Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘I don’t know. I only know he didn’t die when they said he did and that he’s not coming back. The government thought he was dangerous so they locked him up.’

  ‘Why would he be dangerous?’ I pictured him sitting on a riverbank singing lullabies to Mavis when she was a baby and how he used to run his big rough finger down her perfect cheek to get her to close her eyes. And then I remembered the furious arguments he and my mum had the last time he was home, but not what was said.

  ‘Is he a spy?’

  ‘No, he’s not a spy. He’s an idiot.’

  I closed my eyes. He was my dad. She shouldn’t call him names. Suddenly I wished Mr Tait was there. She wouldn’t have said that if Mr Tait was there.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘No, he’s not a spy. You’ll only worry if I tell you the whole thing. I had news today that might change things, that’s all. That’s why it’s on my mind.’

  ‘News? Did you get a letter then? Did he say where he is?’

  ‘No, Lenny, just news on the radio. Listen, forget it. It doesn’t matter right now. When the war is over maybe we can see what’s what, but just now you don’t need to know any more. In fact it might even put you in danger. And he’s not coming back. He’s made his choices. I’m sorry. I know this is hard but you’re going to have to trust me on this. Now let’s go back through to the girls and get into bed properly. I don’t know what I was thinking coming in here. We should burn this mattress as well. I’ll do it tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. I have to go back to Clydebank tomorrow and meet someone in Singer’s.’

  She wouldn’t tell me any more, and once we were back next door in our own bed I had to be quiet and not wake Mavis and Rosie. It felt like I was full of bombs again just waiting to go off, which is how I’d felt after the Germans flattened Clydebank. I had to lie very still in case I set them off, so I lay all night long and hardly slept a wink.

  Chapter 7

  Rub-a-dub-dub, three girls in a tub. Not at the same time of course. It wasn’t big enough for that. We went in strictly in order of age, youngest first. And always on a Tuesday.

  Mum was late back from Clydebank, but that didn’t stop us. Neither did the fact that I was dogtired because I’d hardly slept for trying not to think about my dad. Or about Mr Tait and that ache I felt of missing him, an ache that threatened to engulf me at any moment. Instead I’d been wondering how to keep us in Carbeth. Planning.

  First, I needed a job.

  The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, which was it to be? When we did the tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor game at school the week before, I got beggar man and thief and I didn’t want to be either of those. And anyway, what about welder, checker, rigger, riveter and draughtsman, or for that matter teacher, nurse, dairymaid, secretary and shop assistant?

  Miss Read, the teacher, had given Mavis a letter for my mum about my sneaking off the day of Mr Tait’s funeral. I hadn’t gone the next day either. Rosie told Miss Read I had flu but Mavis just said I’d ‘gone off’. Thanks, Mavis. After our bath we put the letter in the fire and watched it burn, finishing with the signature.

  Mavis was right. I walked halfway to school and then doubled back across the hill past lots of other huts including Mrs Mags’s and the big rope swing tree at the top of the hill and the Connors’ hut. They were bad George’s parents and only came at weekends. I went through the pine trees behind them and on down the other side of the hill, through more huts, across the field, past the loch and the hay barn where I’d hidden when I found out about Mr Tait, then back up onto the road. This meant that I cut out the bit where our hut was.

  A lorry roared up beside me and the driver offered me a lift into the village so I said thank you very much and climbed in thinking what a good start this was.

  The cabin smelled of engines. The man at the wheel was round in every way, round face, round belly and peculiarly round fingers. I asked him if he had any work he could give me.

  ‘What, a scrawny little thing like you?’ he said, making his eyes round too.

  I stuck my nose in the air and tried to look composed. That’s what you look like when you haven’t got bombs going off inside.

  ‘Can you lift a sack of coal?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ I said, but he didn’t have a black face like a coalman and his sacks were clean.

  We were almost at the bottom of the hill. He pulled his lorry in beside a long low farm building of pale brown stone and turned off the engine. The whole thing shook so much it made all my bones bang together.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Can you lift a sack of grain?’

