He had secretly cursed Ruth’s untidiness, while knowing perfectly well that his father was to blame for purposely coming too early, before she had time to put everything away.
All the same he cursed her afterwards and a bitter quarrel had shattered the last remnants of pleasure in their grand new home. Until later, lying stiff and unhappy in the darkness, beside her in the cabinet bed he felt her toes and her fingers begin to edge caressingly towards him. Then her body wriggled gently nearer, melting his misery with its warmth and its voluptuous quivering flesh. She began kissing every part of him except his mouth although his mouth sought hers with increasing anxiety.
His temples, his eyes, his ears, her tongue tickling and exciting in exploration. The hollow of his neck, deep under his arm, his belly, his groin.
His pace lengthened and quickened after turning left into the Saltmarket. He banished Ruth from his mind and concentrated instead on his immediate surroundings.
Many famous names had been associated with the Saltmarket. Oliver Cromwell had lodged in the street when he occupied Glasgow. King James VII had visited a house here when he was Duke of York. Daniel Defoe had walked along this street. But it had been a different place in those days. Some hundred-odd years after Defoe’s visit, the Saltmarket and the near-by streets, Goosedubs, Bridgegate, King Street, Trongate, High Street and Gallowgate had been described as ‘a citadel of vice’. Within less than one sixteenth of a square mile there were a hundred and fifty shebeens and two hundred brothels.
Glasgow had been and still was a grim city. Yet it had a bouncy pulse of humanity and a humorous quirk that was the very essence of the place.
He liked the story about the crowds outside the Justiciary buildings in Jail Square on the left side of Saltmarket. Glasgow folk love a pageant, a procession, any kind of show, and crowds always gathered to watch the beginning of each High Court, with the trumpeters and the solemn-bewigged judges. A crowd gathered at the end of each big trial across the road at the entrance to Glasgow Green. The police, fearing trouble from the supporters of gangsters who had just been sentenced, and danger to witnesses leaving the court-house, decided it was imperative that something should be done. There was only one way to disperse a mob at this particular spot. The Parks Department of Glasgow Corporation planted a few flower-beds to break up the open space. No Glaswegian, not even a gangster, would trample over a flower-bed. Even a gangster being chased by a policeman would make a detour round a flower-bed and the policeman chasing him would do the same.
The South Prison used to be in Jail Square and prisoners were hanged in public outside it. The last thing a condemned person saw before he died was Nelson’s monument in Glasgow Green - a fact which gave rise to the Glasgow insult, ‘You’ll die facing the Monument’.
The last person hanged there was an Englishman, a Doctor Pritchard who had poisoned his wife and mother-in-law in his house in Sauchiehall Street. Thirty thousand men, women and children had gathered to watch the hanging in eighteen sixty-five. Bakers and piemen did a roaring trade and as usual on these occasions, including the years when pickpocketing was a hanging offence - pick-pockets did their best business.
Sammy saw a white tram coming and raced for it.
A memory of his father had caught at his guts and the sudden burst of energy helped to excoriate it.
His father would have enjoyed public hangings. To watch someone suffer puffed him up with glee and to deliver the punishment himself was a luxury he indulged in as often as possible.
The Hunter family had always been organised along military lines. They mustered to attention by the sides of their beds at the crack of dawn for kit inspection. Then they route-marched to the park every morning before school and twice on Sundays and round and round inside the park before having to perform violent exercises to the sergeant-major roar of their father.
Some of the older brothers had been lucky. They could remember a spell in their youngest days when Hodge had been away from home. Sammy being the last born had had no such luck.
Punishments ran along military lines, too - square bashing, at the double, and in full kit, and full kit could be anything heavy his father managed to find with which to weigh them down. Detention was being locked all night in the coal-cellar. Duty watch meant the mortuary. Hodge had also delved back in time and come up with punishments the army had long since abolished, like flogging and the old army custom of branding.
Only once had the latter punishment been meted out and Sammy had been the recipient.
