The New Breadmakers (2 page)

Her main aim these past few years had been survival. It still was. She had come close to death and, ever since, her priority had been to protect herself. For the sake of Andrew, if nothing else. He was only a schoolboy and, in her opinion, not yet able to fend for himself. Admittedly, he’d always been sensible, even courageous. Fergus used to torment Andrew when he was younger. Andrew had been such a lovable little boy, with his chubby features, big round eyes and curly hair. She well remembered one occasion when she’d heard talking and had looked out of the sitting room to see the five-year-old Andrew stamping towards the bathroom repeating determinedly to himself, ‘I am
not
afraid of ghosts. I am
not
afraid of ghosts.’ Instead of coming to her for help and telling her that he was frightened to go to the bathroom because Fergus had told him there were ghosts in the cupboard ready to jump out on him, he’d struggled to cope with it himself. She’d found this out from her friend Madge’s children.

Andrew had always been like that. He’d never been a worry like Fergus. He was a good boy to her and to Melvin. It saddened her to think that he might be getting the wrong impression about her relationship with Melvin and thinking that she was the villain of the piece. She had to admit his dad was all right with him. As good a father as any, she supposed, although there had been a time when he had not been anything like the perfect father he now tried to make out he was. Andrew had been too young then to be able to remember it. She remembered, though.

‘Fat little bastard,’ Melvin had sneered. ‘I don’t suppose he’s even mine.’

That had been after Melvin came home from the war, terribly affected by it. If he’d sometimes acted like a madman before the war, he certainly became much worse during and after it. All right, he must have suffered a lot. She tried to remember that and to feel some compassion for him. Before the war, he’d had the physique of a gorilla and had always been proud of it – he never tired of boasting about his muscular body. He exercised regularly, never missed his ‘physical jerks’ as he called them. But he came back a mere shadow of his former self, physically at least, hollow-eyed and balding, with sallow skin hanging loosely on an emaciated body. She could not help feeling some pity and compassion. She’d kept quiet and gone along as best she could with all his crazy plans of becoming wealthy and successful in business and his home being the envy of everybody in Glasgow.

Big ideas. Showing off. That had always been him. Now he’d purchased a television set with which to show off to as many of his customers as could be crowded into the house. When they went out, he was too mean to buy even a cup of tea if they were in town and she said she was exhausted. ‘Do you think I’m made of money?’ he’d say. ‘There’s plenty tea you can have at home.’ Now this magic box was to display the Queen’s Coronation, transmitted in black and white from London, for everyone to marvel at. No one else they knew was the proud possessor of a television. Tea and sandwiches were going to be provided and passed around – by her, of course – and never mind the expense. Not to mention all the work – the preparation beforehand for such a horde, the washing up afterwards and no doubt cleaning up of a sea of bread and biscuit crumbs from the carpet. It could sink forever under spilled tea and crumbs, for all she cared, but he’d go berserk about his precious carpet if it was left uncared for. He was still as house-proud as ever.

She longed to leave him. But where could she go? Not to her mother. That would be like going from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. How could she keep herself? She had to be independent some day, but how? Melvin had been telling her for so long that she was helpless and useless and would never be able to survive without him that she was afraid it might be true. Deep down, she believed him.

‘You’ve lucky you’ve got me,’ he kept telling her.

She began to look for secret areas of her life in which she could find some happiness. She clung to her friends. But they thought she was lucky as well.

Most of the customers that Melvin had invited to come and view the Coronation were from Partick. McNairn’s new bakery was down nearer the Partick end of Byres Road. It had more working-class character than the other end, where Great Western Road was filled with large villas and equally roomy terraced houses, all of splendid architectural quality. Further along towards the centre of the city, the tenement blocks, mostly above shops, were commodious and very respectable. It always had been like that around there.

