Impulsively she hauled herself up from the kitchen chair and trailed through to the room to search in one of the drawers for a photo of Mammy. Then, finding one, she stood staring at it for a long time.
Mammy’s health had broken eventually. Probably having a late baby and then losing the wee boy did not help.
She had been slightly taller than Dad, a fine-looking woman with a proud lift to her head, a gleam of courage in her eyes and a touch of red in the brown hair pulled severely back and plaited.
The photograph of Mammy was in her hands when the knocking at the door jerked her attention irritably away and made her slip it into the pocket of her smock.
She had a good mind to ignore the knocking and keep her father out. She had threatened him more than once to do it. Pain niggled her again and she leaned against the sideboard for a minute or two before forcing herself to go and open the door just a crack so that she could see but not be seen.
Mrs Vincent was standing on the doormat as small and slim and expensive-looking as ever. Normally her perfume was something Julie envied. Now it brought nausea to trigger off another bout of sickness.
‘Julie! I knew you hadn’t gone away. I just knew it! Oh, my dear, your face! You look so pale and ill!’
Julie turned away in anguish, fighting for dignity, but jerky spasms persisted in heaving her body and she had to run to the sink.
Afterwards she splashed cold water on her face and brushed her hair before looking round at Mrs Vincent who had followed her into the kitchen.
She saw the older woman’s horror, saw the minister’s daughter shrinking from the evil, fallen woman, saw Mrs Vincent’s struggle with herself, her expressions changing like butterflies fluttering backwards and forwards across her face.
At last her loyalty to Reggie won. She took a little breath like a sigh then said:
‘I’ll do all I can to help you. What do you need? A new smock? A nightdress? Baby clothes?’
Before she sat down her gloved hand lightly brushed the fireside chair clean.
‘I don’t need any help, thank you,’ Julie replied. ‘I’ve knitted one set of baby clothes. I won’t need any more. I’m having it adopted.’
There was a tiny silence then Mrs Vincent said:
‘Yes, of course. That’s very sensible of you. And after it’s all over, don’t you think you would be better to come and stay with me? That’s what Reggie would have wanted.’
‘I have a good home here. Thanks all the same.’
‘Oh, dear, I do feel guilty. Reggie did tell me to look after you. I’m sure if you had been over in Kelvinside with me this …’ Her face creased as if she were in pain and she forced her eyes just for a terrible moment to rest on Julie’s swollen belly. ‘This terrible thing would never have happened.’
Julie reached for her cigarettes, lit one and tossed the match into the fire with a careless defiant gesture.
‘What has happened has nothing to do with you. But if you must know, I love this man even more than I loved Reggie. He’s crazy about me too. But he’s married!’ She shrugged. ‘That’s my hard luck. We love each other, that’s the main thing, and I’ve known him for some time. He didn’t pick me up off the street, you know!’
Mrs Vincent’s face tightened again but she said:
‘I would still like to help. Are you going into hospital?’
‘Yes.’ Energetically Julie puffed at her cigarette. ‘Ten days from now.’
‘Are you sure you have everything you need? A confinement is so expensive. Have you something really pretty to wear in bed? It makes such a difference to how one feels. I always believe in having a really pretty nightdress and négligée.’
‘Yes. I can imagine. I’ve still got the one from my honeymoon. It’ll do.’
‘I’ll get you something else. And some of the other little things that make such a difference. A nice talcum, a good soap.’
‘You’ve no need. Thanks all the same.’ She turned away, her breath catching with another pain. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. The kettle’s on the boil.’
The thought occurred to her that she might have started labour. Doctors could make mistakes. Or something might have gone wrong.
Mrs Vincent peeled off her gloves and smoothed them neatly across her lap.
‘Thank you, my dear. That would be nice. I’ve been worrying about you so much and then finding you like this … I’ve developed quite a migraine. Nervous tension, do you think?’
‘You should go home and lie down. But drink up your tea first.’
