Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘I didn’t know it was her,’ said Rosie. ‘I want to see what she looks like.’ She got off the bed. Mavis looked at me then at the door. There was a thud beyond it. Rosie stopped in fright.

  ‘She’s all wet,’ said Mavis. ‘It can’t be her.’

  ‘Of course she’s all wet,’ I said. ‘Just ’cause she’s a lady doesn’t mean she can’t get wet like the rest of us. The rain it raineth on the just.’

  Mavis laughed and joined in, as loud as you like. ‘But also on the unjust fellow, but mainly on the just because the unjust stole the just’s umbrella.’ We both laughed. It was an old favourite of our dad’s, though Mavis wouldn’t remember that, only that we sometimes said it.

  ‘What?’ said Rosie. She hadn’t heard that rhyme.

  Poor Rosie. She didn’t have a dad, not even one who was missing presumed dead, but the truth was we might not have had one either then, for all we knew. Rosie’s, however, was completely dead in the bombing along with all the rest of her family. Poor little Rosie, and the oddest thing was that she looks so like Mavis (who looks just like me) that no-one ever asks whether we really truly are family. We even have the same hair, dark and bobbed with a fringe.

  I remembered what Mr Tait had said a few minutes earlier about my dad and I thought about looking under the bed for him, but it seemed better to wait until no-one else was there in case I hadn’t understood him properly.

  ‘Lenny, are you decent?’ my mum called through the door.

  ‘Nearly,’ I shouted back. I couldn’t get myself dry without standing by the fire, not properly, not when it was so cold, but I pulled on my vest, pants and dress anyway even though they stuck to me.

  There was another thud on the other side of the wall and then all the adults started talking at once. I grabbed my muddy socks and shoes and ran back through.

  Mr Tait was coughing again. Miss Barns-Graham had taken off her scarf and hat and coat and was holding our candle lamp over the doctor’s head. My mum was kneeling on the ground with the doctor, and in between them on the floor there was a pile of blankets and shoes.

  Except it wasn’t a pile of blankets and shoes. It was Mr Tait.

  ‘Hold the lamp still, Miss,’ said the doctor, ‘so we can secure him adequately.’

  ‘Yes, doctor, sorry,’ said Miss Barney.

  ‘I’ll take a turn,’ I said, and I took the lamp before she could stop me and held it over the bundle that was Mr Tait.

  His skin was like the wax candles I’d seen in chapel until we stopped going. His eyes were red-rimmed and they opened wide when he saw me.

  ‘Lenny, my dear... ,’ he said.

  I took his hand. ‘Mr Tait, what’s happening? What are they doing?’

  ‘Keep the light up,’ said Miss Barns-Graham.

  ‘Careful, Lenny,’ said my mum, and she limped round behind me.

  Mr Tait’s grip on my hand wasn’t strong, but I felt his fingers push mine so I squeezed back. A squall battered at the window as if it wanted to come in. Miss Barns-Graham looked up in alarm.

  ‘If you could stand back, Miss,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll wrap the blanket round him and then we can go.’

  Miss Barns-Graham did as she was told.

  ‘I’ve been nursing him fine,’ said my mum. ‘I’m doing my best. He seemed to be alright. Does he really need to go?’

  ‘I’m going to give you some aspirin, Mr Tait,’ said the doctor. ‘You must try to swallow it. Don’t worry, it’s in water. It should slip down easily enough. Mrs Gillespie, if you would, a little water in a cup, and yes, I’m afraid he really does need to go. Apart from anything else there are the little ones to consider. If it should spread... . You understand. He won’t be far away.’

  Mr Tait’s eyes opened wider. He gazed at me long and hard and an odd sensation like an itch ran up the back of my neck.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ I said. ‘I’ll look after him, won’t I, Mr Tait? I’ll look after you. Mum, what’s happening? What’s wrong with him? Why is he ill?’

  ‘Keep the lamp still, child,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s going to be alright, but he has something called tuberculosis and it’s quite a serious condition so he needs to be in hospital. He’ll come back when he’s better.’ Then he turned to Mr Tait again. ‘Now drink this.’

