Read Crystal's Song for Free Online Page B

emphatic. Not a tear – just a quiet statement: “No. I’d know in here,” she said, patting her breast, “if anything bad had happened to my Tam. I just know, and don’t ask me why, but I do know he’s still …”
    “Alive, Granny?”
    “Aye, alive, Phyllis. Alive!” Mary emphasised, wiping the tears away from Phyllis’s cheek with her bare hand before kissing the girl fiercely on the forehead.
    Dinah persisted however. “My life’s over now. Wi’ Tam gone, I’d enter a nunnery if it wasn’t for the bairns.” Patsy nodded but wondered what the poor nuns had done to deserve that!
    On reaching Restalrig Circus, Johnny was the first of the children to burst into the house. “Johnny!” Etta whooped, leaping up from her seat by the fire to hug him.
    However, when Patsy came into the room, tugging a very tired Senga by the hand, things didn’t go quite as planned. “Where’s Dinah?” she asked, her eyes roving around the room.
    Etta shrugged. “Oh, Patsy. Her pal Eva came in and suggested, just to cheer her up, that they go up to the Palais in Fountainbridge.”
    “She’s away to the Palais dance hall and her man no cold in his grave?” screeched Patsy, before clamping her hand to her mouth in a vain attempt to take back the words.
    By now, Tess and Johnny had surrounded Patsy. “What d’ye mean … saying our Dad’s not cold in his grave?” sobbed Tess.
    “Well. Maybe he’s no,” Etta countered, in an effort to calm them all.
    “That’s right,” agreed Patsy, who tried to catch hold of Tess but was angrily rebuffed. “You see, all the telegram said was that he was missing – and that usually means …”
    “Presumed deid!” screamed Johnny. “I hate this bloody war. Us being treated like pigs and now Daddy being …”
    Silence fell in the room and no one noticed that Senga had slipped into the small bedroom and was now crying uncontrollably into a pillow.

5
    Mary Glass had just turned into Restalrig Circus when her ears were assailed by the sound of loud shrieks emanating from her daughter-in-law, Dinah, who was hurling verbal abuse at her mother Patsy. In addition to this, a radio was being played at full blast in the background. Thinking that the screams might be the result of disastrous news from the front about her son, Tam, Mary began to race towards the house. Once up the path, she noticed the living room windows were wide open and so, instead of going to the door, she stuck her head in at the first window and called out, “Is this a private war or can anyone join in?”
    “Och, it’s yourself, Mary,” Patsy responded. “Come away in and see if you can make this daft lassie of mine see some sense.”
    Much to Patsy’s astonishment, Mary made no attempt to withdraw her head. Instead, she simply pushed her body further in until she finally landed on all fours on the floor. “Noo, what’s this aw aboot?” demanded Mary, as she stood up and skipped over to kiss Phyllis.
    “It’s me,” yelled Dinah, “telling this … this interfering mother o’ mine that just because the Jerries are knocking hell out o’ London that’s no reason for my bairns to be sold back into slavery!”
    “Slavery?” queried Mary in some puzzlement.
    “They’ve been given the chance to be evacuated to a country estate where they’ll be safe and well looked after,” Patsy explained, lifting a letter from the mantelpiece and handing it to Mary.
    “Look, Mammy, the pasting everybody said we would get here hasnae happened, has it?”
    “That right? And what was the first place the Luftwaffe hit when this blinking war started?”
    Dinah laughed derisively before quipping, “Oot there in the Forth. And a right shambles that was. For two years we’d aw been practising on how, when the siren went, we were to get oursels into the Anderson shelters while putting on our gas masks. And when the raid did happen, the dopey air-raid wardens forgot to sound the alarm.”
    Mary bristled. “You blaming