Mrs Vincent gave a little sighing breath.
‘Think about coming to stay with me, Julie. It would be so nice to have you. I get lonely at times. After this is all over we’ll talk about it again, shall we?’
‘I belong here.’
‘You would soon settle in and there’s your friend in the crescent now - young Mrs MacNair.’
Stiff-faced, Julie watched her taking her time over her tea. Sipping it slowly, delicately, then each time replacing the cup gently, quietly.
‘I thought she looked a bit peaky the last time I saw her,’ Mrs Vincent murmured between sips. ‘Of course, I don’t think she has any domestic help and those houses are rather large. Then I believe she pops in quite often to the shop. I hear the business is going very well.’
At last she rose. ‘Tomorrow I’ll go into town and buy you some nice little odds and ends. No, you can’t dissuade me, my dear. I can be very determined when I like.’
Just before she left she leaned forward and pecked Julie on the cheek.
Julie closed the door and returned to the kitchen. She felt unexpectedly upset. The pain was distressing enough, but now a new emotional upheaval suddenly gripped her chest and sent it lurching into big noisy breaths, like sobbing without tears, and made her plead to the empty room, ‘Mammy. Mammy.’
The grinding pain intensified, became her only world demanded all her attention. Then it died away again and she became aware of the sweat trickling down her face.
Long ago she had saved up enough for a taxi. The money was ready in her purse but her dad was supposed to phone for one and have it come to the close to collect her. Her case was ready packed. She had everything arranged.
Slowly she made her way through to the room and collected her case. It was an old scuffed one from Woolworth’s and the cardboard it was made of showed through the brown paint. She struggled into her coat then went over to the window.
Her father was standing down at the corner and she fought to open the window and call out.
‘Dad!’
He looked up in surprise. ‘Eh?’
‘Phone, right away.’
‘My God! Aye, aw right, hen.’
The journey back to the kitchen was excruciating. Her grip tightened on her case and, still clutching it close to her, she sat down to wait for the taxi. She would arrive in style. That’s how she had planned it. Then with any luck everything would be all over by morning. Life would return to normal. She would be herself again as if nothing had happened.
Chapter 20
If it had been an ex-Navy camp maybe Alec would have felt more at home but the Hughenden Playing Fields off Great Western Road, which belonged to the Hillhead High School, had been requisitioned by a Royal Air Force Balloon Squadron in 1939.
Now its Nissen huts sheltered a gypsy band of squatters, travelling people, rootless ones, displaced persons, the rubbish dirtying the skirts of respectable West End society, the flotsam washed up by war.
Most of the men were ex-servicemen. Some of them had had their wives and families in married quarters while they had been in the forces and after demob had been unable to find alternative accommodation. Others had returned to find that their homes had been destroyed by air-raids. Others like Alec had been unable to get work, could not pay their rent and been forced to quit.
He had been in several places, hanging on, trying to make the best of it until workmen came to cut off water and electricity and tear up
floorboards and fling his furniture and belongings out on to the street.
He had missed death while serving in the Navy. Since the war he had died a thousand deaths.
The Nissen hut, as Madge said, was better than being in Barnhill but they had no privacy, especially from the children, and any amenities that existed were communal. Everybody in the camp went to the same place for ablutions and to wash their clothes as best they could in cold water. There were no facilities for ironing.
He did not mind the communal bit so much. He liked plenty of people around. What he did suffer from was the lack of clean, pressed clothes. He had always been a natty dresser and it was an acute humiliation to go about in a creased suit or wrinkled raincoat or grubby crumpled shirt. Embarrassment made his eyes become evasive and he acquired the habit of looking down as much as possible when he walked outside the camp with the ostrich-like hope that if he saw nothing, nobody would see him. If anyone, especially a woman, spoke to him he could still come out with some of the old patter and his eyes still twinkled at them, but with hasty sideways glances that betrayed a furtive restlessness. His walk did not lose its sailor’s roll or its Glasgow swagger but the movements shrank, lost their jaunty bounce, became a gentle imitation.
