*
The operator said that she couldn’t connect me. The lines in Greenock were down. That night, the bombers came again, with more squadrons. The town burned, and then the peat-covered hillside above caught fire. People watching from Helensburgh, on the north side of the Firth, looked across the water into a trembling open furnace three miles long.
*
It was three days later that I was able to take leave and go to Greenock. The trains to the town had stopped; rumour said there were parachute mines the size of laundry boilers lying across the rails. But some buses were running as far as the outskirts. The inner streets of Greenock and Port Glasgow looked like my own last sight of Warsaw: blackened gables, smoke still rising, tangled hoses flushing the roadway with rippling fans of water.
I stopped to question an elderly air raid warden, as he watched a fire brigade team digging into a hill of rubble. He guessed the dead must number hundreds, maybe thousands. Many families were still hiding in the moors up by Loch Thom. He peered at me over his spectacles. ‘It puts me in mind of Pompeii. But it was no the volcano we got. It was the barbarians.’
I walked on. As in the London blitz, the Germans had used their curious instinct for class discrimination. The working-class part of town had been devastated, while the west end of Greenock, with its broad, straight avenues, was almost untouched. As I came up Union Street, everything seemed normal except for the smell: a thick marzipan reek of burned plaster mixed with the scent of peat smoke from the hill.
Mrs Melville was sitting in the kitchen. Her smart Red Cross uniform was creased and stained. Beside her, at the table where Helen and I used to share cigarettes and eye one another, there was a pale young woman staring at me fearfully, clasping an equally pale small boy on her knee. ‘Goodness, see who’s here,’ said Mrs M weakly. She tried to get up, but fell back into her chair. ‘I was up all the night. There’s no gas. I’ll just make tea on the wee Primus.’
‘Don’t...’ But she struggled to her feet and lit the methylated spirit under the little burner perched on the table. I wondered how to get her alone for a talk. Everyone seemed too stunned to speak.
When the tea came, the small boy grabbed the spoons and pulled them into his lap. When a plate of biscuits came, he grabbed them all too. Next he snatched a box of matches which I brought out to light a cigarette, and I saw that his pockets were bulging with small objects. Mrs Melville reached out to take back one of the spoons from his fist, but he clutched it tighter and began to scream. ‘That’s mine, that’s Mammy’s.’ His mother tried softly to unlock his fingers, but the screaming went on.
I took my cup of tea and beckoned Mrs M into the next room. We closed the door. ‘That’s Stella and that’s wee Francis,’ she said. ‘Bombed out from Clydebank, you know. They’ve been here for a month. They lost everything, just every single thing. Did you ever know anyone who had nothing – not a roof, not a change of shoes, not a toy?’
‘Mabel, I know where Johnston is.’
She sat down on the sofa. She did not look at me, but took off her spectacles and began to polish them alertly with her silk scarf.
‘Mabel, he’s fine. He’s changed his name, got a job, a new identity card. The empty cottage at Kilmun – I think I know all about that.’
‘What are you going to do about it, then?’
‘About him? About you? There is nothing I can do about him – not now. The Fronsac – the explosion – I think it was not his fault. But I helped him hide and become somebody else. So if he is caught, I am also falling in the, in the... how you say?’
‘I would say: in the soup. But wouldn’t soldiers and sailors say something else?’
She suddenly yawned. A strand of grey hair fell over her face, but she seemed too tired to brush it away. It was if she had forgotten what we had been talking about. There was a silence.
‘And how is Jackie?’
‘You are risking something on my son’s account. Risking a great deal. I realise that, and I wouldn’t have you thinking I do not.’
‘Yes, but Jackie?’
Mrs Melville sighed, then suddenly shook her head as if she were waking from a doze.
‘Ach, I took her out of that wretched school. She goes to St Columba’s in Kilmacolm now. The girls have to wear white gloves there. If they aren’t wearing their gloves when they get off the train from Greenock, they get a row. Oh, it’s right perjink, is St Columba’s. And their motto is “Variety Without Disorder”. It’s my view that at Campbell Street it was all “Disorder Without Variety”.’
