Mr Tait had a wooden leg! Mr Tait had a wooden leg! I was utterly unable to speak for five whole minutes.
I should have left straightaway and not stayed to chat with Mr Tait when my poor mum was stuck in Mrs Mags’s hut with strangers. I should never have stopped.
It was either a wooden leg or he had a very serious skin condition, because what I saw was dark brown, shiny and smooth with no hairs, unlike my dad’s legs which had lots of dark hairs all over them like bits of bristle from a brush, or like the stuff that was coming out of Mrs Mags’s sofa. Mr Tait had none of that. In fact he had a dent in his leg, and unlike the dents that frequently happen to my legs, this dent was paler on the inside than on the outside.
The only conclusion I could come to was that this was not a real leg.
I had a kind of sick feeling, with prickles up the back of my neck. I think I may have become temporarily deaf because I didn’t hear a word Mr Tait was saying. I stood up and, before I knew it, I had picked up a brick and was positioning it roughly where we’d agreed the corner of the hut would be. I think I may also have become temporarily blind because it wasn’t long before I’d built a short tower, two bricks one way, then two bricks the other until I had about six or seven layers, but with no idea of what I was doing. Sandy says you call that automatic pilot.
‘There were legs, legs, made out of wooden pegs,’ I sang inside my head. A brick slipped from my grasp and landed heavily, narrowly missing my foot. My pretty hat slipped down over my eyes. I left it there.
‘Whoops, careful,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Very good, Lenny. That’s exactly how we’ll do it, but we need a bit of cement to stick them all together and we need to dig too, so that it sits right down into the ground. I need someone else for that though because of my bad leg.’
I wanted to say to him that it wasn’t a ‘bad’ leg; it was a non-leg, a leg that didn’t even exist, either as a good one or a bad one, and he hadn’t even told me about it in all this very long time that I’d known him, which of course was only eight days in total, but felt more like eight months.
‘Lenny?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I lied, only a little white one. I slipped Mavis’s shoe into my pocket. ‘I really need to go. My mum will be so worried.’
‘Lenny . . . ?’
‘Bye, Mr Tait! Thanks for the tea!’
‘Lenny, perhaps you could bring Joey . . . .’
I pretended I hadn’t heard. That was a white lie too wasn’t it? Or was it a black one, a black lie? I shook my head as I ran, to keep out the pictures of horrible things. I ran, heavy of heart. There were people all down the road, back a little among the trees, doing what Mr Tait was doing, building huts. They were mostly men but up the hill a bit there were women and kids. Bonfires smoked here and there. I wondered if any of them knew about Mr Tait’s leg, if I was the only person in the whole world who didn’t know about Mr Tait’s leg, if everyone else had been let in on the secret, everyone except me.
‘Bye, George!’ I said as I ran past the lorry, my hand on my head to keep my hat on. I’d forgotten too that we hated each other, but he had found and kept and returned Mavis’s shoe.
He had two legs; that seemed important.
I had two legs; that seemed important too. I listened to my two feet tap-tapping on the road and remembered what Mr Tait’s feet sounded like when he was on the road, his one foot, his wooden foot, and his stick. It was more of a tappety-tap, tappety-tap, and his body rocked as he went. It was just an old person’s sway. I couldn’t have known, but surely he could have told me. Now images of a stump filled my head, but was this stump below the knee or above it? How far above it, or how far below? Was it round and smooth, like the wood at his ankle, or flat like a tree branch that’s been sawn off?
‘The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah!’ I puffed and took my hat off. ‘The elephant and the kangaroo . . . .’ Who was the elephant and who was the kangaroo? ‘And they all went into the ark for to get out of the rain.’ And they all had the proper amount of legs, and nobody had any secrets, and everyone was everyone else’s friend.
How could he not have told me?
Mr Tait had lied! He’d told me his leg got a bit stiff sometimes when really it was completely and totally solid.
I had to slow down to consider this (I was running out of breath). Was it a white lie, to be kind, to save me being upset, or was it a black lie, designed to cheat? Did he pretend to be my friend when actually he wasn’t?
The road came to an end. I turned left into the main road. Jimmy Robertson’s bus was up ahead and people were milling about with milk bottles and loaves of bread. Jimmy Robertson glanced up as I passed so I pulled Mavis’s shoe out of my pocket and waved it at him. He gave me a quick thumbs-up and went back to his customers. The length of four buses and I was at the bottom of the hill, relieved to be on familiar territory.
