Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  you who was sick and Mavis said you were trying to find a job. What really happened?’

  ‘N... nothing,’ I said. ‘Honest.’

  ‘You can’t afford to miss school. You miss most of what’s said to you when you’re here.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, miffed, suddenly finding my voice.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she replied sternly.

  I put the last of the slates in the cupboard. ‘C... can I go now?’ I said.

  But she made me set the fire for the morning first. I brought in the wood from the outhouse and twisted the newspaper into balls and sticks for kindling, hurrying to get away.

  ‘I have to catch up with Mavis and Rosie,’ I said. But they were waiting for me in the shelter in the playground playing chuckies. And then the rain came on.

  There was a picture in one of the newspapers that I didn’t recognise. I sat down and crossed my legs for a better look. It seemed at first like lots of dark squiggles with arrows pointing upwards. I couldn’t make sense of it at all. Then I realised it was a map of Britain but on its side and the arrows pointing up-the-ways were actually pointing from east to west, from places on the coast of Europe to places on the coast of Britain. It was how the Germans might go about invading us. SOMETHING BIG IS BREWING it said. My stomach leapt. I held my breath and checked the date, but phew! It was January 1942, more than a year and a half earlier, and I sagged in relief and remembered the darkness of two winters before, our first in Carbeth, and how we had worried. When the bombs came down, some people thought there were German’s under the parachutes and not just huge fifteen-foot parachute bombs that blew apart the whole street.

  Last summer in those brief moments when George wasn’t building his hut or making my life a misery, he used to practise bayonet charges with the other boys. One of them had a newspaper cutting called COMMANDO TRICKS YOU OUGHT TO KNOW with little drawings about how to tackle a Nazi, in case we met one unexpectedly, because even last summer we still thought we might be invaded and find real live Germans wandering about the countryside, scaring people from behind bushes. I’d tried some of these tricks on Rosie and Mavis. We even made these exercises into a new form of gymnastics, lunge and thrust, until one of the girls next door got hurt and I wound up with the blame as usual. They seemed like handy tricks to know when George was around.

  But the same day we had our swimming tournament this summer and Mr Tait told me we all deserved a medal for going into the pool at all, he also told me we weren’t going to be invaded by the Germans and that Britain was winning the war and that God was on our side. I don’t know about God but Mr Tait was definitely on my side and he was right about most things, so I stopped worrying about Germans in the bushes.

  When I’d finished laying the fire, Mavis and Rosie had given up and started for home. But they were so slow I caught up with them well before we got there.

  The house was empty, my mum still making plans in Clydebank. I gave them both a piece and jam, sent them off next door to play with the Duncans and sat on the little birch bench and thought about what Mr Tait had said about my dad. I looked under the beds, then searched everywhere else. I didn’t know what I was looking for and the only thing I could find, and this under the springs under the cushion on Mr Tait’s chair, was my mum’s old blue leather handbag that she’d been clutching the night she was under the building. She had it when they took her to hospital and all our money and papers had been inside it. A square had since been cut out of the leather on both sides and attached to the elbows of Mr Tait’s blue work overalls. Several long strips had been cut out and attached to the wrists to stop them fraying. All the papers were gone.

  I turned what was left of it upside down and shook it, thinking all the time how silly it was to keep this old wreck of a thing with not much leather left to use. The tattered lining flopped forwards, like my gran’s petticoat that had seen better days, and hung limp and grey, little fronds of thread sucking back and forth as I leant forward and peered. I gave it one last shoogle for luck, ready to shove it back where I’d found it, when something landed in the sack the lining had made. I went to the light at the window, set the bag on my knee and pulled out an old brown envelope so withered round the edges its contents emptied themselves into my lap before I could stop them.

  And there staring up at me was my dad.

  My heart thumped up into my throat. My dad! What was he doing there? I never knew there was a photo of him. Oh, Mr Tait, thank you!

