by Isla Blair
It was dark and Fiona and I were fast asleep when our parents came in with much excitement and said to put on our dressing gowns and slippers as the volcano Stromboli was erupting and it was the most amazing sight that we just had to see. Indeed, it was – rivers of hot red lava poured down the side of the mountain and there was a rumbling, hissing sort of noise. People took out binoculars, others took photos, but I had something much more important to concern myself with. My brown hare with a blue tummy and lollopy ears had gone blind. His eyes failed to light up however hard I pressed his tummy. It was dreadful. A blind hare who would never see Stromboli or me ever again. I still liked him though and took him back to bed to comfort him.
The nights got cooler and the days grew longer and soon we were steaming our sedate way into Tilbury Docks. This, then, was “Home”.
THREE
A Postie in Auchtermuchty
It seemed strange and all wrong somehow. The sounds and the smells were alien; there were no turbaned heads and betel nut smiles. There were no limes or marigolds, no mangoes, no crows caw-cawing; it was noisy though on the quayside, full of men in collarless shirts and black waistcoats, with flat caps on their heads. Some wore brown overalls and shouted a lot. So this was “Home” so talked about, so planned, so packed for, argued and dreamt about – I did not understand it at all; it was grey and wet and smelt of cigarettes, but not the familiar beedees, and damp raincoats, towels that hadn’t been dried properly and a smoky smell that wasn’t wood – but, according to Daddy, was coal.
All the big black steel trunks that were “not wanted on voyage” were being sent straight up to Scotland where they would be stored by my mother’s parents until we were ready for them. We made our way down the gangplank with our suitcases, my mother’s hat boxes and beauty case, coats, over our arms and made our way to the train that would take us to London and the promised “marshmallow” beds of the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch.
We spent four or five days in London, going to see all the things strangers to London should see: Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London with its forbidding traitor’s gate and beady-eyed ravens. The crown jewels didn’t impress me as much as they ought – the jewels certainly sparkled, but I thought the crown was spoilt by the wodge of purple velvet in the middle of it. We walked up the Mall and into St. James’s Park. We walked to the Albert Memorial and saw Peter Pan’s statue in Kensington Gardens.
By far the most exciting thing we did was to visit a real theatre – the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane; Kiss Me Kate was playing and this was my first time in a theatre. It was hard to take in the enormity of the auditorium. Its huge chandeliers sparkled as they hung from the painted ceiling and all the way round there were boxes with people holding opera glasses, chatting and laughing, just as excited as we were. The seats were made of velvet; Daddy rolled up his raincoat for me to sit on, to make me taller.
The orchestra played all jangle-y music and my mother said this was “tuning up.” Then the lights went down and the orchestra played properly for a bit and slowly – very, very slowly – the velvet curtain was raised and I gasped with the wonder of it, as people in beautiful costumes sang and danced and seemed to be doing it all just for me. I think I metaphorically held my breath throughout the whole performance and my parents said I didn’t move at all. I declared on the way back to the hotel that I was going to do that. I was going to sing and dance and bang cups on the table and sing “I Hate Men.” I asked if I could go and see it all over again the next day, but apparently there were other plans.
The drizzle of London tired me out more than the heat of Cochin. It was like looking at everything through a veil that wet my fringe and eyelashes. Standing on the red road outside our bungalow in the High Range in a monsoon downpour was like standing under a waterfall. Here in London the drizzle was like being spat at by my cat Mingo. Ah! Mingo. I wondered where she was. Padding her sleek black way through the jungle; I wished I was with her.
We hired a small Austin car and drove north to Scotland, being saluted on the way by AA men when they saw the badge on the front of our car. On our way to Blairgowrie, where Daddy’s mother Granny Sara lived, we visited Edinburgh and we saw the Castle, the Flower Clock and soldiers marching to bagpipes and drums at the famous Edinburgh Tattoo.
The Tattoo was spectacular. We sat with rugs over our laps and sticks of Edinburgh rock and the chilly East wind ruffled our hair. There was lots of marching, but my favourite bit was when a man appeared at the top of the castle all on his own in a spotlight and played a sad lament that echoed across the parade ground. It was very quiet, apart from the piper, and the sound pricked my eyes and gave me an ache in my throat.
