‘Get the wheelbarrow!’ someone shouted. ‘We need a wheelbarrow!’
I hadn’t got very far, only as far as Mrs Mags’s hut, where a big old wheelbarrow like a bathtub was lying on its side against the back wall. It had long handles and a little rubber wheel and was heavy and difficult to get upright.
‘Need a wheelbarrow!’
‘Coming!’ I muttered. What was all the hurry? A cupboard could wait. So could a stack of pots. It wasn’t dark. I had the wheelbarrow standing but every time I tried to lift the handles, it lurched sideways.
‘There you are!’ said Sandy. ‘Where did you get to? You must be so excited!’
About no news?
‘Not really.’
He came round behind the wheelbarrow and took one of the shafts and together we wound our way down the path.
‘Mr Tait’s in a terrible fluster. She won’t speak to him,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Mr Tait. She won’t even let him help her off the bus.’
‘Who won’t?’
The wheel struck something under the grass, jamming the shafts into our stomachs. We both cried out, laughed, righted the barrow and set off again. A man in work clothes came to help us.
‘That’s my dad,’ said Sandy with a grin. ‘Dad, this is Lenny.’
‘Hello, Mr Mags, Mr MacInnes,’ I said, not sure what to call him. He looked nothing like his wife, Mrs Mags. He was tall and thin with neatly combed hair, whereas Mrs Mags was short and stout and had hair like a wild bush on fire.
‘Hello, Lenny,’ he said. ‘Mr Mags is just fine.’ He put his head to one side. ‘But look at you! So like your mum!’
‘Tart!’ said bad George who strode past us now.
‘Don’t you dare, boy,’ said Mr Mags. Mr Mags looked nothing like the old Mr MacInnes in the shadows on the chair behind the sofa who was his father, but for a second he looked quite a lot like George with his little eyes and tight mouth. They hissed and glared at each other. I pretended not to notice.
How did Mr Mags know my mum? Perhaps he worked in Singer’s too.
When we got down the hill the road was so full of people and their mountains of belongings that I wondered how they had ever fitted on the bus in the first place. People hugged each other and talked and a little brown dog was sniffing their ankles, looking for an owner.
‘Make way! Make way!’ said Mr Mags, friendly again now. ‘The royal throne is here. Make way!’
‘She still won’t come out,’ said Mrs Wilson, who was standing with a group of others. ‘Not until Lenny’s found.’
‘I’m here!’ I said. ‘Where’s Mr Tait? What’s going on?’
Mr Tait was by the door of the bus with Mrs Mags. He had his brown hat in his hand and was turning it round and round and frowning at it so that all his wrinkles fell forwards to his mouth. The bus driver, usually a patient man, was explaining that he couldn’t wait forever, it would be blackout soon and he really had to go. I slipped my hand into Mr Tait’s.
‘Lenny, my dear, there you are at last,’ he said. ‘Your mother is here.’
‘What?’ I said, tears bursting to my eyes, my heart going bang-bang-bang and my tummy all tight. ‘Where?’ I didn’t understand. ‘How can she be? The hospital . . . you said . . . .’
Perhaps she hadn’t really lost her foot. Perhaps it wasn’t true.
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘She’s here, a bit earlier than expected. She’s on the bus. Go on. You can go in. She won’t get off the bus without you.’
Her face floated through the shadowy reflections of the glass, a face I knew so well, still surrounded by the white turban which was held in place by a safety pin. She didn’t see me. Mr Tait produced a clean white handkerchief. He patted my tears with it and put it in my hand.
‘Lenny’s here!’ Mr Tait called in through the bus door.
‘Don’t come in here!’ said my mum, when he put his foot on the step.
‘She’s a bit scared, Mrs Gillespie, that’s all,’ he said. ‘But alright. I’ll wait here. Lenny, on you go.’
How could my mum be there? She wasn’t supposed to be out of hospital until we’d built the hut, until her foot was better or her leg, at least everyone said so. I didn’t understand. What was going on?
‘Lenny?’ Her voice was small now.
‘Yes, Lenny’s here,’ said Mr Tait.
So I clambered up into the bus and stood on the top step blinking back the tears, smoothing down my grubby dress and squeezing the shoe at my belt.
‘Mum,’ I said. I couldn’t say more. My throat felt like I’d been strangled. (I knew how that felt because a bad girl had tried to strangle me at school in Clydebank.)