  He looked almost as young as George and he beamed with bright twinkly eyes that seemed to stare right into me and laugh. I found myself jumping off the seat and laughing back. He had lots of thick dark hair, some of which was falling forwards over his face in a great loop.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, blinking back a tear and realising one of my hands was flat across my head and I had no idea how it had got there.

  The photo was fixed onto a piece of card with four big staples. They were old and rust had seeped out of them across his chest and on either side of his head. Above him it said ‘NAME (Surname first in Roman Capitals)’. This was odd because we’d been learning about the Romans at school so I knew they were long gone.

  Underneath this, on a dotted line, someone had written ‘GALLUZZO, Leonardo’ in bright blue ink. But my dad’s name was Leonard Gillespie. Everybody knew that. Leonard not Leonardo, Lenny for short, Big Lenny to save confusion if we were both there at once. And our surname was Gillespie, not Galluzzo.

  ‘Galluzzo,’ I said, ‘Galluzzo,’ and I turned it over in my mouth, saying it as many ways as I could. ‘Leonardo Galluzzo. Lenny Galluzzo. Gal Us Oh.’

  My dad was gallus alright. That’s not one of his words, by the way, but everyone in Clydebank says it. It means cocky, which fitted my dad well. He was always pushing his luck, especially with my mum.

  The name Galluzzo wasn’t a bad name, but it wasn’t ours, even if it did have a certain glamour with two double letters and not just one as in Gillespie. But the fact was it was the wrong name.

  Some other bits of paper had fallen with the photo and when I put them together they made a notebook. But maybe they didn’t all belong together because on one of the bits of paper it said ‘Nationality:’ and someone had written ‘Italian’ next to it, and there he was in his army uniform, the British Army. So ‘Italian’ was wrong too, and it said he was a welder when in real life he was a rigger. But his birthday was right, and there was our old address in Clydebank, the house that was blown to kingdom come along with everything we owned. I flipped over the photo page and on the back, which seemed to be the front of the little book, were the words ‘CERTIFICATE OF REGISTRATION’ and ‘Aliens Order, 1920’ and a list of occasions when the book had to be ‘produced’ for the police. All of this was strange and difficult to understand and probably about someone else. I couldn’t tell, the problem being what was my dad’s photo doing in there along with his date of birth and our address? Who was he pretending to be? I opened it again and gazed at his cheery face inside, glowing with fun and mischief, and wondered, uneasily, if maybe, perhaps, he was a spy.

  ‘Oh, Lenny,’ I heard my mum say. She had a different way of saying it when she said it to him, like she was laughing and telling him off at the same time.

  ‘Dad,’ I whispered, and remembered how it felt when he was there, as if everything was in the right place.

  I set the little notebook on the bench beside me. It was soft, almost fluffy, round the edges and tiny fragments of the card had flaked off onto my cardigan. The envelope was worse. I had another poke around in the bag and found one more thing, a picture postcard with a message scribbled on the back. I couldn’t make out the date but the picture was pretty, a seaside town with a hill behind it, and the message read:

  DeareSt Peggy,

  So Sad not to See your Sweet Self but hope you, Lenny and MaviS are all Safe and Sound. I will alwayS be cloSe and waiting.

  Love, aS alwayS, Uncle RoSS.

  This was pretty strange too. I
don’t have an Uncle Ross, or none that I know of and I always made it my business to know all my aunties and uncles. They were generally good with sweeties or even the occasional penny, at least before the war, apart from my Auntie May who was what you might call ‘nippy’ not to mention mean. But there had never been any mention of an Uncle Ross. And whoever Uncle Ross was he had the peculiar habit of writing the letter ‘S’ extra big when it should have been small.

  I read it through again and examined the picture on the front. Maybe I’d recognise it. But the rain began battering on the roof and drummed all sense out of me.

  I read the message one more time, slowly, with my dad’s picture beside it, and suddenly I knew why Uncle Ross had such silly S’s. Uncle Ross wrote his silly S’s the same way my dad wrote silly S’s, with little flicky bits at either end. I had forgotten this but actually I used to do it too when I wanted to be fancy. At first I thought Uncle Ross must be a long lost brother of my dad’s, but then I saw the truth.

