It wasn’t much further to our street from there but it seemed to take forever. When I got there this is what I saw.
First of all, and most importantly, there was no Mavis, not that I could see much because of the smoke that was still hanging around, but I did ask the men that were working in the rubble, once I’d got their attention. I had to lie and say my mum was just down the road because they wanted to take me away. They didn’t think it was safe. Well, I knew that, but I still had to find Mavis.
They were working on the house on the corner, the one where I’d seen the old lady with the bag fall from one window to the other then disappear in a guzzle of fire, so I told them about that, and then they asked what else I’d seen and I told them about the people in the bottom flat in my close, and the bad boys’ granny.
Although the street was so different, all black and hollow, everything all mixed up together, it was strangely familiar too; it was my street after all, even though the windows were all over the road and you could see the sky where the roofs should have been, and I felt suddenly very heavy as if I’d been given a whole sack of coal to carry all by myself.
I was cold and hungry too. It seemed a long time since the sandwich and tea in the town hall and my tummy had started growling and it hurt. I wondered where everyone was, and a shock went through me, like when I touched the electric wire at school by mistake, because I thought I might find Mavis, but I might find her broken and hurt, or lying all flung about like she lies when she’s asleep, only she might be sleeping the sleep of the dead. And suddenly I didn’t want to see Mavis at all. I stood there with the glass scrunching under my feet and the noise of big stones falling and the smoke up my nose, and I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to see anything, least of all Mavis. But somehow I still saw her because she was in there already, right inside there where I couldn’t get her out even if I wanted to.
And that shuddering came over me again like the bomb inside me was about to go off and I pulled every part of me in around my heart, my eyes pushed into my head, my head inside my neck, my legs pressed hard together, my shoulders around my ears, my fingers knotted together, my elbows in my tummy, and I held on with all my might so that nothing would escape. But it didn’t work. I still had to breathe and when I finally let go, because I couldn’t hold it forever, it came out in a big gluey moan which I didn’t recognise and which scared me all the more. I gulped it back in but that didn’t work either and my face hurt from the salt tears in my cuts.
A noise startled me in the crunching glass and I jumped back and opened my eyes. A dog was staring up at me. It was a fawny-brown dog with a black wiry back, big pointy ears and a tail that curled all the way round in a circle. It belonged to one of our neighbours and lived to sneak into people’s houses and steal their dinners. We looked at each other for a minute and then it barked the loudest bark you ever heard and gave me such a fright that I screamed and screamed and it was all I could do not to fall into the splinters and the glass at my feet.
The dog barked again and then somebody whistled and the dog stopped to follow the sound, and just where the entrance to our close should have been I saw the two bad boys and the big girl who was their sister. And further up the street I saw Miss Weatherbeaten, of all people, climbing over a pile of building with her hair all loose about her shoulders and blowing about gently in the breeze that wasn’t there.
The dog barked again but I couldn’t see it through my tears so I didn’t know what it was, just explosions in my head that wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t see Miss Weatherbeaten any more but I knew I was falling over backwards and might go under the window frames and the stone, just like my mum had been for hours on end with the fires going on all around her and no-one to save her. And I could still hear my shouts coming out of me as if they were someone else’s, shouts like my mum when she came for us in Ayr, like my dad when he was last home, like the lady in the street who had a fit and wet herself, and in the distance there was the boom-crash of a delayed action bomb.
This is it! I thought. I’m going over!
It didn’t hurt but it did knock the last bits of breath out of me and I thought for a minute I’d been lucky and landed on an armchair like the one I’d seen on my way there, sitting at a squinty angle on a garden wall, but it wasn’t an armchair. It was one of the rescue men. He caught me and lifted me up as if I was a wee thing like Mavis and he carried me to where the bad boys were with their big sister. He didn’t put me down straightaway even though I was far too big to be carried, but it was just as well because I don’t think I could have stood up anyway.
‘You need to go and get onto buses down on the main road as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘These buildings are not safe. If you know of anyone stuck in there we’ll do what we can, but you need to get out of here.’
