Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘Hey, watch what you’re saying!’ He elbowed his friend. ‘You alright there?’ he said to me. I nodded. ‘We should take her in, let her dry off at the fire,’ he went on.

  ‘No, send her home,’ said the old man. ‘She shouldn’t be in here anyway. You don’t want to encourage them.’

  ‘This your dad, then?’ said the younger, nodding at the grave.

  I shook my head. Raindrops flew off my hair.

  ‘Grandad?’

  I shook again and something slithered down my back.

  ‘I see,’ he said, though he couldn’t have done. ‘On you go then. Get yourself home. Do you live close?’

  Suddenly I felt like Mavis who stops talking when there’s trouble. I tried to say ‘no’ but my throat had gone dry and nothing came out. I wanted to say, ‘This is my special friend who was like a grandad and provided for me and my family when we had nothing,’ but my voice seemed to have disappeared altogether. I tried a smile instead.

  ‘It’s not a playground, young lady,’ said the old one.

  I backed behind the gravestone, though my legs had turned to jelly.

  ‘Don’t run,’ said the younger. ‘Come back! You frightened her, you eejit.’

  I kept going until I couldn’t see them any more and then stopped against a wall. When it seemed safe I sneaked a little way back and watched them. They shovelled the mud pile into the hole on top of Mr Tait. It sounded like potatoes in a barrel at first and then a shoosh as if Mr Tait was about to speak and they didn’t want him to. I could have said, ‘Goodbye!’ or ‘Stop! I’m not ready,’ but instead I just watched as they trod the earth down over him as if they were planting bushes in a garden.

  ‘Luigi was a laugh,’ said the younger man, who was doing most of the work.

  ‘Right enough, his chips were good,’ said the other.

  ‘I heard they sent him to Australia. The Australian sun’d suit him. He was always complaining about the weather. It was always better in Italy.’ v‘Should have gone back then, shouldn’t he? Anyway, I heard it was Canada. That’d freeze the bollocks off him.’

  ‘There’s a crowd of them out at Helensburgh at the forestry, and Dunoon. Always fancied that myself. There are worse places to be right now than up a mountain cutting trees. Better than shovelling wet earth over dead people in the rain.’

  ‘Damn the rain. Makes the work that much harder.’

  I wished they’d hurry up and go away and I could be with Mr Tait. I willed the rain to start again so they’d have to go. At last they did, and I went back to find the earth piled up and the flowers knocked over.

  I set the milk bottle right, crouched against the stone and whispered to Mr Tait again. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I told him, ‘or what to say. I wish you were here to tell me.’ I wiped my eyes on my sleeves and dried my hands on my dress, stood up to go and waited for a little robin to finish his song on the next door grave.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered. I let the tears run freely and turned towards the gate and home.

  Leaning against the gatepost was my mum still wearing her borrowed hat and feathers.

  ‘Lenny,’ she said. ‘There you are. Thank goodness. George said you might be here.’ I ran and fell into her arms and sobbed and sobbed and we stood there for ages, even though her legs must have been hurting terribly, and then we went and got on the tram and then another tram and then the bus and she kept her arms around me all the way, right in close, until we got home.

  Chapter 6

  Auntie May once called my mum headstrong and reckless. Gran said she agreed wholeheartedly. Because I was only wee at the time I didn’t understand ‘reckless’. I thought of ships that sank without trace. When our house was bombed, I thought it meant not even having a wreck, in other words homeless, which is what we were. Gran and Auntie May never came to visit us in Carbeth. They said my mum was being reckless again. They wrote to tell her so. I saw the letter. Mum was so furious about it we all read the letter, even Mavis who was just learning.

  ‘There... will... be... talk,’ read Mavis, only she said ‘talc’.

  ‘Tongues... will... wag,’ read Rosie, only she said ‘tong-goos’. So we all laughed and waved the fire tongs at each other. All except Mr Tait. Mum put the letter in the fire.

  It was because of Mr Tait. They were confused about him, same as I had been. They thought he was a bad man who wanted to take advantage of my mum when in fact he wanted to look after us. He knew we wouldn’t make a good job of it ourselves and would probably have ended up in the poor house or at least on the parish. Mr Tait rescued us from all that.