My mum was perched on the edge of the seat behind the driver in her old grey coat. She wasn’t as pale as a ghost any more, but she looked tired like she usually did. Two crutches sat on the seat beside her, strange wooden things. She smiled at me, or tried to, and I wondered if it hurt her to smile, the way it had hurt me after the bombing, and then she cried out, like the mew of a cat, and held her arms out to me, like a kid, like Mavis, because she was helpless and couldn’t move. Under the seat I saw her leg, what was left of it, wrapped in a pale brown bandage and tied up with another safety pin. She shifted in her seat a little.
‘Lenny?’ she said, still holding out her arms to me.
I didn’t know what to do.
‘Mum,’ I said.
I didn’t know what to do, so I stayed where I was and I waited. I didn’t want to be near her leg. There were things in my head again, things I shouldn’t have seen, and it was all my own fault. These things were everywhere now, and my eyes flickered back to her foot, her leg rather, the bandage, under the seat, and back to her face and then to the floor. I couldn’t look at her. I was so scared I couldn’t look, so I closed my eyes and shook my head.
‘Down in the meadow where the green grass grows . . . .’ I didn’t sing it out loud of course but I wished I could and I tapped my foot in time.
‘Go on, Lenny,’ said Mr Tait from the ground behind me.
I could see the top of his head again. The grit was all gone. His head was clean.
‘I can’t,’ I whispered and stepped down one. My mum sniffed.
‘Go on, Lenny. It’s your mum, just your mum,’ he said.
Mrs Mags was trying to shoo everyone up the hill. I saw Sandy’s head bobbing about in the crowd.
I tried to whisper. I was going to tell him that I really couldn’t, really, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I was going to tell him how cold I was, too cold to be standing there. I bit the fingernail on my thumb, and I fumbled for Mavis’s shoe, but it must have got lost round the back because it wasn’t there, so I fumbled all the harder and came down another step. One more step and I’d be on the road. As it was I was the same height as Mr Tait, or very nearly. I left my poor mum up there in the bus with her head in her hands, sniffing and mewing.
‘Lenny, my dear,’ he said, in his soft voice from close by. ‘This is a moment for being brave. You have to gather up all your strength and all your kindness, from the very bottom of your boots and you have to stand up very straight and go and give your mum a little kiss and say “Hello”. Then I will come and help you get her off the bus.’
‘No, you won’t!’ said my mum fiercely. ‘Don’t you come near me!’
‘Perhaps the lads at the back of the bus could lend a hand?’ He said this loudly so that they could hear him.
‘Why are all these people still here?’ said my mum. Her words burst out of her, and then she sniffed them back in.
‘This is the hardest bit,’ whispered Mr Tait, leaning into my ear. ‘After this it will be easier.’
Mr Tait left me on the bottom step of the bus and went to ask people to stop staring and move away. I think that’s what he was doing. I kept my eyes shut while he did it. I didn’t want them to see me. I didn’t want Mr Tait to leave me standing there.
‘Lenny?’ said my mum. ‘Lenny, darling . . . .’
My heart went bang-bang-bang so loudly I thought everyone must have heard and I still couldn’t find Mavis’s shoe. I suddenly needed to cough very hard. When I opened my eyes and stopped coughing Mr Tait was standing a few feet away. Someone was talking to him but he wasn’t listening. He was watching me. He interrupted whoever was doing the talking, Mrs Mags perhaps, I don’t know. I didn’t wait to see.
In a sudden rush all the grit came up from my toes, from down inside my boots (except I only had sensible t-bars like Mavis’s) and I hopped up the two metal steps with a clunk-clunk, and without looking down at anything I didn’t want to see, I went to my mum and took her head in my hands and kissed her cheek and held onto her neck.
‘Hello,’ I said, just like Mr Tait had told me to do.
‘Hello, Lenny, my darling Lenny!’ and she put her arms all around me like a huge warm blanket by the fire. She sniffed and sobbed and shook so much it took me a while to realise I was sniffing and sobbing and shaking too. Then she stopped and ran her hand across the top of my forehead and along the side of my cheek to my chin, just like she’s always done since I was a baby, and she put her hand to her mouth to stop the cries coming out again. ‘Thank God for you!’ she said, and the skin on her forehead wrinkled up with trying not to cry again. She wiped her tears away with the heel of her thumb, just like Mavis does and then she wiped mine with the top bit of her thumb, just like she does when she doesn’t have a hanky. I gave her Mr Tait’s nearly white handkerchief and she wiped our tears all over again.