‘Is she happy?’
‘That one keeps her feelings to herself. She does very well in the new school, just excellent marks. But she’s wanting privacy in her own house. She’ll not be sorry when Stella and Francis are away back to their own folk.’
‘Helen?’
‘Isn’t it me should be asking you that? Not a word to me or to Jackie. Not since that parcel. And it’s the best part of a year now. That young lady has all the butter and eggs she can eat over there, and no blackout, and no bombs to wake her in the night. And the bright lights and the big cars. She’ll have found better things to do than remember her own child.’
I got up and went to the big window. It was the same view that I remembered. There were warships out there at anchor, and freighters flying barrage balloons, and an Atlantic liner painted grey. A dispatch launch was cutting an important line of spray. It was sea business as usual, unconcerned by what had happened to the town behind.
‘Did they hit any ships?’
‘Not one. It’s a mercy; that big one was fairly packed with Canadian soldiers. But the noise of their guns was terrible, worse than the bombs.’
‘Worse?’
Mrs M looked down into her cup of tea, gone cold. Without a spoon to stir it, she swirled the tea around for a few moments.
‘Aye, well. Worse? I was down in Cathcart Street the second night. We had an aid post... I thought it was clear and I could make a dash for it across the way. Then I heard this one coming. This skreiching whistle, louder and louder. It seemed to go on for ever, the big one saying he was coming for me, just for me. I lay down on the street with my helmet on, and I gripped my handbag as tight as tight. I mind thinking: how will they tell Jackie? She’s alone in the shelter in the garden with Stella and the wee boy. Who’ll care for her? Please, God, don’t do this.’
I said nothing. Knowing her well enough, I knew she would wish she hadn’t spoken this way. Already she was frowning.
‘There’s always others worse off. Like my father used to say, worse things happened at Culloden. Well, it went into the houses by Station Avenue. Quite a mess. There were families sheltering under the stair. Quite a mess. We were at it there with the wardens and the firemen all night. A “night to remember”? No, thank you.’
‘Mabel, we need to talk about you, what happens to you about Johnston. Do you see Eric?’
‘It’s been a while now. He used to come by once in a few months and blether about Johnston. Still those nice manners and that, but persistent. He had some idea that Johnston wasn’t dead; once he asked me, quite suddenly, if I had heard from him. That was after I found the cottage empty. It was a shock, that question, but I told him nothing. I believe he will have given up now.’
‘No, Mabel, I think he has been watching you all the time. Johnston left when he saw a shore patrol coming to search the cottage. Eric must have sent them.’
‘That was more than a year ago, Mike. There’s more important things to worry about these days. I’ll not ask you where Johnston is, but I’m sure there are things he asked you to bring from the house. Is he keeping warm?’
‘Does Jackie know he’s still alive?’
‘She certainly does not! Well... but I think she makes up stories for herself. She likes reading about people hiding in the hills, Prince Charlie, the Bruce and all that. She’s reading Kidnapped just now.’
I left, promising to come back the next morning. Mrs M would make up a
suitcase with the watch and the clothes and maybe a cake. My problem would be to find a room, if there was a hotel left standing.
The Tontine, a few hundred yards away, was full. Maybe there would be somewhere in Gourock or Fort Matilda, where I had begun my Franco-Scottish life with Commandant le Gallois. I set out to walk.
Gourock seemed almost untouched. But the grey streets I remembered had become a coloured parade of uniforms. Most were British: Royal Navy or RAF. A platoon of Australians in wide-awake hats tramped by. I passed several Free French naval officers, but recognised none of them. A man and a woman in neatly pressed Canadian Air Force battledress strode out of the Bay Hotel as I approached.
No room there either. A Polish sergeant – what was he doing here? – saluted me in the lobby as I turned to leave. He was staying with a family in a tenement up the hill; there was a spare bed in the kitchen.
‘The daughter is nice, but no chance – niema mowy!’ I took down the address with some difficulty. ‘Mathie Crescent’ doesn’t trip easily off the Polish tongue. Then I went out of the hotel and stood on the pavement, wondering how to spend the rest of the day.
