So we had arrived in Carbeth at last, wherever that was and whatever that meant, so for those of you who’re not local perhaps I should explain what all these huts are about. This is what Miss Weatherbeaten told me.
After the last war the landowner allowed some soldiers who came back to build temporary homes on his land. Gradually more came to be built by workers from Glasgow and its smelly factory towns (like Clydebank) so they could have somewhere nice to go at the weekends and for holidays. They were not permanent homes, only escapes, but escape was exactly what we and many others needed. We were neither the first nor the last to arrive. There was no organisation organising us. We were dependent on the charity and goodwill of strangers, and of each other.
When I woke up the following day it wasn’t actually the following day, as it turned out, it was the day after that, or very nearly and I think I only woke up because I was starving hungry. It was dark outside and I’d been dreaming of voices whispering and the crackle of fire.
‘Welcome back,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten.
I had been lying on the old sofa, my back to its back and my arm cradling Rosie who lay alongside me. My head had been in Miss Weatherbeaten’s lap and my neck was stiff and sore as a result. I rubbed it and pulled myself upright at the other end of the sofa.
‘It’s still dark,’ I said.
‘You missed the daylight,’ said Mr Tait from the other side of the stove. He was rubbing his hands over its warmth, and although I had on my old dress, the new dress and the coat the lady at the town hall had given me, and the cut-off petticoat from the fur lady at the La Scala, I was jittery with cold. The crochet blanket fell back over Rosie and a tiny hand came out and yanked it jealously in.
‘Come over by the fire, Lenny, and have some bread,’ said Mr Tait.
I thought about this. He still had his stick and I didn’t know where I was. It was dark outside and I wanted the daylight, I wanted to see things. I wanted my mum and Mavis, and I wanted my dad too, come to think of it. What about my dad? Wasn’t it about time he got here? I knew he wasn’t coming, of course I knew that, and neither were Mavis or my mum, but it’s still what I wanted, and I was cross with them all for not being there.
So I didn’t answer and Mr Tait didn’t ask again. I looked round the room so that I could make up my mind about it.
The first thing I have to tell you is that it was pretty fancy for a hut, so to begin with I thought we were in the wrong place. I thought huts were small brown affairs with thin walls made of strips of wood with only a tiny window for light or no window at all. I thought they were full of spades and flowerpots and jam jars filled with nails, like my uncle’s hut when we went to visit him, and hammers and saws and screwdrivers hanging on hooks from the walls. So it didn’t seem much like a hut to me. It had more than one room for a start. There was a door over in the corner and another one beside it, although the shadow was too thick to be sure. The stove was small and pot-bellied which meant it had a round door with curved glass in the front. It sat to the left of the sofa where I was. Its door was open and inside there were logs burning and hissing and sighing as if they too were glad they’d finally arrived there. Mr Tait was at the other side of this stove swaying in a wooden rocking chair. His stick was on the floor beside him and beside that there was a three-legged stool like the one in the cow byre at my other uncle’s farm that I’d forgotten about completely until then.
Mr Tait tapped the stool with his fingers by way of an invitation to join him, but I wasn’t finished looking round the hut, if it really was a hut.
Beyond Miss Weatherbeaten, who was smiling and watching me, there were thick heavy curtains which might have had big green leaves on them except they were past their best, like my mum said she was, and had rips in them and threads hanging down at the bottom. There must have been a window behind them and a bit further along there was another door with a large wooden handle on it, the front door through which we must have come in whenever that must have been. My eyes strayed back to Mr Tait in his rocking chair. He had a brown china teapot in one hand, just like ours at home, and a large cup in the other.
‘Tea, Lenny?’ he said.
I nodded.
The gurgling of the tea landing in the cup filled the heavy silence of the room. He put the teapot on top of the pot-bellied stove and held the cup out to me. I sat exactly where I was so he put it on the little three-legged milking stool then pointed a round wrinkly finger at it and raised his eyebrows in a questioning sort of way.
I nodded again. Miss Weatherbeaten leant forward over the space between her and him and picked up the tea. I half-expected a row for not having better manners but she handed it to me with a smile. I would almost have preferred the row and then I would have known the world was still in some sort of order, but I took the tea which was lukewarm and strong, just how I like it but without milk, and nodded my thanks.
‘It’s somewhere around midnight, Lenny, and we haven’t heard a squeak out of the Germans so I don’t think we need to worry about them any more,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Not tonight anyway.’
‘That’s good isn’t it, Lenny?’ said Miss Weatherbeaten.
