Blue Above the Chimneys

by Fraser, Christine Marion

  I liked my job, but I knew I would never love it. Often I was bored by the utter monotony of piecing garments together all day. It was too repetitive for my imaginative mind; for me I knew there had to be something else, but just then I was reasonably content. I was earning my independence and that meant a great deal to me.

  Factory life was good for me in another respect. I was continually mixing with other people, able-bods as well as disabled. Double talk and backchat abounded. Shyly I groped for words but lacked the swift repartee of the others. I blushed easily, which brought inevitable teasing, and with my habit of listening rather than talking I soon earned myself the label, ‘a deep one’.

  My workmates were able to argue with the reassurance of believing themselves right. Confidence oozed from them and they enjoyed poking fun, usually at somebody else’s expense. I listened and knew I would never be totally gregarious.

  One day Lizzie, an able-bod who worked the pressing machine, pounced on my sleeping defences. ‘You’ll be the worst wi’ the men,’ she told me with a sort of mocking kindness. ‘The quiet ones are aye the same. Look at ye, these big green eyes, that hair! I bet ye’re a Jezebel!’

  Rather naive for my eighteen years, I wasn’t quite sure if it was a compliment or an insult, but I knew it had something to do with being attractive to men. Already I was receiving some admiring glances from the males in the factory and had experienced the first stirrings of my feminine powers, but Lizzie’s words made me feel that I had been running around starkers, seducing all the men in sight.

  ‘Ach, leave the lassie be.’ Mary, the woman who was training me, rushed to my aid as I blushed crimson to the roots of my hair.

  ‘It wis a compliment,’ answered Lizzie in surprise. ‘I wish somebody would think I was a vamp!’

  Gradually, painstakingly, my shell of shyness cracked till one day I was able to give a swift retort to a derisive remark. My unexpected words earned a look of pained surprise from my tormentor, and she gave me the cold shoulder for the rest of the day, but from that point I had broken through the barriers. My natural reserve saw to it that I never really became ‘one of the gang’, but at least I was no longer the raw recruit I had been.

  For long my mind had brimmed with all the wonderful things that would befall me if only I had transport. Now I had Bertha, but soon realized that the world wasn’t going to come to me. I would have to meet it, but didn’t quite know how to go about it.

  My sisters went dancing every weekend. Arm in arm they went off, unintentionally shutting me out of their world. Each time I watched them go I felt a pang of emptiness at the prospect of another Saturday night indoors with Da.

  Once Margaret persuaded me to go ‘up the town’ with her to a favourite dance hall. ‘You can spectate,’ she told me earnestly.

  Off we went, she crushed in beside me on a box-cum-stool between my seat and the door. My need for company made me throw caution to the winds, though the ‘no passenger’ sign seemed to leer at me.

  When we arrived at the brightly lit hall my courage almost deserted me, but Margaret was determined to get me inside. The doorman gave me a queer look and I smiled to myself. A wheelchair going into a dance hall obviously wasn’t one of his everyday experiences. He proved to be very obliging, carrying me upstairs and depositing me on a seat inside. My chair was whisked away to a cloakroom, and I was left feeling very lost without my wheels around me.

  The atmosphere was gay, full of whirling feet. The music was loud but acceptable to young ears, and I felt a small thrill of excitement. Margaret was pounced on immediately by an eager young man. She was very pretty with her fair hair and shapely limbs. She was whisked away and I was left with the rest of the wall-flowers, but knew I looked more like a wild rose. I didn’t look disabled. My legs were a little thin but there were no other signs to prove my disability. My hair was long, falling down my back in natural waves, my eyes an unusual grey-green, vividly alive in my tanned face. With no one of the opposite sex to reassure me about my looks, I constantly reassured myself by spending a good deal of time in front of the mirror. My figure had improved with the years, and I no longer needed to stuff cotton wool into my bra to improve my shape. Taking all this into account, I wasn’t too surprised at being asked to dance several times in the course of the evening. One young male was particularly insistent and at one point grabbed me by the hands to pull me up before I knew where I was. But my arms were strong and we had quite a tug of war. My imagination began racing and I saw myself being whirled round the hall without my feet touching the floor, quite literally ‘dancing on air’.