It was Mr Chippie!
‘Mr Chippie!’ I said. ‘It’s you!’
He looked down at me. I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my new blue coat.
‘It’s . . . it’s . . . ,’ he said.
‘Lenny,’ I said. ‘I lost my hair.’
‘I know, I remember,’ he said. ‘I haven’t forgotten, and I haven’t forgotten your sister.’
‘Mavis.’
‘Yes, Mavis. I haven’t forgotten her. But we did find your mum. She was . . . .’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want the bombs to go off again.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
The bad boys and their sister were standing very close together, like when they were in the La Scala. They weren’t scary now at all.
‘Did you . . . ?’ I nodded towards the tenement that had been ours.
‘Was anyone . . . ?’ said the bigger of the bad boys. It was his granny who lived in the bottom flat and couldn’t move; the man there was probably his uncle.
‘Most of them got into a shelter,’ said Mr Chippie. ‘Anyone left won’t be alive.’ We didn’t want this news. ‘Have you been to the town hall or the church to check?’
I nodded and so did they, but I hadn’t seen them there so I thought they must be lying.
Then, with a crunch and a tumble, Miss Weatherbeaten arrived.
‘I thought you’d be here,’ she said. ‘I told you to stay at the town hall. Did you find Mavis?’
I shook my head and a little bomb went off in my stomach.
‘Hello, Miss Wetherspoon,’ said Mr Chippie. ‘Sorry about your friend.’ He put me down on a big piece of stone so that I was nearly the same size as Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘You’ve got to get this lot out of here,’ he went on not waiting for her reply. ‘It’s not safe and I have to get back to work.’ And as if to prove his point the ground was shaken by a building in the next street collapsing and sending a new cloud of dust all over us. We put our hands over our ears, the bad boys and me, and I fell against Miss Weatherbeaten who was suddenly beside me. I was as big as the big boy because of the stone, but I felt much smaller than any of them. Miss Weatherbeaten put her arm round my shoulders.
‘I was looking for Lenny,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take her on a bus if there is one but I heard there’s a big queue of people and no buses.’
‘I can’t go. I haven’t found Mavis,’ I said to her, incredulous. ‘I have to stay and find Mavis.’ I’d told her that already, and her a teacher too!
‘Lenny, Mavis is most likely safe somewhere,’ she said.
‘But I have to find her. Most likely isn’t enough.’ I was surprised by my own boldness.
And then they all joined in, even the bad boys and their big sister, telling me she was probably safe but that we weren’t and we had to get moving soon. They seemed to be all talking at once so that in the end I couldn’t hear anything, just rumbles and thumps and the grating sound of lorries and bricks. I watched Mr Chippie go back to the building he was rescuing in and I said, ‘I can’t.’ I said it over and over again, half to them and half to myself, and I wished Mr Chippie would come back and carry me home again, but I was home so he couldn’t, and I wished they’d all stop talking and not listening.
‘Kids!’ said a voice behind us. It was the scary man with the stick. ‘Stop arguing and get into a shelter.’
‘We’re going to the bus,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten, whose hand I had grabbed. I was off the stone that Mr Chippie had put me on and was up against her coat.
‘There aren’t any,’ he said. ‘They’re all full.’ He looked like he too was carrying a sack of coal all by himself, but all he had was a small brown suitcase. ‘And the Germans are coming back. We have to find shelter now. My shelter is big enough for all of us. And look, it saved my life.’
We all looked at him with his saved life. He didn’t seem very big, for a man, and he was swaying slightly. He put his suitcase down on some bricks, took off his brown cap and mopped his head with a clean white handkerchief. The black smoke from the row of blackened tenements seemed to sway with him and he glanced back down the road towards the sunset that was gathering there beyond them and beyond the rubble and the ARP men and the gaps further down where the buildings were gone.
I felt sick again and Miss Weatherbeaten squeezed my hand, but I don’t think it was on purpose. I felt her tremble the same way I did. We all looked at each other through the dust. The Germans were coming back, and I wondered if the bad boys knew about the scary man’s big stick as well and decided that if anyone knew about it those boys probably did.
