When we came to a big flat stone as wide as a road which was pushing up out of the grass, we climbed up onto it and stopped. There were other people on the stone too. They were watching the sky and watching Clydebank, shouting about what was happening.
‘That’s Yoker distillery,’ said a woman, pointing. ‘The bastards! Our James’ll have been down there!’
When I stood there and looked back towards Clydebank, all I could see was a huge orange glow over the whole town and reaching up into the sky, and I felt a pang for Mavis because she was still lost and I hoped the fire hadn’t gobbled her up like the big scary dragon in her book. She wouldn’t have stood a chance in there.
‘We have to go back,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Miss Weatherbeaten, turning suddenly to look at me. Rosie burst into tears.
‘I still haven’t found Mavis. I don’t know why I came here.’
‘We’ll find Mavis tomorrow. We can’t go back,’ she said.
‘But I have to find Mavis!’
She let go of Rosie and put an arm around me and tried to pull me in towards her but I threw her off and jumped down from the rock.
‘Lenny!’ she shouted.
‘Lenny!’ screamed Rosie.
And I lurched to a halt.
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ I muttered, gazing up into the orange sky. I pulled Mavis’s shoe from my pocket and rubbed the leather between my finger and thumb. What was I thinking? Poor Mavis! And my mum. Why didn’t I stay? I can’t go on from here. Where’s Mavis? Where is she? Why did I think I could leave her? She’s probably under a building right now calling for me, calling for me and trapped . . . .
A killer bee appeared from nowhere and roared over my head. I threw myself onto the ground. Behind me, on the rock, there were screams, then a mighty explosion and we were all showered with mud.
‘Mum and Mavis, Mum and Mavis, Mum and Mavis . . . ,’ I said over and over under cover of my arms which were wrapped tightly around my head.
Rosie screamed a scream that would cut you in two. ‘I want my mum!’ It was as if she was tearing her own throat out. ‘I want my mum!’ she screamed and I heard it because it’s what I wanted to scream too. ‘I want my mum!’
Another plane, and another, and another, the bombers roared above us, ripping through the air, like God being angry, shouting down at us and tearing everything to pieces, even the trees and the hills, the grass torn from the ground and the bare rocks exposed in the moonlight.
Mum and Mavis, Mum and Mavis, Mum and Mavis; am I dead yet? Mum and Mavis, Mum and Mavis . . . .
I leapt like a cat when Miss Weatherbeaten laid her hand on my shoulder. Miss Weatherbeaten’s words ran over me in a fog of noise and her hand trembled against me. She was on the ground beside me and Rosie was there too. Miss Weatherbeaten picked me up and hugged me on her lap and unfolded my arms from over my head and my legs that were up at my chin, stiff and hard as if I’d been all nailed together. She was shaking all the time she did it and Rosie was against her shoulder and then under her arm. We all three rocked as if we were one scared little kid in the corner of the playground.
‘We’re going to be fine,’ she said. ‘There is nothing we can do about anyone else just now, only ourselves, and we have to stay together and be sensible and carry on over the hills because no-one can possibly go back in there. Just keep going and stay with me. Oh, my goodness, stay together whatever we do, and let’s not look back any more, just hope and pray that everyone will be alright.’
It was like the words were tumbling out of Miss Weatherbeaten’s mouth into my ears, but then I cried and she cried and I could hear Rosie shivering beside us, shivering and hiccuping like she’d been drinking fizzy juice, but she hadn’t, and we all shook trying to find our breath between crying.
And then Miss Weatherbeaten took us to the burn that was running not far off along the side of the path and she cupped her hands so that we could drink some water. Then I drank and I drank some more with my face in the water, I was so thirsty. We washed our faces in it too and we washed Rosie and drank some more because the only drink we’d had all day was the drop of tea at the town hall.
