Day 77
Millie Gray
In our next instalment of Voices of Leith, Claire Smith catches up with Local Leith author, Millie Gray.
She has written ten family sagas, based in Leith, which describe lives shaped by hardship, transformed by hard work and held together by love and family.
Millie Gray, now aged 87, became a novelist at the age of 75 and has chosen to set all of her work in the area where she was born.
“I was born in the slums - in Admiralty Street - or ‘Admirality Street’. You always know if a person is from Leith because they say ‘Admirality Street’.”
The family moved to Restalrig, but Grey stayed close to her granny who continued to live in a one room and bath in Leith.
“She died when I was 18 so I knew all about ‘Admirality Street’. The docks were so important to us and young people like my brother worked at Henry Robb and went to join the Merchant Navy.”
Another great inspiration was her great aunt, an untrained midwife and nurse who helped poor families at times of birth and death - a service known as ‘hatch and despatch’. Her story is at the heart of her novel ’18 Couper Street’.
Gray loved writing but worked as a school secretary and as a personnel officer for the council. She became a well known historian and storyteller, celebrating the everyday lives of the people of Leith.
It was only when a deaf member of the audience asked where she could find stories in written form, that Gray became a novelist. Her books, published by Leith-based Black and White Publishing, follow families across the forties, fifties and sixties, describing births, deaths and romance against a backdrop of extraordinary social change.
“I do well in the libraries - elderly people like to read my books and they are used to borrowing books. My book ‘Silver Linings’, about the war and the shipyards was popular in Canada and Australia and was chosen as Book of the Day by an Australian radio station.
Gray’s first husband worked for the shipyard. As a widow, she met her current husband, a former policeman, whose tales about Dora Noyce, the madame of Danube Street, inspired the fictional brothel in her latest book ‘The House on Rosebank Lane’.
Gray specialises in writing about strong, determined, family minded women who are determined to survive and prosper - even if life is hard.
There is always some romance in her books - she believes fiction should end with the positivity of love and hope - but there are always difficulties to be overcome.
“I am one of seven children who were born in poverty - but there was always that determination that we were going to do better.”
She believes this is the real spirit of Leith. This and the willingness to help other people whenever possible.
“Leith had these terrible slums, with cockroaches and mice and people did have to help each other out. I remember when I went to my granny’s before I got my dinner I would have to take two bowls of soup over the road to Mrs Burgess over the road.”
In the last year Millie Gray has had a stroke and has had to face the isolation of Covid - it reminded her of hearing her Great Aunt talk about the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, which left her father barely strong enough to crawl across the floor. “They had flu, we have Covid,” she says. Looking back on the history of Leith makes her feel sure brighter times are ahead.
“Life is like the sea,” she says. “Sometimes you go and it’s bleak. But the waves will come rolling in and things will change.”
Book covers as mentioned in the article: Silver Linings, EIghteen Couper Street and the House on Rosebank Lane.
Image of Millie Gray - copyright Black and White Publishing.
All titles mentioned here, and others available from Black and White Publishers can be bought online.