I raced to our house before they got to me and banged the door shut. Rosie was chattering by the window. I wanted her to be quiet, or not be there at all, which was terrible. After she lost all her family in the bombing, she used to chatter away as if they’d just popped out to the shops, not understanding that they were all dead and gone. I wanted so badly to tell her so she’d know the truth, which seemed more important than anything else, and every so often I’d try and she’d look up at me as if I was speaking double Dutch. Then time passed and she stopped asking for them, but she never stopped talking. And here she was again: blah, blah, blah.
‘Lenny’s back!’ she announced, as if I’d arrived for a party. Mavis and my mum turned from the fire where they were warming themselves.
‘Lenny,’ said my mum.
Her face was blotchy and her eyes were red from crying. She had a pair of scissors in one hand and Mavis’s head in the other. She’d been trimming Mavis’s hair, but the fringe was all up and down, much worse than it had been before. I took the scissors and held my mum tight. I wasn’t much smaller than her any more. She had her old dress on from before the bombing, all stitched up under the arm where the seams had burst because of the crutches she used to have, and big woolly socks to cover her wooden foot. She heaved a sob and then so did I, and Mavis hugged us too and then Rosie on the other side, and we all heaved and sniffed and wailed. Then Rosie started howling again, like the packs of dogs I’d seen running about Clydebank lost with no owners, hungry and wild.
‘Rosie, stop it!’ said my mum, drawing back. She was shaking the way she does when her legs get tired and she needs to sit down, so I had to get a chair. She was closest to Mr Tait’s chair so that’s what I got. Mavis slid up against her with her thumb in her mouth and fat tears running down her cheeks.
‘Rosie, stop howling,’ I said, shoving the tears off my own face with my fingers. ‘You have to stop doing that. Rosie? You’re big now. You know what this means.’ Her noise filled the room so I had to shout to make her hear me. ‘But we’re still here. We’re not going to die, not for years and years. You’re staying with us. Mr Tait would want that, wouldn’t he, for us all to stay together? Wouldn’t he, Mum? Mavis? Wouldn’t he?’
‘Of course he would, Rosie,’ said my mum. ‘Please stop screaming, Rosie. I can’t bear it.’
I went right up close to Rosie’s ear, like I did with Mr Tait when he was on the floor ill and I took both her hands, one of which was pulling on her earlobe like there was no tomorrow.
‘Rosie,’ I said, taking hold of her face. ‘Look at me,’ I said. She was trembling from head to foot. Her face was hot and sticky and her hands twitched beside mine as if they didn’t know what to do with themselves, but she stopped howling and looked up at me with her face all twisted up as if she expected me to hit her. But just like before about her own family, I couldn’t find the words and instead just stood there like an idiot saying her name and crying too. Then she put her arms around me and we hugged each other. When we were calmer and our breathing was even, she reached out to touch my face where the tears were.
‘Your face is covered in mud,’ she said, and did a little laugh like the air coming out of a kettle. ‘There’s straw in your hair.’ And she laughed again.
Mavis came and looked. ‘You were in the barn,’ she said in a sad little voice. ‘Why didn’t you come out?’
‘I’m sorry, Mavis,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.’
‘Why?’ said Mavis.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why?’ she said, not understanding that I didn’t know everything, not even about myself.
‘I’m sorry.’ I picked up the scissors where they’d fallen on the floor. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We need to straighten your hair.’ But she batted my hand away and hid behind my mum.
‘Leave her just now,’ said my mum. ‘You should have come out. In fact you shouldn’t have left them in the first place.’
I slumped down on the bench Mr Tait had made from five little birch trees. ‘Sorry. I couldn’t.’ This was no lie. ‘They were only up the hill. They’re not babies any more. I just didn’t think. It’s Mr Tait. I mean, it’s our Mr Tait. My Mr Tait.’ I shook my head and felt my mouth go to jelly again. ‘What did George say? What happened?’ I said, gathering myself. I wanted to ask Why did Mr Tait die? But I couldn’t, not out loud.
‘George said...’ Mum stopped as soon as she started. I waited as she stilled her voice. Rosie took my hand and squeezed hard. Mavis furrowed her brow and we all gazed at our mum. ‘He said Mr Tait had TB, that’s tuberculosis, and pneumonia, which are chest things that make it hard to breathe properly.’ She was so short of breath I was suddenly scared she might have it too. ‘He said Mr Tait had gone to sleep in the hospital in his bed when it was visiting time. He said hardly anyone visits and that he, George that is, had gone outside to smoke a cigarette and when he came back the nurse told him.’ She stopped and took a gulp of air.
‘Told him what?’ said Rosie.
Mum’s voice was all broken and shaky and it took her forever to get going again. ‘That Mr Tait wasn’t going to wake up.’ I thought how Mr Tait must have been the best friend she’d ever had too. ‘He wouldn’t have been in any pain, I don’t think. He just drifted off. George said it was like Mr Tait was there when he left him and gone when he came back.’
‘I know what death is,’ I said, eyeing the little ones. I always hoped they’d forget what they saw during the bombing. ‘You can tell me later.’