His father had been asking the family, one by one, what regiment they would join if ever their country needed them. Each brother in turn mumbled the regiment of his choice but when it came to his turn, hatred suddenly rocketed up to distort his features and rush bile to his mouth with the word:
‘None!’
‘What regiment?’ His father’s face blocked sight, filled the whole world.
‘None!’
‘What regiment?’
‘None!’
He could see the first wave of shock receding and the vision of punishment to come taking its place.
‘Eh? Eh? … What’s this? What’s this? Would you not fight for your King and country?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a disgrace to the name of Hunter. You’re a bloody coward!’
His mother had been alive then, a pathetic shadow of a woman, and he always believed the ceremonial sadism of his branding had been the last straw that had killed her. His stepmother, not having been dragged down by constant child-bearing and the burden of his father, and having perhaps a spunkier nature, might have gone to the police for help, where his own mother struggled to protect him and failed.
The deep scar on his chest was still there.
He had told no one the truth of its origin, not even Ruth, brushing aside questions with irritable hints of road accident injuries.
He stared with grey marble eyes out of the tram-car window. It had left the Saltmarket, trundled beyond it up High Street, rocked round the bulge that was Castle Street before the long stretch of road from the Saltmarket straightened out again and became Springburn Road.
He allowed his body to rock and jerk with the motion of the tram and his mind open to the whirling grind of it as it struggled up the steep gradient towards the heart of Springburn.
First stop in Springburn Road - St Rollox works. Three stops past that - Springburn Cross. There at the hub of Springburn two streets diverged from the main road, Cowlairs Road on the left leading to Cowlairs Locomotive Works and Vulcan Street to the right leading to the main gate of Hyde Park Locomotive Works.
Over the railway bridge now at Springburn Station and the Atlas Works. Where else in all the world, it occurred to him, his spirits surfing on a wave of pride, could a passenger in a tram-car, in the course of a half-mile journey along a public highway, have found such a concentration of railway skills. Company works, private builders, major sheds, and a mainline cable-worked incline.
Away to the west, cranes of the Clyde shipyards spiked the sky. To the north stretched the magnificent sweep of open country across the Kelvin Valley to the Campsie Fells and the first West Highland mountains, including Ben Lomond and Ben More.
But down here where he lived was the next busiest part of Springburn to the Cross. The tenement houses, all with shops below, were old and often dilapidated but there was a homely buzz of life around them. Springburn was a beehive, always busy, busy with people, busy with movement, busy with talk. Traffic passed ceaselessly to and fro, courting couples swung along hand in hand, mothers heaved energetically at prams, and there were always railwaymen in dungarees and shiny caps going on their shifts or coming off with black, soot-smeared faces.
He warmed to the place as he crossed the road to the corner where the usual crowd of men were standing arguing about football. Children were thumping a ball in his close and singing in light bouncy voices:
‘One, two, three, a leary. Four, five, six, a leary, seven, eight, nine,
a leary, ten a leary postman!’
He ran up the stairs, his young-old face brightening to find Ruth with the door open and arms wide waiting for him. He grabbed her waist and made her squeal with excitement as he heaved her up and whirled her round and round their freshly painted hall.
Then suddenly he stopped. He held her close, one hand pressing her dark head hard against his shoulder.
He shut his eyes. He prayed for the sadness to go away - and with it the premonition of something terrible, not in the nightmare past, but something still to come in the future.
Chapter 7
‘Get your hands off my man!’
Madge battered through the swing doors of the insurance office just as Jean, one of the typists, was struggling with breathless laughter to forcibly remove Alec from her chair.
Draped nonchalantly back, his long legs propped on top of her typewriter, Alec had been enjoying the girl’s hands tugging at him and her breasts bulging over the top of her blouse as she jerked back and forward under his nose.
The sudden arrival of his wife knocked both the typist and himself off balance.
‘You rotten selfish little tart.’
