The Breadmakers Saga

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

Alec put sixpence each way on ‘Starter’s Orders’ and went to join the crowd of men lounging and bantering at the corner of Springburn Road. At this junction Cowlairs Road joined Springburn Road at one side and Vulcan Street joined it at the other to make Springburn Cross. Springburn Road had existed for hundreds of years and there had always been some hamlet or village round about the Cross. There had once been an inn, so the story went, and a burn which started as a spring, hence the name Springburn. The mind boggled at the idea of country inns and green grass, burns and springs in this place.

  Alec hung a cigarette on his lip, rasped a match up to light it and wondered who would want Springburn to be like that anyway.

  Springburn Park was there for the kids if they wanted it. He had enjoyed his occasional safaris there but he had always found it alien land. It was more up the hill in Balornock than in Springburn, and could only have got its name because one of the gates was at the Springburn end, at the top of the Balgray Hill. Or perhaps the park had been there, with its marvellous view of Springburn and the whole of Glasgow, long before the existence of Balornock.

  No, give him old Springburn just as it was, any time, any day, but especially right now with the hooters screaming and moaning and competing with each other for air space and the air stretching in the ears, alive, vibrating and painful with the racket. From all around Castle Street to the far end of Springburn men in dungarees and sweatshirts and dirty faces were surging on to the streets in enormous black waves. Men were mobbing from the chemical works, the locomotive works, the iron works, the younger ones whooping, shoving, tripping, punching and bawling in the exhilaration of suddenly being let loose.

  Springburn was a man’s place and men converged on the Cross from all sides and clanging tram-cars lined up in Springburn Road rocking with the weight of men.

  Cowlairs Road led down to Cowlairs works, the headquarters of the celebrated North British Railway Company’s stud of bronze-green locomotives, now spewing out its men to mix at The Cross with the crush from the Hyde Park Works at the foot of Vulcan Street.

  A tram-car ground and sizzled past from the town end and Alec caught sight of Sammy Hunter sitting at one of the windows, stockily built, in a navy suit and white-collared shirt, his thick hair spiking up from its brilliantine plastering, his bushy brows jutting aggressively forward.

  Alec blew out a tight stream of smoke from a fluted tongue. His eyes were on Sammy but his thoughts had returned hot-footed to Ruth.

  Chapter 2

  In between serving customers at the general counter, Catriona kept glancing across the shop to the bakery side where her father-in-law was interviewing Mrs Jackson, a tall scraggy woman who had come about the cleaning job. Mr MacNair’s brusqueness always embarrassed her.

  In the first place he ought to have taken Mrs Jackson through to the cubbyhole office in the lobby at the back between the shop and the bakehouse, instead of keeping her standing there as he clomped about in his too-big boots serving customers with steaming bread and rolls, every now and again shooting a high-pitched whine of a question at her from a pink button mouth perched on top of a wispy goatee beard. The customers, crowding the shop, gossiped among themselves, stopping only to listen with unashamed interest to what was going on.

  The last cleaner had moved to another district with her family, leaving one of the attic houses on the top flat empty. Now the spiral staircase of the three-flatted tenement above the shop that old Mr MacNair owned and let out to his employees was getting messier and messier. So was the shop itself.

  The stairs and the bakehouse needed continuous scrubbing because of the rats, the cockroaches and the flour puffing up in hot grey clouds that dried the nostrils and parched the throat. The flour, not content with continuously swirling in the air, solidified into a slippery paste underfoot to make the bakehouse, the lobby, the shop, the close, the stairs and the landings a dangerous ice-rink.

  The cleaner’s removal had put the old master baker out of temper, especially since one of her sons had worked in the bakehouse and her daughter had served in the shop.

  Catriona had been deployed from her flat above to help in the shop until the new counter assistant arrived.

  ‘No longer than one week,’ her husband Melvin had warned his father. ‘I don’t want her wasting time gossiping to half the folk in Clydend. How’s she going to have my dinner ready?’

