And the Land Lay Still (57 page)

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Ellen came home one day, during her first term at school, to find her twin cousins, Adam and Gavin, in the kitchen, drinking milk as if it were about to be abolished. Her mother was there and didn’t seem to care how much of it they drank. They had the bottle on the table between them and were filling up glasses, knocking it back, filling them up again, and when the bottle was finished her mother fetched another from the pantry and let them set about that too. Adam and Gavin were eight, three years older than Ellen, and every gulp of milk they took seemed to make them swell up so she thought there soon wouldn’t be space in the house for them all.

Which was upsetting, because it seemed they weren’t just passing by on their way to their own house, they would be staying the
night. In fact, her mother explained, they’d be staying a few nights, till Auntie Alice was better.

‘Is she no weel again?’ she said. Auntie Alice was always catching her breath and coughing, and complaining of a sore chest and faintness. She wasn’t a strong woman like her own mother.

‘Aye, she’s very poorly,’ Mary said.

Adam, whom she liked the better of the twins, said, ‘She fell doon when she was daein the washin and noo she’s in the hospital.’

‘How can they no stay wi Auntie Meg?’ Ellen asked, because they’d done that the last time Alice was in the hospital.

‘Because Auntie Meg’s got her hands full,’ Mary said. ‘It’s oor turn tae help.’

‘Is Auntie Alice gonnae die?’ Ellen said, because it had happened before. Uncle Harry, whom she hardly remembered, had died in a terrible accident at the pit.

‘No, she’s no,’ Mary said.

‘Aye, she is,’ Gavin said.

‘No, Gavin,’ Mary began, but he pushed away from the table and ran from the house. ‘She is!’ he shouted. He didn’t want them to see him greeting, that was what that was, Ellen thought. And she knew who was telling the truth.

Adam finished the milk in his glass, wiped his milk moustache on his sleeve and without a word went after his brother. If Ellen had used her sleeve as a clout or left the table like that she’d have been shouted back, but Mary let the boys go, following them with a look that was almost tender.

Ellen said, ‘Is that them away then?’

‘No,’ Mary said. ‘They’ll be back. And ye’ve tae be kind tae them, Ellen, till your auntie’s back on her feet again.’

But Auntie Alice didn’t get back on her feet. She had bad lungs and the broon katies but in the end it was the pneumonia that did for her, about a week later. It could have been worse, it might have been TB, there were folk in the city slums dying like flies of TB, and if you coughed you gave it to everybody else and you had to go to a faraway place in the hills where they wheeled your bed out in the snow and left you to freeze all day and night and sometimes it cured you although usually you died. If you had TB nobody wanted to be near you. When Auntie Alice coughed people looked fearful in case
that was what was wrong with her. It wasn’t but she died anyway and then they all came to her funeral and the boys were in black suits and their hair was stuck down with water and Ellen heard someone say that they were cursed, first their father now their mother, what next?

Uncle Harry had died in an accident in the pit along with six other men. They were still down there. They’d had a funeral for him but Ellen was too wee, she wasn’t at it and neither was he, he was buried already, miles underground. They didn’t put Auntie Alice deep enough to meet him but he was already away, they’d meet in heaven, that was what the minister said. When the boys left the church they held hands. They were brave. Gavin said he didn’t think there was such a place as heaven and Auntie Meg said there was, but Ellen was pretty sure Gavin was telling the truth again.

People still spoke about Uncle Harry, he was a kind of hero and he couldn’t help being in the accident, but soon people didn’t speak about Auntie Alice, it was as if she’d done something wrong by being weak and not coping. Ellen felt sorry for her but also she resented the fact that her aunt had left her own mother no option but to take Gavin and Adam in. Because her Nana and Dey couldn’t take them and Auntie Meg’s house was full and one thing was for certain, they weren’t being taken away to an orphanage. ‘Over my dead body,’ Mary said. So they stayed, allied in their orphaned state against the world, and became to Ellen like two older brothers. They all got on well enough. Ellen tolerated the new arrangements partly in the belief that if she behaved herself the boys would eventually leave and things would be as they’d been before, just her and her mother and from time to time her father. It took a while – a year or so – before she finally twigged that they were there for good. By that time there was even a fondness between the twins and Ellen. The boys were big but subdued and Ellen was wee but bumptious, yet somehow it worked, maybe that was
why
it worked, and just as well, Mary said, there wasn’t room in the house for fighting. Adam and Gavin slept in the back bedroom that had been Jock and Mary’s, and Mary and Ellen slept in the box-bed in the front room, and if Jock was home Ellen got a shakedown in front of the fire, or she went round to her Dey and Nana’s on 7th Street and slept there, which was better for everybody and especially for
her. In fact, she spent more and more time there, so much that it began to feel as if that was her home, and 2nd Street was a place she visited occasionally for a change of clothes or the weekly bath in front of the fire.

