Spit Against the Wind

by Anna Smith

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

It's the long, hot summer of 1968. For ten-year-old Kathleen Slaven and her pals, the school holidays beckon. Into their run-down village in the west of Scotland arrives Tony, a real American kid, like the ones from the movies, ready to lead them into all kinds of adventure: gaining sweet revenge on their sadistic teacher Miss Grant on a trip to Ayr, discovering the unsettling secrets of 'Shaggy Island', and coming up with ways to outwit the people who screw up their lives - like the local parish priest Father Flynn. But the world they live in is a precarious one. And while they escape by playing at TV heroes and film stars, their mothers grow old before their time on broken promises, and fathers make a living in the coal mines or 'digging ditches, in the pissing rain', often boozing or gambling the wages away while their families go hungry. In an impoverished community, suffering and violence are never far from home. And even the optimism and escapism of their years cannot protect the children from the tragedies of life.

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 248

Sample

We could be anyone we wanted to in our dreams. We were cowboys, riding imaginary horses across grassy plains, clearing fences and firing guns from pointed fingers, then falling down clutching wounds that weren’t there. We could argue for hours over whose turn it was to be Blue Boy from the High Chaparral and who would be Manolito. We were the family from the Big Valley and I was Barbara Stanwyck, sitting side-saddle on the wall.

We spoke to each other in Yankee drawl, mimicking with near perfection our heroes from TV war films and westerns. We may have fought a war each day, rustled cattle or killed a few bandits. But in our secret little world there were no sad endings, no tears, no concepts.

In the real world there were psychopathic teachers who got some kind of twisted pleasure out of torturing and humiliating you. There were drunken fathers who blotted out squandered lives in smoky, stinking pubs with men just like them who never even glimpsed their day in the sun. And there were mothers who you could hear weeping in the night as they saw themselves growing old in a world of broken promises and disappointment. Oh yes, and there were the shadowy perverts lurking in lots of corners, in the guise of uncles, priests and family friends.

But in our dreams, in the far-flung places we escaped to, nobody could touch us. We were safe and innocent and pure.

All of that changed in the summer of ’68.

I fell in love as soon as I saw him. I was ten years old. He was eleven. He was digging a hole in the garden with a spade that was too big for his puny body. I watched him from the side of the road, his suntanned neck smooth and brown, soft little hairs wet with sweat in the hot sunny afternoon. He was new. We never had anybody new in our village. Everybody’s families had grown up together for generations and seemed to marry each other’s children again and again. We hardly ever saw anybody outside of the village, and now I was spellbound by this beautiful skinny kid with his sloppy joe and dirty blue jeans.

He looked up, straight at me, and my heart leapt.

‘What you lookin’ at?’ I could have sworn it was an American accent. I was even more in love now.

‘Nothin’,’ I said, standing my ground. He might have been beautiful but he was in my street and I had lived here for centuries. I stood where I was and kept watching.

To my amazement he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and shoved them towards me.

‘Smoke?’ he said, wiping his mouth and sticking a cigarette between his lips, just like one of James Cagney’s kids from Angels With Dirty Faces.

‘Naw, I stopped weeks ago,’ I said casually, trying to hide my shock.

‘Where’ye from? I’ve not seen you before. Have you just moved in here?’ I asked, moving closer to the fence so we were only two feet away from each other.

When he looked up at me he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, like pictures of the sky you see in calendars or magazines. His hair was soft and the colour of straw. He brushed his fringe away, then drew on the cigarette and blew perfect smoke rings. I was enthralled.

‘I’m from America. The States. I just came here with my mom. My dad was a pilot and got killed and she had to come home. She’s got another husband now. He’s Polish and he’s a asshole. He’s not my dad. Shit, I hate this place.’ He threw the spade away and spat, glancing at me for reaction.

I could have listened to him all day. It was like having someone from the movies right in your own street. I couldn’t wait to tell the boys. This was going to be something. A real American boy would be part of our gang. His accent wasn’t exactly Yankee like the way we saw it on the telly, but it was better than ours.

‘You want to come and play with us? We’ve got a gang, well kind of. There’s three of us – two boys and me – and we’re always hangin’ about together. We do loads of stuff.’ I was trying to sound casual, but I would have dropped dead there and then if he’d said no.

