The River Flows On (10 page)

‘Half of them’ll have gone to Singer’s anyway,’ he put in.

Kate knew that to be true. The Singer sewing-machine factory up on Kilbowie Hill was doing well - had even increased its workforce. Miss Nugent was speaking again.

‘With a new order on the books we at Donaldson’s have vacancies, especially for beginners like yourself whom we can train up.’

Kate knew what that meant. It was an old shipyard trick. Once the apprentices completed their time, they were paid off and new apprentices taken on in their place. It saved the bosses from having to pay a time-served man the pay he was due.

That five shillings wasn’t going to go very far. Lily would expect her to hand over almost all of it. And a five-year apprenticeship! Her dreams of the Art School were receding by the minute.

Kate gave herself a mental shake. Both Arthur Crawford and Miss Nugent were looking at her, waiting for her answer. Who did she think she was, keeping these trusted members of Mr Donaldson’s staff waiting? A bubble of humour surfaced. And her only the daughter of a riveter, too. The lowest of the low.

One day she would show them. She would become the best tracer Donaldson’s had ever had. She would rise through the ranks. Maybe she would even become a - what had Mr Crawford called them, ‘the folk who make the insides beautiful? - interior designers, wasn’t it? Yes, that’s what she would do. One day people would ask each other if they’d seen the beautiful designs Kathleen Cameron had done for the new ship - a transatlantic liner, of course, like the
Lusitania
and her sister ships, all built next door at John Brown’s. None of your rubbish. That would show Miss Nugent.

Amused by her thoughts, she gave the woman a lovely smile. She would be gracious, like the young Duchess of York whom she’d seen on a newsreel last week. What was her name again? Princess Elizabeth?

‘Yes,’ she said, extending her hand the way she’d seen the Duchess do in the film, so dainty and lady-like. Maybe Miss Nugent’ll kiss it instead of shaking it, she thought. Aye, and then I can look out of those big windows and see the pigs flying past. Kate smiled again. ‘Yes, I should like to be considered for a position here.’

Arthur Crawford saw her out, escorting her to the main gate. The shipyard was unusually silent, only a few men having been kept on to keep things ticking over. Even Robbie and his father had been laid off. Kate, remembering the boisterous and light-hearted crowd on the day of the launch of the Irish Princess, shivered.

‘Watch your feet.’

Glancing down, she saw a patch of oily water, and stepped around it. They were at the gate. Arthur Crawford nodded to the gatekeeper who sat in a small office to one side of the huge double wooden gates, and opened a smaller door built into one side of them. Signalling to her to go through in front of him, he came out behind her into the sunshine of Dumbarton Road. He held out his hand.

‘Well, goodbye then, Miss Cameron,’ he said, ‘and well done. You can give yourself a wee pat on the back.’

Kate, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, smiled at him and took the plunge. A tram car, bound for the terminus at Dalmuir, clanked and rattled past. She waited until the noise died away before she spoke.

‘Mr Crawford...’

‘Aye, lass?’

‘When you need the Black Squad again ...’

Arthur Crawford coughed. He knew full well what Kate was asking. He patted her on the shoulder. ‘Your dad’s a good man, pet, and we’ll be needing the Black Squad back in soon, but he has to cut back on the drink. We can’t have that. We really can’t. It’s dangerous, for one thing. Can you and your Ma try and keep him off the bevvy?’

‘I’ll try, Mr Crawford,’ Kate said earnestly. ‘I’ll do my very best to keep him off it.’

‘Good girl.’ He took his hand off her shoulder, lifted his head and looked across the main road. “There’s Robbie come to meet you - to see how you’ve got on, no doubt. You’ve got a good lad there, hen.’

‘He’s not-’ began Kate but Arthur Crawford had already disappeared back into the yard, the small door within the gates swinging shut behind him.

Robbie, smiling, darted between two trams to cross the road to her. ‘How did it go?’ he asked eagerly.

‘I start in August.’ And then, forgetting modesty, and because she knew how pleased he would be for her, ‘I got top marks in the exam.’

His face broke into a delighted smile.

‘Och, Kate, that’s magic!’ Seizing her by the waist, he swung her around.

‘Robbie, put me down!’ She was laughing, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder to help keep her balance. An old couple walking past on the pavement smiled at them.

‘She’s just got a start,’ Robbie told them, ‘as a tracer.’

The old man gave Kate a toothless grin. ‘Well, hen, that certainly is something to celebrate.’ He touched his bunnet to her and walked on. Robbie laughed down into Kate’s face.

‘You’re a right clever wee thing, Kathleen Cameron-‘ He broke off suddenly, setting her down on the pavement and whirling around, his head turned to listen. From the other side of the main road came the sound of a hand bell being rung - fast, loud and insistent.

The laughter died out of Robbie’s face. It was replaced by a determined look and his eyes grew steely.

‘It’s an eviction. Come on, Kate!’

Grabbing her hand, dodging between a tram and a horse-drawn coal lorry, he pulled her across the road in the direction of the frantic ringing.

Chapter 6

The woman looked terrified. She also looked very young. Despite the baby she held in her skinny arms, clutched tightly to her breast, and despite the two children clinging onto her shapeless skirt, Kate realized with a jolt that she was only a few years older than herself. She and her children stood in front of a pathetic pile of furniture which was growing larger as a group of men carried the family’s possessions out of the tenement block from which they were being evicted.

