Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  Of course I had no plan for lunch so we had to beg and borrow and bargain with Senga who always had loads.

  Two more days passed in this way. Mavis and Rosie seemed to like being Privates and we defended our hut with our commando lunges if anyone came calling.

  Mr Duncan next door came to ask for our mum. I told him she was sick and couldn’t go out and it was catching so he couldn’t come in either. He shouted good health to her through the window. We always checked the windows before we went out and shouted ‘Bye, Mum!’ so the neighbours wouldn’t ask difficult questions.

  ‘Sssh,’ I said. ‘She’s asleep. l’ll pass the message on. Th... thanks.’

  On the Friday afternoon, battle squad Gallus, as I had by then named us, were passing the Halfway House tearoom on our way home when the thin lady who worked there appeared from nowhere.

  ‘I thought you wanted a job,’ she said without saying hello first.

  ‘Hello,’ I said and waited for her to do the same.

  ‘Well? Do you?’ She looked over my shoulder as if there was someone there.

  ‘Y... yes,’ I said, glancing at the empty road behind me.

  ‘Eight a.m. tomorrow then,’ she said. ‘Don’t be late.’ She turned to go.

  We all laughed. ‘Don’t be late!’ we mimicked under our breath.

  ‘Be clean!’ she said in a sharp voice. ‘Eight.’

  We kept walking ’til we were out of earshot before shouting ‘Be clean!’ and ‘Eight!’

  There was a rap on Jimmy Robertson’s window as we passed.

  ‘Halt!’ I shouted.

  ‘Nine!’ said Private Mavis.

  ‘Thirteen!’ said Private Rosie, and they erupted into giggles again.

  Jimmy Robertson came panting down the steps of his bus-come-shop. ‘Lenny,’ he said. ‘Did you find anything yet?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, well, then,’ he said, in a resigned tone. ‘All the best!’ And he went back inside.

  We carried on in silence until Mavis said, ‘Ah well then,’ which for some reason was unbelievably funny.

  And then, when we were nearly at the Cuilt Brae where our hut was, we heard hooves clip-clopping on the road behind us and Mr Tulloch came flying round the bend on his cart.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, there, whoa!’ he said, pulling back on the reins. The horse snorted and shook her head in annoyance at the interruption. ‘There you are, young Lenny,’ he said once they’d stopped. ‘Mavis, Rosie. I thought maybe you’d disappeared back to Clydebank.’

  ‘Hello, Mr T... Tulloch,’ I said. ‘Say hello then, you two.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Tulloch,’ they chorused.

  ‘Fancy another shot at the milking? My wife’s not up to it and won’t be with, you know, with...’ He tapped his foot on the front of the cart and then cleared his throat. ‘With the baby almost come,’ he said at last. ‘I need to train you up.’

  Ah. I see. I knew what that meant. It meant she was having a baby. And soon. I had thought she was just fat.

  ‘Um... ,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have no more of your ums young lady either,’ he said with a smile. ‘She forgot all her songs,’ he told the squad. ‘What do you think of that? Forgetting her songs!’ He stood there and shook his head and whistled the tune to ‘Scatterbrain’, which was a favourite of ours, finishing with ‘Isn’t it a pity that you’re such a scatterbrain?’ and laughed.

  I wanted to forget my last milking experience. My face was hot just thinking about it.

  He reached over behind him and pulled out a metal cup. ‘You can have some of this as a down payment,’ he said and he lifted the top off a churn, scooped out some milk and handed it to me. ‘You can bring the cup with you, clean of course, when you come tomorrow, okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You got an alarm clock in your house?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got Mr Tait’s,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Alright, six tomorrow morning. That do you?’ he said.

  ‘Six?’ we all three said together.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It comes just before seven. Almost light. You’ll love it. See you then.’

  The horse was already straining forward, tugging on the reins, and needed no encouragement to turn and speed back down the road, leaving us standing there with our mouths open.

  We closed them and went home. Rosie washed some tatties and Mavis brought more wood in, while I lit a fire the way it’s meant to be done. One of the newspapers I scrunched into a ball said WITHOUT LEGS MAN CAN STILL FLY. The man in the picture had no legs but no wings either although it said he was getting them later in the week. I kept that sheet aside so I could figure it out later.

