Rhanna at War Read online

  On his return to Rhanna they had both been overwhelmed with the joy of their reunion yet there had been a subtle change in their relationship. They had both suffered in their different ways. His war wound had left him almost totally deaf in one ear, but he could live with that. It was the memories of war he couldn’t take. They had changed his peaceful soul into a restless spirit that yearned for revenge, both for himself and Shona whose experiences had robbed her of a lot of her gaiety and spontaneous affection. But it was too late now for regrets, too late to change what had happened . . .

  The words on the pages blurred and his head sank on to his chest, the light from the gas mantle turning his hair into threads of gold. Under the fair strands at his neck stretched the tightly-drawn tissue of an ugly scar which split the curve at the base of his skull and distorted the delicate lobe of his left ear. Slowly he lifted his head and looked at the picture of Shona on the dresser. It had been taken during the Indian summer days of their breathless loving when she had still been a child. The picture was in black-and-white but he could see it in vivid colour; her slim, graceful body draped over a sun-warmed stone amidst the heather, the blue of her dress against the blue October sky, her long auburn hair vying with the bronze of the bracken . . . and her eyes, those incredible blue eyes of hers, filled with the love of life. He got up to snatch the photo to his breast, his thoughts carrying him away again, back to the cave on the Muir of Rhanna where first she had given her lovely body to him. He could see it now, the whiteness of it against the creamy wool of the sheepskin rug, her hair spread out in fiery strands, her eyes full of child-like innocence . . . until he had taken it away from her . . .

  Since then she had once made a brief visit to Glasgow but she had been uneasy and out of place in the bustling city. Her discomfort had made him feel awkward and unnaturally polite, while deep down inside he had felt love and sadness churning themselves together. His proud, spirited lass had looked like a timid rabbit caught out of its burrow and he had known that she couldn’t wait to get back on the train which would carry her away from smoke and noise and return her to green fields and purple mountains. But at the station he had taken her in his arms to kiss her and she had melted against him, her tongue touching his, and for a brief moment they had been, in spirit, lying on a bed of heather on the Muir of Rhanna, the bees buzzing in a frantic gathering of nectar, the sheep bleating from the wild summer mountains.

  But then a nearby train had released a hideous bellow of impatient steam and they had jumped apart, the precious moment lost, and a few minutes later, her face hovering forlornly at the window, she was gone from him in a busy huffing and puffing and clattering of pistons.

  The memories engulfed him so entirely that he forgot his studies, turned down the gas mantle and went to the window to pull aside the thick blackout drapes. A pale moon rode brilliantly in the vast spaces of the universe. He could picture it hanging over the Sound of Rhanna, weaving a pathway of rippling light over the deep Atlantic waters. He wondered how it would look to Shona in the grandeur of Aberdeenshire. Was she perhaps at this very moment peeping from her window to see the silvered ribbon of the Dee winding down through the glens . . . perhaps thinking of him as he was of her even while she looked at the sloping shoulders of the Grampians outlined against the sky?

  The only things outlined for him were monotonous rows of houses with stack upon stack of chimney pots rising in the sharp silhouette of urban starkness. The long reaches of the Clyde estuary were hidden from his view by streets of tenement buildings. The subdued murmur of town life reached up from the street below. A dog howled unharmoniously with a wailing baby in the flat above. Somewhere in the backcourts a dustbin lid clattered and feline yowls of outrage followed as a well-aimed tackity boot found its mark. From the kitchen came the indistinct murmur from the wireless. Ma Brodie made a point of listening to the 9 o’clock news every night on the BBC Home Service. He knew she would be ensconced cosily by the range, her stockings rolled to her ankles, nursing one of the many cats which frequently adopted the house. Every so often she would murmur ‘ay’ by way of sympathy for the things that people were having to suffer in wartime.

