Silver Linings (11 page)

Johnny immediately left the boys to attend to Mrs Dickson and he joined Kitty and Connie. He didn’t know what he expected to find in the house he had just entered but it certainly wasn’t his daughter Kitty smeared with blood. ‘What on earth has happened here? Were you injured in the air raid?’

Kitty chuckled. ‘No, Dad. Dora here was in labour and I––’

‘We,’ Connie quickly corrected.

‘We brought the baby into the world.’

‘That’s right,’ crooned Dora, ‘and what a girl you have in Kitty. Don’t know what I would have done without her.’

Johnny nodded, then he looked expectantly about the room, but all he could see, forby the three women, were Ina and Dolly huddled together on the floor and now fast asleep.

‘Where’s Rosebud?’ he stammered.

‘With you I hope,’ Kitty replied. ‘Remember I told you to go and get her and take her to the shelter.’

Johnny’s face drained of colour. His bottom lip began to quiver and his breath was coming in short bursts. Quickly, followed by Kitty, he dashed out of the Ferguson household and, taking the steps three at a time, he bounded up to his own front door.

As he approached the closed door he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. It rose even further when he heard from behind the door a tearful little voice sobbing, ‘Kitty, Daddy, Jack, Davy where are you all? I’m scared of the bangs.’

Turning the key in the lock Johnny pushed the door open and there stood Rosebud as he had never seen her before. Her face was awash with tears and yellow mucus was dripping from her nostrils. Intuitively he reached out to draw the distressed child into his arms and was taken aback when she shied away from him. ‘I hate you, Daddy, and you too, Kitty. You left me and I was frightened for the bangs and that’s why I’ve messed my new pyjamas.’

Kitty had pushed past her father and as she trod in Rosebud’s faeces she felt sick but her need to try and comfort the little girl pushed that feeling back down before she whispered, ‘Come on, dear, we’re sorry that you were overlooked.’

Rosebud sniffed and panted as she blubbered, ‘No, you and Daddy are not sorry! You don’t like me and I don’t like you.’ Without warning Rosebud lifted an excreta-covered foot and kicked Kitty in the shins.

Kitty’s first reaction was to smack Rosebud but Johnny had jumped in between them and, as he held Rosebud close to him, he whispered in her ear, ‘It is true that I have tried not to love you … but when I realised that you were all alone up here when the air raid was going on … I knew that if anything had happened to you I could not have lived with myself.’ Johnny increased his hold on Rosebud. ‘I was wrong, very wrong, to never say to you that I adore you. Believe me, sweetheart, I love you just as much, if not more, than my other children.’ Johnny’s head was now buried in Rosebud’s hair and he was weeping profusely. ‘Darling,’ he panted through his sobs, ‘from this night on I’ll spend as much time as I can with you so you’ll understand that you are one of us. You always have been and I was wrong to keep you at arm’s length.’

Witnessing the emotional scene between Johnny and Rosebud was just too much for Kitty and she stole away into the kitchen. Without being aware of actually doing it, she began to run some hot water into the washtub. She wasn’t going to start washing clothes right now. No, she was going to do the only thing that she could for Rosebud – sponge her clean.

Connie, who had followed the family into the house, gently began to rub Johnny’s back. ‘Come on, my bonnie lad,’ she purred. ‘Pull yourself together, and to help you do that I think I just might have a wee dram left in that bottle under the sink.’

Johnny didn’t wish to hurt anyone else tonight and he had an urgent desire to reply to Connie and say,
No thanks, not just now. Not for a while yet. But do keep it because as life goes on … well you never know.
But instead he stayed mute and then got up and joined his sons at the fireside.

By this time Kitty had taken Rosebud away from her father and had laid her gently in the warm suds she had prepared. She wanted to say to Rosebud as she washed her clean that she did care for her. Unlike her father, however, Kitty could not completely let go of the price that had had to be paid for Rosebud to be born. Right now she ‘cared’ for Rosebud because it was a promise she’d made to her mother. Kitty sighed, wondering,
Will I ever truly and freely love Rosebud for herself?
Reluctantly she accepted that only time knew the answer to that conundrum.

