Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said without even looking back.

  There were trees beside the path and they roared in the wind as I passed. It was the biggest hill I’d ever climbed. I glanced back down from the brow and saw Mavis and Rosie at the end of the line as they went in the school door backwards, staring up at me. I had to stop and lean against a big old beech tree for a second to catch my breath.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted.

  But bad George kept going, shifting the parcel under his arm every so often, and as he went into the distance I realised his suit was Mr Tait’s. I didn’t know what to do then, but I was so out of breath and incapable anyway, I sat down and watched him skirt along the side of a field where the cows watched. As soon as I could breathe again I ran after him.

  ‘George!’ I shouted. ‘That’s Mr Tait’s suit! You’ve no right. Stop!’ But of course he didn’t stop, not until he got to the flat rock, which was miles from where we’d started. But you couldn’t walk that path and not stop at the flat rock because you could see right over Clydebank and Govan and Glasgow. You could see all the churches and their spires and the smoke from the tenements and factories and shipyards, and the light bouncing off the very Clyde itself like a ribbon of pure silver. You could even see the White Cart River where it joined the Clyde on the opposite bank. A few houses nestled beneath the hillside on the way down and over to one side, beyond fields and walls and cows and clumps of trees and the crater where a bomb landed and threw mud and stones all over the place, you could just make out the farm where Mavis ended up during the bombing.

  George stood facing me with his back to all of this and his little eyes all screwed up into his face. Perhaps it was the fact that the sun had suddenly come out and was glaring at us from every leaf and muddy puddle that made him squint. He threw his hand out at me with the fingers all splayed like a fat star.

  ‘You are the most annoying person I’ve ever met in my whole life!’ he yelled. ‘Leave me alone. You know you can’t come. You’re too young and too stupid.’

  ‘I’m not too young. Mr Tait wouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘And you’re a girl and he wouldn’t have let you come. Of course he wouldn’t have. Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference now because HE’S NOT HERE!’ He stared at me with eyes like burning embers inside his head, as if Mr Tait dying was all my fault. Then he turned away and a terrible noise burst out of him. It was like Rosie’s wail only worse because it was George, and sore as if it was splitting him open, and it came scraping out of him like something breaking.

  He swung round and lurched towards me and stood over me with his fist in the air ready to punch my lights out. His eyes bulged wide. His fist shot towards me. I ducked and covered my head and I heard him breathe like an angry bull, felt his heat close to me. Then his boots swished off through the long winter grass and I knew he was gone.

  My heart thumped in my chest. I stayed where I was until I was sure he wasn’t coming back then picked myself up. I don’t know how I ended up on the ground. My face was wet too, as his had been, and I was trembling and hot. I thought about all the angry things I could shout after him, that I’d tell my mum on him, how he looked ridiculous in Mr Tait’s suit, how stupid and despicable he was and all Mr Tait’s work on him had been wasted. And that I was upset too, and it wasn’t just him. But I was too scared.

  For the tiniest of moments I worried that Mr Tait would give me a row when I got home for sneaking off from school, and that made me plonk back down on the rock and cry that he was gone. There was no-one to tell about George except my mum and she didn’t believe me about George because he was always very extra nice with bells on for her.

  Mr Tait had taught George and me lots of sensible things, useful stuff like building huts and how to behave in certain circumstances. But Mr Tait was gone and couldn’t teach either of us anything any more. We had to work it out by ourselves and I didn’t know how to do that.

  I hurried down the hill after George. By then he was a brown speck in the distance, dotting in and out of the trees, but he knew I was following him. I knew he knew I was there because he kept glancing over his shoulder, but I was too clever for him and kept my eyes fixed on the back of his big hateful head ready to duck out of sight behind a bush. I knew where he was going, too, so I didn’t care if I couldn’t keep up, which I couldn’t.

