Clydesiders at War Read online

  Virginia’s heart contracted in pain. How could they have been so thoughtless and insensitive? She had asked herself and Nicholas that question a thousand or more times over the years. It was easier for him. He could—and always did—escape into the seclusion of his writing room.

  She’d challenged him about this eventually and they’d talked things out as much as they were able. Life had become more bearable after that, although secret little pinpricks of resentment still bothered her. Making love had helped. Nicholas had always been a very passionate man. All right, a great deal of his passion went into his writing, but he could still make love with great enthusiasm and virility.

  Virginia also tried to get on with her life by joining the Red Cross and becoming a VAD nurse. To some degree she had Matheson to thank for that. He had lectured her on how she was allowing guilt, bitterness and hatred to ruin her life. He said taking her feelings out on Nicholas was helping nobody. Nicholas had suffered and grieved over Wincey’s disappearance too. He’d done all he could. What more did she expect him to do? Matheson always seemed to be making allowances for Nicholas. But perhaps that was only natural—they’d been friends ever since he’d been in hospital unable to talk, and hardly able to move after his stroke. When Nicholas returned to Glasgow, he had gone to visit Matheson every day. He read the newspapers to him, and spoke to him about how he too had been hospitalised, with his memory gone, after being blown up in the trenches during the war.

  Virginia had been shocked at Nicholas visiting Matheson. She had lied to Nicholas, who was her lover then, about her marriage to Matheson being over. She feared what would happen if and when Matheson recovered, imagining him trying to kill Nicholas. But instead the two men had become firm friends in that hospital. She supposed that Matheson had been grateful for Nicholas’s conscientious attempts to help him. Admittedly, she’d not been much use. She’d even stopped going to the hospital, unable to look at Matheson in the dreadful state he was in, believing that he wasn’t able to even recognise her, far less understand anything she said to him. Obviously she’d been wrong in this.

  It turned out Matheson was perfectly able to understand every word, and he’d got to know Nicholas, it seemed, far better than she’d ever known him.

  Matheson told her it was time she stopped feeling sorry for herself and started thinking of someone else for a change. And the best way to do that was to help other people with their problems. So she’d turned to nursing in the huge, soot blackened Royal Infirmary.

  Now, despite the difficulties of the blackout, she was managing to make her way to the bus stop. The blackout order had gone out earlier that summer, before war had even been declared. As the threat posed by enemy bombers became a reality, all external lights and street lighting had to be totally extinguished. No lighting in houses was to be visible from the outside. Advice had been given about using close fitting blinds and curtains of dark cloth. Skylights, glass doors and fan lights had to have sufficient coats of dark distemper or paint. Roads were completely unlit and private vehicles had no lights. Travelling by public transport meant moving about in your own dimly lit world. Train compartments were now filled with the ghostly glow of a single blue bulb. Windows were painted out, except for a small circle. Even if you raised the blind and peered out through this circle, you couldn’t read the station’s name because it had been painted over.

  Already, only weeks into the war, there had been a three hundred percent increase in fatalities in Glasgow due to road accidents. Virginia felt safer walking and then catching a bus. At least pedestrians were now allowed to carry torches, provided they were covered with a double layer of tissue paper. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of number eight batteries.

  She was kept busy in the Royal every day of the week with casualties who’d fallen down steps, off railway platforms, had bumped into lamp posts and walls, or stepped into canals or rivers. It was even more dangerous trying to drive a vehicle in the pitch blackness.

  Virginia certainly hadn’t the nerve to drive her car. Now, as she slowly shuffled forward, she felt alone in the darkness that mirrored the black hopelessness inside her. Her hand edged along walls and railings, and slid across the icy glass of shop windows. Once at the bus stop, despite the regulation that told civilians not to wave torches at the bus driver, she felt it necessary to make the driver see her and stop. On the bus, she sat lost in thought as the vehicle crawled along through the gloom.

  Matheson had been very supportive about her nursing. As long as she had nothing to do with the war effort, he was satisfied. He was a pacifist, as well as a socialist—her mother in law insisted that he was ‘an out and out communist’. Maybe she was right. He had certainly remained steadfast in his beliefs, like his mentor, John Maclean, before him.

  ‘I’d rather die in prison than have anything to do with this war,’ he insisted.

  She knew this to be true. He had nearly died in prison during the 1914–18 war, but her feelings on the subject had never been as extreme as his. Her position was between that of Matheson and Nicholas. Although she regarded herself as a pacifist, she saw no reason for refusing to take a nurse’s post—in the forces, if necessary. She had also volunteered to be an ambulance driver, and Matheson had no objections to her becoming involved in a humanitarian service that was now more vital than ever. It was something that many Quakers did. They were well known as pacifists, but that didn’t stop them organising a ‘Friends Ambulance Service’.

  Nicholas, however, was all things to all men. She blamed his writing for this. He was always so obsessed with understanding other people’s point of view and motivation, ‘what makes them tick,’ as he said. He was proud of the fact that their son Richard had become a fighter pilot in the RAF. On his desk there was a photograph of Richard standing proudly beside his gleaming new Spitfire. Her own heart melted every time she looked at the photograph. He was very like his father—tall and handsome with his black hair ruffled in the breeze and the sheepskin collar of his leather flying jacket turned up. He had his father’s dark eyes and winning smile. No doubt he’d already broken a few hearts.

