I carried Mavis most of the way to Mr Tait’s hut, perched on my hip with her long, four-year-old legs waving about and her arms around my neck, and then I set her down and we walked the last bit to the front steps, Rosie and I shouting ‘Mum!’ all the time.
Mr Tait’s hut had a roof! The light from the hurricane slithered down it and along its walls too. Some of the walls were missing and none of the windows were there, but only because they hadn’t been put in yet, not because they’d been bombed out. There were blankets across them instead, just like in Clydebank. I clattered up the steps dragging poor Mavis behind me, and wee Rosie stumbled along after her.
‘Mum!’ I said, ‘Look! Look who’s here! Look! It’s Mavis!’
My mum was standing holding the wall.
‘Where is she?’ said my mum, and she fell with a thud onto her knees on the hollow floor and held Mavis by her shoulders, their heads at exactly the same height, and Mavis finally let go of my hand and wrapped herself around my mum, and my mum hugged and hugged her back. I got down there and hugged them both too.
‘Where have you been?’ she said, meaning Mavis, and ‘Where did you find her?’ she said to me, but she didn’t really want answers just then; she wanted to squeeze Mavis, and she wanted to squeeze me, and I couldn’t have answered her anyway because my mouth was full of sobs even though I was so happy because we were all three together again and we had Mavis back. Mavis was crying too in the airless, snivelling way that four year olds do, as if she was shivering with the cold. Her little body was trembling under my arm. Rosie stood beside us patting Mavis on the head with one hand and pulling on her earlobe with the other. I took her hand, the one with the earlobe, and pulled her in beside me.
My mum did what I had done; she examined Mavis from top to bottom to make sure she was all there. She ran her hand round her chin, counted all her fingers (not out loud but I knew what she was doing) and she checked her feet. Mavis was still wearing the dress my mum had made for her, the blue one like mine but with purple embroidery. Mavis had cuts on her hands, bruises on her legs, filthy broken fingernails, and lots of little scratches all over her face, but nothing was actually missing.
‘Quietly, now,’ said Mr Tait to Sandy, Dougie and bad George. ‘On you go in.’ They tiptoed into the hut in the way only boys can do with ill-fitting boots, kicking the steps and elbows banging off walls.
And through my tears I saw Mrs Mags sitting on a chair in the corner, all wrapped up in a blanket. Her face was pink and yellow in the firelight and her red hair was loose about her cheeks. She looked excited and ill at the same time and I wondered what on earth could be wrong with her. But of course she’d ‘had a baby’ – perhaps that was it, and I wondered where this baby was and what type of baby it might be.
A fire glowed in a metal tub set on some bricks. Sparks flew from it at an alarming rate and disappeared up the brickwork chimney above it. The room was busy with yellow shadows. Mr Tait stepped through it in his caramel-brown suit and we helped my mum up off the floor and back into her fantastic new wheelchair which was sitting in the corner.
‘What a happy day!’ I heard Mrs Mags say with a laugh. ‘Congratulations, Mrs Gillespie!’ She had Sandy on one side, Dougie on the other and George was shifting from foot to foot in front of her.
‘Out the way, George!’ said Sandy. ‘I can’t see him. You’re in the light.’
And George did get out of the way, which was a surprise really, with him being so bad and whatnot; I thought he’d stay right where he was and annoy everyone by blocking all the light from the fire. But he didn’t, in fact he asked Mr Tait for a candle, which Mr Tait quickly produced, and they all peered in at Mrs Mags and I couldn’t see anything at all from where I was, leaning against my mum’s good leg.
Mavis climbed up into my mum’s lap and laid claim to her for the rest of the evening. She was the cat that got the cream, my little Queen of Sheba, sucking quietly on her thumb, great drops of tears falling down her smudged cheeks. She didn’t seem to notice my mum’s missing foot, the space where her foot should have been but wasn’t, and even though there was a brand new baby less than four feet away there was no way she was shifting.
But after a while curiosity got the better of me and I unfurled Mavis’s fingers from mine and tiptoed over for a look.
He was no bigger than a doll. His face was like a turnip and he was made of wax. There was a tiny streak of blood under his chin and something white was stuck on his head. He was just two hours old and I was worried about him because he was fast, fast asleep even though we were all poking at him and talking and jostling to get in there to see him in the yellow glow of the candle. Mr Tait was moving the candle about so that we could see his ears and his nose and his little toes which seemed far too long for such a small person. I pulled on Mr Tait’s sleeve and he bent down so I could whisper.
‘Is he dead?’ I said. ‘He’s not moving.’
