Mr Tait and I slept on the floor of Mrs Mags’s hut that night. We shared the room with Mr MacInnes who snored on the sofa. Mr Tait snored too and in the morning he was late for work. He was so late for work he was still there while I slurped hot porridge with Sandy, Dougie and bad George and when I ran down the hill just in time for the bus.
It was Thursday, exactly a week since the start of the bombing, exactly a week since I last saw Mavis and thought I’d lost my mum for ever, but it passed much as the day before had done, only I made friends with the girls with the skipping rope and ignored the boys as much as I could. At the end of the day I hurried up the road ahead of the others. It was windy that day with sun between the showers so I had to hang onto my hat. It was odd to be all alone. It made me feel dizzy and queasy. I hadn’t exactly forgotten Mavis and my mum, or Rosie, but we’d done clapping games all morning and writing all afternoon, and I had to share my slate with the girl beside me, so the afternoon sped past with plenty of talking which Miss Read didn’t seem to mind at all, as long as we all kept quiet when she was talking. So it was only when I left that I got to thinking about my mum and Mavis at all. Shocking!
When I knocked on the door of Mrs Mags’s hut Mr Tait was there on her sofa with a hot black tea in his hand.
‘My, you’re back early!’ said Mrs Mags, who was sliding bits of carrot into a pot on the stove. ‘We’re only just in ourselves.’ Joey the budgie had taken up residence on Mr MacInnes’s chair in the corner behind the sofa.
‘Hello, Mrs Mags,’ I said. ‘What’s the news, Mr Tait?’
‘Hello to you too, Lenny,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a tent. Isn’t that good?’
‘Oh,’ I said, not expecting that. ‘Yes, I suppose.’ I didn’t really want to go somewhere else, even if it was much better than where we were. ‘Did you find any news of Mavis and Rosie? When is my mum going to be out?’
‘I had to stay here today,’ he said. ‘So that I could get the tent sorted out. It’s very grand, for a tent, and I’ve put . . . .’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘You mean you didn’t go? You didn’t go to the town hall, or work, or to see my mum?’
‘Now, Lenny . . . ,’ he said.
‘You didn’t go! You didn’t even go!’
‘Lenny, that’s very rude,’ said Mrs Mags. ‘Don’t talk to Mr Tait like that. Think of all he’s done for you.’
‘It’s alright Mrs Mags,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘Of course you want news, but Lenny, the people in the town hall know where you are. Your mother knows where you are. In time perhaps Mavis will know where you are too.’
‘But . . . !’
‘And Lenny . . . .’
‘No! You didn’t go. You don’t care!’
‘I do care Lenny, but . . . .’
‘No, you don’t! I knew I’d have to do this myself.’ Immediately I started to plan how I was going to sneak off from the school in the morning. I’d slip round the back of the bus when no-one was looking and off up the hill when they were doing morning prayers.
‘Mr Tait cares very much,’ said Mrs Mags, interrupting me.
And what did it have to do with her anyway?
‘No, he doesn’t. He just wants money for billeting me.’ That didn’t sound right.
‘Lenny!’ said Mrs Mags with a gasp.
But Mr Tait laughed, laughed, of all things to do! He laughed, and I hadn’t found Mavis!
‘You’re not worth very much, you know,’ he said. ‘What is it these days, Mrs Mags? Six shillings or thereabouts? Six and sixpence?’
‘Oh, no, it’s big money now. Ten and six, I believe?’
‘Ten shillings and sixpence a week,’ said Mr Tait with a nod. ‘I’ll need to take in a few more then, won’t I?’
‘Mr Tait!’ I said, shocked. ‘You think it’s funny!’
‘I don’t think it’s funny in the least,’ he said, suddenly his old quiet self again. His brow was smooth and he had sat back comfortably on the sofa. ‘You want to find Mavis. I want to find Mavis. I want to make sure you have a roof over your head and that you’re safe. Hitler may be back. This seems like a good place for you and your mother and your sister to be for the foreseeable future. I have a bad leg. I need to rest it every so often in order to be able to do all the things that need to be done. Mrs Mags has very kindly walked with me today to the Sunday Camp and I have made some arrangements for us, and on the way back, while resting by the road, we met Mr Barnes-Graham, Old Barny himself, and we have now identified a very good site on which to build our hut. What do you say to all that?’
‘Now do you see that he cares?’ said Mrs Mags.
I nodded. Of course I did.
‘But you said you couldn’t build a hut,’ I said.
Mr Tait drummed his fingers on the arm of Mrs Mags’s old sofa.