I was just about to nod when I noticed a flapping sound like paper in the wind and my eye was caught by a drawing hanging on a single nail above the pot-bellied stove. It was a loose sheet of paper with a line drawing of a horse crossing a field. It swung loosely on its nail, galloping without a rider.
There was a knock at the door.
I looked at Mr Tait and then at Miss Weatherbeaten. Rosie was finally roused. We all four stared at the door as it opened. A boy of about five burst in and came to a sudden halt next to the three-legged milking stool. He ran back to a girl who’d come in behind him and buried his face in her side. I don’t think he was expecting us.
‘Mrs Mags said to tell you you’re welcome to a brew if you’d like to join us,’ said the girl, ‘and there’s a bit of food too if you’d like. We didn’t want to wake you before.’
And then with a sharp intake of breath she drew me a look that made my face burn. Her eyes roamed from the top of my head which, let’s face it, with most of my hair missing wasn’t the head of a girl any more, all the way down my coat, the sticking-out bit of pocket with Mavis’s shoe in it, the new dress underneath that, the bit of cut-off petticoat which was sticking out beneath that, and all the way down to my shoes and grimy socks, both of which were mercifully now dry and crispy.
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ she said.
I felt my jaw drop. I could almost have said the same to her. She was wearing a pair of men’s boots, dungarees of all things, and a thick Aran sweater.
‘We’d love to come,’ broke in Miss Weatherbeaten, ‘if you could just tell us where?’
The girl gave us directions and then, with a final look at Rosie, who was now upright on the sofa with no eyebrows or fringe to cover her sleepiness or confusion, she left taking her small brother with her. A puff of smoke shot out of the pot-belly and unfurled itself towards the ceiling as she closed the door, and the galloping horse swung wildly in the wind.
‘Well, that was friendly enough,’ said Mr Tait.
I shot him a look.
‘Mostly,’ he smiled.
‘They can’t put us out at this time of night, can they?’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘Not with these girls, surely?’ She had wrinkly bits on her face I hadn’t seen before.
‘No, of course they won’t put us out,’ said Mr Tait, but he looked extra wrinkly too. ‘They’re offering us food.’
I didn’t want to go, not a bit, not even a tiny bit but Miss Weatherbeaten said we had to meet the other people there. She pointed out I’d be scared in the hut if I was left by myself, and hungry, and when that didn’t work and I still wouldn’t stand up to go she stopped being the new Miss Weatherbeaten and went back to being a teacher and told me in no uncertain terms that I was to get up IMMEDIATELY and think of others.
So I did, even though the others I was thinking of probably weren’t the ones she meant.
The other hut was quite different from the one I’d woken up in. It seemed to be a lot smaller for a start but that might just have been the number of people crammed in between its wooden walls. There was no floor space at all as far as I could see which wasn’t far because Rosie and I were in behind Miss Weatherbeaten. I was hoping the shadows would hide me completely.
There had been a great hullabaloo going on when we’d listened outside the door but it dwindled to a murmur like the shoosh of our fire when we went in. But not for long.
‘Move along there, George, Dougie,’ said a woman in grey woollen trousers and a jumper that was too small. ‘Come on in. John shift the wee one onto your knee and let these poor souls have some room.’
She waved a hand at all these people and a space magically appeared on a bench. We sat, three in a row with Rosie on Miss Weatherbeaten’s knee. I, myself, was directly opposite the stove and fully lit by two large candles attached to the wall on either side of it. No shadows for me then, so I hung my head.
Mr Tait, remembering his manners stood up again and offered his hand to the woman, glancing round the company for anyone else’s hand that he should shake. There was an old man hidden in the corner, where I wanted to be, in an old cap, a grubby shirt buttoned to his neck and dark-red braces. Mr Tait leant over to him and shook his hand.
‘Mr Tait,’ said Mr Tait.
‘That’s my father-in-law,’ said the woman, and ‘Stop it, you two!’ she said, not to the two men but to some little kids who were having a carry-on behind the sofa. They stopped and their faces appeared over the heads of the people sitting on it.
‘That’s Mr MacInnes,’ she went on indicating the old man in the shadows. He smiled and shrank back to where he’d come from.
‘This is my son, Sandy,’ she said, and a cheer went up, then she went round the room, naming everyone and I started to sweat. It was warm in there with so many bodies, and each time she called a name, every single one of them stared at that person, so-and-so’s sister, uncle, brother, neighbour, friend, and they began to cheer and whistle after each name, and soon it was going to be my turn. As the circle swung towards me I hung my head still further and crept into Miss Weatherbeaten’s shoulder.
