Liz shivered. Germany’s annexation of Austria the month before had led to an influx of Viennese Jews into Britain. The stories they were telling about what was happening to their people in Germany were hard to believe... but chilling all the same. All of a sudden the little man with the toothbrush moustache who was running Germany didn’t seem such a figure of fun.
Now Herr Hitler was making threatening gestures towards Czechoslovakia, insisting that a part of that country called the Sudetenland belonged to Germany - and that his Nazi stormtroopers would take it by force if they had to. The question was: were Britain and France going to let him?
‘The man’s a megalomaniac,’ said Peter MacMillan. ‘He wants to rule the world.’ Turning his pipe around, he used the stem of it to emphasize what he was saying, pointing it at Eddie. ‘You mark my words. It’ll be our turn soon enough.’
‘We’re an island,’ said Eddie. He shifted in his chair. ‘We don’t have to get involved in a bosses’ war.’
‘No?’ said Peter, his voice sharp. ‘So what happened to “all men are brothers”? Eh?’ He leaned forward, giving his grandson another of those penetrating looks. ‘What’s the difference between a Scottish family in Clydebank and a Jewish family in Austria or Germany? Or, for that matter, a Spanish family? Answer me that, young man.’
Putting his pipe to his lips, he sat back with an air of expansive confidence, knowing only too well that his grandson wouldn’t be able to give him an answer.
‘But Grandad,’ protested Liz, ‘you don’t have to be a communist to be a pacifist.’
‘Christ, hen,’ said Peter MacMillan with sudden passion, ‘only a madman wants another war. I know that better than anybody.’ He paused, and Liz knew that he must be thinking of his firstborn, who had died at Passchendaele. ‘But that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here - a madman.’
The emotion in his voice was enough to silence even Eddie, and for a few moments they sat saying nothing, contemplating the awful prospect and terrible reality of a world stalked by the spectre of fascism.
It had been bad enough when Mussolini had ordered the invasion of Abyssinia two years before, pitting all the power of modern warfare against primitive tribesmen who had tried to turn back tanks with bows and arrows, but that, God forgive them all, had seemed a long way away. Film footage from the civil war currently raging in Spain was much closer to home.
Almost exactly a year ago the Basque town of Guernica had been bombed from the air. It had been their market day and thousands of unarmed men, women and children had been killed. The horror of that aerial attack had sent shock waves around the world.
Aviators had been heroes - symbols of the modern age, of man’s triumph over the forces of nature, of the progress of humankind. Now they were angels of death, raining destruction down from the clouds, slaughtering innocent men, women and children in their own homes. And the airmen who were honing their terrible skills most efficiently in Spain were the men of the German
Luftwaffe
: the men who would be attacking Britain if it did come to war between those two countries.
There was supposed to be a non-intervention agreement about the Spanish Civil War. Germany and Italy were blithely ignoring it. The suspicion was growing that what folk were learning to call the Axis Powers were using Spain as some dreadful sort of training ground, a rehearsal for a larger theatre of war.
There was widespread revulsion at the prospect of Britain once more involving herself in a European war. The dreadful years between 1914 and 1918 had blighted the lives of one generation and made an indelible mark on the next.
Aware of the strength and depth of pacifist opinion, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was trying desperately to stop Britain being dragged into war, adopting a policy which had come to be known as Appeasement. Let the Nazis have something of what they want, ran this philosophy, and we’ll be able to pacify them, keep the ravening beast at bay, the hounds of war firmly on the leash.
The trouble was, anyone who had a conscience was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the reality of Appeasement. Liz knew that Eddie was one of them. He was not in principle opposed to fighting for what you believed in.
A year ago Liz had needed all her powers of persuasion to stop him from throwing up his studies and going off to join the International Brigade fighting in defence of the beleaguered democratic government of Spain against the fascist rebels led by General Franco. In the end she’d told him it would break their mother’s heart if he went off to war - and that had been the argument which had finally convinced him to stay at home.
Now, with the international crisis growing more serious every day, she knew he was having a great deal of trouble reconciling his political convictions with his innate sense of honour and decency, although he wasn’t going to let go of those convictions without a fight The two men were talking about the Soviet Union now, a country which Eddie idolized.
‘Eddie, Eddie,’ her grandfather was saying, shaking his head in despair, I’ll grant you that the October Revolution was one of the great events in human history, but it’s been corrupted. Look at the show trials in Moscow last year. What were they, if not the revolution eating its children?’
‘No, no,’ cried Eddie, ‘don’t you see? They have to constantly keep purifying the revolution - and if that has to be done by blood,’ he declaimed, tossing his tousled locks, ‘then so be it.’
Liz snorted. ‘This from the man who has to ask his mother to take a spider out of the bath? And then asks her to be sure not to kill the poor wee thing?’
Eddie scowled at her.
“The end justifies the means,’ he said. ‘That’s what we have to remember.’
‘Edward, my child,’ said Peter MacMillan, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so, what you’ve just said is - excuse me, Lizzie - a load of shite.’
They were off again, amiably trading insults and casting aspersions on each other’s intelligence, shrewdness and political judgement. Liz wouldn’t interrupt. They were both enjoying themselves far too much.
She looked at the old clock on the mantelpiece. If she listened carefully she could make out its reassuring tick-tock underneath the men’s raised voices.
