The Breadmakers Saga

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  Pockets, bulging with pennies ready to fling at the floats, eagerly jumped and jingled.

  ‘And now it gives me great pleasure,’ the convener continued in a voice already cracking and getting hoarse, ‘to ask Mrs Struthers, wife of our Medical Officer for Govan, to crown Miss Flora Rattrey Queen of the Old Govan Fair.’

  Mrs Struthers, flushed and pretty in a frothy confection of yellow hat, rose and the convener relaxed down in his seat, only to bounce straight up again, every nerve at the ready. His eyes bulged at the wolf-whistling multitude, and he gesticulated for silence with waving arms and thickly pursed lips.

  Order was restored but the convener did not risk sitting down again. He hovered in the background strafing the crowd with sharp admonishing stares as Mrs Struthers lifted the crown.

  ‘I now crown Miss Flora Rattrey Queen of the Old Govan Fair.’

  With these words she laid the symbol of majesty on the Queen’s head and cheering swooped upwards.

  The Old Govan Fair procession was about to begin.

  The streets were awash with colour. Red, white and blue Union Jacks of all sizes, and the gold and red lion rampant of Scotland, swayed and flicked and cracked. Streamers streamed rainbows, bunting puffed and flapped.

  Melvin had instructed Catriona to secure a good vantage point on Langlands Road at the end of the park near the library.

  ‘Make sure you come without your mother, mind,’ he warned her. ‘And as soon as the procession’s over, I’ll come back and meet you.’

  It hadn’t been easy getting out without mother because all Catriona’s life Hannah Munro had kept a conscientious eye on her and had insisted on accompanying her everywhere. It made the situation doubly distressing that she had been forced to give a reason for wanting to go off on her own. Unpractised in the art of telling lies, she could think of no alternative but the truth. Her mother immediately tried to restrain her and lock her in the front room, but to miss the Govan Fair as well as a meeting with Melvin proved too much for even a person of Catriona’s timid temperament.

  For the first time in her life she mutinied, actively rebelled, fought tooth and nail in fact, and rushed sobbing but triumphantly free from the house.

  All the same, she was glad when she met Norma, a neighbour’s daughter, and they crushed together on the pavement’s edge outside the park and danced up an down giggling and squealing like children in eagerness for the procession to come.

  Catriona’s excitement at seeing Melvin was always sharpened by fear. He was an unknown (and now forbidden) quantity. She had not the slightest idea what was expected of her in speech or behaviour in any man’s company and the extent of her newly-discovered ignorance appalled her. Melvin was her first male friend and she found herself, without warning, like the person in the experiment who is locked for days in the black-dark, silent, sound-proofed room, completely divorced from the normal stimuli of sight, touch and hearing, the measure, the criterion acquired through learning and experience with which to judge a situation and react with appropriate patterns of behaviour. Every time she was with Melvin, she was blind and deaf and alone.

  ‘Here it’s coming!’ Half-laughing, half-crying, she clapped her hands.

  ‘Here’s the police!’ A delighted yell broke out. At any other time such a cry in Glasgow would immediately disperse any crowd, clear the streets like magic, but on the day of the Old Govan Fair the City of Glasgow Police Pipe Band led the procession and a splendid sight and sound it was. Many a Glasgow villain’s heart warmed towards it and they felt proud, and boasted at having been ‘nicked’ by one of the big ‘Kilties’.

  The cheeky swaggering skirl of ‘Cock O’ The North’ took command of the road. Pipers in the red tartan plaids and kilts of The Royal Stuart, giant men in bearskin headgear, short-stepping, kilts swinging, were in immaculate military order with each drone or bass pipe pointing up from exactly the same place on each man’s shoulder.

  Catriona felt so moved by the sight and sound of the pipe band she could have wept on Norma’s shoulder. Emotion ranged free and, unused to the freedom, pride and happiness became distressing to the point of grief.

  After the police pipe band came the sheep’s head held aloft, then the Navy band, then the Queen’s landau and the motorcade of guests. Then came another pipe band with a big mustachioed drum-major marching out front and tossing and twirling the mace with nonchalant panache, eyes glued straight ahead, not needing to watch the intricate manoeuvres of hand and arm, aggressively confident.