  The picture made me snort with laughter.

  ‘Whit’s funny?’ sniffed the youth.

  ‘Nothing … just … I don’t dance … honestly.’

  ‘Then ye’d be better goin’ to the pictures,’ he growled and slouched off into the crowd.

  When the evening came to a close I was singled out by the manager and presented with a large box of chocolates. ‘Come back,’ he smiled. ‘But next time don’t sit around on your backside all night. Show them all up! Do the wheelchair twist or something.’

  I promised I would, but knew I wouldn’t go back. The evening had been an experience, but I needed something in which I could take an active part and I knew I would never find that in a dance hall.

  Good times were round the corner for me, but something happened in our lives that put everything else in the background for a time.

  Da was taking more and more to his bed. He was neglected and lonely. It was beyond my powers to take meals to his room, so if no one else was at home he had to wait for them. Now nearly eighty-five, his senses were as keen as they had always been, but since Mam’s death his morale had been low. We went up to see him but found little to say. We couldn’t bridge the gap that had always existed between him and us, but it was easy to be gentle with him. Our fear of him had long gone, though there were times of unease when he went into a temper, his one eye blazing with fury, his large gnarled hands bunched into white, taut knuckles.

  His room was reminiscent of the Govan house, with the leering pictures hanging self-consciously on the clean modern walls and smells of apples and tobacco escaping from the drawer in his old-fashioned dresser. The odour of stale smoke clung to his bedclothes, for he still smoked, though in moderation because it gave him the ‘water brash’. Away from his watchful eye we were able to have friends in and play records on Kirsty’s record player, but we could never be quite certain of his reactions because he was still capable of a few surprises. Sometimes he banged loudly on the floor with his chamber-pot or a shoe – whichever came to hand first; at other times he roared from the top of the stairs, demanding silence. One night he surpassed himself, giving our friends something to remember for the rest of their lives. The records were on and we didn’t hear him creeping downstairs. None of us even heard the door opening. ‘Turn that bloody juke-box off!’ His voice soared in ear-splitting grandeur above the general din. He stood there, a ghastly apparition in his tight-legged, sagging-bottomed combinations. Because he spent so much time in bed, he no longer bothered to wear the glass eye that had once been his pride, and the effect of one solitary eye blazing its fury upon the gathering was not something to be forgotten by the uninitiated.

  Margaret’s giggly friend stared open-mouthed, Kirsty’s latest young man turned white but got up respectfully and turned off the record player. I was fortunate that my friend was a girl who lived next door. She often popped into the house and was used to Da and his ways so I was saved the awful embarrassment that my sisters were showing with their crimson faces.

  ‘Go back to bed, Da,’ said Kirsty quietly, ‘you’ll catch cold.’

  ‘And you’ll catch a skelp on the lug if ye don’t make less din! This is my house!’ he cried. There was a look about him, a defeated crushed look. I had never seen it before. His age had caught up with him. He turned slowly and retreated upstairs. I felt an affection for him and a sympathy. How awful to be so old, to ha
ve no one to talk to, to spend the long nights alone and to waken up next day with nothing to look forward to but more loneliness.

  It was his last grand finale. Several nights later I went to bed early to read a book. I heard Kirsty coming upstairs, going towards Da’s room to take him his nightly cup of tea and a biscuit. There was a few moments’ silence, then her anguished cry split the night apart. ‘Chris! Margaret! Da’s dead! Da’s dead!’

  I don’t remember getting into my chair but all at once I was racing through to the adjoining room where Kirsty had crumpled into a chair, her face void of colour. ‘Da’s dead,’ she repeated dazedly. ‘I thought he was sleeping and shook him … he just … fell to the side.’

  I looked at my father and saw bubbles of air frothing in his throat, the air of his life expelling itself forever. Quietly he had slipped off on his last journey, his innermost thoughts unknown to us. There was a certain dignity about his going. He had made no fuss, no struggle to hold on to a life that had become empty and meaningless to him.

