Alec chucked her under the chin before collapsing back in the horsehair sofa in the kitchen and draping himself across it.
‘I’ll never get back to Clydend tonight, Alec. What’ll I do, son?’
‘Stay here! She’s welcome to stay here, isn’t she, Madge?’
‘Och, of course! Sit down here, hen. I’m going to make a cup of tea.’
‘But my work. Oh, dear, dear.’
‘Relax, Ma,’ Alec advised. ‘It’ll still be there tomorrow.’
‘But will we, son? Will we?’
Madge shouted with laughter.
‘What’s to stop us, for God’s sake.’
Mrs Jackson came very close as if Madge had gone deaf.
‘What’s to stop us? What’s to stop us? Any minute there’s going to be a war. The last one was bad enough but this time there’s going to be air-raids. You should do what your man tells you and evacuate yourself and the weans.’
‘I don’t want to leave Alec, and anyway, Ma, I don’t feel able to go stravaiging away with thousands of weans. Puddling along with my own mob from day to day’s bad enough.’
‘She won’t listen to me, Ma. I keep telling her it’s for her own good.’
‘You can shove two or three of them in the pram and there’s always somebody would help. Somebody would help. Anyway, poor Alec is going to be called up.’
‘He’s trying for a postponement.’
‘That poor lad will have to go. They won’t listen to him. They never listened to his father.’ Mrs Jackson’s mouth went into a sudden grotesque paroxysm. She fought a battle with it and won. ‘The least you can do is see that the weans are kept safe.’
‘Ma’s right, hen. I keep telling you. And you know what it said in the papers - Springburn’s one of the bull’s-eye areas.’
Mrs Jackson began wringing hands that plopped with sweat.
‘You’re smack in the middle of all these works.’
‘You needn’t talk.’ Madge grinned round as she splashed water in the teapot. ‘Dessie Street. At the docks?’
‘Me being another bull’s-eye doesn’t help the weans. If you think anything of these weans, you’ll evacuate them.’
‘Och, poor wee buggers. I should, shouldn’t I?’
‘And the quicker the better if you don’t want them blown to smithereens!’
‘Och, all right, then.’
Alec lit up another cigarette and accepted a cup of tea.
‘That’s my girl! What’s the latest from Dessie Street?’
‘Up the close, you mean?’
‘Uh - huh.’
His mother sat down beside him on the sofa and stirred vigorously at her cup. ‘Wait a minute now. There’s eh … there’s eh …’ Blotchy patches of red appeared on her face. ‘Oh aye!’ She gasped with the sudden relief of remembering. ‘You know Tam McGuffie?’
‘The wee white-haired baker?’
‘Yes, he and his wife and daughter live next door to Catriona MacNair.’ She leaned forward as if imparting a secret. ‘His father’s moving in with him.’
Alec chuckled.
‘What’s he called? Methuselah?’
‘He’s well over eighty and as deaf as a post. You know Catriona? Well, her father-in-law’s coming to live with her too.’
Madge poked the fire into life before settling down with her cup.
‘Is that that wee blondie one who was expecting at the same time as me?’
‘That’s the one. I delivered the wean. What a night that was. I’ll never forget it. A nice big wean she had though. Did you no see him in his pram one day? Andrew, she calls him. A nice wee lassie she is, Catriona.’
Alec winked. ‘A right wee beauty as well!’
‘Here, you!’ Madge warned. ‘You keep away from her.’
Mrs Jackson’s mouth quivered again.
‘Keep away? The poor lad’s not going to have any option. They’ll take him away, I’m telling you, Madge. They won’t listen about any postponement.’
‘It’s great when you think of it.’ Alec shook his head. ‘I’ve never even met a ruddy German in my life!’
‘Och, I know,’ Madge sympathised. ‘It’s a damn shame. All of them politicians should be put in a field and told to get on with it.’
‘What a thought!’ Alec grinned.