I was exhausted.
When my mum laughed it sounded more like extra big hiccups, almost sore. It was high and sharp, a bit alarming if you weren’t expecting it. Sometimes people stopped laughing themselves and stared at her, to make sure she wasn’t choking before carrying on with their own laughter. My gran, on the other hand, was like a donkey; a long husky intake of breath followed by a single honk, and my dad was different again. He was a straightforward Ha . . . Ha . . . Ha, slow and rhythmic like the beat of a waltz, but somehow airy. I used to worry he’d run out of breath.
It was my mother’s laugh that assaulted my ears as I rounded the curve of the hill, somewhat breathless myself. Laughter was not what I’d expected and not, I felt, quite right somehow. She was sitting on an upright chair, wrapped in a coat with a tartan blanket tucked in around her knees and her crutches lying on the ground, one on either side of her as if she’d dropped them and fallen into the chair.
‘Lenny!’ she said, still laughing. ‘Hic! Where have you been? Hic!’
Mrs Mags was on another chair beside her, rolling from side to side. She was a silent laugher. Clouds burst from both their mouths. Mrs Mags struggled to compose herself.
‘Where have you left the boys, Lenny?’ said Mrs Mags.
I collapsed onto a stump of wood, panting, then rose again to get some water from the bucket inside, thumping back down on the stump again, cup in hand.
I told them I’d found bad George at Mr Tait’s hut, that wasn’t a hut yet.
‘Oh, good!’ said Mrs Mags. ‘When you’ve caught your breath you can go and tell his mum. She’s frantic.’ (So I was right.)
I didn’t really want to. I wanted to be with my mum.
‘You went to Mr Tait,’ said my mum as if this was a simple statement of fact.
‘Yes, sorry,’ I said. I didn’t really think I had to be sorry because going to Mr Tait had been an accident, but I was sorry I’d gone, sorry I’d seen his . . . I took a deep breath.
‘Mr Tait has a wooden leg,’ I said. ‘I saw it this morning by mistake.’
‘Does he, now?’ said my mum.
Mrs Mags said she knew that. She thought everyone knew that. Didn’t I know that?
No, I hadn’t known, obviously I hadn’t known.
My mum said she’d heard about his leg but thought it was just a rumour.
‘He lost it in the last war,’ said Mrs Mags, ‘or so he said. Blown up by a mine or something like that. What did you see?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, and I pulled my lips tight inside my mouth so that nothing would fall out.
But they weren’t having it, especially Mrs Mags.
‘You must have seen something,’ she said. ‘What was it like?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Brown, I suppose. I don’t know.’
‘Brown,’ she said. ‘And which bit did you see?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, squirming now, because what I saw was an ankle without a foot, torn and ragged, blood drying on a dark pavement, a pavement covered with glass and glittering like rubies. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing indeed!’ said Mrs Mags.
‘Nothing,’ echoed my mum, not laughing now.
‘I saw nothing,’ I said.
‘Well, nobody else has ever seen Mr Tait’s leg so you’re a very lucky girl,’ said Mrs Mags, and she did her silent laugh. ‘I only know because I asked him. It’s nothing to be ashamed of after all. He’s a hero, he is.’
I stood up. I needed to move so I hopped from foot to foot. My head felt hot and my throat was dry. I started to cough, just like when I was down at the bus the night before, and while I was coughing I was singing, inside my head of course. I sang my favourite skipping game: ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high, Out pops Mavis from the sky, She is handsome, she is pretty . . . .’
I could hear Mrs Mags and my mum behind it all, somewhere far off. They were calling my name, and then Mrs Mags went back inside the hut and brought me some more water from the bucket and my mum was telling me to ‘Come here!’ and trying to get out of her chair to get to me.
‘Lenny!’ said Mrs Mags so loudly it made me jump. ‘Stop that!’ She took my hand and put a tin cup full of water into it and practically forced me to drink. I took a big gulp, which made me cough all over again.
‘Lenny . . . ,’ said my mum half out of her chair, reaching for her crutches.
‘Mrs Gillespie, sit back down! You’re going to fall!’ said Mrs Mags. She sounded just like Miss Weatherbeaten for a second.
