Weeds and Nettles

The feeling was grief, pure and simple. A devastating grief that was somewhere in the post: it hadn’t had a chance to express itself. She wasn’t even sure she was supposed to express emotions. No-one in Scotland ever spoke about ‘emotions’. Emotions were for toffs.

The night was darker than anything. Black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat, as Wullie would have said. She almost might as well have been blind, just putting one foot in front of the other and trusting there was terrra firma for the next footfall. Her poor Wullie had died not an hour before in that far-off hospital. Wullie her love. Her lovely man Willie. Wullie her husband. William and Mary. Wullie Michie was finally and irrefutably no more but he’d left a wife behind to walk crying through the bleak, blacked-out night.

There had been a scorch of tears at his bedside. Complications from his long-suffered gangrene picked up in the last war. Blighted in the first while fighting, fallen in the second while at personal peace. He one-legged, she bow-legged.

“Legs like Queen Anne chairs” Wullie would exclaim.

And now these little legs had to take her the long miles home.

The home without a husband. The home without a father.

If Mary could have articulated it thus, she would have said that grief was like hunger, a hunger forced to feed upon itself. And it was an entity so much bigger than her little frame as she walked lonely in the night and growing and growing with every painful step. How could she hope to encase it? It was bigger than her whole life. This is what she would find.

The thought of her four children – and strangely, the wee one who had died – and her abiding duty to them drove her on, the dank water lapping gently beside her. Wullie had so loved their children and they him. They had thought his wooden leg was a toy when they were younger. True poverty was having your father’s wooden leg as a toy.

Erskine was fifteen miles west of Glasgow and on the south bank of the Clyde. She’d have to walk this distance then cross on the Jamaica Bridge to trudge eastward a further two miles. This would surely take her all night but at least the dawn may light her way into the big city.

Wullie had been in Erskine because it was there they specialised in military amputees and where prosthetics were designed and made. They made them from leather and willow for lightness. A basket-type casing from thigh to knee then a wooden spar down to moulded shoe-shape. It was called an ‘Erskine leg’ and was designed by the craftsmen who made the luxury fittings on the passenger ships that had been built in the yards all up the dirty, deepened river. Wullie’s leg had been designed and built by Clyde ship-builders.

He made ‘ooh arr, Jim lad’ noises like Long John Silver to delight the children and hopped around after them in the tiny room and kitchen above the chippie. Sometimes the smells from the chip shop made them salivate and their stomachs rumble. The dusky ambience of sodium street-lights. The dank chill in the air. The breath of words at tram-stops.

A person’s absence was eternal. Everywhere you were and would be would be without them. Everywhere you are they are not and everything will always remind you of them. The strange paradox was that, though they were never there, they were also always there. This was how bleak grief was. How cruel.

She walked on, her back sore, her heart anesthetised for fear that she may collapse among these weeds and nettles. She had to think only of her progress home to her diminished family.

Way, way in the distance she saw a dull light which she took to be her city.