Mrs Wilson gave me a little straw hat with a brim that was coming undone and a piece of greying elastic under the chin. There was a pink and yellow stripey band around it and some cloth flowers that had once been purple were stuck beneath the band. It was the kind of hat boys didn’t wear. I put it on my head straightaway and she took it off again straightaway in case I got grit into it. She found another dress for Rosie and a pair of boy’s trousers for me with a belt to hold them up, and jumpers that didn’t match. Her grandchildren were too big now, she said. I wasn’t sure about the trousers. My mum would never dream of wearing trousers far less putting me in a pair. But there was no choice.
When we got back down the hill Miss Weatherbeaten and Mrs Mags made us a bath and stoked up the fire in our hut. We closed the curtains with the green leaves and the threads hanging down. After Mrs Mags left, Miss Weatherbeaten shut the door and soon we were snug as bugs in rugs, as my gran says, and the horse galloped over the stove, with a tick, tick, tick against the wall. Miss Weatherbeaten poured a last kettleful of boiling water into the bath, and then went into the little bedroom and left us to it. (We were embarrassed taking our clothes off in front of strangers.)
Rosie and I looked at each other. Suddenly I felt hot and shy and had to pull the hat over my eyes. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted my mum. She and my gran and my Auntie May were the only people who’d ever seen me without my clothes on, ever, and Mavis of course.
‘I want my mum,’ mumbled Rosie. Her little bottom lip was trembling again and she was having a go at that earlobe.
And I thought, I want Mavis. I felt that wrench of not knowing again and the need to hold Mavis and feel not sick and not scared. And there was poor Rosie with no sister or mother left, no father or brother, no goodness knows who else, and I hoped it wasn’t all true for me too.
So I started to help her undress and this is what I found: Rosie had skint knees, skint elbows and a smattering of bruises all over her body in the oddest places. She wasn’t as thin as Mavis but not far off it. I tried hard not to look but she didn’t seem at all bothered by my stares. I found myself checking that everything was there, two hands, ten fingers, both arms the same length and so on. I had to be sure. Mrs Mags had given us a little piece of soap. Rosie kept very still while she let me scrub her back and wash her hair and when I’d finished she leant back in the bath and slunk away down into the small quantity of water that we had and pulled her earlobe, and I wondered what was going through her little head that had no fringe, but was too afraid to ask.
I wrapped her in the rough old towel Mrs Mags had given us and she sat silently on the rocking chair that Mr Tait had sat in, but she didn’t rock it at all. She just hung her hand from her ear and looked at the orange flames dancing in the glass front of the stove. We heard the page of Miss Weatherbeaten’s book turn and we heard her sigh, and when the bang, bang, bang of the hammer started again we gasped and looked at the window, even though the curtains with the big leaves were closed and we couldn’t see anything.
It’s funny how safe a hat makes you feel and I don’t mean a hat like Mr Chippie’s hat that was made of tin and was shiny and hard. Even an old straw one that nobody but me wanted any more could do it. No-one would dare call me a boy in that hat, even if I had to wear someone’s trousers until my dress was dry. I kept it on in the bath, at least to begin with, then I put it with Mavis’s shoe on the three-legged stool where I could see both the hat and the shoe, in case Miss Weatherbeaten decided to throw them away. I put my old dress there too.
The water in the bath was already black and grimy when I slipped into it, and it was getting cold, and when I’d finished washing, Rosie poured a jug of cold water over my head to rinse out the soap, just as I had done for her, only she missed most of it so I had to do it again myself, and then the clean water had run out. When I stood up the water round my feet was dark with all the dirt I’d carried with me over those strange long days, dirt from the bombing over the hill at home, shiny black dust out of the coalbin in Mrs Wilson’s hut, brown mud from under the rope swing, sticky smears from jammy pieces and stew that I’d eaten and spilt. After my turn with the towel it was black like a miner’s rag and full of bits of hair from both our heads.
BANG, BANG, BANG, went the knock at the door. I fell back into the water with a slop. Miss Weatherbeaten ran through from the other room and grabbed the door handle before anyone could turn it. But it was only Mrs Mags with a mirror for us to look at ourselves in.
