Authors: Meg Henderson
It was November, a cold Monday. She remembered that so clearly because the next day was Lily’s birthday and Kathy had a present for her that she knew her mother would love. She had come
upon it weeks before on one of her hunts for Con. When he went missing there was no doubt that he would be in some drinking howff, and finding the right one was a simple case of following his trail
from one to another until he was found in his usual slumped condition. With Jamie in tow as usual, she had been going round the Barras stallholders asking if anyone had seen her Da, when she had
spotted it on Cockney Jock’s stall. A Londoner called Dick Lee, he had been renamed ‘Cockney Jock’ and ran a ‘swag’, or fancy goods stall. The unsuspecting customer
could buy any number of treasures from Jock, ‘Roldini gold brooches’, ‘South Sea Island Pearls’, all of them one hundred per cent counterfeit, and Kathy was especially fond
of him because he got away with the most blatantly dishonest claims. She had been in his audience one day when he’d been selling paint and found himself being constantly interrupted mid-spiel
by a heckler. ‘It’s no’ paint at a’!’ yelled the heckler merrily, trying to take over the attention of Jock’s punters. ‘Pull the other wan, it’s even
cheaper!’ At each jibe Jock would stop politely and assure the large man and the potential customers in the crowd that it was indeed the finest paint. And not just any paint at that, but of
the very best quality, surplus from a job that had just been done at Buckingham Palace and, being a Cockney, by birth at any rate, he had been given the chance to buy, at a knockdown price which he
was about to pass on to the lucky punters, what was clearly the Château La Fitte, if you took his meaning, of home decorating materials. Still the large chap shouted him down, till Jock could
take no more. ‘It’s merr water than paint!’ came the taunt, at which Jock had tipped a canful over him. ‘What’s up with you?’ Jock demanded as the heckler
protested. ‘It’s no’ paint, it’s water, you said so yourself. I’ll do you a good price on a towel to dry yourself off with!’
That day, Kathy’s eyes had fallen on something in the corner of Jock’s stall and as soon as she had seen it she knew Lily must have it. It was a rectangular box about ten inches
long, covered in bright red, padded satin with a heart design woven into it, and finished around the edges with gold cord. She asked if she could see it and Jock handed it to her, muttering with
hurt pride that it had been left over from Valentine’s Day, and it wasn’t his fault that Glaswegians had no romance in their souls, was it? The inside of the box was lined with mock red
velvet, and a removable shelf had been fitted with various compartments so that it could be used for anything the owner required. Leave the shelf intact and it could be a jewellery or a sewing box,
remove it and you could store photographs or papers or whatever you wanted. She asked Jock how much he wanted and unable to do a deal without at least the pretence of haggling, he grinned and asked
her how much she had on her. Kathy had rifled in her pockets and come up with 2/6d, gleaned coin-by-coin from her lunch money over several weeks, and a further search of Jamie’s pockets
turned up another 2/–. ‘Take it,’ Jock said happily. He’d sold it, a couple of months late, but still, honour had been restored. ‘It’s only taking up room
anyway.’ So she carried it home wrapped in brown paper and hid it carefully in her bedroom, knowing how delighted Lily would be, anxious for her birthday to arrive. Lily’s world was
completely devoid of anything feminine or frilly, there was no satin and lace about life with Con, but now she would have something pretty, and more to the point, it wasn’t worth enough at
the pawn shop for Con to hawk it for booze money, so Lily had a chance of keeping it.