Going north the Forth Bridge was rather a disappointment; I hadn’t expected it to be a sort of rusty brown.
We got our uniforms from Forsyths, everything a little bit too big so we would grow into them. We put our kilts on (my tartan was Stewart, Fiona’s – I think – was Gordon) and we had to kneel on the floor to get the measurements right. I rather liked our gym slips and skirts and blouses and jumpers, but the pants or bloomers made Fiona and me laugh, for they were huge, like those Tudor pants men wore in Fiona’s book about Elizabeth I. I didn’t understand why we needed Liberty Bodices with their rubber buttons. Mummy said we’d understand when the winter came. Winter was a concept neither Fiona nor I could grasp.
For a while we stayed at Loon Brae the house our father’s mother, Granny Sara, shared with her sister Ann. It was nice being tucked up by our parents under slippery eiderdowns (we never had those in India – just starched sheets and thick cotton covers and in the monsoon months we’d have a blanket). They would read us stories and I would twiddle my hair and suck my thumb.
I had a hollow feeling inside me though, because I wanted Ayah so much – but I didn’t say so, in case Mummy thought she wasn’t enough. I wanted Ayah to stroke my back and call me her Missy Baba Isla; I wanted her to kiss my eyelids to make me go to sleep and I wanted to smell her coconut hair oil. I knew she was not coming “home” with us, but next morning I decided to speak to Daddy.
“I know that Ayah is staying behind in India, but I think she’d like to be with us – so will you send for her? I need her to be here and so does Fiona.” Mummy was, after all our mother and we didn’t love her less because we loved Ayah, we just loved Ayah too.
Daddy sat me on his lap and looked straight into my eyes like he did when he had something important to say.
“Isla, you and Fiona are big girls now and you don’t need Ayah anymore. You are going to school here in Scotland and Ayah wouldn’t like it here. Besides, she has gone to a new family.”
“But she’s ours! She’s our Ayah. How can she have gone to another family? Which family? She belongs to OUR family.”
“She’s gone to Nicholas and Catherine Cook, you remember them, and their new baby boy.”
Nicholas Cook had eyes so bulgy I thought they would fall out of his head one day. I’d never noticed the new baby, only that it was small and purplish with a fuzz of ginger hair. I felt a surge of jealousy for this child.
“I’m sorry Isla, I thought you knew. We can visit her next time you come out to India.”
“Yes, but she’ll have forgotten all about me. She’ll be too busy with her ginger baby.”
I got off his knee and went to the bedroom I shared with Fiona. I took out my butterfly wing box. Inside the marigold was going a bit brown and it smelt a bit funny. I closed the lid and looked at the man and woman silhouetted against the blue. I had a pain in my chest from missing Ayah and it was made worse by the feeling, however unjust, that she had somehow betrayed me, us. I know she had said she wasn’t coming but I wondered, in that self-oriented way children have, how could she possibly exist without us; her world would end. Instead, my world had changed – it was an empty, Ayah-less world.
I went to find Fiona and she told me she knew Ayah had gone to the Cooks. So everyone had known but me – I felt shut out because I wasn’t ol
d enough to be trusted with the truth. They thought I’d be upset and angry and… Well, they were right. I was angry and upset, so they knew more about me than I did. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to push away the walls and run from the garden. I didn’t though. I walked around it some more, kicking at the leaves when, through the kitchen window, I heard Granny Sara talking to her cat in a straight, conversational sort of way, as if he were a person. “And where are you off to today my darling? Don’t get shut in the summer house again. I will see you later. Perhaps we can have a nap together after lunch; we’ll draw the curtains.” I liked the way she spoke to him. He was called Watson and he had a silver moustache.
I sought her out. She was in the kitchen making fudge, or “tablet” as they called it in Scotland. She said I could stir the pan very slowly but I had to be careful – if any of it splashed on me, it was so hot and sticky that it wouldn’t come off and would burn right down to my bones. The skin on Granny Sara’s arm was so thin I could see the little blue veins and the pulse in her wrist go beat, beat, beat, almost popping out. I asked if I could put my hand over her beating pulse. It felt like a tiny fluttering bird trying to escape. I swiftly took my hand away.
