The Breadmakers Saga

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  ‘Thank God for all of it but all the same I’m desperate for a job. It’s slow death hanging about like this.’

  ‘Well, Joe Banks where I work is due to retire soon. I could put in a good word for you. But it’s not in the office, Alec. It’s not your kind of job …’

  ‘Listen, mate, I don’t care what kind of job it is as long as it’s a job.’

  ‘Joe’s the storeman. He works in the basement. As said, it’s …’

  ‘Do you think there’s a chance?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. I’ll certainly do my best.’

  Alec got up, grabbed Sammy’s hand and, speechless with gratitude, pumped it energetically up and down.

  Sammy laughed.

  ‘Take it easy. Where did you say you were living? I’ll speak to the boss tomorrow and come out at night and tell you what he says. He’ll probably let me know when you can go in and see him.’

  ‘Hughenden Playing Fields, off Great Western Road. It’s right next to the asylum. Handy if I go berserk. They can just toss me across the fence. I’m itching to tell Madge, Sammy.’ He made for the door. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  He clattered down the stone stairs with almost as much vigour as he once had after seeing Ruth. Now he did not look back at the window as he used to but winged his way across to the camp as fast as the tram-car and his long legs would carry him.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Madge greeted him above the racket of all the children. ‘You’ve been drinking again. I smell the stink of you from here.’

  ‘Och, I only had a bottle of beer, hen.’

  ‘Only? The money for that could have bought the weans something, you rotten selfish bastard!’

  ‘Now just a minute, Madge. Give us a chance.’

  ‘I gave you your chance years ago. And look where it’s got me.’

  He groaned.

  ‘I met Sammy Hunter. He took me up to his house.’

  ‘What did you do there? Compare notes with him about his wife?’

  ‘Once and for all, Madge, will you shut up about Ruth. She was a nice girl.’

  ‘Oh, she was a nice girl, was she? I’ll “nice girl” you!’ She flung herself at him, her fingers digging and grabbing and shaking him, her face ugly and contorted.

  He struggled with her and all the children began to scream and jump around them. Desperately he bawled at her.

  ‘I’ve got the chance of a job, you maniac! In Sammy’s place. He’s coming here tomorrow night to fix it up.’

  ‘Oh, so you think you’ll soon be back to your f—ing cocky self, do you, in an office full of girls, do you? You think you’re going to leave me here in this dump with this howling mob all day, do you?’

  ‘Madge, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Well, I’ll soon fix you. I’ll tell Sammy a thing or two for a start and if you do get the job I’ll go up there and barge into the place every day …’

  All the time she was fighting him and it took all his strength to keep a grip on her arms or wrists.

  ‘Agnes!’ she shouted. ‘Sadie! He’s twisting my arms. He’s hurting me. Run quick and phone the police!’

  ‘Madge, what are you trying to do to me? I’m trying to get you and the weans out of here. This is the first chance I’ve got.’

  She gave him a punch on the shoulder that made him stagger back.

  ‘You’ve had your chance. Now it’s my turn. You stay here. You watch your own weans. I’ll find a job. I’ll go out and work.’

  She seemed hell-bent on destroying him. Finishing him off good and proper. Grinding him under her big strong foot as if he were no more than an insect.

  ‘After I come out the nick again, you mean?’

  She laughed then and it was the big blowzy laugh that did it. He suddenly lashed out at her with all his strength, all his pent-up frustrations. Afterwards, running through the quiet dark streets where Madge had often walked admiring the houses, he sweated with the thought that he might have killed her if it had not been for the children all hanging desperately on to him like leeches and the sound of Charlie’s sobbing voice, high-pitched and pleading with fear.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’

  He stopped running eventually and slipped in behind some bushes in the driveway of a house. He was shaking and gasping for breath and the nightmare scene he had left still imprisoned him like a shroud of icy cobwebs. It had been raining and the leaves of the bushes had an earthy smell and glistened and dripped with water. The dampness seeped through him and made him shudder as he peered through the leaves. The big villa was in darkness. Maybe the owners were out enjoying themselves at the theatre, or away on holiday. Staring at the place, it occurred to him how ill-divided the world was. What made these people so special that they had so much of the world’s goods and comforts and he had so little?

  Were the man who owned that house or any of the other men around here such paragons of virtue? Did they work harder than he had once worked? Were they more honest?

  He had never stolen a thing in his life but now for the first time he was really tempted. If he took something from that house what would it mean to the owner who owned so much, compared with how valuable, how important, what a difference it could make to himself who had nothing.

  Perhaps there was enough money in a safe in there to give to a house-factor as ‘key money’. Money could get anything. If he had enough money he could get a house, a decent house. Not unnecessarily big like that one but adequate - a good-sized flat in Springburn with a bathroom in one of the decent red sandstone buildings - maybe up the Balgray Hill near the park.

  The poky room and kitchen in Cowlairs Pend had been smaller than the Nissen hut.

  He was still in the nightmare, he could still hear Charlie’s voice. The dream of money and a house only spun across the surface for a minute and then was gone with the temptation, leaving him more tormented than ever.