Laughter made Madge splutter her tea.
‘You’ve got a mind like a sewer. Fight, I mean. If they want a fight they should bloody well fight it out between themselves.’
‘They won’t, though. Trust them,’ Mrs Jackson said bitterly. ‘They’ll have that poor lad, that’s for sure! They’ll have him.’
‘Shut up, Ma!’ Alec’s good-humoured voice had the beginnings of an edge to it. ‘You’re making me feel I’ve one foot in the grave already.’
Madge put down her cup and stared in inarticulate distress.
‘Don’t worry, hen.’ Alec blew her a kiss. ‘The Jerries will never be able to run fast enough to catch up with me.’
‘Aye, son, you just take good care of yourself. You’re a good lad. I couldn’t stand you getting shot to pieces like your father.’
‘Ma, I couldn’t stand it either, so will you shut up! You’re scaring me rigid!’
‘It’s terrible to be a man, so it is!’ Madge said.
‘Pack it in, Ma. Let’s get to bed. Where do you want to sleep, hen?’
‘I’ll just slip in beside the weans.’
Mrs Jackson nodded towards the high hole-in-the-bed behind the sofa where Agnes, Sadie and Hector sprawled in various poses of sleep. The three young children were divided between prams over in front of the coalbunker and the cot through in the room.
‘Better you than me!’ Madge sent a peal of laughter ceilingwards. ‘Them wee middens kick like horses. Do you want to go through and use the throne, hen?’
The throne was an old pail kept in a curtained recess in the room and used on cold nights to save going outside to the icy lavatory in the yard.
Mrs Jackson shook her frizzy head, her eyes still twitching anxiously at her son.
‘No, away you go.’
‘I’ll find you a nighty.’
‘No, no. I’ll be fine in my vest and knickers for one night. If only that was the only thing I’d to worry about!’
‘Well, if we didn’t know there was a war in the offing before,’ Alec said, later in bed, ‘we know it now!’
Madge cuddled close to him.
‘Och, Alec.’
‘What, hen?’
‘What do they need you for? You’re an insurance man.’
‘Maybe they need a policy!’
He could not be sure whether Madge had started to laugh or cry against his chest. She was a big girl and she was making the bed rock and bounce. He laughed, just to be on the safe side.
Chapter 12
Melvin swelled with rage. His eyes bulged and blotches of colour stained his cheeks. Catriona had never seen him so angry.
‘That settles it!’ He hitched back his shoulders and flexed his muscles. ‘I’m going to join up!’
She stared at him. Events were moving too fast for her comprehension.
The Prime Minister’s broadcast still trumpeted solemnly in her mind like the heralding of doom:
‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street.
‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government an official note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
‘I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany …’
Then there was the terrible shock about Wee Eck the baker. Wee Eck had worked as an apprentice-baker at MacNair’s for years until recently when he had taken his cheeky grin and freckly face off to sea as a steward on a ship called the Athenia.
Incredible that cheerful, hard-working Wee Eck
was dead. She could not accept it. Her mind clung tenaciously to the belief that there must be some sort of justice, order and fairness in the world. God and the powers that be only punished the wicked. The wicked suffered varying degrees of hell on earth according to their sins. Then came the final judgement day when every deed, every thought had to be accounted for and the judgement was either acquittal to the safety of heavenly regions or damnation in the fires of eternal hell.
She could well imagine herself destined for the torments of the abyss, but to believe that Wee Eck had done anything to warrant the terrors of death by drowning was completely beyond her.
The Donaldson Atlantic liner Athenia had been torpedoed and sunk without warning two hundred and fifty miles west of Donegal. Bound from Glasgow to New York, she was carrying fourteen hundred passengers. Radio messages from the sinking ship brought British destroyers full speed to the spot and passengers had also been picked up by a Norwegian vessel and a Swedish yacht.
Most of the survivors were landed at Galway and Greenock, many of them wounded or suffering from shock, but Wee Eck had been one of the hundred and twenty-eight killed.