She tried to take my lovely hat off, and I tried to stop her, but she took it off anyway and saw no hair, or hardly any, and lots of little scabs, the big one over my ear. Her eyes darted backwards and forwards between mine and around my face trying to understand what had happened to me. I put the hat back on.
‘Lady, I need to get this bus moving,’ said the driver. ‘How about you boys in the back give these two a helping hand?’
‘I lost Mavis!’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I hugged her all over again. ‘Sorry,’ I sniffed. ‘Sorry.’
‘Lenny,’ she whispered back. ‘I don’t believe Mavis is lost.’
‘Mr Tait’s going to find her. He’s nice, I promise. He brought me an orange and it wasn’t even my birthday.’
She made a face like bad George and I wondered how I was ever going to persuade her? The boys at the back of the bus were hovering about us like nervous rabbits ready to run. They didn’t look much older than Sandy or bad George, but they helped her anyway which meant I didn’t have to. When I got to the bottom step of the bus Mr Tait was there. I smiled at him so he’d know I’d done what he said and he stepped out of the way so my mum could get down with one of the back-seat boys helping her. Another passed her crutches down to Mrs Mags, and somehow an ordinary wooden chair, like the one Miss Read sat on at school, appeared by her side and she plumped down on it and sighed.
‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ she said in her voice that was different from everybody else’s because we weren’t from Clydebank or Carbeth.
I figured if I stayed right beside her all the time I wouldn’t have to look at her foot, or her leg, so that’s what I did, I stood right beside her, with my hand on the back of her chair. She smelled funny, a hospital smell I suppose, of disinfectant and ether, which is what Mr Tait said it was. I suppose they must have used the same stuff on my mum’s cuts as the lady with the fur coat at the La Scala. But my mum smelled of bombs too and misery and fear. Perhaps it was stuck to her handbag, which she was gripping tightly on her lap. Its blue leather was ripped at one end but it still bulged like it always did only now it smelled of boom-crash.
The bus roared off. The crowd thinned out. Mr Mags and another man were talking to Mrs Mags and a woman who looked just like her only smaller, all in a huddle. Mr Tait was some way off, wrinkly again and standing with Sandy.
‘I don’t know what to do, Lenny,’ said my mum suddenly. She still had Mr Tait’s handkerchief. I didn’t tell her it was his.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘They needed the bed,’ she said, ‘and I had nowhere else to go, the hospital I mean, but I thought you had somewhere to stay here. Mr Tait told the nurse he had a hut, in fact he called it a chalet in the hills and it sounded lovely. He told me there was a nurse here who could look after my leg, and I don’t believe it now for a second. And then once they’d let me out and we were on the bus he told me he hadn’t built his chalet yet. I don’t know what to do!’
‘There is a nurse,’ I said, ‘and we didn’t think you were coming for another week or two.’
‘They might have kept me in longer if Mr Tait hadn’t turned up,’ she said.
She was fiddling with the clasp on her bag, clipping it open and shut, open and shut. I put my hand over hers. It shut with a brisk snap.
‘He’s nice, Mum,’ I said quietly, ‘and so’s everyone else here. They opened all the huts, even the ones that were locked and the owners weren’t there, and they let the people from Clydebank in. The Salvation Army were here giving out blankets and food, and Mrs Mags, that’s her over there, gave us stew and baths. I’ve been to school too. Not my school, Craigton school.’
‘I can’t accept any help from Mr Tait,’ she said, through tight lips. ‘He’s a nasty, evil, little man. We’d be in America now if it wasn’t for him.’
I looked at wrinkly Mr Tait with his fancy bedpost stick. He had taken off his hat again and was wiping his forehead with another of his clean white handkerchiefs, even though it wasn’t hot at all.
‘Umm,’ I said.
‘What are we going to do?’ she said.
‘There are some tents . . . .’
‘Tents?’
‘Yes, Mr Tait and me, we were going to stay in one until we got the hut built. I was going to help seeing as he’s got a bad leg.’
‘You and Mr Tait in a tent? That’s ridiculous! I’m not going in a tent and neither are you. How could I with only one . . . ? Where are these tents anyway? That’s what I want to know.’
I started to point down the road, but Mrs Mags was coming towards us, smiling a big smile.
‘Mrs Gillespie!’ she said. ‘Welcome to Carbeth! I’m so glad to meet you at last. Lenny’s been an absolute pleasure to have around. She’s a lovely girl!’ I blushed under my hat. ‘Very adventurous, she is, and not afraid of anything, aren’t you not, darling?’