  Mr Tait was lying on the floor with his head on a folded blanket. The doctor reached under Mr Tait’s neck and helped him up enough to sip at the cup. It was the same one I’d tried to give him before, and the doctor had to insist because Mr Tait really didn’t want it and kept turning his head away until the doctor said he was being a bad example to the children, meaning us, although Mavis and Rosie were back in the other room with my mum. Obviously the doctor didn’t know Mr Tait very well, because he was the best example to me ever, if only I was better at following him. But Mr Tait did as he was told. And then he stared at me again.

  I knew what he was doing, too. He was trying to fill me with grit and bravery, just like he did after the bombing when I didn’t know where Mavis and my mum were for days and days, and when my mum came out of hospital with only one foot and I was frightened. The problem was that this time, by trying to give me courage, he was scaring me all the more. So I turned away while the doctor fussed and asked for shoes, and Miss Barns-Graham and my mum looked about the room for Mr Tait’s overcoat and his Bible, which had all his papers in it. I knew where all of those things were, and my mum probably did too, though they seemed to take forever to find them, but I couldn’t help because I was blinking into the darkness to make my tears go away. I didn’t feel brave, not one tiny little bit. Then I heard him again.

  ‘Lenny,’ he said. ‘Lenny...’ So I turned to face him and he looked smaller than he should have been and sad in a way I’d never seen before. Even after the bombing, he was only worried or disappointed when someone was unkind, for instance, but not sad. I bent down to listen to what he had to say, but instead the doctor startled me.

  ‘No kissing!’ he said. ‘Good Lord, no!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to kiss him,’ I said.

  ‘Keep back please,’ he said, ‘and give me the lantern so I can see my way about this place. Don’t you have any candles, Mrs Gillespie, or a Tilley lamp?’

  Miss Barns-Graham said she would send some candles down to us. My mum said only if it wasn’t any bother, which was silly because everything’s a bother when there’s a storm raging outside. And we still had the candle in the other room. My mum went to fetch it and lit it from the fire. There was still a wee bit of light outside anyway.

  But the daylight was fading even without the row of not-so-perfect white handkerchiefs across the window. The wind blew down the chimney so that clouds of smoke puffed into the room, and when it wasn’t doing that it was shoving its way in the door and making the fire seethe redder.

  ‘Children shouldn’t be in here anyway,’ remarked the doctor. ‘Mrs Gillespie, can you ask this child to go next door?’

  ‘Lenny,’ I said. ‘My name’s Lenny and I think Mr Tait wants to tell me something, don’t you, Mr Tait? It’s probably important. He doesn’t say things that aren’t important.’

  ‘On you go now,’ said the doctor. ‘Mrs Gillespie? The girl.’

  The doctor was ignoring me. I bit my lip and stood up to go, but when I looked back at Mr Tait his face was more than sad. His brow was pulled down over his eyes and his dry lips were squeezed together as if he was trying hard to understand something, and then I realised he was frightened. It had never occurred to me that Mr Tait might be scared of anything at all, he was always so calm. He shifted on the floor as if he wanted to get up, but then sank back onto the blanket with a sigh like a baby’s rattle, so I stayed in the room but kept back in the shadow behind the stove.

  Footsteps clumped up the steps to the door and someone blocked the last of the light.

  ‘Ah, here you are at last,’ said the doctor. ‘Is this the lad?’

  ‘George?’ I said. ‘George? What’s he doing here?�
�

  ‘Afternoon, Mrs Gillespie,’ said George.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come, George,’ said my mum. ‘I wasn’t sure the message would get through. This is Miss Barns-Graham.’

  ‘Willie,’ said Miss Barns-Graham. ‘Call me Willie.’

  George touched his hat.

  ‘And the doctor,’ said my mum.

  ‘What’s George doing here?’ I wanted to know, and why was he being introduced to everyone as if he was a proper adult when everyone knew I was much more sensible than he was. Bad George could hardly even write and didn’t know any of his times tables, even before he left school and went back to Clydebank to be an apprentice in John Brown’s shipyard, the biggest shipyard in the world, probably.

