The River Flows On (3 page)

Kate looked after his retreating back in dismay. Why had she snapped at Robbie, of all people? He had always been there, right from the beginning, part of Kate’s earliest memory. She must have been three, maybe nearer four, and she was sitting out on the back step, crying, salty tears streaming down her face. Robbie, five years old and a big boy in Kate’s eyes, came ambling over, sat down beside Kate and put a clumsy arm around her shoulders.

‘Has your Da drunk all his pay again? Come to our house. My Mammy’ll give you something to eat. Come on.’

Kate had looked at Robbie, her eyes round and big. ‘I’ve torn my pinafore too,’ she wailed, in abject misery, because the pretty flowery thing that Granny had sewn for her had caught on the door handle and ripped when her mother had sent her down to the back court to play.

Robbie, kind, tousled-haired Robbie, who always went about looking like a ragamuffin, despite the best efforts of his mother, had struggled to understand Kate’s unhappiness - and failed. Clothes didn’t matter, did they? But food did.

‘Come on,’ he said again, pulling Kate by the hand. ‘My Mammy’ll give you something to eat. Come on, Kate.’

Mrs Baxter did give her something to eat - a big piece of bread, spread thick with yellow margarine and sprinkled with sugar, straight from Tate & Lyle’s refinery down the river at Greenock. Kate had never tasted anything so good. She munched it and smiled, while Robbie’s parents exchanged a look she didn’t see and Robbie smiled broadly back at her. Kate had stopped crying. That was all that mattered.

It was Robbie who’d come rushing to the rescue when she’d found an old sack at the river’s edge with a litter of kittens in it. She’d cried on that occasion too, thinking they were all dead, but then Robbie’s voice had gone high and excited.

‘Kate! One of them’s moving. It’s still alive!’

It was Robbie who’d done the unbelievable and persuaded Kate’s mother that she could keep the kitten. His own mother would help feed it - find some scraps it could have. There were never any scraps in Kate’s house, but Robbie’s mother was a good manager. As folk said, nodding sagely, Agnes Baxter was one of those women who could make ten shillings do the work of a pound.

Kate and Robbie named the kitten Mr Asquith and Kate’s father laughed and told them they were a couple of daft: bairns, but when he was well and not in drink, he would let the little black and white kitten climb up on his lap and stroke it with gentle hands.

Kate walked slowly towards the close mouth, delaying her climb up the stone stairs to her home on the second floor. Their flight of the stairs would have to be washed, too. No doubt she’d get that to do as well.

‘Your Mammy relies on you, Kate lass,’ her father always told her, the lilt of his native Highlands still strong in his voice. ‘You’re her right-hand woman, you might say.’

And Kate would smile reassuringly at her father and say nothing. She’d been nine when he’d come back from the Great War, a sombre sad-eyed stranger, nothing at all like the tall, laughing man she remembered. Mammy had changed too, had looked suddenly older, a permanent little frown of puzzlement settling between her brows as her husband withdrew further and further into himself.

It hadn’t always been like that. Oh, there had often been fights over Neil Cameron drinking too much, but Kate had other memories too. Her mother had beautiful hair, long and golden. Only one of her daughters had inherited the colour, Kate’s sister Pearl.

Kate could remember her mother washing her hair and kneeling on the floor in front of the range to dry it, pulling a comb through the long shiny tresses. Kate loved to watch her do it. It was just like the story her teacher had read them at school.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair
. Mammy had smiled at her, enjoying the admiration in her daughter’s eyes.

Then her father came in, tall and strong and dark. His eyes went immediately to his wife. He crouched down beside her on the floor and slipped his arm around her waist, lifting her to her feet. With a wink to Kate, he turned his head and kissed Lily first on the cheek and then, softly, on her ear. She blushed, swaying in his embrace. Daddy gave Kate a few coins. ‘Away and buy some sweeties, lass. Take your sisters with you - and don’t hurry back. Go for a wee walk or something.’ His voice, soft and dreamy, had trailed off.

Kate, standing on the back step, sighed. Five minutes more, she thought, lifting her chin and pulling her cardigan more tightly about her. Five more minutes of peace and quiet and then I’ll go in. It was dry but too cold to stay out much longer anyway. She peered anxiously at the sky. All that effort to hang out the washing and it would be wasted if the snow fell. No, it was all right. The sky was grey, but the clouds didn’t look heavy.

She lowered her gaze. The river too was grey today. It was always different, sometimes calm and smooth, running down towards the Tail of the Bank, to the islands and the hills, sometimes like it was today, dark and forbidding - and unusually silent.

The yards had closed early today, but normally you could hear them all from here. To her left, up towards Glasgow, there was Yarrow’s. On the other bank of the river there were the yards upriver at Govan - Fairfield’s and Stephen’s and the rest. To Kate’s right, heading downriver, there was Rothesay Dock and then John Brown’s at Clydebank. Donaldson’s, where her father worked, was halfway between the two. Further down there was Beardmore’s at Dalmuir.

Boy, was it noisy sometimes! The sound of hammers hitting iron and the rivets being banged into place echoed all along the river bank. It could be deafening, but it was a good sound. It meant that the men were working - and if the men were working, there was food on the table. Aye, it was a good sound.

And maybe, just maybe, if the orders kept coming and her father kept off the drink ... maybe Lily would relent about Kate staying on at school. Maybe.

She went into the close. As the neighbours said, Lily Cameron didn’t have her troubles to seek. There was the continuous struggle to make ends meet and a husband who too often tried to find solace for painful memories at the bottom of a bottle. And then there had been the twins - Eliza and Ewen - who had died in the ’flu epidemic back in 1919. They had come home from school one Friday and never gone back. Lily kept their schoolbags, in the top drawer of the tallboy in the front room. They were exactly as the twins had left them, with their spelling cards unlearned, their writing homework half done. Kate had crept in to look at the old jotters once, crying hot and silent tears over the round and smudgy letters of the alphabet.