  ‘If you can lift a sack of coal,’ I said with false heartiness, ‘you can lift a sack of grain.’

  ‘You think so?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re on,’ he said, and he opened his door and jumped down. ‘Out you get!’

  I pulled the handle and the door swung out and nearly hit the barn. Then I turned myself round and felt with my feet for the steps. It was a high door and a long way down and my foot slipped on some mud I must have put there on the way in, so I landed in a heap on the ground. He laughed and closed the door.

  ‘Beveridge’ was written big red letters across it. By the time I’d got myself up, Mr Beveridge was standing at the back waiting for me.

  ‘I’ll give you a chance,’ he said. ‘I’ll lift it off the lorry and load it onto you. Turn round. Bend a little. Hands at your shoulders.’

  ‘I know how to carry coal,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Forgot I was dealing with an expert.’

  I should have looked at the sacks before agreeing. It was a hard lesson to learn. I heard the sack sliding along the tailgate. I heard him gasp as he lifted the sack, then felt it land on me and half a second later I was flat out on the ground underneath it. I heard him laugh as if he’d burst, which I wished he would. ‘Hahaha!’ he shrieked, as if he was at the circus. I thought I might die. Maybe he was sitting on top of me. I thought of my mum underneath the building.

  And then suddenly the laughter stopped and there was an explosion of shouting and someone shoved the grain sack off me. They helped me up but I could hardly breathe or stand straight and plonked straight back down on the ground. Then Mr Beveridge and his lorry took off down the road and left me wailing on the ground with the farmer who I didn’t even know. I wanted to shout and scream after Mr Beveridge.

  ‘There there,’ said the farmer, as if I was a lion needing tamed. ‘Better get up, then.’ He patted my head while I swayed and spat mud and grit out of my mouth. Then his wife came out.

  ‘What in the name of God?’ she exclaimed. ‘Is she hurt? Did Beveridge hit her? Help her up, for goodness sake, and don’t stand there staring.’

  ‘Are you okay? Maybe we shouldn’t move her,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s got something broken.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I managed. Everything hurt. The farmer’s wife helped me up. ‘My knees!’ I said. I could see red blood pushing its way through the gravel and muck that were stuck to them.

  ‘What were you doing with Mr Beveridge?’ he said. ‘Is he a relation?’

  ‘I was looking for a job,’ I sobbed, picking a pebble out of my knee.

  ‘With Mr Beveridge?’ he said. His wife burst out laughing.

  ‘Yes,’ I sniffed, ‘with Mr Beveridge. He gave me a lift so I asked him for a job, on the off chance.’

  ‘A very bad choice, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ said the wife. ‘You any good at picking peas?’

  ‘Peas?’ I said, wiping the back of my hand across my nose.

  ‘Yes, peas. Little round things. Green. About that big.’

  She took me inside to a white enamel sink in a clean and orderly kitchen and washed the cuts on my knees with a spotless rag and warm water. Then she sent me into a bathroom with a bowl of water and a pair of overalls (which Mr Tait would never have let me wear), a towel, and a jumper that was too small and had been shrunk in the wash. While I was in there
I counted the bruises. It didn’t give me the same kind of pleasure as usual. When I was clean and dressed she gave me a basket and a pair of scissors and sent me into a field to pick peas. It wasn’t difficult, picking peas, and soon I felt better. I had a black-and-white farm dog for company who kept interrupting me to be stroked, and a large extended family of rooks in the sycamores nearby. As I picked I thought about the things we could do with the money I was going to make harvesting everything on all the farms and how pleased my mum would be when I gave her it.

  ‘Fourteen you say?’ said Mrs MacLeod. That was her name, and although she lived on a farm she was small and thin and tired-looking as if she’d been working hard through the night in Singer’s.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, not looking at her.

  I’d finished the picking already and we were shelling the peas and putting them in a bag made of tight netting. My dress was drying on a string over the kitchen range and my coat had been scraped of mud and hung on a chair beside it. She rested her hands on the table a moment and looked directly at me.

  ‘You sure? You don’t look it. What school did you go to?’

  ‘Craigton,’ I said.