  I looked on as he was allowed to take Mr Tait’s hand and to listen to what he was whispering. I fumed by the stove while bad George went for more water for him and when he folded the blanket back round Mr Tait and made him comfortable as I had wanted to do. George, who was nasty and spiteful and did everything he could to make my life a misery, was allowed to cradle Mr Tait’s shoulders while the doctor fed him the last of the aspirin, and Mr Tait seemed to forget all about me. Maybe he couldn’t see into the shadows by the stove where I slid down the wall and hugged my knees, watching the pain he was in, how hard it was for him to breathe, how he leant back on George and closed his eyes and let the doctor talk as if he wasn’t there, as if none of us were there except George and the doctor.

  And then everything seemed to happen very fast and we all talked at once, all of us except Mr Tait. Miss Barns-Graham put her coat and hat and scarf on again and went out first, saying she’d open the car door. Then George and the doctor slid Mr Tait across the floorboards on the blanket towards the front steps. The rain came pelting down on his leg and my mum started shouting.

  ‘He’s getting soaked,’ she said. ‘Surely that’s not good for him, doctor? Couldn’t we cover him with his coat as well?’

  The doctor was too busy manoeuvring Mr Tait and telling George what to do. Big bad George is what I always call him because he’s bigger and badder than anyone I know. And my poor mum couldn’t do anything because she had her wooden foot which she still wasn’t very good with and couldn’t move as fast as she would have wanted to. Mavis and Rosie were squealing behind her, especially Rosie who had lost all her family and didn’t want to lose anyone else.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ she was shouting, and she pulled at her ear so hard it bled.

  Mavis whimpered and bounced from foot to foot and tried to see what was going on even though everyone was in her way.

  ‘You’re going to drop him!’ said my mum. ‘Look out. Miss Barns-Graham, maybe you could help. They’re going to drop him. Goodness, oh goodness. Oh, Mr Tait!’

  ‘He weighs nothing,’ said George, and he looked up at the doctor in surprise from the bottom step. Once they had him down the steps I jumped down after them.

  ‘Mr Tait!’ I said, and I came along beside him.

  ‘It’s alright, young lady,’ said the doctor. ‘Off you go. I’m in charge of him now. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Mr Tait,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  Then they got to the car and George stuffed the bottom half of Mr Tait into the back seat then ran round to the other side and pulled the rest of him in until the last bit of Mr Tait was sticking out the side of the car and the doctor was still holding onto his shoulders.

  ‘Bend him at the knee,’ said the doctor.

  So they bent Mr Tait at the knee and then George came back to the doctor and got into the back of the car along with Mr Tait and laid Mr Tait’s head in his lap as the doctor told him to.

  ‘Mr Tait,’ I said.

  But he didn’t open his eyes and he didn’t say anything. I wanted to get into the car with him too but I knew they wouldn’t let me. He lay there with his head to one side like a little baby fast asleep on George’s lap. Then my mum came across in the rain with Mr Tait’s overcoat and went to the side George wasn’t on. She opened the door and laid it across Mr Tait’s bent legs, then to the passenger door at the front and handed a bundle to Miss Barns-Graham and a book that was his Bible with all his papers inside.

  ‘Where are they going?’ I said. ‘I don’t want him to go.’

  The doctor got into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. The rain grew heavier again and battered on the metal of the car

  ‘Will you let me know how he is?’ said my mum over the noise of the engine and the rain.

  ‘It’s a little tricky, Mrs Gillespie,’ said the doctor, ‘because, after all, you’re not family. You’re not related and strictly speaking I can’t give out information.’

  ‘We’re family in everything but blood, doctor. Surely you’ll come back and tell me? He’s like a father to these girls.’

  The doctor smiled crisply. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘Goodbye. Wash everything thoroughly, boil what you can and burn anything with blood.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Gillespie,’ said Miss Barns-Graham. ‘Don’t worry, dear, he’s in safe hands. And the candles, I’ll send them down.’

  They drove off into the rain and I followed them like an idiot, running along beside the car in my bare feet shouting ‘Mr Tait!’ as if that was going to stop them. They soon disappeared round the bend and we were drenched to the skin again and wretched with cold. Our Mr Tait was gone.

