‘At the pictures.’
‘On your own?’ I asked, knowing the answer full well.
‘No, with a boy … but you’re too wee to ask such questions.’ She held out her hand. ‘Here – I saved you all a bit of chocolate.’
I took the tit-bit eagerly. ‘Can I eat it now?’
‘Ay, but don’t tell Da or I’ll get it on the ear for giving you sweeties in bed.’
I savoured the chocolate, feeling grown up and special, the youngest of the family yet still awake and talking to Mary.
‘Go to sleep now,’ she ordered. ‘I was through seeing Mam for a minute and she’s not too well. We’ll all have an early rise in the morning.’
Immediately my pulses raced with dread. ‘What’s wrong with Mam?’
Mary paused, then said softly, ‘You’re too wee to understand, Chris.’
I frowned in the darkness. ‘No, I’m not,’ I declared stoutly. ‘Mam’s having a baby soon. I know about babies. They grow in your belly. Did you know that, Mary?’
She chuckled. ‘Ay, now that you’ve told me. It’s getting them out of your belly that’s so hard. Now go to sleep this minute.’
The morning was a bustle of activity. Mary didn’t go to work as usual. Instead she organized us like an efficient little mother. Mam was still in bed. I looked at her flushed face and felt frightened. ‘What’s wrong, Mam?’ I wailed and began to cry. A smile touched her mouth. Her green eyes were very bright. ‘Chris, my wee lamb,’ she said tenderly, ‘don’t cry. You’ve been my baby up till now but there’s going to be another. It’s going to be born soon. I want you to look after Alec and do as Mary tells you.’
After we had breakfasted on thick porridge and buttery toast we were bundled into the room.
‘But have I not to go to school?’ cried Kirsty, who was a very well organized little being and liked everything to run in its usual order; also, she took a pride in getting marks for good attendance at school.
‘No,’ said Mary, ‘you’re to stay in case you’re needed to go for messages. I’ve got to help Mam so you and Ian will have to look after the wee ones.’
Ian sniggered, positively revelling in the prospect of a day off school. His blue eyes shone in his sunburned face and Alec and I squirmed, not relishing a day under our big brother’s regime.
‘Behave yerselves or I’ll hear aboot it,’ warned Da, his voice less menacing without the influence of drink.
‘You’d best get to work, Da,’ said Mary. ‘The midwife will be here soon and you’ll only get in the way.’
Normally she would never have dared order him to do anything, but today was an exception.
‘There’s the door,’ said Ian, rushing to admit a small woman dressed in green. She had delivered quite a few of us and had told Mam I ought to be the last. She glowered at Da, who ably returned the look, and she flounced past him into the kitchen.
Mam was beginning to moan quite loudly. We draped ourselves about the room, eyeing each other in unspoken dread.
‘Rotten babies!’ said Ian, his memory able to take him back to similar times. ‘Mam should stop having them. They’re noisy and smelly.’ He looked at me. ‘You were really smelly. I had to clean your bum sometimes. I thought after you Mam wouldn’t have any more.’
Terror at my Mam’s plight, combined with rage, made me brave. ‘I wasn’t smelly!’ I cried passionately ‘And – and you never had to clean my bum. I never had to wear nappies. I was never a baby like you. You should still be wearing nappies ’cos you mess up your drawers all the time …’
‘Be quiet,’ said Kirsty. ‘C’mon, out to play, all of you.’
The backcourts were bereft of the usual bustle because all our friends were at school. Every so often Mary popped her head from the window requesting Ian or Kirsty to run for a message. Lunch consisted of thick slices of bread and jam thrown down from the kitchen window. We set off to the Elder Park, our gloom dispelling at the idea of an afternoon guddling about by the little boating pond. The baby still hadn’t arrived by tea-time but the birth wasn’t far off. Hungry and resentful of babies in general, we argued among ourselves in the room. Kirsty was allowed the breathtaking honour of going through to the kitchen to heat water, leaving us with Ian who grabbed the opportunity to show us how masterful he was. He made us sit on the floor, cross-legged, arms folded, daring us to move a muscle or speak.
