In the pocket of my coat, along with Mavis’s shoe, there was a silver half-crown, the one Mr Tait had given me when I went to find my mum at the hospital. In the other pocket I stuffed the ‘piece’ Mrs Mags had given me for my lunch – two chunks of bread and dripping. Along with the silver half-crown and Mavis’s shoe I had the picture of Mr MacInnes’s gums, on the back of which were the plans Mr Tait and I had drawn up for the new hut. I tore off a piece and scrawled a message. I still had a pencil, the same soft one I had used for drawing, which I had sneaked from Mr MacInnes’s bag the night before and hadn’t had a chance to return. The message read:
‘Please tell. Gone for Mavis. Back soon. Sorry. Len . . . .’
The lead ran out before I could finish my name.
It was Monday morning. Mr Mags, Mr Connor and Izzie had left on the early bus to go back to work for the week. Along with all the other kids, I was in line at the school door. Miss Read was beaming happiness and order from the front step. I slipped the message into Sandy’s pocket and said I needed to go, you know, to the cludgie. But really I just needed to go. I didn’t want to go; I’d much rather have stayed and recited my nine times-table, but I knew there was no alternative. No-one else could do what needed to be done, that was clear. It was down to me.
So while they were all saying prayers in the hallway, as we did every morning, I sneaked up the burn beside the school as fast as I could scamper, which wasn’t very fast at all because this hill was even bigger than the hill at Carbeth. They were singing ‘There is a green hill far away’ practising for Easter, and I sang ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high . . . .’
When I got to the top of the hill I saw the big beech tree that we had sat under when a big bomber killer bee flew over us a week-and-a-half earlier. Carbeth was hidden in the valleys now, tucked up safely amongst the trees.
I was sorry to upset everyone, especially Mr Tait, but I really needed to find Mavis. The day before and the night before that, when everyone had gone to the dance except us, had been unbearable, intolerable, suffocating. My mum had cried all night and we hardly slept a wink and I knew I had to find Mavis for her. The next day I had been unable to speak to anyone, not even Mr Tait. It all had to stop. I had to do something. Even the simple act of walking over the hill made me feel better. Mr Tait would be busy with his hut. Mrs Mags would look after my mum. No-one would miss me until school was over.
I thought about how worried my mum would be with me gone but how pleased she’d be when I brought Mavis back. I wanted to bring Rosie too, but that might have to wait.
Ten days had passed and there was still smoke over Clydebank. It was drifting in from the west (from the same oil tanks, as it turned out, that had been hit at the beginning of the bombing, guiding the killer bees to us). I walked towards the town, getting hotter with every step, although the big sun that was rising above me was no more use than a light bulb. If there was still smoke, there must still be fire. What on earth would I find? My mum had said there were still terrible things to be seen in Clydebank and I started to worry about the things I’d already seen that I shouldn’t have seen.
A man passed me, hurrying to work. I told him where I was going and he wished me luck and sped off down the hill in great lollops. There was something that looked like tents over by a farm – bedraggled looking things hanging all loose and any old how with some kids playing out in front of them. Cows wandered across the path, eyeing me and eyeing the tents, interesting new inhabitants of their field. I eyed the tents too and wondered. At the big flat rock, the one we’d sat on before, I washed my hands in the burn, not because they needed it (my mum made me wash them the night before) but more for luck, which seemed in short supply. I sat on the wide flat rock and looked out over Clydebank. I couldn’t see much from that distance except something white and square which might have been the La Scala picture house where I had spent most of a night.
Perhaps my planning had not been complete. Perhaps I needed a plan for what I could do if I saw things I didn’t want to see, which it seemed likely that I would. What had Mr Tait said I should do when I got a fright, because it would be a sort of fright, wouldn’t it, to see things I didn’t want to see? He said . . . I tried hard to remember, squinting into the morning sun, ignoring the cows on the other side of a stone wall, munching, nodding their heads. He said . . . don’t be scared, we’re safe in Carbeth. Well, that was no use; I wasn’t in Carbeth any more, was I? And he said . . . this jumpiness will pass, being scared will pass, even though I hadn’t told him I was scared. It would pass.
‘Excuse me!’ said a voice.
I threw my arms about my head and rolled onto my side.
‘Sorry, love,’ said the voice. ‘You alright? I didn’t mean to give you a fright.’