Miss Weatherbeaten said it was true, we didn’t know what had happened to Mavis and that it was quite possible she had not survived, but far more likely she had and was somewhere safe and warm right then at that precise moment. She said the best thing I could do for her now was to look after myself and keep myself alive so that I could look after her better when we did find her. She said a lot of other things that made me feel very tired.
It struck me that Miss Weatherbeaten was not at all like the Miss Weatherbeaten I’d known at school who would have banged her ruler on my desk and told me to stop crying IMMEDIATELY or she’d give me something to cry about. She’d have told me to go and wash IMMEDIATELY if I’d been dirty or she’d have promised me that right good seeing-to that she was always on about. It struck me too for the first time that no-one I knew had ever had a right good seeing-to from Miss Weatherbeaten.
When we went back to the big flat rock, Mr Tait was there with his small brown suitcase. He must have followed us after all and I couldn’t help being pleased, even though I couldn’t decide whether he was a bad man or good one. Miss Weatherbeaten wasn’t as surprised as Rosie and I were. Rosie crawled up into his lap and fell asleep straightaway, even though the killer bees were still dropping their bombs, and we sat on the edge of that rock in a little row, me squashed in between Mr Tait, the not-quite-so-scary man with the stick, and Miss Weatherbeaten who was looking very weather-beaten indeed, but whose shoulder was comfortable anyway.
I suppose I must have drifted into a half-sleep, sleeping the sleep of the living, because I heard them talking but couldn’t understand. Broken sentences drifted over my head.
‘. . . very basic, but needs must . . . ,’ she said.
‘. . . what if there’s no room?’ he said. ‘We won’t be the first.’
‘. . . can’t surely turn us away?’ she said.
‘. . . right thing to do in . . . ,’ he said.
‘. . . no sanitation or water . . . ,’ she said.
‘. . . safe where we can stay for a few days . . . .’
‘. . . bring Rosie back . . . ,’ she said.
‘. . . no bombs . . . no fire . . . no bodies . . . no danger . . . .’
Miss Weatherbeaten’s shoulder shifted slightly.
‘. . . my closest friend in all the world . . . ,’ she said. ‘All I had.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
‘. . . nothing left to lose,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it may not seem like it now but there’s always something left, something that’s still to come.’
I wondered what he meant. I knew that if I lost my mum and Mavis, I mean really lost them, forever, then I’d want to be dead too, and then I wished I hadn’t woken up to have that thought. I opened my eyes and there was that orange glow over the whole town and in the sky I saw the outlines of the planes, like moths fluttering at a candle. On the path that skirted round about us, the white moonlit faces of other Clydebankers floated past us, trudging slowly and methodically up into the hills.
Miss Weatherbeaten carried Rosie a little bit of the way after that until she’d woken up properly. Mr Tait carried his small brown suitcase and his stick. We crossed fields and moorland, climbed gates and snagged our coats on briar. There were sheep hiding against walls and cows huddled against the farm buildings not far off. The hills rose up, solid, silent and surely indestructible, and trees shifted by the path – pictures of a quiet country life of hard work and peace, a life my dad always wanted but couldn’t persuade my mother, a life disturbed now by killer bees.
The path started down the other side of the hill. We stopped and put our backs to a big tree (a beech, Miss Weatherbeaten couldn’t help telling us) and Mr Tait opened his suitcase and pulled out some cheese and a loaf of bread which he ripped into pieces and gave to us. Nothing ever tasted so good!
But while we were sitting there, one of those big black killer bees growled right over our heads nearly deafening us all. We ducked. The tree shook angrily and the plane passed on up the valley into which we were peering, our valley of hope. How could that be? It never occurred to me that the Germans might follow us here, that bombs could land in Carbeth too.
‘So where can we go now?’ I wailed to everyone and no-one.
‘To Carbeth, though Lord knows what we’ll find there,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘All I know is it won’t be bombs even if that one did go down there.’
‘Will my mum and dad be there?’ said Rosie. She was shivering again, almost as much as me. No-one answered her so she had to ask again. Still no-one spoke. Finally Mr Tait told her we had to go to Carbeth for safety. We’d find out about her mum and dad later. Rosie gazed back at the orange sky above Clydebank and tugged at her earlobe.