Not that he walked much around the Great Western Road area. He did not like this part of Glasgow. He realised of course that his views were jaundiced by the unpleasant experiences he and his family had suffered in the West End.
He supposed it looked all right. Plenty of big houses and trees. Sometimes he went for a walk with Madge and the weans and looked at them all. Madge loved to stare at houses. She would keep crying out in admiration.
‘Oh, Sadie, look at this one, hen. Look at its lovely big windows. How many rooms do you think this one’ll have, eh?’ Or, ‘Agnes, would you just look at that. Oh, my, isn’t that lovely, hen?’
In the silent avenues, terraces, gardens and lanes where no children played, Madge’s voice boomed out with excruciating loudness. Not that they needed Madge’s voice to draw attention to themselves. The mere fact that there were nine of them crowding along the pavement was enough. In the camp they blended in with the others. In Springburn’s busy streets they would have merged into the background too. Here, however, they were vulnerable as if a spotlight was aimed at them, ruthlessly picking out every shabby detail.
He became acutely conscious of his own seedy appearance, of Madge’s down-at-heel shoes and dirty ankles, of the children’s motley mixture of ill-fitting clothes, of skimpy coats, with dresses drooping underneath them, and of Hector and Willie’s knobbly wrists protruding from their jackets.
Charlie looked worst of all. His mouth was plugged with a dummy-teat but his nose was usually running and his nappy drooped down at his ankles. His clothes never seemed to meet. Bare skin always showed in the middle. Often Charlie was left to stagger or crawl along on his own, getting dirtier and dirtier, until Alec lifted him and tried to wipe him with a handkerchief. He was fond of Charlie. The other children had grown away from him and now resented him as a symbol of authority.
Madge kept shouting at them.
‘I’ll tell your daddy on you, you rotten wee midden!’ Or, ‘Daddy’ll throttle you, I’m warning you.’ Or she would command him:
‘Do something with these weans! Don’t just loaf about like the useless big article you are!’
Coming back to the camp after one of their walks, he felt especially diminished, as if all the grand houses all around were only there to emphasise the fact that he was no use as a provider. All he could manage for his family was a dark corrugated iron cave.
He tried to blot out his thoughts in drink as much as he could and one night after he had had a few and Madge was nagging him, he suddenly lost his head and struck her.
Looking back on it he sometimes thought she had been purposely egging him on. The way she had been acting anyone would have thought the war and everything else was his fault.
‘Aye, you’ve always been all right, haven’t you?’ she sneered. ‘Sailing around the world, having your way with women every chance you could get. Talk about the proverbial Smart Alec. Well, you’re not so smart now are you, eh? An unemployed ex-con and a right wilted one at that!’
As soon as he struck her, he bitterly regretted it and the well of tenderness he had for her immediately overflowed.
‘I’m sorry, hen. I’m sorry.’ He tried to take her into his arms but she knocked him aside and sent Agnes running to phone for the police. When the police came, she had him charged with assault.
He marvelled at the long memories and the natural vindictiveness of women. Madge had never forgiven him for playing the field and it did not matter what he did or did not do now, it made no difference. She continued to punish him at every opportunity and all the misfortunes that befell them were fuel for the fire of her resentment. Sometimes he felt he could not stand the camp, the Nissen hut, or Madge any longer, and he took the tram to Springburn and stood at his old street corner and watched the world go by. Often he would meet someone who had once been a customer, or a neighbour or a friend and they would buy him a drink and talk about old times, or the war, or the present.
Then one day he met Sammy Hunter. He could never fathom how Sammy of all people had been a conscientious objector. He certainly did not fit in with most people’s idea of what a pacifist should look like. Sammy had the appearance of a prize fighter with his stocky aggressive build and broken nose and short red hair. He came from a military family. All his brothers had been in the Army and his father had once been a sergeant-major. He remembered how Sammy’s father used to drill all the wee Hunters in Springburn Park and children from miles around came to jeer at them. It occurred to him that this could be why Sammy refused to have anything to do with the military. He would probably have been sick to death of army ways long before the war started.