  She loved her son as much—perhaps more—than his father did. For that reason alone, she wished he’d never joined the RAF. She lived in constant fear now of him being shot down and killed. She couldn’t understand Nicholas’s attitude. He seemed so proud and happy when he spoke of Richard in the RAF. She had always hated war, and she hated it all the more now. The last war had robbed so many mothers of their sons. The flower of British manhood had been thrown away in a brutal, pointless struggle over a few pitiful miles of French and Flemish wasteland. A land fit for heroes was what they had been promised, but many of the survivors who had returned were nervous wrecks, suffering from shell shock. Thousands of others came back badly wounded, mutilated or enduring the terrible after effects of poison gas. And all they got in the land they’d fought for and returned to were homelessness and unemployment.

  Now, hardly twenty years later, there was another war to suffer. A war that would no doubt consume another generation of young men. Men like Richard.

  ‘But this time it’s different,’ Nicholas insisted.

  ‘Why is it different?’ she’d wanted to know.

  His tall, regal looking and infuriatingly snobbish mother had been there at the time. Mrs Cartwright had always been a regular and very active churchgoer, sailing to the church every Sunday morning in her musquash coat, or fox furs and an old fashioned cloche type hat. She had been president of the Women’s Guild and God knows what all else in the church. It was enough to make anyone an atheist, Virginia thought bitterly.

  ‘Do you not even know what that dreadful little house painter once said?’ Mrs Cartwright peered through her lorgnettes at her daughter in law in disgust. “‘One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both.” That is all he was, you know. An ordinary house painter.’ She repeated the words in disgust. ‘A house painter’. ‘This has always been the danger. My late hus
band always maintained—give the workers an inch and they’ll take a mile. Oh, how right he was!’

  She glared at Virginia as if accusing her of proving the point. Virginia did not rise to the bait although she fumed in secret. She could remember a time when she would have argued with Mrs Cartwright. Now she didn’t see the point. Her mother in law was too old and too set in her ways. No good would come of arguing with her. All it did was to turn Nicholas against her.

  ‘She’s an elderly lady and she’s grieving for her husband. For goodness sake, Virginia, try to have a bit of patience and understanding.’

  So now, for the most part, Virginia kept silent or tried to avoid Mrs Cartwright altogether. But it was very difficult trying to maintain this pretence of civility. The woman was such a snob, and she never missed a chance of running down the working class, or of reminding her daughter in law of her lowly origins and how she could never be ‘one of them’, meaning the upper class. All of which infuriated Virginia, who remembered only too vividly the suffering endured by her hard working mother, father, and brothers. Her mother and father were worth ten of Mr and Mrs Cartwright, and there was no comparison between her brothers and some of the wealthy chinless wonders who used to visit the Cartwright house.

  Nicholas said, ‘We tried our best for peace. We had to do something about Poland.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Don’t quibble, Virginia. You know perfectly well what I mean.’

  Mrs Cartwright drew herself up, back stiff, bosom held high. ‘Nicholas and I are proud of Richard fighting for his country, even if you are not.’

  As far as Virginia knew, Richard had not as yet been involved in any fighting. She prayed every night that this situation would continue. It seemed as if nothing much had happened since war had been declared. To many people it had been a bit of an anti-climax, and some people were beginning to call it the ‘phoney war’. Anxiety and expectation of the worst had been at fever pitch at first. Everyone had been issued with gas masks, Anderson shelters had been dug in almost every back garden, and brick shelters had sprung up in tenement back yards. New walls—known as baffle walls—had been erected in front of the shelter entrances and on pavements in front of closes. These brick walls were supposed to save lives by lessening the effects of blast, but already hospital emergency departments were inundated with cases of people having run or walked into them in the blackout. Virginia had seen some horrific facial injuries that had been caused in this way.

  At least Mrs Cartwright was against Hitler, although for the wrong reasons in Virginia’s opinion. However, at least up until the declaration of war, many aristocrats had been openly sympathetic to the Nazis. She remembered not so long ago at a dinner party she had been to with Nicholas, a woman at the table had said, ‘Personally I like the Germans and I admire their leader. They are the best organised people in Europe.’

  Nicholas ignored the remark but Virginia had said icily, ‘Well, I certainly don’t admire Hitler.’

  Sir Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts were still marching in the streets of Britain, although not in Glasgow. He’d visited Glasgow Green and had to make a quick exit in his van with a howling mob of Glaswegians chasing him. Mosley’s Fascists preached simplistic philosophies and easy answers. They just blamed the Jews for everything—from mass poverty to the war itself, but according to Matheson, there were other people in Britain who were far more helpful to Hitler than Mosley. There were at least nine other organisations supporting Hitler, Matheson said. One of these organisations had over four thousand members. They included two dukes and the chairman of Morris Motors. Another of the organisations, the Anglo-German Fellowship, boasted that its membership included sixteen peers, the governor and a director of the Bank of England, the chairman of ICI and the chief political advisor to the Foreign Office.