‘Sure … yeah … there’s nothin’ else for me around this shithole anyhow. I hate bein’ in the house with that Polack bastard.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the house.

‘Oh, by the way, my name’s Tony, Tony Keenan, after my real dad. What’s yours?’

‘Kath … it’s short for Kathleen … Slaven. Everybody calls me Kath.’ I felt my face go red as he looked me up and down.

We stared at each other in silence, and his lips moved to the slightest hint of a smile. We were friends. And I knew there and then that I would have done anything for him.

The moment was broken by the sound of a sharp rat-a-tat on the window of his house from the inside. I could see the figure of what must be his ‘mom’ beckoning him inside. She looked tired. Her hair was in a kind of bouffant and flicking out at the bottom like Millicent Martin, a singer who used to be on the telly on a Sunday night. His mum looked as if she could be quite glamorous. It must have been all that time in America, because nobody around here looked remotely glamorous, apart from the bus conductresses, but everybody knew what kind of dirty women they were, with their short skirts and musty smells.

‘I have to go, my dinner’s ready. Come for me tonight, in an hour, er … Kath?’ he said, looking over his shoulder as he walked away.

‘Yeah,’ I said, almost in an American accent.

I was walking on air.

*

Before I even got to the back door I could hear them shouting. There was always someone shouting or arguing in my house. Nobody ever just talked about happy things or how the day had been. It was always conflict and grunts and everything done and said with some kind of edge to it. Except of course when they were talking to me. I could do no wrong in their eyes. I was the youngest of the family, and arriving late, being six years younger than my older sister and eight years younger than my big brother, I was to be protected at all times. I don’t know how they came to that conclusion since I witnessed more fights and tears in that house than anything else. If it wasn’t a row over my father being drunk and abusive, it was my mother and my sister Ann Marie bickering over how little freedom she got. She was sixteen, sweet sixteen my dad used to say when he was drunk, and she wanted it all, everything in the world. There was no pleasing her. And if it wasn’t them it was my brother Kevin who was eighteen and all the man he would ever be, as he said, who would not be dictated to by a drunken father who spent every penny he got his hands on.

They were all screaming at each other when I put my head in the back door and I could hardly see them for smoke. I choked and started coughing. The place was black. Smoke clung to the walls. Even the holy water font with the Pope’s picture in 3D full colour was streaked with black.

‘Yer a bastardin’ eejit,’ Dad was shouting at Ann Marie, who was in tears, her black mascara running down her face. She had left the chip pan on while she was watching Crossroads and it was the smoke that wakened Dad, who had been sleeping off the afternoon’s drink.

Fortunately Kevin arrived in from work just in time to catch the chip pan as it burst into flames. And being the hero he was, he calmly soaked a towel and smothered the flames, killing the fire, but sending clouds of reek everywhere.

‘Right, just calm down. Nobody died … It was only a pan of chips, for God’s sake,’ Kevin was saying, gingerly lifting the chip pan away from the cooker and out of the back door.

‘We could have been roasted to death because your head’s fulla mince.’ Dad’s eyes were popping out of his head. His hands were shaking.

Just then the door opened again and in came my mother. She burst into tears straight away.

‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what’s happened? Who’s hurted?’ Her hands were waving in the air as she spun around the kitchen looking for casualties.

She clutched me to her and I could smell the damp fleshy smell she always had on her when she came back from her work in the frozen chicken factory.

‘Are ye all right? Oh my God, we could all have been killed,’ she was sobbing.

I always felt like crying when I saw her crying and I had to shut my eyes tight to keep the tears back.

I don’t know if she was crying because of the chip pan or if that just gave her an excuse to cry because of the hopelessness of everything around her. I used to lie awake at night and worry about the look in her eye sometimes. She was always so tired from getting up at five in the morning to work in that poxy chicken factory two miles away, where she was on the production line all day freezing to death, her fingers chilled to the bone and her feet raw cold inside the big black wellies she had to wear. Sometimes I used to go down to the main street in the village to meet her coming off her shift and I would watch as she and the rest of the factory workers, mostly women, piled off the bus, puffing their fags and gossiping great guns. The young girls were always having a laugh, but some of the older ones, like my mum, just looked weary and distant as they went their separate ways. But she always cheered up when she saw me, and sometimes she would even kiss me, which left me mortified in case anyone thought I was getting slobbered over. I had to walk fast to keep up with her and she never said much, but I knew she was always wondering what was waiting for her when she got home.

