The Breadmakers Saga

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  Still smiling, Sarah pushed open the half-wood, half-glass door of MacNair’s Bakery and General Grocers. Being the foreman baker’s wife gave her a special status here.

  Already the shop was busy and her tired eyes lit with pleasure at the sight and sound of so many familiar people. Carefully she shut the door. Gratefully she savoured the heat of the place as it wrapped lovingly, comfortingly around her.

  Old Duncan MacNair, no longer spending his nights in the bakehouse but working from nine to five or six in the shop instead, was taking his time serving at the counter, his few grey hairs carefully parted and greased down over his head, his straggly moustache and goatee beard wet and drooping at the edges. He wasn’t that old, of course, only about sixty-five, and he had vivid blue and red veined cheeks, and glittery if somewhat watery blue eyes to prove it. He could be quick when he wanted, rheumatic hands clenched, elbows bent, boots lifting and clomping like Sandy’s horse; but this morning he did not want to and Maisie his assistant was being forced, much to her annoyance, to speed up her pace.

  ‘Oh, come on, Duncan, man!’ a customer tried to chivvy him on. ‘We’ll still be here when the hooter goes and nothing ready for our men’s dinner.’

  Duncan’s words came from his nose, not his mouth.

  ‘It’ll not take you long to fry your sausage and open your can of beans.’

  ‘You mind your cheek. I’m not Rab Munro’s wife, remember.’

  ‘Rab Munro’s wife?’ Sarah’s small rusty voice echoed over her shoulder. ‘What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘She was in here arguing the toss with old Duncan. But I’ll not argue with him. I’ll be over that counter and chug the beard off his face.’

  ‘Ah thought Rab’s wife never came over here.’

  ‘No, we’re not good enough for her nor her blondie-haired daughter. She was trying to put a spanner in the works and stop the girl and Melvin getting married. Old Duncan chased her, didn’t you, you auld rascal? I heard she went upstairs though.’

  The first thought that leapt to Sarah’s mind was that her husband had a weakness for blondes. Wasn’t that why, no matter how tired she felt, she never failed to bleach her own hair? As soon as the brown roots began to appear she conscientiously attended to them.

  A pulse twitched and leapt about her face and she hoped nobody could see it.

  ‘Blonde, did you say?’

  ‘Aye, long it was. I think thon hair must be natural.’

  Lines of strain pinched Sarah’s skin.

  If only she had been able to give her man the wee Iaddie he wanted. It was right and proper that a man should want a son.

  She felt ashamed - especially after all her man had done for her. Where would she have been, what sort of Iife would she have had without him? A bastard, brought up in a single-end-a dismal self-contained room - by a drunken granny, homeless when the old woman died and the factor put someone else in the house - where would she have gone but on to the streets?

  That’s what her mother-in-law always said.

  The danger now lay in being ill and a nuisance to Baldy or being ill and having to leave him to go to the hospital.

  A man needed to have his loving regular.

  And then there was the worry about money, too. Baldy never complained but the expense of her being ill was terrible.

  ‘Pretty, too, ah’ll bet,’ she quavered, her smile at its weakest.

  ‘Not half!’ The other woman unwittingly piled on the agony. ‘No make-up or anything either, just a wee, long-haired bairn.’

  Suddenly Duncan MacNair banged a gnarled fist impatiently on the counter.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he ordered in his high-pitched nasal tone. ‘What do you want? Let’s have it!’

  ‘Cheeky old rascal!’ The customer plumped her message basket on top of his hand making him yell with pain. ‘l don’t envy that girl coming here. If she doesn’t watch out she’ll have this one to contend with as well as the other.’ She suddenly bounced with laughter, and straining round to Sarah she added, ‘He’s fit for anything. And you’d better watch your Baldy, hen. He’s a great one for the blondes is Baldy.’

  ‘Aye!’ By some miracle Sarah found herself laughing instead of weeping. ‘He’s an awfi man!’