For Mary there’d been no choice in the matter. With Jock seldom home she was the one with the space, and the boys were family. It would have been a betrayal of Alice if she hadn’t stopped them from being put in a home. Jock was irresponsible but not cold-hearted and he agreed with her. He grumbled at the extra costs and complained that there wasn’t room for him in his own house, but the new situation gave him all the excuses he needed to stay away more or less permanently. He needed to earn more, he said – not that much more appeared on the postal orders. He liked Gavin and Adam, but not enough to make him settle.

Mary didn’t have time to argue about the situation. She wanted to do right by her dead sister and by her two nephews. She rushed home at dinner time to feed the three bairns, packed them off to school again, and told them to go to their granny’s afterwards till she was home from work. After a few months of this the twins decided to skip the interludes at Nana’s. They learned to manage without Mary, to make pieces for themselves and Ellen during the day, and to prepare the tea when they came in from school. They were a unit, almost inseparable, and knew not to expect to have things done for them – not to expect anything much in the way of special attention. Mary was as fair and kind as she could be, and appreciative of their willingness to help around the house, even though she hardly showed it. She persuaded herself that what she was giving them was the best thing they would ever possess – the ability to survive. As their mother never had done, they were coping.

With Ellen it was different. She needed to engage with adults. For years Mary relied on her parents to keep Ellen out of harm’s way. Long after she started at the school, she still spent most of her evenings and weekends at her grandparents. Often she slept the night and went to school from there in the morning. This made her feel special and independent. It made her feel like herself.

Nana and Dey were getting old and worn, and so was everything they possessed. Their street was somehow poorer than the others, a
begrimed, crouching, sorry-looking row of cottages made sorrier by the bright, bold marigolds Nana grew in the thin beds beneath her windows every summer. The cottage was impregnated with the accumulated odours of years, a mixture of old soup and smoke and sweat and earth, powerful and cloying. Whenever Ellen went in, the smell hit her. It took a minute to get used to it again, then it was cosy and friendly like the house itself, a secret, safe den of a place. Nana was always bustling, never still. She made toast and spread raspberry jam on it for Ellen, and poured her tea from the same pot her Dey had his from, thick and swirling with bits of black twig floating in it. Strangers, Nana called them. She showed Ellen how to pick them out and thump them between her fists to see what day they were coming to visit. Sometimes the tea was that full of strangers her Dey would look around the room in horror and exclaim, ‘Guidsakes, whaur are we gaun tae pit them aw?’ He had his tea black with sugar, but Ellen had hers topped up with milk, for it was that strong it would turn your insides to leather and she was too young for that, her Dey said. He had leather insides himself, but that was because he was sixty years old, you didn’t want to get them too young or you’d start creaking. ‘Listen!’ he’d say and right enough she could hear him creaking away like the seats on buses, his lungs wheezing like air brakes. She always listened when her Dey or Nana said she should. If her Dey said, ‘Sharpen your lugs, lass, and I’ll tell ye something ye dinna ken,’ he nearly always did. Or when thunder rolled around the sky on a clammy August evening, and her Nana said, ‘Aye, there’s God getting his coals in for the winter,’ she could hear the din of him doing it.

Coal, coal, coal, everything was coal: her Dey’s coal-black spits hissing as they hit the red coals shuffling in the grate; the scuttle full of coal waiting to be thrown on; the layer of dust on windows and shelves. And Nana’s jam was coal-dark and thick and luminous with seeds. ‘The jam ye get at the shops’ll never taste like that,’ she said. ‘It’s no real, the bought jam. They pit woodchips in it tae look like seeds, sae ye think it’s the real thing, but it’s no.’ Her Dey nodded solemnly over the rim of his mug. ‘She’s telling the truth, lass, and it’s no just the jam. The capitalists keep the best o everything for themsels, and the rest o us get crumbs.’ ‘If we were their dogs they would treat us better,’ her Nana said.

