More and more, he was becoming like his father, who eventually worked days instead of nights. Melvin had made Baldy Fowler the head baker or manager on the night shift because Baldy ‘knew his stuff’. He had been one of the few survivors when Dessie Street had been bombed. Not that Baldy had ever shown any gratitude for the fact.
‘Isn’t it just like the bloody thing,’ he’d complained at the time. ‘Life’s not worth living for me. I don’t care if I snuff it. But I’m the one who survives.’
He still hadn’t forgotten his wife Sarah and the terrible day she had been hanged for the murder of his mother, even though it had happened many years ago and he was now courting a woman from Springburn.
Catriona remembered that terrible day as well. Poor Sarah had been nagged beyond endurance by ‘Lender Lil’, Baldy’s ghastly money-lending mother. She could well understand how Sarah felt. Often in the past, she had felt like stabbing her own mother to death. More recently, she’d felt like murdering Melvin. She had come to genuinely believe that anyone was capable of murder. At least her mother’s aggressive nagging and threatening of God’s punishments weren’t so constant now. She still reminded Catriona what God thought of her but now it was with a regretful sigh. As Grand Matron of the Band of Jesus, she appeared to have a direct line to God and inside knowledge of His every wish and plan. Catriona used to believe this, but not any more. Oh, there were still deep-rooted fears that, no matter how much she mentally pooh-poohed them, refused to be completely banished. But now, she fought against them as best and as often as she could. She knew that her mother used God to get her own way.
Catriona had come to the conclusion that He couldn’t be much of a God if He allowed Himself to be so often manipulated by Hannah Munro. He had never listened to the pleas and prayers of Catriona McNair. No help, no mercy and certainly no love had ever been doled out to her. She didn’t believe in a God like that. Practically every time she saw Sammy Hunter, she argued with him about her beliefs or rather lack of them. Sammy had been a conscientious objector and suffered much at the hands of the military in Maryhill Barracks where he’d been imprisoned for a time. His wife Ruth had been killed in the war. After her death, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, had helped to get him out of prison. The Quakers were pacifists and held mock tribunals to help COs and prepare them for the ordeal they would face and all the questions that would be flung at them, when they were called to face the real tribunal. Sammy was just one of many they helped in this way.
After his imprisonment in the Barracks, Sammy had served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit for the rest of the war. After it ended, he’d kept in touch with the Society of Friends. Sammy had fiery red hair and a broken nose, and he looked like a prize fighter. He certainly could be argumentative and he held strong views, but he never brought up the subject of God or religion. It was her that could never resist taking every opportunity she could to vent her bitterness and argue about religion with him. If Melvin was there, he’d say things like, ‘Will you shut up about bloody religion? It’s bad enough when your mother goes on about it.’
Sammy was the only one she could talk to. He argued with her, but he never made any attempt to convert her. She was curious to know why. Wasn’t that what religious people, especially members of religious sects, were supposed to do? Sammy said it wasn’t. Love is the meaning of life and the light of God is in everyone, he believed.
Catriona found this very hard to swallow, especially when she thought of Melvin. It intrigued her that a man like Sammy could go along with it, although she could remember one incident about which he’d shown amazing tolerance and understanding.
His wife Ruth had been killed in a cinema when it received a direct hit and Alec Jackson, Madge’s husband, had been with her. It was while Sammy had been in Maryhill Barracks and Ruth had been fed up and lonely. They’d barely got seated, apparently, when the bomb fell. To Alec’s credit (and there never had been much to Alec’s credit), he had given his name and Ruth’s to the air-raid warden when asked, then had gone down on his knees and dug with his bare hands to try to find Ruth and get her out. He could have walked away without saying or doing anything. That way Madge and Sammy would never have known.
Ruth had been a very beautiful girl, sexy too. Catriona could well believe that her every move could be sexually provocative, especially to a man like Alec, with her hips swaying as she walked, her full, pouting lips and black, suggestive eyes. As far as she knew, though, Ruth and Sammy had been ideally happy together and they had been so proud of their little room-and-kitchen flat. Sammy had obviously adored Ruth. Her death had devastated him. His emotions kept coming to boiling point about the way she’d died. It added fuel to his hatred of war.
