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  There was a genuine note of affection in Lachie’s voice. ‘I think it’s a shame, brother-in-law, that you never got away from the Dounhead muck-heap. You’re the only civilizing influence in this parish. I wish you’d talk the men out of this strike. The masters have agreed a hard line is necessary. No matter how long it lasts, you can’t win. Go back to your men and tell them that. Make sure they understand it.’

  Duncan made a quick, almost dancing movement towards him, and although Lachie ducked away, he dragged him by the shoulders to the office window.

  ‘See that end house there? In the third Row? Poor wee light, isn’t it? They don’t run much to candles or paraffin. Willie Macarthur lives there, with Jessie and their bairns. How many? Too many, probably. But they do their best for them. On a pound a week.’

  He looked into Lachie’s face and grinned without pleasure. ‘Go back to your fellow masters and tell them Willie Macarthur is striking for a stable wage. Willie Macarthur wants to nationalize the pits. Willie Macarthur thinks he’s going to win. Make sure they understand that.’

  *

  ‘Why can’t I go to Dounhead?’ Kirsten persisted.

  Her father sipped appreciatively at the hot barley broth in front of him, making little smacking noises with his lips. ‘This is good,’ he told his wife. ‘A fine, strong flavour.’

  ‘Why, Father?’

  Dr Mackenzie turned his deceptively mild blue eyes in Kirsten’s direction.

  ‘Because I’ve said so.’

  ‘But that is no reason at all. That is totally without logic. You can’t bring me up to think for myself and then turn round and dictate to me —’

  ‘I fear you have an inflated and romantic notion of what a coal strike is all about —’

  ‘He is merely pointing out, dear,’ said Mrs Mackenzie, ‘that you know nothing of the hardships out there. Tempers can be inflamed when a strike breaks out. They may even call in the Hussars. There’ll be fights and drunkenness.’

  ‘Father only pays lip-service to the notion that women should be emancipated,’ argued Kirsten. ‘What if I decided I wanted to be a missionary? I have thought about it, you know. Would you let me go to Africa?’

  ‘The case does not arise.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop me. It would make a mockery of all your Christian beliefs. In what way are the poor of Dounhead different from the African natives?’

  ‘And in what way are you fitted to help either?’

  ‘I can run a soup kitchen.’ Despite herself, Kirsten’s eyes filled with tears of aggravation. ‘I should be working with Sandia’s aunt and uncle. They are good people.’

  ‘We only have your word for it. We have not met them.’

  Kirsten got up and put her arms around her father’s neck.

  ‘Please. Let me go. I want to live my life.’

  He gazed into that soft, unmoulded, intelligent face. He had always held that the female intellect had been too much subsumed by the domestic and trivial, but all sorts of fatherly and protective instincts rose in him now, wanting to guard this beloved sprig from the hurts of the world. It was no help at all that she merely wished to carry out his own theories.

  Made angry by his fear for her, he said, ‘You’ll get no blessing from me if you go.’

  She patted his greying hair. ‘I’m going, just the same.’

  An hour later Kirsten took the horse tram to the Central Station. She was calm and had managed to put her father’s anger behind her. Strangely, it had been her mother who had reassured her, with a kiss and the quiet declaration that she would be all right so long as she remembered her Bible and common sense.

  In the tram she sat next to a grubby child with bare feet and a tear-stained, dirty face. The child drew her tattered, smelly rags towards herself, not to contaminate the lady.

  ‘Don’t you go to school?’ Kirsten asked her gently.

  ‘I work. I wind bobbins,’ replied the girL ‘But I’m not working today for I’m going to see my mother in the infirmary.’

  Further questioning elicited that the mother had probably been carved up in a street brawl. Kirsten gave the child a shilling. She was symptomatic of everything that was wrong with Glasgow — the casual brutality, squalid slums, child exploitation in the sweat shops. Yet symptomatic of its tough spirit, too, as she got off the tram ahead of Kirsten and ran off, spinning the coin joyfully through the air.