  Niall’s reverie was broken by the thin wail of the air-raid sirens which suddenly pervaded the house. Ma Brodie raised her voice to shout, ‘Would you listen to that! These poor souls in London are getting it bad. The sound of the siren is even coming through on the news!’ Out of the blue, the Brodies’ large ginger torn, known in the neighbourhood as Ginger Moggy, appeared in Niall’s doorway, his fur on end and his green eyes narrowed to slits. He glared at Niall, his nostrils aflare with fright, and then shot under the bed to crouch there, howling and spitting. The sight of the terrified animal triggered Niall into action, for he realised that the sirens were not coming through the radio but were sounding in the immediate vicinity. Quickly he donned his coat and tin helmet and snatched up the case containing his gas mask. Outside on the landing there was a low murmur of voices and the sound of one or two doors banging on the landings above, but Niall knew that many of the residents of his building would not go down to the shelter. The experience of previous alerts had taught him that many of the residents would simply huddle under anything they considered might keep them safe, unwilling to leave the deceptive security of their homes.

  Ma Brodie was in the lobby clutching a huge suitcase in which she kept her most personal documents. Her best coat and lain’s Sunday suit were still on their hangers, draped over her arm. She was always thus prepared for an air raid. ‘C’mon, son,’ she said stoically. ‘I have everything that means anything to lain and myself. If anything happens . . .’ she paused for a moment, her thoughts on her husband out on fire-fighting duty. ‘Ach, but it won’t, it will likely just be another false alarm. I’d best get over to Miss Rennie and see if the auld scunner is hiding under her bed again.’

  Niall went back to his room, grabbed Shona’s picture and stuffed it into his gas mask case. As a last thought he reached under the bed for howling Ginger Moggy and bundled him inside his roomy coat. Ma Brodie was on the landing helping tottering old Miss Rennie downstairs. But the old lady was loath to go.

  ‘Joey, I must take Joey with me,’ she protested. Joey was Miss Rennie’s talkative budgie and the wailing sirens had excited him greatly. Boisterous cries of ‘Mammy’s pretty boy!’ echoed from Miss Rennie’s flat, and Ginger Moggy stirred in the depths of Niall’s coat. Viciously, he clawed at Niall’s chest till he was free, and bounded with a triumphant flick of his bushy tail through Miss Rennie’s door.

  ‘Joey!’ the old lady cried and broke away from Ma Brodie to totter unsteadily back into the flat.

  Niall was feeling uneasy. It was his duty as an Air Raid Warden to make sure that everyone was in safe cover, and something told him that tonight’s alert signalled the real thing. Ma Brodie was seeing to Miss Rennie once more, so Niall bounded upstairs to check on the others before going off to his post. The top flats were empty but for one. Inside, sprawled in a shabby armchair, was Blackie O’Riordan, renowned for his drinking bouts and subsequent brushes with the law. He was drunk now, an almost-depleted bottle of cheap wine hanging precariously on the end of his fingers. At sight of Niall the slits of his eyes widened in glazed recognition.

  ‘Young Niall! All dressed up like a soldier! Will you be havin’ a drink with me?’ Without replying, Niall yanked him to his feet.

  ‘Will you stop pullin’ at me!’ Blackie yelled.

  ‘C’mon now,’ Niall said persuasively. ‘The sirens are howling like blazes.’

  ‘Up the sirens! I don’t give a damn. Let the bloody Nazis fly about all night for all I care. I hate the bastards! They shot me out the stinking war but it’ll take more than the crap Luftwaffe to chase me out my own house!’

  Niall pushed his shoulder under Blackie’s oxter but the brawny Irishman was built like a plough horse and tore himself free. His huge hands flew out and Niall found himself being propelled to the door and all but thrown out on to the l
anding, after which the lock shot home accompanied by a shower of abuse.

  Finding himself alone on the landing, the blackout shutters on the windows muffling the sounds of the outside world; the stairs, lit only by the feeble flicker of a gas mantle, eerily deserted; and the high walls seeming to lean ever closer in claustrophobic conspiracy, Niall took the stairs two at a time, anxious to leave behind the ghostly confines. He followed the sound of friendly voices and soon found that everyone had crowded into the stuffy kitchen of the bottom flat because no one particularly favoured the damp brick shelters in the backcourts. Familiar faces wore cheery masks of composure. Gentle little Miss Rennie had the patiently resigned look of her generation, in the midst yet apart from the rest, her frail old arms clasped protectively round Joey’s cage on her knee. Niall quickly realized that the stem dissatisfied countenance of Mr Maxwell was missing.