Immediately afterwards, everyone, even Madge, thought it best not to add to poor Sammy’s grief by telling him that Ruth had been with Alec. It was not until years later that Alec had confessed to Sammy. Alec had been a terrible womaniser. Even Catriona, who had been quite naive in her youth, had realised it eventually. Madge had given Alec absolute hell, not only because of Ruth, but because he’d seduced Catriona in the early years of her marriage, during the time her mother had taken the children from her ‘for their own safety’. Catriona had allowed him to persuade her to have sex with him. She’d believed it to be an expression of love at the time. He had been so gentle after all the brutal and completely insensitive sex she’d suffered from Melvin. At the time she had felt more vulnerable than usual and in need of some sort of comfort, but afterwards she’d suffered agonies of guilt, even though it had only happened on one occasion. All her previous so-called sins shrank to nothing compared with the sin of adultery.
Much to Alec’s horror, she’d confessed to Madge, who immediately felled Alec with a blow to his handsome face. Madge was a big, strong girl.
‘You rotten big midden. She’s only a wee lassie,’ she bawled at her husband, ‘and she’s worried about her weans.’
That one act of unfaithfulness had resulted in a pregnancy about which she’d had to deceive Melvin, to convince him that baby Robert, like Andrew and Fergus, was truly his.
Not that she had ever regretted having Robert. She had loved him dearly and always would. He had been such a good wee boy. She remembered saying to Sandy, the van man, when they were all sheltering in the bakehouse lobby just before the bomb was dropped, ‘Look at that wee pet. Wide awake and not a whimper.’ She had been sitting on the floor at the side of Robert’s pram with her knees hugged up under her chin. Leaning her head to one side, she had begun to sing to the baby. She could still see him staring up at her, wide-eyed with delight.
Wee Willie Winkie
Runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs
In his nightgown.
Tirling at the windows,
Crying at the locks —
Are all the weans in their beds,
For it’s now ten o’clock.
What kind of God was it who could allow such a lovely and loving wee baby to be crushed to death, even as a punishment for her? Her mind shrank away from the memory and the torment, and drifted on to Sammy again.
He had certainly shown great tolerance towards Alec. He’d always had a horror, he said, of Ruth dying frightened and alone. She had always liked Alec and Sammy was glad that he had been with her. He’d even helped Alec, by then unemployed, down-and-out and very miserable, to find a job and regain some of his self-respect. They were now good friends and Alec obviously thought the world of Sammy.
Fine, fine. But that was just Sammy. Not God. Not bloody God, who had allowed her baby to die a horrible death.
She fought to gather her strength so that she could survive for Andrew and Fergus’s sakes. And go on surviving. God or no God, by hardening herself and fuelling her hatred of Melvin, she would find the strength.
3
Catriona lost count of the number of people who were crowded into the sitting room. Children and some of the younger adults sat on the floor nearest to the t
elevision. Then there were rows of chairs. Crammed in behind the chairs, people stood pressed against the walls at the back. Catriona gave up trying to pass round tea and sandwiches and she too squeezed in behind the chairs.
Wide-eyed with admiration, everyone agreed that it was a magic box indeed. Here they were in a room in Glasgow and actually able to see what was going on in London – as it happened. This fact took a lot of believing and was really much more amazing and impressive than the Coronation itself. Glaswegians had never been greatly impressed with the Royal Family. For one thing, they were English. For another, they had more money than was good for them. As her mother often said, ‘It’s an ill-divided world.’
For once, Catriona tended to think the same way as her mother. Her mother always said, when referring to the soon-to-be-crowned Queen, ‘If she came to my door tomorrow, I’d invite her in and make her welcome the same as I’d do with any decent woman. But I’d never bend the knee to her.’