  The house was cold with quietness when she returned upstairs. And the coldness and the quietness made the house grow and made Sarah shrink; her slippered feet quickened their shuffle across the hall, pulled as if by a magnet to her retreat beside the kitchen fire.

  The fire was not long lit and smoke spiralled straight up, suddenly to bend and collapse, flutter and puff outwards. Huddled dull-eyed in her chair Sarah watched it. A mouse in the cupboard behind her nibbled tentatively, delicately, then, thinking the house must be empty because of its stillness, it began scraping and clawing and gnawing with reckless abandon.

  Sarah had drifted away to her youth: perched on her granny’s bottom-flat window-sill across the road, her skinny legs swinging, her short cotton dress covered by one of her granny’s long cardigans instead of a coat, she breathlessly admired the boys playing football.

  Old MacNair’s shop door served as one goal area, her granny’s close the other.

  Dessie Street echoed to bursting point with male yells, oaths, criticisms of play and desperate instructions.

  ‘Tackle him! Don’t let him through …’

  ‘Clear it! Clear it!’

  ‘No goal … no goal … it wasn’t off!’

  If a goal was scored in old MacNair’s doorway it had the added excitement of one of the boys, usually Baldy, having to swoop into the shop to retrieve the ball and shoot out again with old MacNair hot on his heels screaming for the police.

  And when the police, in the form of Constable Lamont, materialized (usually from the bakehouse where he had been enjoying a jam doughnut and a big mug of tea), the boys scattered and disappeared like cockroaches and Sarah scrambled down off the window-sill and hared up the close to the cries of protest from women having a lean out their windows above.

  ‘Och, they were no doing any harm, so they weren’t! How do you expect the Rangers and the Celtic to get any players if you’ll no let them practise in the street!’

  Baldy had eventually got a job at MacNair’s and flung himself into the flour of the bakehouse with every bit as much energy, noise and enthusiasm as he tackled everything else.

  One night in the bakehouse, after a bear-hug behind the flour sacks in the storeroom and a kiss that tasted of hot cross buns and had the squelchy sound of the dough-mixer, she told him that the doctor said she was expecting and for the baby’s sake they would have to get married.

  Baldy hadn’t batted an eyelid. ‘Aye, as soon as you like, hen. There’s plenty room round at Ma’s.’

  Ma meant Mrs Fowler or Lender Lil as she was more commonly known because she was Clydend’s money-lender. She did not have an office. All her business was done at her flat in Starky Street and there was a stream of people lapping in and out of Lender Lil’s all day.

  She was continually complaining about them and when Sarah moved in as Baldy’s wife her resentment increased.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Everybody lives off me around here, so why shouldn’t our Miss Sweeney?’

  ‘Ah’m not Miss Sweeney. Ah’m Mrs Fowler,’ Sarah stubbornly insisted. ‘And you shouldn’t be keepin’ Baldy’s wage packet now. Baldy’s my man. He should be handing his pay over to me. Ah’m his wife.’

  After her miscarriage she persuaded Baldy to leave his mother’s and take the house in Dessie Street, and his mother’s complaints instead of ceasing became worse.

  ‘Fancy, after all the sacrifices I’ve made for him, after all I’ve done, after keeping him for years while he served his time in that baker’s, he ups and leaves me before I’ve time to get a penny-piece back. My only son. Little did I think my Baldy would ever do a thing like this to his mother. Of course it’s not him, the big fat fool! It’s you and well I know it, Miss Sweeney! You’
ve tricked my boy into marrying you, now you’re making sure you gets your hands on all his money.’

  Often her harangues ended in floods of tears, but Sarah felt sorry for her. She suspected the older woman must be very lonely. Lender Lil maybe had diamond rings and gold watches and quite a bank account with interest money but she had very few if any real friends.

  Her sympathetic feelings towards Mrs Fowler however did nothing towards weakening her claims on her husband. Baldy was her man and the house in Dessie Street was their home, and she thanked God for them both, not Mrs Fowler.

  But now, with the news that another woman was coming to live on the stair, she felt heavy with secret hopelessness.