  He ached to run again. He could thumb lifts down south on the long-distance lorries. He could get to London. He could shake free of Madge and the weans and all his problems, no bother at all. He could manage fine on his own.

  The prospect of absolute freedom, the chance to start life afresh, reared up with tantalising attractiveness. It immediately lightened him, seemed to lift the weight of the whole world off his shoulder.

  He moved, restless to be away. The bushes rustled and sprayed his crumpled demob suit with water.

  He said a mental goodbye to Madge and the weans. He saw them all in his mind’s eye.

  He wiped his wet face with the sleeve of his jacket as he walked away. Then, still rubbing clumsily at his face and cursing himself, he turned back towards the camp.

  Chapter 21

  Catriona began reading psychology books. She read about things like transference and wondered if that explained Melvin’s behaviour. Was he transferring everything about himself on to her? When he accused her of being weak and no use - was he secretly afraid of facing his own weaknesses and guilt feelings? And if so, what could she do about it? She was becoming more and more convinced that either Melvin and the old man were going off their heads, or she was. She felt herself slipping, losing her grasp, as if she were hanging on to the edge of a precipice and below her yawned a black pit.

  At every opportunity she studied the Bible in an effort to cling on.

  She read every paper or magazine that had a horoscope. Her ears were for ever attuned to anything that might apply to her problems on the radio, or in anyone’s casual conversation. She read the agony columns but no one’s agony seemed so complicated and hopeless as her own.

  Everything was getting beyond her. The housework was a nightmare roundabout on which she whirled round and round without end. And Melvin still kept trying to involve her in all the problems and extra responsibilities that success was bringing to the business.

  Her father-in-law worried her to distraction but Melvin pooh-poohed the idea that the old man needed a doctor.

  ‘Da and I aren’t like you,
with your pills and potions and your carry on with doctors. I don’t want you bringing any of your doctors into my house. Da’s old and can’t hold his liquor so well now, that’s all.’

  But Melvin did not see the old man as often as she did. Melvin was at the bakehouse half the night and it was then Da was at his worst and she did not know what to do. During the day for the most part he was perfectly all right. He never worked in the shop or the bakehouse now but occasionally called in to see how they were doing. Or he would ask Melvin for all the news at mealtimes. Then Catriona would wonder if she had imagined every nighttime when she lay sick with exhaustion, and ears straining up from her pillow, listening for the old man.

  Was that him staggering about the house again? Might he not fall down the stairs? It was not the first time he bumped down the stairs and hurt himself. Was that the scrape of a match, the crackle of flames?

  Rigid with anxiety she made desperate plans of how she would rescue the children if Da set the house on fire and they suddenly became trapped in a roaring furnace. A thousand times in her imagination she wakened them. Should she risk precious seconds waiting until they put on their dressing-gowns, or should she try to rush them out the window and down the drain-pipe and put them in danger of catching pneumonia through being outside in the cold wearing only pyjamas?

  But they would never be able to climb down drain-pipes from this height and neither would she. They would fall and break a leg or an arm, or be killed.

  She wept to herself, but quietly, so that she could still listen.

  Sometimes the old man called her and she jumped out of bed and raced to his room, tugging on her dressing-gown as she went, tightly knotting her nerves and emotions along with her dressing-gown cord, retaining a quiet voice although her heart drummed noisily.

  ‘Yes, Da?’

  ‘Take Tam out of here.’

  ‘Tam?’

  ‘Tam MacGuffie. You remember Tam. There he is at the back of my bed.’

  Tam had been one of the Dessie Street bakers and he had been killed in the air-raid.

  ‘There’s nobody there, Da,’ she said. ‘Cuddle down and try to go to sleep.’

  His goatee beard bristled and he slavered with anger.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to talk. The wee nyaff’s no taking up half your bed.’ He suddenly whipped back the bedclothes to reveal spindly legs dangling from a too short nightshirt. ‘I’m getting up!’

  She averted her eyes in embarrassment and then was sickened to hear the thud of him falling on the floor. Rushing forward, she struggled to lift him. He seemed only a bundle of jaggy bones and yet felt as if he weighed a ton. It took every last ounce of her strength to wrench him up and stagger with him to the bed and while doing so she felt her menstrual period, which had just finished, start again with a painful gush. She felt faint and saw the old man through a misty haze.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘What are you doing in my bedroom?’ he whined querulously. ‘I never get a minute’s peace. It’s terrible.’

  Sometimes she went to his room and he would be up and dressed and would immediately pounce on her.

  ‘About time too. What’s the meaning of this? I’ve been sitting here the whole day without a bite to eat or even a cup of tea.’

  ‘But, Da, this is the middle of the night,’ she’d wail. ‘You had your tea hours ago.’

  But there would be no convincing him and she would have to trail downstairs and wander about the kitchen half asleep cooking ham and eggs or sausage or whatever she could find, then carry it up on a tray to his room.

  Sometimes by the time she got there he would be back in bed and asleep and if she wakened him he would peer incredulously at the ham and eggs and sausage, and yelp in high-pitched outrage.

  ‘Have you gone off your bloody nut? It’s the middle of the night!’

