But not quite. Miss Read kept me back so that I could help put the books back in the cupboard and by the time I was finished the others had already started up the road. No-one wanted to wait for the bus which wouldn’t be there for a while yet, even though it was miles and miles and miles to walk. I could see Sandy and Dougie and bad George up ahead, nearly at the brow of a hill. The stragglers were mostly the wee-est ones.
So I stood on the road where the burn dives under it and wondered which way to go, weighing up Mavis at home over the misty hills, my mum in hospital down the road in Glasgow, and Mr Tait coming back from there to Carbeth.
Mr Tait had promised. He’d promised before and kept his word, so maybe he would keep it this time as well and find Mavis, Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten and bring them all back to Carbeth with my mum. On the other hand grown-ups were always making promises they couldn’t keep. And some grown-ups were straightforward disorganised, like Miss Weatherbeaten who had missed the bus. I didn’t fancy being left in Carbeth when Mr Tait missed the bus too. Everything rested on Mr Tait.
Miss Read came out of the school with the other teacher and made the decision for me. She thought I’d lost my way and very kindly told me what I already knew, that I had to follow all the other kids until I got to the Halfway House pub. Then she waited and watched while I followed her instructions, so I set off for Carbeth.
And then Sandy came back for me.
‘I’m not a baby,’ I said.
‘Thought you might not be able to see to get home.’
I looked at him sideways.
‘Without your glasses?’ he said.
I stopped. My hat shoogled precariously. I grabbed it quick before the breeze took it. Sandy was laughing so I laughed too and we carried on up the road.
‘You shouldn’t mind George,’ he said. ‘He’s alright really. He was evacuated last year and he’s been like that ever since. He says there was a lady there who had lots of friends and kept funny hours and he had to work all the time.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. I wished my mum had lots of friends.
‘Poor George,’ he said.
I couldn’t agree less, but I didn’t say so.
‘Dougie was going to go there too but their mum and dad realised something wasn’t right,’ he said. ‘So they went and brought George back instead.’
‘Hmm.’
‘He’s just as horrible to his mum as he is to you.’
This didn’t make me feel a lot better.
‘Hates his mum.’
After a few hundred yards we came to a broken-down house I hadn’t noticed before behind the hedge. Its roof was caving in and the door was half-open and it smelled of cowpats. Sandy wanted to explore so we climbed the gate, but I didn’t like it.
‘I don’t like it here,’ I said. ‘I want to go.’ I waited by the gate for him to come back. There were sheep further down the field, soggy things with mud on their legs, and crows over the turnip field next door. The sky was grey and the wind was sneaking inside my coat.
‘Let’s go round the back,’ he said, ignoring me, but I stayed where I was and sang under my breath, ‘Down in the meadow where the green grass grows, Where Lenny bleaches all of her clothes, She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet . . . .’
‘Aren’t you coming?’ he called back.
‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high . . . .’
Then Dougie and bad George came running out of nowhere shouting ‘BOO!’ and Sandy came back shouting ‘Leave her alone!’
So I screamed and landed in a cowpat and the mud that was everywhere and I climbed back over the gate and onto the road.
‘Bastards!’ I shouted, shaking my fist like wee Rosie. ‘Bastards, you’re all bastards! I’m telling Mr Tait on you! You wait! You just wait!’
‘Shut up! You great bullies! Why did you do that? She’s only nine!’ It was Sandy and then I heard the thwack and grunt of boys fighting, stupid boys, always doing stupid things, and I wiped my tears back with the sleeve of my new coat from the town hall and banged my feet on the road to get the cow poo off, then ran as fast as I could along the road.
It felt good to say ‘bastard’ out loud, but scarily naughty so I kept on saying it but only inside my head, in case someone else might hear. But I was saying it so loudly inside my head and banging my feet on the tarmacadam so hard that I didn’t hear the bus come up behind me until it was right beside me. It roared past me with a snarl that threw me into the hedge that ran along the roadside and then it came to a crunching halt a few yards up ahead. As if I didn’t have enough cuts and bruises already!
A lady I hadn’t seen before stepped down and hurried back to me.
‘Are you alright, love?’ she said and helped me out of the hedge. ‘You look like you’ve been in this hedge before, if you don’t mind me saying so!’ She fussed about and pulled the twigs off me and straightened my torn hat. ‘Nice hat!’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I stuck my hand in my pocket and found Miss Read’s clean white handkerchief which wasn’t very clean or white any more but was a lot better than the sleeve of my coat that I couldn’t very well use with this kind lady standing there being so particular.