  We boiled Rosie’s tatties, rolled them in oats and roasted them in a pan. Very delicious I can promise you. We were settling back, at ease, on the birch bench by the window when Willie, Miss Barns- Graham, arrived at the door panting and wheezing like nobody’s business. She came inside and coughed.

  ‘Hello there? Anyone at home? Still no candles?’

  My heart leapt into my mouth. The last time Miss Barns-Graham was in our house was when she brought the doctor for Mr Tait. Maybe she had bad news now about my mum.

  ‘Wh... why?’ I began.

  ‘Hello, young lady, how are you today? I brought you two,’ she said in a loud smiley voice and handed me two candles from her pocket. ‘Y’aright? S’only me. No need to look so alarmed. Is your mum in? Mrs Gillespie? You there?’

  ‘She’s... she’s sick,’ I said with an awful feeling that this had all happened before.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she whispered, a hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry for making so much noise then. Not seriously sick, I hope?’

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Rosie, not whispering at all. ‘She won’t mind. She’s very kind.’

  ‘I’m sure she is,’ said Willie.

  ‘She adopted me,’ said Rosie

  ‘Really?’ said Willie, bending down for a closer look at Rosie.

  I thought this was big of Rosie, given my mum was the latest grown-up to vanish out of her life.

  ‘And did she adopt you two as well?’ said Willie.

  I was just about to say that actually it was me who had done all the adopting round here, and that even though I was only twelve going on fourteen, actually I might as well be thirty-two and a half, which was my mum’s age at the time. But my mouth went to jelly.

  ‘Oh no,’ Mavis piped up, whipping the thumb out of her mouth. ‘She’s our real mum, hers and mine.’ The soggy thumb flashed between us. ‘Rosie didn’t used to be our sister but she is now.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willie. ‘She’s very like you. No-one would ever guess.’ She looked round at us all. ‘My goodness,’ she went on. ‘And now you’ve lost your dad, you poor things.’

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ said Mavis. ‘Mr Tait wasn’t our dad. He was our friend. Our dad’s gone camping.’

  ‘Home on leave then, is he? What is he, a soldier?’

  Mavis stopped and glanced over at me for help but I was too busy wondering what she was on about.

  ‘No,’ said Mavis, ‘I don’t think so. Well, he was a soldier for a bit.’

  ‘He was definitely a soldier,’ I put in.

  ‘But now he’s gone camping,’ said Mavis.

  ‘Really?’ said Willie.

  I made a face at Mavis to stop. Rosie was tugging at her ear and looked like she was about to go off on one, so I cut in:

  ‘C... can I give my mum a message when she wakes up?’

  ‘I wanted to ask if it was okay for you to come and help me again tomorrow night in the kitchen. We’ve got guests, important ones. D’you think she’d mind? I’d give you a bit of money and you can have dinner too. Chicken this time. One of the dogs got out and went on the rampage at Home Farm.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind at all,’ I said, too stunned to have a jelly mouth.

  ‘Super! Let’s say five o’clock. Alright?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I may have to
go m... milking at four.’

  ‘Milking too? What an enterprising young woman you are. Just get along as soon as you can then.’

  By the time she left it was almost dark and the rain had started again, but she didn’t seem in the least bit bothered and waved a cheery goodbye, pulling her hat around her ears against the wind.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ I said, running through all my new jobs. ‘We’re going to be as rich as kings, you wait and see, and there’ll be no more talk of leaving Carbeth. Tomorrow’s Saturday so you two have to stay here and don’t wander. Just say Mum’s ill and accept all offers of food. Got it?’

  They glanced first at each other and then at me.

  ‘Look, you know where I’m going to be and you know I’m not making it up, don’t you? I never go anywhere and I always come back.’

  Rosie’s hand was back at her ear and Mavis glowered at me from behind her fist then went to the window and stared out into the dark.

  ‘I bet Mum comes back tomorrow afternoon anyway,’ I said. ‘You’ll see. She won’t just go off and leave us.’

  But I was scared too. I wanted her to come home. I wanted to know she was okay.

  ‘What do you mean Dad’s camping?’ I said, swinging on Mavis.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said and backed into the corner.

  ‘Yes, you do. You must have meant something. What do you know?’

