Sadie raised her comically expressive eyebrows. ‘We were waiting for you to tell us some,’ she said smartly.
‘Aw, Sadie,’ he grinned, settling square shoulders back in his chair. ‘I thought you were my friend … actually – I was hoping for an introduction to the new girls,’ he finished, flashing me a look from his twinkling brown eyes. Before the night was over Marie and I had promised to accompany him on a buggy run. ‘I’ll show you how to drive properly!’ he roared cheekily as we departed into the night. Bobby Meredith was almost fifteen years older than me but it was the start of the age-old chase between male and female. I wanted no more than a platonic friendship, but soon learned that this was one of the most impossible relationships between the sexes. We argued, laughed, and fought. I kept on running, he kept on pursuing, and we had a whole lot of fun. My social life was now very full and I was out almost every night, greedy for all the good times I had missed in my early teenage years. Often the family were in bed when I came home, and I had good reason to be thankful for all the methods I had devised to overcome obstacles, particularly the one for conquering stairs. Those nearest to me had become so used to my independence that they seldom came to my aid now for anything, which did annoy me sometimes because often a helping hand wouldn’t have gone amiss. But sadly, since our parents had gone from our lives, we had all become rather intolerant of each other. Because of my circumstances my life took different paths from the so-called norm which perhaps estranged me slightly from my own kin. The young are often blind to each other’s feelings because their vision is so filled with feelings for themselves. No effort is made to analyse each other’s thoughts and fears, no questions asked. So it was with us then, and I was glad that Mam had never coddled me in childhood. Otherwise I would never have managed in a house where it was survival of the fittest.
So each night I came home, surmounted the two steps at the porch by sitting on a brick flower box, folding my chair and getting into it, then going through the whole procedure again once inside the house but on a much tougher scale, because of the flight of stairs up to my bedroom. My bottom became hard, my arms strong, and I thanked God for giving me so many different kinds of strength.
Despite my busy life, I was able to rouse myself each morning for work. I was now a reasonably competent machinist and though I didn’t enjoy the job I made the best of it, releasing my creative impulses into a little garden I cultivated out of a piece of waste ground in the back yard.
Everyone laughed when I first voiced my ideas.
‘Ach, you’re daft,’ said Lizzie. ‘You’d need a tractor tae get rid of these weeds.’
‘You wait,’ I told her with assurance.
The boss grinned dryly when I put my request to him. ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you getting enough work in the factory?’
‘Plenty,’ I hastened to assure him. ‘It would just be nicer to sit outside at dinner-time surrounded by flowers.’
My optimism incurred another dry smile, but he gave me the go-ahead for my garden. Armed with a shovel from home and a few feminine wiles, I soon persuaded one of the boys to dig over the ground. After that I raked, hoed and raked, till the earth was nicely brown and free from weeds. Old Gabby the foreman shook his head when he saw me kneeling on my hands and knees with my backside sticking up in the air. ‘You’re an awfy lassie,’ he told me for the umpteenth time. ‘You’ll never get flowers tae grow there.’
Ignoring all the pessimism, I planted neat rows of seeds, each lunch-time racing outside to peer at the earth for signs of life.
‘D’you need a magnifying glass?’ asked Lizzie sarcastically.
By June I had an abundance of blooms in my tiny garden. My rose bushes were ebullient with life and I rather hoped the estate gardener wouldn’t see them because I had foraged them out of his compost heap.
The boss came out to inspect my handiwork, bringing one of the directors.
‘Good show,’ said the latter, with the aloof smile that people of his standing keep for underlings. ‘You might come and tidy up my garden a bit, eh?’
I smiled with deceptive charm. ‘At five pounds an hour I think you’d find me too expensive.’
He paused, at a loss for words. It certainly wasn’t the answer he expected from an employee.
‘Oh … aha … ha – yes, very good,’ he mumbled and turned away, my boss making appeasing sounds in his ear.
Lizzie looked at me in amazement. ‘You’re helluva cocky! Ye wouldny say boo tae a goose a few weeks ago.’
‘I had good teachers, Lizzie,’ I answered quietly. ‘Anyway, why should I lick that old geezer’s boots? I hate people who speak down to me.’
Now I was able to pick a large bunch of flowers from my very own garden to take to Mam’s grave. I don’t know what compelled me to go to the cemetery, because I didn’t like to look upon the rows of cold stones. I didn’t think of Mam as lying in the crumbling earth, but pictured her in some wonderful place far beyond our planet. The words on her stone were so conventional and meant little to me. What did they tell of her life? There was no indication of the gentle life that had existed between the dates of birth and death. When I left the quiet, dreaming cemetery, it wasn’t with the feeling that I was leaving her behind but that she came with me and watched over me, surely the most devoted of guardian angels.
At this time my home life was almost non-existent. The house had no harmony as in days gone by. It was just a place to rest and feed the body. Our views on home management differed greatly, but somehow we kept things ticking over, saw to bills and other unsavoury but necessary items.
There was nothing to keep us together, no head of the house to dictate a routine. Kirsty tried to maintain the family atmosphere, but we resented it if she became too overbearing. She was now going steady with the young man who had made his first encounter with Da under such embarrassing circumstances. We all liked him. He was full of interesting chatter about his upbringing on the Hebridean island of Tiree. After a spell in the Merchant Navy he was now a driver on the Corporation buses with Kirsty as his conductress.