  Auntie May said my mum had nearly ruined her life by marrying my dad, because he went to chapel and we went to church, and she said that now my mum wanted to complete her downfall by ‘living in sin’ with Mr Tait, made even worse by the fact that she was already married. They didn’t say that in their letter. That’s what my mum told me on the way home from the funeral when I asked her if we’d have to go and stay with Gran. She was upset at the very idea.

  ‘Mr Tait knows all about sins,’ I said as quietly as I could. ‘He was very careful to avoid them. I think the sins in our house are all by me, Mavis and Rosie.’

  The bus stopped to pick up a boy from my school and his mum.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Gillespie,’ said the lady, and she patted my mum on the shoulder and left her hand there. ‘So sorry to hear about your Mr Tait. You will be staying in Carbeth won’t you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said my mum. ‘Yes, for a bit, I suppose.’ She turned her face away to blow her nose and they passed on to the back of the bus and I heard that song in my head, the one about the back of the bus they canny sing.

  ‘He wanted to marry me,’ she said. ‘We have to keep an eye out for the girls, by the way, so we can stop the bus for them.’

  ‘Marry you? But what about Dad?’

  ‘Shh!’ She glanced at the other passengers. There were plenty of them but they were mostly quiet, staring at the heads in front of them. ‘Gran and Auntie May thought I was...’ Her head fell forwards, then back up. ‘Living in sin is when... . Maybe we better talk about this at home.’

  ‘No, tell me now. What does it mean?’

  She thought for a moment and then leant into my ear and whispered. ‘They thought Mr Tait and I were living as if we were married.’ She looked into my face to make sure I’d understood and I stared back and tried.

  ‘Well, you were though, weren’t you?’ I said. ‘He went out to work at Singer’s and you sewed at home on your machine for people in town and looked after the house and us.’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘Isn’t that being married?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s part of it, I suppose, but it’s not what they meant. Let’s talk about it at home.’

  I had to think hard about this. They didn’t sleep in the same bed, if that’s what she meant, like Senga’s mum and dad and like when my dad was still at home. We’d all slept in the same bed in the alcove, but that wouldn’t have been right with Mr Tait. And we all slept with my mum anyway, Mavis and Rosie and me, and the bed was only pallets, like his, so there wouldn’t have been any room. And he was a man.

  ‘I couldn’t anyway because of your dad.’

  ‘Because of Dad, no. But surely if he’s...’ I was going to say the ‘D’ word, D-E-A-D dead, but she was peering out the window, wiping the mist off it so she could see.

  ‘Stop, driver, please!’ she called out. ‘There are the girls, Lenny. Go and tell the driver to stop.’

  So I just had to figure it out by myself.

  Mum cooked up square sausage for tea that night with Mrs Mags’s onions and Mr Duncan’s tatties. The butcher had been generous because of Mr Tait so we ate our fill and Mavis burped and we all laughed, which Mr Tait would never have allowed.

  ‘That’s rude,’ I pointed out. ‘Mr Tait would send you to bed.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rosie. ‘I want to go to bed.’

  ‘We had physi
cal education today,’ said Mavis grandly. ‘Miss Read called you wilful.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, not surprised. ‘What did you do then, for PE?’

  So we tried their physical jerks, stretching and lunging while my mum arranged the accumulators for the radio close to the fire to charge them for the news later. When I glanced at her she was staring at something on the wall as if the radio was already on. She didn’t tell us off for making noise or knocking her chair. I packed Mavis and Rosie off to bed and told them a story about three little pigs in a house made of wood, but without the big bad wolf. When I’d finished and Rosie was snoring and Mavis was still as still, I went back through. My mum had moved into Mr Tait’s chair and was staring at another spot on the wall.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ready with a battalion of questions.

  ‘I miss our old house,’ she said. ‘I miss Clydebank.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do, and I miss going out to work, which is just as well because I’m going to have to get used to it all over again.’

