do it, each time is like the first look into a treasure chest of priceless collectables,” she says, adding with a laugh: “The Family Circle Biscuit Tin of Treasure…”

Every home has one – an old box of photos no-one ever quite got round to putting into albums, scraps of old letters and dog-eared home-made cards made at primary school for parents who lovingly stored them away for generations.

Recently, Bridget – who set up the popular Facebook page Castlemilk Cooks Up Memories - shared her own recollections of growing up in Glasgow for Times Past, and it inspired her to look even further down memory lane.

Glasgow Times: Bridget on the chute at nursery

“The biscuit tin has been kind of hidden away out of sight at my brother’s house since we lost our mum,” explains Bridget.

“Sitting going through the tin with my own kids, who are now grown-ups themselves, it felt like I was almost reliving each picture as I told the story behind each one….”

Bridget was born in Castlemilk, in the house her parents and older siblings moved to from the Gorbals.

Glasgow Times: Bridget and her brother in their jammies

“I can remember playing in the garden, playing shops using old newspapers and empty food cans and even grass and leaves for fish and chips,” she says.

“We’d be out playing all day, in for dinner, then back out to ‘sell’ our fish suppers thinking all the time, ‘ah cannae wait tae Friday tae get real chips aff the chip van.’ Then my mum would appear at the back door, and the ‘chippie’ would close for the day - in, washed and ready for bed.”

Bridget adds: “There’s a picture of me and my brother dressed in our jammies and I actually remember that picture being taken, as I was wearing brand new frilly pink jammies which I just loved.

“There are photos of my gran in the tin too – we didn’t call her gran, or granny, always Maw. She was my mum’s mum, also called Bridget, like my mum and I. I always wondered why my older sisters hadn’t been given that blessing as they did come before me, after all. But no, it was kept for me.”

She laughs: “As if having ginger hair full of ringlets wasn’t enough to contend with - I was like the Scottish Shirley Temple when I was wee. Now I’m proud to have been called after my mum, and Maw.”

Bridget says her gran was ‘like one of the characters in The Steamie.’

“She was a hawker down the Briggait, a character, that’s for sure,” she smiles. “She was with us most days while I was young, even on our summer holidays when, for two weeks of each year at the Glasgow Fair, we would all get on the train at Glasgow Central and head off to Saltcoats.

“My mum, Maw, my sisters and brothers and me all went – my dad would come down at the weekends with his pay poke and stay until the Sunday when he’d go back up the road to work on the Monday.”

She smiles: “He’d have some fly pub time in McNee’s or the Star Bar next to the Larkfield Depot where he worked – he was a bus driver.”

Bridget adds: “I’m proud to be from Castlemilk. My children are too. I hope one day they will be able to show their kids their very own biscuit tin full of family and Glasgow memories.”

 

href="https://www.facebook.com/Glasgow-Times-History-109940018077424">