The River Flows On

by Maggie Craig

‘Your Mammy would think the 534 looks bonnie,’ Jessie told her niece, ‘because your Daddy, who’s helping to fit the ship out, gave her some money out of his pay to buy her nice new winter coat.’

  Kate grinned. She was pleased with the coat, all the more so because she didn’t often get new clothes. Robbie, however, had insisted that she buy it. He knew full well how much she’d come to hate the old herringbone tweed coat she’d been wearing for years, and which had been second-hand when she got it. That would now be relegated to the foot of their bed, an extra covering for the cold winter nights.

  Jessie, on her Christmas holidays from college, had helped her sister choose the coat on a shopping trip that morning. It was dark green, with a big shawl collar in black velvet. The coat was well cut, hung beautifully and made Kate feel beautiful too. She couldn’t wait to show it to Robbie.

  Kate glanced up at the Singer’s clock, rising above the huge complex of the sewing-machine factory. The imposing tower was a landmark for miles around, the clock face, so she’d been told, the second largest in the world. An hour till he was due home. Grace’s feet slid on a patch of ice. Kate tightened her grip on her hand, smiling down reassuringly, and Jessie took the little girl’s other hand.

  ‘I wonder what they’ll call her,’ mused Kate, nodding towards the 534.

  Jessie tossed her head. ‘Andrew Baxter reckons that Queen Victoria is the best bet. Typical, he says, of this country’s backward-looking stance to the glory days of Empire and its refusal to reach out and embrace the modern world.’

  Kate bit her tongue. Jessie, however, said it for her, smiling ruefully.

  ‘I know, I know, he does talk like a political manifesto sometimes, but I-’

  She broke off, colour staining her pale cheeks. Kate changed the subject, asking her a question about her studies. That kept them going till they got down onto Dumbarton Road and she and Grace had waved Jessie off on the Yoker tram.

  But I love him. Was that what Jessie had been about to say? Kate thought it over as she and Grace walked the short distance from the tram stop back to their little flat. Andrew Baxter might profess to love all of mankind, but Kate had a suspicion he had a rather more personal interest in womankind. She had seen him several times with different girls - all flashy types like Pearl. Jessie didn’t stand a chance against that sort of competition.

  Quiet and studious, she didn’t make the most of herself. She was always clean and neat, but she took little interest in clothes and she wore her brown hair as she had done since she was a child, neatly combed back into a pony tail. For the umpteenth time, Kate wondered what would have happened if Barbara Baxter had lived. Would she have brought her friend out of her shell as the two of them approached womanhood, given her some of her own happy-go-lucky spirit? She sighed. No point in heading down the road of what might have been. She knew that better than anybody. She led Grace over the crossing at the bottom of Kilbowie Road.

  She’d made one of Robbie’s favourites for tonight’s tea -mince and tatties. The mince, thick with gravy and rich with carrots and onion and turnip, had been cooked that morning before she went out, and the potatoes were peeled and steeped in water, waiting to be boiled. She’d got some butter to cream them with. Normally she bought margarine to save money, but Robbie didn’t like the taste of it. Since things did seem to be getting a bit easier, and the 534 looked set to guarantee work for the next couple of years, she’d lashed out on the butter.

  Walking up the stone stairs to their flat on the second floor, Kate thought how funny it was how having a wee bit of money could make all the difference between being miserable and being happy. Knowing she could afford the supplies now as well as the modest fee, she had joined a local Saturday-afternoon art club in the spring. Getting back to some serious painting again had been great, and she quickly realized that she’d been fooling herself when she had thought she could put off her own ambitions indefinitely.

  They’d done sketches of the river and street scenes of Clydebank, gone up to the Bluebell Woods above the town for a more rural subject. Now that they were back indoors for the winter, some of the students were working those up into paintings, while others were concentrating on portraits, using each other as models.