Robbie’s mother was mopping the stairs which led to the Baxter flat on the first floor.

‘Well, Kate,’ she said, swabbing down one half at a time so that folk could get past. ‘It’s a sair fecht, eh?’

‘It is that.’ Kate sighed, thinking about the twins.

Agnes Baxter, dipping the mop in soapy water before squeezing it out hard in the drainage sieve of the galvanized bucket, smiled at her tone. That sounds really heartfelt.’ She looked up and the smile was replaced by a swift frown. ‘What’s the matter, hen? You look gey tired.’

‘I’m just fed up, Mrs Baxter. Feeling sorry for myself, I expect.’

Agnes Baxter leaned on her mop. ‘You’ll have had the lion’s share of the chores to do, I’m thinking.’

Kate shrugged. ‘Och well, just the stairs to do now.’ There was no point in trying to deny it to Robbie’s mother. With them all living on top of each other and the houses being so small, everyone knew everyone else’s business.

‘And yourself,’ said Agnes. ‘A bit of titivating for tonight, eh? You know,’ she said, putting her head to one side and studying Kate, ‘I’ve got a dress that might do you, if we make a few alterations. Got it from one of my ladies.’

Agnes supplemented the Baxter family income by doing dressmaking for some of the better-off families in Clydebank. She surveyed Kate with a professional eye. ‘You’re a bonnie girl, Kate Cameron, and no mistake. I wish my lassies had nice natural waves in their hair like you do. It’s my Robbie that’s got the best of it in that department. Wasted on a laddie, eh?’

Kate hid a smile. Robbie had three wee sisters - Alice, Flora and Barbara. While they had thick and glossy hair like their brother, it was, unlike his, perfectly straight. They were beautiful girls, with big solemn eyes which belied their mischievous natures. Kate thought their hair was real bonnie.

Mrs Baxter, however, unwilling to let nature take its course, subjected her three daughters to what Robbie referred to as ‘the instruments of torture’ in an attempt to produce waves or curls on the heads of her offspring. Andrew, as a boy, was exempt from this, but the little girls had their hair wrapped up tightly in rags every night to produce smooth fat ringlets which had fallen out by halfway through the next morning.

When they had their hair washed once a week, the wavers were brought out. Like huge steel paper clamps with teeth, three of them were applied to each small head. Terrible threats were issued as to what would happen if they took the wavers out before the next morning. Kate smiled at the thought.

‘That’s better.’ Mrs Baxter nodded approvingly. ‘A lassie like you should smile more often.’ She nudged the girl with her elbow. ‘Laddies like to see a bit of a sparkle, especially a certain laddie we both know.’

‘I’d better get on. I’ve still got the stairs to do.’ Shyly, Kate dipped her head and started past Mrs Baxter. Why did everybody assume ...?

Agnes Baxter put a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t you bother about your stairs. I might as well see to them too, since I’ve got the mop and bucket out.’

‘Och but Mrs Baxter, you’ll have your own house to do.’

Agnes winked. ‘I’ve got my lazy good-for-nothing family doing most o’ that. I can easily manage another flight of stairs. Now, get on with you. You don’t want to go dirty into the New Year, do you now?’

Kate pushed open the heavy door into the house which she’d left on the latch before she’d gone downstairs to hang out the washing. It gave onto a tiny lobby with a door to either side. One led to the room at the front of the house where her parents slept with wee Davie. She could hear her mother in there now, crashing and banging as she got on with some heavy-duty dusting of the furniture. Kate turned. There was suppressed giggling coming from the other room.

This was the living-room, and kitchen, and bedroom for Kate, her sisters and Granny. The old lady was dottled now, but Kate could mind what she’d been like before. When she’d still been fit she and Kate had gone for walks and Granny had told her what Yoker was like in the old days, before their houses had been built. People had always called it ‘the Yoker’ back then. It had all been fields and there had been an old mill, and where the Yoker burn flowed into the Clyde, men had fished for salmon. Hard to imagine now. The river was always beautiful to Kate, but it was dirty. That she had to admit.

Granny didn’t always know who Kate - or anybody else - was now, or even what time of day it was. More than once she’d wakened the girls in the middle of the night telling them to come and take their porridge. It was time they were off to the school.

The last time it had happened she’d even started cooking the porridge, left to soak overnight in a big black pan. Nobody knew how she’d found the strength to lift it onto the range which stood on the wall along from the box bed where Kate, Jess and Pearl slept. ‘She’ll have us burned in our beds!’ Pearl had wailed, but Lily had given her a clout round the lug and told her not to be so stupid.

The three girls took it in turns to sleep with Granny on the hurly bed which had to be pulled out every night from a cupboard under the box bed. Except that Pearl never wanted to take her turn.

‘Oh, hello Jenny. How are you the day?’ Jenny had been Granny’s sister who’d died of diphtheria when she was fourteen. Kate would normally have gone along with it, answered her grandmother as though she were that Jenny who’d died so long ago. Contradicting the old woman only distressed her and made her more confused.

For now, Kate merely smiled absently at her grandmother where she sat in the corner. Baby Davie was at her feet, snug in his cot made out of one of the drawers of the tallboy in Mammy and Daddy’s room. It was lined with an old sheet, folded several times over to make his wee bed as soft as possible. Judging by the faint smell wafting across to Kate’s nostrils, she was going to have to change his nappy soon, but that certainly wasn’t the most important thing on her mind at the moment.