I reached for my hat again knocking Mavis’s shoe and my old dress off the three-legged stool and onto the floor. Mrs Mags opened the door a tiny crack and slipped the mirror through it. A slither of icy air reached round my back in the metal tin bath. Miss Weatherbeaten set the mirror down behind me against the chest of drawers.
‘Lenny, you need to have those cuts seen to,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you let Mrs Wilson have a look at them, once you’re dressed?’
She tiptoed back next door. A right good seeing-to. Hmm.
The mirror was one of those cut glass affairs that I’d seen in my friend’s bathroom, the same friend that had a bed like Mr Tait’s new stick. I couldn’t see all of myself in it at once so I had to bob up and down and then stick all the bits of me together in my head. Everything was still there but a lot of it was red and I had itchy scabs all down my legs and arms and on my face, and over my left ear there was a bigger cut that had started bleeding again and felt worse than all the rest. Apart from that I looked very like Rosie, with strange bruises in funny places. We stood together, me and Rosie, bobbing up and down in front of the mirror, jostling each other out of the way, then we got dressed in our new clothes that weren’t really ours.
Rosie’s dress was dark pink, a bit like Mrs Wilson’s hat, and her jumper was light powder blue. My trousers were dark red and my jumper a vivid green, like the green of new leaves in spring, and there was a leather belt that was probably meant for a grown-up, but it had a hole in it made specially for someone as small as me. I rolled up the legs of my trousers, tied the belt tight and put my new hat back on my head.
I felt very sleepy and stiff. Perhaps it was the grit that Mr Tait said I had. But there was a lot of grit in the bath now along with my burnt hair. I saw it when we poured it in bucket-loads into a special hole at the back of the cludgie. I hoped that didn’t mean I was going to be a jelly again.
I thought bath-time was over but Miss Weatherbeaten had found a pair of scissors and wanted to sort out my hair.
‘There’s nothing left to cut!’ I said, thinking I needed every bit of hair I had, but she put me on the three-legged stool anyway and got down on the floor on her knees with the scissors. Snippety-snip-snip, she cut off the last remaining wisps which hung down here and there, reminders of how long my hair used to be. While she was down there she had a look at the cut over my ear and said ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk!’ just like Mrs Wilson the witch had said. Then Mrs Wilson came and had a look. She said that salty water was what my ear needed, three times a day.
‘This is going to hurt,’ she said, and guess what? She wasn’t joking either. She asked me if I had any more cuts that felt like that and I said no although I hadn’t even thought about it. But when Miss Weatherbeaten washed it again later that day I showed her the yellow cuts on my legs and she washed them in salt too.
When Mrs Mags and the boys came to take the bath back, bad boy George said an extra bad word. I heard it loud and clear above everyone else’s chatter. It was ‘bloody’. I couldn’t move I was so shocked and excited. He got a thump on the ear for that and was sent to get more water from the well at the bottom of the hill. Good riddance to bad rubbish is what I thought. And then he did it again. He said ‘bloody hell’ this time. I had to cover my mouth in case I screamed or laughed or said something I shouldn’t. Mrs Mags was red in the face either with embarrassment or from carrying the bath, I couldn’t tell.
After all that we went to the lookout chair, me and Rosie, to wait for Mr Tait. The lookout chair was a big old thing with only one arm that someone had left on the brow of the hill and we sat on it and waited in silence for a long time, Rosie on my knee. We could see right across the valley, even as far as a farm that must have been Mr Tulloch’s, and all the way back down the road towards home. The sun had gone down and a big black rain cloud was where it should have been. We fixed our eyes on the bend in the road so we’d see Mr Tait’s bus as soon as it appeared.
After a while some rabbits came out to eat the grass, twitching their little noses. The sun came back out from behind the cloud and made all the raindrops shine. Birds came and sang in the bushes behind us and over by Mr Tulloch’s farm there were trees that were waiting for winter to end.
The road was busy with people like us, like me and Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten and Mr Tait, walking away from danger, walking to keep themselves safe. A big blue van came and parked behind the Halfway House pub and some people gave out soup. Mrs Mags went down and brought some of those lost people up among the huts and found them a bed for the night.
‘Lenny,’ whispered Rosie once I’d almost forgotten she was there.
‘Mmm?’
‘I know my mum’s dead,’ she said, ‘but when is she coming back?’