  Then the decorated floats with motor-bikes weaving in and out of the procession, and in between the floats, too, bands and more bands until the whole of Govan rocked with sound.

  And tenements towered above the procession and tenants were a crush of faces and arms and hands at every window and the sky became a chinkling, winking, sparkling copper-gold shimmer of pennies descending onto floats.

  Catriona watched the big letters MACNAIR AND SON - BREADMAKERS come into view.

  All the men on the float and the pretty bright-eyed girl were dressed in white trousers, white jackets, white aprons and jaunty white hats. Heads were tossing back, laughing, arms were jerking, throwing out, golden bread was pelting the crowd.

  A tall young man, his curly hair blue-black against the white uniform, was tossing pancakes with intense concentration flipping high, higher, bumping, reaching, always catching. Catriona’s gaze rested on him. Then she was startled by the unexpected pain of a crusty loaf flung by Melvin finding its target on the side of her face.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Leerie, leerie, licht the lamps,

  Long legs and crooked shanks …’

  The summer’s evening closed its eyes, shutting out light. Black velvet darkness softly muffled sound, hid the crumbling stone of the Dessie Street tenements, the ugly carving on the walls, the litter, the dust, the chalked pavements.

  A bottom-flat window was open wide and a woman leaned out on folded arms. A cluster of other women lounged outside, some shoo-shooing infants at the same time as chatting about the Govan Fair and everything that had taken place during the eventful day.

  A sheaf of youngsters propped itself up in the gutter to watch the lamplighter raise his long pole to the gas-lamps all along the street. The children chanted their song to him but with weary voices dragging fainter and fainter.

  ‘Leerie, leerie, licht the lamps,

  Long legs and crooked shanks …’

  The street took on a cosy hue as the leerie’s pole, like a magic wand, touched each lamp, springing it into brightness that faded into a circle of flimsy yellow on pavement and road.

  Behind curtain-closed windows people slept, peaceful in the knowledge that life continued. There was always a baby exercising newborn lungs somewhere, its screeching muffled by high buildings and hole-in-the-wall beds. Someone was always having a ‘hing’ out some window and there were always a few men leaning or squatting at street corners. Across the Main Road in Wine Row, the street that ended at Clydend Ferry, the shebeens were supplying the winos with Red Biddy. The meths drinkers were down at the river’s end, huddles of hairy spiders, not human, yet more pathetically human than anyone, hugging bottles deep in their rags, oblivious of everything except the individual world of fantasy to which they had retreated.

  But in Dessie Street the bakehouse, the warm nucleus of life, was busy with breadmaking sounds as front closes puttered and hissed into flickering light and back closes became echoing tunnels.

  Melvin had taken Catriona and Norma home. He had only succeeded in shaking Norma off for a few minutes in the park by dodging behind some bushes with Catriona firmly held in tow.

  ‘If it’s not your mother, it’s your next-door neighbours!’ he had hissed. ‘I’m fed up with this. It’s time we got married!’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘You heard what I said. It’s time somebody cut your umbilical cord. Anybody would think you were an infant the way you’re tied to your mother. Don’t you know the law?’
/>   ‘Law?’

  ‘By Scottish law you can get married at sixteen without your parents’ consent. Everybody knows that! I’ve got a palace of a house.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I’ve got furniture, dishes, bedding, the lot. I’m a hundred percent fit and I’ve got a ready-made son - my son Fergus, a grand wee lad. What more could any lassie wish for?’

  A silence dropped between them. Through the bushes he watched, with mounting exasperation, Norma coming nearer.

  ‘Well?’ His eyes bulged down at Catriona.

  ‘Have we known each other long enough?’ she queried, really anxious to find out.

  ‘Och, we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other after we’re married. I’ll be good to you, if that’s what you’re worrying about. I don’t drink and I only smoke the occasional pipe. Here’s Norma! Come on, come on, make up your mind, woman!’