  Once again funeral arrangements had to be made. Again the house was quiet and dark with the scent of flowers hanging heavy in the air. Only fourteen months had lapsed since Mam had been laid to rest. Da hadn’t cried then and we had felt bitter towards him. The same old Da, never showing emotions because to him it was weak to display them to the world. The months had gone by and still his eyes remained dry, but gradually we came to realize we had been lucky in finding a release for our grief. His pain had been locked inside and he had simply pined to death.

  His coffin was borne away and we all said goodbye to the tough old man who had been our father. Once upon a time we had feared him, but his advancing years and our growing up had lessened our fear and deepened our respect for him. He had commanded respect from everyone who knew him and had received it from many during his long life.

  Quite unexpectedly I remembered the toast he had given us every New Year without fail. The memory brought to mind the years of childhood spent in the lofty tenements in Govan. Despite many things they had been good years, filled with all the ingredients that were necessary for a close-knit family circle. There had been a cosiness, too, about our room and kitchen that, no matter how hard we tried to convince ourselves, was undoubtedly missing in the rather cold atmosphere of the new house, where the walls were thin enough to allow neighbours’ voices to be heard, neighbours who had come from much the same environment as we had and who went about looking slightly lost without the closes and the landings where a good ‘stair-heid’ gossip could be enjoyed and where you couldn’t help but bump into a well-kent figure every time you went out.

  Remembering the years with our parents, I experienced a terrible yearning for the past. So many things belonged to it, Govan, Mam, now Da. One thought gave me comfort. I had come through many years of pain, of turbulent emotions I’d had to suppress. Half of my childhood had gone by in doubt, fear and inactivity. That part of the past I wasn’t sorry to let go of, and my mind zoomed away from it quickly.

  The funeral cars were going away, a soft August rain was falling, the clouds wept for an old soldier on his final journey.

  ‘Goodbye, Da,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t need the pennies or the whisky now, but you need the heaven and I hope you get it.’

  Days to Come

  One girl I’d known all through Guides got a little buggy soon after me and we began going everywhere together. We had heard about a club in town for disabled people and to this establishment we took ourselves one evening.

  When we arrived at the brightly lit building, I sat hesitating in Bertha but Marie came up to me impatiently, ‘Out,’ she ordered. ‘You’ll never get anywhere sitting thinking about it.’

  Although Marie had been disabled since infancy with brittle bones, she was quite active. She was small and dark with a rather forceful personality and plenty of confidence. In a way this was good for a born dreamer like me, with very little confidence in myself.

  I heaved my chair outside and unfolded it. ‘All right,’ I answered without enthusiasm. ‘But you stay beside me till I get the hang of things.’

  A collection of humans propped up by wheels, crutches and sticks milled busily inside the building.

  ‘C’mon,’ Marie urged me further into the depths of the hall where table tennis was in progress, played by two boys in wheelchairs. Little groups cohered everywhere. Curious eyes fell upon us. I gulped and put on my nonchalant look. I was extremely good at this, perhaps too successful because my workmates regularly told me I looked either superior or supercilious. I could have told them that the two meant much the same, but that would have been taken as a sign that I was airing my supposed superiority. For a shy person life can be extremely difficult, because if you show you are shy it’s an open invitation for others to take the upper hand. If you try to cover your shyness, then the mask you wear to serve the purpose is entirely misconstrued.

  A small, heavily built woman, supported by sticks that kept pace with her short legs, came toddling over. ‘Hallo,’ she said in a deep boom that rocked the foundations of a person’s defences. I had expected her voice to match her size. ‘I’m Sadie McCraw. C’mon and meet the girls.’

  The ‘girls’ were twice the age we were, but I had long ago discovered that a person’s age was of the least importance. To me, personality and character were the things that mattered. Sadie’s ‘girls’ were full of both, with the addition of a sense of fun such as I had never encountered before. Sadie was full of whimsical humour. Her chuckle bubbled out in great throaty gusts as she related experiences she’d had on public transport in an era when there was no provision of invalid cars.