When we got to the door of the bus, I saw Mr Tait standing at the top of the steps with his fancy bedpost stick in one hand, and his other resting on a special handle for people getting off.
‘Mr Tait!’ I said. And the tears sprung to my eyes at the same time as the grin which spread right across me and through me and lit me up from the inside.
‘I did promise,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I? Good gracious whatever happened to you?’
He thanked the kind lady and we sat down on a seat together and it seemed like no time at all till we were standing at the side of the Halfway House pub looking up that big enormous hill to where ‘our’ hut stood. I told him everything that had happened, apart from me calling the boys ‘bastards’. And then it hit me!
‘Where are they?’ I said. It was an accusation really to us both. I had forgotten all about them, Mavis, Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten, and he had let me prattle on about silly playground games. That meant he hadn’t found them, I was sure, and I crossed my fingers for it not to be true. ‘Please?’ I said, all my longing squeezed into that one little word.
‘Well . . . ,’ he began. ‘Well . . . .’
‘Well . . . ?’ I said, helping him on. This slowness was not good news. It meant that Mr Tait was trying to think how best to tell me something that he knew I didn’t want to hear. ‘You didn’t find them, did you?’ I said flatly.
‘Well, actually . . . ,’ he said, and he put his bottom lip over his top one and blew. Those wrinkles on his forehead squeezed together. ‘In a sort of a way I did. Let’s walk a little way or we’ll never get up this blasted hill.’
Blasted hill? I thought. That wasn’t very polite! What had happened to Mr Tait? I thought it better to just wait and see what he might say, in his own very good time.
‘Miss Wetherspoon, in her great wisdom,’ he said between breaths, ‘has decided to go to an evacuation centre to help out – a kind of rest centre.’ He stopped briefly and rubbed his back and caught his breath. I held mine, thinking over and over again, what about Rosie, what about Rosie? I bit the fingernail on my forefinger until I pulled a great strip of nail right off all the way down to the quick. He took ages to get going again.
‘What about Rosie?’ I said in the end, unable to help myself.
He coughed loudly putting a fist to his mouth and then licked his lips a few times before replying.
‘She took Rosie to the town hall.’
I put both hands over my mouth.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Oh, no! How could she? Wee Rosie!’
‘I know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m sure Miss Wetherspoon was doing what she thought was the very best thing for Rosie. It’s just not what you or I would have done. Quite extraordinary that she’s a teacher, really.’ He muttered this last under his breath. It was quite a breach of grown-upness to have been so frank with me and I don’t think I was meant to answer.
‘How could she? Poor Rosie. Where will she be taken?’ I said, and I remembered the town hall ladies saying they’d no idea where she’d end up. Rosie didn’t want to go with them. I imagined her screaming and crying, maybe shaking her fist and sticking out her jaw when she found herself betrayed. Perhaps she even thought I’d known? Perhaps she shook her fist at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mr Tait.
The tears were spilling through my fingers now so I pressed at my eyes to stop them.
‘Poor Rosie!’ I said. ‘Poor Mavis and now Rosie too!’
Mr Tait nodded and his breathing was heavy. ‘I’m so sorry. I really didn’t expect this. She sent me a message.’
It seemed the whole world was crying. The grey sky had turned to mist again and the mist had turned to rain and poured down on us with no compassion or kindness.
‘No!’ I sobbed. ‘That’s not fair! Poor Rosie! We have to rescue her. We have to get her back. She doesn’t want to go to Edinburgh, or anywhere else!’ Edimburry, as she’d called it. ‘Poor Rosie! What are we going to do?’
‘Well, we have to think carefully about this. We don’t know . . . .’
‘What do you mean we don’t know? We know where she’s gone and they’ll have a record now of wherever she ends up. We just have to go and find out and get her back, don’t we?’
‘Lenny,’ he said with a sigh, ‘it’s quite possible Rosie has family somewhere, aunts and uncles or grandparents.’
‘She never mentioned them to me,’ I broke in. ‘I don’t think she does. She might not.’ A sudden gust of wind lifted my coat and I grabbed it back down, quick as I could.
‘Miss Wetherspoon will have assumed I couldn’t look after her. The authorities will assume the same. I’m a man! They’re not going to hand her over to me, a man who’s not even related to her. I’m a cripple without a house.’
‘But why not?’ I said. ‘I’m alright, aren’t I and you’re looking after me?’
‘Well, that’s debatable,’ he said, but he had his head to one side and a little twist in his mouth. I wasn’t sure what debatable meant but I had a good idea. He looked me up and down. ‘If they saw you now, if your mum saw you now, she’d be very worried indeed!’