‘Joining up?’ Catriona echoed.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘But what about your work and me and the children?’
‘Don’t be so selfish. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At a time like this King and country comes first. Anyway there’s Baldy - he’s a good foreman and there’s your father and Tam and Sandy McNulty. The army wouldn’t give any of that lot a second look. Baldy’s no use for anything except the bakery since they hanged his wife. Your father’s got his ulcer and his dermatitis and every body knows about old Sandy’s feet. No, it’s men like me they need in the army.’
He stripped off his shirt to admire his bulging muscles in the sideboard mirror. Gripping his wrists, he grunted, wrenched himself this way and that and swelled himself up to grotesque proportions.
‘Look at that neck! Look at those shoulders!’ His moustache puffed. ‘Have you ever seen triceps like that? Good job I asked the old man to come and stay.’
Jerking both arms up, elbows bent, fists clenched, as if he were about to punch himself in the ears, he forced his stomach muscles to do a circular rhythmic dance.
‘The army won’t have seen many men with muscle control like that.’
Catriona watched hypnotised, as each muscle in his body in turn performed its cocky, bouncing pirouette. She could never credit how he managed to do this amazing trick of sorting out all his muscles and making them work separately.
In the privacy of the bathroom, she had tried to make her own white body emulate his, but without the slightest success. The frustration of not being able to find any muscles at all nearly reduced her to tears. The only things she could jiggle were her small breasts and she managed that only when she jumped up and down.
‘He’ll keep an eye on things.’
‘Who’ll keep an eye on what?’
‘My father. He’s not that old. Only there was no sense in him wasting money on a woman to do his house over there and cook his food for him.’
‘Who’s going to keep an eye on him?’
‘What do you mean, who’s going to keep an eye on him?’
‘You said he was drinking too much.’
‘I said nothing of the kind.’ Melvin stopped exercising and glared indignantly at her. ‘He likes a wee glass after he stops work at night. It washes away the flour.’
‘Your father may be the master baker but he’s never baked for years.’
The unfairness of Melvin’s having insisted the old man lived with them, without either discussion or consultation with her, was something for which she would never forgive him.
‘Are you insinuating that my father doesn’t work hard? Melvin’s voice loudened as it climbed up the ladder of incredulity. ‘He’s downstairs working now while you’re lazing there on your backside!’
‘My father worked all night with flour filling in his nose and mouth and hair.’
‘What do you mean - your father worked all night? I worked all night.’
‘It’s different when my father takes a drink, though!’
Her voice held a bitterness that encompassed far more than what she said.
He came over and pushed his face down close to hers, enveloping her in a suffocating smell of onions and sweat.
‘Your father can drink himself to death for all I care!’
Daggers of defiance aimed from her eyes to his.
‘Oh, I know you don’t care. You don’t care about anything!’
She would like to have added ‘except yourself’ but had not enough nerve.
Melvin straightened, bulged his eyes heavenwards and spread out his palms.
‘Women! I’ve just said I’m going to join up and fight for my King and country!’
‘Big man!’ Catriona’s mind twisted in sarcastic mimicry. ‘Big, brave, strong, kind, thoughtful, unselfish husband!
‘Oh, yes?’ she said aloud.
‘You don’t believe me?’
Dutifully her gaze lowered, her voice smoothed out.
‘Oh, yes, Melvin.’
He scratched his moustache, then grinned.
‘The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. I bet you’d be as proud as Punch to see me in a kilt. I’ve got marvellous legs for it, haven’t I?’
‘Yes, Melvin.’
‘Or the Black Watch. The lasses from Hell, the Huns called them in the first war. The Black Watch used to have a piper marching out in front, plying a stirring Scottish tune and behind him would come the men with fixed bayonets.’
He laughed and puffed his chest up. ‘That would be a sight for the Huns. It must have scared them stiff. Can you imagine me in a kilt, eh?’
