Saturday City Read online

  Saturday City

  Jan Webster

  © Jan Webster, 1978

  Jan Webster has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1978 by William Collins Sons & Co.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Lyn and Stephen, with love.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

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  Part One

  Chapter One

  The two girls sat in the horse tram going along Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. The open upper deck was draughty, damp from recent rain, and whisky fumes reached them from the seat behind, where a drunk man sang morosely into his gingery beard.

  Sandia Kilgour, torn as always between her desire to expand experience and her wish to be a meek, obedient daughter, already regretted being drawn into this Saturday-night adventure by her friend Kirsten Mackenzie. The conflict showed in the whitened knuckles of the hand grasping the brass rail in front of her, the rigid posture of the slender neck and the way dismay followed eager involvement moment by moment in the expressive, wide-set blue eyes, like fleeting clouds obscuring a watery but persistent sun.

  Her mother believed she was at Kirsten’s home near the university, stitching nightgowns for the poor under the benevolent eye of the professor and his hospitable English wife. Some kind of judgement was upon her, she was sure. Maybe death from fright and remorse as the tram lurched and shambled through the throng of Saturday-evening shoppers. Or it was possible God and her parents had something else up their sleeves.

  Kirsten, by contrast, seemed totally at ease. She was never bothered by vague, ill-defined reservations about behaviour. English people seemed to possess this sang-froid and Kirsten was half-English, of course, her craggy Highland father having brought home a dark-haired, educated bride from some Non-conformist eyrie near Manchester.

  ‘We’ll save Argyle Street for last,’ said Kirsten now, ‘as it’s the best.’

  ‘But it’s rough there,’ Sandia demurred. Sauchiehall Street would be altogether safer and more salubrious, she felt. But Argyle Street was the real hub of the city, where everyone went: football supporters, bargain hunters, street musicians, pavement artists, second-hand booksellers and sharp-eyed shoppers buying everything from new suits to chipped crockery and broken biscuits. Part of her wanted to go there every bit as badly as Kirsten; the other part was consumed with holy terror at the very thought.

  At Renfield Street Kirsten pushed her friend before her down the tram stairs. Gasping on the pavement, Sandia said faintly, ‘I think, Kirsten, I’ll just go back home now.’ But Kirsten took her firmly by the arm.

  ‘You are you,’ she said forcefully. ‘It is a free country, under the Queen. Your parents do not own you, you know.’ At this seditious statement, Sandia looked paler than ever, but now she was actually among the cheerful Saturday crowds, recklessness took over. A jig played by a street musician made her treacherous feet do a joyful little shuffle. Kirsten felt her shift of mood immediately and said encouragingly, ‘After all, my dear Sandia, we are grown-up. You are seventeen and I am eighteen. Surely we are old enough to look after ourselves?’

  ‘Your parents are different,’ Sandia pointed out. Dr Mackenzie was quite alarming in the way he kept speaking of women getting the vote and his wife positively encouraged girls to have a point of view, an attitude which sometimes embarrassed Sandia as at home she had to behave with much greater decorum.

  If her parents’ only knew the half of the things discussed in the Mackenzie household! For example, Mrs Mackenzie was sometimes heard to declare: ‘It is not enough for women just to have babies.’ She had even insisted that there were ways people could employ to prevent having children, and Kirsten had blithely offered Sandia a book called The Fruits of Philosophy, about something called birth control, which had been the subject a few years before of a notorious prosecution by the courts. She said her parents had encouraged her to read it and Sandia could borrow it to study if she wished.

  Sandia had refused, of course. Ever since Kirsten had told her what she alleged happened between men and women when they married, she had felt it was probably wrong for them to go on being friends. Sandia doubted if Kirsten could in fact be correct. Was it not much more feasible that people — well, simply embraced and kissed and that from such spiritual union something vague and cloud-like turned from vapour into matter and so into an infant? But then again, she had once been sure Heaven was a physical place with tables, chairs and sofas that you ascended to through white fluffy clouds and blue skies, and God a physical presence like her late grandfather Findlay Fleming, and neither tenet seemed probable any longer, so she could be wrong about babies too. If only her mother did not look so pink and confused and evasive when she asked for facts!

  Sandia had not broken the friendship, however. She had gone on listening in horrified but fascinated silence while Kirsten pointed out that this birth control thing was necessary because the population was getting out of hand — more so in Glasgow than anywhere else in Britain — that some extremists were advocating that all babies after the third in poor families should be killed.

  When Sandia’s disgust had broken through in protest Kirsten had rounded on her fiercely. ‘Have you seen the East End slums? Babies die anyway from malnutrition and neglect. Mothers do get past caring. Open your eyes, Sandia, dear. Surely if families were limited to two or three, life would be worth living for those poor child-bearing machines, for that is what they are!’