‘When are they coming?’ said the big girl in a hushed voice. She and the boys huddled even closer together, merging in a mass of grey.
The light was fading behind her and I realised it was about that time of day, the same as the day before when I had pushed the smaller of the bad boys into the canal and lost Mavis. I calculated that meant we had not much time at all.
‘Soon,’ I said, before the scary man could reply, and I looked at the bad boys to see if they were thinking the same thing as me, that time was not on our side, like my gran had said last summer. It was hard to tell. Then they both talked at once, and everyone started to fidget, as if they had ants in their pants.
‘We’ve got to go, Izzie,’ they said (like Lizzie but without the ‘L’). Her hair was sticking up around her face. ‘Mum and Dad said we’ve got to go!’ And they started off.
‘We’ll never make it in time now but at least we’ll be out of here,’ she said, quickly following.
‘But where are you going to?’ said the scary man.
‘We’re going to Carbeth,’ said Izzie, calling back. ‘We have a hut there, my uncle has a hut there too. But we need to go now or it’ll be dark and we won’t find the way.’
‘What on earth are you doing here, then?’ said the scary man.
‘My gran . . . ,’ and she threw her head towards the tenement, their granny’s and mine, but I didn’t want to think about that so I started hopping from one foot to the other. Then Miss Weatherbeaten took my hand again and we turned to follow Izzie.
‘Rosie!’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘I told you to stay at the town hall!’
There was Rosie in the same coat as me standing on a broken heap of furniture. She was hopping from foot to foot too and pulling on her earlobe.
‘Rosie,’ I breathed. Rosie, a pretend version of Mavis, right outside our own front door. I felt a surge of annoyance with her for running off, just like Mavis, and then turning up where Mavis should have been. ‘Rosie,’ I said. She grinned white teeth through her dirty little face.
‘Well, it’s too late now,’ said the scary man. ‘We all have to get into a shelter or go wherever we’re going. Now, can somebody find me a stick of some kind to help me get over this pile of rubbish?’
Miss Weatherbeaten started looking about. Rosie stayed where she was. I kept a firm grip on Miss Weatherbeaten’s hand which made her search for a stick more difficult. And I didn’t want to have to search and find something I didn’t want to see, like Mavis.
‘Take Rosie, and follow the boys,’ she said in a voice that couldn’t be questioned, so I did, even though I didn’t want to.
‘They said I had to go to Edimburry,’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t want to go to Edimburry.’ She sniffed loudly and pulled the back of her hand across her cheek. ‘I want my mum.’
‘Edinburgh. You should have gone, Rosie,’ I told her. ‘Now the Germans are coming back and we’ll have to go into a shelter with that scary man with . . . .’ But Rosie didn’t know about the scary man with the stick and she had enough to worry about with the Germans.
We caught up with the others and we all waited for Miss Weatherbeaten and the scary man near the top of the road.
‘How far is Carbeth?’ asked Miss Weatherbeaten. Her face was flushed and her eyes were red and bloodshot.
The two bad boys looked at each other, two faces alike in the dirt.
‘About ten miles over the hills, up Kilbowie Road,’ said the biggest.
‘Then go!’ said the man.
‘Ten miles?’ said Izzie with a snort. ‘Two at the most.’
‘Seven,’ said the smaller boy. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Alright, three,’ said Izzie. ‘Up Kilbowie Road, along Cochno and then over the hill. There’s a path over the hill and stiles over the walls and then along the main road and turn right at the Halfway House, that’s the pub. Maybe four.’
I looked back down at what was left of my street, nearly dark now.
‘How far is a mile?’ I said.
‘Not far,’ said the man with the stick. He had a real stick now, made out of a fancy piece of wood, like a banister from a stairwell, or a piece of a bedstead like the one in my friend’s house.
‘Here’s home,’ he said, ‘what’s left of it. Just as well it’s at the end of the row, so we can go round the side or we’d never get to the shelter.’
I looked at his stick. I didn’t want to go into the shelter with him and his stick.
