Rue End Street

by Sue Reid Sexton

  But good old Mavis and Rosie seemed to have forgotten all that and were zigzagging across the driveway and tapping tree trunks at either side.

  ‘Come on Lenny!’ my mum called back. ‘We haven’t got all day.’ Then she laughed and scratched her head. ‘Actually, come to think of it we have.’ She leant against an old fence post at the side of the road and waited for me to catch up. The wind held her hair off her face and her cheeks were apple red, like Mavis’s used to always be before the bombing. Despite my mum’s missing foot she leant erect on the old post, her head high on her shoulders, the cloth bag with our lunch hanging easily over her arm. ‘I love you, Peggy,’ I heard my dad say. ‘I’ve always loved you.’ Then Mr Tait coughed and coughed again. ‘Peggy, my dear,’ he said. I stopped on the path and closed my eyes. Mr Tait was in there smiling. I opened them again and there was my mum who everyone loved, smiling, her old self again, singing the song from the night before but without the words. Singing. Something was wrong here, or rather something had to be very right.

  ‘Come on, Lenny,’ she called. ‘The factor’s waiting.’

  I ran over and took her arm.

  ‘Why are we going to see the factor?’ I said.

  ‘Questions questions!’ she said. ‘Goodness me. You’ll find out soon enough.’

  And no matter how I badgered her she wasn’t going to tell me.

  We crossed the farmyard past the barn which on Sundays was the church. Inside two men were forking hay. The biggest horse you ever saw stood waiting by a stable door. The factor’s office was beyond all this.

  He seemed like a nice enough man but he suggested we girls wait outside. I set my chin, ready to insist. He patted the front of his woolly jumper, green with no holes, and waited for us to leave.

  ‘Off you go then, you two,’ said my mum. ‘Lenny, you come with me.’

  Rosie glared first at the factor, then at my mum, and lastly at me.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Mavis, throwing me a look that could kill.

  But Rosie wouldn’t move. She crossed her arms and the bottom lip came forward, the forehead down.

  ‘Oh, let them stay,’ I said. ‘It’s not worth it. You don’t know the trouble it’d be to get rid of them.’

  So we all huddled into the factor’s tiny office and I waited with bated breath for what might happen.

  The factor opened the drawer of his desk and brought out a sheaf of papers, sifted through them and chose one. On the other side of the table, our side, my mum went into her cloth lunch bag and brought out two pieces of paper which she unfolded, turned round and set in front of him. He picked them up and read them quietly. I read what I could upside down. LAST WILL AND TEST-AM-ENT. My heart began to beat faster.

  The factor put down the papers. He shuffled his own papers together and put them back into the drawer.

  ‘I thought you were going to ask for the advance rent back,’ he said. ‘Which of course I couldn’t have given you, not without going through lawyers. I’m assuming you couldn’t afford one of those. This changes everything. You have ten months’ rent bought and paid for.’ He smiled. ‘There is just one problem.’ The smiles fell off our faces.

  ‘I need his ownership papers,’ he said. ‘A will bequeathing the hut to you isn’t enough. I can’t transfer a land rent contract to you without ownership papers for the hut itself. I’m assuming you have them?’

  My mum blanched. ‘They weren’t amongst his papers.’ She said. ‘Oh no. I don’t know what to do. They weren’t in the hut when we left. I know that for certain because we cleared the whole thing. I thought we were leaving forever. I don’t know what to do.’

  The factor’s face became serious. ‘I can’t give you the money, you know, if that’s what you’re after.’

  ‘We’re not after the money,’ I said, before she could. ‘Mr Tait and I built that hut, with help from George Connor and Mr Duncan.’

  ‘And me and Mavis,’ said Rosie.

  ‘And these two,’ I said.

  ‘Then you need to find the papers.’

  I was beginning to wonder if there was something that happened to people when they had a desk put between them and other ordinary human beings. There was a pause during which I thought I could actually feel all the sadness and anguish flood back into my mum.