‘And there’s Mr Tait,’ she said, and her voice rippled round the room. There was a pause. I was next to Mr Tait. ‘And Bella from next door, and our Izzie on the other side of our guests . . . .’
Izzie?
I stole a glance. It really was Izzie, on the other side of us, two along from Miss Weatherbeaten. What about the bad boys? I stole another quick glance. Yes, they were there too. Miss Weatherbeaten was talking now. I heard ‘Rosie’ and ‘Lenny’ and ‘Miss Wetherspoon’. Then Mr Tait said he was Mr Tait, which he’d already said, and I wondered why he would do that.
‘Well, Mr Tait, Miss Wetherspoon, Rosie and Lenny,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Mrs MacInnes or Mags. Mrs Mags is what everyone calls me. You are all very welcome here. Someone give them all a toddy.’
I forgot most of the names straightaway.
The general uproar wound up to full volume again and the tiny floor space next to Mrs Mags was filled to bursting by two girls. One was Bella from next door who’d come to invite us over and the other looked just like her and must have been her sister. They were arguing over a kettle and some jam jars and after a minor tussle we were all of us handed a jar, Rosie included, with steaming hot toddy in each of them. Whisky! I couldn’t drink that, my mum would kill me, and anyway, it tasted so . . . well, I’d no idea how it tasted!
‘Extra honey for the wee one,’ I heard Mrs Mags say, and a teaspoon clinked round the jam jar.
While I was being handed my steaming brew I became conscious of eyes on me, not staring but sneaking glances, and the two behind the sofa were making very little pretence about it either and were whispering loudly together. Who were all these kids? Surely they didn’t all belong to Mrs Mags? I sipped the hot golden liquid and let its whisky slip up my nose and make my eyes water.
Over my head Mr Tait and Miss Weatherbeaten were talking to Mrs Mags about our hut, which of course wasn’t ours but somebody else’s, somebody who was completely unaware of our presence there. Mrs Mags didn’t seem to think that was a problem, for the time being anyway, which was a big relief.
I didn’t really want to talk to anyone so I looked at the drawings that were pinned on nails all around the wall. They were like the one over the stove in our hut, which wasn’t ours, except that they weren’t all horses, just some of them, with the result that cows, sheep, ducks and deer were also galloping round the walls in the heat and the draft caused by so many people in such a wee small space. There was a drawing of a girl’s face, directly over the stove, so that her chin bobbed up and down as if she was talking. She was smiling, in her eyes as well as her mouth, and I realised it was Izzie, the bad boys’ big sister. People look so different when they smile, and she was smiling now, chattering to the two bad boys, and in her portrait she was chattering away to the whole room.
A bowl of hot rabbit stew and dumpling was thrust into my lap with a twisted fork stuck in it halfway up to the handle. I muttered my thanks and downed the last of the whisky so that I could eat, which made my eyes water all over again. The jam jar was whisked away. We all moved up so that Rosie could have her plate on the bench as a table.
‘There you go, darling,’ said Mrs Mags.
Rosie looked up at her in the same new dress that I wore with the same dark hair that I had only mine was mostly gone. Then she turned to the bowl and ate with great seriousness until nothing at all was left.
The rabbit stew tasted fantastic, with carrots and onions through it as well as the dumpling.
‘No-one slept much last night or the night before so there was too much sleeping today. No-one’s tired,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘I’ll come over with you and see that the hut is alright and you’ve found everything.’
The smaller of the two bad boys from the canal came and took our plates.
‘You made it,’ he said to me, meaning I’d made it to Carbeth, not that I’d made the stew.
I nodded.
‘You didn’t find Mavis.’
I shook my head. He didn’t say any more, but he stayed there with the dirty plates wobbling in his skinny arms until the forks landed on the floor with a clunk and a clatter.
‘Dougie!’ said Mrs Mags, with kindly exasperation. ‘Deary me!’
I tried a smile but my face hurt.
Mrs Mags was clapping her hands now and chasing everyone out or into bed, I don’t know which, but some people disappeared through a door at one end of the room and I could hear the thuds and clumps of elbows against the wooden walls and squabbles over blankets and beds. Others, like Bella and her sister and the two little kids behind the sofa, disappeared out the front door with cheery ‘Goodnights’, so they didn’t all belong to Mrs Mags.
The hut fell quiet.
Mrs Mags took Rosie’s hand and we all went out into the cold night, our feet whistling through the long grass, the dew soaking into my socks, wet feet again. She had brought a large green jug of water with her which she set down on a chest of drawers I hadn’t noticed before. She lit the candles and opened a door.