‘I have been persuaded otherwise,’ he said. ‘Of course I need someone who can draw to help me design it. Do you know of anyone who might be able to help?’
I thought about this long and hard until Mrs Mags pointed out he meant me. She picked up my unflattering portrait of Mr MacInnes, the old man in the shadows (it occurred to me for the first time that she might not be very pleased about my drawing the inside of Mr MacInnes’s mouth), flipped the paper over and straightened it out on the board I’d used the day before. Then she thrust paper, board and a pencil into my hands and we all went and sat outside on the old church bench at the front of the hut (for the sake of the daylight) and plotted how we would build our new home.
We’d need a room for me and my mum and Mavis, and another for Mr Tait, and another for the stove, but perhaps Mr Tait could sleep in the room with the stove, or perhaps me, Mavis and my mum could sleep in with the stove. Yes, that sounded good. I knew it wasn’t really alright to sleep in the same room as Mr Tait but seeing as I’d just spent the night on the same floor as him and a hundred other people and was about to move into a tent with him, I didn’t really see what the problem was. We settled on two rooms with a stove in one and a big bed in the other. There would be a cupboard and a table in the stove room. The plan was drawn and our new hut was going to be much grander than our real house in Clydebank, and the cludgie would be all ours!
We’d need bricks, and struts, and sleepers (apparently we didn’t have enough and these came from the railway anyway), and packing cases for the floorboards, hammers, nails, saws, and shovels. Mr Tait took a small notepad out of his pocket that I hadn’t seen before and started to write things down in it.
We were still there when the boys arrived back. Of course they had plenty to say about it all, especially Sandy and Dougie, who suffered from delusions of grandeur (something my Auntie May thought my mum had) about how they were going to help with the building. I looked at their puny arms and knobbly knees and scratched my head. Bad George grunted and kicked the corner of the hut. His jumper was ripped at the elbow, his face scabby from the day before. Mr Tait was small and had a bad leg. I was even smaller. We were a sorry crew.
But after an early tea and a quick shot on the rope swing, we headed over a field towards our plot, dodging the horses that were kept there and skirting the big house that Old Barney lived in.
I needed to get Mr Tait to promise to go to Clydebank the next day but with so many people about and so much excitement it was hard to get him alone. Instead I spent some time with Sandy making squeaky noises through reeds from the burn. We pressed them between our thumbs and blew, tickling our lips which made us squirm. Then Sandy cupped his hands into a hollow and made a soft sound which he told me was like an owl, and I heard them answer him from the trees, rhythmic and gentle. ‘Wuh-woo-woo-wuh-wuh,’ they went. Mrs Wilson told me the next day they weren’t owls at all, but wood pigeons, like the ones you see in town only bigger, and tastier.
Finally we met the road and on the other side of it, our plot. There was bracken all over it and it wasn’t flat. We kids stopped and stared at this disappointing scratch of ground and shook our heads. The wind made the trees creak. Someone was working further along the road. ‘Tap-tap-tap’ went a hammer, then the clatter of wood on wood.
‘You see how close we are to the standpipe?’ said Mr Tait. He was flushed with excitement, ‘and it’s quite protected from the wind by these trees.’
‘But it’s not flat,’ I pointed out. ‘Won’t we slide down the floor?’
‘Gracious no!’ he laughed. ‘That’s what the bricks are for, to even up the floor. We’ll put the hut here.’ He pointed to a bush. ‘From here to here,’ he said, hobbling past a little tree, which he’d have to take down or it would come up through the floor. ‘The door can be roughly . . . um . . . here. And if we build it high enough we can have a verandah.’
‘A verandah?’ said bad George. ‘And what would a “verandah” be when it’s at home? La-di-dah!’ He sounded just like my dad, but not nice at all.
‘George!’ said Mrs Mags. ‘Behave!’
‘A verandah is like a balcony,’ said Mr Tait, ‘like the bit outside our hut, the one Lenny and I were in to begin with . . .’
‘It’s not your hut,’ said George.
‘. . . only it’s raised higher off the ground – very posh!’ said Mr Tait.
Mr Tait went back to the bush and walked, with some difficulty, heel-to-toe from one end of the proposed hut to the other, counting under his breath with each step, then he took out his notepad and wrote something in it, and then he did it all over again at right angles and wrote that down too. A motorcar went past on the road so we all stood and waved at it as if it was the king inside, all except Mr Tait and Mrs Mags who were too busy to notice. The car slowed down at the top of the hill and disappeared.