It was a man in a dark-red knitted hat with a ripple of bright orange hair around the sides. He was wearing a jacket that stretched over his tummy so that the last button looked like it might ping off at any minute.
‘Mr Tulloch?’ I said breathlessly, rubbing my shoulder. I’d only seen Mr Tulloch in the dark. Perhaps he had orange hair and was tubbier than I remembered him.
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh! No,’ I said, peering at him, ‘but you look like Mr Tulloch. He gave me a lift on his cart.’
‘That would be my brother. We sound the same, don’t we? He’s got a farm over Carbeth way. I’m the brainy one.’ He smiled.
‘That’s him. Yes, you do sound the same.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to bother you; sorry to give you a fright, but I wondered if you could fill this bottle for me, from the burn, save me climbing over the wall? Phew! You’ve been roughed up a bit. What happened?’
I nodded towards the town.
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Are you coming or going? To the town?’
I nodded at Clydebank again. ‘I’ve got to find my sister. She’s four. I lost her.’
Mr Tulloch, this new Mr Tulloch, asked if there wasn’t a grown-up that could look for me, to save me going, and I told him there wasn’t. I filled his bottle for him and handed it back. He had a tin cup in his hand.
‘Fancy some milk?’ he said.
I nodded. And then to my surprise he slapped the nearest cow on the behind and he bent down behind the wall for a few seconds where he and his cows were and came back up with a cup full of frothy milk.
‘Straight from the cow,’ he smiled. ‘It doesn’t come any fresher than that.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking the cup, but it was warm from the cow’s body and I couldn’t drink that!
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘It won’t do you any harm. Goan.’
I didn’t really want to drink it, not really at all, but I knew it was a very special present, this foaming cup of warm milk, even though the very thought of it made me feel sick.
‘Goan,’ he said, just like his brother had said to the horse.
And this will pass too, I thought. This will be over soon too. So I flung the milk down my throat with a gulp, gulp, gulp and smiled a big thank you to him.
‘There now, that’ll set you up for the day,’ he said. ‘Better um . . . ,’ and he pointed at his top lip and peered at mine so I wiped the milk moustache off it with the back of my hand.
I thanked him and hurried on my way down the path.
‘Good luck!’ he called after me. ‘I hope you find her.’
‘Thank you!’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mavis,’ I said. ‘And Rosie. Rosie’s my friend, same age as Mavis.’
‘I’ll look out for them.’
‘Thank you!’
‘I’ll ask at the tents!’
I stopped and went back. ‘Tents?’ I said.
‘Tents isn’t exactly what they are. More like make-shift bivouacs.’
‘Bivouacs?’
‘Made of sheets and sticks and bits and pieces. Next to my barn in the calving pen.’
‘Who’s in them?’
‘Oh, now, there’s a load of people all ages. Yes, there’s a few kids with them. Maybe even your Mavis and Rosie.’
What was I to do? I thought about it for a minute, my hand on the shoe in my pocket, and then red-haired Mr Tulloch scratched his chin and shook his head making his red hair wobble. Then, like his dark-haired brother, he told me what to do.
‘I think you should keep going where you were going, the town hall I’m guessing, and I’ll ask my wife for you. She’s the one who knows about the tents. I can see there’s no time to be wasted.’
‘Will you? Thank you!’
‘What’s your . . . ?’
‘Lenny,’ I said as I started down the hill. ‘Lenny Gilliespie.’ And I hurried away from him as quickly as I could mainly because I needed to go into a bush and go ‘Yuck, yuck, yuck!’ about the milk.
I stole in behind some yellow broom, in amongst the spiders and the beasties and I rubbed my tummy, imagining that I felt sick. And actually I did feel sick but it was nothing to do with the milk. It was the thought of going back to Clydebank and what I might find. I thought about going over to the bivouacs instead, with red-haired Mr Tulloch, but he was a stranger so I couldn’t do that, or back over the hill to wait again for grown-ups to find Mavis, but so far that hadn’t worked. So I thought about grit and being brave, which wasn’t how I felt, not at all. I felt more like that jelly I didn’t want to be, with no grit at all. I took Mavis’s shoe out of my pocket and rubbed its leather, hoping for the genie of bravery and grit to put in an appearance, or just an ordinary genie to grant me three wishes: Mavis is alive, Mavis is with me, Mavis and I get home safely. But after all that wishing I still felt sick.