‘It’s a damned disgrace!’ a woman shouted, ‘putting the lassie out while her man’s not in the house.’ The voice was familiar. Standing on tiptoe to peer over Robbie’s shoulder, Kate saw that it belonged to Agnes Baxter. With three or four other women she was squaring up to the removal men and a man holding a sheaf of papers who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings.

There were shouts of, ‘Shame!’ from the people gathering in front of the tenement, spilling off the broad pavement into the street.

One by one, half a dozen men detached themselves from the crowd and moved through it to surround the girl. One of her older children whimpered at their approach, re-doubling his grip on his mother’s skirt, so fiercely that she nearly lost her balance. One of the men, tall and straight, gave a deep, reassuring laugh, bent down and lifted the boy onto his shoulders, turning tears to delighted laughter within seconds. Kate gasped. It was her father Neil.

‘My Da and your Ma,’ she whispered before she realized that Robbie was no longer in front of her. He too was one of title men now standing around the little family like a guard of honour, shielding their trembling bodies from the man Kate had now worked out was the sheriff’s officer, and the men he had employed to carry out the eviction. It was a scene which had become all too familiar in Clydebank in recent months.

A mere fifty years before, within living memory, the town hadn’t existed at all. When J. & G. Thomson decided to build a shipyard downriver from overcrowded Glasgow in 1871 - the yard which was later to become the world-famous John Brown’s - they chose an area of green fields known as the Barns o’ Clyde. There had been nothing there but a few cottages.

By the time the American Singer company started building Europe’s biggest sewing-machine factory eleven years later, other companies had moved in and Clydebank - named after Thomson’s yard - was set to boom. Houses for the new and rapidly-expanding workforce, some of them built by the companies themselves, were hastily thrown up.

Too hastily, in many cases. By the 1920s, when landlords tried to introduce rent rises for tenement homes which were often damp, poky and badly constructed, tenants decided that enough was enough. They banded together and called a rent strike, refusing to pay the increased rents unless and until improvements were made.

The landlords fought back. Some tenants found their arrears of rent were being stopped from their wages - an indication that many employers were in cahoots with the landlords’ factors. As the dispute escalated, the landlords became heavy-handed, taking tenants to court for non-payment. The law too seemed to be on their side, and eviction orders were not hard to get.

Political leaders - men like the local Labour MP Davie Kirkwood - advised people to put the rent money to one side, so that when it came to the crunch, families would be able to pay the arrears and not have to face being thrown out onto the street. With so many men out of work, however, the idea of being able to keep any money by was a bad joke.

It was Agnes Baxter who’d rung a hand bell to summon assistance, a strategy borrowed from earlier rent strikes up in Glasgow, and one which had rapidly been adopted as the evictions had increased. It was a signal which brought everyone within earshot running - particularly the women. More likely to be at home during the day, they had come to play a leading role in what had rapidly developed into a war between the people and the factors. The latter had tried carrying out evictions at dinner-time, just as wives were cooking and dishing out meals for hungry husbands, assuming women wouldn’t break off from their household duties. They’d been wrong.

The strategy changed again. The factors began to carry out the evictions at night. An appropriate response was mounted. Kate’s father had joined the Vigilantes, a group which patrolled the town during the hours of darkness. If they couldn’t prevent an eviction they at least found someone to take the affected family in and give them a roof over their heads.

Agnes Baxter had stopped ringing the bell and was haranguing the men removing the furniture from the tenement. They were looking nervously to the sheriff’s officer for guidance. The crowd was big enough to be intimidating, and the phalanx of men standing around the evicted family all looked as though they meant business.

‘Youse ought to be ashamed o’ yourselves!’ Agnes waved an angry hand at the young mother. ‘Where d’you think this lassie and her bairns are going to spend the night, eh? Answer me that!’

‘That’s no’ our concern, missus. We’ve got a job to do. Now, if you’d just let the men get on wi’ it...’

Agnes put her hands on her hips. She wasn’t a big woman, but she had personality enough - and anger enough - to present a formidable obstacle. Kate saw Robbie glance sideways at his mother, his mouth quirking. She caught his eye and he gave her a wink and the ghost of a smile. Neil Cameron, the young boy still riding high on his broad shoulders, moved forward to stand beside Agnes, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She glanced behind her to see who it was, and gave him a quick nod of recognition before turning her attention once more to the sheriff’s officer, standing uneasily in front of her.

‘Putting women and children out o’ their houses, is it? Think that’s man’s work then, do you?’ As she looked him up and down, a slow blush spread over the man’s face, creeping up from his stiff white collar. There were some sniggers, but the crowd remained curiously quiet, awaiting the outcome of this encounter with edgy anticipation. Kate knew that it could go either way. An eruption into violence might be only seconds away. She sent up a swift prayer. Please God, don’t let anybody get hurt.

Robbie’s mother, however, knew what she was about. She gave her victim a cool smile, then a look of withering contempt, and she took a step towards him. The officer made the mistake of taking a step backwards. The crowd hooted its derision and erupted, but into laughs, catcalls and whistles.

Kate laughed too. The man was at least a foot taller than Agnes. It was a ridiculous sight - the majesty of the law humbled by a wee woman from Yoker with her hands on her hips and a gleam in her eye.

Another voice, deep and authoritative, sounded out over the hubbub.

‘Be off with you, man - and your carrion crows. There’s not a man jack of us in this crowd that  doesn’t need a job - but there’s some work no decent man would undertake.’