  ‘Nothing. Leave me alone.’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  She stuck that stupid thumb of hers firmly in her mouth and wouldn’t budge. And then, completely from nowhere, I had a sudden need to thump her across the head. I’m not proud of this but suddenly she was just about as annoying as any one single person could be, apart from maybe George. I’d already had enough of being in charge.

  ‘She’s just making up stories,’ said Rosie. ‘She didn’t mean anything really. Your dad’s dead, same as mine, everybody knows that.’ And on she went.

  ‘Shut up Rosie,’ I said. My fingers twitched to thump her too now. ‘It’s none of your business. He’s not your dad.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she said. ‘If your mum’s adopted me then your dad must be my dad too.’

  I hadn’t considered this possibility before. It made me feel slightly sick and dizzy. I sat down in Mr Tait’s chair and put my fingers in my ears so that I could think this crazy idea through. It turned out even Mavis knew stuff about our dad that I didn’t know, and now I had to share him with Rosie too and we didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead. I’d been there a few minutes listening to my heartbeat thundering in my ears when I felt a damp hand round my wrist.

  ‘Lenny,’ said Mavis, as she pulled my hand away from my ear and blinked up at me. ‘Linny...’ Two tear lines ran down her cheeks. ‘Lenny, Daddy’s gone camping. George told me. And then he told me not to tell you. I’ll be in trouble now.’ She chewed her lip.

  ‘George? What do you mean George told you?’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ I said, and I wasn’t, not any more, just confused and frustrated. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just a bit strange, that’s all, and I don’t understand. I don’t seem to know anything about my own dad.’

  I got her up on my knee on Mr Tait’s chair and we stared at the fire in the grate. Rosie stayed on the bench by the window pulling at her ear and rocking back and forwards. Every so often she’d mutter something. ‘He’s going to be my dad too,’ she said. ‘Everything will be alright. Lenny will look after me.’ I don’t think she meant Big Lenny.

  ‘Mavis,’ I whispered. ‘What did George say to you? Tell me exactly what he said, word for word.’

  She thought for a long minute. ‘He said, Your dad’s in a camp, and he said, He won’t come back and he might die there.’ She pulled at her lip. ‘But I thought he was already dead.’

  ‘A camp? What else?’

  ‘He might even be dead already,’ she said. ‘That’s what George said. That’s all. And he said if I told you he’d tell everyone Mum had gone to Clydebank and we’d be sent to the poor house or Miss Weatherbeaten.’

  ‘When did you see him?’

  ‘Day before yesterday. He came past the school.’

  ‘You should have told me, Mavis.’

  Chapter 12

  I fell into a deep, deep sleep that night, roasted between Mavis and Rosie and lulled by the hum of the wind. Mr Tait’s alarm went off at five thirty. I’d left it by the stove so that I’d have to get out of bed to put it off. It had two little bells on top and a hammer that banged so hard back and forth between them that the whole thing jumped off the shelf and onto the floor, narrowly missing the water bucket.

  ‘Turn it off!’ shouted Mavis before I could find the knob in the dark.

  I put on the spare dress my friend Mrs Mags had given me a few weeks earlier that had belonged to her sister’s sister-in-law’s stepdaughter, or something like that. It was pale green with little yellow flowers all over it and I liked it a lot. It matched my dark green cardigan, made me look at least fourteen and was clean into the bargain, and I reckoned if I kept my coat on at the Tullochs’ farm I should still be able to arrive at the tearoom in a clean enough state for work. If I was really careful I might even get to the big house in it. I kissed them goodbye and left them sleeping, grabbed my coat and scarf and set off in the moonlight for the Tulloch’s farm.

  In the porch of the farmhouse I rubbed my arms against the cold and pulled on a pair of wellies. Mr Tulloch was whistling beyond the front door and nearly fell over me in the dark when he came out.

  ‘Whoops!’ he said. ‘There you are! Good morning to you!’

  Molly the collie gave a single bark and a nip at my elbow.

  ‘M... morning.’

  ‘But those’ll never do,’ he said bending to peer at my boots.

  ‘N... no?’

  ‘Not unless you have two left feet.’

  I examined them in the light from the door and saw that he was right enough.