  ‘Won’t you get more sewing work?’

  ‘There isn’t any. They only gave me it because of my leg and most of it came from people Mr Tait knew round Clydebank. Bearsden and places like that. No, I need something better, more secure and I won’t get that here, not with only one foot.’

  ‘I could get a job,’ I said. ‘I could ask Barmy if they need a maid. I could be a maid in the house. They’d probably feed me too.’

  ‘Barney, darling. Don’t call him Barmy. You have to go to school.’

  ‘Everyone always thinks I’m older. And I know everything there is to learn at school now. We keep repeating everything for the wee ones. It’s a complete waste of time. Apart from geography of course. That’s always good.’

  I had a plan. While trying not to cause myself maximum panic by thinking about it, I had in fact thought a lot about money and living and getting by with no proper wage-earner in the family. It stopped me thinking about Mr Tait being D-E-A-D for a start, and how much I missed him. My mum was doing a fine job with the dressmaking, but since the latest austerity measures came in last year there was no fabric to buy and everyone was skint anyway. There’d been less and less work for her and more and more walking for me delivering her work further and further away. This could continue if someone lent me a bike. I could also speak to Jimmy Robertson, my friend who ran a shop from his bus at the side of the road where, by the way, he slept too, although obviously I’d never seen him do it. He would help. I didn’t look twelve. Maybe it was the bombing that made me grow up, though it didn’t work for George, but I could pass for fourteen which meant I could get an office job. There was bound to be an office in the village somewhere.

  ‘I’ve got a plan,’ said my mum, and she shifted back in her chair.

  Her plan was different from my plan. This is often the case, I’ve noticed, with adults. The things they think are important make my head spin. Mr Tait, on the other hand, said we should stay in Carbeth at least until the war was over, in other words forever. This was my view too.

  ‘Mr Tait hadn’t planned on... leaving us,’ she said. ‘Things are different now. I’ll have to go back to Singer’s.’

  ‘They probably don’t take children in the worker hostels,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact I bet they don’t take ladies either. We’ll have nowhere to stay and you’ll have to spend all your money and time getting back here.’

  ‘I’ve made some enquiries about rooms,’ she said. ‘There’s an old friend of mine down near Beardmore’s, and Miss Weatherbeaten owes me a few favours.’

  ‘Miss Weatherbeaten?’

  Oh dear.

  ‘You could go back to your old school,’ she went on. She smiled as if this was a good thing. She had no idea. I hadn’t liked to bother her about the coal-shed caper when it happened because I had put up a good fight, and because she was worried about my dad not coming back. I was going to have to tell her, perhaps add a few embellishments.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said as sensibly as I could, keeping the dread out of my voice.

  ‘You’d be with your old pals. You keep saying there’s nothing left to learn in Craigton except geography. I bet at your old school they’re doing history and art and cookery. You like cookery.’

  I didn’t want to do history or art and I was sick to death with cookery because I did so much of it at home, thank you very much. ‘I don’t want to do history. Who cares what happened hundreds of years ago? And I can do art already.’

  ‘Maybe your friend in the bought houses could put us up for a bit. What was her name?’

  I told her I couldn’t remember and that she’d been evacuated and I was tired and needed to go to bed.

  ‘Lenny. Lenny? Lenny!’

  ‘What?’ I said from the bedroom door.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry, darling, you must be exhausted. Go to bed and I’ll be through in a minute.’

  She wasn’t through in a minute. I heard the radio come on and the murmur of news and I lay listening to Mavis snuffling and Rosie snoring and cried. It was like I’d been bombed out again, my whole world blown apart. But then I heard Mr Tait: ‘Save your tears for later and be brave.’ And I remembered Mr Tulloch, a farmer near us who’d told me to always eat a good breakfast and make a plan and that planning was very important. So I went back to my plan and put some flesh on the bones and that made me feel better. At last I began to drift off.

  Not long afterwards I heard Mr Tait in his room. He was tossing and turning, which he did a lot when he was ill. His elbows kept banging against the wall and then I thought he must have got up because I heard a scraping sound on the floor.