  ‘But, I don’t know where to look. Isn’t this enough?’ She tapped the Will and Testament with her finger. ‘Can’t we draw up new papers with my name on them? Why is there a problem?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the factor, with another pat to his sweater. He stood up and gestured towards the door. ‘I’ll be here all afternoon.’

  I stood up too, full height, and shook my hair out of my eyes. ‘We’ll find them,’ I said. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Factor. We’ll find them, won’t we, Mum?’

  ‘Well, Lenny, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.’ She stood unsteadily and I helped her to the door.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ I said, conscious of my bottom lip doing a Rosie-like push forwards.

  Outside a clear blue sky stretched above the trees and the wind hummed and ahhed. We returned along the path in silence, a thoughtful little bunch.

  ‘Why would Mr Tait lose something so important?’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t think he ever lost anything important before. He kept everything safe in its proper place all the time.’

  ‘Even us,’ Mavis put in.

  ‘He was always telling us to do that,’ Rosie went on, ignoring Mavis. ‘And if it wasn’t in his Bible, he must have put it somewhere else.’ Blah, blah, blah. Sometimes, often, I wished Rosie would be quiet and let us all think. She prattled on until we got as far as Mr Duncan’s hut and his geese, at which point the geese gave us such a welcome, of sorts, that she fell silent at last. There we were, outside our very own front door. I listened for Mr Tait, the tap-ke-tap of his walk, his quiet voice, but he wasn’t there. Suddenly it came to me.

  ‘I know where it is,’ I said. ‘Oh my goodness, I know where it is! It’s under his bed. He told me, or I think he did. ’

  I ran up the steps, in the door and through to Mr Tait’s room. I was looking for a loose floorboard but all the slats ran sideways right under the walls, held there by the walls themselves all of which fitted perfectly, not a wobble amongst them. I was wrong again.

  In the stove room everyone else was looking in the stove, around it, under it. We examined the birch bench from every angle, ran our hands along the ceiling supports.

  I couldn’t bear it and went outside to sit on the step. Oh Mr Tait, why didn’t you just tell me exactly what you meant? ‘Your dad,’ he’d said, ‘not far’ and ‘find’ and ‘under bed’. The sun came bursting between the swaying trees, flashing in my eyes and flashing again. ‘Under the bed.’ I turned round and peered through the steps beneath the hut, beneath Mr Tait’s room, under his bed, and there it was: a short little tower of bricks, an extra one, like the supports round the edges. He must have added it later because it didn’t quite touch the underside and wasn’t supporting anything. I crawled in to examine it more closely. It really was just a tower, two bricks this way, two that, and lots of dead leaves. I shoved the leaves aside and dug at the bottom with my hands, the way a dog digs, until my nails scraped a piece of wood. ‘Singer’ it said, a word which appeared everywhere on all sorts of things all around our house, not least the sewing machine.

  ‘I found it!’ I yelled.

  The earth around it was soft and loose and came away easily in my hands until I had a small box, maybe for spools, with a little brass catch on the front. I opened it. Inside it said ‘LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT of John Tait’. Attached to it with a pin was a letter stating that the house on our plot belonged to Mr Tait, the very thing we needed.

  I let out a yell and banged my head on the underneath of the hut in my hurry out. ‘I found it! Look everyone. Where are you? Look!’

  Beneath the Last Will were t
wo postcards identical to the one of Helensburgh, one addressed to Mavis with the message. ‘Daddy will always love you,’ in big square writing. The other was for me: ‘Dear Sweet Lenny, I miss you more every day. Daddy will always love you.’ The postmark was clear on both: March 1942, a year and a half earlier. Mavis and Rosie clattered down the steps. I gave Mavis her card. She read it and handed it back. Rosie grabbed it from me and read it aloud. My mum came to the top of the steps.