  Mrs Jackson was a widow and had been living alone in her house over in Townhead since her son Alec had married and moved to Springburn. Catriona had had the whole history before Mr MacNair had bothered to look at Mrs Jackson. The woman had rushed into conversation, a nerve twitching her eye like a wink. All about her son - what a good boy he was and how badly she missed him.

  ‘His wife’s a bit happy-go-lucky and extravagant. It worries me. Alec never complains but I know he worries too. It’s the weans, you see.’ She leaned closer to Catriona as if concentration on her stare and its nearness would help Catriona to understand. ‘I’d like to help but I’ve only my widow’s pension and what I get for a few hours’ work in town. If only I could get this job at least I’d save on the rent.’

  Old MacNair collected rent from all those employees who occupied his flats, as had the last cleaner, but this time he had made up his mind to pay no wages and instead allow the new cleaner the attic flat rent free.

  ‘You’ll do!’ his nasal whine announced at last. ‘Start on Monday and think yourself damned lucky.’

  ‘Cheeky bugger!’ One of the customers turned to Mrs Jackson. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, hen.’

  A bright red collar of fire suddenly appeared round Mrs Jackson’s neck and quickly burned her face to the roots of the dry-fizz of her hair.

  ‘Thanks, Mr MacNair. Thanks.’

  The old man drowned her words by thumping a gnarled fist on the counter.

  ‘Come on, come on! Who’s next?’

  Mrs Jackson squeezed between the customers to come back across to Catriona.

  ‘Thank goodness that’s over! Thank goodness!’

  Catriona looked down with embarrassment.

  ‘I’m glad you got the job.’ Holding her hair back with one hand, she stole an anxious glance at the older woman. ‘I hope you’ll like it here.’

  She was secretly wondering if Mrs Jackson knew about the murder. The MacNair building in Clydend at the corner of Dessie Street and the Main Road had made headline news not so very long before. The Street of Tragedy all the papers had called it.

  Sarah Fowler, wife of Baldy, the foreman baker, had stabbed her mother-in-law in one of the flats upstairs. Never as long as she lived would Catriona forget the day when Sarah had appeared at the door, face apologetic, eyes bewildered.

  I’ve kill’t Baldy’s mammy!

  They had hanged Sarah in Duke Street prison and normal life as they had known it in the close at Number One Dessie Street had disappeared down the trap with her.

  There had been other deaths, other changes. People had moved away, people had come to stare at the building.

  Catriona herself had nearly died with a miscarriage.

  ‘The trouble with you is you’re too soft,’ her husband Melvin kept telling her ‘You don’t do enough physical jerks.’

  ‘Physical jerks!’ Her mother saw red every time Melvin mentioned the words. ‘You wicked man. May God in His infinite mercy forgive you. You and your physical jerks were nearly the death of that girl.’

  Her mother had never forgiven her for marrying Melvin.

  ‘Why? Why?’ Even yet she kept asking, and she was always putting up prayers for her at the meetings of the Band of Jesus of which she was Grand Matron. ‘Why, Catriona? That man’s old enough to be your father. He’s been married before and has a child. You were only a child yourself. You weren’t seventeen when you married that man. And what you saw in him I’ll never know. A vulgar immodest ignorant man like that, and you such a well-protected, well-sheltered girl. I even insisted on being over in Farmbank instead of in Dessie Street so
that you would have the benefit of being brought up in a respectable district.’

  She never tired of ranting on and on, digging mercilessly over and over again at old ground.

  ‘It’s your daddy’s fault, of course. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your daddy hadn’t been off work with his filthy dermatitis that man would never have needed to come to the house to give your daddy his wages. And if he hadn’t come to the house he would never have seen you and all this trouble would never have started.’

  Why had she married Melvin? She had repeated that ‘why’ to herself far more often than her mother did. She had longed to leave her parents’ house and have a place of her own. Perhaps that was the answer; yet Melvin’s house had never felt and still did not feel a home of her own. It did not have the stamp of his dead first wife either, despite her photographs all over the house and the likeness in her little son, Fergus. It was Melvin’s house. Everything belonged to him as he kept telling Catriona.

