Dragon Land (4 page)

My aunt was Mum’s stepsister. Mum had told me that she was two years old and Margaret was fourteen when her mother had married my grandfather, but they had always got on with each other and I knew how much my mum missed her when she married Gerald Cook, who worked in the Diplomatic Service. Up till that point she had been a headmistress at a private school in Edinburgh, but now she travelled all over the world with her husband and we rarely saw her. Still, I had loads of postcards from various foreign countries and I loved looking at them and imagining I was going to visit them all, just like her.

Before he went off to the army, Dad had also loved rummaging in the box, but unlike me he had been abroad. He had visited Paris and had gone on a skiing holiday to Norway while still at school, but now he was missing somewhere in France. I hoped he would manage to find his way home.

Granny came in and said she had made the tea, so we sat at the table in the window and I watched the people walking quickly in the street and the many carts and horses pulling large bales of jute on their way to one of the many jute mills in the area.

Later, when we went to bed, I heard Mum crying softly, and I lay in my strange new bed and wished we were back at Garland Place and that life would get back to normal.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, the few weeks would stretch to five months. Mum kept saying we were going to go back to our own house, but by the winter of 1917 there was no more news about my father, so she had to reluctantly give up the keys to Garland Place.

It was mostly financial. My parents’ savings were slowly dwindling away and even with a great deal of help from Granny Flint and Aunt Margaret, Mum had to face reality. Her best pieces of furniture were put into storage and everything that was portable was brought to Victoria Road. The rest of the things Mum didn’t want to keep were sold.

I know she was deeply unhappy with the situation and I missed our own house very much, but Mum said there was no choice. I was still able to go to Rosebank School, which was one small blessing for me, although it meant a longer walk every morning and afternoon.

To begin with, Mum would walk with me up Bonnybank Road then along Ann Street towards the school, but as time went on she said she had to look for a job. There were hundreds of women now working in what were once looked upon as men’s jobs. They went out every morning to the mills and factories, they even drove buses, and a lot of unmarried women had left the city to work in munitions factories.

According to reports in the newspaper, quite a lot of these women were happy to work outside the home. It gave them extra money, which they enjoyed having at the end of the week, but it also meant that the women filled the jobs that the men used to do before they were called up for the war. If it wasn’t for the women, then industry and services would have collapsed years ago.

However, there was a great deal of unhappiness and grief in the city due to all the deaths over three long years of war. In fact, I had been embarrassed on my first day back at school in August when my teacher, Miss Price, had knelt down and, putting her arms around me, given me a hug. In the background, I could hear a few snatches of laughter, as some of my friends thought it was funny.

However, a few days later, four older boys in the school also lost family in the trenches in France – a father, two brothers and an uncle – and everyone felt sorry for all of us. I remember looking at the boys in assembly as we sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ and felt so sorry for them, especially when one of them began to cry.

This war had caused so much death, distress and hardship in our community, and it was a pattern repeated across the entire country. I read in the paper one day that over a few days of fighting, more than a million men had perished. I tried to visualise this amount but couldn’t – until I realised my own father was one of those casualties. It wasn’t the number of deaths but each personal one that mattered, each household either waiting for news or living with the news that a loved one had died.

Mum had worked in an office before her marriage but had often said she’d hated it, so she scanned the employment column in the paper to see what else was available.

I had overheard Granny telling one of her friends, ‘Beth is so choosy, but she’ll soon realise that she’ll have to take whatever’s available.’

I remember my cheeks burning with shame at Granny’s words, but I never told Mum. I felt she had enough to worry about. In March of 1918 she managed to get a job in the millinery department of DM Brown’s department store, a position I’m sure was wangled by one of Granny’s cronies who worked in the dress and mantle department.

‘Is the millinery department like a hat shop?’ I asked.

Granny said, ‘You’ll love the position, Beth. DM Brown’s is a great shop to work in and the customers are always so pleasant.’ She looked at me. ‘Please don’t call it the hat shop, Lizzie.’