Mr Tait laughed lightly, kindly, so that I knew it wasn’t true.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s just exhausted from getting here. He’s sleeping the sleep of the . . . .’
‘How did he get here?’ I said, thinking suddenly how exhausted I was too from my day’s journeys.
Mr Tait took a very long time to answer, so I knew it was something important he was going to say, and something that was difficult to explain. When I looked into his face I saw that it was red, and I wondered whether he was very hot from the fire.
‘Mavis, come and see the baby,’ I said, but she shook her head.
Mr Tait still hadn’t answered my question but just then there was the tiniest whimper, like the puppies in Ayr when we went there, Mavis and me, at the beginning of the war, only it wasn’t puppies; it was the baby.
‘Mavis, you have to come and see,’ I said, but she shook her head again and I saw her fall softly into my mum’s shoulder.
The whimper suddenly became a cry.
I squeezed my head in between Sandy and Dougie so that I could be sure the baby was alright.
‘Lenny, a little privacy for Mrs Mags, please,’ said my mum. ‘Boys!’
Mr Tait and the boys clattered down the steps outside while she explained what breastfeeding meant. I tried hard not to look, but you know me! Rosie stared too.
When Mrs Mags was finished and Mr Tait had come back in, we tried to quiz Mavis about where she had been. She didn’t want to talk but she told us a little and Rosie helped with the rest.
‘I went to the hills,’ said Mavis.
‘To the tents,’ said Rosie, ‘except she slept in the barn with the cows at the beginning.’
‘Who were you with?’ I said. ‘Who took you there?’
‘I don’t know. The lady who was singing in the shelter.’
‘That’d be Mrs Brand,’ I said. We had been in their shelter once or twice before and Mrs Brand liked to lead the singing, which was just as well because her daughter couldn’t sing for toffee (which didn’t stop her trying).
‘Yes,’ said Mavis. She shifted on my Mum’s lap and turned her back to us.
This is what happened, as far as I could make out, and it took ages to get this much: Mavis had gone up into the hills after the first night of the bombing. She had walked most of the way but was allowed to sit on Mrs Brand’s granddaughter’s pram sometimes too. She heard the bombs, and she heard people cry but she closed her eyes when she was told to and had hidden in Mrs Brand’s voluptuous bosom (what my mum says my Auntie May has and Mrs Mags has one too). But when they arrived at the hills there was nowhere to go, so she stood on the flat rock with Mrs Brand and lots of other people until they were taken to a farm (which turned out to be red-haired Mr Tulloch number two’s farm). She had been there ever since. There were so many people in the barn, there was hardly space to sleep and everyone smelled bad, especially Mrs Brand. She said the farmer and his wife were kind people but they got very angry sometimes because there was no food or tea or beds. And then some tents arrived and some sandwiches.
The first night was cold because they had no blankets so she slept very close to Mrs Brand and they covered themselves with straw. That was the night we walked over the hills and my mum was in the hospital.
The next day Mavis and Mrs Brand and her family were given soup, but it was cold because there was nowhere to heat it. I had slept most of that day and ate Mrs Mags’s rabbit stew at midnight.
The day after that was the same, only another farmer brought them carrots so they had raw carrots with sandwiches that some ladies had left for them. The Brand family made a ‘tent’ and filled it with straw to sleep on. That was the day I didn’t want a bath, the day I ran away to try and find Mavis, seeing as no-one seemed to want to help me, and Rosie and I went to the witch’s hut. Miss Weatherbeaten found us in the morning and we had a bath anyway.
The food on Mavis’s farm didn’t improve that day either and our hut was overrun by other people from Clydebank (put there by the Salvation Army).
That was also the day Mrs Brand and her daughter and grandchildren were billeted with a Duntocher family and Mavis was left behind on the farm in the hills. Mrs Brand said she was very sorry and asked another family to keep an eye on her, but then they were billeted too, and Mavis shared her straw bed, in a tent under a tree, with four other kids.
The following morning, having slept on the floor, we got on a bus to Glasgow and I caused a stooshie in my mum’s hospital and I cried in the bus on the way back.
But Mavis couldn’t tell us what happened to her that day or the rest of the days she spent at the farm, in fact she wouldn’t talk at all, no matter what we did. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and cooried into my mum.
Rosie took up the story.