We heard Da clumping in from work and ten muscle-cramped minutes later he put his head round the door. ‘Come on ben,’ he said, a hint of pride in his steel-blue eyes. ‘Yer mother wants ye to see yer new sister.’
‘A girl!’ snorted Ian.
‘Ay,’ returned Da. ‘Thank God we’ve no’ another yin like you.’
We trooped into the kitchen. It smelt of disinfectant and steam. Mam looked exhausted, with blue shadows under her eyes. The new arrival was snuggled into a shawl at her side. Ian gave it no more than a cursory glance, then turned away. Da lifted Alec up to have a look, then he grabbed me in his strong arms. I stared at the baby’s red face. It yawned widely, exposing pink gums.
‘Do you like your wee sister?’ asked Mam.
‘It’s got an awful wrinkled face and it’s baldy,’ I said disgustedly, feeling a pang of jealousy as Mam cuddled the baby to her breast.
‘It’s likely done it already,’ I stated bluntly.
‘Done what?’ asked Mam.
‘Shat itself,’ I said, with an evil chuckle which died in my throat at the feel of Da’s heavy hand across my upturned bottom. He despised such talk unless he was in the mood for it. If Mam used such words he couldn’t help laughing because she made them sound so funny. She was forty years old when she gave birth to Margaret. She had spent a lot of her life bearing and rearing children. At barely eighteen she had given birth to her first son. Another son and two daughters were to follow before she was widowed at just twenty-seven. It wasn’t for us to wonder why she had married Da, who was thirty years her senior, a widower with a grown-up family scattered around the globe. In retrospect he must have been a pillar to lean on, someone to man a house full of dependent children.
But he had been the means of swelling the family even further, till now we numbered nine. Seventy when Margaret was born, he had the bearing of a young man. His iron-grey hair was thick, his eyesight so good he disdained the use of glasses except for reading. He had fought through the Boer War and the Great War and was a man’s man, tough of body, resilient of spirit, unable to understand anyone whose power of will wasn’t as indomitable as his own. He expected his offspring to reflect his strength of character and found it in all but Alec, whose nervous manner and hesitant speech constantly annoyed him.
Fortunately we had also inherited Mam’s sensitivity to temper our stubborn natures. None of us was close to Da in those early days. The age gap was too great to be bridged by the usual forms of communication. Because Mam was always so busy we had no one to turn to for advice on school work and personal matters, so we looked to each other and were close-knit brothers and sisters, though we niggled so much at each other.
Da was a frightening figure to us in our infancy. His drinking petrified us. Weekends were the worst of all. He had more money in his pocket then. We waited fearfully for him to come home, knowing his temper would be fiery, his tongue sharper than a razor. If we didn’t get the brunt of it, Mam did. It was terrible to see the sadness in her eyes and the flush of anger on her face. Yet despite her vulnerability, she defended herself and protected us with a tenacity perhaps even greater than Da’s because hers was born of love, not stubbornness.
But Da’s shell of hardness had many soft spots. He spoiled Mam in different ways. Every Sunday he gave her breakfast in bed, his whole attitude softened. It was his way of making up for his previous night’s drinking.
Beyond the tenements were houses where flowers smelt sweetly. In summer we went for long walks, taking up the breadth of the pavement. Da never failed to pluck a rose dangling from a wall. ‘There ye are, Evelyn,’ he would
say to Mam, ‘a rose for a rose.’
Because of Mam we laughed a lot together. When Jimmy Shand played on our big, accumulator-operated radio, she grabbed Da and they waltzed round the kitchen. Unable to resist, the rest of us joined in, jigging from kitchen to room in a long crocodile, Da chuckling heartily, Mam’s eyes wet with tears of merriment.
After Margaret’s birth, Mam remained physically exhausted for a long time and we all had to do our share of work. Though I was only four I soon learned to change Margaret’s nappies, taking my displeasure out on the baby by slapping a cold flannel against her little pink buttocks. When she cried in protest, I was quick to turn an innocent face to Mam.
‘My, but she’s a girny bairn that,’ Mam said once.
‘Not like I was, Mam,’ I said self-righteously.
‘No, not like you were, Chris,’ said Mam with a smile, ‘you were much worse.’
