B&W, 2000, 237 p.
This is a sequel to Davis’s novel The Clydesiders, though it might as well not have been. The actual plot here does not require it. It could as easily have been anybody’s daughter who fled the house after her grandfather died in front of her when she had frozen at his fit and not fetched his medicine. As it is, Davis more or less uses it as a thread to tie this one to the first book in her trilogy.
Wincey (Winsome) is that much-loved daughter of Virginia and Richard Cartwright, whom everyone sees as close to her grandfather. Wincey knows his darker side though. When he takes that fatal fit she watches immobile as he dies, before fleeing off and taking the first tram she sees. She ends up crying on a street in Springburn where Florence Gourlay befriends her and takes her home – as an orphan otherwise destined for the workhouse. In a sense Wincey strikes lucky. The Gourlays – father Erchie, mother Teresa, eldest sister Charlotte, twins Euphemia and Bridget and Granny, Erchie’s mother, who gets all the best lines – are a friendly loving family and treat Wincey as one of their own.
It is the thirties though, and times are hard with Erchie unemployed. Salvation comes with the family’s sewing activities spearheaded by Charlotte but which, with Wincey’s help and Erchie’s knack for mending machines, is built up over the years into a successful business. Flies in the ointment are employee Malcy making up to Charlotte with an eye to the main chance and Wincey’s total aversion to men. She is cold even to Erchie, who has given her no reason to be. Very occasional chapters deal with the loss Virginia and Richard feel at Wincey’s disappearance, the strains it places on their marriage and their ongoing friendship with Virginia’s first husband James Mathieson, bound as they are by their socialist principles.
All this takes place in the shadow of the 1930s, the growth of Nazism in Germany and the shadow of forthcoming war. One bright spark is the Empire Exhibition of 1938 held in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park, the mention of which in the book’s blurb enticed me to buy it in the first place. Literally bright; the night time illuminations were famously spectacular. Though Davis has clearly researched it (she may even have attended the event,) the scenes at the Exhibition itself are a little cursory. Then again a lot of the book is. Relationships are sketched out, developments telescoped, the treatment rushed, the information dumping and drawing of background somewhat crude. Sometimes conversations are too obviously designed to provide the reader with explanations. Though probably true to life as it was then the female characters seem much too eager for Wincey to be married off given she’s still in her mid-to-late teens.
Davis has been described as Glasgow’s Catherine Cookson. I’ve not read any Cookson. And I won’t in the future.
Pedant’s corner:- Davis uses the term ‘abusing’ of Wincey’s grandfather’s treatment of her. That’s an anachronistic word for what was more likely known in the 1930s as molesting or interfering with.
Otherwise; “of the abdication King Edward VIII” (abdication of King Edward,) “‘Any digestives,’ Granny asked” (a question mark, not a comma, after ‘digestives’,) “hokey kokey” (hokey cokey,) an end quotation mark in the middle of a piece of direct speech. “‘For years they’ve been these camps’” (there’ve been,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “‘Did she do along with this story’” (go along.) “‘Hiding’ yer heid in the sand’” (Hiding, [or, Hidin’] yer heid.) “‘An aw wis right’” (An ah wis right,) “‘When’s she ever been a blether,” Granny wanted to know’” (a question mark, not a comma, after blether) “along side” (alongside,) “the Atlantic restaurant” (it’s a proper noun, so Atlantic Restaurant,) “‘You really do believe there’s going to a war, then’” (going to be a war.)