  ‘Nothing’s yours. You hadn’t even a spare pair of knickers when you came here. By God, you were lucky when you got me, and don’t you forget it.’

  Think yourself lucky. Think yourself damned lucky. How many times had she heard those words? Be grateful. She was grateful for having escaped from her mother but living with Melvin had given rise to the hypnotic fascination and the morbid fear of sleeping under the same roof as a dangerous animal. Often she dreamed of a friend to help and protect her, and wistfully, yet without any real hope, she watched Mrs Jackson’s golliwog head leave the shop.

  ‘Here you!’ her father-in-law yelped. ‘Don’t just stand there looking gormless. Get on with your work!’

  Like a trapped bird beating its wings against the bars of its cage, Catriona flurried into action. Her hands delved into sacks to shovel up sugar and peas and beans and lentils and potatoes, her arm jerked backwards and forwards cutting sausages and black puddings, her fingers tinged over the till. Movement quickened her mind sending racing ahead to wrestle with all the work waiting to be done in the house upstairs.

  She became conscious of the metallic stammer of the riveters in the Benlin Yards across the Main Road. The racket was always there as if the whole of Glasgow was filled to the skies with blacksmiths. Often she managed to ignore it, to accept it as part of the savage background that life had acquired since her marriage to Melvin. But now it filled her head, drowning out the buzz of customers’ voices and the jangle of the shop-door and the rattle and clash of trays and tins in the bakehouse at the back, and the kettle-drum tattoo of metal-rimmed cart wheels on the cobbled street outside.

  Until suddenly even the Benlin riveters were banished by the shock of seeing her mother, straight-backed, big-chested and angry, in the shop.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Ruddy, purple-veined cheeks mottled with anger she swung round to face Mr MacNair. ‘Are you trying to kill this child? Isn’t one murder enough round here?’

  ‘Mummy!’ Catriona hissed, keeping her head well down in order to avoid everyone’s eyes.

  Her mother turned on her again.

  ‘Get out from behind that counter and come upstairs at once!’

  ‘But, Mummy!’

  ‘Do as you’re told!’

  ‘Away you go, child,’ old MacNair’s voice sniggered. ‘Do as your mummy tells you.’

  Trembling with humiliation Catriona came round beside her mother who immediately punched and pummelled her out of the shop, leaving behind whoops of laughter.

  ‘I’m not a child.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet.’

  Mrs Munro shoved her into the floury close, sickly with the beery smell of yeast, and up the spiral stairs to the first landing.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ Catriona repeated, but her trembling and the tears filming over her vision denied the words any authority. Her mother thumped on the door.

  ‘I don’t know what I have ever done to deserve all this worry. After all I’ve done for you, Catriona, after all the sacrifices I’ve made - and God knows I’ve made plenty, and I’m not taking the Lord’s name in vain. After all these years …’

  The door opened before she could say any more and Melvin, wearing striped pyjamas, the top lying open to reveal a hairy chest, stood glowering at her.

  Catriona spoke breathlessly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Melvin, Mummy knocked before I’d time to tell her I had the key.’

  Melvin flicked his eyes upwards in disgust and stomped away, his bare feet slapping loudly on the linoleum.

  He was not a tall man but Catriona was a fragile wisp of thistledown beside him. Melvin had an ape-like physique with a massive upper-arm measurement greater than Catriona’s waist. Intensely proud of his muscle control, he exercised religiously every day, giving a cringing Catriona a nude display of muscles bunching, twitching, hunching, circling.

  ‘For a man working nights in a bakehouse, especially a man of my age, I’m a marvellous specimen,’ he never tired of telling her, despite his grey-white baker’s face and the thinning hair that looked as if it had been parched with a lifetime’s flour dust.

  Now, not quite awake, he yawned and scratched his moustache as he returned to the bedroom, shouting out without looking round.

  ‘I’m going to do my exercises. Put the kettle on.’

