When I was a child, my family conspiratorially called our shed the chalet because it seemed wrong to admit we had holidaymakers staying there for the Glasgow Fair.
Had we been middle class, the wooden bijou space in a seaside town – with glass frontage, two single beds, cooker and a sink – would be called a summer house.
There were no complaints from the two evangelical Mormons who lived there when my parents moved in, in 1967, but no, it was definitely a shed.
We are now in the midst of the Glasgow Fair and for me it evokes memories of sleeping in the living room with my parents and brother, while every other available space was occupied by holidaymakers from the city.
The black economy of renting rooms in Ayrshire to the “letting folk” was such a booming business up until the 1970s, the local council held off chasing unpaid rates, knowing that after the Fair the money would roll in.
As soon as my mother placed an advert in the Daily Record, the phone would ring until my mum yanked it off the hook because despite every free room in Saltcoats being up for rent, demand outstripped supply.
Now living in Glasgow, the streets of my city are noticeably quieter as workers take a break for the Fair.
Today the destinations are Spain or further afield, certainly more exotic than when they once headed “doon the watter”, to the coastal towns of Rothesay, Dunoon, Saltcoats and Stevenston, as well as to the east, stretching up to Aberdeen.
For us children, the Glasgow folk arriving was exciting but for our mums, with the dads at work, it was stress and sweat.
For those like my parents, the Glasgow Fair was their only chance to make ready cash.
Our two bedrooms upstairs were rented for £20 a week, which doubled my dad’s monthly wage and for that they got the use of a little kitchen and to share the bathroom.
If they wanted a heat, in a rainy July, they put coins in the meter.
They brought their own sheets and pillow cases and towels but my mum still had to clean the rooms in a two-hour turnaround.
With the first week’s “letting money” my parents bought a fridge and those Glasgow people certainly put a dent in the mortgage.
They were out all day, down to the beach where rented deck chairs sat cheek by jowl and the sea became a human soup.
The chip shops, the pubs, the high street of grocers, clothes shops and a Woolworths, were teeming with people.
Our “letting folk” were well behaved – apart from the woman we found sprawled drunk on the bathroom floor.
For children the highlight was the arrival of the shows, the waltzers, dodgems and ferris wheel, which gave a vantage point so high I thought I would see America if I strained my neck enough.
I recently shared my memories with Natalie Cowie-Kayes, 55, whose great grandmother Mary Ellen was from the White family who ran the fair camped by the sea wall for the summer.
Her family ran the dodgems and the waltzers and the big wheel and rented pitches to other show people.
Natalie said: “What was excitement to you was work to us.”
But she loved her times in Saltcoats, sleeping in a caravan, sheltered from the ocean bluster by a line of show lorries.
She said: “The days seemed sunnier then and at night it was lovely to see the fair lit up and hear all the screams of delight from people on the waltzers.”
Busloads would come from the city and kids would disembark with brown labels pinned to their chests, with their name and coach number, so the show people could keep an eye out and return the wanderers.
She said: “If a bus came in the morning we would always open up. When the Glasgow Fair came, that was the busy time. We had to be up and ready and as we got older, we would take turns to work. They tended to put the small children in with their parents or siblings in a stall, so they could do little jobs and be kept an eye on. I used to love working on the hook-a-duck stall.”
I remember taking my first prize goldfish home in a bag to my bemused parents.
Natalie recalls her father buying the goldfish in bulk from a pet shop and to appease her, he kept them in a child bath so they would have room to swim.
The show people knew all the locals and Natalie is still friends with a family who lived near the shows and who took the kids in to play and get them ready for bed while her parents worked.
Of course it is all so different now, the lights of the shows are gone and the sparkle of the place has dimmed.
Like Natalie, I cherished walking to the nearby harbour to gaze at its cottage museum collection of speckled seabird eggs.
I still go to the harbour to walk through an opening cut into the stone wall that stops Saltcoats being laid out like a corpse under a sheet of water.
Down the small concrete steps, a shoulder of rocks slope, where you can sit in audience of an untameable giant, of sea and wind.
Natalie describes it as “like stepping through to Narnia”.
If you strain your neck, maybe you will see America or at least be transported to the magical memories of a Glasgow Fair.