Mr Tait groaned as he pulled himself upright with the aid of his stick. He seemed to be limping now which I hadn’t noticed before, but we needed to move to keep warm. Perhaps he had difficulty with the steep downhill we were on.
A burn was now running along beside us, murmuring quietly to itself but no birds sang in the trees at its edge, and at the bottom of the hill it ran under a bridge which carried a road. I remembered what the smaller of the bad boys and Izzie had said: Kilbowie Road, over the hill, over the stiles, along the main road and turn right at halfway. Halfway to what? I couldn’t tell, but we were at a main road so we could go ‘along the main road’, and off in the distance up ahead we could see another bedraggled little group with bags and bundles shuffling along just like us.
I wondered again how big a mile was and felt sure we had passed many, many miles already. The thought that we might have missed the way began to creep slowly into my mind and gave me something new to think about.
I tried to think about how good it was going to be to get where we were going. There was a rope swing for a start. There was also a rope swing where we went to stay in Ayrshire at the beginning of the war, evacuated without my mum, but I was only on it once because I fell off. They said I was too wee to be on it in the first place. But I knew I could do it. Then my mum had come and taken us back to Clydebank because we weren’t clean or properly fed, so I never went on the swing again.
And there was a lily pond at Carbeth. I’d never seen a lily pond but I couldn’t help thinking it sounded beautiful. I imagined sunlight sparkling on water, reeds swaying, grasses full of little wild flowers, and lilies like big daisies only pink, or maybe yellow sticking out of the water. I’d never seen lilies, even in books, so I wasn’t sure.
And rabbits, he said there were rabbits. My friend had a pet rabbit, a chocolate brown one with black ears. I liked rabbits.
But most of all I thought about how excited the smaller bad boy was when he told me about Carbeth, how he didn’t look bad any more at all and it was hard to believe he was the same bad boy who had poked me back into the canal with a stick.
The big moon spread its eerie brightness, lighting our way and glinting on the road. Although we could still hear the boom of the bombers and sometimes they flew over our heads, they didn’t drop their bombs on us, only on home. We could still see the orange glow of Clydebank above the hill filling the sky all around, but a certain quietness was there too and the sound of our feet on the hard road, the shuffling of our coats, our sniffs and sighs all took on gigantic proportions.
I began to feel a new kind of tiredness, a tiredness that expects no end. I could feel my bones banging together, crunching at the knees and elbows, fleshless bones, bones that magically held themselves up without muscles, thwack, thwack on the road. Perhaps we were dead after all only we didn’t know it. Perhaps we had died and gone to hell but then God had changed his mind and rescued us and we were on our way to heaven. Our faces were blue, and the trees were blue, Mr Tait’s brown jacket and trousers were blue, and his small brown suitcase. The fur on Miss Weatherbeaten’s collar was blue, and my coat and Rosie’s were both super blue, because they were blue to begin with.
I wondered whether to tell Miss Weatherbeaten that we had missed our way and I sang to myself, just quietly so as not to disturb the others, while I wondered. ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run, Don’t let the farmer catch you with his gun.’ I wondered if there were any real rabbits there by that road. I couldn’t see any but perhaps they were in bed where I should have been or too scared to come out of their holes.
And while I was singing and walking I remembered coming up into the hills with my dad. I suppose it must have been those same hills and it must have been just after we arrived in Clydebank because he left as soon as the war started. We saw rabbits that day, and deer. I wondered if the deer were hiding too. We’d had a picnic by a river and went paddling. Mavis was too wee, I suppose, so it was just Dad and me. He had chocolate and sandwiches and beer and it was sunny and warm, just me and my dad who’s missing presumed dead.