Partick, on the other hand, had a chequered history. At first it had been a village, then, with the deepening of the river, the rise of shipbuilding and the massive influx of workers that followed, the place had simply grown and grown. Eventually there had been a unanimous decision to make the area into a burgh so that something could be done about the unhygienic conditions that were causing so many deaths. Smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, typhoid and cholera were constant threats. A major source of much of the infection was the milk supply and, once the area became a burgh in 1852, sanitary inspectors kept an eagle eye on the many dairies, cow keepers and byres. A register was kept of ice-cream shops and a whole host of other premises, including grocers, fish restaurants, newsagents and bakeries.

Partick had fought long and hard to remain a separate burgh. Nevertheless, at midnight on 4 November 1912, it ceased to exist and was included within the boundaries of Glasgow.

Catriona had seen the Provost of Partick’s gold chains and official badges of office in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, one of the few places she occasionally managed to escape to. If Melvin was on night shift in the bakery, it was difficult. He only slept for a few hours during the day and was liable to come padding barefooted and hollow-cheeked out of the bedroom looking for her and wanting a cup of tea because he couldn’t sleep and his mouth wa ‘like a sewer’.

More and more, he was becoming like his father, who eventually worked days instead of nights. Melvin had made Baldy Fowler the head baker or manager on the night shift because Baldy ‘knew his stuff’. He had been one of the few survivors when Dessie Street had been bombed. Not that Baldy had ever shown any gratitude for the fact.

‘Isn’t it just like the bloody thing,’ he’d complained at the time. ‘Life’s not worth living for me. I don’t care if I snuff it. But I’m the one who survives.’

He still hadn’t forgotten his wife Sarah and the terrible day she had been hanged for the murder of his mother, even though it had happened many years ago and he was now courting a woman from Springburn.

Catriona remembered that terrible day as well. Poor Sarah had been nagged beyond endurance by ‘Lender Lil’, Baldy’s ghastly money-lending mother. She could well understand how Sarah felt. Often in the past, she had felt like stabbing her own mother to death. More recently, she’d felt like murdering Melvin. She had come to genuinely believe that anyone was capable of murder. At least her mother’s aggressive nagging and threatening of God’s punishments weren’t so constant now. She still reminded Catriona what God thought of her but now it was with a regretful sigh. As Grand Matron of the Band of Jesus, she appeared to have a direct line to God and inside knowledge of His every wish and plan. Catriona used to believe this, but not any more. Oh, there were still deep-rooted fears that, no matter how much she mentally pooh-poohed them, refused to be completely banished. But now, she fought against them as best and as often as she could. She knew that her mother used God to get her own way.

Catriona had come to the conclusion that He couldn’t be much of a God if He allowed Himself to be so often manipulated by Hannah Munro. He had never listened to the pleas and prayers of Catriona McNair. No help, no mercy and certainly no love had ever been doled out to her. She didn’t believe in a God like that. Practically every time she saw Sammy Hunter, she argued with him about her beliefs or rather lack of them. Sammy had been a conscientious objector and suffered much at the hands of the military in Maryhill Barracks where he’d been imprisoned for a time. His wife Ruth had been killed in the war. After her death, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, had helped to get him out of prison. The Quakers were pacifists and held mock tribunals to help COs and prepare them for the ordeal they would face and all the questions that would be flung at them, when they were called to face the real tribunal. Sammy was just one of many they helped in this way.

After his imprisonment in the Barracks, Sammy had served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit for the rest of the war. After it ended, he’d kept in touch with the Society of Friends. Sammy had fiery red hair and a broken nose, and he looked like a prize fighter. He certainly could be argumentative and he held strong views, but he never brought up the subject of God or religion. It was her that could never resist taking every opportunity she could to vent her bitterness and argue about religion with him. If Melvin was there, he’d say things like, ‘Will you shut up about bloody religion? It’s bad enough when your mother goes on about it.’

Sammy was the only one she could talk to. He argued with her, but he never made any attempt to convert her. She was curious to know why. Wasn’t that what religious people, especially members of religious sects, were supposed to do? Sammy said it wasn’t. Love is the meaning of life and the light of God is in everyone, he believed.

Catriona found this very hard to swallow, especially when she thought of Melvin. It intrigued her that a man like Sammy could go along with it, although she could remember one incident about which he’d shown amazing tolerance and understanding.