  ‘He’s maybe went to visit his sister in Dumbarton,’ someone suggested, but Niall ran out and back up the steep dark stairs. Bursting into the widower’s house he found him comfortably ensconced under the kitchen table, a pillow at his head and a blanket tucked round his bony frame. A little Thermos flask stood conveniently at his elbow together with a large, tea-stained Queen Victoria Coronation mug.

  ‘I’m stayin’,’ he told Niall bluntly. ‘I’m no’ goin’ down to that house with everybody reekin’ o’ sweat and smokin’ like lums.’ At that moment the softly insidious drone of the first wave of German night-raiders wafted into the room. Niall cocked his good ear upwards and Mr Maxwell put a horny hand to one of his large lugs, moulding it into a wrinkled trumpet. ‘They’re comin’,’ he said incredulously. ‘It’s for real right enough.’

  ‘Ma Brodie has dumpling and pancakes downstairs,’ Niall said in a persuasive rush.

  ‘Ach, all right, anything for a bit peace . . . but mind now, if that auld Jennie Rennie and her damt budgie are down there I’m for comin’ back up.’ He crawled stiffly from under the table and allowed Niall to assist him downstairs and into the crowded kitchen.

  Despite everything, the inconvenience, the apprehension, it was a jolly company. The teapot was already to the fore and Ma Brodie was cutting thick slices of juicy dumpling. She slipped a generous portion into a bag and pushed it at Niall. ‘Eat this when you have a meenit, son,’ she ordered sternly. Then her face relaxed into a warm smile and she gripped his hand tightly. ‘Take care, my laddie, the tea will be on the stove when you get back. You’re like my own son . . . remember that.’

  He stooped to hug her briefly, sensing her unspoken fears. ‘Don’t worry about me . . . or Iain. He can take care of himself.’ At the utterance of the words a strange fear gripped his heart. He looked at Ma Brodie’s smiling, kindly little face and on an impulse he stooped to kiss her cheek. ‘Take care, Ma,’ he said softly and then turned to abandon the warmth of the kitchen for the cold black streets. There, anonymous shadows flitted, felt rather than seen. The dark shape of a baffle wall loomed and he stopped for a moment to lean against it and to look up into a sky torn apart by the furring vapour-trails of the German bombers. The ragged silhouette of the town was already sharpened by the orange glow of fires. High explosives were falling in the lower parts of town, and fountains of smoke and flames licked into the sky. He watched the planes tearing past, small dots thousands of feet above, divorced from the earth by the power of engines, yet so easily able to tear it apart by the force of explosives. Panic closed in on him. It was here! It was real! No need now to go to war, it had come to him and to thousands like him. Incendiaries were raining down. One landed at the close entrance and he dashed forward to kick it away then he began to race towards his post. His thoughts were bitter, and the nerve-shattering experience of Dunkirk came to mind again in vivid snatches. Smoke and acrid fumes made his eyes smart with tears but they were also tears of anger at the destruction and grief that he knew the German Luftwaffe would leave in its wake. ‘Nazi swine,’ he murmured softly, the words, spoken in his lilting tongue, full of an uncharacteristic hatred in a boy who had never hated anyone in his life.

  Chapter Three

  The shower of incendiaries that came spitting out from the planes of the Luftwaffe, Third Air Fleet, were profuse enough for some to find their way into inflammable areas of industrial sites. The black spaces of the surrounding open fields pushed the orange flames into a giant torch which greedily began to devour the little town and spread thin curls of oil-laden smoke eddying through the streets. Another wave of bombers was arriving from the east, bearing down like evil birds of prey against the cold, pale sky. Within seconds they were dropping altitude and more bombs were falling, together with parachute mines, allowing no time for people in the target-area to sort out one thought, one fear, from the other. Enormous craters split the tarmac, blowing water mains and gas mains to smithereens. Because three Auxiliary Fire Service Stations had been put out of action earlier in the evening, the problem of dealing with the Clydebank inferno was overwhelming. Many of the hydrants were dry and the firefighters were driven to use the muddy water filling the craters.

