The girl felt quite excited at the prospect of the change round, especially when she thought that there would be strangers in the house. ‘How much will you charge them?’ She was being more realistic than her mother, or perhaps she was not quite old enough to be affected by the tragedy of the situation. Anne looked bewildered. ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t know how much lodgers usually pay.’
‘There’s a bit in here about accommodation vacant as well.’ Renee was looking at the newspaper again. ‘Some of them say one pound per week, so if you took two, you’d get two pounds. How much do you need for the mortgage?’
‘It’s four pounds a month, that’s one pound a week.’ Anne frowned in concentration. ‘With two pounds from the lodgers, and whatever I get from the shop, I might just be able to keep things going. It’ll be a struggle, though, with all the other things to pay.’
‘I’m sure you’ll manage.’ Renee helped her mother to draft a letter, then Anne wrote to the six of the box numbers which seemed to be most suitable. Now that she had burned her boats, she would have to wait patiently for replies, but in the meantime, she had to organise extra beds and bedding, and rearrange the present sleeping quarters. Maggie gave her an old single bed she didn’t need, which Granda and Uncle George transported in the shop van, and they repeated the operation with another bed, which one of Jim Gordon’s friends offered to Anne. She asked them to move her double bed to Renee’s upstairs room, and to shift the girl’s single bed into the loft, which Granda had covered with flowery wallpaper to make it more pleasant as a bedroom for the girl.
‘It’ll be oor birthday present for Renee,’ he remarked, refusing to take the money Anne wanted to give him to pay
for the wallpaper, paste and paint. Maggie and some of her friends donated sheets, blankets and bedspreads, as well as pillows and pillowcases, and Anne rushed about making the downstairs room presentable.
In a few days, she received six letters in answer to hers, and sat down with Renee to see which of the writers, if any, would fit into her household. Some of the notes were quite badly written, but two were worded politely and thoughtfully, so they were the obvious choices.
One was from a William Scroggie, who said he was a gardener in Huntly and had been offered a job with a firm of horticulturists in Aberdeen. He would be going home every weekend, and was twenty-three years old.
‘He seems a friendly sort of person, from the way he’s written.’ Anne laid his letter to one side.
‘That’s one, then,’ Renee smiled. ‘What about this Jack Thomson from Peterhead?’
‘Well .
. . he’s very young, just newly sixteen, he says, but he does sound quite nice. He’s starting an apprenticeship with an engineering company, though he doesn’t say which one, so that’s steady work . . . and he’ll go home at weekends, too. Yes, I think I’ll settle on them.’
Anne wrote replies to each letter she had received, four saying that she regretted that her vacancies had been filled, and two stating her terms and hoping that the boys would find her home comfortable. Renee could hardly wait, now, for the lodgers to arrive, because they would be sure to brighten up her existence, and, hopefully, her mother’s. Anything could happen with two young men in the house.
Chapter Three
When the boarders made their appearance, Anne Gordon knew she’d chosen well. Bill Scroggie, from Huntly, had a mop of fiery red hair, belying his quiet, serious disposition. He was about five feet eight, and quite stocky, but very polite and friendly. Jack Thomson, from Peterhead, was almost six feet, very slim, and his sandy hair stood up in a quiff at the front. He, too, was inclined to be quiet, especially at first, but he had a strong sense of humour, and his whole face lit up when he smiled, tiny dimples appearing at the edges of his mouth.
They settled in quickly, and Renee soon came to regard them as part of the family, but Anne worried in case she was charging them too much, seeing they went home at weekends. When she mentioned this to Bill, he smiled. ‘No, Mrs Gordon, we’re very happy about it. There’s lads paying the same and sleeping four to a room in a tenement.’
Renee avidly followed the course of Bill Scroggie’s romance with Lena Wilson, and often wished she was old enough to go to the Old Time Dancing in Gray Street, which was where he’d met his girlfriend.
‘Why don’t you go out dancing?’ she asked Jack one evening. He was sitting, as usual, listening to the wireless in the living room.