Once Rosebud was in fresh nightclothes Jack lifted her up to sit on his knees while Davy went to spread some jam on a piece of bread for her. Emotionally drained and physically exhausted, Kitty looked at the happy trio sitting in the firelight glow. Grudgingly she admitted to herself her brothers were better people than she was. Rosebud had from the day she was born been ‘one of us’ to them, whereas to Kitty, poor little Rosebud was a burden she resented, yes, even now.

The sound of the outside door clicking shut caused Kitty to turn and find that Connie had left without saying goodnight. What Kitty was unaware of was that Connie just so yearned to be one of them. Ever since they had arrived she had somehow longed to be accepted as the mother figure they had lost. She had fooled herself into thinking that this family would give her the proper and decent purpose in life that she prayed for every night.

Connie had been born and bred in the coal mining town of Whitburn in West Lothian. Being the third daughter of a miner was not an easy life. Poverty and deprivation stalked all miners and their families.

Often Connie would reminisce about life in what were called the miners’ rows. These were rows and rows of small terraced dwelling places that were owned by the limited coal mining company. The pit was called The Lady, but in reality she was in no way a lady – she was nothing more than an unfeeling bitch. Men, some so young you could have called them children, slaved in her deep underground. Day in and day out they banged away continually to drag out the black gold, the good-quality coal. And what was their reward? Wages that were hardly above subsistence level and, for some, their further recompense would be the black lung disease, pneumoconiosis, when their lungs became filled with choking coal dust. If the afflicted miner was lucky he would be able to stay in his ‘rows’ house, but most workers who became disabled, gasping for breath, would find their houses removed from them, and they had to rely on charity or the council to house them and their families.

Connie gave a derisive chuckle when she recalled how her mother always proclaimed that she was pleased that she never had a son – a son whose sole purpose in life would have been to spend his life like a mole in the dark bowels of the earth. Her mother, a firebrand if ever there was one, also hated to be beholden to the pit owners, and after years of badgering the council, she was awarded a two-bedroomed house in Whitburn’s Armadale Road. The house even had a bathroom – so no longer did her dad have to endure the indignity of being scrubbed clean in a tin bath in front of the living-room fire while family life went on round about him.

The miners’ resilience was something Connie tried to emulate. Fondly she remembered the gala days. So vivid was her recall that she always started to tap her feet when she remembered how the annual parade was led up Main Street by the colliery pipe band, followed by the award-winning brass band. Her dad had been a trumpeter and so it was only natural that when a young lad called Mark Sharp, not a miner but a trainee painter and decorator, joined the brass band, that she was drawn to him.

The first thing that Connie noticed about Mark Sharp was his fingers. They were long and elegant, like a surgeon’s fingers. There was also an air about him that marked him as different and she admitted that it was true that she was the one who had pursued him.

Gentleman that he was, he did try at first to discourage her. Unfortunately this only added to her desire to pursue him. The result was that when he finished his apprenticeship the two of them were married. Connie had dreamt about how wonderful her wedding night would be, but Mark preferred to spend the night drinking with his lifelong friend, a blond, blue-eyed chap called Jamie Oman. Mark’s friendship with Jamie was so close that when he decided to move through to Glasgow, it was a trio that set up house there.

Connie had led a sheltered life as far as sex and adult relationships were concerned and it came as a shock to her that the sexual encounters that took place in her home were between Mark and Jamie, not between husband and wife. She recalled with shame just how naive she had been until she came home early one day from work to find the two men in bed. Humiliation and disgust overwhelmed her and it was then she moved into Jamie’s room and he moved into Mark’s. That was not the only thing she did. No, from that day on she dyed her hair blonde and flirted indiscriminately. She really became quite coquettish and ended up being the talk of the town. This wanton image that Connie had thought would provoke people into asking what was amiss with Mark only served to have people pity him for having such a fast piece for a wife.

After ten years in Glasgow, Mark announced that he was arranging an exchange with a family in Edinburgh who needed to move to Glasgow. This was a bolt from the blue to Connie but she went along with it and then, surprise, surprise, the day before the move Mark arrived home to announce he would not be moving to Edinburgh with Connie and Jamie because he had started up a relationship with a lad ten years younger than Jamie.