  Uncle RoSS was my dad. It was a Secret meSSage to my mum. He was letting her know he was still alive and maybe where he was, if she knew the place, which I didn’t.

  If Uncle Ross was my dad that meant my dad wasn’t missing presumed dead. He was alive, just like my mum said. Or did it? I squinted at the date on the post-stamp, but couldn’t make it out even though I held it up to the window and opened my eyes so wide they hurt.

  The rain made such a racket I didn’t hear Mavis and Rosie until there was no time to hide what I’d found.

  ‘What’s that?’ said nosy Rosie.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Mavis, peering over. Mavis didn’t know her own dad, but then she was only three the last time she saw him. I was nine which is old enough to remember, plus we used to have special days out, me and him, when we’d go walking in the Kilpatrick Hills.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nobody.’ I shoved it all quickly together and hid it under my arm. The bag was behind me on the birch bench. Mavis poked my arm with a damp finger and eyed me suspiciously.

  ‘Are there any more carrots?’ she said.

  ‘My grandad’s friend had a little book like that,’ said Rosie cheerfully. ‘He got taken away by the police and no-one ever saw him again.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, wondering how to get the envelope back to its hidey place. Rosie was four when she last saw her whole family. She wasn’t a dependable source of information, and Mavis was best kept in the dark until I knew more.

  ‘Yes, Mavis, there are more carrots but get your wet clothes off first and hang them by the fire,’ I said, which gave me time to get the book and the photo and everything all back into the bag and under the cushions on Mr Tait’s chair.

  I redd up the fire and got the tatties boiling. Once we’d eaten we did some of those Commando exercises from the papers but not for long because I was so tired, and then I thought the time of the last bus must have passed because the light was going. I wondered what could have happened to my mum who should have been on it. She had a job in Singer’s again, but nowhere to stay so she had been coming back in the evenings and leaving early in the morning. She was so tired she’d fallen asleep on the bus the day before and no-one noticed her slumped sideways on the back seat until they were all the way to the terminus at Drymen, a few miles down the road. A Glasgow man dropped her off on his way to town, which took forever, of course, because of the blackout.

  We watched the wind blow black leaves across the sky and listened as it roared through the branches over our heads, and to the tick of the clock over the fireplace until it said eight o’clock, which was well past our bedtime.

  So we washed our faces in the bowl just as if my mum had been there and went and crept into bed and cooried into each other. We were quiet, even Rosie, all wondering why she wasn’t home, hoping she’d just fallen asleep again, but I knew it wasn’t true.

  ‘Maybe she’s gone to the pictures,’ said Mavis. That’s where she was the night of the bombing. Mavis stuck her thumb in and gazed at me over her fist.

  ‘No, she’s found someone to stay with and been too tired to come home,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe she’s doing night-shift. My mum did nightshift,’ said Rosie, panic making her talk. ‘And they have to work extra just now because of the war and making guns instead of sewing machines.’

  ‘Yes, Rosie, I suppose,’ I said with a yawn.

  ‘See,’ she rattled on, ‘we don’t need sewing machines as much as guns just now because people can’t make clothes because of the rationing.’ This is what Mr Tait had told us.

  ‘Quiet, Rosie, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Oddly, she was quiet and lay rubbing her ear between her fingers.

  So on top of wondering where my dad was and whether he was alive or dead, now I had to worry about my mum too. I wanted to take his picture back out and stare at it for ages and remember him, and look at the strange things written in the little book and at the picture postcard to see if I could squeeze a memory out of my head, but I couldn’t because of the little ones. So I lay between them and waited until Rosie got to wheezing and Mavis started snoring, but then I was stuck tight between them and they’d have woken if I’d budged an inch.

  A great hole appeared in the darkness and into it drifted the picture of my dad, as clear as day. I stared at the ceiling and remembered teaching him clapping songs I’d learnt at school and picnicking in the hills before the bombing. But that was before he wasn’t coming back, before the war had even started.