So it was Monday, the day before Lily’s birthday, and Con was doing whatever Con always did, probably helping around the market for ready cash after the busy weekend trading, then making
for the Sarrie Heid, as Lily worked in Stern’s warehouse. She had been so happy to get a full-time job at last, after years of doing three or four jobs a day, working herself to death for a
collective pittance that never amounted to a full-time wage. Working herself to death; now there was an ironic phrase. B. Stern & Co Ltd was an upholstery firm, housed in an old whisky bond
built in 1850 in James Watt Street, in the warren of narrow streets down by the River Clyde. It hadn’t been used as a bond since 1961, but the wooden interior staircases were still there, and
every window had remained protected by iron bars, even though these days anyone breaking in to the three-storey building would find only sofas and armchairs to steal. Stern’s neighbours were
mainly just as far removed from the old days of whisky bonding: a tobacco warehouse, the local branch of the Seamen’s Union, a glassware warehouse, and just 400 yards away was Cheapside
Street, where nineteen men from the Fire Service had died fighting a blaze eight years before. Lily had enjoyed working at Stern’s, the other workers were a good lot, she said, a mixture of
around twenty-seven men and women, from teenagers to sixty-somethings. She liked the companionship and the easy friendships with people like herself, and before long families had been shared. Kathy
knew all about Nancy, whose daughter had given birth to a profoundly handicapped baby girl a couple of years before, only Nancy couldn’t accept that there was anything wrong with her
grand-daughter. She would come in to work with pictures of a toddler who, though beautiful, was clearly ‘no’ right’, who had to be held in a sitting position for the camera. She
was, said a desperately upbeat Nancy, who deep inside knew the truth, ‘a wee bit slow’, but she was improving every day, and sometimes the other women would feel her pain so strongly
that they would hit out at her. ‘She’s no’ right, Nancy! Will ye stop kiddin’ yersel’?’ they’d say, and Nancy would rush to the toilet in tears, locking
the door behind her and refusing all entreaties to come out till she had composed herself. By that time the women would feel guilty about what they had said and once again look at the latest clutch
of photos, announcing that ‘Ye’re right, Nancy, the wee yin’s gettin’ oan fine, so she is!’, all the while exchanging sad glances behind the delighted Nancy’s
back. And Kathy knew from Lily whose daughter was having a baby soon, whose son was doing well at school and, she supposed, the other women had also glimpsed something of the difficulties in
Lily’s life. It was how women were in those days. It was an era when they accepted that their lives were devoted to their families, and that included having to take low-paid work outside the
home. The money they more than earned went towards providing for their children, and there was no thought given to their own career structures, competitiveness or promotion. They did dull, boring,
repetitive jobs for little money, and found whatever satisfaction they could in being together, in having a laugh and a gossip and sharing their family worries and joys with each other. Being
working class it was all they had been conditioned to expect of life, and regardless of how intelligent they were, or what heights they might have reached had they been given an even playing field,
it was a situation they had to accept for themselves, even in the Sixties. They knew they had been short-changed, that they were being used, but what was new in that? But one day, they hoped, it
would be better for their daughters, and that was very often why they accepted their own lot. Many of the women were saving every penny to put their children, girls as well as boys, through
university, so that they wouldn’t have to work in places like Stern’s.
Suddenly on that Monday the fire alarm had sounded. The secretary had tried to dial 999, but an incoming call prevented her, so the Seamen’s Union next door summoned the fire brigade. The
fire started on the first floor, where the showrooms were situated, and the building very quickly ‘went up like a box of fireworks’, according to a survivor. For a few moments a man was
seen inside, frantically trying to force the iron bars covering the only escape route, with several women behind him. Then, as the attempt failed, the desperate faces behind the barred windows were
lost in the smoke. The only doorway to freedom and safety was locked, the key that would have opened it locked in a downstairs office. People working in other warehouses came running, alerted first
by the screams, and repeatedly tried to force their way through the smoke and flames, choking with the heat and the fumes. Two men were seen inside the warehouse, trapped in a lift that had become
stuck between floors, the flames licking around it, as the wooden staircases, then the roof, collapsed, bringing down the floors below. Twenty fire units rushed to the blaze, and three foam units,
as the thick smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air above the city, the firemen helplessly trying to find an exit route for the twenty-two terrified souls who clawed at the barred windows. Then
the screaming stopped and the faces disappeared from the windows, leaving only outstretched, charred arms visible through the smoke.