How Granny knew about the pleasant customers was a mystery because she hadn’t worked outside the home since her marriage to my late grandfather, who had been a very successful solicitor in the town: a man who had worked at his desk right up till the day he died. That was a few months after Dad had left school. He had been planning on joining the Royal Navy, but Granny had persuaded him to join the family firm, as it had been founded by his great-grandfather, Peter John Flint.

I thought Granny resembled the late Queen Victoria. Like the late queen, she was tiny, plump and always dressed in black, and there was little in life that amused her. Her main interests were the church and her circle of friends. Every Sunday I would go with her to St Andrew’s Church in King Street, where I would attend the Sunday school.

After the service we would head back to the house to have our dinner before four of Granny’s friends visited her for afternoon tea and the knitting circle. Mum didn’t go to church, in spite of Granny’s remarks about heathen qualities. Mum always pleaded tiredness after six days on her feet in the hat shop – sorry, the millinery department – saying she liked a long lie in bed. I was always pleased to see Granny’s reaction to this. Her eyebrows would almost disappear into her hairline and she puckered up her mouth in such a way that the tiny wrinkles around her cheeks made her look like a disgruntled elf.

Personally, I loved Sunday afternoons, because Mum and I spent them together. As soon as the women arrived at the door, we would be standing with our coats on, ready to leave. Mum was always pleasant to Granny’s friends, saying, ‘You have so much to talk about and you don’t want a child running about the house.’

This annoyed me because I never ran around the rooms. I always made sure I walked normally, and because I read a lot of books, I was nearly always quiet. But as we walked down the stairs, Mum would take my hand and give me a big wink, which always made me laugh.

During the summer months we would go to the park and I would play on the swings while Mum sat on a bench and read the newspaper or her book. Sometimes we would walk along the Esplanade or go for a trip across the River Tay on the Fifie, which I loved. Also, now and again we would go to Magdalen Green, where lots of people gathered on a Sunday to either stroll on the grass or to socialise with friends.

During the cold winter and spring months, finding somewhere to go posed more of a challenge. Nearly all the shops were closed on the Sabbath, but there were a couple of small cafés attached to chip shops where we would crush into the tiny sitting area and eat chips with loads of salt and vinegar and drink hot cups of sugary tea.

Mum would always say on these occasions, ‘Lizzie, Granny would have a heart attack if she knew we were eating chips, but do you know, I don’t care.’

As far as I was concerned, however, the best trips were when we walked around the docks, making our way over tiny swing bridges and viewing the giant cargo ships that lay at anchor beside the wharves. I would write down in my small notebook all the exotic names, like
City of India, Benghazi
and
Peking Pearl
.

I tried to visualise these far-off ports and how glamorous they were, and sometimes dark-skinned sailors would make their way down wooden gangplanks and pass by, all chattering in wonderful strange languages.

I was still getting my postcards from Aunt Margaret and I knew Mum wrote to her every week, her face turning pink with pleasure when she received a reply.

‘I suppose Aunt Margaret has seen all these foreign places?’ I said one day.

Mum nodded. ‘Well, maybe not all of them, but she has been in lots of different countries. Your dad wanted to travel like that and see lots of new places, but when your grandfather died suddenly he had to go and take over his business, much as he hated it.’

‘He should have said he couldn’t,’ I said, thinking how easy that would have been.

‘Well, life isn’t always easy, Lizzie. Sometimes we have to make sacrifices and your dad made one when he said he would take his father’s place in the office.’ She frowned as she looked at her watch. ‘It’s time to go back.’

Once a month, Mum took me to the Eastern Cemetery on Arbroath Road. Her father, mother and Margaret’s mother and father were all buried there and she liked to change the flowers on the two graves. She would tidy the place up and throw away the withered flowers from her previous visit and arrange the new foliage in the stone vases that lay in front of the headstones. I didn’t understand why there were only two graves when four people had died.

‘It’s because my parents are buried in one plot, while Maggie, my stepmother, and her husband have their own plot. Your aunt Margaret arranged that.’ She pointed out that another headstone that was inscribed ‘Charles Bell and his beloved wife Margaret Bell Ferrier’.