  ‘They’re all hoping Hitler’s Storm-troopers will be a buffer between them and a communist revolution. Their greatest fear is something like the Russian Revolution happening here, and they’ll do anything to avoid losing their privileges and their wealth.’ It was the sort of thing that made Matheson so furious that Virginia feared he would have another stroke. ‘These people don’t care about the ordinary working man,’ he told her bitterly, ‘or woman. Remember how you were treated when you were in service, slaving in some of their houses. And in the munitions work that killed your brother.

  They know, as well as I do, that trade unionists are being arrested and jailed by Hitler and his henchmen and they’re all for it. They don’t care about anything or anybody but their own selfish, greedy …’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Virginia soothed, ‘but you’re not going to change anything by making yourself ill. Calm down, for pity’s sake.’

  He always did calm down but his anger left him trembling. She felt sorry for him. She despaired of the whole complicated mess. But most of all, she worried about her son and the fact that, whatever happened, he and his fellow pilots would soon be in the front line.

  3

  Florence still couldn’t quite take it in. Nor could the twins. While Wincey was saying goodnight to Dr Houston at the front door, they whispered together in the kitchen. ‘There she was,’ Florence hissed as if she was an actress in a melodrama, ‘admiring my new house as if it was a palace. She even said it was like a palace, and all the time she knew her place in the posh West End was ten times the size of my wee house in Clydebank.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Teresa said, ‘her place was here in Springburn. She still thinks it is. You heard her just now.’

  ‘There was me so proud because my new house had a bathroom,’ Florence continued. ‘Not like most of my friends who start off with a toilet out on the landing. But I bet she was used to bathrooms en suite. Here,’ her eyes became enormous, ‘remember how she used to clean that outside toilet when we lived in the room and kitchen. She must be mad. I even thought so at the time.’

  ‘Stop that, Florence. She was always a good, hard working wee girl. I won’t have you, or anyone else, saying a word against her.’

  Just then Wincey returned to the room. She was clutching her bottle green cardigan around her as if she was freezing. ‘I didn’t say to Robert, but I honestly wish I’d never sent that letter now. I feel terrible. I won’t be able to get a wink of sleep tonight. We were perfectly all right the way we were. I was perfectly all right.’

  Erchie shook his head. ‘Naw, ye wernae, hen. Ye were awfae awkward wi’ men, for a start. Even wi’ Robert, an’ ye couldnae meet a nicer fella.’

  ‘Well, I suppose … But writing that letter isn’t going to help that.’ She sank onto a chair at the table. ‘It’s only going to make everything worse. What’s my father going to think about what I’ve said about his father? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘The chances are he’ll wish his father wis still alive so as he could tell him whit an auld bastard he wis. Ah mean, ye were only a wee lassie, hen. It wis terrible whit he did tae ye.’

  ‘The thing that worries me,’ Teresa nursed her cup between her hands, ‘is you letting your parents think you were dead all this time. I can understand how you felt, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘You were frightened, dear. Your grandfather dying like that and everything.’

  ‘Well, I just hope they’ll understand, but I doubt it.’

  ‘Well never mind, it’s not as if you’ll have to face them on your own. Granny and Erchie and I will be right there beside you.’

  Wincey went over to Teresa and hugged her. ‘Oh thank you, Teresa.’

  ‘Goodness me, you’re an awful wee girl.’ Teresa patted her straight, grey speckled hair and smoothed down her floral apron. ‘I’ll pour you a fresh cup of tea.’

  Florence and the twins cried out, ‘Can we stay overnight, Mammy? Then we can be here too.’

  Wincey felt a bit overwhelmed but grateful at the same time. She knew she’d feel safer with all the family around her.

  She still felt the Gourlays to be her family—far more so than the Cartwrights.
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  ‘But what about your man, Florence?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘Eddie’s coming here after his work.’ Eddie worked in Singer’s factory and had escaped conscription because of mild epilepsy. Nobody outside of the family knew he had it, and at first the mere idea had frightened Florence, but she’d discovered that he only very occasionally took a ‘wee turn’ in which he just seemed to lose the place for a few minutes. Then he ‘came back’ and was all right again. Anyway he was a lovely man with brown curly hair and laughing eyes, and she loved him. They just didn’t mention the epilepsy to anyone and he took his pills on the quiet.

  The twins’ husbands, Joe and Pete, had been conscripted but both had ended up in the Highland Light Infantry in Maryhill Barracks, which they regarded as a right bit of luck. Maryhill wasn’t all that far from their homes in Dumbarton Road in Clydebank. Apart from bayonet practice, which meant them charging about thirty yards to plunge fixed bayonets at four foot sacks hanging on a line, they had never been involved in any action. Some men talked about the ‘phoney war’ and the ‘bore war’ and were restless for a fight, but Joe and Pete were very content with the way things were. They could see their wives regularly and Euphemia and Bridget were proud to walk along Dumbarton Road arm in arm with their men in their smart new HLI uniforms.

  ‘Oh well, if Eddie’s all right about staying …’ Teresa turned to the twins. ‘What about Joe and Pete?’