“Yes darling. When that stops, I stop.”
“What is it?”
“It’s where my heart beat sort of echoes in my wrist, that’s all. My heart beating. Let’s find yours.” She put her hand over my wrist and neither of us could feel the beat.
“I think it’s stopped. Perhaps I’m going to die.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Isla. Of course you’re not. It’s here somewhere. Ah, yes. Here it is, put your fingers here.”
I liked Granny Sara. She was quiet and would move slowly in a calm sort of a way. And she had a lovely laugh, not a polite way of laughing but laughing as if she really found things funny. At tea time she would bring in a tray and a three-tiered cake stand with little cakes set in paper cups; my favourites were the cornflakes in chocolate. I was a little afraid of Aunt Ann, Granny Sara’s sister. She wasn’t pretty like Granny Sara and she was always telling us to sit up straight, in a cross sounding voice.
One evening Granny asked me to take up some tea to Aunt Ann without spilling it. I knocked on her door and when I was told to come in I found Aunt Ann wrapped in a shawl sitting in a chair with her teeth in a glass beside her. She had a jug of wine on the floor with a hot poker sticking out of it. She said the wine was “to keep the cold out.” She sounded slurry when she said it, perhaps because she was toothless. I put the teacup and saucer on the table and made for the door.
“Thank you, dear,” said Aunt Ann. I turned to look at her and she had put her teeth back in.
We woke up to a watery sun and very soft rain that Daddy called Scotch mist. It was so fine you could hardly see it and, although it wet your hair and your clothes, you couldn’t open your mouth and swallow it like you could with the monsoon rain.
At the back of the house and up a steep path in the garden was a small summer house where Aunt Ann would nap in the afternoons. There was a folded up rug on the long chair and a lantern that I suppose she used to read by. The little room smelt of paraffin and peppermints and of damp, as if the rain had slid in under the door and sogged into the wooden floor boards. But it was a nice room, warm and cosy. Outside there was half a coconut shell and little strips of bacon on a string; this was what Granny Sara fed the birds, birds we had never seen before – blue tits who ate upside down on the coconut shell and sparrows, speckled thrushes that sang so sweetly and, our favourites, the robins who sometimes came and sat right beside you and looked you straight in the eye.
Loon Brae
“Girls, I am going to walk you down to Aunt Mina’s house where you will have lunch. After lunch your parents will come to collect you.”
Aunt Mina was Granny Sara’s other sister and so different from Aunt Ann. She was round and always seemed to be smiling. She was full of stories about herself as a little girl. She was my father’s aunt, married to a rather posh but taciturn vet who had been made a Sir for his services to veterinary science. The house smelled of chloroform and metaldehyde. I loved saying these words, as no-one really knew what they meant and they sounded grown up – “Metaldehyde and Chloroform.” This house was a source of delight to Fiona and to me.
But not the Chinese room, that was all black and gold lacquer and Chinesey – birds with hooked beaks and ivory carvings of men with wide hats crossing bridges with poles in their hands and lizard-y things with black eyes and spiky claws. There were tall vases of grasses that were dusty and full of cobwebs and there were screens and shawls that hung from them. Aunt Mina was very proud of this room and because she was nice and kind to us and really quite old I didn’t let on that I thought it was the ugliest and most suffocating room I’d ever been in. It was like being in one of my own bad dreams, frightening and dark with horrible images everywhere you looked. She kept the blinds down to keep the sun from fading the carpet and the silk screen with a dragon on it that had an open mouth and bulging eyes like a Pekinese dog.
Jessie was Aunt Mina’s maid and Fiona and I liked her. She had a round, red face with purplish veins on it and stiff swollen hands. She walked with difficulty when she carried in the tray, but she winked at us and smiled and slipped a marshmallow chocolate biscuit into our pockets. We sensed that she liked us and we liked her back. She and Aunt Mina were very good friends. You knew this because they scolded each other a lot and laughed together.