  I shuddered awake to silence. Mavis dug her fingers in my side and Rosie kicked.

  ‘Ssh!’ I said, although neither of them was awake. The room was hazy with no curtains, and a hint of candlelight marked the shape of the door. Our hut was scarily quiet without his snores and not even any wind in the trees. But then the rain started again, whispers at first and then it battered on the roof as if fairies were up there dancing in hobnail boots. I unwrapped myself from Mavis and Rosie and went to find my mum.

  She was on Mr Tait’s bed with her coat pulled over. We’d burnt Mr Tait’s blankets after he went to hospital, just like the doctor said. She was on the bare mattress we’d made out of old sheets and straw from the farm. We should probably have burnt that too. I crawled in beside her. She put her arms round me and I listened to her breathing and waited for her to go to sleep so that I could too.

  ‘Lenny?’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Tait wanted to marry me so that I could have his pension if... if anything happened to him,’ she said. ‘I wish I had now. He must have known how ill he was. I just couldn’t face the truth.’

  ‘But you’re already married.’

  ‘Yes, exactly, so it was impossible anyway.’

  ‘But he’s probably dead.’

  ‘Don’t say that, darling.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  The rain had died back. She stroked my hair a moment then stopped. Then a deep silence.

  ‘He’s not dead, you know,’ she said in a dreamy slurry voice.

  I opened my eyes and saw a slither of moon like a cut in the wall.

  ‘Mr Tait?’ I whispered. ‘Mr Tait’s dead. I saw his coffin. I saw the earth go in. I saw his name on the bit of paper and his dad’s name on the gravestone.’

  ‘What?’ She was awake now.

  ‘Mr Tait. He’s dead. You said he wasn’t dead.’

  ‘Oh dear, what did I say? I said he’s not dead, did I?’

  ‘Yes, you did, but he is.’

  ‘Well, of course he is, of course Mr Tait is...’

  ‘Don’t say it!’

  We listened to the silence now the rain had stopped. A streak of moonlight made a line across the coat. She blinked and blinked again.

  ‘Who, Mum? Who did you mean?’

  ‘I
didn’t mean Mr Tait, oh dear, Lenny, no. Of course he’s...’ She didn’t finish. I waited. This waiting was a technique I’d had to develop with Mr Tait himself. He was always slow to speak when there was something important to be said. ‘I meant your dad, darling,’ she said. ‘Your dad is alive. I didn’t mean to tell you but I suppose you’re old enough now. How stupid of me talking in my sleep.’

  Nerves stabbed at my fingers. I sat up. The coat fell off me. A taste of cold touched my lips.

  ‘Dad? What do you mean? Where is he? Mum?’ I gave her a little shake. ‘Mum, please. Tell me. How do you know he’s alive?’ The cold wrapped itself round my shoulders and a million thoughts crowded my head. I suddenly remembered Mr Tait’s saying something about my dad being under the bed. I’d thought he was jibbering and hadn’t even looked.

  She shook her head. Her eyes were closed.

  ‘Mum, please, I want to know.’

  She rolled over and tried to pull me back down. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said. ‘Please, Mum, it’s important.’

  I waited while she got back up on one elbow and pulled the coat over our legs. I leant back against the rough wall beneath the window. She was frowning but awake, biting her lip. Finally she propped herself against the wall. There was just enough light to see each other. She cleared her throat and breathed a long sigh out and a quick one in.

  ‘Right, now listen to me, Lenny, and listen carefully because I don’t want you talking to anyone about this at all, not even Mavis and certainly not Rosie and her big mouth. This is very serious. Perhaps you are old enough now to be trusted not to tell anyone, but this is the biggest secret you’ll ever have to keep, alright?’

  I thought about all the other secrets I’d ever had to keep, like when I stole the best biscuits from my gran, or when Mavis lost her ugly new hat from Auntie May accidentally on purpose, or when Miss Weatherbeaten told me not to tell Rosie all her family were dead. That was probably the biggest so far, about Rosie’s family. I’d had a lot of trouble keeping that one.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, cautiously. ‘Where is he?’