Izzie and the bad boy brothers started to leave.
‘What’s the hut like? How big is it?’ I said. ‘Who else is there? Where do you sleep?’
‘In the hut, of course,’ the smaller bad boy called back. ‘There’s bunk beds. It’s not very big but it’s bigger than a normal hut. There’s a rope swing right next to it and rabbits and a lily pond and other kids and huts and a river we dammed for fish and . . . .’
‘Can I . . . ?’
‘Yes, come and visit us sometime. There’s always space, if you don’t mind the floor.’
‘She’s a girl!’ said the bigger one.
‘No, I mean now,’ I said. ‘Can I come now? Or as soon as I’ve found Mavis?’
‘Lenny, come on!’ said Miss Weatherbeaten from the corner of the building. It was dark now, as dark as it was going to get, as dark as the big fat moon was going to let it, which was not very. We were all lit up again like the night before, picked out from the shadows for the Gerries to see, for the Gerries to put us in their sights and rain down their bombs on us all over again. Rosie was on ahead, her dark hair glinting like jewels set in silver, her hand in the hand of the scary man with the stick as he led her to the shelter, and I knew I’d have to go with her because Miss Weatherbeaten might not know what his stick was really for, for beating naughty kids like me, and like Rosie who didn’t stay where she was told to stay, and like Mavis.
I wished I could go with Izzie and the bad boys, even though they were bad. I grunted goodbye at them and went round the building to the shelter, thinking what about Mavis and what is going to happen to us?
The door of the shelter was hanging off. Miss Weatherbeaten and the man with the stick went to find something to fix it and Rosie and I went inside and sat on a bench, Rosie with her feet swinging, her toes gliding over the puddle that had formed on the floor, and me next to her. She quickly tucked her arm through mine. She had a grizzly big snotter from her nose to her top lip. I was so thirsty I even thought about scooping up the puddle.
‘My mum will be missing me,’ she said.
‘Were there any other girls like you in the town hall?’ I asked her. I didn’t want to think about the bombing that was going to happen soon.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Anyone called Mavis?’
She nodded. My heart leapt and I tried to stand up but she held onto my arm so I sat back down. My feet landed in the puddle, and one shoe got soaking wet.
‘What did she look like?’
But the girl she described was nothing like Mavis, too big, too fat, too blond.
‘Anyone else?’
It was hard to tell. Rosie was only four. How was she going to know?
‘Where were they all going?’ I said.
‘Edimburry, to stay with that lady. But one of the other ladies said she didn’t know where we’d end up,’ said Rosie.
I wondered whether some other girl in another shelter was holding Mavis’s hand. Mavis was as cute as could be. She’d get a piece at anyone’s door, as my mum always said. She had straight dark hair, like mine, and healthy red cheeks, not like mine, well perhaps my cheeks were red at that precise moment but they certainly weren’t healthy. She had big brown eyes that you couldn’t say no to, even if you were told to by my mum. I hoped there was a girl looking after her in a shelter. Better still, I hoped she was a million miles from there and not in a shelter at all.
But one thing I suddenly knew for certain was that there was nothing I could do for Mavis at that exact moment, absolutely nothing, and while that filled me with horror, it made things easier too. The same was true for my mum who was as safe as she could be in a hospital now. So while the scary man and Miss Weatherbeaten were trying to lift some fallen masonry to jam against the door to protect us I had a good think, sitting there in the dark. I peered out at them in the silvery light, with the wisps of smoke and that terrible stink. We needed dinner and water and sleep and air without smoke, and we needed to be away from there.
‘Stay here a minute will you?’ I said to Rosie and climbed out of the shelter, both feet now wet from the puddle. The back of the scary man’s building had a piece missing. A lot of it was on the ground. There was a glow I didn’t like inside a downstairs window. I heard men shouting out in the street.
‘Miss Weatherbeaten . . . ,’ I said.
