When the Lights Come on Again Read online

  ‘Don’t you see, Eddie,’ said Liz eagerly, ‘that’s one of the reasons I want to go in for nursing - it’s all tied up together. It has to do with what you want to fight for - jobs and decent houses and good wages and better health and all those sorts of things.’

  She turned to him in her enthusiasm. The quick movement blew a strand of brown hair across her face, and she tucked it impatiently behind one ear. ‘But it’s about education too - health education for a start. I mean, people needn’t have such big families. There is such a thing as birth control - but there need to be doctors and nurses who can tell folk about it.’

  Edward MacMillan, revolutionary and free thinker, blushed to the roots of his hair. Liz guessed he wasn’t too happy about discussing the controversial subject of birth control with his kid sister, but he did his manful best to control his embarrassment. They were children of the twentieth century, after all.

  ‘That’s what’s wrong with all your Free Love theories,’ Liz added. ‘It’s the woman who ends up paying the price.’

  Eddie’s only response to that statement was a noncommittal grunt. Liz had a shrewd suspicion - given added weight by that betraying blush - that her brother’s theories on Free Love were exactly that - theories. He might dress unconventionally, but in other ways he could be surprisingly shy - especially when it came to the opposite sex. Not unlike his sister, she thought wryly. Although what she’d had to put up with from Eric Mitchell over the past two years might possibly have something to do with that...

  They turned the corner into Radnor Street.

  ‘Ah!’ said Eddie. ‘Here we are at last!’ There was just a little too much relief in his voice.

  Peter MacMillan swung open the heavy door to his ground-floor home. His craggy face lit up when he saw Liz and Eddie standing in the close.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, ‘I’ll lead the way.’

  Out of sight of their grandfather, Eddie winked at Liz. Peter always spoke about leading the way, as though he were conducting you into some palatial dwelling, full of rooms and corridors in which you might very well get lost without him to guide you safely through.

  His two-room apartment was actually tiny. A minuscule lobby led to a small bedroom-cum-parlour looking out over the back court, and to an even smaller kitchen at the front. This was the room where he spent most of his time and to which he was conveying Liz and Eddie now. It was smaller than the corresponding rooms on the floors above because the space for the entrance close to the tenement had been taken out of it. Yet Granny had given birth to six children here, four boys and two girls.

  Both of the girls had died young - of scarlet fever, which had nearly taken Liz herself as a child. With no effective treatment for infectious illnesses, there weren’t many families who escaped that sort of loss. Liz and Eddie’s wee brother George had died of it.

  Her father’s eldest brother had fallen in the Great War. Of the three boys who had survived, only William was still in Clydebank. Bruce was in the Merchant Navy and dropped in and out of their lives erratically, turning up on the doorstep every two or three years with an armful of exotic presents. Bob had emigrated to Canada when he was eighteen, married and settled down in Ontario. Unlike Bruce, he was a faithful correspondent, his long letters about his life and family out there eagerly awaited by his parents. It wasn’t the same as having him round the corner, though, as Granny used to sigh.

  The relationship between Peter MacMillan and his youngest son was a fraught one. Since Granny’s death it had become nonexistent. There had been a furious argument the morning of the funeral, although Liz and Eddie had heard only the aftermath of that: slammed doors and angry footsteps.

  After the church service, William MacMillan had helped his father, Eddie and friends of the family lower his mother into the earth. Then, walking out of the cemetery, he had announced that he would not be attending the purvey, or funeral tea. In a carrying voice, he had said that as far as he was concerned, both of his parents were now dead.

  Liz had never forgotten the look which passed between her father and grandfather that day - shuttered bitterness on one face, hurt on the other. Now William MacMillan was quite capable of passing his own father in the street without a word. She’d seen him do it.

  She had no idea what the argument had been about. She had summoned up the courage to ask her grandfather once, but he had shaken his head, such a sad look on his face that she hadn’t ever had the heart to pose the question again.