‘When Miss Weatherbeaten forgot about me I tried hard to remember where we had been, you and me and her and Mr Tait,’ she said. Mr Tait was sitting on the floor against a wall. I could hear the boys playing bombers outside. ‘I came out of the town hall and went straight up Kilbowie Road, all the way and then another road which I wasn’t sure of and then I came to the flat rock. Mr Tulloch found me on the flat rock, because I didn’t know which way to go after that, only it wasn’t Mr Tulloch, it was another Mr Tulloch with red hair and a red hat, and he told me I could stay on his farm if I wanted until you, or Mr Tait or Miss Weatherbeaten came for me. So I did. Mrs Tulloch gave me honey.’
Rosie seemed pleased as punch with herself.
‘Two days after that all the blankets disappeared and some other things too and everyone thought it was me.’
Mavis turned herself right into my mum’s neck. Her feet were all scrunched up together, the toes rubbing against each other.
‘No!’ said Mavis, sniffing.
Rosie stopped.
‘Go on, Rosie,’ said my mum. ‘Well?’
‘Mavis had them. She had all of them, everything that was missing, even the old ladies’ teeth and Mr Tulloch’s pipe.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said my mum.
‘They were all in her tent. There was no-one in her tent but her, but you could hardly get into it because of all the stuff she’d stolen.’
‘I didn’t steal it!’ said Mavis, suddenly fierce.
‘Yes, you did! She didn’t get anything of mine.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘I didn’t have anything,’ said Rosie.
‘Did you give it all back, Mavis?’ I asked.
She nodded, and I saw it was hard for her, giving everyone back their bits and pieces, all by herself in her tent with no-one of her own to keep her warm at night. I thought about the shoe, her shoe, and how important it had been to me, but when I searched my pocket it was gone, and so was the drawing of Mr MacInnes and his blunt bit of pencil. I found all of it later in Mavis’s coat pocket.
‘She came into my tent after that,’ said Rosie solemnly. ‘With the other kids and the lady, and then today red Mr Tulloch took me and Mavis over the hill and put us on his brother’s cart. And then we found Lenny on the road.’
‘Poor Mavis!’ I said. I gave Mavis’s hand a little squeeze and she sniffed but didn’t squeeze back.
It was too late and too dark to go home to Mrs Mags’s so we bedded down on that rough wooden floor, the whole lot of us with coats borrowed (not stolen) from Mr Tait’s new neighbours.
Sleeping on floors was what I did every night, only this time I had my mum and Mavis so I didn’t care where I was. We were like sardines in a tin, me, my mum, Mavis, Rosie and then Mrs Mags all in a row, sandwiched together, and beside Mrs Mags was the new baby, then Sandy, Dougie, and bad George. Good Mr Tait was by the door. Apart from Mrs Mags who fell asleep (and snored) straightaway, we nodded off in reverse order as if sleep was seeping in under the door. Mr Tait went first (even his snores were gentle), then the boys, then Rosie, Mavis, my mum and lastly me. I was too excited for sleep. All my wishing had come true, except for my mum’s foot and Mavis being so quiet, and I must confess that I cried and cried and cried, quietly, all to myself, that night, the silent tears of deepest joy. But even I fell asleep in the end, deep and peaceful, almost completely content, only missing Mavis’s laugh.
I cried the next morning when I told Mr Tait that Miss Weatherbeaten wanted to look after Rosie and I cried when he left to go and find her. And I cried when, before he went, he stood outside with me and I saw in full daylight what a wonderful hut he had built.
It sat on eight towers of brick, like the one I had made without thinking the day I saw his wooden leg. On top of the bricks there were big, dark railway sleepers, massive chunks of wood that smelled of factories and oil. On top of those there were floorboards and on top of that there were walls. The roof came down from its ridge among the branches and over the front door and it stopped a few feet in front of the windows. This left a covered area so that on a hot day, or a wet one, you could sit outside and watch the world go by or listen to the birds. ‘Wuh-woo-woo-wuh-wuh!’ And the windows were so big you could see all the way down the road in one direction and all the way up it in the other.
Mr Tait showed me, while I cried, how he could make an extra room for me, Mavis and my mum, just like we had planned, along one side, and he showed me where he could build another one like it for Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten, if she came back to us and if she chose to stay with Rosie. He said we could all be safe until the end of the war if we stayed in Carbeth.
In my head I was shouting, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ but the tears still ran like rivers down my cheeks. Mavis was with me – there were few times over the following weeks when she wasn’t attached to me in some way or other. She was staring up at me, thumb in mouth.
‘Yes, Lenny, yes!’ she whispered. And Rosie copied her only louder. ‘Yes, yes!’
My mum appeared in the front door at the top of the steps. Her face was red and she was struggling with her crutches.