Madge advanced, big-boned, high-hipped, feet and hands like spades.
‘Playing around with a married man - and him with four weans!’
‘No! No!’ Jean protested. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘Oh, come on, gorgeous!’ Alec slipped between them and pinched Madge’s pale freckled cheek. ‘As if anybody could lure me away from you.’
Madge knocked him aside.
‘I was told about you,’ she loudly accused the typist again.
‘About me?’
‘You heard.’
‘What about me?’
‘You’ve been seen going around with my man, hanging on to him like a leech. I’ll leech you!’
‘Alec!’ the girl appealed.
‘I’ll Alec you!’
Madge’s hand shot out and found bull’s-eye on the girl’s nose. Blood spurted in the silence for a horrified moment before Jean managed to wring out a long agonised scream.
Alec tugged at his wife’s arm.
‘Madge, for pity’s sake, come on home before they get the police to us.’
The normally quiet sedate routine of the office had switched to uproar and typists were running, whinnying for Mr Torrance.
‘Quick!’ Alec urged, putting his arm round Madge and hauling her off. ‘Before old Torrance arrives!’
As he told her later, on the angry march home:
‘You’ll be lucky if I’m not ruined and you’re not in the nick by tomorrow. Then what would the weans do?’
‘Women like that ought to be shot.’ Madge tucked a straggle of short hair behind her ears then suddenly grinned. ‘I did not bad, though, considering I hadn’t a gun.’
They plunged into the gloom of the pend, their feet echoing like a stampede of wild horses.
‘But look, Madge, I’ve enough trouble tangling with women at work without you making things worse.’
‘I was there to help you.’ Her voice became angry again. ‘You ought to see Mr Torrance. You ought to tell him, Alec.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘That women won’t leave you in peace.’
‘What can he do, hen? Except to tell me to pack in the job. The married ones are the worst,’ he confided. ‘Some of the houses I go to - my God, I’ve to fight them off.’
‘Which houses?’ Madge stopped at the foot of the outside stairs, one red hand gripping the railing. ‘Tell me which ones. I’ll fight them off all right.’
‘Sparrin’ for a barney, eh?’ One of their neighbours leaning on her window sill, plump arms folded to support her big chest, cosily joined in the conversation.
‘It’s a bloody wee midden in the office trying to get away with my man.’
‘No!’ Mrs White looked suitably shocked.
Alec shook his head.
‘Honest to God, hen,’ he appealed to the neighbour. ‘It beats me where she got the idea.
‘Mary down the road told me “A girl you worked with” she said,’ Madge explained. ‘Saw her hanging on to you like a leech and hauling you up a close in Castle Street.’
Gazing up at the older woman, her voice loudening, she added: ‘And when I went in to the office today to find out which wee midden it was - I caught her - carrying on before my very eyes!’
‘No!’
Alec chortled out loud. A case of mistaken identity. ‘Mary down the road’ must have got her beady eye on him on one of his visits to Rita Gibson.
‘Madge gave her a straight right.’
Alec began jerkily sparring, head down, fists jabbing backwards and forwards, as he bounced up and down on the balls of his feet.
‘And then a left hook and then a quick one, two, three to finish her off!’
With a howl of hilarity Madge punched and unbalanced him against the stairs.
‘I gave her a bloody nose though!’
‘No!’
A smell of kippers and ham and eggs titillated their nostrils. Windows were open, frying pans sizzling, getting-ready-for-high-tea-happy-sounds.
A little girl jumped up and down, legs twisting and knotting as if desperate to hold in water.
‘Mammy, Mammy!’
‘What is it?’ (A bawl from inside one of the houses.)
‘Mammy, fling me a jeely piece.’
‘Yer tea’s nearly ready.’
‘Och, I’m starving.’
Then like manna from heaven a piece of bread, spread liberally with jam, sailed out one of the top windows.
‘Come on.’ Alec made a rush at the stairs. ‘I’m starving as well.’