  And a little extra money meant that she’d been able to buy Grace a doll for her Christmas. Granny Baxter, in on the big secret, had made two sets of clothes for it. Grace would be old enough to understand about hanging up her stocking this year and she’d waken up on Christmas morning to find it filled with an apple, an orange, a few sweets and a shiny new penny. Kate was looking forward to seeing her wee face - especially when she saw her dolly.

  For most adults, who went to work on Christmas Day like any other, the big celebration was a week later at Hogmanay, but Kate liked the idea of celebrating them both. She’d bought Robbie a present, too - a fountain pen. He seemed to be doing a lot of writing these days. She wasn’t quite sure what – he was being unusually secretive about it. Och well, no doubt he would tell her in his own good time.

  She had just put her key in the lock when the heavy door swung open. Robbie stood there. Kate blinked. What on earth was he doing home so early? She looked closer. He was very pale. She reached out a hand to him and he grasped it between the two of his, pulling her and Grace into the house.

  ‘Are you ill?’ she enquired anxiously.

  Clutching her hand to his chest, he shook his head, started to speak, then had to swallow and gulp and take a second shot at it.

  ‘We’ve all been laid off,’ he told her. “They’ve stopped work on the 534.’

  Chapter 21

  At the beginning of the second winter of unemployment, in November 1932, Kate sold the lovely green coat. She got half of what she had paid for it. She used the money to buy food, and a pair of shoes for Grace, second-hand but in reasonable condition. She hated not being able to buy them new, but she searched long and hard to find a pair that were as good a fit as possible. At least now Grace wasn’t going around wearing shoes which were letting in water and really past repairing -like her own.

  She took the old shabby herringbone tweed coat off the bottom of the bed and starting wearing it again. She hated doing that too, but there was nothing else for it. Och, but Robbie was angry with her when he found out.

  ‘What did you sell your coat for?’ he asked, his mouth set in a tight line.

  ‘Because Grace’s shoes were falling off her feet! Because I wanted us all to have something nice to eat for a change!’ Kate flung back at him. ‘The dole money doesn’t buy very much.’

  ‘I’d have happily done without,’ he replied, tossing his head. He looked so haughty, glaring at her, his eyes like grey steel. She had never thought she would ever be on the receiving end of a look like that. It made her want to shout at him, to point out how thin he was, how thin they both were. They were doing without as it was, not taking their own fair share so that Grace could have the nourishment a growing child needed.

  Angry and tired of it all, she had squared up to him, hands on hips, ready to give it laldy. The ghost of a smile had touched his mouth as he looked down at her. Then, his eyes softening, he had uttered one simple sentence, his voice low and husky.

  ‘I wanted you to have a bonnie coat - a new coat.’

  She learned a little more about male pride that day. How a man felt when he couldn’t provide properly for his wife and family. Especially when he had the strength and the skills and the willing hands - but the work just wasn’t there. That didn’t stop Robbie from trying to find some. Every day he tramped around looking for homers - carpentry jobs he could do to earn a few extra shillings to supplement the dole money.

  With hundreds of men doing exactly the same thing, finding the wee jobs that still needed doing wasn’t easy. More often than not he came home footsore and weary, and with nothing to show for his efforts but another hole in the sole of his shoe.

  Kate tried to make some money herself by selling her pictures, going up to Glasgow and doing
the rounds of the private galleries. At the first two she tried she was looked up and down and shown the door. She was a young woman in a shabby coat trailing a child by the hand. What could she possibly have that would be of interest to them? At the third one she was more persistent, insisting on opening her small portfolio. The woman in charge pronounced the four water colours of the Bluebell Woods to be quite pretty. Kate’s heart leapt until the woman went on to reject them. ‘It’s a bit of a hackneyed subject, isn’t it, the bluebells of Scotland?’

  Back out on the pavement, Kate pulled Grace into the doorway of an unoccupied shop. Tilting her head back against the heavy metal grille which guarded the door of the empty premises she closed her eyes briefly. This was awful. It was like trying to sell part of herself.