We both lunged forward in time to steady my mum. She sat back on her chair and I rearranged her blanket, tucking it in around her waist, but once within her reach she wasn’t letting me go. She kept a hand on my elbow in case I tried to run. When I’d finished tucking her in and wiping my eyes and nose, she slipped her arm around my middle and gave me a squeeze, and I leant in against her.
‘You mustn’t upset your mum like that,’ said Mrs Mags, sounding more and more like Miss Weatherbeaten every minute, only she was breathing heavily as if she’d just climbed the hill too. ‘I thought you had more sense than that, Lenny. Really, running off over the hill when you know your mum needs you.’
‘She’s alright,’ broke in my mum, ‘aren’t you, Leonora? She’s just a bit scared, like Mr Tait said. Isn’t that right?’
I nodded, and felt those coughs coming on again.
Mrs Mags said she thought she’d take a little walk over to George’s mum, and perhaps check up on the boys on the way. She meant Mr Mags and Mr Connor. They were working on someone else’s hut a little further over the field. She told me to take good care of my mum, which I always do anyway.
I had a conversation then with my mum like nothing I’d ever had before. She told me what had happened the night of the bombing. She had met her friend down near the docks and no sooner had she met him but the sirens went off. They had laughed and shrugged it off as just another false alarm, which is what most people did to begin with. It was what I did, except I didn’t laugh because I’d already lost Mavis by then. But suddenly he said he had to get back to his wife and family and he left my mum standing there in the middle of the main street all by herself and ran off down a side street, which made him a not very nice young man.
My mum ran through the tunnel under the canal and up over the railway bridge calling out for me and Mavis, but the bombers had arrived by then and no-one would have heard a thing, so she had to keep looking, looking, looking, peering through the smoke and the dust, but seeing nothing. And then she heard a bomb with her name on it and ran down a close to get away, but the bomb really did have her name on it and that’s when she was buried for hours and hours and hours. She was only down our street on the other side of the road. We’d looked in the same places but missed each other.
‘I lay there in the dark and listened,’ she said. ‘When the bombs stopped for a bit I tried to shout again but it hurt. I shouted your name, Lenny, but no-one heard for ages and then a man called in to me and said they were coming back; they were going to get me out. After that it got very cold, even though the fire would have been raging above me, and all I could hear was the bombers flying backwards and forwards and the bombs dropping.’
I was standing beside her with my fingers pressed into my eyes, little gulps coming up from my tummy as if I was going to be sick.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I thought you’d better know.’
‘I had better know,’ I told her, although I wished I didn’t have to. ‘I do want to hear.’
‘Sit down, Lenny,’ she said, ‘so I can see you. I’ve missed you so much! Here, sit beside me.’
I didn’t want to do that either, but it was alright, I’d laid the blanket over her so that it went all the way to the ground. I pulled Mrs Mags’s chair over a bit closer and sat down. I still had my hat on, my pretty hat with the yellow and pink ribbon and the purple cloth flowers. She took it off and sat it on her knee, fiddling with the pretend violets while she spoke.
‘I don’t actually know what happened next, just that I miraculously woke up in hospital with bandages all over me and no . . . .’
‘I know!’ I said, interrupting. ‘I know what happened next. Mr Tait was there. He was there when they brought you out.’
‘Was he?’
‘He said you were speaking.’
‘Was I?’
‘He said you wouldn’t go in the ambulance because you didn’t know where me and Mavis were.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’
‘He said your legs were in bad shape, but not, you know . . . .’
‘Not that I’d lost a foot.’
‘No, not that.’
‘I see.’
We sat a minute in silence. I flicked my bottom lip with my finger so that it went pop, pop, pop against my teeth.
‘They said it was gone,’ she said, ‘when I arrived, and that . . . .’
‘No, no, no, no!’ I shrieked.
‘Oh, Lenny, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s just that I saw it,’ I said.
‘Saw it?’ she said.
So I told her how I’d seen it further up the road when I’d been running through the bombing with Miss Weatherbeaten; I’d seen her foot and I’d seen some other stuff too that I shouldn’t have seen, because Miss Weatherbeaten made me promise not to look but I’d broken my promise, like I knew I would when I made it.
‘No, Lenny, no it can’t have been. They said . . . they said it was there. Still attached but . . . no use. They had to . . . .’