  Niall, working with a rescue party clearing the debris of a crushed tenement that had received a direct hit from a 500-kilo bomb, had lost his gas mask. He breathed in choking dust and hot smoke till his lungs were raw. Someone pushed a dirty hanky at him. ‘Here, tie this over your face or we’ll end up rescuing you!’ Quite unexpectedly they had come upon a pile of battered corpses that were so twisted and bloody it was difficult to believe they were people. From out of the heap of dead flesh a terrified voice cried for help and they extricated a young woman, pulling at her arms as gently as they could, trying to ease her free from the ensnaring bodies that held on to her legs like the sucking mud of a bog. ‘She’s the only one in this lot,’ said one of the men. ‘Dear Jesus! There’s dozens of them gone!’

  A squad of rescue workers raced up, filthy spectres with reddened eyes and pale lips showing through the grime. ‘The next street!’ panted one. ‘We need some hands!’

  Niall ran, and somehow he knew, even before he turned the corner, that the place he called ‘home’ in Glasgow was no more. All of the façades of the buildings on his street had been sheared off as if someone had taken a giant axe and split bricks and mortar down through the centre. The portions of the front walls which had been blown away ludicrously exposed all the little domesticities of family life. In one kitchen an elderly couple were seated at the table as if about to eat supper. They had been killed by a bomb-blast which had left them whole but sucked all the air from their lungs.

  Two houses along to the right, underneath the great mound of smouldering debris, were buried all the people whom Niall had helped to ‘safety’ just a few hours before. Old Mr Maxwell’s table stood sturdy and intact amidst its humble surroundings. In the kitchen above, Miss Rennie’s rocking chair sat by the jagged ruins of the range. On the mantelshelf china plates remained unbroken, on the smashed hearth a plaster dog lay on its side, its painted eyes staring out from the ruins. The Brodies’ bedroom lay fully exposed to the elements. All the furniture was intact but the bed mat had flipped upwards to drape over the wardrobe and a lamp shade hung from a brass bed knob on the bed end. Eerie sights, made spine-chillingly macabre by the curious whims of blast.

  Blackie O’Riordan stood at the edge of his kitchen on the top flat, waiting to be rescued. A torrent of abuse, directed at the bombers in the vaults of the heavens, drowned out the instructions of the rescue squad.

  Some of the dead had been blown into the air and had landed so far from where they’d first been struck it seemed they might have been dropped from the sky. They littered the road like broken dolls, arms and legs twisted beneath them. But had they been dead when they were blown into the air? That was the question that drummed into Niall’s brain as he stared around him in disbelief. He looked at a crumpled ball of orange fur lying on the cracked pavement and realized it was Ginger Moggy stretched in a pool of his own blood, his lips drawn back over his fangs in a grimace. He had
suffered a painful death. Above him, alive by some freakish escape, Joey perched on a crazily-leaning lamppost, feebly muttering ‘Good-night Mammy! Mammy’s pretty boy.’

  Miss Rennie’s broken body was being lifted from the rubble, the jagged spars of Joey’s cage embedded in her chest. Light pink bubbles of lung-blood oozed out of the little holes.

  Half-sobbing, Niall ran to the heap of masonry and began to tear at it with the strength and blindly unthinking rage of a bull. Voices roared at him to be careful and several pairs of hands tried to pull him away but he shook them off and went on with his demented searching. There was no whimper of life from the piled rubble, nothing to tell him that a soul still breathed. He found Ma Brodie quite suddenly. Her eyes were open, gazing up at him out of the debris.

  ‘Help me get her out!’ he shouted desperately, but the other men were already pushing aside lumps of jagged stone, carefully freeing what was left of Nellie Brodie’s diminutive frame. The teapot was still clutched in her hand, and fragments of a teacup were embedded into the flesh of her arm like crazed paving. Her rib cage had been smashed, and splinters of bone stuck through the gay, flowery apron Niall had given her at Christmas. It was soaked in blood which had congealed quickly in the powdered dust and crushed brick that had caved in on top of her.