‘Where are they sending you?’
Madge’s voice was still a bit needly, and she pushed it over her shoulder at him as she washed her hands.
Trust old Madge to put her big foot in it and remind him.
‘There’s a rumour we’re off to France soon. The BEF’s in dead trouble.’
‘The BEF? What’s that?’
‘The British Expeditionary Force. The Jerry Panzer divisions are beating the hell out of them.’
She gave a whoop of derisive laughter.
‘God, I hope the poor buggers aren’t depending on you to save their bacon.’
He laughed along with her and hoped the same thing.
Chapter 20
Sammy’s father had often gleefully related stories about tough English soldiers who had served all over the world yet who dreaded being posted to Maryhill Barracks. Its prison-like reputation was legend.
Now, bumping along in the army landrover between two soldiers and with the corporal in charge sitting beside the driver, Sammy viewed the approach to the place from the bottom of a deep well of anxiety.
The barracks were enclosed within a high wall constructed in bastion form with a series of projecting angles, and the main gateway had impressive stone piers.
The landrover screeched to a halt inside. A soldier appeared and spoke to the corporal. The gates closed behind them. The landrover jerked into movement again and Sammy’s world vanished.
This other world smelled different. The air was a heady mixture of cordite, oil, carbolic, brasso and paint.
Gone was the leisurely rocking of the trams, the pleasant untidiness of people strolling this way and that, stopping to enjoy a talk in straggly groups whenever or wherever the fancy took them. Gone was the interesting undulating broth pot of humanity.
Here life was all mechanised. Men drilled on the parade ground like robots with stiff jerking necks and limbs.
The rhythmic clump of boots grew louder and louder. Someone screamed through a crocodile mouth wide open and high.
‘Iya- eft - ick- ar! ’Eft ’ight ’eft ’ight ’eft ’ight ’eft ’ight ’eft ’ight …’
A flag crackled in the wind.
The landrover stopped. The car horn gave two rapid blasts.
‘Out!’ They scrambled from the vehicle.
‘At the double!’
They were outside another gateway now. This one had a huge iron door with a small wooden window. A soldier peered from the window before the iron door creaked and squeaked and clanged open.
They were entering the detention part of the barracks, high-walled off, separate. Into an office at one side of a small yard. The corporal gives Sergeant-Major Spack their papers. The corporals and soldiers go away.
Sergeant-Major Spack bristles short grey hair on head and lip and has a bouncy enthusiasm.
‘Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!’ He struts smartly around Sammy examining him from head to toe. ‘What have we here? The black sheep of the Hunter family? Well, lad, no nonsense here, remember. You’re with my bunch now. The army, lad. Nothing to beat it. We’ll soon make a soldier of you, eh? Eh, Hunter? The guards here will help keep you right. Good men. From Blackrigs. You know Blackrigs, Hunter? Eh? Blackrigs?’
He knows Blackrigs.
Other districts like Springburn or Clydend or the Gorbals were cosy old places compared with Blackrigs housing scheme. There, new council houses had windows broken and boarded, doors chopped up for firewood, streets continuously swirling and flapping with old newspapers, broken beer bottles and other litter, and everywhere buildings, walls, pavements and roads chalked with gang slogans and obscenities.
There also, insurance men and others who dared go about their business in the scheme were beaten up and robbed, and taxi, van and lorry drivers passed rapidly through with their heads down, huddled low over steering wheels to avoid being hit by flying stones or bottles.
‘Reeight, Hunter. Reeight, jump to it. Strip off! At the double!’
Sammy glowers defiance.
‘You don’t know the routine yet. The routine, Hunter. First everybody strips off. Reeight. Reeight! At the double!’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Spack looked genuinely astonished. ‘Why? Nobody asks “why” in the army!’
‘I do.’
Spack nods to the soldiers.
‘Ree … ight!’
He struggles, getting redder and redder in the face with the violence of his exertion. Close-cropped hair bristling close to his eyes. Khaki sandpapering him. The soldiers have numerical advantage and they are older and heavier men. In a matter of minutes he is naked.