  ‘What have you found?’ she said, but all the sounds of the trees and the geese and Rosie’s nonsense got mixed up in my head. I crouched on the ground by the box and with shaky hands drew out a folded sheet of paper marked ‘Lenny’.

  ‘Lenny, my dear,’ it said and I heard Mr Tait’s soft gentle voice. ‘I will probably be gone by the time you read this. Take good care of your precious mother, Mavis and Rosie and don’t pay any attention to that fool George Connor. Here are postcards your father sent which your mother thought best to keep from you. I disagreed. You always loved the truth. Your very own Mr Tait.’ Then near the bottom it said: ‘Your father is in Greenock, but perhaps, knowing you, that will not be news.’

  The letter fell shut. I pressed it to my heart. The geese let out a particularly loud blast of honking.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Tait.’ I whispered. ‘Thank you!’

  The End

  Historical accuracy and the Barns-Graham family

  Until very recently, the Barns-Graham family owned the land on which the Carbeth hut community sits. After the First World War, Allan Barns-Graham allowed a returning soldier to build a hut there and gradually a few more went up over the twenties and thirties. Then, in 1941, the Clydebank Blitz happened and hundreds of refugees from that devastating attack flooded over the hills to Carbeth seeking shelter. Responding to this need, the Barns-Grahams gave another piece of land for them to build on, like Lenny and her family.

  During this period, the Barns-Graham family did not live in or even own Carbeth Guthrie House, which Lenny calls ‘The Big House’, but were actually in Carbeth House, a more modest building on the other side of Carbeth Loch in a wonderful spot with great views of the Campsie Fells. They were neither wealthy nor ostentatious. I have exercised artistic licence, and permission given by the family and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, to place them in Carbeth Guthrie House, an elegant and rather grand place sitting aloof on a hill with its back to the loch.

  The reason for this inaccuracy was simply practical. Carbeth House was too far for Lenny to walk as often as I needed her to in the midst of all her other adventures. Carbeth Guthrie also offered a greater contrast in living conditions to those of the refugees and evacuees in the Carbeth huts.

  Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was the daughter of Allan Barns-Graham and at that time an artist of the St Ives modernist art movement, having moved to St Ives in Cornwall in 1940. She is known to have visited the family at Carbeth on holiday during the war. It is not known exactly when.

  Never having met ‘Willie’ myself I hope the portrait I have painted of her is somewhere near the truth, based as it is on what I have read of her life. I am grateful to the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust and to the current Allan Barns-Graham, her nephew, for their permission to include her in Lenny’s story.

  The paper mill at Overton to the south of Greenock actually closed in 1929 and the buildings were partially destroyed in 1939. I was working from an older map and did not discover this fact until that part of the book was written. It was so spectacular a spot for such an important moment, as visitors to Loch Thom will know, that it just had to stay in.

  My apologies also to any church or church-goers in the Rue End area, or indeed elsewhere. The minister and Mrs Brindle are entirely fictitious. I needed something bad to happen and the minister obligingly presented himself. I’m sure the real churches in that area would have had their work cut out for them and they would have risen admirably to the challenge.

  There may be other inaccuracies which have slipped in, for which I take full responsibility and offer apologies.

  For more information about Wilhelmina Barns- Graham please see http://www.barns-grahamtrust. org.uk.

  Information about the Carbeth huts can be found here: http://www.carbethhutters.co.uk

  Information about Greenock during the Second World War as told by those who lived there: http:// www.rememberingscotlandatwar.org.uk/Accessible/ Exhibition/204/Port-Number-One

  A note on Italians in Britain during the Second World War

  Italy did not join the Second World War until the 10th of June 1940. On that day Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini announced that Italy would join Hitler’s Germany and declared war on France and Britain. Until that point Germans living in Britain were considered ‘enemy aliens’ and each person was categorised according to the level of risk to Britain they were considered to be. Some were interned; others had certain freedoms withdrawn, for instance no radios were allowed and they could only travel with special permission. The system was inefficient and unfair, especially considering many of these people were Jews who had perfectly understandably fled the Nazi regime in their native country.