‘Eh?’ I said.
‘I’m Mrs MacInnes,’ she went on, ‘but everyone calls me Mrs Mags. That’s my husband over there and my sister, Mrs Connor, and her husband. But you’ll be wondering where on earth you’ve come to.’
‘Well, yes,’ nodded my mum.
Mrs Mags bent down so that their faces were very close together and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I caught Mr Tait’s eye and shrugged my shoulders. He shrugged back.
And then Mrs Mags told the other grown-ups they were all to wait while she and my mum went into the hall.
I haven’t told you about the hall yet because I hadn’t been in it before then. It was near the bus stop and was used for dances. I think my mum needed a wee. Mrs Mags took her to the toilets in the hall and I tiptoed along behind them, not sure what to do with myself, but making sure I didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on the back of her head.
When we came back Mr Tait had borrowed the chair to rest on for a minute. He stood up straightaway. My mum looked at him sideways but wouldn’t say a word. Poor Mr Tait who meant no harm. Poor Mr Tait who had been so kind to me. I wanted to go and slip my hand into his but I thought I’d better not.
‘We don’t need the wheelbarrow,’ said Mr Mags. ‘We can lift her in the chair. You grab the other side.’ The other man took hold of the other side of my mum’s brown wooden chair.
‘OH!’ screamed my mum as she was lifted vertically and nearly thrown over backwards onto her head.
And I screamed too. I’d only just got her back. I didn’t want her hurt again and to have to go back to hospital.
The chair landed with a ker-thump on the road.
‘Wheelbarrow!’ said the men. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ They seemed to think this was very funny. My mum didn’t agree, and Mr Tait was jumping around as if he had ants in his pants, as my Auntie May would have said.
‘You keep out of this!’ said my mum to Mr Tait, then, ‘Lenny?’ she said in her small voice to me. ‘Lenny, you stay right beside me. I don’t want to lose you.’ I said I would make sure that I did.
So they put the chair in the wheelbarrow, not with my mum still on it of course, and she stood up and put the crutches under her arms to support herself. I stood right beside her, just like she said, and she swung her crutches forward and hopped on her one leg. She managed all the way to the Halfway House pub which was probably the length of four buses, and then they took the chair out of the wheelbarrow again so that she could sit down a minute. She was trembling all over with so much hard work and exertion.
‘You’re all very kind,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to be so much bother.’
Mrs Mags said she was no bother at all, and not to be so silly. She said we could all stay in her hut because the boys, Dougie and bad George (she didn’t call him ‘bad’ but I suspect she would have liked to) would be staying in their own hut now that her sister and her husband (their parents) had arrived for the weekend.
‘I’ll leave you here then and go to the tents,’ said Mr Tait.
Mrs Mags fussed and fussed and tried to insist that he didn’t go to the tents but came along with us, such a long way and it was nearly dark, and I hoped and wished that he would change his mind and come to Mrs Mags’s hut instead. Then my mum would see I wasn’t lying, that Mr Tait was kind and good and didn’t clype on her at Singer’s factory. But she was silent as the grave, as my gran would say, staring straight ahead of her at the great hill she had to climb.
Mr Tait said he was quite sure he wanted to go to the tent.
Even though I didn’t want to and I knew my mum wouldn’t be pleased, I had to say goodbye to Mr Tait. I didn’t want him to go. I needed him to tell me what to do next.
‘I’ll come over in the morning,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring Sandy and Dougie too and we can start on the hut, first thing. I promise.’
‘Let’s just wait and see what happens, shall we?’ he said. ‘Your mother needs you to help her. I think she must get first shout.’
I didn’t want to help my mum. I wanted to stay with him. Wasn’t I awful? I wanted to stay with him in the tent and build the hut in the morning and play on the rope swing whenever I could.
‘She’s like the orange, Lenny,’ he said. ‘She looks a bit funny, a bit scary, but she’s just your mum, the same old mum you last saw a week ago going to the pictures.’
But I thought that was years ago, even though I knew it wasn’t. It felt like years ago and Clydebank felt like miles away even though it was only over the hill. I looked at the hill now, for a clue, and so that no-one would see me bite my lip.
‘Good night, Lenny,’ he said. ‘No doubt I will see you tomorrow.’ He bent down and gave me a little hug so that I could smell the smoky fire on his jacket, and he hobbled away from us along the road all by himself with the trees looming in on him from either side.
Suddenly I was very cold and very tired and the hill seemed very, very big.