‘I can’t afford it, not on my wages.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’ Even though Jack smiled to let her see she hadn’t annoyed him, Renee was annoyed at herself. She should have remembered that her mother had told her he only got five shillings a week, and his widowed mother had to take in dressmaking to pay for his lodgings. He went home every week to see her, so he had little money left to spend on enjoyment, but he never complained and sometimes played Snakes and Ladders, or Ludo, with the schoolgirl when she finished her homework, which passed the time quite pleasantly for both of them.
When Renee was eleven, and attending intermediate school, she started weaving dreams about Jack, now seventeen, waiting for her until she was old enough to be his girlfriend. By that time, of course, he’d be a time-served engineer and making a decent living wage, she realised, with a talent for finance picked up from listening to the discussions her mother had with her relatives.
Every Sunday, George Gordon drove up in the Erskine, which he’d bought for five pounds after his brother Jim died, to give Anne her share of the profits, but he never asked her how she was coping. As it happened, she’d always managed to meet the monthly mortgage, although it was very difficult sometimes, with all her other expenses, and providing meals for four. She’d to scrimp and cut corners, mending sheets and clothes instead of buying new, as she would once have done.
Sometimes Peggy came with her father, and Renee was glad of her cousin’s company to let her be free of the boring adult conversation. She felt jealous of Peggy’s smart new dresses and skirts now and then, but she never mentioned this to her mother.
Maggie and Peter McIntosh came every Friday evening, to make sure that their daughter and her child were not going short of anything. The difference between them and Uncle George, of course, was that they would have given Anne their last penny if they had suspected she was in need of it. Maggie’s legs were beginning to trouble her, and Anne often felt ashamed that they always came to see her, instead of the other way round, but with all the work she had to do, the cleaning, cooking, patching, and letting down Renee’s clothes, she seemed to be at it until bedtime every night. Peter, too, was looking older. He would be retiring from his work as a monumental mason shortly, and arthritis had set in to his hands. His back was bowed now and his face was lined with deep furrows, but his white hair was still bushy, like his moustache and eyebrows, though they were not so white, more a gingery grey.
One Sunday, about a year and a half after their circumstances had so dramatically changed, Renee realised that her mother had been standing talking to Uncle George at the door for nearly half an hour, and wondered what they could find to talk about after spending all afternoon in discussion.
At last, Anne came in, and sat down heavily on an armchair, her black dress making her pale face look even paler. ‘Your Uncle George and Auntie Jenny are . . . splitting up,’ she said carefully, obviously considering that her daughter was too young to be given any reason.
Renee, however, wouldn’t have it left at that. ‘Why? What’s happened?’
Her father’s brother was her favourite uncle, handsome and smartly dressed, with his jet-black hair always slicked back neatly, and often telling her little jokes, but his wife, Auntie Jenny, was a dour, thin-faced woman, with a constant expression of disapproval, no matter where she was or who was there.
Anne seemed to be rather relieved to talk about it, after all. ‘Uncle George has been . . . seeing another woman, and Jenny found out about it. She’s told him to get out of their house, and he’s got nowhere to go, as his . . . friend’s married already.’
‘Oh! Poor Uncle George!’ Renee did not stop to think that it should really be ‘poor Auntie Jenny’, and her mother did not correct her.
‘He said he’d pay thirty shillings if I took him in here, that’s more than the other two. Of course, he’d be here at the weekends, so that would be full board.’
‘There’s no room for another bed in that room – you’re not going to put Jack or Bill away, are you?’
Anne looked at her daughter’s apprehensive face. ‘George doesn’t want to share at all. He wants a room to himself.’
‘Not both of them?’ Renee was alarmed now. ‘Oh, Mummy, you can’t do that. You can’t put both of them away, you’d have less money than you have now.’
‘I wish you’d stop jumping to conclusions, Renee. I’m not putting any of them away. As you said, I need the money.’
‘What’s Uncle George going to do then, if you told him he couldn’t come here?’
Anne hesitated. ‘I . . . er . . . told him he could come. He can have my room, and I’ll move in with you.’
‘That’s not fair!’ The girl’s face showed exactly how indignant she was. ‘I’ve always had a room to myself, ever since I was old enough. I need it to keep my books, and all my . . .’
