It was a touchy question. There had been rumors about the fate of the Sportin Moor and Walter Bone, who generally could be counted on to defend the established order of things, was one of those who denied that Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo, now the Countess of Fyffe, would allow such a thing. If they took away the moor Mr. Bone would be forced to admit that a part of his life had been based on a lie. He couldn’t afford to believe the rumor.
“They could be doing any of a thousand things,” Mr. Bone said. “They could be surveying for a new cricket green.”
It was his belief, as it was with a great many workingmen, that there was a balance between the ruling class and the working class and that God had intended that balance. There were those to lead and those to follow, them and us, and it was to the mutual benefit of both classes to respect one another.
“When the balance gets out of kilter, one side asking or taking too much, nothing works right until the balance is restored. That’s the order of society. It is ordained.”
Gillon didn’t choose to argue that one. And it seemed that Mr. Bone was right because nothing happened after that for a long time, until one afternoon they came up into the slant of a sharp September sun and found a gang of men, Irish road workers by the tattered despair of their looks, fencing in the moor. There was a desire not to see what was happening, but when enough men came to Walter Bone for reassurance that nothing was going to happen to the moor, Mr. Bone finally knew he had to face up to the issue with Mr. Brothcock.
“The men are a wee bit unsure, a wee bit upset, Mr. Brothcock.”
“You tell them not to worry, Walter. The crossing rights to the moor will be secured. No man is going to have to walk around our moor.”
Mr. Bone went outside the office but he knew it wasn’t enough and went back in.
“What I mean is, will my grandchildren be playing football on that moor?”
Brothcock was annoyed.
“Look, you mine the coal and I’ll mind the property. If we both tend to our own affairs I think you’ll find it works out best for both of us.”
When the men asked Walter Bone what the superintendent had said, he was forced to tell them he didn’t know. Gillon wasn’t the only one to see the hurt and puzzlement in his eyes.
The work went slowly. It was an ugly-looking fence, high wooden slats painted a heavy blackish green, none of the slats matching the next one. They were poor workers, demoralized men, forced to camp out at night by the Gypsy caravans because the people resented their presence. A few came down to the College one night but were asked to leave. It was the young men who bothered the laborers most, coming down hot from play, making comments on their work and asking them questions about the moor they couldn’t answer. Finally Mr. Brothcock had to come up to the moor to put a stop to it.
“All right,” he shouted to the football players, “all of you off the moor.”
They stopped as they were, in the middle of play, the football still bouncing its way across the field.
“You heard me, everyone off this moor.”
Jemmie trotted across the grass to the mine superintendent.
“We have a game, sir. We have a game this evening. Pitmungo against Kinglassie.”
“I don’t care a damn what you have. Get off the grass.”
“They come a long way to play, sir.”
The Kinglassie boys were across the field, stripping down to their shorts and undershirts. They had trotted five miles up from Kinglassie after a ten-hour shift in the pit.
“I wouldn’t know how to tell them,” Jem said.
“Oh, you’ll find some way.”
“It isn’t going to hurt the grass none; we have to clip it all the time.”
It was Jem’s stance as much as anything else that annoyed the superintendent, his tough stocky legs spread wide apart, the lift to his dark chin, the hard bright nuts of eyes, just short of defiant.
“Look, you. I told you to get the hell off this grass and I mean what I say. Get your asses off this moor.”
“You don’t own this moor, sir. The people own this moor.”
The issue, for the first time in Pitmungo, was joined. Mr. Brothcock walked up the moor until his belly was almost touching Jemmie.
“I know you. We know your name. You’re the greedy pig who don’t know when to stop.”
Jemmie looked at Sam and then at the others who had come up around him. The odd thing to Jem was Sam’s silence; there wasn’t even anger in his eyes. There was nothing there.
“Aye. James Drum Cameron. The lads want to know what you’d do if we went on with our match.”
Brothcock smiled.
“I’d see you never worked in these pits again. I’d see your brothers never worked again. I’d see your father never worked. And I’d see that all the coal masters in Fife saw you never set foot in their mines. That answer your question?”
He started back down the moor, the folds of his fat neck showing above his collar. He was stepping over a quoit bed when the rock stung by his ear, missing his skull by an inch or two. He must have heard it humming by his ear, but if he didn’t, he saw it when it hit in front of him and went thumping down the moor. The superintendent had to be given credit for a kind of raw courage or style. He never stopped; he never gave the players the satisfaction of turning. But the fact remained for Brothcock and all Pitmungo to ponder. Someone had wanted the moor enough to try to kill Mr. Brothcock.
“Did you do that?” Jem said, turning to his brother. Sam didn’t answer. There was no expression on his face at all.
* * *
Rob Roy was elated. After coming out of the pit and taking his tub in the boardinghouse wash room he skipped his pints in the College because he wanted to be clearheaded for the meeting with Mr. Selkirk.
“Well, we have it,” Rob said. “We got our issue at last. They handed it to us.” He was let down when Mr. Selkirk shook his head.
“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” the librarian said. “It lacks the classic Marxian ingredients.”