The bishops bent both knees. There they were at the Queen’s feet in their magnificent robes. All around her were equally sumptuously attired peers in velvet and ermine cloaks and coronets. The Abbey too looked magnificent and Catriona couldn’t help wondering what it, like the expensive robes, had to do with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, the lowly carpenter, the young man who’d upturned the money changers’ stalls and chased them out of the temple. All the wealthy, and by the looks of them snobby, characters who filled the Abbey probably thought they were miles better than anyone in this room. They were certainly of a different world, a world of privilege that Catriona could hardly imagine.
Afterwards, everybody said what a miracle it was, meaning the television and its ability to bring pictures live into the room. The only remark that Catriona heard made about the Coronation itself was, ‘That crown must have cost a bob or two!’
Everybody told Melvin how grateful they were to him for allowing them into his house to see his magic box. They thanked her for the tea and sandwiches. Then they went happily back to their ‘single ends’ and room and kitchens in the tenement jungle of Partick. It was a far cry from the pomp and circumstance and show of wealth that they had just witnessed, but it didn’t seem to bother them. They had enjoyed a good time and had been just as interested in seeing the inside of Melvin’s big house as they’d been in seeing the inside of Westminster Abbey.
When they were gone, Catriona got out the Hoover and started attacking the carpet. Melvin hovered at her back, hands jingling coins in his pocket, determined to make himself heard, while she was equally determined not to listen.
‘They won’t forget today in a hurry – visiting a house like this. This will give them something to talk about for years. There isn’t another television set for miles, you know.’
Catriona knew only too well that there must be plenty of other televisions – many no doubt bigger and better than Melvin’s pride and joy – in the large villas along Great Western Road. But she had no wish to get into an argument with him just now.
‘Did you see their faces?’ Melvin enthused as he swaggered around. ‘See how impressed they were? And not just by my television set. Their eyes were taking in everything from the moment you opened that front door. That hall out there is bigger than most of their whole houses. You could easily fit a single end or even a room and kitchen into that hall.’
Madge would have stayed behind to help wash up the cups or Hoover the carpet but, when she offered, Melvin had said, ‘Away you go back to your own place. You and your mob’ll cause more mess than you’ll clean up. We’ll manage.’
‘We,’ he’d said. That was a laugh. Madge laughed but not for the same reason. Big, blowsy Madge liked straight talking. She was a straight talker herself, and she was always ready to enjoy a good laugh.
‘You’re an awful man, Melvin McNair,’ she said as she rounded up her crowd of children, all still at school but relishing the day off for the Coronation. They’d got a mug with the Queen’s picture on it. All the children in every school had been presented with a memento of the Coronation. Some had a tin of toffees with the Queen’s picture on the lid.
Until they were flung out on the street, Madge and her brood had squatted along with other families in one of the big villas on Great Western Road. That was after they’d got into arrears with their rent in their original house in Cowlairs Pend. After they’d been forced out of the squat, they’d gone to one of the Nissen huts in the Hughenden playing fields off Great Western Road. The playing fields belonged to Hillhead High School, but they’d been requisitioned by the Royal Air Force Balloon Squadron in 1939.
After the war, the Nissen huts had sheltered a band of squatters, travelling people – displaced humanity. They were the flotsam washed up by war, regarded as dirtying the skirts of respectable West End society. Many were ex-servicemen and their families who had lost their homes in the bombing and, after demob, had been unable to find alternative accommodation. Others, like Alec, Madge’s husband, had been unable to get work, couldn’t pay the rent and had been forced to quit.
Now, at last, they were settled in a nice council house in Balornock, up the hill from Springburn. Madge was as happy as a lark, especially with the fact that for the first time in her life, she had the luxury of hot and cold running water, a bathroom and a kitchenette with a wash boiler. No more taking turns in a zinc bath in front of the kitchen fire. No more trekking with a pramful of washing to the ‘steamie’. The house was still full to overflowing with her seven children. It had two bedrooms, a front room and a living room. Alec and Madge slept on a bed settee in the front room. The bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, both had bunk beds.
Catriona noticed that the small house wasn’t any warmer than her mausoleum of a place in Botanic Crescent. Just like in Botanic Crescent, everyone in the Broomknowes Road flat crowded round the coal fire in the living room, roasted at the front and frozen at the back. Winter or summer, to go into the bathroom in either house was like walking into a freezer. It was a torment to bare one’s skin, even to sit on the toilet.