‘Ree-ight, Hunter!’ Spack’s voice bellows louder. ‘You’ve got three minutes to get across that yard, have a bath and be back here. Get going. At the double!’
Sammy stares impertinence through grey-green marble stones of eyes until one of the corporals digs him in the ribs with the truncheon he carries.
The air blasts against his skin, darting it with sharp needles of rain. The bath is in an open-sided hut which also houses four wash-hand basins. The water turns his blood to ice. Back across the yard again still naked.
A heap of clothes lie waiting for him on the floor of Spack’s office. Prison clothing of khaki denims and plimsolls. Under the conscientious eyes of the sergeant-major he dresses in silent hatred.
Across the yard. This time into the prison building, ancient black stone with small barred windows like vacant eye-sockets. The iron door of each cell has a spy hole so that the guard can watch every move.
Into a cell where the barber is waiting. The corporal knocks him down on to a chair. The other soldier cuts his hair off. Crops it scalp-close.
He is prodded and pushed along to another cell. Inside there is a locker and a bed. The mattress is rolled up tightly with the blankets folded neatly on top. He puts the small kit he has been issued with on top of the locker and hangs the khaki battle-dress inside. He sinks into the silence.
He sat motionless on the edge of the bed and thought of Ruth.
His main worry was that Spack might not allow him to write to her or receive any of her letters. It was up to him to decide what mail a prisoner should be allowed to receive or send out, and all mail incoming or outgoing was read by him.
The sergeant-major also decided if a prisoner was to be allowed any visitors.
He did not expect that Ruth or anybody else would be allowed to visit him but he did hope for some contact with her, even if it were only an occasional letter.
All that sleepless night he longed for her, imagined her in his arms in the cabinet bed in the kitchen. And how was she going to manage. She had assured him that she would be perfectly all right. She would find a job, she said.
It was terrible to think of her having to go out to work. At home she could suit herself and be her own mistress. She was so proud of her home.
To Ruth, it was probably the same as to most women, home meant many things and was terribly important. Home was the roots of civilised life, home was security, home was the reflection of achievement.
He remembered the fuss Ruth and all the other Springburn women made at Hogmanay. Soon after tea-time on December 31, Springburn quickened with household activity. Women energetically cleaned windows so that the first light of the New Year should not shine through dirty glass. Flushed faces and flyaway hair told of much scrubbing and polishing and conscientious cleaning of every corner so that they and their homes could start the New Year right.
In the last minutes of the Old Year there would be much scurrying of feet on the tenement staircases as the women carrying their kitchen ashpans, ran to the dustbins to get rid of the last ashes of the dying year.
Then everything would be ready, the house sparkling, the fire crackling, the bottles and glasses mirrors for dancing light, the plates of sultana cake and cherry cake and black bun and shortbread piled generously high. Everyone waiting, newly washed and brushed and wearing clean clothes.
Springburn hangin
g breathlessly in unnatural stillness.
From somewhere down by the Clyde, a solitary tentative blast from a ship’s siren heralded midnight. From the Springburn Parish Church came the glorious clamour of bells. Springburn exploded in welcome. Countless railway whistles shrieked. Over the hill from the direction of St Rollox came the deep Caley roar. Above it all was the steady crack of the detonators spaced along the rail and being happily exploded by one of the engine crews.
Everyone happy and wishing everyone happiness. Happy camaraderie spilling out of every door.
He awoke to bleak reality.
‘At the double! At the double!’
For years he had been sick of the words. ‘At the double! At the double!’ A favourite army phrase and one his father never tired of using.
It was five a.m. and the first duty of every day was to scrub out the cells and then work down the central hall and from there through the various rooms, corridors and offices.
At seven o’clock there was breakfast at a long table in the central hall with the other prisoners, a guard sitting at each end of the table. Other guards strolled around the hall, ever watchful. Talking or smiling were punishable offences so that the meal was a dour and silent one.