I thought about my mum and about Mavis, and I wondered what they would think of all this. As far as we knew my mum still didn’t like Mr Tait and wouldn’t want to set foot in any hut of his, never mind stay in it. I hadn’t been allowed to tell her he wasn’t bad but good and kind and that it hadn’t been him that had clyped on her for whatever she did at work. And if I told her I was living in a hut, she would do what I had done, she’d imagine my uncle’s hut with no windows and with tools hanging everywhere, instead of something like the one Mr Tait and I had stayed in first. My mum seemed so far away. How could I explain all this if I wasn’t even allowed to see her?
Mavis on the other hand would LOVE it, and everyone here would love her, and she’d have so many friends she wouldn’t know what to do with herself. I could just see her now, swinging on the rope, like Rosie had, with the big ones helping her, or sitting on Mrs Mags’s bench with a glass of Mr Tulloch’s milk, or scrambling through the woods picking snowdrops like the ones I’d seen on the way over. I gave the shoe a squeeze and remembered buckling it onto Mavis’s foot the morning before we all went out to go round the shops in Kilbowie Road.
It was a week ago at exactly that time that she kicked the shoe off into the canal and I fell in. She threw dirt at the bad boys. I jumped out, but she had run off. I chased after her and the sirens went, and I couldn’t find her; she wasn’t there; she wasn’t anywhere; no matter where I looked she wasn’t there.
‘Lenny.’
‘Leonora!’ said bad George in a singsong voice.
‘Lenny,’ said Mr Tait, bending down so that his mouth was close to my ear. ‘Lenny, my love, we’re going over the hill to the tent. What’s wrong?’
I sniffed.
‘It’s just . . . it’s just . . . today . . . .’
‘Today?’ he said. I could hear him puzzling. ‘Ah, today. It’s exactly a week.’
I nodded.
‘Since you saw Mavis?’
I nodded again.
‘Shall we say a prayer?’
I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want it. Don’t pray. Not out loud.’
He took my hand. ‘On you go,’ he said to the others. ‘We’ll catch you up.’ And then he said to me, ‘Alright. No praying, not out loud.’
And we just stood there in the middle of the bushes, beside the road and just along from the standpipe, and when I looked at him his eyes were closed. But I didn’t want to close mine because I was scared of what I might see, so, remembering that talking kept those pictures in my head all shut up in the dark, I said, ‘Mavis is my sister. She’s the best sister anyone could hope for and only four, well, four-and-a-half, and she’s cute as ninepence, if she’s ever allowed to get here, if everything is alright, which I’m sure it is, and she has dark hair like Rosie’s but with a fringe and a dress like my old one before it got burnt. I know she’ll love it here with all the other kids and the rope swing, and she’ll love Joey the budgie too and we can go and find the lily pond that Dougie told me about and swim in the loch when the weather gets warm and . . . .’
Mr Tait stood on his sore leg and listened to me tell him all the things I’d already told him about my sister Mavis, and he held my hand, and when I looked at him his lips were pursed as if he was trying to lock something in, and his eyes were wet round the edges.
‘I will go to Clydebank tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered. ‘Thank you, Mr Tait.’
‘Now, I’m going to sit on that rock over there,’ he said in the softest voice ever, ‘and you can run up that hill through the trees, straight up mind, don’t go sideways, and when you get to the ridge at the top, you’ll see the tents down at the bottom on the other side. Mrs Mags and the others will be up there too. Have a quick look then come back down. I think we should stay with Mrs Mags one more night.’
As I ran up the hill, some of the others were already coming down, shouting about how they wanted to stay in the tents too and how lucky I was. At the top there was a sharp drop, and down below there were tents, white tents and brown tents and green ones, like little houses dotted about amongst the trees. A burn ran through the middle of them and some people had built a fire beside it and were sitting by it with plates on their laps. They looked dark and bedraggled like the lost people in the hut, but I heard someone laugh, and someone else call over to them in reply.
Mrs Mags pointed to a little group of four tents all close together and told me ours was one of them, and I remembered again about the other tents on farms nearby that I’d heard about and wondered whether Mavis might be in a tent too. Then Mrs Mags took my cold shivery hand in her big warm one and led me back down the hill. We went back along the road because the light was nearly gone, and I listened to the wind for killer bees and bombs that went boom-crash.
‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run,’ I sang under my breath as I wandered along.
‘My eyes are dim, I cannot see!’ sang Dougie gustily.
And Sandy joined him, ‘I have not brought my specs with me!’
And we all sang, ‘I have not brought my specs with me!’
And then we had to climb that big hill again.