‘You didn’t sleep in the beds?’ she said. ‘You must sleep in the beds, of course you must!’ She held up her candle so that she could peer at us.
‘We just fell asleep,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten.
‘Yes, I bet! Well, there’s a double bed in here for you and bunks for the kids in this bit.’
There wasn’t room for us all to go through to see but I could hear Mr Tait trying to explain.
‘We’re not married,’ he said.
‘No, sorry, of course you’re not,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘Silly me!’
‘We’re neighbours, some of us,’ said Mr Tait. ‘We found each other wandering about.’
‘Wandering?’
‘Rosie was supposed to go to Edinburgh with . . . who was she going with?’ said Mr Tait. His voice was soft. I tiptoed to the door to help explain.
‘She lost everyone,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone. All dead. So the ARP said. I’m not even sure where she lived but so many of the streets are flattened. You can barely get along most of them. The place is on fire. I mean everything. You’ve seen the orange sky. Shocking, shocking.’ He was shaking his head now and I heard a rasp escape him, that I hadn’t heard before and he put his hand to his mouth, like I did, I suppose to stop the explosions coming out. Perhaps Mr Tait had bombs inside him too.
Mrs Mags put an arm on Mr Tait’s back and so did Miss Weatherbeaten.
‘I’m Lenny’s teacher,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘I lost . . . I lost people too.’ There was a pause while we all waited for her to explain. ‘My friend. My closest friend. She was almost family to me. We did everything together. Except that night. She went to the pictures with some other friends.’
‘How awful, you poor things!’ said Mrs Mags.
‘Lenny’s mum’s legs were crushed so she’s in hospital,’ said Mr Tait, ‘but we don’t know where yet.’
There was a pause. Miss Weatherbeaten and Mr Tait seemed to be sniffing. I listened waiting for them to go on. The story wasn’t finished.
What about Mavis? I thought. No-one even mentioned Mavis.
And all my sadness and my fury came right up from my toes, like that bomb was going to go off no matter what I did, it was going to catch me right there when I wasn’t ready, and I thought of all the terrible things that might have happened to Mavis and how it was all my fault for not looking after her properly, for not keeping her safe from the bad boys, for not running after her fast enough down by the canal. And I thought that no-one even cared.
A gulp of a sob got out, and then another one, and another.
‘I want my mum!’ said Rosie quietly beside me. ‘I want my mum. Where’s my mum?’
We both started to wail. I was vaguely aware of the adults standing looking at us, but I felt like my insides were being wrenched out. Finally I yelled ‘MAVIS!’ at the top of my voice. ‘What about Mavis?’ And Rosie was yelling too.
‘MUM!’ she shouted in that voice wee kids can cut the air with, and pulling at her earlobe till it bled.
There were footsteps and suddenly I felt my face being hit and I fell sideways onto Rosie, knocking her flat and landing on top of her. We lay there knotted together in a sodden heaving heap, while Miss Weatherbeaten shouted at us. I don’t know what she was saying. I was too busy sobbing, and pulling poor whimpering Rosie out from under the debris that was me.
Mr Tait took Miss Weatherbeaten through to the other room with the double bed, and I heard them both talking at once, then Miss Weatherbeaten said, ‘I don’t want to live. What’s the point?’
Mrs Mags helped me and Rosie untangle ourselves and get up. We were both crying like tired babies, all shuddery and shaky, and Mrs Mags poured water from her big green jug into a bowl that was there and helped us wash our face and hands. She cooed just like my Auntie May who’d come to stay last summer and she took us into a room with two sets of bunk beds and a very small space in between, just wide enough to walk. At the back of the room was a door to outside with a window in it. Right opposite that was another very small hut which was the toilet, or the cludgie. It had a love heart carved into the door for light which didn’t make much difference, and a shelf for a candle. She promised not to go away while Rosie and I took our turns, but Rosie wouldn’t shut the door, or let us out of her sight, so we had to stand there and look the other way, with the wind blowing through us.
Then Mrs Mags took us back into the hut and closed the door behind us.
‘Tomorrow we can try to find your mums and whoever else,’ she said. She tucked us both into one of the bottom bunks, kissed us both goodnight even though she didn’t know us at all, and left. Then she sneaked back in and said, ‘Come over tomorrow and I’ll give you some fat to put on your burny face, Lenny.’ Then after a bit she said, ‘Try to be patient. The grown-ups are upset too.’
I didn’t reply. How would she know? She hadn’t lost Mavis.