‘Mr Tait!’ she said, and we all looked round. ‘Mr Tait!’ she said, towering over us on the top step and swaying slightly. She was not happy, I could tell. ‘Mr Tait!’
‘Mrs Gillespie,’ said Mr Tait, in his quiet voice. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I would appreciate it, Mr Tait, if you would not put silly ideas in these girls’ heads,’ she said.
One of her crutches landed at the bottom of the steps, then the other.
‘Silly?’
‘Yes, silly,’ she said.
Holding the rail that Mr Tait had erected, she edged closer to the rim of the step and hopped down from the top onto the next step. We all moved closer. Rosie grabbed my sleeve. Mavis came in closer.
‘How silly?’ asked Mr Tait. He glanced at me briefly and smiled, nodding his head as if to say, ‘Here goes!’
‘We can’t possibly stay here,’ she said, hopping down another step.
‘No?’ said Mr Tait, moving closer.
‘Well, no, of course not,’ she said. ‘After all that’s happened, after . . . and we have a perfectly good place to stay at Mrs Mags’s . . . .’
‘Mum . . . .’
‘. . . and then I’ll go back to the town hall and ask for somewhere for us to live . . . .’
‘Mum . . . .’
‘There’s bound to be somewhere.’
‘Mum . . . .’
‘What is it Lenny? Don’t interrupt.’
‘But . . . ,’ I said.
‘But . . . ,’ said Mr Tait. We glanced at each other again.
‘We can’t prevail on you any more . . . .’ She landed heavily on the ground, still clutching the railing.
What did she mean?
Mr Tait tried to protest that it wasn’t a question of prevailing. It was a question of survival, so she told him she could survive very well, thank you very much, at Mrs Mags’s until she got herself, and us, back to Clydebank.
‘But Mum . . . ,’ I said.
‘You can’t walk well enough yet,’ he pointed out, handing her the crutches. ‘You need . . . .’
‘Thank you, Mr Tait. I know what I need, and I know what my children need.’
‘Mum,’ I said. ‘The houses are all broken in Clydebank. There isn’t anywhere.’
‘Look, the windows will be here in a couple of days’ time,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And that wood . . . .’
He pointed to a pile under a tree.
‘It’s for our room!’ I said.
‘It’ll only take a couple more days,’ said Mr Tait.
‘We could have two sets of bunk beds,’ I pointed out, ‘like our first hut, with enough room for Rosie too!’
‘But . . . ,’ said my mum.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Yes, we could, until we see what Miss Weatherbeaten wants to do, I mean Miss Wetherspoon.’
‘It’s going to be there,’ I said, dragging Mavis and Rosie with me and indicating the side of the hut.
‘Lenny, we’re not . . . ,’ said my mum.
‘A little further back, I thought,’ said Mr Tait, following us round. He pointed with his stick at the space he had left for the door. ‘Further back would give you the privacy of being behind this bush, you see. There would be a window.’
‘No, there wouldn’t,’ said my mum. ‘Where would you sleep?’ she said. ‘There’ll be talk, you know. And there’s already been enough of that.’
Well, wasn’t that the point? Talk? Someone to talk to? Someone to help out?
Mavis and Rosie were crouched down peering under the hut. They’d lost interest already, although Mavis held on to the bottom of my coat.
‘My room would be at the other side,’ said Mr Tait. ‘There’s space there.’
‘And another room at the back for Miss Weatherbeaten,’ I said.
‘What would a teacher be doing living in a hut with us?’ said my mum.
Mr Tait and I glanced at each other again. There was so much to explain.
‘You see what kind of nonsense you’ve put in her head?’ said my mum. ‘No. No, I’m afraid not. Come on Lenny, Mavis. We have to help Mrs Mags back to her hut with the baby. Where are the boys? Come along everyone.’ I could hear the boys, Sandy, Dougie and bad George playing Tarzan further up the hill.
‘Come along!’ she said. ‘Lenny, you’ll have to push the chair.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘I’m not pushing your bloody chair!’
‘Lenny!’ said my mum.
Mr Tait, Mavis and Rosie gasped.
‘You see the kind of nonsense?’ said my mum.
‘I’m not pushing it!’
‘Lenny,’ said Mr Tait, in his quiet voice. ‘Swearing is . . . .’
‘No!’ I put my hands on my hips to show I meant it. Mavis and Rosie scuttled back to my side.
‘Behave yourself or . . . ,’ said my mum.
‘You can bloody push your own bloody chair!’
‘Mrs Gillespie,’ said Mr Tait, as if I hadn’t spoken, as if I hadn’t sworn, three times now. ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Didn’t do what?’ she said, shaking her head.