‘She’s dead, Rosie, you know . . . .’ That sickness came back like my tummy was pushing up against my heart and my heart was trying to escape out of my mouth.
‘I know, but . . . .’
I didn’t want to talk about this, not least because Miss Weatherbeaten would be angry if she found out I had. It was just that my mum had told me not to lie, and so had my gran. It was very annoying because it meant I couldn’t, for instance, for talking’s sake, take an extra biscuit. I’d be scared of them asking if I’d taken an extra biscuit, because then I’d have to tell the truth and be found out. But then my mum had also told me there were times when little lies were alright. Telling Rosie her mum was coming soon felt like a very big lie, not a little one at all. I thought about what Miss Weatherbeaten had said and I wondered what to say.
‘Lenny?’ said Rosie.
‘I was just thinking that I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think being dead means you’re not coming back.’ She jumped slightly. ‘But I could be wrong, so I don’t know.’
She nodded.
‘But my mum always comes back,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t go anywhere without me.’
‘She probably didn’t mean to. It was probably an accident that she didn’t come back,’ I said. ‘Lots of accidents happened that night, remember?’
Clearly she did remember because she was pulling at her ear again, vigorously. She was staring into the distance at where the road disappeared but I could tell she was seeing things inside her head too. I wished I wasn’t too scared to ask what she saw in there, but I was.
‘What did the ARP man say?’ I said.
She thought about this for a moment. The rabbits appeared again and sat nibbling a few feet away, pausing every so often to listen.
‘He said “Hello, what’s your name?” so I told him.’ She stopped for a minute and pursed her lips. ‘And he said “Why are you wandering about here? Where’s your family?” so I told him.’ She stopped again to watch the rabbits. Her hand drifted up towards her earlobe.
‘What did you tell him?’ I said after a bit. She seemed to have got stuck.
‘I told him I’m Rosie Tomlin,’ she said.
The rabbits were nuzzling each other.
‘And?’ I said.
‘And what?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
A hammer went bang, bang, bang again and all the rabbits ran away. The birds in the bushes behind us fluttered in the branches.
‘I told him my mum and dad and gran and big sister Rhona were at home,’ she said, ‘and he said “Where’s home?” And I told him the address because my mum made me learn it. I couldn’t find my house.’
‘What next?’
‘He said “Oh, dear”.’
‘Oh, dear,’ I said. ‘He said “Oh, dear” and then what?’
‘He said “Who was in your house?” So I told him again.’
‘And?’
‘He said “I’ll do my best”.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Well, no. He said other things like “Hold on tight” when he was carrying me, and “Close your eyes” and then he brought me down to the La Scala.’
Suddenly I was very angry with Mr Chippie even though none of it was his fault, but then I remembered how kind he had been to me. He’d promised me he’d find Mavis too and instead he found Rosie. I tried wishing again that Rosie would be Mavis but it didn’t work. Mavis was a thumb sucker. Rosie tweaked her earlobe.
Something flashed on the horizon at the bend in the road where it disappeared over a hill. We stood up even though we couldn’t see any better standing and we watched the sunlight glint off something that was creeping along the road at a snail’s pace. After a bit this shiny thing turned into Mr Tulloch and his horse and cart with the silvery milk churns on the back. When he got closer we waved at him, but he didn’t see us.
Then Miss Weatherbeaten sneaked up behind us and we nearly jumped right out of our skins. She sat down on our chair and I didn’t know what to say again. The sun was making her face glow yellow and her reddish-brown hair glinted with gold.
‘I brought you this, Lenny,’ she said, ‘in case it got lost. I know it’s quite important to you.’
It was my old dress with Mavis’s shoe still in the pocket. I took it from her and turned it over in my hand. Beside our new clean clothes that were somebody else’s, this rag of a dress looked filthy and useless, but I decided to put it on anyway seeing as it was all I had left of my mum and Mavis. I started to take off my bright green jumper so that I could put it on underneath.
‘Lenny, I think we ought to wash that first,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten.
‘Why do you want that old thing anyway?’ said Rosie.
I pulled the dress away from Rosie’s grasp.
‘What do you want to do with it?’ said Miss Weatherbeaten kindly.
