‘That’s the kind of woman I’d like to be,’ I said.
‘But really, my favourite thing is roses. I managed to get some almost perfect Ophelias and some hedgehog roses, which we don’t often see in our neck of the woods. They still grow at the end of my garden, but I can’t tend to them like I’d want, what with my knee. The white ones, my Madame Zoetmans, always come out the best. They’re fluffy. Like sheep on a stick.’
‘Oh, I love Zoetmans!’ Else said, coming to sit with us in a burst of woody perfume. Walter stared at Else with delight. Like she was a unicorn hedge. So we left them to it.
Margot turned back to her drawing.
‘Where to?’ I asked, while she shaded the dark outer corners of what appeared to be a tin bucket.
‘You’ll like this one,’ she said, as she used her thumb to smudge the dark shadows cast by the bucket onto the floor. ‘We’re going back to the house I grew up in,’ she said, ‘to an evening in 1941.’
Cromdale Street, Glasgow, 1941
Margot Macrae is Ten Years Old
I was in the bath when the air raid siren went off. My mother swore very quietly under her breath and stubbed her cigarette out on the soap dish.
My bathwater was still hot, and we’d filled it up to the line drawn in black paint that went all the way around the tub.
‘How will they know?’ I’d asked, when my mother had painted the wobbly line the year before.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘they won’t know.’
‘So we could fill it all the way to the top?’ I asked.
‘Not past the overflow,’ she’d said, trying to navigate the paintbrush past the plug chain without painting it too.
‘We could fill it up all the way?’
‘Yes,’ she’d said, ‘I suppose.’
‘Why don’t we just do that then?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘they might not know, but we’d know. And how could you face your class at school knowing you’d had a big hot bath and they’d all had to clean themselves in puddles?’
I didn’t say anything, but I felt that I probably wouldn’t have minded that as much as my mother expected.
The air raid siren screaming, my mother scooped me up from the warm water and roughly rubbed at my arms and legs with the towel. I whined that she was hurting me and she told me she was trying to be fast.
‘Come on, Margot,’ she said in the sing-song voice that she used whenever she was trying to cover her fear, and she hurried me down the stairs, out of the kitchen door and into the back garden.
Outside it was icy; even the grass underfoot had frozen. My breath danced away on the air and I stopped still.
‘Come on,’ she said, the pressure beginning to really tell in her voice.
I was dressed only in a towel and standing in our garden in the middle of winter, and I had no desire to go down into the cold, damp Anderson shelter. I started crying.
When the war was still new, my mother had made a game of the air raids, by marking down in a notebook every time we used the shelter. ‘Our fifteenth visit,’ she would say, as though we were having fun and not hiding from fire falling from the sky.
We’d built the Anderson shelter with the help of some non-combatant soldiers provided by the local council. I’d watched as they’d packed the earth on top of the roof, so that what was once a square, simple garden was now home to a human rabbit warren. They’d talked to my mother about keeping it dry, and what necessities to store inside. They’d warned her not to smoke down there because the air would become thick.
Before they left, the larger of the two soldiers had asked me if I had any questions for them.
‘Can we get out to go to the toilet?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘You can’t get out for any reason until the siren stops.’
‘Then how do we go to the toilet?’ I asked.
The answer was revealed to be – any way you wanted. My mother’s solution was a large tin bucket. It lived in the corner of the shelter beside some magazines and newspapers, which were mostly for reading but also functioned as toilet paper.
‘I shall be very proud of you,’ my mother said when she installed the bucket, ‘if you never have to use this bucket. You can have my jam ration any day that we come down here and you don’t use it.’ Jam was a big incentive for me at the time so I’d never used the bucket.
‘Hurry up, Margot,’ my mother said. Standing only in my towel in the bitterly cold air, I fixed her with a scowl and slowly followed her. She pushed open the corrugated iron door to reveal my least favourite grandmother squatting in the middle of the shelter, her knickers around her ankles and her skirt hitched up around her hips, urinating into the bucket on the floor.