  There was no hurry. Everyone else had to come from Carbeth and it was a long way if you got the bus into Glasgow and out to Clydebank again and didn’t walk directly over the hill. I came down Kilbowie Road which runs over the hump of the hill and on towards the river, stretching down in front of me to John Brown’s shipyard at the bottom with its cranes reaching upwards like arms silhouetted against the green fields on the bank opposite. Closer by, the big white La Scala picture house stood surrounded by rubble where the buildings used to be and then the chimneys and clock tower of Singer’s further on. A coalman’s cart was struggling up the hill, the driver’s eyes white in his black face. Two motor cars were stuck behind it. The coalman grinned white teeth at me and passed by. Then a tram came sneaking up behind me. ‘Ding’ it went as it passed, and the conductress laughed when I jumped. I straightened out my dress as if I’d meant to jump and ignored her.

  There was a long pile of rubble down one side of the road where the tenements used to be and a neat row of red sandstone houses on the other. You had a bit of money if you lived in them.

  Halfway down the hill was the church. I saw George go in, but he’d only been in there a couple of minutes when he came dashing out again and ran off down the road towards John Brown’s. He was in such a hurry he even took his bunnet off. I decided to wait in the rubble and perched myself on a black chunk of tenement. There was no place to hide properly. A couple of old neighbours passed by and said hello and asked why I wasn’t in school, so I said I was waiting for my mum, which wasn’t entirely untrue.

  After the bombing happened, my mum said we didn’t need to go to church again. She said, ‘How could there be a God if He let that happen to us?’ When my dad was still there we used to go to chapel sometimes on a Sunday. They talked in a language I didn’t understand and neither did my mum. Maybe my dad did. The chapel had hard seats and a little bench to kneel on and none of my friends went there. Then, when my dad left to fight in the war, we used to go to this church instead, the one on the hill where Mr Tait’s funeral was going to be. My mum said it was like going home. I liked the singing. We all liked the singing. But then the bombing happened and we didn’t go to church anymore. Sometimes we went to the makeshift one in the barn but not often. Mr Tait would say prayers sometimes, especially at dinnertime, but my mum never joined in. She said it felt like lying and only went to the barn to please him.

  While I was perched there, a tram stopped a little way down the hill. Three women got out and one of them was my mum. I stood up, then sat down, then stood up again. I should have been helping her, but I shouldn’t have been there too and I’d be for it if she saw me, so finally I crouched down and kept still. They stepped back from the road and waited for the tramcar to continue on its way, then crossed over. A few minutes later, when I was getting tired of crouching and keeping still, I saw a horse and cart with two men on it and lots of people walking behind and I knew it was Mr Tait and all the neighbours and friends going to the funeral.

  As it drew close I saw the big wooden box on top of the cart and some flowers lying beside it all jiggling about. The box was brown, like Mr Tait’s suit that bad George was wearing, and it was flat on top. There were rope handles on either side. The horse was straining up the hill with the weight of Mr Tait and the box to pull and I worried that Mr Tait was going to fall off. It was a very steep hill and the horse made the cart shake and shudder and the flowers twitter and twitch until a sprig of yellow broom landed on the road. No-one seemed to notice. I nearly went and told them that Mr Tait would fall too if they weren’t careful, but I knew that would upset my mum who already looked upset and that she’d se
nd me straight home. So I held still and didn’t breathe. All the people in the street had stopped. The men had taken off their hats and the ladies bowed their heads to show they knew what was happening.