His wife Ruth had been killed in a cinema when it received a direct hit and Alec Jackson, Madge’s husband, had been with her. It was while Sammy had been in Maryhill Barracks and Ruth had been fed up and lonely. They’d barely got seated, apparently, when the bomb fell. To Alec’s credit (and there never had been much to Alec’s credit), he had given his name and Ruth’s to the air-raid warden when asked, then had gone down on his knees and dug with his bare hands to try to find Ruth and get her out. He could have walked away without saying or doing anything. That way Madge and Sammy would never have known.

Ruth had been a very beautiful girl, sexy too. Catriona could well believe that her every move could be sexually provocative, especially to a man like Alec, with her hips swaying as she walked, her full, pouting lips and black, suggestive eyes. As far as she knew, though, Ruth and Sammy had been ideally happy together and they had been so proud of their little room-and-kitchen flat. Sammy had obviously adored Ruth. Her death had devastated him. His emotions kept coming to boiling point about the way she’d died. It added fuel to his hatred of war.

Immediately afterwards, everyone, even Madge, thought it best not to add to poor Sammy’s grief by telling him that Ruth had been with Alec. It was not until years later that Alec had confessed to Sammy. Alec had been a terrible womaniser. Even Catriona, who had been quite naive in her youth, had realised it eventually. Madge had given Alec absolute hell, not only because of Ruth, but because he’d seduced Catriona in the early years of her marriage, during the time her mother had taken the children from her ‘for their own safety’. Catriona had allowed him to persuade her to have sex with him. She’d believed it to be an expression of love at the time. He had been so gentle after all the brutal and completely insensitive sex she’d suffered from Melvin. At the time she had felt more vulnerable than usual and in need of some sort of comfort, but afterwards she’d suffered agonies of guilt, even though it had only happened on one occasion. All her previous so-called sins shrank to nothing compared with the sin of adultery.

Much to Alec’s horror, she’d confessed to Madge, who immediately felled Alec with a blow to his handsome face. Madge was a big, strong girl.

‘You rotten big midden. She’s only a wee lassie,’ she bawled at her husband, ‘and she’s worried about her weans.’

That one act of unfaithfulness had resulted in a pregnancy about which she’d had to deceive Melvin, to convince him that baby Robert, like Andrew and Fergus, was truly his.

Not that she had ever regretted having Robert. She had loved him dearly and always would. He had been such a good wee boy. She remembered saying to Sandy, the van man, when they were all sheltering in the bakehouse lobby just before the bomb was dropped, ‘Look at that wee pet. Wide awake and not a whimper.’ She had been sitting on the floor at the side of Robert’s pram with her knees hugged up under her chin. Leaning her head to one side, she had begun to sing to the baby. She could still see him staring up at her, wide-eyed with delight.

Wee Willie Winkie

Runs through the town,

Upstairs and downstairs

In his nightgown.

Tirling at the windows,

Crying at the locks —

Are all the weans in their beds,

For it’s now ten o’clock.

What kind of God was it who could allow such a lovely and loving wee baby to be crushed to death, even as a punishment for her? Her mind shrank away from the memory and the torment, and drifted on to Sammy again.

He had certainly shown great tolerance towards Alec. He’d always had a horror, he said, of Ruth dying frightened and alone. She had always liked Alec and Sammy was glad that he had been with her. He’d even helped Alec, by then unemployed, down-and-out and very miserable, to find a job and regain some of his self-respect. They were now good friends and Alec obviously thought the world of Sammy.

Fine, fine. But that was just Sammy. Not God. Not bloody God, who had allowed her baby to die a horrible death.

She fought to gather her strength so that she could survive for Andrew and Fergus’s sakes. And go on surviving. God or no God, by hardening herself and fuelling her hatred of Melvin, she would find the strength.

Catriona lost count of the number of people who were crowded into the sitting room. Children and some of the younger adults sat on the floor nearest to the television. Then there were rows of chairs. Crammed in behind the chairs, people stood pressed against the walls at the back. Catriona gave up trying to pass round tea and sandwiches and she too squeezed in behind the chairs.