Connie had spent the night consoling Jamie, who continually kept asking, ‘How can he do this to me? I love him. I trusted him. What will people think of me?’ Connie felt for Jamie, but hadn’t she been treated even worse by Mark?

The removal truck had just left and Connie and Jamie were boarding a train for Edinburgh when Jamie grabbed her hand and kissed it. ‘Sorry, love,’ he blubbed, ‘but I can’t live without him so I’m going back to put up a fight for him.’

Whether Mark and Jamie did get back together Connie didn’t know or care. What she did know was that when she arrived in Restalrig Road she found that she had a three-bedroomed house all to herself. And indeed it was to her a silver lining, because she was happy living there with no one knowing about her past.

That past did not come back to haunt her until Johnny Anderson fell down drunk and incapable on to her bed. He looked so comfortable there that she undressed him down to his long johns and climbed in beside him. Snuggling into him she felt an overwhelming sadness engulf her as she accepted that even if Johnny did recover from losing Sandra, he could never be anything to her – she was a married woman and he was strict Church of Scotland and that meant he would consider it sinful to sleep with another man’s wife!

*

Ever since Jenny had sunk down into her depression she had refused to go out into the air-raid shelters when the alarm sounded. On the night that all the commotion was going on around the Restalrig area she grabbed hold of Kate’s hand and dragged her under the solid oak table.

Kate was of the opinion that hiding under the table was a bad idea because, should the house be hit and the table collapse, they would be killed by the sheer weight that would descend on them.

When a bomb – meant no doubt for the docks – landed close by the house it shook the building so violently that ornaments and clocks crashed to the floor. Once the all-clear sounded, Kate emerged from under the table and began to clear up the debris.

She wasn’t in the least sorry that the Whistling Boy that had stood all its life looking out from the front-room window would whistle no more. Nor could she shed a tear for the smashed Royal Doulton china cups that no one had been allowed to drink from. But when she looked at her father’s granddaughter clock lying smashed beyond repair, all the pent-up emotion that she had refused to release since he had died now erupted from her. Lying across the wooden frame she wept for all she had lost, not only in this war but also in the previous one.

Jenny knelt down to console Kate. It was then she realised that she had been so wrapped up in her own grief that she hadn’t been aware of the needs of others. Why hadn’t she realised that Kate and Johnny would also lament the passing of her Donald, their beloved father? Instinctively she attempted to lift Kate up into her arms, and drawing in a deep breath, she vowed there and then that from this day onwards she must become the matriarch again.

The morning after the air raid that had terrified the districts of Restalrig and Craigentinny, Kitty was busy washing Rosebud’s soiled clothing when Jenny walked in.

‘Oh no, Granny, please don’t tell me that something awful happened to you or Aunty Kate last night.’

‘Not quite awful. You see, the things that were smashed are replaceable, with the exception of your granddad’s clock.’

‘The clock he wound up every week with the key we were never allowed to touch?’

Jenny nodded. ‘Anyway, last night I decided to stop licking my wounds so I’m here to see if there is anything I could be doing for you.’

Kitty lifted her hands out of the washing tub and as she dried them on her apron she gave a little giggle. ‘Well, Granny, last night’s raid, which was not one of the worst to happen here, sure shook our family up. Look’ – Kitty pulled out a chair so that Jenny could sit down at the table – ‘just sit down and I’ll tell you all about …’

Rosebud had now come into the kitchen and when she saw her grandmother she squealed, ‘Granny, Granny, have you come to smack bad Kitty for what she did to me last night?’

Jenny turned her head towards Kitty. Her fingers then began to tap, tap, tap on the table. Kitty took this strumming as an indication that her grandmother was waiting for an explanation.

Since she was a child Kitty had known that it was not a good idea to get into her grandmother’s bad books. This being so, she swallowed hard before she submissively said, ‘It was just that I was so busy delivering Mrs Ferguson’s baby that I forgot to check that Dad had taken Rosebud to the shelter, so … Oh, Granny, we never meant to leave her here all alone.’