  Whatever it was, she knew that it caused both her grandfather and her gentle mother a great deal of distress. But that wasn’t something, she thought bitterly, likely to keep her father awake at night.

  Having conducted his young guests safely into his inner sanctum, Peter MacMillan gave them the usual command.

  ‘Sit yourselves down. I’ll make the tea.’

  Liz chose a chair as far as possible from the black range which filled most of one wall. Being so small, the kitchen could get as hot as a blast furnace. Eddie made a face at her at being forced to sit close to the heat.

  ‘My birthday treat,’ she murmured to him. ‘Take your coat off and stop moaning.’

  They both looked up brightly as their grandfather approached. Not for all the tea in China would they have hurt his feelings by complaining about the heat, which he himself didn’t seem to notice. He had a package in his hand.

  ‘Well, hen,’ he said to Liz, holding it out to her. ‘Happy birthday, and many more of them.’

  The parcel was small, but solid. He had wrapped it in the newspaper - the Glasgow Herald - which he read avidly from cover to cover each morning. With the interested eyes of the menfolk on her, Liz unwrapped her gift. Then she burst into tears. He had given her a pocket nurses’ dictionary.

  Two

  Two cups of tea and Eddie’s explanations later, Liz’s grandfather was looking at her with deep sympathy in his piercing blue eyes.

  ‘Och, lass, I’m so sorry. You’ve been that patient, too.’

  ‘I have, haven’t I?’ she gulped. ‘I’ve done everything he wanted me to do. First that commercial course and then the job at Murray’s, and I thought maybe that if I did all that he would relent when it came to the bit - when I was old enough to apply to the Infirmary - but he hasn’t!’ Her voice rose on a sob. ‘And now I can’t see any way that I’m ever going to get to be a nurse!’

  ‘You could always do it when you’re twenty-one,’ said Eddie uncomfortably.

  ‘Och, Eddie, that’s ages away!’ wailed Liz.

  A father’s word was law where his children were concerned. Liz might consider herself quite grown up at eighteen, but the law wouldn’t recognize her as an adult for another three years.

  ‘Wheesht,’ said Peter. ‘Dry your tears and lift up your head - isn’t that what your granny used to say?’

  Applying her sodden hankie to her eyes, Liz nodded. ‘It’s such a disappointment, Grandad. That’s all.’

  He leaned forward and patted her on the knee, the room small enough to allow him to make the gesture without leaving his chair.

  ‘I know, hen, I know.’

  The only sound in the room was the ticking of the old clock on the high mantelpiece over the range. Liz looked up at its familiar face. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known those solid black Roman numerals.

  Dry your tears and lift up your head. How many times had she sat in this room and heard Granny say that? She and Grandad had always been ready to listen, always ready to offer consolation when she or Eddie had come storming down the stairs after another dressing-down from their father. Liz blew her nose.

  The two men were looking very sombre. It wasn’t fair to burden them with this. They’d both done what they could to comfort her.

  ‘Well, Grandad,’ she said, ‘what do you think of the international situation?’

  Eddie visibly relaxed, leaning back in his chair and exhaling a long breath. The question was a joke between the three of them. Whenever the conversa
tion flagged, someone would come out with it.

  Peter MacMillan smiled, but he answered her seriously, lifting his pipe and tobacco pouch from a small shelf beside his chair as he did so.

  ‘Well, lass, to be perfectly honest, I think the international situation is looking pretty grim.’

  ‘You don’t think Hitler’s going to stop at Austria?’ asked Eddie.

  His grandfather, filling his pipe, gave him a searching look from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Damn the fear of it, I should say. I think he’ll not be satisfied until the whole of Europe is under his blasted swastika.’

  Liz shivered. Germany’s annexation of Austria the month before had led to an influx of Viennese Jews into Britain. The stories they were telling about what was happening to their people in Germany were hard to believe... but chilling all the same. All of a sudden the little man with the toothbrush moustache who was running Germany didn’t seem such a figure of fun.