  On the 10th of June 1940, when Italy became Britain’s enemy, all Italians in Britain automatically became enemy aliens too. The panic in Britain was such that on that same day Italian businesses were trashed and Italians attacked in the street. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered all enemy aliens to be rounded up. ‘Collar the lot!’ is what he famously and rather shockingly said.

  Previous to this only those Germans who were considered a high risk had been interned. On the 11th June all categories of German aliens were arrested and interned along with all categories of Italians. One of the strange things about the Italian internment was that only men were taken. The women were left to struggle on alone without the main breadwinner and often having had their business premises seized along with their means of making a living. The interned Italian men were aged between sixteen and eighty, though there were also reports of internees as young as fourteen.

  In Scotland many were herded onto trains and sent south to Liverpool. From there some were sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man while others were put on ships in terrible conditions of overcrowding and deported to camps in Australia or Canada, some to places of relative safety and peace, but others to dire circumstances and inhumane treatment. One such ship, the Arandora Star, was hit by a German U-boat on the 2nd July with the tragic loss of over 800 lives, including British seamen and soldiers, and German and Italian internees. Such was the chaos of the interments that no accurate records were kept of who was on the ship, so the exact number of dead and their identification is not entirely certain.

  By September 1943 the tides of war had turned. Britain no longer believed invasion was imminent. Mussolini had been toppled and imprisoned. On the 8th of the month it was announced that Italy had signed an armistice with the Allies and had therefore swapped sides. This meant the internees were no longer enemy aliens. Most of those who had not already been freed were released shortly after this date, leaving interned only those known to be high risk, although some low risk internees were retained for essential war work. This may seem odd, but many sections of the ordinary population were also retained in various forms of employment, often without the option of moving to other work or negotiating better rates of pay or conditions. On their release, many Italian internees were allocated various forms of employment including farm work closer to home but not necessarily within reach of friends or family. Given the level of chaos during the Second World War, it’s not surprising that many people fell through the various nets while others were inextricably caught in them.

  For more information please read The Scots Italians by Joe Pieri, published by Mercat Press in 2005.

  The importance of Greenock during the Second World War

  Winston Churchill claimed ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril’. As a group of islands, Britain was essentially in a s
iege-like situation and nearly brought to its knees by the lack of incoming supplies. This was certainly Hitler’s plan and one which very nearly succeeded.

  To ensure essentials were brought in, merchant ships travelled in convoys and were accompanied by naval vessels for protection. German submarines, or U-boats as they were known, followed their movements in highly efficient ‘packs’ to torpedo and sink them wherever possible. Churchill named this the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’.

  The supplies they carried would have included food but also raw materials and equipment essential not just to daily life but to the war effort and the armed services as well. They also carried servicemen from all over the world including the colonies. For instance, two million American soldiers arrived in Greenock and were shipped south directly from Princes Pier railway station. Without access to the sea Britain could also not have transported troops to the Mediterranean and beyond to fight on the various fronts.

  The Battle of the Atlantic was fierce and brutal. Somewhere between 75,000 and 85,000 people lost their lives, of which over 30,000 were merchant seamen, a higher proportion of loss than for any of the armed services in the rest of the war. In May 1943 the Germans partially withdrew so the threat, while not entirely absent, was at least diminished.

  During the Second World War Greenock was known as ‘Port Number One’. The Clyde, its estuary and the sea-lochs which stretch out of it formed a vast natural harbour in which ships could be built, repaired and tested and where the convoys could gather in relative safety before heading out to sea. Greenock therefore became a hub in which a great many of the houses were requisitioned for war work and which saw an invasion of a different kind – of servicemen of all Allied nationalities, of incoming workers to the factories and docks, and of Wrens, the Women’s Royal Naval Service, who backed up the whole effort. Additionally those rescued or captured at sea were often brought through Greenock.