Her Dey had worked for years down the Borlanslogie pit, which had been sunk when Queen Victoria was a lassie, he said, and would likely go on giving coal till this new queen, Elizabeth, was in her grave. A long while, in other words, barring accidents or revolution. Even the accident that killed Uncle Harry and closed off one of the main galleries hadn’t stopped production, though it had caused a lot of problems quite apart from the loss of seven lives. But her Dey’s back and lungs couldn’t take being underground any more, they’d brought him up on to the surface, where they paid him less to work on the tables, sorting the coal as it came up. That was where he’d worked as a boy, fourteen years old. ‘Ye start on the tables and ye finish there,’ he said, spitting black spits as if his insides were not only made of leather but lined with coal like the sides of the tunnels he used to crawl through. When she started school, she finished half an hour before her Dey was lowsed and she’d go up to the end of 7th Street and wait for him there. He’d come down the road from the colliery with some of the other older men, the ones with injuries or illnesses or who were just worn out and worked above ground like him, and although he wasn’t as black as he used to be his clothes were still full of dust, and he’d to go through the house to the back and stand there in all weathers, take off his overalls and beat them, just standing in his drawers whacking the stour out of his clothes and hawking and spitting tar on the ground. He wasn’t always in the mood to chat to her, he was sometimes tired and crabbit. But a few months later he started to come home cleaner and more cheerful, for they’d finally built a bathhouse for the men up at the pit. Of all the dozen collieries in the area, Borlanslogie was the last to get its baths after nationalisation. ‘Noo washed by the National Coal Board on behalf o the people,’ her Dey said, pulling his breeks up to display his pure white shins. Some days he didn’t need a bath, as if he’d not been at his work at all. But they paid him for the hours he was there, even if there was little to do. That was a change since the coming of the Coal Board. In the old days the Logie Coal Company would never have paid him to be half-idle.

So things were better than they had been. Before the war, there had been weeks, months sometimes, when there’d been no work. The olden days, her Dey called them. He’d go from pithead to
pithead, he’d walk for miles looking for any kind of labour, and always where he walked there were other men walking beside him, or returning along the road he was going. The empty-handed days. ‘I used tae come hame tae your Nana,’ he told Ellen, ‘Janet, I’d say, there’s naething again. Ye’ll need tae tighten oor belts. That was your Nana’s job, tae tighten the belts on baith o us sae your mither and your aunties could eat. Ye live in blessed times, lass, compared wi then, but it’s nae thanks tae the capitalists that ye dae.’ And she looked around at how little they had, the very negation of plenty, and wondered how they could have had less, but in that dark crouched cottage somehow things never seemed to get a lot worse, just as they never got much better.

Next door on the right were the MacLeays. They had three sons who had all emigrated, gone to Australia on £10 tickets. The MacLeays looked permanently sad to Ellen, especially the old woman, whose eyes filled with tears whenever she spoke of her sons on the other side of the world. They had a dog, a fat, waddling thing, a cross between a Jack Russell and a pig, that Mr MacLeay was forever walking round and round the streets. If he stopped walking he would have to sit down and then he would die, that was what Ellen thought.

On the left were the Hoggs, a cluttered household that seemed to change its personnel week by week, though there were usually four or five men – a father, some sons or cousins – going to or from the pit in a dirty, loud crush along the street. Mrs Hogg was a fixture, sweating and clattering around her kitchen preparing meals for this army of Hoggs, and so too was her mother-in-law, Auld Mrs Hogg, an ancient moustached crone with yellowish, wolf-like eyes, long yellow teeth, yellow skin and long grey hair tied back from her ears with a greasy bit of string. Most days she lay in a narrow bed in the front room, talking to herself or anybody who came in and delivering loud, poisonous and frequent farts, so that the room stank of rotten cabbage. Occasionally, if the weather was fair, Mrs Hogg would haul her out on to the street and sit her in a wee armchair while she turned out the bed, washed the sheets and aired the room. And then there was Denny, who was ages with Ellen and – according to Nana – had come along years after the other Hogg bairns because Mrs Hogg forgot herself one night, although
how you could forget yourself was something Ellen didn’t understand. Denny was unpredictable: he could be funny and friendly one day and the next he’d take the first opportunity to pinch or bite you. He himself seemed to have no sense at all that his moods varied. The only thing you could be sure of about Denny was that he smelled of pee and had a permanent dreep on his nose. Periodically he removed this with an upward sweep of his forearm, naked or sleeved it made no difference, in a snottery salute to the sky. Ellen was both repulsed and fascinated by the Hoggs. She imagined they might be distant relatives of Sawney Bean the cannibal and his extended family, who had lived in Scotland in the olden days and turned passing travellers into stews and pies. She took good care not to get too close to Mrs Hogg when she was cooking, or to Auld Mrs Hogg’s claw-like hands, and although she quite enjoyed Denny’s company she guarded herself well when she thought a biting mood was on him.