  The cart turned into the side street and stopped by the church steps and the men on the cart jumped down. They were completely dressed in black apart from their starched white shirts and looked sombre and serious. One of them went to the horses and held onto the bridles and the other went round the back and spoke to some of the men. George was there with Mr Tait’s trousers that were too short and the bit of leg showing. Another was Mr Duncan from Carbeth, but I’d never seen any of the other men. They slid Mr Tait in his coffin off the back of the cart and put him on their shoulders then started up the steps of the church. I thought he was bound to fall this time because the two men at the front were so much higher than the others and because Mr Tait’s head was down the hill. I leapt up, my tummy fluttering like a butterfly, and thought how uncomfortable that must be for him, and I remembered standing on my head for too long at the back of our hut once and having a sore head for the rest of the day. George was in the middle, at Mr Tait’s waist, and when they stopped at the top of the steps to the church door, he turned and looked straight at me with his tight little eyes and his face all red with the weight of the coffin. Then they all went inside. When I looked for my mum she was standing near the cart with her hands clasped together, almost as if she had been praying, as Mr Tait would surely have been if he hadn’t been inside the coffin. Maybe she was praying he was alright in there and not all scrunched up on his head and that they wouldn’t drop him all over the road and the steps. Then she followed him in along with the others, and everyone who wasn’t with them put their hats back on their heads and carried on about their business as if nothing had happened and Mr Tait wasn’t dead.

  I suddenly thought I could smell Mr Tait, his whiff of toast and poached egg in the morning, or carbolic soap.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘You know what to do.’

  I looked behind me. There was no-one there. There was no-one anywhere in the rubble except me so I guessed I must have heard his voice in my head, but it was so real I had to listen again. Nothing came, only the echo of what I’d already heard: ‘Go on then. You know what to do.’ He had said this to me often, but only when he was still alive.

  ‘Mr Tait?’ I whispered. ‘I don’t think I do.’

  But I knew what I wanted to do, go into the church and say goodbye to Mr Tait, because, after all, that’s what funerals are for. So I crossed the road and went up the steps. The minister was in his pulpit at the front and everyone was listening. He wasn’t talking about hell-fire and sinners like I’d heard him before. He was talking about ‘our brother’ and ‘God is welcoming his son’ and things like that. And because you wouldn’t dare not listen to him, no-one paid any attention to me sneaking in the back. I picked up a blue hymn book and sat in the back row beside the door and opened the hymn book in front of my face.

  We sang and then we prayed and then we listened to the minister again, or tried to, and for once I heard most of what he said because he was talking about Mr Tait going home and I remembered what my mum had said about going home to church, but I was wishing I was going home to Carbeth with Mr Tait. Then we prayed again and sang again, except I couldn’t because I had a big gloop in my throat and my voice kept going all wavery. Then the minister did more talking and I couldn’t listen to any of it and suddenly everybody stood up to leave so I had to get out of there as fast as my legs would carry me before I was seen.

  This time I went down the hill, which was silly because there was nowhere to hide down there and still be able to see what was going on, but when they carried Mr Tait back out of the church George was on the other side of him so he couldn’t glare at me. Once he’d put Mr Tait back on the cart, he turned and looked for me on the other side of the road and then whispered something to my mum. She looked over there but of course I was gone, then she put her arm round George and gave him a squeeze. I’d never seen anything like it. Then she handed him one of Mr Tait’s big white handkerchiefs and he started away from the crowd and down towards me. I didn’t know what to do so I didn’t do anything at all. I just stood there gawping as if I was meeting the queen, frozen to the spot with my teary face cold in the wind. He put his hand against a wall for a minute and I thought he was going to be sick. He was swallowing hard and kept standing up extra straight then flopping down again. I heard that strange noise from him that I’d heard on the hill. His hands were shaking. I felt the blood drain from my face and the cold wind blew up my dress. George rubbed his cheeks and then pressed his hand against his mouth, I suppose to stop the noise getting out.

  While he was standing there I saw the cart starting to move off with all the people following it. I wanted to say, ‘Hurry up or you’ll be left behind.’ He was scaring me. It made my eyes burn to watch him and I began to swallow too. But I didn’t want him to know I’d seen him that way and I looked about for somewhere to hide. Then he stood up straight and tugged Mr Tait’s jacket down so it was neat, which made the bottom of his trousers flap, and he turned back up the hill and hurried round the corner after the others. I don’t think he saw me even though I was right in front of him. I hurried to follow.