Another man came over the hill so I waited until he’d passed and then crawled out and followed him down across the fields, until at last we came to a road. The man was far ahead of me now where the road turned down towards Clydebank. There it became Kilbowie Road, the main road that ran near my house, so I followed on down, Mavis’s shoe still in my hand.
At the junction of Kilbowie Road and Great Western Road, which is the big road that runs all the way into Glasgow and marks the very edge of Clydebank, a huge crater had opened up, a big deep hole. It was deep enough for four of me all standing on top of myself and as wide as the baths at Hall Street. It was full of pipes and mud and rocks and water. I peered in half-expecting a giant beetle to wave its snappy claws at me. There was another hole a little further down Kilbowie Road, just as deep and just as wide. It too was full of rocks and mud and pipes, and over in the field to my left there was another one and mounds of grassy earth were scattered everywhere, even onto the road where I was standing. The houses on the right of the road had holes in them too, and great mounds of rubble were spread up the streets with broken furniture and glass everywhere. It was just like before, just like our street, just like all the other streets I’d run through on those two terrible nights, only with the cool daylight from the big shimmery sun spread all over it, so you could see everything.
There were socks and little girls’ dresses, forks and teapots, tablecloths and bedpans, potted plants and bent budgie cages, all sprinkled with the glitter of broken glass. Most of the houses had no glass in their windows or only fragments that were jagged and treacherous. Some were roughly boarded up with bits of table or loosely covered over with old curtains. There was an odd quietness, few chimneys with smoke and hardly any people in the street, and those I passed were silent, or whispering closely to each other, as if afraid to disturb the peace.
‘Mavis,’ I whispered. ‘Mavis, Mavis, Mavis.’ And then, ‘The wind blows low, the wind blows high, Out pops Mavis from the sky.’ And then I had to hold my nose and sing inside my head because there was a smell. It was different from the night of the bombing because the houses weren’t burning any more, only the oil tanks. It smelled of burnt oil, like cars, but it smelled of other things too, rotten things and toilets, old meat and churches, and cold, dark places where you don’t want to be.
It’s a difficult thing trying to look all about you and not look at the same time, especially when the world has been turned upside down and everything is in the wrong place. It was like someone had lifted up each house and turned it over so that all the contents had fallen out, including all the roofs and floors, then set them back down again exactly where they’d been. How else could these things get so mixed up?
I tiptoed past the first big hole and then the second one and the holes in the fields and the broken houses with roofs missing, and then I tiptoed past a whole lot more broken houses, and then some more, until I wasn’t sure where I was because nothing looked familiar any more, except that I could see the La Scala, big and white up ahead. Before the La Scala, where the high tenements should have been, there was a long pile of rubble with metal girders sticking up at one part like the outline of rooms. At another there were girders like doorways from one pile of muck to another, but they weren’t doorways because doorways are made of wood, everyone knows that. I don’t know what they were. Behind the pile of rubble was the back wall of the buildings that should have been there. You could see the sky through the windows, and the haze drifting in from the oil fires. The shops from our window-shopping day out were all gone and so were their fancy goodies that no-one was going to buy now, and above me some tram-wires still ran from their posts, spindly across the street.
There was another big hole in the road. My school was beside it, but a lot of it was missing. A row of sinks was on the outside and the playground was full of sandstone. My heart beat fast. Beyond the big hole in the road I could see the church. There were people at the entrance, going in and out, and I thought I might know them, so I skirted the hole, shaking, careful not to fall in, and asked.
Some of them knew my mum, and some of them even knew that she’d gone to the hospital, and one even knew she’d lost her foot; but no-one knew where Mavis might be except that she might have been in a shelter at number thirty-two, down our street. So after I’d asked everybody in the crypt (they were having sardine sandwiches and tea) and I’d told them we were in Carbeth with Mr Tait from Singer’s factory, I crossed the road beneath the great gaping hole that was there and stood at the beginning of the side street that went towards our house.
I tugged my coat tight about me. I held my nose with one hand and Mavis’s shoe in the other. I closed my eyes and waited for my heart to stop thumping but when I realised that it wouldn’t I opened them again and stared. If Mavis was up there, I thought, I’d never find her. It was a mountain of rubble as far as I could see and dogs were sniffing about it, skinny dogs with scabby legs and hungry looks who turned their big eyes on me when I took my first step.
