Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  ‘Yes, sir, I will do,’ I said. ‘I’ll do that.’ Although I’d no intentions.

  ‘And tell George he should have listened to Mr Tait more. He needs to put his back into it if he’s going to do anything but hit the wood. He needs to slice it, you see, slice down hard with the axe. And he needs to swing it sideways, round and back over his head so there’s momentum, and then down.’ He stepped out of the doorway and demonstrated how. ‘He needs to use the momentum of the axe’s weight.’ He made a chopping movement with his right hand against his left. ‘Chop chop! You tell him. Go on then, you tell him, chop chop.’ He laughed at his own joke and turned to go back inside. ‘Thank you,’ he said and closed the door.

  Then I went down to George, swallowing back the lump in my throat, and sat down on a tree root a little way off. It was never a good idea to get too close to George.

  Thwack! went the axe.

  I had three reasons for coming to see George. ‘Thanks for getting me my penny,’ I said. That was the first one.

  Thwack! went the hammer. I watched him doing his chopping all wrong.

  ‘The man up the hill gave me a message for you,’ I said, wishing he hadn’t, and wishing I hadn’t mentioned it. It wasn’t one of the three important things and it seemed like the wrong moment to deliver it.

  Thwack! He winced as the axe bounced off the log. One of his beady little eyes turned on me. I made sure not to laugh.

  ‘Well?’ he said, leaning on the axe.

  ‘He said you have to swing the axe round sideways,’ I mimed how, ‘round and back and...’

  ‘I know how to chop wood, thank you very much. I don’t need you to tell me.’ He picked up the axe again.

  Thwack!

  I resisted the temptation to point out how obviously he didn’t know how to chop wood because I needed him to talk.

  He took one last swipe at the log, but the axe bounced off it and shuddered right out of his hands. I saw the shock travel up his arms and his face twist with the pain. He turned away and straightened so I wouldn’t see. I’d seen him do this before, this turning away. It meant he was going to be extra-super-mean when he faced me again, like he was putting on his meanest face specially for me. But this time I was wrong.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said, with a sigh as if he was only tired. ‘You’re putting me off.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering what you knew.’ I stopped here. It seemed such a strange thing to say, ‘about my dad’. I realised I had never talked about him to anyone, not even Mavis really. It was like he was completely taboo, as if to say the words ‘my dad’ was against the law.

  ‘About what?’ said George.

  He was the last person I wanted to say this to, but I had to if he was the only person alive who knew, but just at that moment my mouth suddenly went to mush again and I couldn’t get the words out.

  ‘M... m... my...’

  ‘What?’

  I took a big deep breath. ‘My dad,’ I shouted. ‘What do you think? My dad, of course.’

  ‘No need to shout,’ he said quietly. ‘I can hear you. So the little piglet squealed, did she?’

  ‘She’s not a piglet.’

  ‘She is in my book,’ he said. I suppose he hadn’t forgotten how she threw grit in his eyes when he was picking on her down at the canal in Clydebank. It was the night of the Blitz, just before the bombing started, and he’d lost his balance and fallen in.

  ‘She’s too wee to keep secrets,’ I said. ‘Look, keys, George, keys. Can’t we have a truce for a minute? Just for once?’ I crossed the first two fingers on each hand. I had stiff fingers and they were sore with all the work, so crossing them was difficult. As soon as they were crossed I held up both hands up for him to see. ‘Keys,’ I said again.

  He looked at me for a minute and burst out laughing. Then he went and picked up the axe where it had fallen and swung it up onto his shoulder. ‘I haven’t got time for this,’ he said. ‘I’ve got firewood to chop and I’m lining my hut. Some of us have to work for a living and only have a Sunday to do everything else. I don’t have time for keys.’ He laughed again and I tried hard not to spit out everything I’d been up to for the past two days.

  ‘I’ve been working too,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘You know I have.’

  But he laughed again and started towards his hut. So I followed him all the way inside.