Rob was indignant. Here was the issue, on fire in front of them, and here was Mr. Selkirk trying to pour cold water on the blaze.
“Christ, they tried to kill Mr. Brothcock.”
“They? One person. Probably one of your hardheaded brothers.”
“I hope it was.”
“Now, if all of them had joined together and mobbed Mr. Brothcock, then you would have something. One man throwing a rock is an act of violence, a group of men mobbing a mine superintendent is a revolutionary act.”
“You just don’t understand what that moor means to the people here, Henry.” They were on a first-name basis now. “The moor is life and without it there is death. Do you know what it is? Without our moor we become Easter Mungo, we become Dirt Hill. We know it. They all know it.”
“Bunch of quoit players. You want to form a revolution out of that?”
“Aye, that’s just it. Damn good quoit players. The best quoit players in Fife. It’s all part of it.”
Mr. Selkirk pondered the problem for a while.
“No, Marx wouldn’t approve. It has to be here”—he tapped his stomach—“in the gut. Everyone has to hurt. The rugby players are hurt, oh aye, I’ll bet that one in your family is boiling…”
“Sam. Aye, he’s not boiling, he’s gone ice cold.”
“… but the women aren’t hurt. If they sink a mine, there’s going to be more work, more coal. The anger will go out when the pay packets come in.”
Rob had turned his back on his teacher.
“I want your permission to write Keir Hardie.” He waited. Selkirk said nothing. “I want to ask him to come down here and organize Pitmungo into the Scotch Miners’ Union, so when we do something we’ll have someone behind us.”
“I can’t stop you.”
“I want you to write a covering letter so he knows I’m a serious man.”
“Your letter will tell him that.”
“So you won’t do it?” Rob turned around and
found Henry Selkirk studying him as if he were a herring for sale.
“Aye, I’ll do it. And where are you going to put him if he comes?”
Rob’s face dropped, the way his father’s sometimes did. He hadn’t considered that.
“I’m not asking him to come down here and get jailed or embarrassed or beaten by some Company police,” Selkirk said.
It was a thing Rob would never forget about this odd angry man, that he had been jailed and beaten and blacklisted at every pit from Fife down to Durham and Wales. His fighting days were long done; he was all memories now and when he remembered, he drank, but Rob would always respect him for it. Rob looked down into Colliers Walk from the coal-grimed window of the Reading Room.
“I know a place where there’s room and where we can get him into town without being seen.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you where right now. But it’s there. I want you to take my word on it.”
Selkirk was studying him again.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because it’s personal. My pride is involved.” Mr. Selkirk should understand what that meant.
“I wouldn’t want to write the letter until I was sure,” Selkirk said.
“I am sure,” Rob said, in an outburst of enthusiasm. “Ah, this is going to be the start of it all. The first step on the path, Henry.”
Such a romantic, Selkirk thought, so much like his father, so much like himself when he was young, so filled with the idea that when people finally heard the truth they would respond to the truth. That was the hardest thing to learn.
“You write your letter,” Selkirk said. “I’ll cover it.”
Because where would one be without the dreamers, to make the first blazes on the trail that the practical ones would take later on? Rob Roy was going to suffer, he knew that, and that was the standard price for dreaming. He wished the boy would go away then because he felt a need for a little of the reassurance in the bottle at his hip.
18
Rob Roy wrote his letter and waited. No answer came.
“Keir Hardie will answer you,” Henry Selkirk said. “He’s a busy man, they’re killing him with work and he’s on the run from the law at the same time. But Keir Hardie will answer you.”
There was nothing for Rob Roy to do but wait, but others in Pitmungo were moving in their own way. To everyone’s surprise the leader was Walter Bone. Moving very quietly through Uppietoon and then down through Doonietoon, where people were flattered to have him in their but-and-bens, he raised a legal fund to explore the miners’ rights in the matter of the moor and one Sunday, against his religious scruples, went down to Dunfermline to consult Mr. Murdoch Carnegie, of the eminent firm of Carnegie and Company, perhaps the first miner in Pitmungo ever to engage a law agent. Gillon was honored to be asked to go along.
What they learned from Mr. Carnegie, who never asked them to sit down—men from the pits stand—was not reassuring.
The fence was put up, in his opinion, to re-establish and reinforce the fact of possession of the moor by the Tosh-Mungo family. Allowing the miners to use the moor did not mean the owners had relinquished their rights to the ground.
“For three hundred years, sir?” Walter Bone said.
“For three hundred years, yes.”
“What about the cart of coal, then?” Gillon found himself saying. “When she accepts the coal she admits our right to the moor.”
The other miners with Mr. Bone nodded. It was to them a crucial point.
“No, no,” Mr. Carnegie said. “Just the reverse. The fact that you pay her a cart of coal each year is proof that you recognize her ownership.”
Gillon felt the taste of gall in his mouth. The thing they had felt established their right worked out instead to establish their debt.
There was, Mr. Carnegie said, one legal step they might take. They could file a claim of presumption in the Court of Session—that it was simply presumed by tradition, common law and local habit that the land, by their continued use of it for such a long time, had become theirs by right of forfeit.