Dry your tears and lift up your head
. She could hear her grandmother’s voice saying it. She lifted her chin.
I’ll do my best, Granny.
Liz stretched her legs out, then hurriedly drew them back up again as her feet hit the cold patch of sheet at the bottom of the bed. As she did so, the memory of yesterday evening’s confrontation with her father came flooding back. She curled herself up into a tight little ball of misery. So much for her resolution to count her blessings.
She had thought that turning eighteen would solve all of her problems. She’d been fourteen when she had first composed a letter to the Western Infirmary up in Glasgow about nursing training. When she had received a polite and businesslike reply telling her she couldn’t be considered until she was eighteen it had seemed such a long way away.
All through school and after - when she had done a course at commercial college to learn how to type and do shorthand, activities which didn’t interest her in the slightest; when she had gone to work at Murray’s - eighteen had been the magic number. It had twinkled on the horizon, out of reach but edging slowly closer, full of hope and promise, offering her the opportunity to fulfil a dream which had matured over the years into the desire to do something useful with her life: to help others, to make a difference.
She could remember every detail of the time she had spent at Blawarthill Hospital when she’d had scarlet fever as a child. Being carried down the stairs at Radnor Street wrapped up in a red blanket, her mother and Granny waiting anxiously on the pavement by the horse-drawn ambulance which was to take her away.
Sadie, a young mother who’d already lost one child to the dreadful disease, had been pale and silent, her face stricken with grief and fear. Granny, a comforting arm laid along her daughter-in-law’s thin shoulders, had smiled at Liz and told her to be a good girl and get better soon. Her father had been standing on the pavement a step or two away from his mother and his wife.
Liz, only eight years old, had known that her brother George had gone off in a closed carriage like the one to which she was being carried - and had never come back. One afternoon, without any sort of an explanation, she and Eddie had been taken to his funeral. Liz watched the small white coffin being lowered into the ground, turned to her mother and asked, ‘Is that heaven down there? Where they’re putting Georgie?’ No one had given her an answer.
About to be put into the ambulance, her father opening the door for the nurse who was carrying her, Liz made the terrifying connection between what was happening to her and what had happened to her wee brother. Turning to her father, she reached out for him.
‘Daddy, Daddy! Don’t let them put me down the big hole!’
But William MacMillan, his face shuttered, had taken a step back from his daughter’s outstretched arms. Without a word of farewell to his daughter or comfort to his wife he turned on his heel and walked back into the close. The next thing Liz knew she was in the darkness of the ambulance, weeping as though her heart would break.
And then, small and scared and lonely, Liz’s paroxysms of grief had subsided to an exhausted sobbing, and a nurse at Blawarthill had laid a cool hand on her hot brow and told her that everything would be all right. The woman had sat with her and talked to her, offering much-needed comfort and reassurance to a very frightened little girl.
Her mother had been allowed to visit once a week, and even then they had only been permitted to look at each other through a window. They hadn’t been able to talk to each other. Her father hadn’t visited at all.
But Liz had survived, gradually regaining her health and strength, and eventually being allowed to go home. She had never forgotten the kindness of that nurse, and of the others who’d looked after her during her six weeks away from home.
As she grew older, Liz came to realize that nursing was what she wanted to do with her life too.
Now, at long last, she had got there - only for the dream to be cruelly snatched out of her reach by her own father. She’d always believed he would have preferred it if Georgie had been the one to survive, not her. He was proud of Eddie but he didn’t seem to think daughters were much use for anything.
Liz groaned, and pulled her knees up more tightly. She tried not to revisit the bad memories too often. Sometimes they seemed to crawl up to the surface of their own accord. The door of her room creaked. Cocooned in her sheets and heavy blankets, she looked up and saw her mother peering round it.
‘Come on, Lizzie,’ said Sadie MacMillan in an anxious whisper. ‘You know your father likes us all to have breakfast together.’
Always what her father wanted. Liz bit back an angry retort.
‘Aye, Ma. I’ll be two ticks.’ She gestured towards her underwear, lying folded in a neat pile on the upright chair which stood against the wall. ‘Hand me those, would you? I’ll need to warm them up.’ She must be a better actress than she’d thought. Her mother’s face cleared a little. That was good.
Clutching her underclothes, Liz suppressed a shriek as the smooth artificial silk of her petticoat made contact with her own warm skin. It had never been this cold in the old house in Radnor Street, where she had slept in the box bed in the warmth of the kitchen, listening to Eddie snoring on the hurly bed on the other side of the curtains.
There, she’d had to perfect the art of putting her clothes on in bed for modesty’s sake. Here, she did it to prevent her skin breaking out into goosebumps as big as Ben Lomond.
She knew her mother missed the old place, but to her father moving into Queen Victoria Row had been a great mark of achievement. Eddie, with his firebrand communist politics, was less happy about it. Their father was now one of the ‘bastards in bowlers’, the choice of hat as much a mark of status as anything else.
His new position set them apart from a lot of the people they’d been friendly with before. As far as some of them were concerned, William MacMillan had now gone over to the enemy. That made life difficult for his wife. She was a shy woman, but she had known people up the road - had appreciated having her parents-in-law just down the stairs. Brought up in an orphanage after the early death of her own parents, she had been close to her in-laws, who had taken her to their hearts in a big way when their son had first brought her home.