And then I remembered the old lady with the bag in the house on the corner who appeared in the downstairs window and was gobbled up by the fire. It was her who said ‘missing presumed dead’ and she said it about someone else, I think, her husband or son, and not about my dad, and that gave me a warm feeling, that perhaps he was only missing and not actually dead. My mum had been missing and she wasn’t dead. Maybe Mavis was the same. ‘On the farm, no poor rabbit, comes to harm, because I grab it! Run, rabbit, run!’
A plan was starting to form in my head. We would go to Carbeth and find a hut and then I’d find the hospital my mum was in and bring her to Carbeth and while I was at it I’d find Mavis, probably at the town hall. I’d bring Mavis out here too and we’d stay there in a hut safe from the bombs and Mum would get better. Mavis and I would catch fish in the river and play with the other kids, and we’d find ourselves a proper house and stay forever, and my dad would come home and bring lots of medals and presents for us all. We probably wouldn’t go to school either because we’d all had such a terrible time, except perhaps Miss Weatherbeaten who could live with us and teach in the school they had out there, Carbeth school probably. The sun would shine of course, so we’d be happy every day and eat bananas seeing as we hadn’t had any since the war started. No-one would ever mention the Germans because we’d have forgotten all about them. We’d all be far too busy being happy.
Apart from my singing, no-one uttered a word for ages, so when Miss Weatherbeaten said she thought we’d arrived it gave me quite a fright. I think I may have been sleepwalking, just on and on and on, and I found it hard to get any words out, just like coming out of a dream.
There was a low stone building by the side of the road and a track running away from us alongside it. The track was full of shadows, dark black in contrast to the brightness of the moon and I was blinded for a while. Rosie started to snivel again at the thought of going up this track so Miss Weatherbeaten and Mr Tait left us at the bottom with Mr Tait’s small brown suitcase. We leant against the end of the long low building. It was warm to the touch. There must have been a fire on the other side of it. Rosie and I crouched down into the darkness and I put my arm around her and we slumped onto the grassy verge and fell asleep.
A short while later we were woken by the sound of a giant killer bee buzzing right over our heads. We looked up and saw its blue-grey underbelly soaring over us, over the long low building and through the blackened silhouettes of the trees, and then we heard a deadened BOOM as it dropped its cargo over the hill and another fainter one a few seconds later. We leapt to our feet.
‘Miss Weatherbeaten!’ we shouted. ‘Miss Weatherbeaten!’ and Rosie shouted ‘Mr Tait! Mum!’ (For my part I still wasn’t sure about him and his stick, even though he’d been very kind to Miss Weatherbeaten.) We screamed and shouted and nearly started up the dark and shadowy path after them, but not quite. Fortunately Miss Weatherbeaten came running back down the track to us with Mr Tait hobbling a good way behind her.
‘It’s alright, I’m here,’ she said, holding both of us in close and tight, which actually hurt a bit because of all my cuts. ‘We’ve found a hut that’s open just up this hill.’
Just up this hill? Grown-ups will tell you anything to get you to do what they want. That hill was the worst hill I ever climbed in the whole of my life. My legs, which had been bones without flesh not so long before, became pure jelly, like the stuff around my mum’s meat loaf (which didn’t have much meat by the way). It was a steep hill with stones all shapes and sizes to trip you up and it went on for ever and ever. I remember a fence, a little gate, a door that made a squeaky sound like the oven door at home and I remember a foosty sort of smell, a smell I know now as moss on wood, and I remember the candle being lit, the flame sputtering at first and throwing out tiny white sparkles and then the yellow glow that grew and took the blueness from our faces that were gathered all four around it.
There was an old battered sofa against a wall with a crocheted blanket over it. Rosie and I sat down on this until Miss Weatherbeaten told us to get up again and put the blanket over us. We sat side by side with the crocheted blanket tucked under our chins while she and Mr Tait lit another candle and looked about the place. My eyes were closed before I knew it and I fell asleep to the sound of the stove being filled, and I was back in our single end room in Clydebank with the bang of the kettle on the ring and my mum’s snores beside me in the bed.