Backcourt Capers
By the time I was six I was an established tomboy and much preferred the company of boys. I scorned girls’ games and girls’ toys. Dolls were for cissies, cars and trains a delight. I was accepted into gangs of boys, included in their wild games. Walls and trees were there to be climbed. I resented the fact that I’d been born a girl and grew furious when the boys teased me because I wore knickers, but could do nothing about it because wearing knickers was infinitely preferable to wearing none.
Our favourite territory was the nearby Elder Park, where we whooped in and out of the bushes brandishing pieces of wood for guns. The park-keeper spent a great deal of his time chasing us and we spent a good deal of ours shouting rude names at him and pulling dreadful faces at a safe distance. One of our most favoured occupations was browsing round the trees looking for caterpillars. If they were scarce in the park we went to nearby gardens to hunt through large nasturtium leaves, sometimes managing to find a nice fat caterpillar before we were chased from the gardens. I loved my caterpillars; not for me silly caterpillar races with the poor little creatures getting poked with sticks if they went in the wrong direction. I preferred to study mine, feeling thrilled at a miracle of nature that had made so many pairs of sticky little legs. The feel of them creeping over my hands was an ecstasy; even when they expelled their minute particles of excreta, I hugged myself with the wonder of it all.
They were housed in a big matchbox which I kept under my pillow. I hoarded them jealously, careful that Da never saw them because he had already broken my heart by throwing some in the fire the previous year. Listening to them popping in the flames I mustered all the powers in me to bring about a similar doom to such a murderer, but my unsavoury wishes never came to fruition.
With the passing of a year I became more cunning where Da was concerned, but I didn’t reckon with Kirsty. One day she found me in the room playing with my caterpillars. She was distinctly more lady-like than me and hated creepy-crawlies in any form. She stared at the squirming little creatures, her horror all the keener with the knowledge that she had, in all innocence, been sleeping beside them for nights on end.
‘I’m going to tell Da on you,’ she said, her disgust making her resort to the most despised threat of all. ‘I’ll tell if you don’t get rid of them. You’re a dirty wee bitch!’
‘Tell-tale!’ I jeered, while racking my brains for another place to keep my pets. Inspiration came with a blinding flash and my eyes sparkled. ‘Tell all you like, Lady Kirsty. I don’t care. No one’s going to find my catties!’
Later that day I crept down to the stairhead lavatory, inserted the key and went inside. It was a square little box of a place, known to our family as ‘the cludge’. The walls, cistern and pipes were all painted a dark dingy green. The bare boards of the floor were scrubbed white, with sheets of newspaper spread over them to guard against muddy feet. To the left of the toilet pan was an oblong window with rusty wire mesh over the lower half. One of the panes had been broken by an errant ball and never replaced. A piece of wood was nailed over the space so that there was always half-light in the small enclosure.
This was one of my favourite hideouts, a place of privacy when ever-present humans became too much of a burden. Each tenant on our landing had a key to it; ours hung on a hook just inside the door in the lobby. It was here I came to scrutinize the pages of the Sunday Post. Perched comfortably on the wooden toilet seat, I chuckled with glee at the antics of ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’.
When I genuinely wanted to use the toilet I amused myself reading little snippets from the neat squares of paper that were threaded through with string and tied to a nail on the door. These squares were used by our family in the course of our needs, except for Mam who preferred something of a gentler nature and armed herself with fistfuls of tissue paper on her excursions to the cludge.
Our neighbours distinguished themselves by being able to afford real toilet paper and one lady had asked Mam to remove the newspaper squares because they brought down the tone of the toilet. The ‘posh’ landings above ours took it in turns to hang neat rolls of paper in their toilets and our neighbour was anxious for our landing to follow the same principle. But her pleas were in vain and, little devils that we were, we tore huge bundles of squares, waited till the lady appeared from her lavender-smelling house, then trooped downstairs, gaily trailing streams of paper tied in such a way that they resembled the paper bows in the tail of a kite. We were known as ‘the Fraser tribe’ in our area and must have been a great nuisance to our neighbours. Our ‘Toilet Paper Lady’, as we had wickedly christened her, appeared to regard her trips to the lavatory as an altogether shameful business. She glided down on noiseless slippers, tried the door and, if it was locked, crept back upstairs again to await a later chance. I knew she watched through her keyhole for the coast to be clear and delayed my exit from the cludge as long as possible. Always I waited till she was forced to try the door again, then I would shout in a voice full of innocence, ‘I’m just coming.’ When I finally emerged, it was my joy to summon Alec to the lobby where we took turns peeping through the keyhole to watch the lady’s head gradually come round the crack in her door; then, seeing no one, she would go bolting red-faced downstairs.