This hung in the air between us, this unimaginable thing that I didn’t want to think about but couldn’t help trying. I put my hands over my ears and screwed my eyes tight shut and hummed, ‘When Mavis comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah!’
‘Lenny! Lenny!’
I heard her through my palms.
‘When Mavis comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah!’
She held my elbow again and I could tell she wasn’t going to let go. The tears were pouring down my cheeks, so that I couldn’t see. Her hand squeezed on my arm, like the rhythm of a heartbeat, and she reached over as far as she could and wiped the tears from my cheeks with her thumbs, just like she always does, and I saw that big tears were pouring down her cheeks too.
‘They said I’m lucky to be alive,’ she said, when I took my hands off my ears.
‘I know.’
And for the first time I considered the possibility of her not being alive, of my being like wee Rosie with no mum or dad, and that took the breath out of me all over again.
‘Mr Tait said he had to tell them who you were,’ I said, after a bit.
‘He must be lying then because I had my bag,’ she said. ‘I still had my bag when I woke up in hospital. And guess what?’ Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘I still have all the papers, the birth certificates and the photo of your dad and me on our wedding day, and the America money! What a relief! Thank goodness I did what the government said and kept it with me all the time.’ She sniffed loudly and laughed a loud ‘hic’.
‘Oh, good,’ I said, not convinced. I didn’t want to go to America to family and I didn’t believe Mr Tait ever lied. He just sometimes forgot to tell me he only had one leg.
‘Though God only knows if we’ll ever get there now,’ she went on.
‘Mr Tait says you will,’ I said. I was annoyed now. Mr Tait was my friend. ‘He says you’ve got gumption, like me. He says I’ve got lots of grit, for a girl, and that people should listen to what happened to me and how I survived. He says I’m the bravest little girl he’s ever come across. And he says you are too and all you need is your gumption to get you to America.’
‘Leonora,’ she said, a bit sharp now. ‘When you’re a big girl I’ll tell you what Mr Tait did and why I don’t like him. You’re too young to understand, just now.’
I stood up and grabbed my hat from her lap and trembling, stuck it firmly back where it belonged, on my head.
‘I’m not too young!’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you did, but I know that Mr Tait didn’t clype on you. It was somebody else. He said so and Mr Tait doesn’t lie! He promised me he’d come to the hospital at two o’clock sharp and he did. He even brought me an orange, and . . . .’
‘Alright, alright!’ she said. ‘Goodness! Alright, Mr Tait is not a liar. It was someone else. Alright!’ She waved both hands in the air as if to shake off all the bad things she’d been thinking about him.
I didn’t know whether to mention what George had said, about her being a tart and all that. Perhaps not. I sat back down on Mrs Mags’s chair. We sat there so long in our silence that the rabbits came out and started nibbling the grass again. It was a beautiful clear sunny day at last, and I had my mum at last, and I didn’t want either of us to be upset any more. We watched the rabbits until a gang of wee kids came rushing up the hill and chased them away with their noise.
‘So tell me what happened to you and how you got through the bombing,’ she said.
So I did, I told her all of it, all that I’ve told you, about the bad boys and losing Mavis and the bombs and Mr Chippie, the fur coat lady, Annie and the dead baby and on and on and on. I told her about Miss Weatherbeaten and Mr Tait and walking over the hills, and Miss Weatherbeaten slapping me, and Mr Tait’s sandwiches and his blood orange, and poor Rosie losing all her family and then going back to the town hall.
I told her about sneaking into the hospital, that I hadn’t meant to sneak in, I just had to see her so that I knew she was still alive, and I had to tell her I was alive too.
‘Of course you wouldn’t be allowed in,’ she said. ‘What on earth was Mr Tait thinking of letting you go up there on your own?’
‘That’s what he said,’ I said.
She looked at the treetops and shook her head.
‘Poor little you!’ she said, finally. ‘You’ve been so brave! I hate to have to say it but Mr Tait is right! You are the bravest little girl in the whole world!’
Which wasn’t quite what Mr Tait had said but I thought I’d let that pass. And I hadn’t been brave. I’d been terrified. I’d survived but I’d lost Mavis.