Back to the cells again to fold the blankets and roll the mattress, and brasso and blanco all the kit and set them out for inspection. The stupid waste of time, the sheer useless idiocy of polishing the studs on the soles of the boots irked him beyond words.
He knew the army ‘bull’ so well, had been nurtured on it for as far back as he could remember. He had been polishing the soles of boots and washing and whitewashing coal while his contemporaries were out playing football.
Yours not to reason why
Yours but to do and die …
He had long ago come to believe that the army, far from being an institution for the defence or preservation of mankind, was in fact the most dangerous, the most destructive force, not only to the body but to the mind of man.
The professional soldier’s profession was to kill and he believed that - especially at officer level - they wanted war because peace bored them. They wanted to play their army games, not with little flags but with real people.
He believed the militarist ideal was to drill and regiment, the process of regimentation beginning at school where every independent, individualistic urge could be crushed and disciplined.
Instead of aiming at the development of every faculty to its highest capacity the militant ideal was the creation of efficient machines; not fostering a sense of individual responsibility and a questioning inquisitive intelligence but making a virtue of unreasoning obedience.
The military used harmless-sounding words to mask manoeuvres that meant death, suffering and destruction. They pinned on medals and played brass bands. Statues went up and poppy wreaths were laid. Impressive ceremonies covered multitudes of sins.
He hated the militarist ideal more than anything else in the world.
The kit was perfect, ready and waiting when the adjutant with his entourage of sergeant-major, corporals and guards came in to inspect it.
Without looking at Sammy, the adjutant jerked out his stick and knocked the kit on to the floor.
‘Get that kit cleaned properly.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
The adjutant’s eyes flashed round and for a minute he gaped.
They all gaped. Before their faces disappeared behind their military masks again.
All his enemies.
Chapter 21
The sirens started so scream, breathlessly, jerkily, just as Catriona and Ruth were about to get ready for bed.
‘What do you think we should do?’
Ruth came from the sitting-room leisurely brushing her hair, arms reaching up and back, brushing, smoothing, breasts lifting, pushing.
Each siren followed hastily the one before, until it sounded as if the whole of Glasgow was exploding with sirens, each one competing in feverish excitement with the other and every one out of time and tune.
Catriona put a hand to her brow.
‘They’ll waken the children!’
‘It seems a shame to lift them, doesn’t it? Nothing’s happened so far, has it?’
‘I know. They’re liable to get their death of cold being lifted from their warm beds and taken down that draughty stair. Still …’
Catriona nibbled at her nails, eyes straining with worry. ‘What if anything did happen? Oh, dear, and there’s Da as well.’
‘You can’t make him go downstairs, can you? His safety is his own responsibility, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, no!’ She was shocked. ‘Melvin would blame me if anything happened. Oh, dear!’
‘Something might happen to you if you’re not careful, mightn’t it?’
‘It doesn’t matter about me.’
She avoided Ruth’s eyes, thinking what a good thing it would be if she had a premature birth. Only things never happened the way you wanted them to. It would be just typical if this baby was late.
Ruth raised an eyebrow.
‘Doesn’t it? What about the baby? And what about Fergus and Andrew if anything happens to you?’
Catriona could have wept.
‘Oh, well, I suppose we’d better get started. At least this time the alert went before we were undressed.’
The sirens wailed gradually away fainter and fainter until the silence was only broken by people stirring in the building and beginning to make their way down the stairs. Old Angus MacGuffie from next door who thought everyone was as deaf as himself was protesting loudly to his son Tam, who had run up from the bakehouse to help his father down because neither his wife Nellie, nor his daughter Lizzie could do anything with the old man.
‘You’re always doing this!’ Angus was roaring. ‘Hauling me out of my bed for no rhyme nor reason!’
‘There’s a raid on, Paw!’ Tam roared back.
‘A raincoat on? No I will not put a raincoat on. It’s too cold!’