Perhaps it was the dry spring air, or the dust or the smoke that made my throat so rough but I felt those coughs coming up, like gulps and barks at the same time, so I swallowed hard until I couldn’t swallow any more and coughs came bursting out of me. Some dogs came tripping over, I don’t know how many, five or six, all sizes.
‘Leave me alone!’ I said, and I pulled myself all tight while they sniffed at my knees and my pocket and at Mavis’s shoe. I was shaking, crying, wishing someone was there, like my dad for instance, or a passer-by, and then suddenly they all went away and left me standing there on top of a pile of bricks.
‘Mavis,’ I whispered, trembling with cold. ‘Mavis. I’ve got to find Mavis.’ I tried to breathe properly but I was all shuddery and sore. ‘Mavis,’ I said louder. And louder again, ‘Mavis!’ Her name echoed off the buildings. The dogs stopped and gazed back at me. ‘Mavis!’ I shouted, and one of them barked.
Some of the buildings were full height but empty inside and some were hardly there at all. ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high . . . ,’ I sang under my breath.
‘Mavis!’ I called her name into doorways and up to the rooftops. ‘Mavis!’ I said.
I tripped over the foot of a table, trying not to see its brown curves and caught my fall with my hands. ‘I like bananas because they have no bones, ow-ow-ow. Don’t give me your peaches, don’t like ice cream cones . . . Mavis!’
My palms were bleeding now, new cuts by the old, and they were black like when the bombs fell, like the day after, and the day after that.
‘Mavis!’
There was nobody to be seen down that street and all the buildings were black. Tenements lined the road, high ones of four or five floors a least with holes for windows and nothing inside. The road had been partly cleared so that for some of the way I could walk up the middle and it wasn’t difficult, but for the most part I had to clamber over things I didn’t want to see. There was an odd rotting smell like the damp moss that I’d smelled in our first hut at Carbeth, only it was different, sharper and foosty, sweet and clammy, a smell I didn’t like. I wanted to hold my nose again but I needed both hands, one in case I took another fall and the other to hold Mavis’s shoe.
‘Mavis!’ I shouted at the top of my voice, and it echoed back to me this time as if lots of little Mavises were hiding out there and I had to stop and cough and got scared that the buildings might fall down. Maybe there were unexploded bombs in them, like the ones inside me, and that was why all the other people I’d seen were being so quiet, so as not to explode the bombs. But nothing moved except the dogs so I stayed there for a moment and looked all about to make sure the buildings weren’t going to fall on me.
But in amongst the writhing debris there were things I couldn’t help seeing, things no-one should see, things that shouldn’t have been there, a teapot for a head, a drainpipe for a leg, a shoulder of rubble, eyes of glass winking. The wind suddenly rushed through me, funnelled by the tenements. It lifted the sleeve of a jacket caught in a window and threw my straw hat over my shoulder.
A rat shot out in front of me, and another and another, hundreds of them, whistling and screaming across my path.
‘Go away!’ I shouted. ‘Go away!’ And I heard my own breath pumping through my mouth, pumping in my chest, pump, pump, pump and I thought I was going to run out of air and the rats were going to run up my legs under my dress, under my arms, onto my head, and I nearly dropped Mavis’s shoe. But instead I wrapped the shoe and my jittery hands around my head and pulled all my bravery up from my t-bar shoes and I jumped as far as I could right over the stream of rats and didn’t look at any of the houses or the mess in the rubble, even though I could see things moving in there. I ran on and on down the street and round the corner, with the sudden sound of all the dogs barking behind me in excitement over what they had found.
But my street was even worse and I couldn’t find number thirty-two where Mavis might have been because there were no numbers, and I didn’t want to go round the back of the tenements because I might find a lady in a sea of bricks and I knew exactly where one of those was and I didn’t want to see her again or anyone else dead for that matter.
I began to tap out a rhythm on my side: dah-dah-di, dah-dah-di, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, and then I hummed a tune to it. I hummed my way over the mess until I came to our house.
Our house was exactly like all the other houses, black and windowless and cold, but I knew it was ours because the house over the road was gone.
And there I cried so hard I thought my body would just break into pieces, and I crumpled down onto a piece of the baffle wall and wished it all not to be true.