  ‘Okay then,’ he said, once I’d found a proper pair. ‘Go into the barn and fetch the bucket and fill it like you did the last time in the grain store and do the mangers. If you do it quick you’ll be done before I bring the cows in. Go on now.’

  I took a huge lungful of air so I could speak properly. ‘Yes, Mr Tulloch,’ I said in a loud firm voice.

  ‘That’s the way!’ he said, and he disappeared into the darkness towards the fields with Molly sleek beside him.

  Feeling slightly more in command of my voice I sang a marching song on the way to the barn. Quietly. ‘I had a good job and I left and it jolly well served me right... right... right.’ And then on the way back I went: ‘It jolly well served me right ’cause I had a good job and I left... left... left.’ But slower, because the bucket was heavy. I decided to keep singing no matter what. It was ‘Away in a Manger’ next while I filled the mangers but I stopped when Mr Tulloch came back because it wasn’t Christmas.

  ‘Mrs Tulloch is trying to get up, but just in case she doesn’t make it, I’m going to show you what to do right now. You ready?’

  Deep breath. ‘Yes, Mr Tulloch.’

  ‘You’re very polite this morning,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Tulloch,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Keep talking. What did you have for breakfast?’

  This was a tricky one. I hadn’t had any breakfast. I paused just long enough for him to realise.

  ‘I’ve told you about this before, haven’t I?’ he said, but not angry. ‘A good breakfast is very important. What was your mum thinking letting you out with nothing in your stomach?’

  ‘I... I don’t know.’

  ‘Right, we’ll get you some milk in a minute, but we have to get it first.’

  Oh dear. I knew what was coming. Warm milk, straight from the cow. Yuck. And I’d forgotten to bring the cup he’d given us.

  ‘This is Forsythia,’ he said. He slapped Forsythia across the bottom. ‘Move over. Forsythia. Forsythia, th
is is Lenny.’

  Deep breath. ‘Hello, Forsythia!’ I said. Forsythia took her head out of her feed, paused, then stuck it back in again.

  ‘Not so loud, Lenny, in case you scare them.’

  Mr Tulloch put a three-legged stool on the ground beside Forsythia and sat down on it himself. He put a bucket underneath her and made me crouch down beside him so I could see what he was doing. This is what I saw:

  Forsythia’s udder was huge and pink and hard, fit to burst, and it was muddy as if she’d sat down in the soggiest part of the field. Mr Tulloch’s bucket was full of soapy water and a cloth.

  ‘See all this muck?’ he said. ‘You got to make sure none of it goes in the milk. So it has to be clean, alright? Like this.’ And he showed me. Forsythia carried on munching as if there wasn’t someone fiddling about with her udder. ‘No standing behind her, remember. Always from the side. You can go round the other side if you need to. On you go now. Your turn.’

  I got down on the floor and washed the teats. They were hard but soft too, like my gumboots. And they were rough like Mr Tait’s hands. I sloshed the soapy water up over the dirt. It was mostly country pancake, if you want the truth, but I washed her anyway. Mr Tulloch didn’t say a word but watched me all the time.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘You’re a natural. Now carry on round and do the others and I’ll follow you with the luggie.’

  ‘The luggie?’ I said.

  ‘The milk pail,’ he said. ‘What a townie!’

  So I washed the other cows’ udders, and I can tell you I earned my penny that day and washed my hands very well afterwards. When I’d emptied the soapy water, he told me to come over and he’d show me something.

  ‘This is how you do it,’ he said. There were two cows left. We got down beside one of them, who was called Forget-me, Mr Tulloch on his little stool and me crouched beside him.

  He spread his fingers wide and gripped the top of one of the teats between his thumb and the knuckle of his hand then pulled the other fingers in below, one after the other. A squirt of milk hit the side of the bucket and stopped as soon as his little finger joined the others in what looked like a fist.

  ‘Pull and squeeze. Come on Forget-me,’ he said. ‘That’s short for Forget-me-not.’ He showed me again: ‘Pull, squeeze, then release it, pull, squeeze, release, so the milk comes down.’ Then he did the same with his other hand with another teat. ‘Grip it tight at the top so it can’t escape back up,’ this he did, ‘and again,’ squirt went the milk, ‘then the other one again,’ squirt, ‘and this one, and so on. You try it.’