Silver Linings Read Free Page A

we made for when he would come marching home victorious.’
    Sinking down on to the basket chair, Kate allowed her head to bend over and she cradled it in her hands. Rocking backwards and forwards, she now thought of that fateful day, 22 May 1915, when the 7th Royal Scots, Leith’s own Territorial Army, which Hugh had joined, set off for the front line. A train which they had boarded tragically ended up in a disastrous rail crash at Quintinshill, near Gretna. A simple error by a signalman led to the troop train colliding with a stationary passenger train. What was worse, before anyone could stop it, an express train from Glasgow bound for London ploughed into the wreckage, resulting in an uncontrollable fire. Between the collisions and the consequent inferno, 418 people were left either killed or injured.
    When news of the worst rail tragedy ever to happen in Britain filtered into Leith, Gladys Brown ran panicking to her friend, Jenny Anderson. Throwing open the Andersons’ door she screamed, ‘Jenny, Jenny, all our braw laddies hae been killed. And not, mark you, in the blinking war, but in a blasted train crash here in Scotland.’
    The noise of the slap that Jenny had made across Gladys’s face was still reverberating around the room when she pulled hysterical Gladys into a strong embrace. Holding her in her arms, Jenny looked towards Kate and whispered, ‘Dear God, Kate, it seems Hugh’s been killed. Quick, get Gladys a cup of hot sweet tea and lace it with a dram.’
    Kate did hear her mother’s request but the thought that Hugh might be dead riveted her to the spot. With fists so tightly clenched that her knuckles were white she thought back to only the night before, when she and Hugh had walked hand in hand through the Links. They talked and talked about nothing except their future together. Hugh vowed he would come back and then they would tell their families of their love for each other and they would marry. They had even spoken about emigrating to America. All the films they had seen in the Leith Picture House had inspired in them the belief that they could go out to the Land of the Free and make a go of it there. After all, Kate had argued with Hugh, hadn’t Dunfermline’s Andrew Carnegie gone from rags to riches in 1835, emigrating to America and becoming the richest man in the world when he sold the empire he had built up for $480 million in 1901? Buoyed up by Kate’s enthusiasm Hugh conceded, and readily agreed, that they would make it in America and they would not be greedy. Just one million would satisfy them. After all, who really would ever need more than that?

    All over Leith people were huddled together into whispering little groups. They were impatiently awaiting news of their loved ones. At the Leith 7th Battalion Royal Scots’ Drill Hall in Dalmeny Street, from where the lads had left earlier that day, lists of the names of the dead were eventually posted on the outside billboards.
    ‘Kate, you push yourself into the front of that rabble there and see what it says,’ her mother brusquely commanded.
    ‘Oh, Jenny,’ Gladys pleaded, ‘what will I do if it says … I mean, how will I break it to Dodd?’
    Jenny’s only response was to tuck Gladys’s arm firmly under her own.
    When ashen-faced Kate returned she inhaled two deep breaths before spluttering, ‘Oh, Mum, thankfully our Hugh’s name’s not on any of the lists.’
    ‘So it looks as if he’s okay?’ was her mother’s quick response.
    ‘He might be,’ Kate replied with less enthusiasm, ‘but the lad who posted the notices was also saying that the lists are not complete.’ Changing her tone Kate went on. ‘But, Mum,’ she almost sang, ‘he also said some, might be as many as fifty or even a hundred, have survived.’
    ‘That right?’ Gladys cried as she wrestled herself free from Jenny’s grip.
    Kate nodded. ‘And they will either continue their journey onwards or come back here, and then after a while, they will be