  ‘Craigton,’ she said. ‘Miss Read.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘George Connor,’ she said. (That’s ‘bad George’ to you and me.) ‘He pulled the swedes for me last year.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’ve got two wee sisters and my mum and Mr Tait. He’s... not with us any more and my dad’s... gone.’

  ‘Why don’t you get a proper job then?’ she said. ‘Go into Glasgow or something. You’ll have to sign up for war work, you know, and they’ll send you where you’re needed.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into Glasgow,’ I said, trying not to sound sulky. ‘I want to stay here. Carbeth is my home now. We came from Clydebank.’

  ‘You’ll only get farm work here,’ she said. ‘D’you want farm work?’

  ‘Yes, I do, definitely,’ I said. ‘Do you have more peas to pick?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got some carrots. You can help me with them if you’ve any strength left.’

  She gave me a bowl of purple beetroot soup and a thick chunk of bread and we hung the peas from a hook in the ceiling to dry. Then she gave me another sack and took me on a cart to a field. She told me to pick carrots, put them in the sack, then carry them back and empty them into the cart. She left me there saying she had cows to milk. I thought my back would break completely in two. I was sticky all over with sweat. And then at three o’clock when she came out with a drink of milk for me I said I had to go home and see to my wee sisters, which wasn’t true. But she didn’t seem to mind and gave me back my clothes. She handed me a bag of peas and carrots too but no money. I wished I’d told her before I started I wanted money for my work but didn’t know how to say so.

  ‘Come back any time,’ she said.

  Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? I work hard.

  So that’s what I’d been up to and why we had to burn the letter from Miss Read, because I didn’t want my mum to know anything until I had a proper job with money to keep us there.

  Mavis and Rosie and I ate the carrots and peas as soon as I got home, those I hadn’t already eaten. They were sweet and crisp, the veg that is, not Mavis and Rosie. Mavis and Rosie were stupid and annoying. They also asked lots of questions about where our mum was and why, so I had to tell them some of those white lies my mum always talked about, only I was beginning to wonder about white lies and whether they were as alright as she said.

  All lies are about keeping secrets and I had started to care less and less what colour they were as long as they were keeping me from the truth. And on top of that I didn’t want to lie to Mavis but I had to find a way of keeping us there, and I had to find the truth about our dad, and I had to do all of this without worrying Mavis’s worried little head any more than it was already worried.

  So I sent them both up to the hideout as soon as they’d finished their carrots and put the kettle on for that bath. Then I took a candle and peered underneath our bed for my dad, keeping my ears open in case they suddenly came back. Obviously he wasn’t there. There was only a handkerchief under the pallet, all stiff and dusty, and some mouse droppings, but old ones so nothing to worry about. I tried the radio for news too, but the accumulators were dead.

  Later, after the bath, when my mum came in she thought we were sickening for something because we were so full of peas and carrots and didn’t want any dinner. Being covered in bruises was quite normal for me so I didn’t have to tell her about Mr Beveridge.

  She made herself a cup of hot sweet tea with the remains of our ration and said she’d been to see Miss Weatherbeaten, and that Miss Weatherbeaten was in a sad and sorry state.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said, not really fussed about Miss Weatherbeaten’s well-being. No-one ever called her by her real name, except Mr Tait. She escaped from Clydebank with Mr Tait, Rosie and me when the bombs were falling and the town was on fire.

  Rosie was all ears and not mouthing off the way she does twenty-five hours a day. She stood right up close beside me so I had to move and nearly burnt my hand on the fire.

  ‘I went to ask her why she hadn’t been sending me my money,’ said my mum, ‘and what she thought I was going to feed Rosie on if she didn’t keep her end of the bargain.’ She took a large gulp of tea and slouched into the back of Mr Tait’s chair with a sigh. We waited. I opened my mouth. Rosie spoke.

  ‘Well? What did she say?’ Rosie tugged at her ear.