Alec had a regular job now, thanks to Quaker Sammy, and was almost back to his former confident, cocky self, although Madge had him on a short lead and kept a vigilant eye out for any signs of his old philandering ways.
Catriona switched off the Hoover when she reached the bay window and gazed out at Botanic Crescent. She could see Madge’s tall figure striding along towards Queen Margaret Drive surrounded by her family, intent on catching the next tram car to Springburn. From there they’d walk up the hill to Balornock and their flat in Broomknowes Road.
Their mutual friend, Julie, lived in the Gorbals, but she had been working all day in Copeland & Lye’s department store, so she hadn’t been able to join the television viewing. Julie was slim and smart, and could sound and act very ‘posh’. As she herself said, she had to keep up with the wealthy customers in Copeland & Lye’s and also, of course, with her mother-in-law. It was a strange set-up with Julie and Mrs Muriel Vincent, Catriona thought. Julie’s husband had been an RAF pilot, but he had been shot down during the war. Mrs Vincent and Julie had never had anything in common. Now the only thing they shared was a terrible grief. Mrs Vincent was the only child of Catriona and Melvin’s elderly next-door neighbours, the Reverend Reid and his wife. Always immaculately dressed, Mrs Vincent was a politely spoken, middle-class snob, who regarded the Gorbals as hell. She tried everything to prevent Julie’s marriage to her son, Reggie. But after Reggie’s death and for years now, she had clung to Julie as if Julie was her own flesh and blood. She even wanted Julie to come and live with her in her roomy flat in Botanic Crescent but Julie had always refused.
‘She suffocates me, that woman,’ Julie complained. But in her own abrupt, proud way, she still managed to be kind to the older woman. She even called her ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother’.
‘Och well,’ she explained to Catriona, ‘it keeps her happy.’
As far as Catriona knew, Julie had been brought up by her father. She�
��d once asked what had happened to her mother but Julie had just shrugged and dismissed the query with an abrupt, ‘Haven’t a clue!’
It was nearly ten years since Reggie had been killed, but Julie had never married again. She’d had an illegitimate baby, the result of drowning her grief in drink on the wild night of the victory celebrations, VE night, as it was called. She had given the baby – a little girl – up for adoption and had confided in Catriona. Catriona had tried to persuade her against it at the time.
‘You’ll always regret it,’ she’d warned. But Julie insisted she had to think of the child’s future, not her own, and the baby would have a better life with a secure and loving family. Although she remained her usual perky self and put on a brave face, Catriona saw the suffering in Julie’s eyes the day she had come out of the hospital without the baby.
Mrs Vincent had found out but had been intensely supportive. Catriona guessed Mrs Vincent felt that Julie was the last link with her son. And Reggie had told his mother how much he loved Julie and asked her to look after his young wife while he was away during the war.
Mrs Vincent had certainly done that ever since. Or as much as the fiercely independent Julie would allow her to. Julie was coming later in the evening to see the television.
At one time at the beginning of their marriage, when they lived in Dessie Street, Melvin had not allowed Catriona to have any friends. He’d been the same with his first wife. ‘But oh,’ Catriona kept assuring herself, ‘I’m made of stronger, more stubborn stuff!’
4
The Stoddarts lived up the same close in Broomknowes Road as Madge and Alec. It was over a year ago that they had all been to visit Melvin, watch the Coronation and admire his television set. The Stoddarts had even sat next to the Catholic O’Donnels without a complaint. They also lived up the same close and couldn’t always be avoided. Like all the others in the street, the close had a shabby-looking entrance decorated with the cheapest, reddish-brown paint the Corporation could find. The brown colour went halfway up each wall and was topped by flaking whitewash. The tenants did their best to keep the place looking decent. They took turns washing the close, the landings and the stairs, and conscientiously decorated each side with squiggles of white pipe clay. Chrissie Stoddart had told Madge that these squiggles kept witches at bay. Or so the folk long ago believed.
The New Breadmakers Page 2