  Catriona was prodded into giving a harassed ‘Yes’ and Melvin irrevocably sealed the bargain by announcing the news of his proposal and acceptance to Norma who could hardly wait to tell the whole of Farmbank.

  Now he sauntered into Dessie Street and up the close, shoulders back, big hands clinking coins in trouser pockets.

  Already heat was blanketing out from the side door in puffs of white and beery fumes of yeast, and rolls were becoming golden, and bread steaming, doughy, sticking together, crusts floured on top.

  Past the bakehouse door, he grabbed the iron banister and leapt up the stairs two at a time. Gulping in air, nostrils stretching, he paused at his own door on the first landing. Then as if unable to resist the challenge of the stairs he suddenly attacked the second spiral, pausing only for a minute between big Baldy Fowler’s door and Jimmy Gordon’s door before bounding up the last flight to the attics.

  Lexy was a long time answering his knock and when she appeared her eyes were heavy with sleep and dark underneath where mascara had smudged against her pillow. She was absently rubbing the sides of her breasts making them quiver under her cheap cotton nightdress and the nipples tweak up.

  ‘Ohi, in the name of the wee man!’ she wailed, recognizing Melvin. ‘Mr MacNair! I’d just went to my bed. Ohi!’ Her hands flew to her face and hair. ‘I was that tired, too, I didn’t even bother washing my face.’

  ‘You’re all right.’ Melvin strolled past her and into the house.

  ‘Here, just a minute, Mr MacNair.’ She followed him into the tiny camceiled kitchen, her bare feet slapping loudly on the linoleum.

  ‘It’s not time to start my shift yet. What’s wrong? Has something happened?’

  ‘No, not a damn thing. You’re a fine figure of a girl, Lexy. Do you believe in physical jerks?’

  Lexy gave an unexpected splutter of a laugh and Melvin glowered with annoyance.

  ‘Nothing funny about that. I’m a great believer in exercise. That’s why I’m so well-made.’

  ‘I know, but could you not have told me that down the bakehouse? Are you not working tonight?’

  ‘Baldy knows I’ll be late.’

  ‘Want a cup of tea? The kettle’s sitting on the side of the fire.’

  His good humour returned. ‘No, thanks, darlin’. It wasn’t tea I come up for.’

  She gaped at him, still glassy-eyed with sleep, but understanding splintered through with astonishment and another burst of laughter.

  ‘Here, you’re terrible, so you are!’

  ‘Come on,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve seen Rab sneaking up here.’

  ‘Rab’s different. He’s fond of me. And I’m sorry for him, so I am!’

  Melvin put out his hands for her.

  ‘All right, darlin’, be sorry for me!’

  ‘Away you go!’ She ran light-footed across the room and clambered up into the high hole-in-the-wall bed, the exertion making her giggles become breathless.

  Melvin followed at a more leisurely pace and, reaching the bed, stared at it with interest. He gave the mountain of mattress a punch, then heaved his solid bulk on top of it.

  ‘Ohi! Get off, you daft gowk!’ Lexy squealed. ‘You’ll burst my springs!’

  ‘I’ve never been in a hole-in-the-wall bed before,’ he admitted, settling down and loosening his tie, to the accompaniment of Lexy’s piercing squeaks and her struggles to wriggle further up the bed and away from him. ‘We’ve always had ordinary ones. It feels queer. Like being shut in a cupboard. But I suppose it’s cosy in the winter tucked in here away from the cold draughts.’

  ‘You’re terrible! Away you go and try your tricks on with your own lassie!’

  ‘Och, to hell! I’d need a tin opener for her!’

  Lexy stifled a paroxysm of laughter with her fists but as soon as Melvin reached for her she punched him.

  ‘You’ve a nerve! I told you - Rab’s my man. He’s real fond of me, so he is.’

  ‘Rab’s not your man and never will be. He’s married and he’s daft about his wife.’

  Then, while her bleak smudgy eyes were still vulnerable with hurt, he gathered her to him.