He took me by the hand and we struggled up the rest of the hill, slipping and sliding in the wet. The rain washed the last of the cow poo off my feet. My hat was sodden and soft and the daffodil was gone. My new coat grew heavier with every step and my bare legs were streaked with mud. We went straight to Mrs Mags who gave us steaming bowls of vegetable soup and hung our coats around her fire. I didn’t want to eat. I wanted Mavis and now I had to want Rosie too, who could be anywhere.
Mrs Mags was upset about Rosie too.
‘Poor wee mite!’ she said. ‘What a heartless thing to do!’
‘Miss Wetherspoon went to help other poor souls at a rest centre,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It does seem odd but perhaps she thought it was for the greater good . . . ?’
‘Greater good, my big backside!’ was the retort. ‘For the greater good a poor wee thing like that who’s just lost all her family has to go to God knows where, Edinburgh if she’s lucky, the poorhouse more like and all by herself, without even you and Lenny with her.’
Mr Tait and Mrs Mags both glanced at me. She’d named my greatest fear, that Rosie had been sent to the poorhouse, that Mavis might be there too, eating watered down porridge and working twelve hours a day.
‘No!’ I said. ‘No, they wouldn’t have taken them there! No!’
I’d been so grief-stricken about Rosie I hadn’t had the heart to ask about Mavis too, even though I knew what he was going to say, that he hadn’t found her, that she was still missing, that anything could have happened to her – the poorhouse or even missing presumed dead. I howled into my soup.
‘It is extremely unlikely that Rosie and Mavis are in the poorhouse,’ said Mr Tait in his quiet voice. ‘Extremely unlikely. They will both probably be billeted with families out in the country, just like lots of other children.’
‘Then why is there no record of Mavis?’ I said loudly with a big wet sniff. ‘If she was billeted with a family they’d have had to give her a billeting slip and so they’d know.’
‘Lots of children went with families in a hurry,’ said Mr Tait, ‘and lots didn’t get billeting slips. They just had to get out, just like we did and sort things out later. You don’t have a billeting slip to stay with me, do you?’ And he dug into his pocket and handed me a clean white handkerchief.
‘No, but . . . .’ I wiped my eyes and blew my nose so hard it hurt.
‘I’m sorry I mentioned the poorhouse, Lenny,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘It was careless chatter.’
‘Careless talk costs lives,’ I said, even though I knew that wasn’t the case here. I’d seen the posters and they scared me, just like I was scared now.
‘Lenny,’ said Mr Tait, quietly. ‘You’re starting to be rude.’
I had Mavis’s shoe in my hand. I pulled it round to the front of my lap, under my dress, and fiddled with it. I had no hat to hide under because it was hanging up to dry, so I hung my head. The fire crackled and spat.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘That’s alright dear,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘You’re upset. I understand.’ She patted my knee. ‘She’ll turn up. Don’t you worry. I feel it in my bones, I do!’ she laughed as if that was that settled then.
Mr Tait and I both stared at her with our mouths hanging open while she sat there slapping the sides of her big round tummy.
‘You both think I’m crazy,’ she said, ‘but I’m never wrong, never wrong. She’ll turn up, just you wait and see.’
‘Well, I very much hope you’re right on this occasion, Mrs Mags,’ said Mr Tait.
I very much hoped so too, but honestly, why did grown-ups come out with such things? It wasn’t kind, even though it was meant to be. Now I didn’t know what to think.
‘Where’s my boys?’ said Mrs Mags, suddenly, as if she’d only just remembered them.
I couldn’t tell her the truth.
‘They missed the bus,’ I said, which was true.
‘Why, what were they up to?’
‘Um.’
‘I see, so you’ve joined their ranks already, have you?’
‘Um.’
‘Clearly they’re up to no good,’ she said.
I was too tired for this, and too wet. She had let me sit very close to the fire on an old wooden box, so that steam came out of my dress and the air was heavy with dampness. My socks were on a nail behind the stove and were soon hard and dry. I rubbed the crispness out of them and put them back on my feet, then ate my soup.
Mr Tait and Mrs Mags started talking about tents then, and it turned out there were tents in Carbeth but other tents on farms nearby too, with people from Clydebank in them. Perhaps even Mavis. But just as I was about to point this out, Mr MacInnes, the old man in the shadows, came in shaking a huge umbrella behind him and smelling of whisky.
‘Damn rain!’
