When the Lights Come on Again Read Online Free Page B

own accord. The door of her room creaked. Cocooned in her sheets and heavy blankets, she looked up and saw her mother peering round it.
    ‘Come on, Lizzie,’ said Sadie MacMillan in an anxious whisper. ‘You know your father likes us all to have breakfast together.’
    Always what her father wanted. Liz bit back an angry retort.
    ‘Aye, Ma. I’ll be two ticks.’ She gestured towards her underwear, lying folded in a neat pile on the upright chair which stood against the wall. ‘Hand me those, would you? I’ll need to warm them up.’ She must be a better actress than she’d thought. Her mother’s face cleared a little. That was good.
    Clutching her underclothes, Liz suppressed a shriek as the smooth artificial silk of her petticoat made contact with her own warm skin. It had never been this cold in the old house in Radnor Street, where she had slept in the box bed in the warmth of the kitchen, listening to Eddie snoring on the hurly bed on the other side of the curtains.
    There, she’d had to perfect the art of putting her clothes on in bed for modesty’s sake. Here, she did it to prevent her skin breaking out into goosebumps as big as Ben Lomond.
    She knew her mother missed the old place, but to her father moving into Queen Victoria Row had been a great mark of achievement. Eddie, with his firebrand communist politics, was less happy about it. Their father was now one of the ‘bastards in bowlers’, the choice of hat as much a mark of status as anything else.
    His new position set them apart from a lot of the people they’d been friendly with before. As far as some of them were concerned, William MacMillan had now gone over to the enemy. That made life difficult for his wife. She was a shy woman, but she had known people up the road - had appreciated having her parents-in-law just down the stairs. Brought up in an orphanage after the early death of her own parents, she had been close to her in-laws, who had taken her to their hearts in a big way when their son had first brought her home.
    Now it was much more difficult and time-consuming for Sadie to visit Peter MacMillan. Because of the dispute between him and his son he wasn’t able to visit her at all.
    Performing the various contortions needed to get into her bra and knickers, Liz sighed. Her mother’s life wasn’t easy. For her sake she’d better go through there and play the dutiful daughter.
    Her father did not drink to excess. Nor was he a physically violent man. Liz couldn’t remember that he’d ever given her and Eddie so much as a smack when they’d been little: but he’d never hugged them either.
    To the best of Liz’s knowledge he’d never lifted a hand to her mother. He didn’t need to. He dominated his wife quite successfully by sheer force of personality, bullying and undermining her at every turn, belittling her whenever she had the rare temerity to contradict him.
    To Liz’s way of thinking that made him little better than the Tam Simpsons of this world - or the men who came home from the pub on a Friday and Saturday night and, in Eddie’s memorable if gruesome phrase, bounced their wives’ heads off the wall.
    Liz slipped into her place at the kitchen table and scowled at the handsomely framed print which hung on the wall opposite her. It was one of her father’s most prized possessions: Prince William of Orange crossing the Boyne in 1690 to defeat the Catholic army of King James.
    It’s all your fault, she silently told the bewigged monarch, resplendent on his white charger. One of the arguments her father had advanced against her going in for nursing was that she might end up having to care for Roman Catholics. Honestly, he was quite ridiculous!
    ‘Good morning, Elizabeth.’ He hadn’t lifted his head from his newspaper, and he had used her full name. She was still in the doghouse, then.
    ‘Good morning, Father,’ she replied. Had she ever really called him Daddy? And her father, despite his allegiance to the monarch his