  It was Josie who opened the door to Kirsten when she at last reached the cottage in the Dounhead Rows. A hot and dusty Josie, engaged in cleaning out the coal range, whose eyes widened at the sight of the neat, blue-clad figure on the doorstep, bearing a carpet-bag and asking in a clear, well-modulated voice if she were Mrs Fleming.

  ‘I am,’ said Josie shortly. ‘What’s your business, Mistress?’

  ‘Miss,’ Kirsten corrected her. ‘Miss Kirsten Mackenzie.’ She held out her hand. ‘Your husband said I could visit you. I want to help —’

  ‘So it’s you?’ Duncan appeared in his shirt-sleeves behind Josie, a pen stuck behind one ear and his hair on end. ‘Come in, lass.’ He turned to Josie and explained. ‘She’s from Glasgow. Wants female suffrage, same as you.’ He grinned, not put out by Josie’s accusatory stare. ‘I told her we could show her what politics are all about.’ Now the grin was turned on Kirsten. ‘I never thought you’d have the nerve to come.’

  Kirsten looked round the kitchen with a curiosity not untinged with revulsion. The table was piled with unwashed crockery and scraps of food left over from meals, except for one clear corner where Duncan had obviously been working on a speech. In a wooden cradle near the recessed bed, a baby was stirring from sleep. Baby and other garments littered the chairs, while a dusty sideboard held an amazing clutter of magazines, books, papers, china and food.

  ‘You could stir it with a spurtle,’ Duncan admitted cheerfully. ‘Josie whisks round once a week with a broom. If she has the time.’

  The baby, Carlie, let out an ear-splitting scream, and Josie picked her up and nursed her as the visitor took a hastily-cleared chair on the opposite side of the table from Duncan.

  ‘Well,’ said Kirsten nervously. ‘Here I am. What can I do to help?’

  Josie half-turned away from her and put the baby to the breast. At fourteen months, Carlie would have been weaned but for an attack of measles.

  ‘I’m still not clear what brings you here,’ Josie said ungraciously.

  ‘This is the lass who was with Sandia,’ said Duncan. ‘She wants to see for herself why pitmen in Lanarkshire are talking about a strike.’ He smiled at Kirsten a shade uncomfortably.

  ‘What is it to her?’

  ‘I want to help,’ Kirsten intervened. ‘I’m tired of being the sort of Christian who never gets her hands dirty, Mrs Fleming. I want to get involved in politics. But maybe you think women have no right to put their noses in.’

  ‘I never said that,’ said Josie sharply. ‘My man will tell you I’m a believer in women’s rights.’

  Kirsten beamed at her. ‘Then we can be friends.’

  Josie sniffed. ‘You’d have been better to stay in Glasgow. The Rows are no place for the likes of you.’

  ‘I can think of no better.’

  ‘The Rows are not your fancy West End drawing-room, where you can discuss the poor with your pinkie held out over your cups of China tea.’

  Duncan laughed to soften the harshness of Josie’s words.

  ‘How old is the baby?’ asked Kirsten, ignoring the jibe. Carlie gave up her feed and turned an interested gaze on the newcomer.

  ‘Fourteen months.’

  ‘Would she come to me, do you think?’

  ‘No,’ answered Josie triumphantly. ‘She’s just had the measles, and she’s grizzly.’ She hugged the baby possessively, watching Duncan with a certain smirking irony as he tried unsuccessfully to tidy the table.

  ‘You must be tired from nursing her,’ said Kirsten sympathetically. She rose and competently cleared the table, piling up the crockery for washi
ng. She took off her braided jacket and removed her hat, taking a little blue feather from it to amuse the baby.

  To Josie she said intently, ‘You have made my point for me. It’s time I got away from the talk and involved with deeds. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Just so long as you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said Kirsten relievedly. She added, ‘If I can have something with which to cover my skirt, I can tidy up.’ Josie pointed to a piece of rough sacking behind the door, her look indicating that if Kirsten were soft enough to get her hands dirty, she was welcome to get on with it. While Josie nursed the whimpering baby and Duncan tried again with his speech, Kirsten systematically swept and dusted and in an hour had transformed the room. By then, Josie had nodded off before the fire, loss of sleep from the baby’s illness finally catching up with her.