The children had been left in the house while Madge went round to the office and they spilled out with the dog the moment she opened the door. In a few months’ time there might be another to add to the rush because Madge had ‘missed’ again. He hoped she was pregnant. Nothing like a baby to keep a woman out of mischief.
‘Right, hen!’ His hand slid between her buttocks and underneath to tickle her as the children milled around them. ‘I’ll go through to the room and have a look at the paper while you get the tea ready.’
His finger kept twitching the back of her dress as he walked close behind her, until she smacked at his hand.
‘Get off!’
He went through to the room whistling and glad that his brood had followed their mother into the kitchen in the hope of something to eat.
The sight of the old roll-top desk reminded him of work and his mouth twitched. A case of mistaken identity - poor old Madge, always blundering into something or other. Just in case she blundered into Rita Gibson he had better be careful.
He had been making a habit of Rita since bumping into her the day the Exhibition opened. Her man was an engine-driver at Eastfield and worked shifts. Railwaymen worked damnable hours - never the same ones from one week to the next. His shifts went all round the clock, starting at a different time each week. He was older than Rita - past it probably - that would explain her insatiable appetite. Just could not get enough. He would have to cut her down. She was a right hairy.
Now take Ruth Hunter. She was different - a plum; ripe, succulent, juicy.
The door opened, interrupting an imagined energetic grapple with Ruth. ‘I’ve given the weans theirs,’ Madge announced, slapping her bottom down on a chair. ‘So that we can have ours in peace after.’ She slumped back. ‘God, Alec, I’m tired.’
Now that he looked at her, he could see she was pregnant. Thick-waisted and high-bellied she sat with her knees splayed out and her hands hanging helplessly in the hollow of dress at her groin.
‘Och, never mind, hen,’ he comforted. ‘I’ll stay in tonight.’
Her freckled face brightened and she gave him a big grin.
‘You mean it?’
‘’Course I do.’
‘There’s a good programme on the wireless.’
‘Mm-m
m!’ He winked. ‘Nothing as good as the programme I’ve lined up for you!’
She laughed but her enthusiasm tailed off a little.
‘No kidding, Alec. I’m beat.’
He came across to hunker down in front of her and slipped his hand gently up her skirt.
‘You won’t have to do a thing. You’ll just lie back and relax and enjoy yourself.’
‘Get off!’ she protested, but remained in the same slumped back position as if she had not enough energy to move.
She sighed.
‘You’re a randy bugger.’
‘Aren’t you lucky!’ he said.
‘I’ll kill you if you leave me for that wee midden in the office. And I’ll kill her as well. Becky McKay’s man went away and left her and she had to go to the poorhouse. Fancy! Becky McKay’s in Barnhill and she gets chucked out every morning with all her weans. She’s to walk the streets all day until they let her back in at night.’
With a jerk she awakened from her reverie.
‘Alec!’
A stampede along the lobby made Alec sit back on the floor and Madge tug her skirt down just in time, as the door burst open and Sadie and Hector came yelling in the room.
‘He stole my piece,’ Sadie accused. ‘I was helping Maisie eat her tea and he stole my piece.’
‘Didn’t! Didn’t! Sneaky big clipe!’
Alec suddenly let out a bear growl and lunged at them on his hands and knees and they went hopping and skipping back along the lobby, with Alec after them, their fury changing to hysterical screams of excitement.
Madge followed, tucking her hair behind her ears and laughing.
The kitchen was small and hot because even in summer the fire had to be on to heat the oven at the side, and the hobs on top for cooking.
‘It’s sausages.’ She tried to make Alec hear above the din. ‘Do you want a couple of eggs with them?’
Alec got up and enjoyed a good stretch.
‘I’ll take anything you’ve got to offer me, gorgeous!’
‘That’s three slices of sausage and a couple of eggs.’
She grinned, adding good-humouredly to Sadie, ‘Grab that bread knife from Maisie, hen, she’s going to kill herself!’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 23