Miss Weatherbeaten was bent over. I saw them from behind. They didn’t hear me. The scary man had his arm around her shoulders and was murmuring to her; I couldn’t make out what. I heard her sob, and just like I had done, she was retching, and then I heard her voice but it was too quiet to hear properly. Their faces were close together. Something urgent was being said. He held her in front of him. He was holding her by the shoulders and talking to her and even in that silver light which made them look like two ghosts, I could see her listening to him and nodding, and then he listened to her, even though she was still crying as she spoke, and then he nodded too.
Although he wasn’t a big man he had to lean down to see her because she hung her head so low, then he lifted her chin with his finger, so that she had to look at him again. And I saw how kindly he was looking at her, even though he had a stick, and I wondered whether my mum had been wrong about him after all.
Then the sirens went and they looked up and saw me and barked at me to get into the shelter straightaway, and I could see there was something they were trying to hide from me, near the back of the building.
I wondered if it was Mavis, sleeping the sleep of the dead.
‘Is it Mavis? Where is she?’ I said, trying to see round them.
‘No, it’s not Mavis,’ said the man with the stick, and he raised the stick that they had found for him and waved it at me, so that he was scary again.
‘Please go into the shelter, Lenny,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten in a shaky but teachery voice, so I turned to go back in and nearly fell over Rosie again. She had followed me out.
‘I don’t want to go in there!’ said Rosie.
‘I don’t want to go in there either,’ I told Miss Weatherbeaten and the man. ‘I don’t want to stay here. I want to go to Carbeth with those boys and Izzie. We can come back tomorrow. We can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. Please.’
The sirens had stopped now. Rosie took my hand. I held hers tight. The possibility of trying to find Carbeth, just me and Rosie, danced through my mind until I realised I was scared of doing that too.
Miss Weatherbeaten glanced behind her.
‘Carbeth,’ she said. She was thinking about it. ‘How is your bad leg, Mr Tait?’ The scary man with the stick had a name: Mr Tait.
Mr Tait leant on the fancy stick and shook his left leg.
‘Carbeth is a very long way,’ he said, ‘and we’ve almost no time to get out of town. Rosie is too wee and I can’t carry her, and poor Lenny here hasn’t slept since yesterday no doubt, or eaten. None of us have.’
‘I can carry her,’ I said. ‘And we had a sandwich and some tea at the town hall.’
‘No, Lenny, I’ll carry her.’ Miss Weatherbeaten was sure, I could tell. ‘Can you walk, Mr Tait?’ she said. ‘I’ll take responsibility for these two. We only have to get to the hills.’
He looked about him, and fidgeted with his buttons, and took off his cap and scratched his head. Then he gave his leg another little shake and put his hat back on.
‘I’m staying,’ he said. We all stared at him, surprised.
No-one said anything, and then suddenly everyone started talking at once. Mr Tait went into his shelter and pulled a piece of corrugated iron in front of the door but not before Miss Weatherbeaten had hugged him and they had another conversation that I couldn’t hear properly. Funny how adults all seem to know each other.
Then Miss Weatherbeaten took Rosie’s hand and I still had her other one and just at that moment we heard the distant rumble of the killer bees, like a tiny hum, and for a second we listened to it grow and then ran round the house.
But I looked back and saw what they didn’t want me to see.
There were bricks and blocks of stone, great big pieces of wood, a chest of drawers and a gas cooker, and in the middle of all this was a face, a face I thought I half-recognised, floating in this sea of debris. It was the face of a woman, youngish, probably not much older than Izzie, with brown hair, silver in that light, hair that was pulled back in a clip over her ear. I saw her collar, blue with white flowers, and the blood that had flowed down onto it from her mouth. Her lips were dark with it and her eyes were not quite shut, like she was very tired, and not really sleeping the sleep of the dead, tucked up in a bed of bricks.
I was pulled round the corner so suddenly that I nearly fell over again and then I couldn’t see that face any more, and something sank in me right down to my soggy wet shoes. The noise of the German planes was louder now and we hurried as best we could over the mess on the road. My legs were like lead, as if they had grown and were fat cylinders of metal like the bombs and I thought I’d just have to stop. But behind me the engines roared and then the bombs started to come down again, boom-crash, boom-crash, and sometimes the awful screech first, the ground shaking beneath us and grit and stones flying past our heads and some of it hitting us, and not being able to see for the smoke and the burning in our eyes as if the fires had set light to them. And the heat! It was so hot I could hardly breathe and everything looked wibbly-wobbly as if the buildings were made of putty and were being melted.