  Kirsten was acutely aware of Duncan, even though he wrote steadily without raising his head. At last he threw down his pen and gave her a long, considering look. She felt her clean, well-made clothes and the memory of her comfortable, well-run home like an affront, at that moment.

  ‘I’m glad I came,’ she asserted, almost as though he’d asked the question.

  She made some tea, poured it into freshly-washed cups and produced some tea-bread from her bag to go with it. She felt the urge to scratch under the waistband of her skirt. Still, what were a few flea-bites? She was well and truly launched on the long road ahead.

  *

  Duncan hurried through the gate at his mother’s grey-stone cottage, sending the silly hens scurrying through the cabbages in a squawking crescendo of panic. Kate’s face was at the parlour window, peering a little short-sightedly to see who was coming.

  She fancies she looks like Queen Victoria in that little lace cap, her son thought indulgently. She was tranquil in her widowhood, tending her hens and her garden. When he remembered the hard times in the Rows, the periods of his father’s drinking, he was glad for her.

  ‘Maw, I can’t stop. There’s a strike meeting in Summerton’s Field.’ He kissed her hastily. ‘I want a favour of you. Can you put up a visitor from Glasgow, a very respectable young woman? She’d be no trouble at all to you.’

  Kate had given sleeping accommodation in the past to Duncan’s political friends, trade union leaders, co-operative members, and once, even, a Member of Parliament. But a woman was something new.

  She looked closely at her son’s expression, but it registered nothing but a slight impatience.

  ‘What sort of a young woman?’

  ‘A professor’s daughter, sympathetic to the cause. Now this strike’s dragged on, she wants to help Josie run the soup kitchen. She’s a born organizer —’

  ‘All right, she can come,’ Kate agreed. ‘Are you putting up someone else in your own front room?’

  ‘Might be,’ said Duncan evasively. Realizing, as always, that there was no point in telling his mother less than the truth, he admitted, ‘She and Josie get on well enough. But they are two strong wills —’

  ‘Say no more,’ beamed Kate. She quite liked the sound of the professor’s daughter.

  Duncan set off at a run for Summerton’s Field, which was in fact little more than a rough piece of stony ground which the local farmer had allowed to pass by default into public use. It was near the river and a favourite spot for children to go paddling, swimming or guddling for baggy-minnows in the summer.

  Keir Hardie had promised to make a fleeting visit to rally the strikers. He was running into trouble at the Hamilton pits, mainly because he appeared to have dug too deeply into union funds, but he would still be a draw here. It seemed to Duncan that the entire population of the Rows had turned up, and half the remaining village as well.

  He struggled panting towards the co-operative float that was to be the platform and on which stood a harmonium which Josie had spirited away from the new co-operative hall. Kirsten was seated before the harmonium, playing soft chords and harmonies that floated out over the summer air. It could have been a gala, a festival, and the children seemed to be treating it as such, playing games among themselves. But the women hugging shawls and gossiping were drawn-faced and anxious. The strike was into its fourth week and they had been serving up tatties for dinner long enough. No wonder they called it the Tattie Strike! Although they had been away from the coal-face for a month, the men still wore lines of coal-dust round their eyes and on their hands.

  Duncan gathered up the attention of the crowd.

  ‘Brothers and sisters, let us sing together.’ He and Josie and Kirsten had agonized over the choice of hymns, wanting them to be as broad-based and near-secular as possible.

  With Kirsten pounding away at the harmonium, it was impossible for the crowd not to join in. After the first hymn, Josie dragged a young miner with a fine voice up on to the platform to sing ‘Jerusalem’. Even the children stopped playing to listen to him. Duncan looked around the daisy-strewn field, at the scarecrow, raggedy crowd that inhabited it. The contrast between nature’s graces and human deprivation choked the words in his throat.

  ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he began his speech, ‘we are not giving in, are we? We are hungry. We have nothing to put in our cooking-pots. No coal for our fires. No boots for our children. But we are not giving in, are we?

  ‘We know if we give in, one day it will all have to start again. Unity now means a stable wage. It means the eight-hour shift is coming nearer —’

  Down the edge of the field to a mixture of cheers and catcalls came Keir Hardie, the young miners’ leader from Hamilton who, some said, was going to end up in Parliament.