But it was. It was all true. I knew it was because the stone I was sitting on was the same one Mr Chippie had put me down on before the second night of the bombing. Dah-dah-di, dah-dah. And I knew I couldn’t leave there until I had checked for Mavis. And lots of horrible things passed through my head clear as daylight as if it was all happening again, and all the bombs were raining down and the people were running and screaming and lying down dead, and one of them might be Mavis. ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high . . . .’
So like a ghost I stood up and started looking for bits of our life, things from before, the teapot, the clock, the bed, my dad’s chair perhaps, checking for things that might be useful, things that were ours. We didn’t have much that was ours. We hadn’t had much even then, but every little counts. All we need is Mavis. Out popped Mavis from the sky, She is handsome, she is . . . , I thought. I clutched my hat on my head, squeezed Mavis’s shoe back into the pocket of my coat, and took a step towards our close. Glass crunched beneath my feet and a mouse ran under the stone. A couple more steps and I was in.
It was oddly dark and light. Anything that could have been burnt, had been, everything that fire could gobble up. Even the white walls of the close were black and through the jambless door of the downstairs flat where all my neighbours had been sheltering there was a black hole that stank, no tables or chairs or beds, just stone and bedsprings, twisted and jumbled under a blanket of dirt. There were no neighbours and no bits of neighbours but there was a stove like our stove with a big iron kettle on it, set back into the stone wall underneath the chimney. There were no floors in that house or any of the others, but up above in the stone wall was another stove with the curve of a kettle, like our kettle, just visible over its edge, and another up above that. And above that only sky and some birds fighting over the top spot on the gable, flapping across the space where the roof should have been.
‘Mavis,’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t be here.’
Something moved behind me, glass falling through the debris. I wanted to run but I had to stay.
‘Mum,’ I whispered, and I wished she was there, and the birds flapped at the sky and I wished I was in Carbeth with the wood pigeons and not in this dark, scary place with my blood pumping in my ears and every foothold so shoogly. I started up the stone stairs, sliding on the mess, but needing to go up and fast.
The door to our house was gone and there was no floor, only a drop all the way down to the bottom that reminded me how sick I felt. Our stove was there too, crouched in the wall beneath the chimney, with my mum’s cup sitting by the chimney pipe and the kettle next to it. The iron poker lay along the foot shelf at the front waiting for my mum to lift it.
Our window was gone and through the gap I saw a billow of black cloud from the oil tanks and beyond it a deep blue sky. There was nothing else left in our single end flat: no sink, no draining board, no cupboard underneath. The silence boomed in my ears. I looked and looked, trying to put the bed back, the floor, my dad’s chair, the patchwork bedcover, the rag rug, the sink, the space under the bed. Where we’d have died if we’d been there.
A little brown bird suddenly landed in the window, clutching the blackened stone with its little claws. It fluttered silently to the stove and sat on the edge of my mum’s cup. Two more came in after it and together they swooped around the space where our room should have been, chattering to each other, then rushed out the window again. I heard them over my head but couldn’t look up because my legs were shaking and I might get dizzy and fall into the big hole that went all the way down, down, down into the basement below the bottom flat.
Something moved behind me up the stairs and I got such a fright I nearly did fall down that big hole, but instead I ran and fell and slid down the stairs, just like I had done when the bombs were coming down and it was killer bees and not little brown birds up there, and I arrived panting at the bottom. But instead of going back over the rubble to the street, I went through the close, like the wind did, so that I could look in the back court in case Mavis was there, but sure, somehow, that she had not died there.
The ground was full of holes and bricks, and further down the street there were buildings missing. There was nothing of our life in the back court, no bits and pieces that had been flung through the window, no pegs on the drying line and no line. Nothing – nothing at all but rats and little brown birds and big black crows up in the sky, and a dog howling, like I wanted to howl out over the rest of the town.
Back out the front, I ran down the road telling myself it was a good thing Mavis wasn’t there, and not wanting to look anywhere else in case she was somewhere nearby. I couldn’t find number thirty-two and anyway time was running out and I had to get to the town hall. A little further on, I passed the building my mum had been buried under and the place where the nasty old lady with the bundle had told me she had seen Mavis, but I carried on over the railway bridges which had more gaping holes on either side of them, and under the canal. It was the same way I had walked after the first night of the bombs only in the other direction. I wished Mr Tait would suddenly appear, just like he had then, and I wished I’d let him in on my plan so that he could have come with me.