Miss Weatherbeaten was up ahead of me with Rosie on her hip, trying to hurry in a place where no hurry was to be had, and Rosie was bumping and flopping against her, holding on with both arms tight around Miss Weatherbeaten’s neck.
I scrambled on and I wondered why the Germans were back. There was nothing left to bomb. The houses were all down or torched and the distilleries and Singer’s burning still from the night before. They’d already got my mum, who’d said ‘Who’d want us anyway?’ Well, I wanted to change that. Who’d want to kill us more like? Why would anyone want to kill us? Us of all people? What good was that going to do?
Miss Weatherbeaten came to an abrupt halt and turned sharply towards me. Her eyes were flashing like beacons in her head and her mouth was trembling, as if she was trying to say something but hadn’t quite decided what, which wasn’t like her. Her hand held the back of Rosie’s head so that she couldn’t turn round.
‘Promise me,’ she shouted above the din. ‘Promise me you will look at the ground and nowhere else. Rosie you must close your eyes and keep them closed NO MATTER WHAT. D’you understand? No. Matter. What. It’s very important. More important than staying in the town hall, MUCH more important. Lenny, the ground only.’
‘Can’t I look at the sky?’ I said. ‘Someone’s got to look at the sky.’
‘Well, alright, the sky and the ground under your feet. Nowhere else.’
I tried hard not to look. There were people lying in a row where someone had cleared a space, people who were a funny colour and had torn clothes, burnt clothes and no hair and pools of dark blood around them. They didn’t really look like people but I knew that’s what they were. Some of them had bits missing, like a leg or a foot, and close by there was a collection of those bits. I saw an arm, a hand, a leg.
‘Lenny, the ground!’ said Miss Weatherbeaten fiercely.
But it was too late.
I don’t remember much of our escape through the streets after that, just the noise, the endless drone of the killer bees overhead and the relentless boom-crash, the roar of fire and the shouts of other people trying to escape, and all I saw was the ground beneath my feet and the people sleeping in death, separated from their feet or their hands, no longer whole, unable to complete themselves. I wondered what my arms would look like without my hands. I watched my bloodied hands clamber over the debris with my feet close behind them, and I watched Rosie’s feet swing round Miss Weatherbeaten’s back and her fat little hands grasp Miss Weatherbeaten’s coat, and I wondered if my mum still had her feet and hands attached in the hospital or if she’d lost her hands that were so much a part of her, a part of me.
And then suddenly I realised I was walking on a real road with hardly any bricks or glass and I ran ahead to where Miss Weatherbeaten and Rosie were and we walked all together now as fast as we could up the hill. Rosie was on the ground walking but only for a while to give Miss Weatherbeaten a rest.
We crossed the big main road, Great Western Road. There were other people walking there too. Some of them had bags and budgies in cages. There was a huge woman in several coats but others had nothing, just themselves: a man in only a shirt, trousers and bare feet; a boy with blood down his face and front; a goat leading a little old man, a woman pushing a pram with a baby in it, running with another child running beside her. A lady fell. I don’t know if she got up. People may have shouted but they were drowned out by the noise. Some were well-dressed and fat with layers. Others were ragged and burnt.
And then we came to fields and, being March, the fields were damp and the grass dead and stringy to catch at our feet, but my feet were already wet from the puddle in the shelter and my new dark-blue coat that the lady at the town hall had given me was thick and warm against the bushes and bracken. The air was cleaner. There was less smoke because of a breeze, so we could breathe better. We were going more slowly now. Rosie was being carried again and we knew we were out of the worst, being away from the town, but bombs were still crashing all around us in the hills and the killer bees were still scudding overhead. We could see them clearly circling over our heads through the moonlit air.