  She had been young and bonny once and full of life and loving. She had even once had long fair hair. She remembered brushing it and tying it back with pink satin ribbon the day that she and Baldy got married.

  She was suddenly agonizingly aware of the change in herself, of energy and eagerness drained away, the dewy wonder, the vulnerability, the excitement of youth dried up and toughened.

  The more she thought of the newcomer to Dessie Street, the more her mind shrank away from the idea.

  Like a mirror to the child she could be no more and could never have, Sarah did not know how she could bring herself to look at Catriona, and dreaded the ordeal of seeing her as she had never dreaded anything else before.

  Chapter 6

  The staccato stutter of the Benlin riveters filled to bursting point the whole Main Road and Dessie Street and all the streets in Clydend with a fiendish metallic noise that echoed all over Glasgow, even drowning the rumble and clanging of the tramcars.

  The people in Dessie Street had learned to live with it, to ignore it, to adapt their outside voices to broad, lusty bawls accentuated by elastic mouths that looked as if they were trying to make lip-reading as easy as possible for the deaf folk.

  Women leaned out of windows and shouted pleasantries to each other and exchanged titbits of gossip. Little girls in the dusty street below squealed and giggled and teetered and tiptoed about in their mothers high-heeled shoes and too-long dresses and held on to huge-brimmed, feather-trimmed hats. Others were lost in rapt concentration, their eyes glued to a fast bouncing ball.

  ‘One, two, three a-leary … four, five, six a-leary, seven, eight, nine a-leary, ten a-leary postman!’

  One child was crawling along the pavement intent on chalking in as big letters as she could stretch to: ‘Alice Campbell loves Murdo Paterson’.

  Big boys and wee boys were racing and slipping and dribbling and kicking and shouting and fighting, playing football.

  Upstairs in Number 1 Dessie Street Mrs Amy Gordon, widowed mother of Jimmy Gordon the confectioner, snoozed in her rocking-chair beside her kitchen fire.

  Sometimes at moments like this she thought her husband was still alive. She would waken, startled into awareness by the sound of the front door, a rush of joy bringing his name to her lips. And then in the heart-rending minute as she remembered, the world emptied. She was alone. Seven long years he had been dead yet her subconscious mind, her unconscious heart still refused to accept it.

  He had been a kind and loving husband, a conscientious if somewhat strict father, and a good hard-working baker for MacNair’s although he’d never got much thanks for it; a big bully of a man like Baldy Fowler was thought much more of in that place. The bakery had killed him; the long night hours, the heat, the extreme change of temperature outside that the body never had time to adjust to, the heavy lifting and handling, the breathing in of flour dust through the mouth, the nose, the lungs and every open sweaty pore.

  They’d vowed that Jimmy would never have to follow in his father’s footsteps and encouraged the lad to stay on at school. They’d even dreamed of seeing him at university.

  Jimmy had an intensely studious and searching mind. He was always experimenting with things and asking questions and he soaked up books, any kind of books, at a truly bewildering rate. He worked his way through the nearest library at Elder Park in no time and was soon spending hour after hour in the Mitchell Library in the city.

  ‘It’s the most marvellous place, Mum,’ he kept assuring her. ‘They’ve even got a music room there.’

  It worried her how he lay reading in bed till all hours in the morning and then emerged, white-faced, to sit with his dark eyes still glued to a book all through breakfast, or at least until his father came in and snatched the book angrily from him.

  ‘Can you not strike a happy medium? No good can come of going to such extremes.’

  Her husband had been sorely tried with Jimmy’s piano-playing as well. First the hours of laborious practising: the nerve-twanging scales, up, up, up, up, up, up, down, down, down, down, down, then the stumbling melodies, the suspense-filled pauses as Jimmy struggled to find the right chord.

  ‘Is that you, son?’ she called towards a sound in the hall, her rocking-chair squeaking forward.

  Her answer was the strangely haunting notes of Sibelius’s Valse Triste issuing faintly from the front room as if Jimmy were playing the piano miles and miles away.