  There were lots of places to hide in the graveyard but funnily enough lots of other people seemed to want to hide too or at least not get close to the grave. They hung back as if they were just waiting for a bus in the sunshine, and I’m pleased to say it was sunny, but windy too. So I had to wait by the gate, which meant I couldn’t hear what they said about Mr Tait and putting him in the ground. I had to wait until everyone had gone back out before I could go and say goodbye to him myself. I hid behind the gatepost while George and my mum went past holding each other by the arm. I don’t know who was keeping the other one up.

  Chapter 5

  The other gravestones all had humps of earth in front of them or plain old grass. Some had jam jars with flowers and one was planted with little white starlike blossoms like I’d seen in the woods at Carbeth. I decided to plant those on Mr Tait’s grave too. I was sure he’d have liked that.

  But when I got to the grave there was no grass or mound of earth, just the biggest hole you ever saw with straight sides making a huge rectangle of darkness and lots of mud around it and footprints going in all directions. A mound of earth was on the grave next door. Huge it was and high as if a fat person was buried underneath. The gravestone at the back of Mr Tait’s had the name ‘JOHN TAIT’ in squinty letters and a date from long ago and I wondered if they’d got the date wrong. John was Mr Tait’s Christian name but only certain adults were allowed to use it, mostly men. Perhaps it was his dad’s name too. There were other names on the gravestone, two Elizabeths and a James, and a milk bottle with some flowers sat beside it.

  When I got close I gazed into the hole and deep down inside was Mr Tait’s coffin with a piece of paper stuck to the top that said ‘John Tait’, a number and a date. Splatters of mud were all over the length of it. I wondered why they would leave Mr Tait in such a mess and thought how clean he always was and how upset he’d be at that important moment to have mud all over the place.

  It was a long way down. If I’d stood up straight in it my head might have reached the rim. I crouched at the edge and thought about how cold it must be and dark in that box with a lid shut tight. Once, at my old school, some bigger girls locked me in a coal bunker and I thought I’d be there all day and all night and no-one would ever hear me shout, and someone would find a skeleton in a hundred years’ time and wonder why I was there. This actually happened to someone in a big old house in the middle of Glasgow, but the teacher let me out at the end of lunch when she heard them laughing about it.

  A bit of muck peeled off and landed on the coffin with a whisper. Then a great splop of rain hit the paper with Mr Tait’s name on it and the ink ran away everywhere. I went to lean on the stone for safety and watched as more rain f
ell and the blue ink brightened and spread until you wouldn’t have known who was in there at all and the paper was like clouds of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Mr Tait,’ I whispered into the downpour. Although I tried, I couldn’t quite say goodbye. I felt like he was standing there beside me, which is how I often felt when he was alive, as if he was with me even when he wasn’t. So instead I said, ‘I wish you hadn’t gone,’ and I stayed there trying to think what else to say until the shower stopped and I was wet right through to my bones and my teeth were clacking against each other.

  ‘Bloody Eyeties,’ said a voice.

  I ducked behind the gravestone.

  ‘What’s that?’ said another.

  ‘The Italians,’ said the first. ‘All very well changing now.’

  ‘Most of them won’t have wanted to join Hitler,’ said the second. He was about my dad’s age and had a shovel and a rake on his shoulder.

  The first one was as old as Mr Tait, and lurched down the path using his shovel like a walking stick. ‘Cowards every one, you mark my words,’ he said. ‘No backbone, the lot.’

  ‘Och, away you go,’ said the other. ‘There’re elements in this country would’ve joined the Nazis as quick as Bob’s your uncle. You know that. It could have been us. We shouldn’t be too quick to throw stones.’

  ‘No. Never. Not us. The Scotsman is a socialist through and through. Wouldn’t happen here.’

  ‘Not if we had our own government, no, but we don’t, and the ones we’ve got...’ He broke off. ‘Oh, would you look at that.’

  The gravediggers stopped and stared at me so I came out of hiding.

  ‘Soaking wet,’ said the younger, and he swung his spade and rake to the ground and leant on them the same as his friend. ‘You’re like a drowned rat.’

  ‘You’ll catch your death, young lady,’ said the older. His spade sang on the cobbles.