The New Breadmakers (3 page)

Wide-eyed with admiration, everyone agreed that it was a magic box indeed. Here they were in a room in Glasgow and actually able to see what was going on in London –
as it happened
. This fact took a lot of believing and was really much more amazing and impressive than the Coronation itself. Glaswegians had never been greatly impressed with the Royal Family. For one thing, they were English. For another, they had more money than was good for them. As her mother often said, ‘It’s an ill-divided world.’

For once, Catriona tended to think the same way as her mother. Her mother always said, when referring to the soon-to-be-crowned Queen, ‘If she came to my door tomorrow, I’d invite her in and make her welcome the same as I’d do with any decent woman. But I’d never bend the knee to her.’

The bishops bent both knees. There they were at the Queen’s feet in their magnificent robes. All around her were equally sumptuously attired peers in velvet and ermine cloaks and coronets. The Abbey too looked magnificent and Catriona couldn’t help wondering what it, like the expensive robes, had to do with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, the lowly carpenter, the young man who’d upturned the money changers’ stalls and chased them out of the temple. All the wealthy, and by the looks of them snobby, characters who filled the Abbey probably thought they were miles better than anyone in this room. They were certainly of a different world, a world of privilege that Catriona could hardly imagine.

Afterwards, everybody said what a miracle it was, meaning the television and its ability to bring pictures live into the room. The only remark that Catriona heard made about the Coronation itself was, ‘That crown must have cost a bob or two!’

Everybody told Melvin how grateful they were to him for allowing them into his house to see his magic box. They thanked her for the tea and sandwiches. Then they went happily back to their ‘single ends’ and room and kitchens in the tenement jungle of Partick. It was a far cry from the pomp and circumstance and show of wealth that they had just witnessed, but it didn’t seem to bother them. They had enjoyed a good time and had been just as interested in seeing the inside of Melvin’s big house as they’d been in seeing the inside of Westminster Abbey.

When they were gone, Catriona got out the Hoover and started attacking the carpet. Melvin hovered at her back, hands jingling coins in his pocket, determined to make himself heard, while she was equally determined not to listen.

‘They won’t forget today in a hurry – visiting a house like this. This will give them something to talk about for years. There isn’t another television set for miles, you know.’

Catriona knew only too well that there must be plenty of other televisions – many no doubt bigger and better than Melvin’s pride and joy – in the large villas along Great Western Road. But she had no wish to get into an argument with him just now.

‘Did you see their faces?’ Melvin enthused as he swaggered around. ‘See how impressed they were? And not just by my television set. Their eyes were taking in everything from the moment you opened that front door. That hall out there is bigger than most of their whole houses. You could easily fit a single end or even a room and kitchen into that hall.’

Madge would have stayed behind to help wash up the cups or Hoover the carpet but, when she offered, Melvin had said, ‘Away you go back to your own place. You and your mob’ll cause more mess than you’ll clean up. We’ll manage.’

‘
We
,’ he’d said. That was a laugh. Madge laughed but not for the same reason. Big, blowsy Madge liked straight talking. She was a straight talker herself, and she was always ready to enjoy a good laugh.

‘You’re an awful man, Melvin McNair,’ she said as she rounded up her crowd of children, all still at school but relishing the day off for the Coronation. They’d got a mug with the Queen’s picture on it. All the children in every school had been presented with a memento of the Coronation. Some had a tin of toffees with the Queen’s picture on the lid.

Until they were flung out on the street, Madge and her brood had squatted along with other families in one of the big villas on Great Western Road. That was after they’d got into arrears with their rent in their original house in Cowlairs Pend. After they’d been forced out of the squat, they’d gone to one of the Nissen huts in the Hughenden playing fields off Great Western Road. The playing fields belonged to Hillhead High School, but they’d been requisitioned by the Royal Air Force Balloon Squadron in 1939.

After the war, the Nissen huts had sheltered a band of squatters, travelling people – displaced humanity. They were the flotsam washed up by war, regarded as dirtying the skirts of respectable West End society. Many were ex-servicemen and their families who had lost their homes in the bombing and, after demob, had been unable to find alternative accommodation. Others, like Alec, Madge’s husband, had been unable to get work, couldn’t pay the rent and had been forced to quit.