She could imagine him in the tartan all right, bulky shoulders, tree-trunk legs, kilts swishing smartly from side to side as he swaggered along.
‘Well?’
‘Yes, Melvin.’
‘The Black Watch or the Argylls! Or how about the Cameronians?’
‘I’d better make the tea.’
‘You’re a fine one to talk about not caring. What regiment do you think?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ Catriona began setting the table. ‘Your father will be through for his tea in a minute.’
The day he had told her that his father was coming to stay he had sat sucking his pipe, contented, at peace with himself and the world, as he announced:
‘Oh, by the way, I’ve asked my father to move in with us. He needs someone to look after him in his dotage and there’s no use paying two women.’
Now, in the sharpness of her resentment, things that she had never noticed about the old man were becoming obvious. He was so mean, he never gave anyone any Christmas presents, not even his grandchildren.
‘Just because I’m in business folk think I’m made of money,’ he would complain in his high nasal voice. ‘But I’m not. I’ve had to struggle all my life to keep body and soul together.’
He could never resist a bargain and often bought clothes and boots from customers whose menfolk had died. Or if there were no deceased’s clothing forthcoming when he needed it, he would go and haggle for a cut-price garment at the local pawn-shop. Nothing ever fitted. Collars never matched his shirts and sagged forward over his straggle of beard. Suits of coarse, cheap material hung loose at his bottom and bulged at his knees. He always wore heavy boots and looked as if he were constantly on the point of walking out of them.
Every night at some time or other, he woke the baby with his clomp-clomp-clomping about.
But it was all Melvin’s fault. The old man had not wanted to come.
‘I see enough of Dessie Street when I work in the shop all day,’ he protested, but Melvin kept persuading him until eventually he talked the old man round by pointing out how much money he would save.
When Melvin broke the news, Catriona visualised the years ahead, the lack of privacy, the extra nagging at the
children, the anxieties, the responsibilities, the heavy nursing when the old man became bedridden.
‘You want to be the envy of the other women. I know you. So be sure you pick the best.’ Melvin scratched the surface of her attention. ‘The Argylls have the glengarry. Cocky looking it is with a couple of black ribbons streaming down the back, a red and white diced band with one line of the red squares joined to remind folk of the battle of Balaclava. You’ve heard of Balaclava?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a right one, you are! In Russia, you fool. The thin red line’s famous.’
‘I remember now. It was a painting.’
‘A painting, be damned! It was a battle. The Argylls advanced in a great long line, all smart in their red tunics and kilts and white sporrans, bayonets at the ready.’ He thrust his fists forward and struck an aggressive pose as if he were threatening her with a bayonet. ‘There’s nothing to beat the Jocks for tough fighting men. The salt of the earth, the Jocks are.’
She had wanted to say, ‘You ought to have discussed this business about your father with me first. I don’t know if I’m able to cope with him just now. I’m worried enough about the children.’
But it was because of the children that she said nothing. She must not put Melvin in a bad mood just when she was working hard to butter him up to a receptive frame of mind in an effort to get his help and advice.
Fergus needed constant watching since Andrew was born. She dared not leave him alone with the baby and had to keep alert and watchful every minute the child was in the house.
She thanked God for school and the few hours of comparative peace it afforded her. Or the few occasions like this one, when Fergus had been persuaded to go out and play.
The peace was suddenly shattered by a piercing scream that made even Melvin jump. They both flew, jostling and pushing at each other to get into the bedroom.
The side of Andrew’s cot was down and he was lying blue in the face, and choking, his woolly jersey rumpled up, his nappy at his ankles.
She reached him first and snatched him into the safety of her arms to cradle the soft rubber-milk flesh, and nurse it close.
‘Sh … sh! Sh, sh! Mummy’s wee lamb. It’s all right. It’s all right. Mummy’s here! Sh … sh! Sh … sh!’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 26