‘When you came into the hospital that day they were not nice to me, the nurses. I mean I do understand, they didn’t want you bringing in mumps and measles and whatnot, but it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault either. If the trumped-up little tart on the reception desk had been kinder she would have taken a message for you.’
(It still didn’t seem like the moment to ask. About tarts.)
‘I’m only saying that because that’s what everyone said about her, a nasty little busybody who thinks she’s too good for the shoes that she’s in,’ she said. ‘One of the nurses, a young one, said so. She was lovely.’
She said she hadn’t actually seen me getting hauled out of the ward because the doctor was in the way. She’d given him and the grey-haired monster nurse a piece of her mind afterwards and very nearly got put out of the hospital for her trouble. Then Mr Tait had arrived with his daffodils and his basket, fumbling about and coming in when she’d expressly said she didn’t want to speak to him, not without seeing me first. It was just like Mr Tait had said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘You do?’
‘Yes, Mr . . . ,’ I said. I paused a moment. ‘Sorry. He told me. He said it was like a nest of she-cats in there and that you and I caused a stooshy.’
‘Mr Tait said that?’ she said. ‘He’s right.’
‘Mmm . . . .’
‘I should still be in hospital,’ she said. ‘How am I going to learn to use these crutches in the middle of a wet field? The bottom just cuts right through the grass and disappears. If we were even by the road I could practise on the road.’
I couldn’t say ‘Mr Tait’s hut is by the road’ so I couldn’t say anything at all. I moved my chair a bit closer to her and leant my head on her shoulder.
‘I’m trapped,’ she said. ‘Completely trapped and helpless. I can’t do anything for myself. I can’t even make tea or go for a wee!’
‘I’m here, Mum,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’ I put my arm around her shoulders.
‘I know, love,’ she said, patting the top of my head with her hand. ‘I know.’
But I wasn’t going to be enough.
We watched the wind stir the trees and some birds flitting in and out. A man walked by with a hammer in one hand and a toolbox under his arm. He waved to us and passed on up the hill.
‘To have to depend on strangers . . . ,’ she said.
‘And me,’ I said.
‘And you,’ she said.
‘And if they needed help, wouldn’t you help them, these strangers?’ I said, stroking her arm.
‘Of course I would, Leonora, it’s just that I’m not sure how I would help anyone now. I can’t pay anyone back for their trouble.’
‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Maybe some other time.’
‘I won’t even be able to look after you or Mavis.’
So I told her I could look after Mavis, and I could look after her too until she was better, until she’d got used to the crutches. And while I was about it and feeling a tiny bit braver, I told her we could stay in Mr Tait’s hut and she could practise walking on the road and he could make sure she still had her job when she was better. She didn’t need two good legs, did she, to test sewing machines?
But apparently she did. What about lifting and carrying and working the foot pedals and so on? And no, she wasn’t going to stay in a hut with Mr Tait, or grovel and ask him for her job. Sorry, but no.
Shame. It seemed like the perfect solution to most of our problems, but she didn’t seem as angry with him as she had been, so I allowed myself a tiny smile, which she wouldn’t have seen because I still had my head on her shoulder.
Three rabbits came out of their burrows again and hoppity-skipped across the grass until they found a patch they liked and settled down for a good nibbling.
‘Mum,’ I said in a loud stage whisper. I didn’t want to disturb them. ‘Mum, what about Mavis? Mr Tait’s the only person who can go to Clydebank and look for her.’
‘Nonsense!’ she whispered back. ‘What about Mr Mags?’
‘Mr Mags won’t get the time away from his work. Mr Tait’s a boss. He can leave whenever he wants, can’t he?’
‘Not really. He’s not a very big boss,’ she said, and I remembered the grown-ups’ talk the night before. ‘Big enough to get me into trouble but not big enough to save my job, I’m sure. Okay, okay!’ She threw her arms up as if she was defending herself from an attacker. ‘He didn’t get me into trouble.’
I didn’t disagree.
‘Alright, I’ll go,’ I said. I forgot to whisper so the rabbits scurried off into the bushes.
‘No, you can’t. I’ve heard there’s still terrible things to be seen there. They’ll be clearing up for ages.’
‘Are there?’ I said.
She ran her hand down my hair and began to stroke it even though there wasn’t much there, and no long bits to twiddle round her fingers.
‘What are we going to do about Mavis?’ I whispered, even though all the rabbits had gone.