I couldn’t speak. I don’t know why. I stood very still, I’m not sure how long for. When Miss Weatherbeaten put her hand on my arm I jumped.
‘It’s Mavis’s, isn’t it?’ she said softly. ‘The shoe?’
Rosie was kicking the grass around the bushes.
I managed to nod my head, but it was like I was all filled up with rain water and when I moved my head it rushed out through my eyes and down my cheeks.
‘What if . . . ?’ I said between sobs. ‘What if . . . ?’ I pulled my hat down over my face and just stood there sniffing like a baby, like Rosie had done, like I’d seen Mavis do, standing in front of Miss Weatherbeaten with tears and snotters running down my face. I squeezed Mavis’s shoe so hard the blood escaped from one of my cuts again and ran onto the dirty blue of the dress.
Miss Weatherbeaten stood up and took the hand that squeezed the shoe and opened it up.
‘Tsk, tsk,’ she said and shook her head in that way I hate grown-ups doing, but what could I do? Then she put an arm round me and sat back down on the chair and held me in close. I could tell this was something new for her.
‘Can I see the shoe?’ she said.
She turned it over in her hands like I had done, even though it meant we were pulled close together. Finally, without a word, she put the dress and the shoe on her lap.
‘Oh, look!’ she said in a whisper. ‘Rabbits.’ They were back to nibble the shoots under the tree.
Rosie suddenly kicked at the grass and ran at the rabbits.
‘Oh!’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. Then, forgetting the rabbits she said, ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we tie the strap of Mavis’s shoe to your belt?’
It felt funny to hear Miss Weatherbeaten say Mavis’s name. I half-wanted to take it back and keep it for myself. I know that doesn’t make sense.
‘And I’ve got another idea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I take this dress, what’s left of it, and wash it and make a bag out of it for you to keep Mavis’s shoe in? You know you have to give these clothes back soon.’
The belt idea I liked, but the dress I wasn’t so sure. My mum had made that dress. It was light blue with pink stitching and she had put pink flowers on the collar, daisies or maybe they were lilies, I wasn’t sure, and there were more flowers on the pocket, not a lot but enough to make it mine and nobody else’s. Except Mavis. Her flowers were purple.
Rosie started yanking up the grass in wet handfuls and throwing them over us.
‘Stop it, Rosie,’ I said and we ducked, but she kept on.
‘Stop it, Rosie,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten, but Rosie tossed wet grass over our heads anyway. She was laughing now as if this was the funniest thing ever, and I can tell you it wasn’t.
‘Stop it, Rosie!’ I said. ‘Stop it!’
‘You stop it!’ she squealed.
‘Stop it!’ I shouted.
A shock of rain hit me in the eye. In my blindness I reached out for Rosie to grab and hold her but a shower of grass like green snow floated before my eyes. Rosie screamed a shriek of laughter. It was sudden and close, like being punched, and I swung my hand back to hit her. Miss Weatherbeaten grabbed my wrist from over my head and held it tight, so that I was helpless, one arm vertical. Mavis’s shoe fell from her lap. Rosie plucked it from the ground like another handful of grass and ran off up the hill with it, still giggling in that forced, pretend, lying sort of way. Miss Weatherbeaten let go of my hand and hared after her. She had my dress. It’s pocket bounced off her leg as I watched her go and she called out for Rosie. I could only walk stiffly after them, helpless and stupid and bereft.
When I was past the bushes and had a clear view up the hill, I saw the two bad boys, George and Dougie. They had Rosie between them, each holding an arm while she wriggled to get free. Mavis’s shoe was not in her hand. Miss Weatherbeaten was striding up the hill towards them, her big old-fashioned coat and my old dress flapping in the wind beside her. I couldn’t hear what was said but Miss Weatherbeaten was waggling her finger at Rosie and I hoped the bad boys would do something really bad to Rosie for being a horrible wee besom and stealing Mavis’s shoe when she knew perfectly well it was important and the only thing I had left of Mavis, who I might never see again and who might even be dead. I turned round and thumped my way back to the bushes pulling my jumper round my neck to keep off the rain, and although the bushes had no leaves I crouched underneath them anyway for whatever shelter they could give me, and stared fuming at the ground which was strewn with bits of grass thrown up by horrible Rosie.