  He disappeared when he had made his speech, and it was Josie who now took over, giving out details about the free soup and clothing which she and Kirsten had been organizing.

  Suddenly Duncan became aware of a disturbance at the far end of the field. Ribald shouts and jeers went up from the men as Lachie, with Tansy by his side, rode his gig to the edge of the crowd and stood up in it. The crowd rapidly surrounded him and Duncan had no option but to join them, with Josie and Kirsten.

  ‘— no victimization … strike has gone on long enough … wives and children who suffer …’ Duncan could only catch part of Lachie’s words. But his bold intention was clear enough. And Tansy sat up there, straight-backed and grave of face, in a yellow dress, giving him her tacit support.

  Somebody picked up a turf and threw it. It sailed over the little horse’s head and landed on Tansy’s lap, sending scurries of dried mud down the beautiful frock. It was followed by another, and another. The horse showed the whites of its eyes, rearing up in terror and alarm. Grim-faced, Lachie gave up the battle, took up the reins and forced his way back out of the field. Children followed the gig a short way down the road, more from mischief than malice.

  Ivy Thompson, one of the more voluble wives from the Rows, turned from shouting insults after Lachie to confront Duncan and his party.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ she demanded, jerking her head in the direction of the departing Tansy. ‘She needn’t put on her airs and graces with us. We know she’s from the Rows.’

  ‘I can remember her when she had snotters at her nose,’ cried a woman called Nettie Boyle spitefully.

  ‘And a bare backside,’ said another.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Nettie Boyle to Duncan, ‘she sees that you lot are all right for meat and victuals.’

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ said Duncan quietly.

  The woman shook a skinny fist in his face. ‘Get away home! We’ve had enough of you and your damned Hardies. Get the men back to work!’

  Duncan said in the same quiet, reasonable voice, ‘Are you running out of victuals at home, Nettie?’

  There was no colour in her distraught face. Two lanky, greasy strands of hair framed it and skimpy tears ran down it, almost as though they, too, had run out of supply.

  ‘We’ve got nothing. We’ve got nowhere to turn.’

  ‘I’ll see Josie b
rings you down something tonight,’ he promised. Nettie wiped the tears away with the end of her shawl. Trailing out of the field, her children followed her like so many tattered, dispirited ducklings.

  Josie and Kirsten were quiet all the way home. Josie had retrieved Carlie from under a hedge where she had been sleeping, and Duncan carried the still unconscious infant slung over one shoulder, like a plaid.

  ‘So that was Keir Hardie?’ said Kirsten at last.

  ‘At least,’ said Josie, ‘he spared us the story of the Glasgow baker.’

  ‘What story was that?’

  ‘About working for a baker when he was nine and getting the sack and a fortnight’s wages cancelled because he was a few minutes late. He was frightened to go home. All he had as he wandered about in the rain for hours was a morning roll he had stuck down inside his semmit.

  ‘When he did get home, his mother had had another bairn and the starving family shared the roll.’

  ‘What a terrible story!’ said Kirsten, stone-faced.

  ‘I know, I know,’ confessed Josie. ‘It’s just that I’ve heard it all before, and we could all produce tales to match it.’

  ‘Josie,’ said Kirsten sternly, ‘I believe you have the makings of a cynic. Did you not think his reference to the men working “seventy fathoms from the daisies” very moving and poetic?’

  ‘No. I’ll stick to empty bellies and bare feet,’ said Josie. ‘That’s moving enough for me. Hardie’s brought the men out, but Hardie’ll not fill their weans’ stomachs. It’s the wives who have to do that.’

  ‘But Duncan is behind the strike, too.’

  ‘Aye, well, Duncan’s not always right,’ said Josie, with an enigmatic glance at her husband. ‘Men get carried away by their principles. I think the iron-masters and coal-owners can break this strike, for they can still get blacklegs to work for them regardless.’

  They had reached the cottage in the Rows and Josie took the baby from Duncan and laid her in her cradle, while Duncan stirred the fire to life and Kirsten took the kettle outside to the pump to fill it.