  ‘Mammy?’ Grace was tugging on her skirt, an anxious look on her little face. Kate smiled brightly down at her.

  ‘A few more places to go, Grace, and then I’ll buy you a bag of sweeties.’ She could just about afford it. Gathering her courage, she took her daughter by the hand. Robbie was doing this all day, every day. The least she could do was to keep trying for a wee while longer.

  At the fifth gallery there was no interest in her pictures of Clydebank or the river - too realistic - the man said, but she noticed that he too lingered over the Bluebell Woods paintings.

  ‘Charming,’ he said slowly. ‘Not an uncommon subject, of course, but you’ve brought a certain freshness to it.’ He hesitated. Then Kate’s hopes were dashed once more.

  ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘No. They’re not really what’s selling at the moment.’ He waved a hand at his walls. Grace was looking around her in fascination, entranced by all the pretty pictures. ‘Sophisticated interiors, picturesque foreign landscapes - the Italian lakes, little villages in the Swiss Alps ... that’s the sort of thing I need at the moment. Have you got anything like that?’ He glanced up, looking at her over pince-nez spectacles. Shades of Miss Nugent.

  ‘No,’ said Kate, tired and fed up and unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘I’m finding it a wee bit difficult scraping up the train fare to Italy at the moment.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s what people want. Something to help them shut out the gloom and doom of the Depression.’

  ‘Some of us aren’t able to do that,’ said Kate sharply. ‘Come on, Grace.’ She began scooping her paintings back into the portfolio, but the man put a hand out to stop her.

  ‘Not so fast, young lady.’ He was studying the pictures again. ‘They’ve definitely got something ... I’d need them framed, though.’

  Kate swallowed. ‘I can’t afford to get them framed. My husband’s out of work.’

  The man hesitated. ‘All right. I’ll take them. Come back in a month and I’ll let you know if I’ve sold any of them.’

  Kate put her pride in her pocket. ‘I need the money now.’

  He quibbled about that. He didn’t know if he would be able to sell them after all, and he was going to have the expense of framing them. With the persistence born of desperation, Kate pressed the point. Eventually he agreed to give her five pounds for the four of them. She’d been hoping for more, but it was a lot better than nothing, and she was well aware that she had very little bargaining power.

  The five pounds didn’t last very long, as they were in arrears with the rent. Back in her own less than sophisticated interior Kate took her frustrations out on keeping the tiny flat ferociously clean and on tramping around Clydebank with Grace in tow looking for bargains. She got to know the times when the butcher would have bones to sell off for a few pence, learned to buy the vegetables which were cheaper because they were bashed, compared notes with other women about which bakers were selling off yesterday’s bread and rolls at half-price. They lived on soup and she wore out more and more shoe leather through scouring the town for the ingredients to make it.

  It all seemed worse because of the 534, rusting there in Brown’s yard. Birds had even started nesting in it. You couldn’t escape it anywhere in Clydebank, towering over the town like a great white elephant. There had been such high hopes the day the keel had been laid. Those hopes were dust and ashes now.

  Cunard, in severe financial difficulties, had pleaded with the government to advance it sufficient funds to allow construction to proceed. The government refused. Clydebank’s MP, Davie Kirkwood, added his voice to those passionate pleas. A skilled orator, he was quick to see the symbolism. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that as long as number 534 lies like a skeleton in my constituency, so long will the Depression last in this country.’ The rusting hull of the 534, which was to have been the greatest passenger liner ever, did indeed become a symbol of the Depression, and of the despair which blighted so many lives in those years.

  Kate felt that despair too. She fought against it, trying to stay cheerful and positive for Grace and Robbie’s sakes, but it was hard. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Sometimes it overwhelmed her, especially when she thought of how very different her life might have been.

  She gave herself a shake whenever she found her thoughts heading in that direction, refusing to allow herself to dwell on what might have been. That was all in the past, like everything else in that magical year when it had really seemed as though things might be going to turn out differently.