  Chapter 2

  In the following days I lost my new blue tammy, a glove and the piece and dripping I had been given for lunch. I lost the words to my favourite song, ‘The Quartermaster’s Stores’, which I prided myself on knowing all twenty-nine verses of. I forgot sixtimes- nine and eight-times-seven and tripped on the skipping rope three times in one dinner time. When I tried to fix our hideout up the hill in the woods I burst my finger open with the hammer and later that day I boiled all the water out of the stovies when I was left in charge of the tea.

  The doctor didn’t come back with news of Mr Tait and Miss Barns-Graham forgot our candles. I guessed bad George had gone back to Clydebank and forgotten us too. My mum said no news was good news and I tried hard to believe her.

  Although bad George kicked and swore around me and Mavis and Rosie, he was always super-polite in the presence of my mum, so we were extra stung that he hadn’t bothered to bring her news. Mr Tait was the only person who ever got George to behave at all, and in return George worshipped the ground on which Mr Tait walked. He’d have known Mr Tait would have wanted us to know how he was getting on.

  Mr Tait would probably have liked his wooden leg too, although he said he always took it off to go to bed, which was probably where he’d been since he left us, in a bed in the hospital. He must have been sitting in his chair by the fire without it on when we came back that day, something he’d never done before and I hadn’t even noticed. It was only when my mum and I went into his room later to follow doctor’s orders and wash everything thoroughly that I saw it leaning on the wall. We brought it through to the front window so we could see it. It had a joint at the foot and another at the knee and it was dark brown and needed a new coat of paint, and it had leather straps for attaching it to his body. They were dark brown too and twisted with wear. My dad would have called the leg ‘rudimentary’ which is nothing to do with being rude.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ I said, ‘not properly.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ said my mum. ‘It’s pretty basic, isn’t it, compared to mine, and very worn in places.’

  She pulled up the leg of her dungarees so we could compare her wooden leg with his, then let it back down again. We turned Mr Tait’s leg round and touched the wood with our hands. It felt wrong to do this. Mr Tait wouldn’t have liked us looking. It was like we were touching him.

  ‘How did he lose it? He never let on,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know, only that it happened in the last war. He was in France in the trenches and by the time they got him to the doctor he had gangrene
and it had to be cut off.’

  I imagined Mr Tait with one pink leg and one green. This was swiftly followed by a blur of horrible things I’d seen when I was running through the bombing with Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten, things I shouldn’t have seen, things no-one should ever see. This used to happen to me a lot just after the bombing, this seeing things from the past as clearly as if they were still happening, but it hadn’t for donkeys. Mr Tait had taught me what to do in times like that to make the horrible thoughts go away, but I wasn’t used to having to any more, wasn’t expecting it, so it took my breath away. I was suddenly too cold and then too hot.

  My mum turned the leg over and the foot flopped forwards. His boot was still on it, of course, and a sock. The foot smelled of leather, not cheese, not like mine when I hadn’t washed for a while. I knew what that was like, but this time I had to glance round at the fire because suddenly there were other smells too, burnt rubber, singed clothes, whisky and sewers and all sorts of other things you don’t want to smell all filling up my nose. But it wasn’t the fire. It was all inside my head. ‘Be brave, Lenny,’ said Mr Tait. (He was in there too.) ‘Remember it will pass.’ Good Mr Tait. I stared hard at the fire and made myself remember.

  We all had funny things we did after the bombing and mostly it had stopped, but my mum had been acting strangely again since Mr Tait had fallen ill a couple of weeks before. She’d been dreaming at night, and she’d talk in her sleep sometimes and wake us all up. Her dreams were mostly about the bombing and being stuck under the building and thinking she was going to die and not knowing where Mavis and I were. She’d shout for help and call our names. It was always the same and I’d have to call back. ‘I’m here. It’s me, Lenny, and that’s Mavis beside you. We’re safe in Carbeth. The other lump is Rosie.’ She used to be like that all the time and then gradually it passed, just as Mr Tait always said it would. But this was different because the Germans weren’t bombing us any more, even though the war was still going on, and everyone said Carbeth was the safest possible place to be.