  Now Herr Hitler was making threatening gestures towards Czechoslovakia, insisting that a part of that country called the Sudetenland belonged to Germany - and that his Nazi stormtroopers would take it by force if they had to. The question was: were Britain and France going to let him?

  ‘The man’s a megalomaniac,’ said Peter MacMillan. ‘He wants to rule the world.’ Turning his pipe around, he used the stem of it to emphasize what he was saying, pointing it at Eddie. ‘You mark my words. It’ll be our turn soon enough.’

  ‘We’re an island,’ said Eddie. He shifted in his chair. ‘We don’t have to get involved in a bosses’ war.’

  ‘No?’ said Peter, his voice sharp. ‘So what happened to “all men are brothers”? Eh?’ He leaned forward, giving his grandson another of those penetrating looks. ‘What’s the difference between a Scottish family in Clydebank and a Jewish family in Austria or Germany? Or, for that matter, a Spanish family? Answer me that, young man.’

  Putting his pipe to his lips, he sat back with an air of expansive confidence, knowing only too well that his grandson wouldn’t be able to give him an answer.

  ‘But Grandad,’ protested Liz, ‘you don’t have to be a communist to be a pacifist.’

  ‘Christ, hen,’ said Peter MacMillan with sudden passion, ‘only a madman wants another war. I know that better than anybody.’ He paused, and Liz knew that he must be thinking of his firstborn, who had died at Passchendaele. ‘But that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here - a madman.’

  The emotion in his voice was enough to silence even Eddie, and for a few moments they sat saying nothing, contemplating the awful prospect and terrible reality of a world stalked by the spectre of fascism.

  It had been bad enough when Mussolini had ordered the invasion of Abyssinia two years before, pitting all the power of modern warfare against primitive tribesmen who had tried to turn back tanks with bows and arrows, but that, God forgive them all, had seemed a long way away. Film footage from the civil war currently raging in Spain was much closer to home.

  Almost exactly a year ago the Basque town of Guernica had been bombed from the air. It had been their market day and thousands of unarmed men, women and children had been killed. The horror of that aerial attack had sent shock waves around the world.

  Aviators had been heroes - symbols of the modern age, of man’s triumph over the forces of nature, of the progress of humankind. Now they were angels of death, raining destruction down from the clouds, slaughtering innocent men, women and children in their own homes. And the airmen who were honing their terrible skills most efficiently in Spain were the men of the German Luftwaffe: the men who would be attacking Britain if it did come to war between those two countries.

  There was supposed to be a non-intervention agreement about the Spanish Civil War. Germany and Italy were blithely ignoring it. The suspicion was growing that what folk were learning to call the Axis Powers were using Spain as some dreadful sort of training ground, a rehearsal for a larger theatre of war.

  There was widespread revulsion at the prospect of Britain once more involving herself in a European war. The dreadful years between 1914 and 1918 had blighted the lives of one generation and made an indelible mark on the next.

  Aware of the strength and depth of pacifist opinion, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was trying desperately to stop Britain being dragged into war, adopting a policy which had come to be known as Appeasement. Let the Nazis have something of what they want, ran this philosophy, and we’ll be able to pacify them, keep the ravening beast at bay, the hounds of war firmly on the leash.

  The trouble was, anyone who had a conscience was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the reality of Appeasement. Liz knew that Eddie was one of them. He was not in principle opposed to fighting for what you believed in.

  A year ago Liz had needed all her powers of persuasion to stop him from throwing up his studies and going off to join the International Brigade fighting in defence of the beleaguered democratic government of Spain against the fascist rebels led by General Franco. In the end she’d told him it would break their mother’s heart if he went off to war - and that had been the argument which had finally convinced him to stay at home.

