‘Is that another letter from Wincey?’ Pete asked.
He passed it over for Pete to read. After a minute or two Pete groaned. ‘Listen to this, Joe.’ And he read out the bit about Euphemia and Bridget.
It was Joe’s turn to groan. ‘Fuckin’ curtains. Can you beat it? What do I care about fuckin’ curtains?’
Pete nodded in agreement. ‘I don’t know what to write to Bridget. I feel as if I haven’t much in common with her any more.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Pete said gloomily.
Malcy replaced the letter in its envelope. ‘Och, the girls don’t mean any harm. They just don’t know how things have changed for us. You’ll be able to explain to them once you get back home.’
‘The trouble is,’ Joe said, ‘I still love the silly wee midden.’
‘How about you, Malcy?’ Pete asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Wincey?’
Malcy looked astonished. ‘Me and Wincey?’ he echoed. ‘That would be a turn up for the book. She always hated the sight of me.’
‘Doesn’t sound as if she hates you now. She’s going to a lot more trouble keeping in touch with you than the twins are doing with us.’
‘Well, I know, but …’
‘But what?’
Malcy tried to laugh. ‘You don’t really think she might be interested? I mean, in me?’
‘Are you daft, or something,’ Joe said. ‘Of course she’s bloody interested. She’s writing to you every other day, isn’t she?’
‘I know but …’
‘Never mind your stupid buts, Malcy. Get in there man. She’s one hell of a good catch.’
Such a thought had never occurred to Malcy before. Wincey of all people. He’d thought of her before right enough, and he remembered lots about her. He’d never imagined, however, anything like what he was trying to imagine now. He could accept that she had changed towards him. Even before he’d left Glasgow, she hadn’t seemed too bitter. Hadn’t seemed bitter at all, in fact. He reread all her letters and began to detect an increasing warmth in them. They certainly gave no indication of either bitterness or hatred.
Then he had an attack of anxiety and lack of self confidence. His face and scalp were scarred. He studied his reflection in the mirror. The doctor had assured him that it would heal in time and if he was lucky, it would only leave a faint mark. If he was lucky. Had he ever been that lucky? He tried to put Wincey out of his mind, but it wasn’t easy because her letters kept on coming. In one of his letters he’d half jokingly referred to his scars and said that he now had a face that only a mother could love—and he hadn’t even a mother. In her next letter, she said what did looks matter. It was the person that was inside that was important.
For the first time she signed her letter ‘Love, Wincey’. Previously she’d signed ‘Sincerely, Wincey’ or ‘Kind Regards, Wincey’. He read the ending of her last letter over and over again. ‘Love, Wincey’. ‘Love, Wincey’. ‘Love, Wincey’ until it turned into ‘Wincey love, Wincey love, oh Wincey love’.
The next time he wrote to her, he spoke of his longing to get back to Glasgow. But there was so much he wanted to tell her that he couldn’t put in a letter. He tried to give her some hints about recent events in the south and why leave had been cancelled, but he learned from a subsequent letter from her that almost everything he wrote had been censored. Malcy reckoned such strict censorship wasn’t really necessary. He no longer believed there was going to be an invasion, and by the look of things, Hitler had changed his tactics and was now trying to bomb the civilian population into submission. Even Glasgow was beginning to get it, albeit not as badly as London and elsewhere in England.
Malcy was becoming heartily sick of the whole business. He’d just missed being sent abroad again to fight. His shoulder and arm had not improved enough and he still had to wear a sling. He’d also caught a dose of flu. Poor old Joe and Pete had not been so lucky and were gone. He couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever see them again. He hadn’t relished the job of telling Wincey about that. The boys had been packed off so suddenly that they hadn’t had the chance to write to the twins before they left.
Wincey had written back saying it hadn’t been much of a Christmas and New Year for any of them. Teresa had made an eggless Christmas cake with carrots, of all things. He couldn’t imagine it. She said shops were hiring out cardboard cakes, especially for weddings. They were decorated with chalk icing sugar and a real, much smaller cake was underneath the cardboard cover.
The twins were very worried about Joe and Pete and hadn’t felt very festive. Granny had talked wistfully and in some detail about the family she’d lost, and about her dead husband. It was something she’d never done before and it worried them all. Wincey’s letters were vivid and she portrayed Springburn Road and the Avenue and Wellfield Street and the ‘Wellie’ cinema so clearly that it brought a lump to his throat. Many’s the time he’d sat in that flea pit of a picture house. There was sometimes an amateur variety show in the interval, and he and some of his pals used to boo and throw orange peel at the performers. Then there were the public baths in Kay Street and the Balgrayhill, leading to Springburn Park. He’d often fished for minnows in the pond there and collected them in a glass jam jar filled with water.
Now there was the Gourlays’ house near the top of the Balgray. If he walked up there now, no doubt he’d see Granny wrapped in her fawn crocheted shawl, hunched forward, glasses balanced on the edge of her nose, peering out of the front room window. Or her wheelchair would be parked in the close beside her old pal, Mr McCluskey. He would gladly give a year’s pay and more to be able to walk up that hill and into that close right now.
Malcy tried not to get depressed but the physical pain he was in didn’t help. Still, he was lucky to have survived. He kept telling himself that. He managed to get a bit of time off and took the train into London. The journey seemed to take forever, as the train crawled cautiously along. In London, the devastation was terrible to witness and among the bombed buildings, notices had been stuck up reminding people that looting was punishable by death.
St Paul’s Cathedral had miraculously survived undamaged amidst a sea of fire. Everything around it was bombed. The fires had been so bad that they were very close to becoming fire storms—raging infernos so strong that people could be sucked into them. Malcy tightened his stomach against flutters of panic at the thought of that ever happening in Glasgow.
He was tempted to tell Wincey about what he had seen in his next letter, but didn’t want to frighten her. Although he couldn’t help thinking she was not a lady who would be easily frightened. Not with that steady stare. He began to realise just how much he admired her. Again he felt lucky. Without Wincey and the rest of the Gourlays, he would have had nothing, and no one, to go back to.
He’d thought he’d got used to that long ago. He was illegitimate, didn’t know to this day who his father was, and when he’d been very young, his alcoholic mother had abandoned him. He’d been discovered stealing food from a grocer’s shop and handed over to the police. They had taken him home only to find there was no one there. He’d been trying to survive on his own. From there he was taken to an orphanage. He ran away from there more times than he could remember. Eventually he’d got a job. He’d got digs. He was determined to make it, and dreamed of being wealthy. He was going to make something of his life, to show everyone who ever doubted him.
Now, showing them didn’t matter any more. Everything had become very simple. He lived for the moment. Survival was the only thing that mattered. He needed to survive to get back to Glasgow. He needed to get back to Granny and Erchie and Teresa and Florence and the twins.
And Wincey.