Sammy shook him warmly by the hand and thumped his arm as if he were genuinely glad to see him.
‘How are you doing, Alec? Where are you staying? I never see you around Springburn now. Come on up to the house. I’ve got some beer in.’
He accepted the invitation but once in Sammy’s wee room and kitchen the memory of Sammy’s wife, Ruth, hit him with depressing pain. He saw the photograph of her on the mantelpiece. Many a time he had come to collect the insurance money and admired that sexy beauty. He sighed and jerked his head towards the photo.
‘She was a lovely girl. You were a lucky man.’
‘I know.’
Sammy poured out the beer and pushed a glass towards Alec and Alec’s hand reached out for it then suddenly drew back again.
‘I was with her that night. She was fed up and lonely and I took her to the pictures. We had just sat down when the air-raid started. I tried to get her out, Sam.’
The night when the Ritzy Cinema was destroyed by a direct hit came roaring at him through time to make him cringe. He felt sick.
‘I was going to take her back home. We were on our way to the exit … Afterwards I clawed at the place with my bare hands. I tried my damndest to get her out but the fact remains if I hadn’t have taken her there she would still be alive.’
A nerve twitched at Alec’s face in the silence that followed. Then Sammy said:
‘It was the war. Dessie Street got it as well. If she had been there …’ He shrugged. ‘Drink your beer.’
‘But I was with her.’
Sammy paused before going on.
‘I’ve had this horror of her dying alone among strangers. It’s over five years ago now but it still bugged me, the thought of her being alone and frightened when it happened. She always liked you. I’m glad you were there.’
Alec sighed again.
‘Such a bloody waste, isn’t it? And I bet the Jerries’ll be better off than us now. Look at me. No job. No home. Squatting in bloody Nissen huts. I admit I didn’t give much thought to why I went away to fight, but, my God, Sammy, it wasn’t for this. Sometimes I wonder what it was all about. Oh,
I know what they tell us, but politicians tell so many bloody lies.’
‘I’m reading this book just now. It says there’s a sickness in Western civilisation and it’s from that that both Fascism and the war grew. It’s a wrong way of looking at human beings. It’s the materialistic view. The idea that men are only valued in economic terms, and to the extent they submerge with their group or class, or nation, and make its ends their ends.’
Alec took a swig of beer.
‘Sounds like Fascism. But we’re supposed to have beaten that.’
‘Don’t you believe it. No, we’ve got to get an entirely new angle of approach to problems, Alec. We’ve got to reassert the value of the dignity and the rights of the individual. And we can’t do that by holding an atomic bomb over their heads. We’ve got to build up an international morality and it’s got to be supported by spiritual forces. Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius - they’ve all something worthwhile to teach us.’
‘I don’t think there’s any danger of another war, though. Nobody would use an atomic bomb.’
‘What are you talking about, man? They already have - twice. There were so many men, women, children and animals buried in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they haven’t been able to make an accurate count. And a so-called civilised Western nation did that. How about when they all have the bomb? And they will.’
‘You’re a right cheerful Charlie.’
‘Just facing facts. I believe, you see, Alec, that now is the time to fight for the peace. Now is the time to prevent the worst war of all. This is the fight for real survival right now!’
‘To hell! I think I’ll leave this fight to the weans. They’ve a lot more energy than me now.’
‘You had another one, the last I heard. How many does that make?’
‘Seven.’
‘Seven? Some guys have all the luck.’
‘Call that luck? Och, they’re a great bunch but, my God, Sammy, they’ve got mouths like Hoovers and they’re growing out of all their clothes. If I don’t get work soon I don’t know what I’ll do.’
‘At least they’ll get dinners and milk at school now and there’s going to be family allowances. That should help.’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 54
