Free On the Island by Iain Crichton Smith Page A

said, ‘Would you care for this one?’ And I danced with him. He was very light on his feet. When we lived in Glasgow we were in a tenement and we had good neighbours.” She stared dully out at the day which was turning cloudy and said, “I liked Glasgow. A lot of people don’t like Glasgow, they say it’s too big and dirty, but I liked it. We had very good neighbours. The people there are very warm-hearted. If anything happened to you the others helped you. I used to go to the shops on Sauchiehall Street. We didn’t have much money but I used to go and admire the shops. When your father had any money he would spend it right away. I used to tell him, ‘Keep some of your money for your old age,’ but he didn’t keep any of it.”
    â€œDid he have a lot of money then?”
    â€œNo, he didn’t. But what he had he spent. That was the way he was. I hope you’re not going to be like that. When you grow up and earn money you should put it in a bank, and that way you’ll never want.”
    â€œI want to be a sailor too,” said Iain who was looking at his picture book in which he could see a big schooner becalmed on a blue sea. “I want to go away and see the world.”
    His mother looked at him for a moment in silence and then said, “Is that what you want to do?”
    â€œBut I would take you with me,” said Iain earnestly.
    â€œWhat good would I be on a ship?” said his mother, laughing so that her face was transformed as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud. “What would I do on a ship?”
    â€œI would take you on a tour,” said Iain. “I would take you on a tour round the world.”
    â€œOne day he went out,” she said, “and he didn’t come back till night, and he’d brought some of his friends with him. He had met them in a pub, they were sailors, and they came from the island. He was very thoughtless that way because of his kind nature. And we didn’t have any food in the house. They stayed all night and one of them had to sleep on the floor in the same room as your father, because we didn’t have another room. I had no food at all and I was ashamed. But they didn’t need any food, all they did was drink and sing. They went away in the morning, the first time anyone left a house of mine without eating. You see, in my father’s time, when people came to the communions there was plenty of food. But we didn’t have any food that night. I remember it well because I was so ashamed and your father said to me, ‘Why didn’t you give them something to eat?’ He didn’t know that there wasn’t any food in the house. He never thought about things like that. That was why he was so popular. Come day, go day.”
    She had forgotten about Iain while she was talking and sat staring into the past as if she were gazing at a series of pictures in a book or on a moving screen and the pictures were so vivid that her eyes followed them intently as they passed in front of her eyes.
    â€œI wonder if he was in Hong Kong,” said Iain suddenly.
    â€œHong Kong?”
    â€œYes, it’s in China and there’s a picture of it here. It’s got a lot of shops and there are Chinamen there.”
    â€œI don’t know about that,” said his mother. “I don’t know about Hong Kong. Maybe he was. He was in a lot of places. He told me about a place where they left food for their dead people. That might have been Hong Kong. He was very alive, you see, your father. I wondered …”
    And again she clamped her lips together as if she had decided against saying something that she had intended to say. “It’s not a good thing when a man is away so long. But he said that that was where the money was. He didn’t like the gasworks. Sometimes on Saturdays we would go out into the country and we would visit Loch Lomond. He was quite happy there