  ‘Listen to that!’ Mrs Munro marched into the kitchen and jerked out the hatpin securing the hat on top of her thick coil of hair. ‘Lord Muck. He’ll be the death of you yet, that man. You’ll be the second he’ll put under the clay, you mark my words.’

  Catriona lifted the kettle.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Her mother snatched the kettle from her. ‘You go and sit down.’

  ‘I’m all right, Mummy. I wish you wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘If you weren’t so wickedly selfish I wouldn’t need to worry. You have been punished, Catriona, and you will be punished again. He’s watching you, Catriona. God misses nothing. Everything, every unkind selfish thought, every cruel disobedient act He takes note of and adds up for the terrible Day of Judgement when you’ll stand before Him to await your final punishment.’

  She splashed water into the kettle, and clattered it on to the cooker. The gas lit with a plop.

  ‘But make no mistake about this, Catriona, you’ll be punished here too. For every sin you’re guilty of, there’s a punishment. Your disobedience, your ungratefulness, your wicked selfishness will be punished.’

  The words were so familiar to Catriona, her mind was mimicking the speech all the time a split second before her mother got there.

  Yet despite the familiarity of the words and her bitter if silent attempts to discredit them, they had long since become part of her. It did not matter how much her mind struggled to reason in her own defence. It did not matter how much hatred and bitterness she conjured up to help her hit back. In her secret innermost places, the darkest corners of her mind, she was convinced of guilt, of unworthiness, and of the awful punishment and retribution that forever hung over her head.

  Her eyes shrank down. ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘There’s no use …’

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘ … being sorry. Do you want to die?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well? Why do you not have more respect for yourself? Stand up to the MacNairs, don’t allow them to make a slave of you.’ She strode about the kitchen finding cups and saucers, straight-backed, handsome, the sun from the window seeking out the burgundy richness in her hair.

  ‘May God forgive the wicked villain! Fancy having you working down there in that shop after you’ve been so ill.’

  ‘There’s a girl starting tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s about tomorrow I’ve come. That man’s dragging you off to the Exhibition, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘But, Mummy.’

  ‘And you’ve agreed?’

  ‘Everybody will be there. The
re’s going to be people from all over the world.’

  ‘None of them will nurse you or care one jot when you’re lying at death’s door again. There’s not a pick of flesh on you and he’s going to make you crush through thousands of folk and walk for miles round and round, up hill and down dale in Bellahouston Park.’

  ‘I’ll take a cup of tea through to Melvin.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. Put your feet up on that stool and drink your own.’

  ‘But Melvin asked …’

  ‘If he wants tea let him come and get it. He’s a lot more able than you. Let him go to the Exhibition!’

  ‘Melvin wouldn’t go without me.’

  ‘Let him stay at home, then.’

  ‘But I want to go to the Exhibition.’

  The door creaked open and Melvin, dressed only in loose-waisted trousers, came slowly into the room, concentrating on his exercises, his back, shoulder and upper arm muscles ballooning up.

  ‘Where’s my tea? See that tricep? There isn’t another man in Clydend, probably the whole of Glasgow, with triceps like that.’

  ‘You ought to be black-burning ashamed!’

  Mrs Munro averted her face, her ruddy cheeks darkening to purple.

  ‘Ashamed?’ Melvin’s eyes bulged with incredulity. ‘What are you blethering about, woman?’

  ‘Parading about half-naked. Displaying yourself.’

  ‘Good God, anybody would think I was walking up the middle of Sauchiehall Street.’

  ‘And don’t blaspheme in front of me, either.’

  ‘Where’s my tea?’

  Hastily Catriona poured him a cup.

  ‘Here you are, Melvin.’

  ‘Ta. My mouth feels like a sewer.’

  Mrs Munro’s nose twisted and her eyes shrunk away again.

  ‘You’re disgusting!’

  Melvin downed the tea as if it were whisky and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand before turning away to continue his exercises

  ‘Just you wait a minute,’ his mother-in-law commanded. ‘I’ve something to say to you.’

  ‘Eh?’

  His attention was not really with her.