‘But that’s what happened, Lenny, honestly. There’s nothing more to tell. He died in his sleep. He fell asleep and just never woke up again.’
So he was sleeping the sleep of the dead, and this time it was real.
‘Stop pulling that ear, Rosie darling,’ she said.
Rosie allowed her hand to be removed yet again and leant in to my mum on the other side from Mavis. Her little chest was rising and heaving like she was getting ready to scream again and her mouth was upside down like a cartoon from the Sunday Post.
When I thought about it, it seemed right that Mr Tait should die in his sleep, so peacefully, and in a proper bed in a hospital instead of the pallet he slept on in our hut. It must have been a quiet way to die, like he was always calm, except for that last day when the doctor came for him.
Mum limped over, sat on the bench beside me, put her arm around my shoulders and drew me close.
‘I’m scared,’ I said, as I shook and let her steady me. ‘Mr Tait was filling me up with grit and I didn’t let him. I looked away because I didn’t want to be brave. I didn’t want him to be ill and lying there on the floor. And now he’s gone and it’s too late and I’m scared. I shouldn’t have looked away. Poor Mr Tait. I couldn’t even be brave when he needed me. And George is away with his leg. Where is he taking it? Why did you give him it? He was shaking it at the Duncan girls.’
‘Lenny, Lenny,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Mr Tait knew you’d be upset. He didn’t want you to see him in that state, but the doctor took much longer to arrive than we thought. I had to sit in the hall in the big house for ages before the doctor came. You must have run all the way back from school that day.’
‘I was worried. I knew something was up.’ I pushed my tears away. ‘I just knew it.’
She pulled me in close and ran her fingers through my hair.
‘The funeral director needed the leg,’ she said. ‘George took his Sunday suit as well.’
I knew what that meant. It meant he wasn’t being laid out in our house. He was somewhere else. He was not with us. I had seen people laid out before and I knew what happened. It didn’t happen after the Blitz because people had no homes to lay their dead people out in, and they often had no dead people to lay out because the whole of Clydebank, or a lot of it anyway, was burnt to the ground. But we did have a home. Mr Tait had a home, our home there in Carbeth, even though it was only a hut. It was a big hut and Mr Tait had his own room that he could have been laid out
in. He had built it himself with help from me and George and some of the neighbours. I changed my mind about his dying in a comfy bed in a hospital. He should have been with us on the pallet in his room.
‘Why?’ I said, feeling wee. ‘Aren’t we going to lay him out like Grandad?’
‘George says the funeral is on Monday,’ she said, so we all started crying again.
We went to church the next day, which was something we didn’t do as often as Mr Tait would have liked, but there were people from the huts who went every week and some of them helped me push my mum’s wheelchair that Mr Tait had made for her from an old wooden chair and the wheels of a pram. My mum still liked to go in the wheelchair sometimes when she was very tired. The church wasn’t actually a church. It was a barn at Home Farm near the main house. The minister walked from Blanefield, which was a good distance and all uphill and is probably why his face was so red. Mrs Alder led the singing because there was no organ. Old Barney was in the front row on a chair and the rest of us sat on hay bales which made us itch.
‘And our thoughts are with Mrs Gillespie and her family at this time of sadness at the departing of their good friend Mr Tait,’ said the minister. His eyes were red too. Perhaps Mr Tait had been his good friend as well. Everyone turned and stared at us. I heard Rosie take a big breath.
‘Thank you,’ muttered my mum and wiped her nose with one of Mr Tait’s big white hankies.
Rosie started howling again and Mavis joined in this time, so I had to take them outside in case they drowned out ‘Abide with me’, which Mr Tait hadn’t, even though I felt like howling too. The rain had stopped but the ground was wet and squishy. We leant against the outside wall and I felt as small as the little mouse that ran past our feet.
Chapter 4
The funeral was on Monday, as George said, but the day began as if Mr Tait had never been. We got up, I made the fire, my mum drew her chair over so she could make the porridge while Mavis and Rosie and I got washed and dressed. We were quiet, even Rosie. There was nothing to say and I for one was concentrating very hard on not thinking about Mr Tait, which meant I thought about nothing else. I tried drawing another face on the window but the mouth bled at the edges so I scrubbed it off.
Then my mum put on her best dress and her coat and a nice grey hat she had borrowed from next door, and Mavis and I stuck some little feathers we’d found into the rim of it. We closed up the fire and bumped the wheelchair down the steps onto the road and set off for the bus stop near the Halfway House pub. We left the wheelchair behind a hedge for later because my mum couldn’t take it with her. As a treat, I suppose, we got to go on the rumbly old bus, but of course Mavis and Rosie and I had to get off at the school. The journey passed in silence, Rosie still mercifully quiet. No-one on the bus spoke either, even the people we didn’t know and who had probably never even heard of Mr Tait and his dying.
When we were nearly at the school we passed a funny-looking man in a brown suit. He was tall and his jacket stuck out at the shoulders and flopped down his arms, and a flash of white leg showed where his trousers were too short. The bus crunched to a halt just as Miss Read rang the school bell (that was honestly her name). I said goodbye to my mum and we all hugged her and waved goodbye from the side of the road. She was going all the way into Glasgow and getting the tram all the way back out to Clydebank. Luckily there were other people going to Mr Tait’s funeral too who would help her.