  Whenever she started to feel miserable she reminded herself that she had Grace, who had brought so much joy into her life. The little girl could even make Robbie smile, no easy task these days.

  Day after day he came home tired and dispirited from the search for work which wasn’t there, sitting silently for hours on end beside the range after they’d finished their frugal evening meal. Grace would study him gravely and then speak.

  ‘Are you sad tonight, Daddy?’

  ‘Not when I look at you, sweetheart,’ he always replied, and she would climb up onto his knee and cuddle into him. Kate often wished she could do the same, show him that physical affection she knew he had once craved so much from her.

  She was by no means sure that he still did. Their days devoted to the struggle to survive, they both tumbled exhausted into the box bed at night. He turned to her less often lately, but when he did his need was urgent and overwhelming. That scared her and, however much she tried to hide it, she knew that he felt her shrinking from his touch.

  He was never rough with her - it was not in him to be that - but the tenderness had gone. She herself was partially responsible for that. Frightened by his passion, she had rebuffed his attempts to hold her afterwards once too often. The last time they had made love - a month ago now - he hadn’t even kissed her or murmured the usual soft words of thanks before turning his back on her.

  Choking back silent tears, Kate had stared at that rigid back for what seemed like hours, lifting her hand to touch it more than once - and dropping it again each time.

  Their easy daytime companionship also became a thing of the past. Worn down by lack of money, worried for themselves and everybody else, two proud people who had hurt each other without meaning to were growing further and further apart. Kate had always shied away from physical contact. Now they had become emotionally tongue-tied with each other.

  If it hadn’t been for Grace, Kate sometimes thought the house would have been completely silent. She had tried a couple of weeks ago, not long after that dreadful night when he’d turned his back on her. Heart-sorry for her weary young husband, pale and tired and painfully easing his feet out of his boots after a day tramping around looking for work, she had asked him tentatively how he’d got on. He had bitten her head off. She hadn’t asked again.

  One Friday afternoon in December 1932, a year after the men had been laid off, Kate trudged home wearily from a prolonged shopping expedition, little to show in her message bag for the effort she’d put into it. She’d walked two miles to a baker’s which had been recommended - to save the tram fare - only to find that everything was sold out. Deciding perversely to walk all the way home again to save a further f
ew pennies, a passing delivery van had then driven through an icy puddle and drenched her legs and feet.

  The only blessing was that she hadn’t had to drag Grace around with her today. She had gone to her Granny Baxter’s till tomorrow. When Kate got in she peeled off the old herringbone tweed coat and spread it over the backs of two of the kitchen chairs to dry.

  Yee-uch! The damp wool smelled like a wet collie dog. She hated that coat with a passion. Her shoes were sopping wet from the soaking she’d got, not surprising when one of them had a hole in the sole and the stitching of the other was beginning to come apart. Kate stuffed them with a couple of sheets of old newspaper she kept for that purpose and set them down to dry at the side of the range. Then she started towelling her hair, looking at herself in the small mirror which hung to one side of the sink.

  ‘You look like a drowned rat, Mrs Baxter,’ she told her reflection.

  There was a knock at the door. Who in the name of the wee man could that be? Padding over the hard floor on her damp stocking soles she opened the door.

  ‘Kate?’

  Dumbfounded, Kate stared at the two people who stood there: Marjorie Drummond - and behind her the tall elegant figure of her husband.

  Chapter 22

  Marjorie was beaming at her, the smile spreading all over her good-natured face.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask us in, Kate? You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost!’

  Bemused, Kate swung open the door and ushered them in. Seen a ghost? You bet she had. Except that ghosts were airy-fairy creatures, trailing white robes behind them. He was far more substantial than that, wearing a smart trenchcoat over a fashionable suit. He was also as handsome as ever, and he was standing in her home, smiling at her.

  ‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ she said, letting the towel – one of those Marjorie had given her as a wedding present and gey washed-out now - slide to her shoulders. She hoped she hadn’t stuttered as she said it.