Ruth laughed and tossed back her hair.
‘He’s started already. Isn’t he a scream?’
Catriona rolled her eyes. ‘Mr MacGuffie and Da are as good as any turn at the Empire. Mr MacGuffie with his bums for bombs, and Da calling them booms. I’d better get the children.’
‘How about just lifting the pram down? And Fergus’s mattress?’
‘What a good idea! I could get one of the men to help.’ Catriona’s small face lit up with gratitude. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Ruth. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
She ran and opened the front door.
‘Tam!’
‘Aye, lass?’
Tam strained a red face upwards, puffing for breath as he struggled to get his father safely down the spiral stairs.
‘Could you send Baldy to help us bring the children down? I’ll just keep Andy in the pram and maybe he won’t even waken.’
‘Right, lass, just as soon as I get this thrawn old buffer down to the lobby.’
Nellie and Lizzie appeared loaded with all their usual accoutrements, cushions, knitting, peppermints, shawls, earplugs, thermos flask, gas masks.
‘Hello,’ Catriona greeted them. ‘Isn’t this a nuisance?’
‘I read in the paper they had a terrible time in England last night,’ Nellie confided. ‘There was this woman who just went back upstairs for a hanky when the bomb dropped and she was killed and the rest of her family escaped unhurt.’
‘Poor thing!’ Catriona tutted. ‘Fancy!’
They always discussed the details of other lads and made sympathetic noises in the same way as they enjoyed little gossips about local scandals. The happenings themselves held no deep reality. Reality was the friendly exchanges, the neighbourliness, the warmth of shared conversation.
Lizzie limped across the landing and peered close through thick glasses.
‘I’ll take Fergus down. I’ll see to my wee baby.’
Immediately Catriona retreated back into the house, he
r face stiffening.
‘I’m seeing to Fergus, thank you.’
She shut the door. Lizzie had taken charge of Fergus when the child’s mother died and had never forgiven Catriona for appearing on the scene as Melvin’s wife and taking over.
Lizzie had queer ways and Catriona felt sure she had done Fergus nothing but harm.
‘Lizzie again?’ Ruth queried.
Catriona nodded.
‘She gives me the creeps that woman. If I’ve to go to the lavatory or anywhere else will you watch Fergus for me, Ruth? Don’t let that woman near him during the night if I’m not there. She’d waken him up and frighten him. She enjoys frightening the children. It’s terrible.’
‘Don’t worry!’ Ruth went through to the sitting-room to put her hairbrush away. ‘I can’t stand her either.’
‘Poor Mrs MacGuffie and Tam.’ Catriona heaved her heavy belly across the hall towards the bedroom and the children. ‘They can’t have much of a life.’
She kept a hold-all packed ready and she checked it as usual to make absolutely sure that everything was all right. Extra clothes for the children, their favourite picture books and toys, a mug and plate and spoon each, ear-plugs, gas masks.
The door-bell went and before she had time to shuffle, flat-footed, wide-legged into the hall, Ruth had answered it and ushered big Baldy Fowler the foreman baker into the house.
Since his wife had been hanged Baldy shared his upstairs flat with Sandy the vanman. Baldy had the build of a huge all-in wrestler and although heavy drinking had taken its toll, nevertheless to bump the pram downstairs with Andrew still sleeping peacefully inside was no bother to him. In a few minutes he was charging like a bull back up the stairs for Fergus.
Catriona noticed how he kept looking at Ruth and how Ruth’s dark eyes fluttered coyly up at him.
Ruth worried and perplexed her. Often in the evenings they talked and talked and Ruth told about her husband Sammy and what a good man he was and how much she loved him.
There had been times when she had gone through to the room for something after Ruth had gone to bed and found her weeping for Sammy. Yet there seemed to be something dangerous that switched on inside her every time a man appeared. It was as if men turned a spotlight on her and she immediately began a sensuous performance, each movement a studied provocation.
The Breadmakers Saga Page 32