  On one occasion she boarded a crowded bus with standing room only, so Sadie tucked herself into the little recess under the stairs. A blithely whistling conductor parked himself in front of her, his posterior level with her face. When her stop came she tapped him on the bottom, requesting access to the platform. The sight of her small, rotund figure so startled him that he shot out of the bus in such a hurry he collided with several passengers, an argument began, and Sadie made good her escape.

  Her second anecdote was even funnier. During a heavy snowfall she waited in the bus shelter till the vehicle came. Over she toddled to wait patiently while the conductor, his back turned on her, adjusted his ticket machine.

  ‘Please,’ she ventured timidly. ‘Could you help me up?’ She was of course asking him to help her ascend the high step on to the platform, but when he saw her standing up to her ankles in the snow his face blanched. He couldn’t see her legs because they were so short in comparison to her body, which was of normal proportions. ‘Oh, my God!’ he blabbered in horror. ‘The bus is ower yer legs, hen. Hing on and we’ll get an ambulance!’

  It had taken a few minutes for Sadie to convince him that she wasn’t sitting in the snow with her legs pinned under the bus. He had taken her calm request for help as an exceptional show of bravery in extreme circumstances.

  ‘The poor bloke was like a bloody sheet!’ Sadie bellowed mirthfully, ‘I felt like calling an ambulance for him! I mind another time I went upstairs for a smoke. When my stop came there was quite a crowd on the stairs in front of me and I was feart I would get crushed so I asked a man down below if he would help me at the bottom because I had bad legs. He couldn’t see my legs for people and must have thought I was the normal height. Before ye could blink he had grabbed me by the oxters and we both went whizzing down to meet the platform. He just couldny take my weight! I felt sorry for the poor bugger even though I nearly broke my legs!’

  ‘Remember that time we met the wee drunk man?’ broke in a tall fair woman with deep dimples and a way of swinging herself carelessly on crutches. Her name was Nellie and her stories were about the different reactions the general public display towards disability. One night she and Sadie emerged from a club run for the disabled. They went walking to the bus stop, a few more of their cronies bringing up the rear. A drunk man came along. Red-nosed, bleary-eyed, he wa
s in a world of his own, bellowing out a distorted rendering of ‘I Belong to Glasgow’. When he saw Sadie and Nellie he stopped in his tracks, clinging to a lamp post for support. Nellie was first to be singled out for his hiccuped question, ‘Whit – hic – happened tae you, hen – hic?’

  Nellie, who was a polio victim, kept her face straight as she answered, ‘Hitler did it … wi’ one o’ his bombs.’

  ‘Aw – that’s terrible, hen, that’s an awful pity,’ sympathized the little man, an unintentional swing round the lamp post bringing his blurred vision to rest on the others. They had heard Nellie’s words and were prepared for the next question that would undoubtedly come from the sozzled gentleman, who was now swinging round the lamp post like a drunken monkey. ‘My God! Whit happened tae a’ youse?’ he blabbered in sagging-mouthed horror.

  ‘Same bomb,’ came from a trio of voices shaking with pent-up laughter.

  The little gentleman landed with a soft thump on the wet pavement. ‘That’s terrible … aw hell, that’s terrible,’ he muttered dazedly. ‘A’ youse folk crippled and maimed because o’ Hitler! Somebody ought tae shoot the bugger!’

  We were still laughing when Nellie launched energetically into her next story, one recent enough to make her eyes glint with anger. She had gone into a tea-room with an able-bodied friend. The waitress had ignored Nellie completely, addressing herself only to the able-bod to the point of asking her what kind of things Nellie usually ate. ‘By God, I gave the bitch laldy!’ said Nellie vigorously. ‘I told her tae get me a coconut so that I could throw it at her silly heid! Was her face no’ red! I think she learnt her lesson right enough!’

  A big man with red hair was bearing down on our group. I had been watching him swing himself all over the hall, the wheelchair attachment that supported his legs being reminiscent of a battering ram. ‘What’s all this?’ he chuckled wickedly. ‘Dirty jokes from Sadie again?’