We were in the garden when our parents came for us. We said goodbye to Aunt Mina and “Thank you for having me.”
“We are going to the golf course girls,” said Daddy.
We loved the visits to the golf course. Our task (Fiona’s and mine) was to find as many golf balls as we could. It became an exciting game. We would periodically shout out “found one” and we would hold out our skirts with a growing pile of golf balls, some in pristine condition and others with their rubbery guts spilling out. We would stumble over and through the heather as it scratched at our legs and delight at the sight of a white golf ball nestling in the bracken like the egg of a ground-nesting bird and we’d laugh and be pleased because Daddy was pleased. He put all the balls into his large pockets and we would all hold hands and go to the Clubhouse and give the man there the balls and he would put them (the good ones) in a big jar and said golfers could buy them for tuppence each.
The first afternoon was to set the tone; we found lots of balls and under a clump of bracken we found two baby hedgehogs. After we had delivered the golf balls to the man at the club we were to have a special treat. We were going to drive to the river Isla – “Your river, Isla!” – and have our high tea as a picnic.
I felt proud that this fierce little river was mine. We took our picnic out and spread everything on a tartan rug; boiled eggs with little twists of salt wrapped in grease-proof paper, and ham sandwiches, and we had fizzy Irn-Bru to drink although our parents had tea from a flask, the milk was separate in a little bottle. There were mutton pies which I didn’t like so Daddy had mine. And we had apples and a slice of lemon cake and Fiona and I shared a wagon wheel biscuit and we pretended not to mind about the midges or be surprised that Daddy really hated the wasps. I sat on Daddy’s lap and held open his hands so I could pretend to read his fortune in his palm like the old lady had done in the bazaar. I didn’t know what I was looking for, of course, but I liked looking at his hands, which were square with long fingers and a ring on the little finger of his left hand which had a thistle on it and a snow plough and the name “BALLO” (I asked him what it meant but he didn’t know). He let me put it on my little finger and it felt heavy as it slid on and off. He told me that one day I would have my own ring, on my twenty-first birthday.
Isla, Ian and Fiona – Blairgowrie golf course
In the evening we went down to the field beyond Loon Brae and gave the horse there with the name of “Dobbin” (“How original,” said Mummy; I think she was being sarcastic), some
apples and some peppermints and we walked back through the clouds of midges down by the river and played “Poohsticks” on the bridge, running from side to side as we watched the little twigs whirl away in the rushing, slightly foaming brown, peaty water. We laughed with delight and it didn’t really matter who won.
That night both our parents came to our bedroom and took it in turns to read us stories; Daddy kissed us goodnight and said he’d see Mummy downstairs. Mummy stroked my hair and whispered “Baby Saluki, Baby Saluki,” over and over again. I half sat up and took her face in both my hands; it felt soft and smelt of flowers and the heather and I smoothed her hair away from her forehead and looked at her properly. “My Mummy, my own mummy.” I saw her face go sad and her eyes filled up with tears. “It’s alright Mummy, it will be alright.”
Isla, Violet and Fiona – Blairgowrie golf course
She kissed me again and pulled my quilt up to my face. “Sleep tight darlings.” She went to kiss Fiona again and switched off the light and closed the door behind her.
We lay in silence for a bit but then I said “Fi, are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“I think Mummy was starting to cry.”
“I know.” She was quiet a bit more.
“Go to sleep now Isla.”
We drove into Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland in the late afternoon and settled into my mother’s parents Granny and Grandfather Patterson’s small bungalow. Slowly the atmosphere in our family seemed to change. We would go shopping with our mother and I would sometimes be allowed to hold the shopping list and Fiona the basket. But Mummy seemed distracted, as if she wanted to get back to the house, even though she was in the middle of the High Street, with lots more shops to visit. Daddy became quieter and sucked a lot more on his pipe. Granny and Grandad didn’t talk much to us. Sometimes Granny would show us how to put clothes through a mangle, to squeeze all the water out (you had to be careful not to get your fingers caught) and how to set the fire and pour coal on it from the long nosed coal-scuttle. But there were long silences that somehow were filled with spikes.