  Outside, the ‘midden men’, looking like coalminers with lights on their caps and string tied under the knees of their trousers, argued with one another about football. They filled their baskets with refuse from the overflowing middens in the back courts. Then, heaving the baskets over their shoulders, they returned, boots scraping and clanging, through the closes. The midden motor eased along at snail’s pace while the men shook the refuse from their baskets on top of it.

  A drunk with a bottle bulging from his jacket pocket lurched lopsidedly along the middle of the road singing, with terrible sadness and great enjoyment.

  ‘The Bonny Wells o’ Weary …’

  A horse and cart rattled past him. Furniture and bedding and all the worldly possessions of an out of work family were roped on the cart. The family huddled on top, the children’s heads lolling sleep-heavy, unconscious of the anxious world in which their parents could no longer pay the rent and had to ‘do a moonlight’.

  Over in Farmbank a lorry skimmed along, hugging the kerb, hissing water out, washing the streets.

  Catriona lay curled in a ball in bed with ‘Lovey’, her pink hot-water bottle, clamped tightly between her legs. The violent scene of a few hours earlier when she had announced her engagement to Melvin was still flickering across her mind with the speed of an old-fashioned movie.

  It had ended in a fight between her mother and father. Yet she knew that the question of her sudden decision to leave home and marry a man so much older than her and go and live ‘in Clydend of all places’, was far from finished. Her mother would nag on and on never-ending.

  Catriona closed her eyes, tired beyond all measure of quarrelling and bitterness. She was thankful to be leaving.

  Chapter 4

  Usually, when Catriona thought of marriage, she thought of a house. She imagined herself going around it dressed in a frilly apron and holding a feather duster out before her like a fairy queen’s wand.

  And when she strolled up the imaginary drive she admired the size of her dream house, the solidarity of it, and the purple clematis swelling lushly round the door.

  It had a carpeted hall; everywhere there were carpets, warm, luxurious and muted, shutting out the draughts of the outside world.

  Inside was all comfort and safety and pleasure to the eye; luxuries everywhere - paintings, standard lamps, bedside-lamps, quilts and counterpanes on the beds.

  She visited it as often as possible and never tired, never became bored. There was always another cupboard, another corner she’d never noticed before, or an alteration to make, some improvement to attend to, a piece of furniture to change to a more convenient place or something to add to her stock of requirements. ‘Good gracious!’ She’d mentally throw up her hands. ‘I haven’t any fish forks and knives!’

  The house was far more real than the flat above the bakery at Number 1 Dessie Street.

  She could still hardly credit the fact that she was going to get married and live in a pla
ce of her own. Often she had prayed for someone - anyone - to come and whisk her away from Fyffe Street and change her life from misery to happiness, from bondage to freedom, but she had never dared to believe that her prayers would be answered.

  ‘Where’s your daddy?’ Hannah dispersed Catriona’s pleasant haze of thought.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know!’ Hannah eyed her with disgust. ‘Well, I know, all right. He’s away hiding in some bar so that I can’t get my tongue on him, that’s where he is. But he’s not going to evade responsibility this time. I’ll see to it. He’s going to speak to that man because it’s all his fault.

  ‘If he hadn’t been off work with his filthy dermatitis, that man would never have needed to come here to give him his wages. And if he hadn’t come here he would never have seen you and all this trouble wouldn’t have started. I’ve told your daddy already - Clydend’s one of the toughest districts in Glasgow. I wouldn’t live there and neither will you. Sooner or later he’s going to speak to that man. But we’re going to speak to him right now!’

  ‘Speak to him?’

  ‘Get your coat on.’

  ‘But, Mummy!’

  She followed her mother along the lobby and watched her dive into a coat and jerk on a reddish-brown felt hat.

  ‘Get your coat on!’

  ‘What do you mean - speak to him?’

  ‘You’re coming with me to that bakery in Dessie Street and you’re going to tell that Melvin MacNair you certainly are not going to marry him.’ Her stare pierced through the shadows into the hall-stand mirror so that she could tug at her hat with both hands to make it sit squarely and aggressively.

  ‘The very idea! He’s old enough to be your father!’

  ‘But, I want to get married.’ Stubbornness gave emphasis to Catriona’s voice. ‘And I promised.’