Now, at last, they were settled in a nice council house in Balornock, up the hill from Springburn. Madge was as happy as a lark, especially with the fact that for the first time in her life, she had the luxury of hot and cold running water, a bathroom and a kitchenette with a wash boiler. No more taking turns in a zinc bath in front of the kitchen fire. No more trekking with a pramful of washing to the ‘steamie’. The house was still full to overflowing with her seven children. It had two bedrooms, a front room and a living room. Alec and Madge slept on a bed settee in the front room. The bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, both had bunk beds.

Catriona noticed that the small house wasn’t any warmer than her mausoleum of a place in Botanic Crescent. Just like in Botanic Crescent, everyone in the Broomknowes Road flat crowded round the coal fire in the living room, roasted at the front and frozen at the back. Winter or summer, to go into the bathroom in either house was like walking into a freezer. It was a torment to bare one’s skin, even to sit on the toilet.

Alec had a regular job now, thanks to Quaker Sammy, and was almost back to his former confident, cocky self, although Madge had him on a short lead and kept a vigilant eye out for any signs of his old philandering ways.

Catriona switched off the Hoover when she reached the bay window and gazed out at Botanic Crescent. She could see Madge’s tall figure striding along towards Queen Margaret Drive surrounded by her family, intent on catching the next tram car to Springburn. From there they’d walk up the hill to Balornock and their flat in Broomknowes Road.

Their mutual friend, Julie, lived in the Gorbals, but she had been working all day in Copeland & Lye’s department store, so she hadn’t been able to join the television viewing. Julie was slim and smart, and could sound and act very ‘posh’. As she herself said, she had to keep up with the wealthy customers in Copeland & Lye’s and also, of course, with her mother-in-law. It was a strange set-up with Julie and Mrs Muriel Vincent, Catriona thought. Julie’s husband had been an RAF pilot, but he had been shot down during the war. Mrs Vincent and Julie had never had anything in common. Now the only thing they shared was a terrible grief. Mrs Vincent was the only child of Catriona and Melvin’s elderly next-door neighbours, the Reverend Reid and his wife. Always immaculately dressed, Mrs Vincent was a politely spoken, middle-class snob, who regarded the Gorbals as hell. She tried everything to prevent Julie’s marriage to her son, Reggie. But after Reggie’s death and for years now, she had clung to Julie as if Julie was her own flesh and blood. She even wanted Julie to come and live with her in her roomy flat in Botanic Crescent but Julie had always refused.

‘She suffocates me, that woman,’ Julie complained. But in her own abrupt, proud way, she still managed to be kind to the older woman. She even called her ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother’.

‘Och well,’ she explained to Catriona, ‘it keeps her happy.’

As far as Catriona knew, Julie had been brought up by her father. She’d once asked what had happened to her mother but Julie had just shrugged and dismissed the query with an abrupt, ‘Haven’t a clue!’

It was nearly ten years since Reggie had been killed, but Julie had never married again. She’d had an illegitimate baby, the result of drowning her grief in drink on the wild night of the victory celebrations, VE night, as it was called. She had given the baby – a little girl – up for adoption and had confided in Catriona. Catriona had tried to persuade her against it at the time.

‘You’ll always regret it,’ she’d warned. But Julie insisted she had to think of the child’s future, not her own, and the baby would have a better life with a secure and loving family. Although she remained her usual perky self and put on a brave face, Catriona saw the suffering in Julie’s eyes the day she had come out of the hospital without the baby.

Mrs Vincent had found out but had been intensely supportive. Catriona guessed Mrs Vincent felt that Julie was the last link with her son. And Reggie had told his mother how much he loved Julie and asked her to look after his young wife while he was away during the war.

Mrs Vincent had certainly done that ever since. Or as much as the fiercely independent Julie would allow her to. Julie was coming later in the evening to see the television.

At one time at the beginning of their marriage, when they lived in Dessie Street, Melvin had not allowed Catriona to have any friends. He’d been the same with his first wife. ‘But oh,’ Catriona kept assuring herself, ‘I’m made of stronger, more stubborn stuff!’

The Stoddarts lived up the same close in Broomknowes Road as Madge and Alec. It was over a year ago that they had all been to visit Melvin, watch the Coronation and admire his television set. The Stoddarts had even sat next to the Catholic O’Donnels without a complaint. They also lived up the same close and couldn’t always be avoided. Like all the others in the street, the close had a shabby-looking entrance decorated with the cheapest, reddish-brown paint the Corporation could find. The brown colour went halfway up each wall and was topped by flaking whitewash. The tenants did their best to keep the place looking decent. They took turns washing the close, the landings and the stairs, and conscientiously decorated each side with squiggles of white pipe clay. Chrissie Stoddart had told Madge that these squiggles kept witches at bay. Or so the folk long ago believed.