‘Mr MacInnes!’ said Mrs Mags. ‘Language!’
He gave me a wink and sat down heavily on the sofa next to Mr Tait, who bounced slightly. Mr MacInnes threw his head back in a gesture of relief but stayed there so long I had time to look at his tonsils and his teeth, which were few and far between.
‘You’re the girl who wants to learn to draw,’ he said, finally, flipping his head over to look at me. ‘Let’s see how good you are then.’ He pulled a grey canvas bag from his side. The strap hung across his shoulder. ‘It’s in here somewhere. There you go. That’s a good solid soft pencil,’ he said. ‘And . . . here’s paper, that’s gold dust to you and me. Gold dust! Now you draw whatever you can see and I’ll tell you what a fine artist you are! No, no, now, just you go ahead, there’s no need to thank me. It’s an artist’s duty to encourage other aspiring young artists, budding, at the beginning . . . .’
Mr Tait was deep in conversation with Mrs Mags by then so I took the precious paper and laid it on a slab of wood Mrs Mags handed me. The pencil wasn’t remotely soft but made a very solid black line and wore down in no time. I began a portrait of Mr MacInnes, starting with his knees for some reason which I can’t explain. By the time I’d reached his face it had fallen back against the sofa again and I got a second look at his tonsils and gums, so I drew them too.
Meanwhile Mr Tait and Mrs Mags were still chatting. Perhaps I ought to explain about the tents, for anyone who doesn’t know. You see, before the huts went up, there were tents in a field a little further out from town. They were owned by the Socialist Sunday Camp who ran summer and weekend camps from April to September every year, and when they weren’t there they stored their tents in a hall that they had built beside a stream. They put on shows and concerts in their hall, and dances, and they had a tennis court too and a special cookhouse. At any other time, in any other circumstances, I would have been excited beyond belief to be going there.
‘He’s given us another piece of ground, rocky, not the best, by the Sunday Camp, with room for probably fifty new huts,’ said Mrs Mags.
‘I can’t build with this leg,’ said Mr Tait. ‘That’s all gone now. When will the Sunday campers be back? We can borrow one of their tents until they come, and then think again.’
‘April Fool’s Day. First of April, and they’re not just Sunday campers. They come every year on April Fool’s Day and stay all summer. Where are we now?’ she muttered. ‘That gives us less than two weeks to build.’ She cocked her head to one side, thinking, her face red in the heat.
‘Mrs Mags, I can’t build. I can hardly get up this hill.’
‘There’s others here can help you, the boys for a start, if they ever get here.’
‘They’re not old enough.’
‘It’ll make them old enough. George especially could do with keeping his hands busy. He’s my sister’s boy. She’ll be coming here with his dad at the weekend. He can help too and my husband will be here.’
‘I can’t see that they’ll want to help me,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’m the wrong side of the tracks for most people up here. I’m probably his boss!’
‘No, Mr Tait,’ she said. ‘You’re not his boss. But right enough, he’ll only be about at weekends, and then if you’re lucky. The other men will help, though, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t like to ask, they’ve enough to do already.’
‘The coal man says he’ll lend his lorry for getting the material here, for a small fee. There’s an old garage I know that’s falling down. You could take that to start you off. You can direct proceedings, just like you do at your work, while the boys do the heavy stuff. It’ll be a piece of cake.’
I hadn’t really been listening to much of this but at the mention of cake my ears pricked up, naturally enough. There was no cake anywhere to be seen.
‘But I’m a gaffer, Mrs Mags!’ said Mr Tait.
‘All due respect, Mr Tait, but you’re not a very big one,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘Not exactly the biggest fish in the ocean. It depends what you’re prepared to barter with.’
‘I don’t have anything but the clothes I stand up in and the contents of my suitcase!’
‘And your position . . . ?’
‘What do you mean?’
Mrs Mags shook her head and glanced at the ceiling. She lifted one of Mr MacInnes’s drawings which was pinned further along the wall from the stove. Underneath it was the word BROWN’S printed in big bold black letters.
‘Ah,’ said Mr Tait. ‘From the shipyard. I see. If I come and go with them, and turn a blind eye, they’ll come and go with packing cases and whatever else I might need.’ He clicked his tongue and all his wrinkles came back. ‘I see,’ he said quietly, and his eyes flicked left and right.
‘Shhh!’ said Mrs Mags and she blinked in the direction of Mr MacInnes and myself. Clearing her throat she carried on. ‘They’re quite comfortable so I’m told, the tents I mean. There’s people down there already. Why don’t you go and have a look. They have wooden floors and camp beds in the hall too. You might even get to stay longer when they come out in April to open up.’