She was scooping up small bits of litter that had blown in from the path as we made our way to the metal wire basket that held all the rotten debris from floral displays. There was always a strong smell from these baskets, and the stalks and dead flowers were all brown and soggy-looking. I always turned my head away if Mum asked me to put our rubbish in and I tried hard not to breathe in the decay.

‘That is why I’m sure your dad isn’t dead, Lizzie. I mean, if he was, why wasn’t he sent back here to be buried? No, he’s still alive and probably a prisoner of war and we’ll see him again after this war is over.’

I hated visiting the cemetery, as the rows of weathered headstones, these large, grey slabs of stone marking the last resting places of the dead, filled me with a terror I couldn’t describe. Some had angels with outstretched wings guarding the plot and some had bushes planted as a remembrance.

When I mentioned these flowers, Mum said, ‘They’re hydrangeas, Lizzie. As you can see, some are pink and some are blue.’

‘Why is that?’

Mum said she wasn’t sure but it had something to do with the soil. I remember this answer vexing me all the way home because surely the soil was the same all over the cemetery. However, I was pleased that Mum was convinced Dad was still alive and I wanted to believe that so much.

Usually by the time we got back from our Sunday jaunts, Granny’s four friends would be on the point of leaving. We would admire the pile of knitting they had done: navy-blue balaclavas, socks and gloves for the poor soldiers in the trenches. Sometimes they would also have a small pile of baby clothes for the poor families in the city. The church usually distributed these small garments to needy families, where I hoped they would be welcomed by the recipients.

This routine lasted for months until one cold day in September when Mum slipped on a step at work and twisted her ankle. It meant she was off work and that we were unable to go out on the Sunday.

‘You can both stay and help with the knitting circle,’ said Granny.

Mum didn’t look too pleased, but she had no choice, so on the Sunday afternoon we sat by the fire waiting for Granny’s friends.

The one person we knew was Mrs Mulholland from next door, but the other three were virtual strangers. Although we had met them every Sunday before going off on our excursions, we didn’t really know them that well. Granny introduced them when they trooped in. ‘This is Miss McMillan, Mrs Lawrence and Miss McKenzie.’

I heard Mum give a small groan under her breath, but she smiled at them as they sat down. Apart from Mrs Mulholland, who was in her fifties, the other three women looked as ancient as Granny.

The afternoon began with tea, sandwiches and small home-baked cakes; then the knitting needles and skeins of wool were produced from capacious cloth bags. It was my job to hold the skeins of wool while one of the women, Mrs Lawrence, wound it into large balls.

Mum concentrated on a knitting pattern for mitts while the five ladies nimbly slipped their stitches from needle to needle, chatting as they worked. Mrs Lawrence told Mum how her husband had died from influenza twenty years before.

‘Have you any children?’ Mum asked her.

‘Yes, I have four, but they’re all grown up now. Three are living in Canada and my daughter is married and lives in Glasgow.’

Granny said, ‘Amy McMillan was a missionary in Africa.’

I gazed in awe at the shrivelled old woman sitting across from me, and even Mum looked interested.

Miss McMillan laughed. ‘Oh, that was forty years ago, Mary. I came back to Dundee after I left the mission and I’m still here.’

I was fascinated by this revelation. ‘Did you see any lions and giraffes when you lived in Africa?’

‘I did see some when I went on a trip to Kenya, but it was monkeys I didn’t like, Lizzie.’

‘I always imagined monkeys were lovely creatures,’ I said. ‘I have pictures of them in one of my books and they are swinging from trees.’

‘Yes, they do,’ said Miss McMillan, ‘but they can be very quarrelsome and sometimes quite vicious. We were always very wary of them if there were a group of them around the huts.’ She stopped knitting and said, ‘What to you want to be when you grow up, Lizzie?’

There was no hesitation on my part. ‘I want to be a pirate.’

Granny looked at me with her forbidding, steely-eyed gaze. I could see she was not amused. ‘Now don’t be silly, Lizzie, you can’t possibly want to be a pirate.’