At seventeen, Chrissie was the oldest daughter and she read a lot. Her mother was always complaining about that. ‘She’s like a walkin’ encyclopedia, that one. All her spare time’s spent down in Springburn Library.’

Both Jimmy Stoddart and his wife Aggie were fervent members of the local Orange Lodge. Madge and Alec and their brood were friendly enough to the family, as they were to all their neighbours, but they didn’t go along with the Stoddarts’ extreme anti-Catholic views.

After all, as Alec said, ‘The O’Donnels are regular chapel goers and they’re as good neighbours as the Stoddarts – better even. Anyway, everybody’s entitled to their own thing.’

‘Except you,’ Madge said. ‘We all know what your thing is.’

Alec rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘I’m talking about religion and religious bigotry, Madge.’

‘Aye, well. Just you watch it.’

He’d enjoyed chatting up and flirting with his women clients when he’d been an insurance man. He’d loved the work. He had been his own boss, out and about, on the move all the time, swaggering through the Glasgow streets, always ready with a cheery word or a wink that set women of all ages giggling.

After the war, like thousands of other ex-servicetnen, he couldn’t get any job at all and, as a result, soon got into arrears with his rent and was kicked out. It was then that he and his family had been hounded from pillar to post, sometimes having to walk the streets with nowhere to go. It had been terrible for them all but particularly humiliating and degrading for him. For one thing, he’d always been a natty dresser, but he’d become shabbier and shabbier, dirty too, because in some of the places where they’d been forced to live, there had been no hot water or any kind of decent sanitary conditions.

To make things worse, Madge had never stopped nagging at him since she’d found out about his bit of nonsense with Catriona McNair, not to mention Ruth Hunter. And he’d never touched Ruth. OK, he would have, if he’d got the chance, but he didn’t. He’d had the occasional bit of fun with a couple of others over the years, but all that had meant nothing. He’d always stuck by Madge and the weans, despite Madge’s constant nagging. Sometimes, she went too far and he’d burst out with, ‘You’ll be blaming me for the bloody war next, Madge.’

He used to be so miserable, he was tempted to leave the lot of them. He could have hitch-hiked down to England and tried for a job there. He’d have managed fine on his own. Somehow, he could never do it, though. He knew Madge loved him despite the nasty way she sometimes carried on. Now she was going through ‘the change’, which didn’t help.

‘At least you’ll no’ be able to lumber me wi’ any more weans,’ she’d say, as if she wished he hadn’t ‘lumbered’ her with any in the first place. Nothing was further from the truth, of course.

She had loved him and he had loved her, and they had loved all their cheeky wee sods of weans. He supposed he still loved Madge, although she had long since changed from the easygoing, happy-go-lucky girl she’d once been. Freckle-faced, big-hipped, melon-breasted Madge with her long, sturdy legs, toothy grin and candid stare had gone. At least now she was clean and passably decent in her dress – unlike when they used to wander out from the unsanitary camp of Nissen huts where they’d been existing and Madge would admire the posh villas along Great Western Road. These occasions were purgatory for him. Madge would keep crying out to the children, ‘Oh, Sadie, look at this one, hen. Look at its lovely big windows. How many rooms do you think this one’ll have, eh?’ Or, ‘Agnes, would you just look at that. Oh, isn’t that just lovely, hen?’

In the silent gardens and streets where no children played, Madge’s voice, booming out with such excruciating loudness, made him cringe, even now, remembering. Not that they had needed Madge’s voice to draw attention to themselves. Nine of them crowding along the pavement was more than enough. He remembered being acutely conscious of his own seedy appearance and of Madge’s down-at-heel shoes and dirty ankles, and the children’s motley mixture of ill-fitting clothes, the girls’ skimpy coats, with dingy dresses drooping underneath, and the boys’ knobbly wrists protruding from their jackets. Worst of all, he remembered Charlie, his mouth plugged with a dummy teat, his nose running and his dirty nappy dropping down at his ankles. He was especially fond of Charlie. During the war, the other children had grown away from him and resented him as a symbol of authority.