  George’s hut was very like ours with a brick fireplace at one end, but it was much, much smaller with only a bench to sit on and to sleep. There were thick wooden supports for the walls on which he had attached various boards and planks for the outside layer. Part of the inner wall had been put in place too. This was what he must have meant by ‘lining his hut’. There was a gap of two inches between the two layers.

  The third thing I wanted to ask George about was his newspapers. I knew he read them because Jimmy Robertson once told me he gave George his old ones. There they were, a stack of papers, and the top one was today’s with the Cut Off Leg headline.

  ‘I’ll trade you,’ he said. ‘Scrunch up those papers, except today’s, and stuff them down inside here.’ He showed me the space between the inner and outer walls. ‘Like this,’ and he tossed the top paper to one side and showed me how to take a sheet of newspaper from the pile and turn it into a ball, as if I was a very stupid three-year-old.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, biting my tongue. ‘So, my dad?’ He stuffed the rolled-up paper down into the space in the wall.

  This is what he told me while we filled his wall:

  One day when Mavis and Rosie and I were all at school and my mum was over at Mrs Mags’s, and George had thought Mr Tait was up at the big house visiting old Barney, George took himself up to our hut and went inside.

  ‘I was just being nosy,’ he said, as if that made it alright, ‘but I found this old bag with strips cut out of it and inside there was...’

  ‘Yes, I know all that,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have been nosing about.’

  He glowered at me a moment. ‘What did Mr Tait tell you?’

  ‘To look under the bed, only that’s not where it was.’

  ‘That all?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘He told me not to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘He changed his mind,’ I said. ‘The day they took him away. When he was on the floor by our fire sweating and coughing and ill. You remember. It was before you came in that he told me. Before my mum came back with Willie and the doctor.’ Suddenly I felt very hot.

  George sighed. ‘You’re not doing the papers.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ I said, and I did.

  ‘Your dad is an Eye-tie,’ he said. ‘Push them down harder. Like this. His real name is Leonardo Galluzzo and he’s from Cantabria, which is somewhere in Italy.’

  ‘No, he isn’t. He was born in Hull, in England,’ I said. ‘We went there.’

  ‘Well, his dad must have been Italian then. I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Mr Tait said.’

  I stared at him a long time and tried to keep breathing and not fall off the bench. Why had Mr Tait told George all this and not me? But that would have to wait.

  Here’s the gist of what George knew:

  When the war broke out my dad had joined the army and gone to fight the Germans. I knew that.

  My dad had come home on leave three days before Italy joined up with Germany.

  Some family (Gran and Auntie May and the baby) had arrived the same day, just before Italy signed up with the Germans, and there had been an almighty row. I remember this row but I was at school when it happened. There was another when I came home. We went to Rothesay the next day, me, Mavis, Mum, Gran, Auntie May and the baby. We left my dad behind. When we came back three days later, he was gone. George said my mum had never forgiven herself for leaving him. He said my dad had been arrested.

  ‘What on earth for?’ I said. ‘Why would anyone arrest my dad? He’s not a criminal. He’s very lawabiding. He joined the army. He
’s funny and kind. Everyone loved him. Loves him. He’s still alive.’

  ‘You’re not filling the walls,’ said George. ‘I’ll have to stop telling you if you don’t stuff paper in the walls. They arrested him for being Italian.’

  ‘Which he isn’t, but even if he was, being Italian isn’t a crime.’

  ‘It is if we’re at war with Italy.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I thought for a minute. ‘But we’re not at war with Italy now.’

  What had Willie’s plus-fours man said? Something about forestry and farming and he’d wondered whether they’d be released.

  ‘That’s probably why Mr Tait thought it was okay for you to know. Stuff the walls, or get out.’

  ‘So, how come you told Mavis he’d gone camping? That wasn’t very nice, telling her something that’s not even true.’

  Very annoyingly, George laughed.

  I threw a ball of paper at him.