In front of me was the harbour railway station, where troops coming off the big ships ‘entrained’ for unknown destinations. The two Canadians were standing outside the booking hall, evidently saying goodbye. They kissed, and the man vanished into the station. The woman looked up towards the hotel, and began to walk quickly in my direction. I moved aside to let her pass as she came up to me. But she didn’t pass.
‘Mike!’
Who was this elegant, laughing airwoman, with her yellow hair in a bun under an officer’s cap? For two seconds, I didn’t know.
‘I saw you there going into the Bay. Looking so serious. Couldn’t believe it.’
‘Your hair. It’s grown so long. You have lipstick!’
Helen stood in front of me, still laughing. I took both her hands and held them tightly.
‘What are you doing here? How did you get here?’
‘I flew, that’s how. That’s what I do. See these wings? I’m a flyer.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m a pilot, Mike. Six months’ training, and I’m passed for a co-pilot on bombers. Ferry duty! The Yanks build them and we fly them over the Atlantic.’
‘Your voice, you talk like an American.’
‘Canadian, okay? Maybe, but on the base they still call me Scottie.’
We went inside, and found somewhere to sit in the lounge among a pack of convoy seamen. They stared at Helen in her neat pale-blue tunic. There was a table between us. Suddenly, we were not sure what to say.
‘The Selangor Star. We all thought you had drowned. But you were in a lifeboat. What happened to you then?’
‘I don’t talk about that. I can’t think about it.’ She pulled out a pack of Camels and lit mine with a gleaming silver lighter. The taste was new to me, sweetish. ‘Now I’ve to go back by sea, on that big liner out there with the next convoy. See, we flew the planes into Prestwick, and came up here to embark. That’ll be ten days and nights on the Atlantic zigzagging back west. Looking down on the water from up high, I can take that. But I’ve been too close to it once already, Mike.’
‘Bad dreams?’
‘You guessed it.’
There was another silence. The things I hadn’t said, the things she hadn’t asked, were becoming monstrous.
‘Let’s go for a walk.’
We went through the streets near the Free French base, and up to the top of the Lyle Hill. It was steep; we didn’t talk much on the way.
‘Are the trains running?’
‘After the blitz? Not yet. Why?’
‘Craig thought he would go through to Glasgow for the day. If there’s no train, he’ll be waiting on me down there. I’ll need to go back and find him. Britain’s still a bit of a mystery to him.’
‘Craig?’
‘My husband. Met him in Winnipeg, when we were training. He’s a farmer in peacetime, somewhere in Ontario. Good guy. Good flyer too. Boy, I hope he stays on the ferry job and doesn’t go bombing Germany.’
‘You are married?’
We had reached the summit. The whole panorama of the estuary lay below us: the tiny ships in rows at the Tail of the Bank, the stone houses clinging to the hillside, the Argyll mountain ranges clear in the background. A destroyer’s siren whooped and echoed. To the east, a yellowish smoke haze lay over Greenock.
Beyond the ships, on the distant side of the Firth, I noticed the hulk of a vessel on its side, bows tilted below the surface. I didn’t need to count the funnels to recognise her. The Fronsac had been towed into the shallows and beached, along with the dead men under her deck.
I didn’t feel like pointing that out to Helen. She was smiling to herself, taking deep breaths, at ease. She might have been appreciating a vast, familiar painting. ‘My father used to take me up here. He said it was the mountain where the Devil took Jesus to tempt him. He showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he could have them if he bowed down to Satan.’
‘Helen...’
‘I’m not Helen any more. Well, to you, okay. But my name’s Mary now. Craig married Mary Helen MacPhail.’
I shouted at her. ‘What are you doing? Jackie could be dead in the blitz, and we have been together for an hour, and you didn’t even ask after her. You cried once because you were a bad mother. What are you now? Your father, Mabel, they could all be in the hospital dying. Butter, eggs, maple syrup, Canada, pretty uniform? This is your country, you bitch! What have you become?’
She sat down on a bench, and looked at me calmly. Her eyes tightened at the corners in the old way.