  Very often Sandia said nothing. She knew that Kirsten’s experience of the world was much wider than her own. When the City of Glasgow Bank had failed two years ago, in 1878, leaving a fearful trail of misery and bankruptcies, the Mackenzie family had been tireless in organizing soup, bread, coal and money for the unemployed during that cruel, hard winter, which had seen degradation piled on misery when the shipyard workers came out on a long, embittered strike. Although the two girls had not known each other then, a dreadful consciousness of what it was like to be destitute and hungry had entered Kirsten’s mind and even now she told Sandia tales of death and hunger at that time which kept the younger girl awake at night, combing her conscience as to whether prayers and the odd bundle of worn-out clothes were enough.

  But in the main Sandia accepted calmly enough that she and her friend lived in different worlds — Kirsten’s free-thinking, outrageous and advanced; her own stable, kirkbound and restricted. She could then listen to her friend’s more advanced ideas without being a party to them.

  Kirsten’s vivacity made all her other friends colourless by comparison, that was the trouble. That was why she was on this ill-considered outing, even now trembling from time to time at her own temerity.

  ‘My mother would have one of her turns if she knew,’ she moaned to Kirsten.

  ‘Your mother uses her turns, as you call them, to her own ends,’ replied Kirsten. ‘She is quite spoiled with
servants — and you are one of them.’

  Sandia’s mouth beaked open in protest, but as often happened, nothing came out. Some rebellious depth in her acknowledged a grain at least of truth in what Kirsten said, but allowances had to be made for Mama since Mabel’s death. Sandia missed Mabel, too, perhaps more achingly than any of them, for they had been closest in age, but she did not admit it to anyone, even Kirsten. Her dead sister’s face came back to her now, sharp, freckled and admonitory, as it had been in life, and annoyed that she had been the one to Pass On, when they had shared the same fever.

  Now Mama put most of her love on to Alisdair, Sandia thought. Glancing at a mechanical bear being made to dance along the gutter, she thought how much Alisdair would have enjoyed this outing. He was a very responsive little boy, bright and loving. She felt Mama kept him at her side too much, in those fussy ringlets and dresses, protesting he was delicate when he was simply made too much of. She should not criticize Mama, of course, but being with Kirsten always seemed to embolden her.

  When Kirsten suggested they go to Mr Stuart Cranston’s Tea-rooms in Queen Street to have some refreshment, Sandia assented with an almost pleasurable leap of terror. The tearooms had only been in existence a few years and were the first of their kind in the world, so Kirsten assured her. They were surely intended for such as they, who did not want to enter the grim, businessmen’s restaurants and would never entertain the notion of going inside a public-house.

  They stood outside the tea-rooms reading Mr Cranston’s announcement: ‘A sample cup of 4s. Kaisow with sugar and cream, for twopence — bread and cakes extra: served in the sample room.’

  Sandia peered over the lace curtains and saw that the tearoom was small but crowded. Throwing caution to the wind, she followed Kirsten inside and sat elbow to elbow with other Saturday shoppers. It was fun to observe and be observed. She knew they made a striking pair, Kirsten in her green cloth dress with its kilted frills and a white feather in her bonnet, she in her brown velvet walking dress, her second-best but still her favourite, with its pretty mussel-shell buttons.

  She knew also she was quite pretty in a wholesome, fresh-faced way, taking after her Grannie Kate, they said, with her fine complexion and fair hair; a foil for Kirsten’s dark vivacity. The strange thing was that if you analysed Kirsten’s features, took them one by one, there was no way they could add up to beauty. Her brow was too narrow, her nose too aquiline, her chin too short. Yet she had something that made heads turn, that made total strangers look at her and smile as though they’d known her all their lives. And her hair was beautiful, a mass of dark, auburn-highlighted curls and tendrils, so thick Sandia feared it must sap her strength, as her mother maintained was the case with very luxuriant tresses.

  Kirsten gave her a small conspiratorial smile and whispered, ‘Mr Cranston is a great tea expert, you know. He was with Joseph Tetley, where they called him “the wizard of the leaf”, and he’s a coffee-taster too!’

  As they gave their order, Sandia could feel the eyes of a pink-faced, handsome youth at a nearby table constantly upon her. She had never seen such thick, light brown hair nor a gaze so desperate yet honest.

  Kirsten jogged her arm. ‘Someone is looking at you,’ she said archly.

  ‘It is more probably you,’ Sandia countered. But she felt a tide of excitement rush through her, making her so mindlessly happy she scarcely gave a fig for decorum.

  ‘No, it’s you,’ Kirsten insisted generously. She began to giggle, a small, irresistible sound. ‘He’s just spilled some tea down his waistcoat! See what you’ve done to him!’

  Sandia could not look for embarrassment. But as she and Kirsten threaded their way back to the street, she glimpsed the young man’s confusion and pity tilted her mouth in a faint smile.

  Her doubts about the expedition had disappeared completely. It was like coming alive. All she could think of was that she was in Glasgow on a Saturday night, as she had so often dreamed. Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire, throbbing with a brash and dangerous life, like the engines of the great steel-boilered ships which carried her name throughout the world in these eighteen-eighties! Her father liked to repeat some of the street names like a litany: Union Street, Jamaica Street, Virginia Street, St Vincent Street, West Nile Street and Wellington Street. Many of them had come about through Glasgow’s commerce with the West Indies and American colonies, in the rich old days of the tobacco barons. But how could even these days compare with now?