‘Things have changed, you know that. You’ve grown out of practically all your clothes, and I can’t afford to buy you new ones the way we are just now.’ Anne brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘You’ll just have to throw out some of the rubbish you’ve collected, and make room for me.’
Renee’s expression of resentment suddenly changed to triumph. ‘Uncle George’ll need a bed, and you can’t afford to buy one.’
Her mother sighed. ‘I’m going to put your bed through for him, and take my double bed into the loft for us to sleep on.’ She held up her hand to avoid further protests. ‘He’s moving in on Wednesday, so you’d better stop moaning. It’s all settled.’
Renee knew that Wednesday was the shop half-day, because her father, in those never-to-come-again days, had taken them out in the car every Wednesday afternoon in the summertime. They’d visited Teenie and Jimmy Durno sometimes, and, more frequently, her mother’s sister Bella, at all the different places Uncle Willie was fee’d at. He usually worked on a farm for only the obligatory six months he’d agreed to at the Feeing Market in Aberdeen, and then moved on to another, so the Lawries had been in cottar houses all over Aberdeenshire and Kincardine.
In the winters, they hadn’t gone out in the car on her father’s half-days, because he’d played football in the Wednesday League, teams being made up of shopkeepers and assistants who were unable to take part in the Saturday amateur games.
Swallowing the lump which had come to her throat, she realised that her mother had gone upstairs. The noisy thumps and scrapings suggested that furniture was being moved round in the loft. Renee hadn’t really minded having to shift out of her original room, because she’d often been afraid at nights upstairs on her own, and when her mother took it over, the girl had been comforted by the knowledge that only a wall separated them. But this move was an entirely different thing – an invasion of her territory. She’d have no privacy whatsoever, and her precious sanctuary would be cluttered up with the big bed taking up double the space of the single. Worse still, her mother would probably claim half the chest of drawers and half the wardrobe, both of which had been given to them by sympathetic friends when her father died; Renee kept cardboard boxes in them, full of small interesting items, as well as her clothes.
The room which was to be Uncle George’s had a boxroom off it, with lots of shelves, and a rail along one side for clothes, so he wouldn’t need a wardrobe. It had a jute carpet square and varnished surrounds, while the loft had only two threadbare mats on the natural floorboards. It wasn’t that Renee actually resented her uncle for further upsetting her life, but she did wish that she could have been left in her little dominion on her own, where she could retreat any time she wanted to spend some time by herself.
Bill Scroggie and Jack Thomson switched the beds around on Tuesday night, and Anne made the single bed ready for her new boarder. The small walnut dressing-table with the triple mirrors and the matching three-drawer chest looked rather feminine for a man – they’d been bought originally for Renee – but there was no money for new furniture, and the room was quite attractive. When she joined her daughter in the double bed in the loft, Anne said,
‘That’s it, then. I hope I’ve done the right thing. Seeing somebody once a week’s not the same as seeing them every day, but I don’t think your Uncle George’ll be much bother. Anyway, time’ll tell.’
George Gordon arrived, in the shop van, late on Wednesday afternoon and had unpacked two suitcases of clothes before Bill and Jack came home. They helped him to carry up a comfortable armchair and a small table, which he had bought in a saleroom with the idea of making himself a bed-sitting room. Renee took up some of his other, smaller, belongings. ‘You’ve got a lot of good books, Uncle George,’ she remarked, as she placed them along a shelf in the boxroom. He smiled. ‘I don’t like Westerns or love stories, if that’s what you mean. Have you ever read any of these, or are you still on school stories?’
‘Not so much now, though I still read them if I’m stuck, but I like
Little Women, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Anne of Green Gables,
and I’ve had Dickens’
Christmas Carol
out of the school library.’ She glanced at the row of books. ‘I’ve never read
Treasure Island
or
Tom Brown’s Schooldays.’
‘You don’t know what you’ve been missing, and you’re quite free to borrow any of my books, as long as you look after them.’
‘Thanks, Uncle George. I’m always careful with books.’ Like Bill Scroggie and Jack Thomson, George took his meals in the lounge, now called the dining-room, but he had to go back to the shop after teatime, because it didn’t close until eight o’clock. If he came home immediately after that, he spent his time in his own room, but more often he did not come home until bedtime.