The man in the odd suit turned out to be George. Rosie and Mavis crossed the road and had already found their pals. My pal Senga, whose name was back to front, was wandering along from the village. She was always late. I stopped by the roadside and watched George in his borrowed suit hurrying along, then without so much as glancing at me he started up the little path along the burn beside the school which I knew went all the way up and over the hill, past Cochno, past Hardgate and down to Clydebank, where we all used to live. It was the path I came over with Mr Tait and Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten when the bombs were falling on Clydebank.
George was going to Mr Tait’s funeral. It wasn’t fair. There was no question of me going. Girls of twelve didn’t go to funerals. I had been told in no uncertain terms that I would not be going, no matter what. So I was going to school instead. But George was on the path on his way to Mr Tait’s funeral and he wasn’t a grown-up either. He was only fifteen, which wasn’t much older than me, and the fact that he was working made no difference, or that he’d built his hut mostly by himself. In my opinion he had no more right to go to Mr Tait’s funeral than I had.
I ran across the road and followed him up the path when I was sure no-one but Senga was looking.
‘Lenny!’ she shouted and started to run, but not fast. She lived on a farm so they were never short of food.
‘George!’ I said when I got close enough.
I startled him. Maybe he was lost in thought, but he seemed surprised to see me. I clambered over the stile, ripping the hem of my dress (again), and ran after him.
‘Stop. Where are you going?’
‘Where do you think I’m going?’
‘I know where you’re going.’
He came to a halt. ‘So why did you ask?’
I stopped too and stared back down at the school. I could see Mavis at the side of the playground with her thumb in her mouth gazing up at us. Miss Read’s bell rang out and they formed the line.
‘I’m going to the funeral,’ he said at last.
‘I know that.’
‘Stupid question then,’ he said in a tired voice, and he stayed there on the hillside looking down at me.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. Why do you always have to be like that?’
I was tired because of waking up all through the night. It had been a still night, deathly still, except for my mum dreaming out loud and Mavis whimpering, and then Rosie had sat bolt upright and screamed blue murder until we talked her into lying down again.
‘We’re all tired,’ said George.
I looked away. As well as everything else, I’d dreamt that Mr Tait was snoring in the next room, and then I’d had to realise all over again that he wasn’t there and it was only a bush outside rubbing in the wind.
George looked like he hadn’t slept either. He was an odd grey, a bit like his brown-grey cap.
‘Mr Tait said... ,’ he said. He started, then stopped himself. ‘Nothing.’ He pulled his bunnet off his head, Mr Tait’s cap that is, and scratched his crown the way Mr Tait used to when he was thinking. He was only fifteen but he thought he was a proper man.
‘Mr Tait said what?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘He... um... he...’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
‘What did Mr Tait say?’
Bad George looked down at his fingers. He shifted his lunch parcel so far under his arm that it must have been squashed.
‘He said I was to look after you.’
‘Look after... ?’ I stood up very straight. ‘That’s ridiculous. Mr Tait would never say that. I can look after myself.’
‘He didn’t mean just you. He meant Mavis and Rosie and your mum too, all of you. How are you going to live now he’s not there to provide for you?’
George put a lot of emphasis on the word ‘provide’ which I thought was unfair. You see a long time ago, after the bombing, Mr Tait promised to provide for me, but I was only nine and didn’t know what he meant by ‘provide’. So I kept telling everyone, hoping someone would explain. On this occasion George was taking the micky.
‘We’ll manage,’ I said. I looked off up the hill so that he wouldn’t see that this was something else I’d been trying not to think about and therefore thinking about all the time. ‘I’ll get a job. I’ll get a Saturday job or a paper round. We’ll manage. We’ll find Miss Weatherbeaten.’
It was his turn to laugh. Miss Weatherbeaten, whose real name was Miss Wetherspoon, had wanted to adopt Rosie who had no-one at all after the bombing except me and Mr Tait. Tha
t was before we found Mavis and my mum. Miss Weatherbeaten was from my school in Clydebank and she had no-one after the bombing either because her very close friend who was nearly family had been killed. But adopting Rosie hadn’t worked out because Miss Weatherbeaten got her old job back in a school in a different building from the school she had been in before and went to stay with a friend from the town hall. Rosie was left with us, and Mr Tait and my mum had sort of adopted her instead. Rosie never liked Miss Weatherbeaten anyway because she was strict, so Rosie kept making trouble for her without really meaning to and after a while Miss Weatherbeaten stopped coming back at the weekends.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said George.
‘No, wait,’ I said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Children aren’t allowed. Your mum’ll be there. She’ll know you didn’t go to school.’
‘I don’t care. I’m coming.’
‘No you’re not. Piss off.’
I gasped. ‘I’m telling... ,’ I said. But I couldn’t tell Mr Tait.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, ‘your funeral.’ And then all the colour drained from his face. He turned and started off up the hill in great lollops and I had to run after him.
‘That’s horrible!’ I shouted. ‘You have to wait for me.’
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