Nothing had turned out the way she had dreamed it would, or the way my dad had promised when they were young. It was just an existence, she said, not a life.

It was hard to imagine my mum and dad as young people like Ann Marie and Kevin when you looked at what they had become. She used to tell me stories about how it was great in the forties when all the young people from the villages around ours would walk for miles to get to a late-night dance in one of the local halls. She said she fell in love with Dad on the dance floor because of the way he looked in her eyes and held her. When he walked her home that night she knew they were meant for each other and that was how they stayed. But now it was all so different.

He drank and preached and ranted. She worked till she almost dropped, and tried to hide the debt and the grinding poverty from us. But we all knew. I could sometimes hear her crying during the night when she was pleading with him to help her and to stop getting drunk and stay in a job for a full month. But she adored him. And when he wasn’t arguing with her or insulting her she was putty in his hands. They were the best times, when I heard them in bed laughing and then making noises I didn’t understand. But at least they weren’t shouting.

*



Jamie and Dan came round for me and I was out of the house still swallowing my last mouthful of food. I couldn’t wait to tell them about the American. I told them he was just like the guys from the movies and that he swore. They couldn’t wait to meet him.

We all stood on the steps of Tony’s house and I knocked on the door. The boys were waiting with bated breath.

But when the door opened it wasn’t Tony, but a big dark-looking man with a mop of black hair and a huge nose. It must be the Polish man, I thought.

‘What do you want?’ His eyes narrowed and his voice was thick. He was like the bad guy in a lot of the movies I had seen, with his lips drawn back in a scowl and his rasping voice. I hadn’t met many real-life foreign people before, except for the missionary priests that came from Africa, where the black babies we paid for at school in class collections were praying for each and every one of us.

The Italians that had the chip shops and cafés in the town were all quite jolly people and spoke with funny Scottish accents mixed with Italian, and most people liked them, even though we called them Tallies.

But this Pole sounded dangerous. He scared me with his gruff voice and his big hands.

‘T … Tony? Is he coming out?’

He didn’t answer but looked all three of us up and down. Then he turned and bellowed in the direction of upstairs.

‘Tony? Tony! Geddown here. The’s friends here for you … c’mon.’

Tony came downstairs looking a little apprehensive, but I was pleased to see his face light up when he saw me. He quickly glanced at Jamie and Dan, who were smiling at the new celebrity.

‘Don’ be late, ya hear, or it’s big trouble for you, boy,’ the Pole said, slapping the back of Tony’s head a little too hard for my liking. I hated him straight away. He looked like a bully and Tony would have no chance if he ever answered him back.

Tony said nothing and jumped down the stairs to join us. We were out of the gate and into the street. We strode past the tight terraced houses where people sat on the front steps in the early evening sunshine. We were free.

‘Asshole,’ Tony said, jerking his head in the direction of the house.

I nodded to Jamie and Dan, who smiled approvingly. This guy even swore like an American.

‘Kath says your daddy was a pilot, Tony. That right? Was he in the war? Did he get blown up?’ Jamie asked as we walked towards the old railway line that led out of the village and into the countryside.

‘Yeah, he was a pilot and he was maybe in some war, I’m not sure. But he died just flying a plane and it crashed. That was when my mom came home because her brother used to live here years ago. Then she met that Polack bastard. He came here after the war … He’s no use. He’s a tailor with his own shop in town, but he’s a bad bastard. He hates me and I hate him.’ Tony lit up a cigarette and tossed away the match, aware that Jamie and Dan were gazing at him in awe.

‘So what do you do around here for fun?’ Tony asked.

We looked at each other, wondering how we could impress him. What could you say to a guy whose dad was a pilot and died in a plane crash and who was an American? We didn’t do anything. We never planned anything. We just went out of our houses because we couldn’t bear to be in them for any length of time. Outside we were free to make up stories and live out our fantasies.

‘We play football,’ Dan said. ‘And we swim in the burn, and make camps in the woods, and sometimes we steal turnips from the gardens. Oh, and we’re altar boys. Do you want to be an altar boy? You have to speak to Father Flynn, but I’m sure he’ll let you in.’

‘I wanted to be on the altar too,’ I said, not wanting to be left out. ‘But they don’t let girls in. Father Flynn said I could come to some of the altar boy meetings though, if I wanted … I might.’

