The walls of the council houses were scribbled over by the children who ran in and out of the closes playing and shouting and quarrelling. Apart from the graffiti, the council houses would have been all right, she thought, but the children wouldn’t leave anything alone, and they were never looked after by their mothers who stood talking endlessly at bus stops, bought sweets for the family when they ought to buy sustaining food, and went about with scarves on their heads.
She herself was seventy years old. She didn’t go out much now. For one thing, there was the stair which was steep and narrow and not meant for an old person at all. For another, there weren’t many places she could go to. Of course, for a young person there were plenty of places, the cinema, the dance-hall, the skating rink and so on. But not for her. She did sometimes attend the church though she disapproved of it: the minister was a bit too radical, leaving too many things in the hands of women, and there was too much of this catering for young people with societies and groups. That wasn’t the job of the church. In any case, it should be left in the hands of the men.
She didn’t go to church very often in the winter. The fact was that it would be lonely coming home at night up that road with all these hooligans about. They would stab you as soon as look at you. You could see them hanging about at windows waiting to burgle the shops: a lot of that went on. She herself often put a chain on the door and wouldn’t open it till she found out who was behind it. Not that very many people called except the rent man, the insurance man (she was paying an insurance of two shillings a week, which would bury her when she passed on), the milkman, and, occasionally, the postman. She would get an airmail letter now and again from her sister in Canada telling her all about her daughters who were being married off one after the other. There were six, including Marian the eldest. Her sister would send her photographs of the weddings showing coarse-looking, winking Americans sitting around a table with a white cloth and loaded with drinks of all kinds, the bride standing there with the knife in her hand as she prepared to cut the multi-storey cake. The men looked like boxers and were always laughing.
In any case, it wasn’t easy for her to get down the stair now. Perhaps it would have been better if she had never come to the Lowlands, but then it was her son who had taken her out, and the house had been sold, and then he had got married and she was left alone. And it was pretty grim. Not that she idealised the Highlands either, don’t think that. People there would talk behind your back and let you down in all sorts of ways, and you couldn’t tell what they were thinking half the time. Out here they left you alone, perhaps too much alone. So far she hadn’t had any serious illness, which was lucky as she didn’t get on well with the neighbours who were young women of about thirty, all with platoons of children who looked like pieces of dirt, with thumbs in their mouths.
Most days she sat at the wide window watching the street below her. Off to the right, she could see the main road down which the great red buses careered at such terrifying speed, rocking from side to side. They would hardly stop for you. One of those days she would fall as she was boarding one. The conductors pressed the bell before you were hardly on, and the conductresses were even worse, very impudent if you said anything to them.
Down below on the road she could see the children playing. She couldn’t say that she was very fond of children after what had happened with her son: leaving her like that after what she had done for him. Not that some of the children weren’t nice. They would come to the door in their stiff staring masks at Hallowe’en, and she would give pennies to the politest amongst them. They were much more forward than the children at home and they had no nervousness. They would stand there and sing their songs, take their pennies and run downstairs again. Late at night, in summer, the boys and girls would be going past the houses singing and shouting; half drunk, she shouldn’t wonder. And their language. You could hear every word as plain as could be. And there were no policemen where they were. Not that the housing scheme she was in was the worst. There was another one where none of the tenants could do anything to their gardens because the others would tear them all up. You got some people these days!
Really, sometimes she thought that if she had enough money she would go back to the Highlands: but she didn’t have enough money, she had only the pension, and the fares were going up all the time. In any event, she wouldn’t recognise the Highlands now. She had heard that the people had changed and were just as bad as the Lowlanders. You even had to lock the door now, an unheard-of thing in the past. Why, in the past, you could go away anywhere you liked for weeks, leaving the door unlocked, and, when you came back, the house would be exactly as you had left it, apart from the dust, of course.
It was hard just the same, being on your own all the time. All you got nowadays was