We also made full use of ‘Chanty Emptying’ times. With no lavatory in the house, there was nothing else to do but use a chamber pot during the night. In the morning we made no pretence of hiding it on the way to emptying it down the toilet, but our Toilet Paper Lady had more finesse about the whole business and would only cart her chamber pot to the toilet during quiet spells on the landing. Occasionally we took it into our heads to waylay her and jostled each other at the lobby keyhole till she emerged. At the crucial moment one of us opened our door and looked out, completely unnerving the poor lady so that she almost dropped her discreetly covered chamber.
Kirsty and Ian were too grown up for such pranks and Alec simply followed me in everything so it was I who incurred the most displeasure in the Toilet Paper Lady.
But she was far from my mind that day I sought a new home for my caterpillars. Carefully I deposited the box on top of the cistern. It took a good deal of effort for, although I was tall for my age, it wasn’t easy to reach up to the damp, flat surface above the pipes, even though I stood on the toilet seat to gain height. But the act was accomplished and I hugged myself with glee. My catties were safe and my satisfaction was complete. For the next few days I was never away from the cludge and Mam asked anxiously if I had diarrhoea. The neighbours spoke in muted whispers about ‘that wee devil, Chris’, surely the wildest member of the Fraser tribe. All went well for almost a week. I made many trips to local gardens for fresh leaves, watching with breathless wonder while my catties nibbled holes, climbed round my fingers, and marched up the cistern pipes for exercise.
Then catastrophe struck. A knock came to our door. The Toilet Paper Lady stood there. ‘Mrs Fraser,’ she said to Mam, ‘do you know anything about these horrible things in the toilet?’
Two-year-old Margaret squirmed in Mam’s arms and held out a chubby fist. ‘Ball
! Gimme ball!’ she chuckled and tried to grab our neighbour’s severe bun. This didn’t help to improve her mood. She glowered at Margaret and stepped back a pace.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Mrs Murdoch,’ said Mam in her delightful Aberdonian accent. Sometimes she deliberately accentuated it so that it was difficult for the untrained ear to fully understand her. The Toilet Paper Lady glared. I hid with Alec behind Mam’s back and waited with bated breath.
‘I mean these beasties! All over the place. Come down and see for yourself.’
We followed Mam at a safe distance. Alec was in the secret with me and his nervous discomfort was perhaps even greater than mine when we saw a gallant army of striped caterpillars marching out from the gap under the cludge door.
‘Oh my,’ said Mam calmly, ‘caterpillars!’
Our neighbour’s lips folded into a tight line. ‘Ay, very perceptive of you, Mrs Fraser! Caterpillars! In the toilet! It’s a disgrace! I couldn’t believe my eyes when one crawled over my knee just as …’ she floundered and blushed scarlet as if she had been on the verge of giving away a trade secret.
Mam glanced at us; we stared at the shiny brown banister with great interest. There was no doubt she knew we were the culprits. Her family was the youngest on the landing. The Toilet Paper Lady had a grown-up daughter and a teenage son, our other neighbour had one very adult son. No matter how fanciful one’s imagination might be, it just wasn’t possible to picture any of them hoarding catties in the cludge.
Mam shook her head. ‘It’s gey funny,’ she said, her accent so pronounced that even we could hardly understand. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mrs Murdoch, I’ll get my bairns to gather them up for you and take them away.’
‘For me?’ exploded the Toilet Paper Lady.
‘Ay,’ returned Mam pleasantly. ‘You wouldny like them left in there, would you now?’
Well! Wasn’t our Mam devious? Mrs Murdoch emitted a gigantic snort before stomping upstairs and into her house without another word. Mam gave me a slow and deliberate wink. Wasn’t that mother love for you?
Blue Above the Chimneys Page 2