At Our Lady and St Francis Convent School in Charlotte Street Kathy’s class was doing a double period of Art that afternoon, and as Art was one of Kathy’s favourite subjects, she was
happily engrossed in what she was doing. She was distantly aware of the door opening and someone entering the Art Room and whispering to the teacher, who looked up quickly at Kathy Kelly. She felt
the hairs standing up on her neck. It must be Con. How many times had she imagined this scenario in her mind? He had either been found drunk somewhere and they wanted to know where Lily was, or
he’d fallen in front of a bus; oh, please, let it be the bus! She felt her cheeks flush red with embarrassment. Funny to think there was a time when she’d been so innocent that she
actually believed there were some folk who didn’t know what he was like, and how desperately she had wanted to keep the knowledge secret. Now everyone would know her father was a drunk, she
would be shamed in front of them, even if, deep down, she had always known it would only be a matter of time anyhow. ‘Kathleen,’ said the teacher quietly, ‘you’re to report
to the Headmistress.’ Everyone in the class looked at her as she left her desk and walked to the door. Walking along the corridor she had whispered to the messenger, ‘Whit is it?
D’ye know whit she wants me for?’ The girl shrugged and ran back to her own classroom, leaving Kathy to do the long walk on her own. She knocked on the door and entered, looking quickly
at the Sister’s expression, trying to guess what was wrong. A black look; yes, this was the day. From now on everyone would know. Even looking back from nearly thirty years the impression of
slow motion persisted. She sat down and the kindly Sister told her gently that there had been a fire. Even then Kathy had wondered if Con had burned the house down, and if he had, where would she
and Lily live now? Well it certainly wouldn’t be with Aggie, even if Aggie’s house had escaped unscathed, there was no chance of that! She was still working out the logistics, hoping
Jamie’s house wasn’t damaged, when she heard Stern’s being mentioned. The Sister must be asking if her mother was working at Stern’s. Kathy nodded; yes, she was. It took an
interminable time for her to understand that the fire hadn’t been at Moncur Street, but at Stern’s, that Lily was involved, not Con.
They took her to a Seamen’s Hostel down by the Broomielaw, where other relatives were gathering, hoping against hope for good news. They looked at each other only briefly and spoke little.
An instinct was at work. By then it was clear that the fire had been a major one, that many had died, and some of the people in the room would undoubtedly be told that their relatives were dead. So
there was a feeling, a tacit agreement, that you didn’t want to speak to one of the potentially bereaved, in case the bad luck that had already settled on them would somehow rub off on you.
It was stupid, but it was there. If you kept to yourself then it wasn’t happening to you, it was happening to those other people, and as you weren’t one of them, you should keep your
distance. It took a long time, days in fact, and they were all thinking the same thing. Even though you knew there was no chance, until you were told, officially and irrevocably, you just
didn’t believe it. Lily could be anywhere, Kathy decided. Maybe she hadn’t been inside the warehouse when the fire broke out, what if she’d nipped out to a nearby shop for
something? And even if she had been inside, in the confusion she could’ve got out without anyone noticing and gone into shock. She could, at this very minute and two days later, be wandering
the streets, cold, hungry and lost, but alive. It
was
possible, there were even stranger stories than that in the
Weekly News
every Friday. The day after the fire Con and Aggie,
accompanied as ever by Father McCabe, had gone to James Watt Street where, much to Kathy’s fury, they had knelt in the street and prayed. Kathy had broken away, she was having no part of
this, and instead she had run through the streets, still heavy with the acrid, choking smell of burning, shouting Lily’s name till her throat ached and her legs gave way. There was no
answer.
Twenty-two people died in the fire, spanning the same cross section of men and women that Lily had described, aged from seventeen to sixty-four, all of them so badly burned that identification
took days. The number of corpses was too much for the city mortuary to cope with, so the gym of the Western Infirmary was used as a temporary mortuary, and years later those who had worked in the
hospital, all fairly unshockable folk, could still recall, with a shudder, the smell of burnt flesh that permeated the corridors from the basement, upwards and outwards. They talked in hushed tones
of how the arms of the blackened bodies still stretched out in death, as if in a last desperate attempt to escape through the barred windows. Lying on their backs, warped and twisted by the flames,
each one indistinguishable from the others, their arms reached straight upwards, an image that would stay with those who saw it, as indelibly as the sight of their terrified faces would remain in
the memories of those who had tried to rescue them.