  ‘He’s in a camp, stupid, a work-camp, a prison camp for prisoners of war,’ he said. This was what Willie had told me about. I didn’t want it to be true. I pictured barbed wire and mouldy bread and cold and no shoes. George picked up a piece of wood and positioned it between two of the supports at the bottom of the opposite wall. ‘They get better food in there than we do,’ he said. ‘Same rations as men serving in the army.’ He pulled a nail out of his back pocket and positioned it at one end of the plank.

  ‘But he wrote to my mum,’ I said. ‘They don’t allow that in prison do they? Do they allow letters? Or cards?’ I was thinking about the picture postcard.

  ‘Did he? You sure?’ He banged the nail in with three little taps then three huge thumps.

  ‘So where is this camp?’ I said once I’d recovered from the noise.

  But George had no idea. All he knew was my dad had been arrested along with lots of other so-called Italians, even though he was a soldier for Britain, and they’d all been taken into Glasgow. I told him my dad said he’d be court-martialled for desertion if he didn’t go back to the army when his leave was over, but George reckoned that was nothing compared to the trouble he’d be in now. He said he’d heard the Italians were put on a train for Liverpool. This was terrible news because Liverpool was bombed just like Clydebank and lots of people died there too. But George said they were all put on ships and sent to Canada and Australia, and would probably never come back. He said one of the ships had been sunk by the Germans.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I said, barely able to breathe.

  ‘Richie told me,’ he said and he stuffed a ball of paper far down into the wall.

  ‘Who’s Richie?’

  ‘He does the river patrol, the bit between Greenock and Cardross. I do Clydebank to Cardross and sometimes we have to pass on information.’ As he said ‘information’ he rolled his shoulders as if they were heavy from carrying so much information, and thwacked the next newspaper into his hand three times.

  I watched and waited for him to go on.

  ‘He’s an apprentice, same as me, but in Greenock. That’s further down the river. It’s where the troopships come in.’ He thumped his paper two more times, sniffed and went back to stuffing the wall. ‘He says it’s where all the survivors are brought into as well, from sinkings and wrecks, like the one that went down with the Italians.’ He paused and watched my face, which I kept very still. ‘I’m not really supposed to tell you any of this, in case you’re a spy.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m only interested in my dad,’ I said, keeping the tremble out of my voice. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It went down off Ireland. Richie said there were only a handful of survivors. Before the war it was a big fancy liner for rich folk and it had the best name, the Arandora Star. Anyone who survived was brought back to Greenock.’

  ‘What happened to them after that?’ I said.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said.

  ‘Can you find out?’

  He shrugged and banged another nail into the other end of his plank.

  ‘Someone must know,’ I said.

  ‘It was ages ago. No-one cares. They’re our enemies, don’t forget.’

  ‘But they’ll have records, won’t they?’ I said. ‘They’ll know if he survived, or at least if he was on it, won’t they? Like the town hall in Clydebank after the bombing. He’s a swimmer anyway. He taught me. He can do fifty lengths just like that. He’d have swum to the shore and hidden.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask your mum?’

  ‘She says he’s not coming back.’

  ‘But not why.’

  I pushed a ball of paper down into the wall.

  ‘Maybe it’s because of your Uncle Ross in Helensburgh,’ he said with a smirk. ‘I always said your mum was a tart.’

  I was old enough to know what that meant and also that it wasn’t true, so it gave me great pleasure not to rise to the occasion but smile sweetly instead. You see, not only did I know something that he didn’t know, that Uncle Ross was my dad, but he’d also told me where the postcard came from too. Helensburgh. My dad was in Helensburgh, or had been.

  George gave me a cold potato he didn’t want, because I was hungry, and he let me tell him what the old man up the hill had said about the axe. But all the time he stared at me with his little black eyes narrowed. So I asked him if I could go out and try it myself, just to see if I’d heard the old man right.

  The axe was the heaviest thing in the world, apart from the Queen Mary liner.

  ‘He said it’s all in the momentum,’ I said.