‘I can’t share a tent with Lenny,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It might have been possible with Miss Wetherspoon and Rosie here but . . . this is all very difficult really, isn’t it? I’m not sure what to do.’
‘Don’t take me back to the town hall,’ I said, leaping off the wooden box. ‘Please don’t.’
Mr Tait sighed and smiled and took my hand.
‘Have you noticed, Lenny, that when I make a promise I keep it?’ he said.
‘Yes, Mr Tait, sorry, but I just thought that . . . I have to tell you . . . I won’t stay if you take me. I won’t stay wherever they send me. I’ll do what Rosie did. I’ll run off. And I’ll get the bus all the way back out here and knock on your tent door. So you might as well plan on keeping me.’ I was quite breathless. ‘Maybe Rosie will run off and find her way back here too anyway. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?’
‘Lenny, I’m not taking you back to the town hall,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I promised you and your mother and I wouldn’t take you back there unless you begged me on bended knees. The thing is you may have to live in a tent. What do you think of that?’
‘A tent?’ I said.
‘Yes, a tent. Haven’t you been listening?’
Well, no, actually, not properly.
‘And then you might have to help me build a hut,’ he said.
‘A hut?’ I said.
‘Yes, Lenny, a hut.’
‘I can’t build a hut!’
Mr Tait had lost his marbles.
‘In that case I’ll have to ask the boys.’
‘I thought you said you couldn’t build a hut either,’ I said.
‘Ah, so you were listening,’ he said.
‘I heard that,’ I said. ‘And “a piece of cake”.’
‘Who’d miss “a piece of cake”?’
We all sat back and laughed and Mr MacInnes shut his mouth with a crack of whatever teeth he had left, then we watched it eek its way open again. Then suddenly it slammed shut again just as the hut door flew open and the three wet boys flooded in, all of them talking at once.
Mrs Mags stood up, arms folded across her belly, mouth tight shut. Her eyes appeared to have shrunk. I looked at these boys and wondered how on earth she thought they would be any help at all building a hut. They dripped great splotches of rain all over the rug and chairs and even down my newly dried dress. But worst of all they had burst lips and blood on their jumpers, even Sandy, and bad George had a graze on his cheek just below one eye. They all had mud from their hair to their shoes and they smelled suspiciously of cowpats.
‘Boys!’ boomed Mrs Mags finally breaking her silence. Sandy stopped jabbering. Mrs Mags seemed to be at a loss what to say next. ‘Lenny!’ she said at last. I stood up.
‘Yes, Mrs Mags?’
‘Let’s test your allegiance, eh?’
Mr Tait shifted in his seat.
‘Yes, Mrs Mags.’ I wanted to ask, What’s allegiance? Was it something to do with intelligence?
‘What happened?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, which was true. None of these burst lips and blood-stained shirts had happened before I ran off.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, Mrs Mags,’ I said.
She dropped her arms and raised her eyebrows. She sounded angry but she didn’t look it so I couldn’t be sure.
‘Honest!’ I said.
‘Hmm . . . ,’ she said.
Six eyes drummed into me. Mrs Mags tapped her foot and looked at the cobwebs over her head.
‘Well . . . ,’ I said, glancing at the boys, but not quite at George.
Ten eyes on me now.
‘They were arguing,’ I said. ‘They were arguing so much they got left behind and didn’t notice the bus.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Mags, ‘and what were they arguing about?’
‘Football,’ I said. ‘And then a sheep came and chased them across a field. I suppose they must have fallen down. That’ll be how they got all those cuts and bruises.’
Sandy, Dougie and bad George all nodded, vigorously.
Mrs Mags’s arms returned to their former position, folded across her belly.
‘Thank you, Lenny,’ she said.
She turned back to the boys.
‘No offence, Lenny,’ she said without looking at me. ‘That was a nice try. I was with you until the sheep part, but when did you last see a sheep chase anyone anywhere?’
‘I’d never seen a sheep before today,’ I said, sheepishly.
Mrs Mags laughed loudly and patted me on the shoulder.
‘Right boys, back down to the pump and get the mud off you. Straight back here afterwards, and you can take those buckets with you to fill while you’re about it.’
Mr Tait smiled at me. ‘It’s wrong to tell a lie,’ he said quietly, while she shooed them back out the door, and for my ears only, ‘but it’s right to be loyal to friends, even new ones.’
‘What are we going to do about Mavis and Rosie?’ I whispered.