‘I didn’t tell stories about you,’ he said.
‘What’s that to do with anything? I already told you. I misunderstood.’
‘In fact I was shocked by how quick they were to do it, shocked by how nasty it became.’
‘Who? Who did it?’
‘And the stories they told.’
She stood up as straight as she could with her crutches and didn’t answer. Mr Tait waved a hand at me like a stop sign so that I wouldn’t speak.
‘I didn’t believe a word of it,’ he went on, ‘about you and men, all that stuff.’ His eyes flickered towards me then back to her. ‘You’re a hard worker,’ he told her. ‘You put others to shame with your work rate. People get jealous. You’re an outsider and your good man is gone. They were like dogs with a rabbit. I don’t like that.’
The boys clattered through the trees, and down the road I noticed old Mr MacInnes wandering towards us. Mrs Mags was nursing the baby in the window.
‘I think the shift organiser had intentions,’ said Mr Tait, ‘if you know what I mean (I didn’t) and I must state now that my only intention is for you and the girls to be happy and safe.’
Mavis slipped her hand round my back and gripped my coat.
‘Mrs Gillespie,’ said Mr Tait, ‘it would make such a difference to me if you would stay here. If you like I’ll build you another hut, if they’ll allow it, one just for you and the girls, so that you could all be close by.’
His voice was trembling. I took a step forwards, the better to see him. Taking a perfect white handkerchief out of his pocket he mopped his wrinkly brow, and when he looked at me I saw that his eyes were rimmed with red.
‘There’s the standpipe, and the road for walking,’ he said. He stuffed the handkerchief carefully back in his pocket and took one step towards her. She took one step back, more of a hop. ‘I’ll stay in the tent,’ he said. ‘We can see how it goes, see how you like it.’
My mum started to tremble like an autumn leaf on a tree. She shifted slightly on her crutches so that he wouldn’t notice.
‘Mrs Gillespie,’ he said in the quietest voice ever, his head bowed. ‘Mrs Gillespie,’ he said again.
We waited. I knew he was going to say something important because he took so long about it. It’s what he always did, and annoying though it was, it was always worth waiting.
‘I’m going to miss Lenny terribly if you go to Clydebank,’ he said, ‘terribly.’ And he shook his head as if to say ‘No, no, no.’ He held out a hand to me which I grasped as I stared up in wonder at kind Mr Tait with red rims to his eyes who was going to miss me. ‘And I’ll worry,’ he said. ‘There’s some terrible things to be seen in Clydebank,’ and he shook his head.
Rosie pulled her ear. Mavis sucked her thumb. I held my breath.
‘And now I really must sit down,’ he said, ‘before I go over there for Miss Wetherspoon.’
Bad George and Sandy brought the wheelchair and a tree stump so my mum and Mr Tait both had somewhere to sit.
‘Lenny,’ whispered Mavis, and she pointed at where my mum’s foot ought to have been. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I told you already.’
‘Will they get her a new one?’
‘I suppose they will,’ I said. ‘Mr Tait has a wooden leg.’
‘Yes, Mavis, it’s true,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Listen to this.’
He tapped his hip, ‘toc, toc, toc’.
‘Go on Lenny, you do it too.’
I didn’t really want to, not really, but I knew he wanted me to, to show Mavis he told the truth, so I reached out and went ‘toc, toc, toc’ on his leg, and Mavis stopped hiding in my coat and looked. Rosie had to have a go too.
‘My, this is a fine hut!’ said old Mr MacInnes, suddenly arriving, breathless from his journey. ‘I think you made the right decision there, Mrs Gillespie. Glad you saw sense in the end.’
‘But . . . .’
‘Now, where’s my Mags?’
So we stayed a few days, and then a few days more, and then a few days more again, just to see how it went, to see how she liked it.
But the very next day when I was crawling about under the hut with Mavis and Rosie, I saw the floorboards from underneath. I saw the roof too when I was up there with George that afternoon fixing the roofing felt. Both roof and floor were covered with the words ‘SINGER’ (my mum and Mr Tait’s factory, remember?) and ‘JOHN BROWN’ (which is the big shipyard in Clydebank that the Germans missed with their bombs). It seemed that Mr Tait had developed a blind eye in addition to his wooden leg, and I noticed such words on other people’s huts too, particularly Mrs Mags’s hut. There were other names as well, like ‘Auchentoshan Distillers’ and ‘Clyde Boilers’.
But Mr Tait said he hadn’t seen anything of the sort.
The End