  I swung the axe out sideways and hit myself on the head with the handle. The whole thing dropped over my shoulder with a clunk and scudded against the back of my legs. This made George laugh his stupid head off, so I rubbed where it hurt and stared at him long and hard, just like he’d done to me. I glanced up the hill in case the old man was watching which luckily he wasn’t, only a few crows who seemed more interested in each other.

  ‘I’d like to read today’s front page,’ I said, giving myself a shake. ‘It might tell me about my dad. He’s a hero, you know, and very, very funny. I don’t believe he’d dead. Not for a second.’

  So I left George with his axe and went back into his hut and read the front page, and then I read the other pages and then it occurred to me that some of the old newspapers we’d just stuffed in the walls might have stories about Italians and could even tell me where the camps were, because George said there were lots of camps but no-one was supposed to know. But someone must have known because someone had to be guarding them, and that person had to be married to someone or have children and those children might want to know where their dad went to work every day and that dad might have said, ‘Oh it’s in such and such, or somewhere-or-other.’ And maybe even the people in the newspapers might make mistakes sometimes, and forget what they’re not supposed to write in their papers, which is what happened when they printed the number of people who died after Clydebank was bombed.

  We had stuffed all the other papers inside the wall so, carefully, I tugged a few sheets back out and scanned them for ‘Italians’ and ‘Italy’ and ‘Arandora Star’ and things like that but hardly found anything at all, only a map of Italy, but without Cantabria on it, and stuff about Italian rail strikes and another map of how much of Germany we could bomb from Italy and an ad for special tablets that I thought might help my mum with her nerves. I folded the map and put it in my pocket. Then I heard George coming back and couldn’t get all the papers stuffed back in again before the door opened.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he yelled. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made!’

  If he’d been anybody else I’d have said sorry, but this was bad George. ‘What mess?’ I said, pretending innocence. ‘I stuffed ’em in, I can take ’em back out too.’ I ducked from his blow and squeezed past him and out the door.

  He went on shouting like that as I ran off down the road. It was time for Mr Tulloch’s milking anyway and I wanted to better my cow score.

  ‘Bye, George,’ I shouted from a
safe distance and blew him a kiss.

  Chapter 15

  That afternoon I milked three whole cows, well, Mr Tulloch had to strip them all for me. They were, in no particular order, Forget-me-not, Tulip and Asparagus (Mr Tulloch wasn’t sure how an asparagus flower looked, but he liked the name). I was so pleased with myself I finally found my tongue and started talking nonsense to the cows. Here are some of the daft things I said:

  ‘This afternoon we stuffed George’s walls with newspaper and then I pulled some of them out again. The news is very interesting don’t you agree, Asparagus dearest?’

  ‘The animals went in two by two, do you? Moo moo?’ which I sang.

  ‘This is the story of Jack who sold his cow for five measly beans. Now don’t be alarmed because we’re not selling you, are we Mr Tulloch?’

  (‘No, not Tulip. She gives the most milk.’)

  I described, in detail, my search for the old man. That story nearly sent us all to sleep.

  Then we went into the dairy and did the milk dishes. This is not dishes as you might know them. Oh no. This is everything to do with milking, big and small, and involves lots of cold water and blue hands, but no actual dishes, just tubes and buckets and things.

  Mr Tulloch gave me another penny to add to my collection and said that starting the next day he’d give me a ha’penny for every cow I milked. I went skipping up the road to tell Mavis and Rosie about Forget-menot and Asparagus and Tulip, and everyone, especially my mum, about all the work I’d done and how we could stay in Carbeth forever after all.

  But there was no smoke above our chimney and the washing had been taken off the line. I speeded past George’s hut and up along the road to home with a million possible explanations flashing through my head.

  No-one was there. Mr Tait’s chair had been pushed back against the wall. The water bucket and bowl were empty, the floor swept and all our crockery, such as it was, gone, even the sewing machine. Only Mr Tulloch’s cup sat alone on the shelf. A huge bundle wrapped in a blanket stood on the bench by the window as if looking out. My footsteps echoed around the walls and the thin autumn sunshine strained through the glass.