  The light-headed excitement lasted as she and Kirsten strolled along Buchanan Street to the Arcade, a roofed-in promenade with a multiplicity of little shops which led through to Argyle Street. Sandia declared her head was beginning to spin from seeing so much in one afternoon.

  ‘You know, it is very interesting,’ said Kirsten, as they passed the Clan Tartan Warehouse. ‘People used to barter for goods in the warehouses. Papa says that the politician Campbell-Bannerman’s family — drapers, of course — were the first firm to have fixed cash prices. But bartering sounds more fun!’

  Sandia nodded. What with gawping at the stiff poses in the photographic studios, and drawing Kirsten’s amused attention to an advertisement for an ‘electric and magnetic self-adjusting’ cure for practically any illness, including Indecision and Palpitations of the Heart, she was in a receptive, happy daze of enjoyment.

  But later, walking along Argyle Street, clinging desperately to Kirsten’s arm, she began to be less euphoric. Here were the really poor that Kirsten was always talking about, obtruding like sores on the city’s bustling, confident surface. Among the sharp-eyed, decent folk making one penny go the length of two, and the Saturday sports with money to burn, were the atrocious, scabby beggars, the barefoot, dirty children with runny eyes and noses, the quiet, waxen babies, carried like shrunken dolls in filthy shawls round the mothers’ bodies, and men so drunk and helpless they fell in heaps in the gutter, grimacing and groaning and sometimes passing into oblivious sleep.

  The noise was beginning to make her head ache when Kirsten suddenly dragged her off-course and into St Enoch Square, where a few people were struggling with packages towards the station that took passengers down the south-west coast to places like Girvan and Stranraer. In the cobbled street near the station, some soapbox orator was gathering a lively and fairly substantial crowd around him. Sandia had had enough. If Kirsten got interested in what this man was saying, they could be there for hours. And Sandia’s courage was on the ebb again, sapped by sore feet and the start of a throbbing headache.

  ‘Please, do let’s get the tram home, Kirsten,’ she begged, but her friend turned an upbraiding face towards her, saying, ‘Shh! It’s the reason I’ve come. I’ve heard him before — and he’s marvellous.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear him,’ Sandia protested, near to tears. Suddenly she was thinking longingly of the quiet life they had all lived at Greenock, before Papa became involved in ship refrigeration and they had had to move recently to Glasgow’s West End. She really was not up to Kirsten’s sophistication. And the rough, contentious types already shouting at the speaker, heckling him constantly made her fear for their safety. A number were Irish, she judged. You could tell by the wary stance they took up on the edge of the crowd. Maybe just arrived that day at the Broomielaw. Papa said they could come for fourpence now, from Belfast, and what with the Poles and Italians and Jews, and all those folk from the Western Isles, they were making Glasgow more like New York every day, Papa said. And he should know, for he’d sailed to New York many times, first sail-and-steam as a boy stowaway, but latterly in style in the big steel ships, at the captain’s wheel.

  A drably-dressed woman walked through the crowd, handing out pamphlets. Sandia took one silently and looked distractedly at the heading: ‘Dounhead Miners’ Union Asks For Your Support.’

  Below were several paragraphs setting out the grounds for the miners’ complaints against the coal-owners. They claimed that wages were being reduced and the men’s demand for controlled output and
stable wages ignored. The pamphlet called for strike action in the Lanarkshire coalfields, and the nationalization of the mines, the railways and land as well.

  Something filtered through Sandia’s agitated brain then, as she stood next to Kirsten in the heaving, shouting crowd, baptized now by a little light evening rain. The heading on the pamphlet said Dounhead. That could really mean only one thing. Her father’s family came from there and his half-brother Duncan Fleming was the agent for the Dounhead Miners’ Union. She looked again at the woman who had handed her the pamphlet and realized that she was, in fact, her Aunt Josie. The start of the rain and the fact that Sandia’s head had been drooping dispiritedly when the pamphlet was handed over had prevented each from recognizing the other. And the bearded man on the rostrum was her Uncle Duncan, categorized by her mother as an agitator but by her father as a good, unselfish man.

  She had met them both a short time ago at her little cousin Donald’s christening. That was what came of belonging to such a big family — you had uncles at either end of the social scale. The baby’s father was Lachie Balfour, one of the coal-owners Duncan was in the process of castigating. (It was only her redoubtable Grannie Kate who held them all together on occasions like the christening.)

  But it was her own position now that filled her with utter panic. If Duncan or Josie saw her, they would surely tell her parents. The delights of the tea-room and shop windows were forgotten as she tugged frantically at Kirsten’s arm. ‘That’s my uncle up there. We must go. I don’t feel well. Please, Kirsten. Please.’

  Her friend simply did not hear her. Her eyes were fastened on Duncan Fleming, her face straining to hear every word he said. He certainly had a compelling demagogic style, his right hand stabbing the points of his argument home, his left raised in exhortation, sometimes both arms held wide as though to embrace the motley horde before him. A dark-haired, thin-faced man, handsome as a poet.