  Now, with the international crisis growing more serious every day, she knew he was having a great deal of trouble reconciling his political convictions with his innate sense of honour and decency, although he wasn’t going to let go of those convictions without a fight The two men were talking about the Soviet Union now, a country which Eddie idolized.

  ‘Eddie, Eddie,’ her grandfather was saying, shaking his head in despair, I’ll grant you that the October Revolution was one of the great events in human history, but it’s been corrupted. Look at the show trials in Moscow last year. What were they, if not the revolution eating its children?’

  ‘No, no,’ cried Eddie, ‘don’t you see? They have to constantly keep purifying the revolution - and if that has to be done by blood,’ he declaimed, tossing his tousled locks, ‘then so be it.’

  Liz snorted. ‘This from the man who has to ask his mother to take a spider out of the bath? And then asks her to be sure not to kill the poor wee thing?’

  Eddie scowled at her.

  “The end justifies the means,’ he said. ‘That’s what we have to remember.’

  ‘Edward, my child,’ said Peter MacMillan, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so, what you’ve just said is - excuse me, Lizzie - a load of shite.’

  They were off again, amiably trading insults and casting aspersions on each other’s intelligence, shrewdness and political judgement. Liz wouldn’t interrupt. They were both enjoying themselves far too much.

  She looked at the old clock on the mantelpiece. If she listened carefully she could make out its reassuring tick-tock underneath the men’s raised voices.

  Dry your tears and lift up your head. She could hear her grandmother’s voice saying it. She lifted her chin. I’ll do my best, Granny.

  Liz stretched her legs out, then hurriedly drew them back up again as her feet hit the cold patch of sheet at the bottom of the bed. As she did so, the memory of yesterday evening’s confrontation with her father came flooding back. She curled herself up into a tight little ball of misery. So much for her resolution to count her blessings.

  She had thought that turning eighteen would solve all of her problems. She’d been fourteen when she had first composed a letter to the Western Infirmary up in Glasgow about nursing training. When she had received a polite and businesslike reply telling her she couldn’t be considered until she was eighteen it had seemed such a long way away.

  All through school and after - when she had done a course at commercial college to learn how to type and do shorthand, activities which didn’t interest her in the slightest; when she had gone to work at Murray’s - eighteen had been the magic number. It had twinkled on the horizon, out of reach but edging slowly closer, full of hope and promise, offering her the opportunity to fulfil a dream which had matured over the years into the desire to do something useful with her life: t
o help others, to make a difference.

  She could remember every detail of the time she had spent at Blawarthill Hospital when she’d had scarlet fever as a child. Being carried down the stairs at Radnor Street wrapped up in a red blanket, her mother and Granny waiting anxiously on the pavement by the horse-drawn ambulance which was to take her away.

  Sadie, a young mother who’d already lost one child to the dreadful disease, had been pale and silent, her face stricken with grief and fear. Granny, a comforting arm laid along her daughter-in-law’s thin shoulders, had smiled at Liz and told her to be a good girl and get better soon. Her father had been standing on the pavement a step or two away from his mother and his wife.

  Liz, only eight years old, had known that her brother George had gone off in a closed carriage like the one to which she was being carried - and had never come back. One afternoon, without any sort of an explanation, she and Eddie had been taken to his funeral. Liz watched the small white coffin being lowered into the ground, turned to her mother and asked, ‘Is that heaven down there? Where they’re putting Georgie?’ No one had given her an answer.

  About to be put into the ambulance, her father opening the door for the nurse who was carrying her, Liz made the terrifying connection between what was happening to her and what had happened to her wee brother. Turning to her father, she reached out for him.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy! Don’t let them put me down the big hole!’

  But William MacMillan, his face shuttered, had taken a step back from his daughter’s outstretched arms. Without a word of farewell to his daughter or comfort to his wife he turned on his heel and walked back into the close. The next thing Liz knew she was in the darkness of the ambulance, weeping as though her heart would break.