The trouble with this was that the Pitmungo miners, not being a corporate body, were probably not entitled to sue. But in the event they were allowed to sue, and they lost—which Mr. Carnegie was certain they would do—they were liable to be fined for bringing false suit, to be ordered to pay all legal and court costs incurred and, finally, to bring the wrath of Lord Fyffe down on their heads.
The only thing Mr. Carnegie could finally suggest would be some sort of act, some sort of collective demonstration, that might draw the attention of the outside world and force the Tosh-Mungos to surrender their claim to the land and their rights to it by way of default.
“What kind of act do you suggest, sir?” Walter Bone asked. The law agent looked at them with amused surprise.
“Do you expect me to give you advice for rebellion?” he said, and charged them two pounds for the value of his judgment.
* * *
They had intended to go down to the little house at No. 4 Moodie Street, where another Carnegie had been born and raised—the great Andrew himself—but that little excursion was forgotten. They turned around and began the fourteen-mile walk back to Pitmungo. For miles no one had the heart to say anything.
“They would use justice to perpetuate injustice,” Walter Bone said at last.
“And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.”
“Watch your mouth, it’s the Sabbath, man.”
“Excuse me,” the miner said.
The lawyer’s last sentence kept running through all of their minds because it was the last course open to them. Advice for rebellion. Some act, some strong dramatic steps never contemplated by the men of Pitmungo before. It was a daring thought and Mr. Bone was aware of where it led. To achieve simple justice, he would be driven into the ranks of the revolutionaries. He put it best, as he was often capable of doing.
“If acting to save our moor makes me a revolutionary, then I am one.”
No man would have believed that three weeks before.
At the meeting held up behind Tosh-Mungo Terrace in the White Coo plantation, out of sight of the town and Company men, Walter Bone made his report to those who had given money to the fund. When he finished it was clear what had to be done.
“What it means then,” a miner shouted, “is tear down that fewkin fence.”
“What it means is occupy our moor the first day they try to do anything with it. We have picks and we can dig. Let them try and drive us out.”
It went on after that. Let them send down the Royal Scots Guard, let them order out the Black Watch; they would stand fast and take their message to the world. Even if they lost, no one was going to take their moor away without a fight for it. That much they could promise.
What they hadn’t learned then was something Mr. Selkirk could have told them had they asked. When revolt is cooking on the stove, make certain to have a revolutionary for a chef. Mr. Bone was not the proper cook. And then there was the question of time. Nothing happened once the fence was built.
Nothing.
The fence stood as it was, blackly there, and then as it does every five or six years, winter came early, a rush of cold from the north that couldn’t get dislodged from the valley. Winter was almost two months ahead of time and wouldn’t go away, warming just enough to give hope that the mistake was being righted only to be followed by another driving storm from the north. Soon the moor grass froze, the long slender green blades becoming stiff from frost and cold winds, and as early as October the snows came, burying the moor beneath them. The loss was less keen then because when the wind was rushing across it, the moor became only a breath-taking ordeal to be endured in order to get to Uppietoon.
The problem that winter was that the people learned to live with their fence. It came to be accepted in their lives. People in the houses in the Doonie rows found that the fence broke the force of the wind below the Sportin Moor. And th
ere was the question of the future. What if, as the older miners often said, some of the other pits were being mined out. A new shaft would mean new coal and new jobs. Giving up football and rugby wasn’t too high a price to pay to keep salt and bread on the table.
A strange complacency began to push out thoughts of rebellion. The emphasis was on the grass itself. The grass came, in time, to lend an almost mystical reassurance to the people in Pitmungo. As long as the grass remained inviolate, the moor was inviolate. Rebellion slumbered under a cover of snow and green grass.
Only Sam couldn’t seem to find some way to make his peace with the fence. He had sunk into a kind of numbness that worried the family. He came home from the pit and had his tub and his tea but when someone talked to him he didn’t seem to hear and if he heard he had no interest in answering. After a time people made no effort to reach him and that seemed to please him just as well. He sat in his room and stared at the wall, and said odd things at times—little warning signals, Andrew told his father, that something was to come. Then he began to read, too, all of Rob Roy’s books and then ones Mr. Selkirk recommended to his father.
“I want to know what happened to your family,” he said one day to Gillon. “I want to know exactly how they were thrown off their land.”
Gillon told him what he remembered, driven off what they had believed was their ancestral land to make room for grouse and pheasant and red deer and, sometimes, sheep; of their going to the edge of the sea and building the stone house and dying of cold and hunger along the shore. The story of Gillon’s mother going for the mussels at night and having her creel cut off her back made Sam angry, the first sign of life they had seen in him for months.
“Did they fight it? Did they band together and resist?” Gillon knew where his mind was going, but he went on with it because it was better to see him this way than dead, the way he had been before.
“Some. Not many.”
“Why not, why not?”
“I don’t know. I never knew.”
“What did they have to lose? They died anyway.”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to the ones who fought?”
The Camerons Page 26