  She got up to make him a cup of tea, wishing he’d play more modern cheery stuff but nevertheless tum-tumming Sibelius and discreetly conducting with plump, ringed hands.

  She sighed, but a smile deepened the creases round her mouth and eyes. He’d be sitting through in the front room now, covered in flour from the top of his curly head to the toes of his working shoes but not in this same world as her carpet and cushions.

  The music gained in strength yet the gentleness of her son’s fingers touched and stirred unknown levels of feeling. Her whole being was gathered up and carried along and swung into sadness with such poignancy that she stopped, tea-pot in hand, lips quivering.

  Jimmy had had a rheumatic heart when he was a child and it still worried and distressed her. The doctor had said Jimmy was a fine big lad and he had youth on his side. His heart would heal and despite his excitable temperament he’d be all right, she would see.

  Every night in her prayers she asked God that this should be so. ‘Please, God, make my Jimmy all right.’

  She made the tea, poured some into a cup, milked and sugared it and carried it carefully before her from the kitchen.

  Outside the front-room door she waited automatically for the Valse Triste to stop, not daring to spoil the perfection of it. She made a strange and incongruous picture standing in the shadows of the hall, a little round barrel of a woman with grey-gold hair, a brown and green wrap-around apron and a cup of tea in her hand; while all around her swirled the music of the gods, quickening, dancing, saddening, pausing, swooping, gentling, gentling, until softly it faded away.

  Jimmy’s attention jerked as soon as his mother entered the room.

  ‘You old rascal!’ He grinned at her. ‘Is this you spoiling me again?’

  ‘Here you!’ Laughing she handed him the tea. ‘I’ll have less of the “old”!’

  He didn’t want the tea. She always put far too much milk and sugar in it, but she was watching him, hands clasped over aproned waist, eyes eagerly waiting for him to enjoy it.

  ‘Slàinte Mhath!’ He swung the cup high as if it were filled with champagne then downed it in one go.

  ‘Oh, my!’ His mother radiated happy laughter and was a joy to see. ‘You’re an awful laddie!’

  Affection for her surged through him and he just checked himself in time from flinging his arms around her and hugging and kissing her. It was unmanly to be emotional. At least it was unmanly in Scotland. Probably it was quite the reverse in countries like France or Italy. Which proved how ridiculous the whole thing was. Only a matter of social convention. It certainly wasn’t a God-made rule. God, if there were a God, had given emotions to men as well as to women.

  He wondered if other men felt as he did. Were they, too, isolating themselves on self-made islands of restraint?

  ‘That was grand,’ he lied, winking at her. ‘You’re the best tea-maker in Gl
asgow without a doubt, without a doubt.’

  He preferred coffee every time. He enjoyed going up to town on Saturdays to buy a half-pound of the real stuff. The old polished oak shop in Renfield Street - with its overflowing sacks of beans and crystallized ginger in jars richly painted with Chinese dragons - had a grinding machine that produced the velvet smell of coffee as well as the smooth brown powder. A hundred delicate aromas floated in the shop, and together formed a warm drug cloud to anaesthetize and titillate the senses.

  He lingered there, savouring the sight, the sound, the smell of the place for as long as possible, happy to pace around waiting while other people were being served, then happier still to burst into eager conversation with the old man of the shop. The old man always seemed genuinely pleased to see him and they spoke about new blends and methods of percolating, and little tricks like adding a pinch of salt or mustard; it was as if no one had been in the slightest interested in coffee all week until he had come in.

  The old man gave him pamphlets to study and Jimmy in turn searched out books from the libraries and the book-barrows on the history of the coffee-bean and the use of coffee, and the coffee-drinking habits of people all over the world, and he loaned them to the old man.

  It was a fascinating subject.

  ‘Get changed now in case somebody comes in.’ His mother’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  ‘Is the water hot enough for a bath, do you think?’

  ‘Saints preserve us, you had a bath last night and the night before, if I’m not mistaken.’