They were married in the spring following Da’s death, and the marriage bound the home together after an initial spell of resentment felt by the rest of us. It was strange to watch another man take over Da’s role as head of the house. Alec sulked more than any of us, though he had often rebelled against Da’s strict regime. But in time we adjusted to the new way of life. I was glad to see Kirsty so happy. She had taken a lot of the responsibilities on her shoulders. Now there was someone to share the load and her whole demeanour became more relaxed.
I never gave a thought to my own future, whether I would get married or not. I lived for each moment. My wheelchair never got between me and the opposite sex. I had discovered that men more than women accepted you for what you were without too many questions. It wasn’t unusual for me to have dates with several partners in one week, places of rendezvous clearer in my mind than the identity of the poor male. Some I liked very much, falling in and out of love so often that Marie was heartily sick of hearing declarations of affection that were as lasting as a puff of wind.
The grass on the other side is always greener. Even while I was going quite steadily with one boy I sighed for the attentions of one young man who was an associate member of our club, which meant that he had all his faculties. He was there to help in the general running of things and was forever rushing to and fro. He was quiet and shy. Sometimes I got a smile from him as he raced past, and I liked the warmth in his blue eyes and his shining thatch of red-gold hair that matched a neat little moustache.
‘He’s nice,’ I remarked to Marie as I watched his slim, agile body flying out of sight.
She sighed impatiently. ‘Here we go again! Another lifetime passion that will fade out next week.’
‘Do you know his name?’ I asked carelessly.
‘Everyone just calls him KC. He’s always with the older crowd.’
‘He must be shy like me,’ I decided in a sorr
owing voice. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to get on with older people when you’re shy.’
It was June 1962 and our club was busy preparing for the annual rally that was held every year in a playing field outside Glasgow.
The day dawned and scores of bright blue buggies met at an appointed place in town. Excitement was rife when a police car and AA patrolmen on motor bikes arrived to escort us through Glasgow. It was a journey to be remembered because of the gaping pedestrians. Police held up other traffic at the lights, allowing us to sail across like VIPs. My face was crimson with suppressed laughter. Royalty could hardly have looked so important as the long crocodile of invalid cars buzzing noisly along the roads.
At the field everything was chaotic for a time till gradually everyone got sorted into position for the different events. I had put my name down for one or two tests of skill and I manoeuvred myself for Round the Flags, gulping with nerves and telling myself what a fool I was to think I was good enough to compete with people who had been driving for years. Marie had had the good sense not to participate and she waved to me happily from the rows of spectators.
I managed to get round the course without flattening a single flag but my Parking and Garaging was a disaster and I was dryly asked by a steward if I was used to keeping Bertha in a hangar.
Judging the Distance came next and I instructed the stewards to put the posts ever closer till they looked at each other despairingly, a look that said only a female would attempt anything so obviously impossible. But I squeezed through by a hair’s breadth, then left the scene with a sigh of relief.
Now that the heats were over I was able to relax and joined Marie to poke round the various stalls. I kept one eye open for KC who was diving about in the distance. He was the Events Convener, which meant that he allotted the stewards their jobs and made sure everything went off smoothly.
‘I wish I could talk to him,’ I said to Marie, but her answer was drowned in a gay bedlam of sound as the Boys’ Brigade struck up on the bagpipes. ‘Let’s go in for a cuppa!’ yelled Marie, and we made our way inside a huge marquee where teacups chinked unceasingly and the butter on homemade pancakes melted in the heat.
I was biting into a large cream doughnut when KC’s bright head popped round the marquee doors. ‘Christine Fraser!’ he called and looked straight at me. ‘Your name’s being called over the loudspeaker. Could you come at once?’
He disappeared and I was covered in confusion. ‘He saw my face!’ I told Marie in dismay. ‘All covered in cream!’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s only a wee bit on your nose.’
We made our way into the sun. ‘How did he know who I was?’ I said wonderingly. ‘And why is my name being called?’
She clicked her tongue in exasperation. ‘I don’t know to the first and you’d better go and find out to the second.’
I was stunned when I was presented with a chrome milk-jug and sugar-bowl, the first prize for Judging the Distance.
‘Imagine,’ I said dazedly to Marie, ‘me winning a prize! How did I do it?’
‘I’ll never know but congratulations anyway. Now, let’s get going.’
We got into our buggies to drive to Marie’s house, where I was to have tea before going on to a party. Before leaving the field I looked back and singled out KC who was still rushing about, his bright head shining under the vast expanse of clear blue sky. For a moment the scene was a lovely tableau, the green fields, all that beautiful sky with no chimneys anywhere to mar the effect of space … and KC, a young man whose name I didn’t even know but who did things to my heart I had never experienced before. I wished that I was staying there among the green fields. With the crowd thinning I might have snatched a chance to talk to him. I knew little about him except that he was an art student in his final year at the Glasgow School of Art.
I wondered again how he had linked my name with my face, but his knowledge of my identity had been no accident, as I was to find out in days to come … In days to come! What did they hold for me? How would I overcome the obstacles that would undoubtedly arise for a nineteen-year-old girl, already bereft of both parents and destined to spend the rest of life in a wheelchair?
Marie hooted her horn impatiently and I turned Bertha’s snout on to the dusty road, my thoughts surging forward to the night of fun that lay ahead. At that moment nothing really mattered but the present. Nevertheless I looked back again at that elusive figure in the distance. I was living for the present but at that moment I was looking back at my future.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd 1980
Published in Fontana Paperbacks 1985
Published in Penguin Books 2012
Copyright © Christine Marion Fraser, 1980
Cover photographs: Children © TopFoto
Tenements © Mary Evans Picture Library/Roger Mayne
Cover: www.headdesign.co.uk
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-197251-0
Blue Above the Chimneys Page 18