‘I don’t know much about football, but I could do with a swim. Where’s the woods? That’s the stuff. An altar boy? Wow, Mom would love that, so would the Polack. He’s always praying and sitting with his hands joined, but he’s still a no-use bastard,’ Tony said.

How we really hated that Polack, we were all thinking. That Polack bastard. For if Tony hated him that was all that mattered. We were all one now, and I could see by the looks of Jamie and Dan that I wasn’t the only one who was in love with him.



St John Bosco’s Roman Catholic school stood at the top of the hill. It had been there for ever as far as I knew, because my dad used to tell stories about his grandad and others from the nearest village walking up to it in all weathers in their bare feet. It was the same with the chapel a few yards away from the school. People used to walk there in their bare feet too, and I was sure they must be in heaven by now if they made that much of an effort to go to mass. There was a story years and years ago, even before my dad was born, that one bad winter, when the village was covered in six feet of snow, a little boy of about seven who got lost in a blizzard was found dead the next day. They found him all stiff and blue in a snowdrift on the hill. People said that on a winter’s night if you listened carefully you could hear him crying in the wind. Sometimes in the snow on the way home from school I would stand at the top of the hill and look down into the greyness of the houses in the village all huddled together beneath a blanket of smoke from the coal fires that burned inside them. You could smell the smoke in the air and it felt good imagining everyone inside all warm and cosy. But if I was on my own I didn’t ever stand around too long in the snow, just in case I heard the lost boy crying.

Most of the people in the village were Catholics, and my dad told me their grandparents and great-grandparents had come over from Ireland to Lanarkshire on the boat looking for work down the mines and in the ironworks because the Protestants and English were starving them to death in Ireland and burning them from their homes. They came here, he said, for a better life, and I used to think that it must have been disappointing for a lot of people down the years to find out that this was what they crossed the sea for. He said we were Irish as well as Scottish and we had never to forget that, but I couldn’t quite understand why he got so excited about it, especially when he was drunk and singing songs about Black and Tan soldiers. It was all too complicated, but as long as you knew what you were you were sound enough.

The Protestants had their own school at the edge of the village, but there weren’t so many of them, and we were led to believe their school was smaller because they weren’t so important. We even felt sorry for them because they would never go to heaven like us, no matter how good they were. I supposed a lot of them might end up in Limbo like the Catholic babies who died before they were baptized to get rid of the original sin, but they would never be up there with us and God and the angels and saints. I couldn’t quite understand that but it was just the way things were. I felt sorry for my Protestant friends, though, who I used to play with in our street, because they just didn’t know any better.

I also used to wonder why the teachers just wanted to punch and slap people all day long. Most of them looked ancient and there were one or two it was hard to work out whether they were men or women. They had moustaches and slicked-back hair and they smelled of mothballs and tobacco. I was three months in one class before I learned that the man teaching us was actually a woman.

But nobody terrified us more than Miss Grant. I had seen movies before with people like her in them and they were always in asylums or locked up somewhere. She haunted me in my dreams and made my stomach churn every time she looked at me with her slightly wall eyes under her butterfly glasses. Sometimes when she looked at you you thought it was the person behind, and if you turned around you might just feel the wooden duster hit you on the side of the head. For impertinence.

Tony had been put in our class although he was a year older. Jamie, Dan and me reckoned that it was because he knew more than us and we would learn from him. We used to ‘reckon’ a lot lately and we used to say ‘I guess’ a lot, just little Americanisms we were picking up from our new friend.

Tony was only in the class about four days when he got his eyes opened to daily life under the regime of Miss Grant.

She had gone out of the classroom for some reason and we immediately started carrying on. Someone rolled up lots of paper and made a reasonable-size ball which we started throwing around the room and punching like a volleyball. In minutes the whole class was up, diving across desks and hooting with laughter. It was great fun. Tony was brilliant at punching the ball and could jump higher than anybody else.

We were so wrapped up, we didn’t even hear Miss Grant come in until she slammed the door shut, nearly shattering the glass. We stopped in our tracks.

‘Rrrr … right! Quiet!’ She was screeching, her mad eyes bulging behind her specs. ‘Rrr … right! Who started this? Come out, the culprit, and take your punishment, you dirty . . .