Free The New Breadmakers by Margaret Thomson Davis Page A

mean about gloomy Sunday lunches. I’ve just come from one. My father is a regular church-goer and before every Sunday lunch, he murders Robert Burns’s ‘Selkirk Grace’. Sammy mimicked his father’s loud, coarse voice:

    ‘Some hae meat an’ cannae eat,
    An’ some nae meat that want it.
    But we hae meat,
    An’ we can eat,
    So let the Lord be thankit.’

    Julie laughed. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, he sounds pretty awful.’
    ‘I don’t mind you saying so because it’s the truth. He’s monstrously awful.’
    ‘I suppose you put up with your Sundays for the sake of your mother.’
    ‘Exactly. I’d never go near that place if it wasn’t for my mother.
    ‘You’ve brothers, haven’t you?’
    ‘Yes, but they got as far away as possible as quick as they could and I don’t blame them.’
    ‘Sometimes I’m tempted. To get away from Glasgow, I mean. But, apart from Mrs Vincent, I like living where I am. She tried to persuade me to move in with her. Can you imagine it? Me buried in that atmosphere all the time. I’d go stark raving bonkers. She still tries, you know.’
    ‘Oh, don’t, Julie. Enjoy life. Make the most of it.’
    After a minute, Julie said, ‘You’re a strange man, Sammy. A real puzzle. I’ve never known what to make of you.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Well, you belong to some religious sect like the McKechnies who live upstairs from Madge. But you don’t seem like them.’
    ‘I should hope not! I don’t belong to any religious sect.’
    ‘What is it you belong to then? Madge has told me but I’ve forgotten.’
    ‘The Society of Friends. Quakers.’
    ‘Isn’t it religious, then?’
    He shrugged. ‘Not in the way you imagine.’ He thought, as he often did, of the nearest thing to dogma the Society of Friends had. It was a list of what was called ‘Queries and Advices’. One came to him now: ‘Let your life speak.’ It was the one he found most difficult.
    He and Julie had to separate abruptly because Julie saw a tram car coming. ‘I’ll have to go. Nice talking to you, Sammy.’
    ‘And you,’ Sammy called after her. He stood for a minute watching the stylish figure in the calf-length tapered coat and flat, wide-brimmed hat race along to the tram stop, catch the pole and swing on to the tram like a seventeen-year-old girl. Yet she must be in her thirties or near enough. Unexpectedly, Sammy experienced a surge of loneliness. He was tempted to turn back and seek the noisy companionship of Alec’s place. With some difficulty, he controlled the urge. There surely must be a limit to Alec and Madge’s hospitality – for him anyway. He took advantage of their kindness far too often.
    Reaching Springburn Road and his close, he took the stairs two at a time, plunged his key into the lock, then was suddenly weighed down by the silence inside the house. He could have wept. He longed for his wife. He remembered with startling vividness her loving caress. It was as if it was only a few minutes ago they’d been entwined in each other’s arms before being wrenched apart. He felt the physical pain of it. Then the anger. Anger at the bomb that had killed her. Anger at the stupidity and the cruel waste of war. Rage at his father for epitomizing all that he hated about the military. It was men like him who refused to think, who only obeyed orders, who believed in force as the only method of solving any problem.
    ‘A good soldier isn’t paid to think,’ he used to bawl at Sammy and his brothers. ‘A good soldier obeys orders.’
    ‘I know what I’d do with all your bloody Quakers,’ he was in the habit of sneering now. ‘Put them up against a wall and shoot the lot of them, as we did in the First World War. Bloody cowards!’
    He knew nothing about Society of Friends, of course. Very few people did. That was the worst of not going around publicising oneself or trying to convert anyone. The fact was, right back from the time of Elizabeth Fry, members of the Society of