  ‘Come here, Rosie,’ said my mum, and she took Rosie up onto her knee even though she was far too big for it. ‘You belong with us now.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Rosie. ‘I never liked Miss Weatherbee.’ This is what Rosie called her two and a half years ago when she was only four. ‘I don’t want to be adopted by her anyway. I like Mr Tait. And you. She wasn’t nice to me and Lenny and she shouted and...’ and Rosie began to relate all the terrible things Miss Weatherbeaten had ever done to us, some of which I didn’t quite remember, and we couldn’t get her to shut up again no matter how hard we tried.

  Finally Mavis shuffled past with her rag doll and unplugged her thumb long enough to say, ‘You talk too much,’ before continuing to the window seat, for which Mum and I were grateful because Rosie stopped and glared at her long enough for us to speak.

  ‘So what did Miss Weatherbeaten say?’ I asked again.

  ‘Do you remember the little girl Mavis used to play with down our street?’

  ‘Doris? Dora? Dorothy? Yes.’

  ‘Miss Weatherbeaten broke her arm.’

  Mavis came running. Rosie nearly fell on the floor. That ‘rrright good seeing to’ that we all used to talk about and Miss Weatherbeaten used to threaten everyone with: she had finally done it.

  ‘She did it!’ I said. ‘The cow! What happened?’

  ‘Lenny!’ said my mum. ‘There’s no need for that.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Mavis. ‘Poor Dora. A broken arm? What happened? Is she going to be alright?’

  ‘Dora is fine,’ said my mum. ‘She’s got a sling and a plaster, apparently, but she’ll mend.’ She gazed into the fire and shifted in Mr Tait’s chair. ‘Miss Weatherbeaten is a poor misguided... . She’s selfish. And twisted. That’s all. We don’t need to have anything more to do with her.’

  ‘I don’t like her,’ said Rosie. ‘She’s nasty.’

  ‘And dangerous,’ said Mavis. ‘I hate her.’

  ‘I hate her too. She’s... she’s violent,’ said Rosie with a great shake of her fist. Then she stopped and looked round at us expectantly and we all stared.

  Then my mum snorted a laugh. ‘Girls!’ she said.

  But Rosie and I copied Mavis: ‘She’s violent!’

  ‘Poor wee Dora,’ I said, once we’d had enough of that.

  ‘Miss Weatherbeaten lost her job at the school,’ said my mum. ‘They sent her home without pay until they can find her another job somewhere e
lse.’

  ‘Somewhere else?’ I said. ‘They can’t let her teach somewhere else, not after that.’

  ‘What about Dora?’ said Mavis.

  ‘I didn’t see Dora, but I heard she’s back at school already.’

  We all thought about Dora who had fabulous ringlets and was almost as cute as Mavis when she was four.

  ‘Miss Weatherbeaten’s stuck in her digs now,’ my mum went on. ‘She has to wait until they find her something. No-one’s speaking to her.’

  ‘No wonder,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why she wasn’t at the funeral, because she was hiding, even though it was Mr Tait and he’s been so good to her in the past. But anyway the whole upshot is she says she can’t afford to pay me so I told her I can’t afford to pay for Rosie either and what are we supposed to do? She adopted Rosie in everything but the law so she has a responsibility. But she said she couldn’t possibly afford to give me anything on no wages at all and hardly any savings so I told her I had no wages at all too and absolutely no savings and three other mouths to feed on only what I can scrape together with the sewing.’ She came to a halt and flopped back on the chair again as if she was completely exhausted with the telling.

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She said you can’t get blood from a stone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Miss Weatherbampot,’ said my mum, sitting up straight again and tugging on the straps of her dungarees, ‘is not used to living on nothing like the rest of us. She’s giving everything she has for her lodgings. She’s right. You can’t get blood from a stone and Miss Weatherbee is as cold and hard a stone as you’ll ever come up against.’

  ‘And?’ I said.

  ‘Now, don’t be upset,’ she said, seeing my consternation. This is another of my dad’s words and it has a lot to do with being stern. I waited for her to go on. ‘We’ll have to go back to Clydebank.’

  ‘No!’ This was Mavis, surprising us all. ‘No, no, no!’ she said, and she flung her rag doll into the corner, then ran a circle round the room.