  More often than not he would have fallen on to the floor off his chair. She was suspended in continuous terror of his falling into the fire, of opening his door and having to face the most appalling, horrific sight.

  As it was, to watch his slow disintegration was bad enough. On the wall he had a picture of himself as a spruce, straight-backed young man and every time she saw it, then looked at the tottering, red-eyed, white-haired old wreck of a man, depression destroyed her a little.

  Was this what we all have to come to? she wondered. Was this all there was to life? All the worry, the pain, the struggling, the trying to understand - it was all for this?

  She sought to keep her eyes averted from the picture. She tried to look at, yet not see, the old man, to find some secret place within herself, if not in the house, where she could be free of distress, but there was nowhere.

  The old man began to dominate her whole life, to take up all her time and energies to the exclusion even of caring for the children, and Catriona felt sad to think that the children’s childhood was passing away and she had no longer the patience or the time for them. It became a regular job to heave Da off the floor in the middle of the night and half carry him back into bed, and somehow the menstrual period that had come back that first time never quite dried up. It streamed heavier each month and heavier and heavier in between months, until it seemed her life’s blood was flowing fast away.

  In terror that Melvin would find out, she planned another visit to the doctor. To withstand a repeat of Melvin’s obscene tirade about going to see the doctor was impossible.

  She began to watch him from the corner of her eye when he did not know she was looking. She furtively listened at the door of any room he was in. For self-protection she tried harder and harder to appear normal when she was with him, as if nothing at all was the matter. Often she chatted about trivial things and laughed while dishing up meals in the dining-room. Then she would come through to the kitchen to the cupboard in the corner for more plates and weep helplessly in shadows behind the door with her arms sprawled over the shelves and her head rolling.

  Then eventually, waiting in the doctor’s surgery, she was strung up in an anguish of suspense in case Melvin somehow found out where she was. Her turn came and she poised herself on the edge of the chair at the opposite side of the doctor’s desk. He looked almost as old as her father-in-law.

  The wrinkled mouth under the tufty grey moustache still strained back to reveal the same little yellow teeth. She stared at him without hope. She felt so terrible and it was all so complicated and she was so tired, she did not know where to begin.

  It occurred to her that the people who most needed help might often be the least likely to get it. For one reason or another they might not be able to communicate their condition in either an adequate way or a way that would arouse enough sympathy and understanding.

  She did not feel well enough to explain. Her mind had gone blank. She did not know where to begin. She heard herself murmur apologetically about having heavy periods and being tired all the time when a loud buzz at the front doorbell made her jump and burst into tears.

  ‘It’s maybe my husband!’ She screwed herself up, hands to mouth, eyes enormous, terrified, waiting, listening to the sound of the receptionist plodding across the carpeted hall outside, listening to the door opening, listening to the muffled voices.

  The doctor said, ‘It’s only another patient.’

  And he gave a jerky little giggle.

  She froze inside. She hated him almost as much as she hated Melvin.

  Now he was writing a prescription. He was rising. She rose too.

  She thought, any minute now he’s going to say - ‘It’s just nerves.’

  He smiled. She smiled.

  ‘It’s just nerves,’ he assured her, seeing her to the door and shaking her politely by the hand before ushering her out.

  On the slow way home, like a little old woman bent against pain, walking carefully, she tried to take deep breaths to soothe herself.

  She thought, ‘Where can I go? What can I do?’

  Turning into Botanic Crescent she pass
ed her next-door neighbours, the minister’s house. His name was Reverend John Reid and he was Mrs Vincent’s father. Her feet faltered, halted, then returned to Reverend Reid’s house. Heart pounding at the enormity of what she was doing she tugged at the doorbell.

  She had never had anything to do with the Reids. Occasionally they smiled in passing and Reverend Reid lifted his hat but they had never exchanged more than half a dozen polite words of conversation about the weather. She had certainly never been in the Reids’ house.

  Now she gazed in consternation at the prim elderly maid who opened the door.

  ‘I … I was wondering if I could see Mr Reid?’

  ‘What?’ The maid screwed up her face and strained one ear forward.

  ‘Could I see the minister please? It’s terribly important.’

  ‘You’re the woman from next door, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I want to ask the minister’s advice about something. Is he in?’

  The older woman moved back and somewhat grudgingly allowed Catriona to enter. ‘I’ll see. Wait here.’

  Left standing in the hall after the maid plodded slowly away into one of the rooms Catriona stared apprehensively around. The rosewood hall with its turkey-red carpet gleamed darkly and somehow made her feel out of time as well as place. Her nerves twitched and her thoughts raced but opposite the grandfather clock slowly tick-tocked, its heavy brass pendulum lazily, contentedly, swinging.

  Knotting her hands together she strained her eyes and ears in an attempt to decipher words from the low murmur of voices coming from the room. She thought she heard a woman say something like, ‘Not one of your flock’, but could not be sure. One thing she did catch was the gentle sighing tones of long-suffering resignation.

  Then the maid reappeared followed by a determinedly smiling Mrs Reid.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs MacNair. Do come in. Jessie tells me you wish to speak to my husband. We were just about to go out but …’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Catriona interrupted. ‘Don’t let me detain you. I’m so sorry for intruding like this.’