  A wave of fury washed over me for my mum who wasn’t coming home, even though something awful might have happened. I realised with a start that I’d known when Mr Tait died that she would go eventually and leave me in charge. She always used to leave me. She did it the night of the Blitz. I was usually good at looking after the wee ones and she knew she could depend on me. It was true she hadn’t gone anywhere since we’d lived with Mr Tait but that was because she had him for company. Now she only had me and Mavis and Rosie and that wasn’t enough.

  And as for Mr Tait, well, I was, of course grateful that he told me, sort of, that there was something to know about my dad. But. Hmm. This is hard for me to admit but I was angry with him too. This was something new, being angry. I’d been annoyed before if he was telling me off when I didn’t deserve it. But he was always right, usually, in the end. Not this time. He knew things about my dad and he went and D-IE- D died before he told me the truth. Until then Mr Tait had always told me the truth.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning, Mavis and Rosie were up before me and the wooden spoon was tapping hard against the pot. I staggered blearily through to see what they were up to.

  There was enough food, for the time being anyway. We had a big flour tin full of oats for porridge and another one full of flour, two-thirds of a sack of potatoes and half a caddy of tea. I had already estimated this would keep us going for about a month, apart from the tea. That would last maybe three days. Unfortunately we had forgotten to soak the oats overnight so Mavis was standing over a pot stirring frantically, then beating the sides as if this would make it cook faster. Rosie was on Mr Tait’s chair pouring the last of the tea into the pot. I grabbed both from her.

  ‘Hey, I’m doing that!’ she said. ‘That’s my job.’

  ‘You don’t need all that tea, stupid,’ I said. ‘There’ll be nothing left at that rate.’

  I peered in at the porridge. Half-crushed grains scooted to the surface then sank back to the bottom. The stove was almost cold. I checked inside where a pile of blackened kindling sat on a scrunch of brown newspaper. Mavis poured another jar of water into the pot.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. The clock ticked. ‘Great idea. Porridge for dinner. That’s about when this’ll be ready. We’ll have it then. Good forward thinking. We need more like you on the team. You, Private Rosie. No tea for you this morning. No time. All into battledress quick as how’s-your-father and
we’ll have turnips behind the ruined cottage. Come on, there’s no time to hang about. Private Mavis, down tools and follow me. Attennnnnnnntion!’ Mavis set the water jar on the stove and stood to attention as stiff as a post. Rosie, who had a hairbrush stuck in her hair, froze too. ‘Private Rosie!’ I shouted. ‘At the double!’ Rosie let the brush hang and stood with Mavis. ‘Excellent, chaps!’ I said. ‘Now walk this way.’ I waddled and kicked my feet up behind me and they did the same and we giggled our way into the bedroom to get dressed.

  ‘Don’t forget your cardies,’ I said. ‘We’re into autumn now.’

  We lifted our coats and scarves from the pegs by the front door and I looked with longing at their blue tammies which, unlike me, they had not lost.

  On the way to school we stopped at the ruined cottage and sneaked round the back where a field of fresh turnips was waiting to be harvested. I’d brought a knife with me and picked and chopped the nearest one and we sat against the cottage to eat, Mavis perched on the window ledge. A giant raincloud hovered over some trees at the other side of the turnip field.

  ‘Mind and chew it fifty-nine times,’ I said, passing strips to them. ‘Or you’ll get bellyache. I won’t have shirkers on my watch. No, siree. And no telling,’ I said, biting on a fresh strip, ‘anyone,’ I chewed, ‘about Mum not coming,’ munch munch, ‘back.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Never mind why not, Private Rosie,’ I said. ‘It’s an order.’

  ‘Orders is orders,’ said Mavis, which we’d heard in a film once. We hadn’t actually been to many films since the bombing because there was no picture house in Carbeth so we had to go all the way into town. The last time was around my birthday in April when we had a trip to Glasgow to see Casablanca. So romantic, so sad, and Mum cried.

  At school they had started without us. Miss Read wheeched her specs off to give us a stern look before flinging them back and going on with the lesson.