‘This Craig – you are not married to this Craig. I give you the news: Johnston is still alive. The funeral – it was all a fake. I tell you the whole story. But no, you are not interested.’
Helen shook her head and turned away. She seemed to be consulting the wind, the Firth.
‘Well, I’m asking a question now. Tell me about Jackie.’
‘She is fine. She is still at Union Street with her grandmother. At a new school. Will you go to see her?’
‘Well, I don’t know. They won’t tell us when the convoy goes, but the word is we need to get on board tomorrow. Johnston... my God! I’m glad, but it’s so long since I thought of him. I can’t rightly picture his face, even. He’s not at Union Street... no? That’s one mercy.’
‘How can you say that? He is your husband. You have to tell Craig.’
‘You’re daft. He wouldn’t understand. I’ll need to sort this, some way, but it’s wartime. In wartime, there’s nothing can’t be sorted. See your long face! Ach, Mike, you’s just a wee Polish prig. I liked you better as my wee Polish count!’
She was sounding less Canadian now. And that jarring laugh was the same. It hurt me and it moved me.
‘Let’s go down, Mike.’
At the edge of the Lyle Hill, with the view before her, she stopped again and stood looking down. Then she turned to face me, crossing her arms over her breasts in a movement – sure, imperious – that I didn’t remember in her.
‘I want you to get this, Mike, once and for all. This is no my country now. It’s just the place where I was a wean. Bens and glens, sure, that’s fine. Maybe I’ll get Jackie away to Canada after the war, and then she and I and Craig and our kids will come one summer and drive around and see the sights. But there’s nothing for me in Scotland.’
She swept an arm across the view, as if she were throwing away stale crumbs. ‘I cannae believe I belonged here. See all those worn-oot folk in their worn-oot houses down there. And they knowing no better. I could never go back to that... dump. Never!’
A sigh. She folded her arms again, more tightly. ‘I’ll tell you. When we were on the approach, coming in for Prestwick, it was right misty. We were just at a couple of hundred feet when I saw that grey old coast coming up towards me. And you know – I felt sick at my stomach. And it wi
sna the big Hudson shoogling about in the wind. It was me thinking: Oh no! I got away from this land, and here I’m back.’
I was lurching into angry words – you do belong here, you can’t just – when her violent stare made me stop. Of all people, was I going to lecture her about loyalty to a place, to people? Me, foreign Mike, who used to boast to her in that kitchen that he needed no home? But then I imagined myself in a swaying aircraft suddenly breaking through clouds to see the Polish countryside – those straight white roads, those Sunday-best little fields striped green, gold and brown – streaming past below me. I felt my throat tighten, here on this Scottish hilltop, but not with dread.
Helen, I saw, was the true escaper. I was evading something else, something closer than a country. The game of words for tears... it occurred to me, for the first time, that it had always been Helen playing it on me. I had never taken my turn to pitch words back at her. Somehow, for some purpose, she had kept the game one-sided.
Now Helen advanced on me. She hadn’t finished. But at first the words wouldn’t come. Frowning, she stabbed a finger on to my breast-pocket button, over and over as if she were ringing the bell of an empty house. Then she said: ‘When they lifted me out of the boat, I was no seeing much at all. And no hearing much. There was damn-all to hear by then, anyhow. We pulled four children from the water after the ship went down. But six days and nights in that boat; the voices went quiet, and... well... I wasna seeing properly but I was thinking yet, I was still thinking. And the thought when I felt those Canadian sailors gripping and raising me up was: never again, no way back. If it’s life I am being given, then it’s a new life.’
She was shaking. I put out my arms to her. But on the instant a thud of wind came from nowhere and blew her smart cap off. We ran after it, as it wheeled under the hilltop bench and on to the roadway. By the time I caught it (an envious glimpse at the red waterproof lining and the burnished patent-leather strap), Helen was laughing. We began to walk down the hill arm in arm.
‘Leave Jackie to me,’ she said, as we came to the first houses. ‘Don’t tell her I was here. I’ll maybe see her next time we’re over. No, Mike, worry about yourself.’
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 9