The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “No, I never had any paper.”

  “This gentleman saw you accept the paper. Heard you, saw you.”

  Walter Bone nodded.

  “Then the gentleman is a liar. His word against my word. Whose do you think they’ll believe?” He turned on Gillon suddenly then. “I kicked your thick-headed son down the steps a few days ago; it’s your turn now.”

  “If you lay hand on that man,” Walter Bone said, in a voice as hard-edged as broken ice, “this pick goes into your arm where the boy’s pick went into his.”

  “Why, son of a bitch. Walter Bone,” Brothcock said and wheeled, and in the same wheeling motion smashed Walter Bone in the ribs and sent him backward through the door the way Jem had gone before.

  * * *

  He was hurt and it wasn’t an easy thing for Gillon, with the use of only one arm, to get him to his feet. He motioned to some pithead girls across the way, loading pitprops on the cage, to come and help, but they had seen what happened and didn’t want to help Mr. Brothcock’s victim, not where he could see them.

  “How are you, Walter? Are you all right, then?”

  “Och, Christ.” Gillon had never heard him use profanity. “I can get up, if that’s what you mean. The bastard broke my rib.”

  “It was a terrible blow.”

  “Aye, but this isn’t the end of it.”

  “No, this is the start. You should sue him too, Walter.”

  “No, no.” Bone was very excited. “Your suit first, man. One at a time. Keep our eye on the main chance.”

  He was right, Gillon knew that. Mr. Bone would have to live with his damaged rib and pride.

  “Will you help me write the letter to Mr. MacDonald? I can’t write yet.”

  “Aye, if I can. Right now.”

  They started up what was left of the Sportin Moor. It was slow going because each breath caused Mr. Bone sharp pain.

  “Do one thing,” he said. “Don’t tell my sons. There are some of them who would do something about it and I don’t want that now.” Gillon agreed on that, and then, despite everything, found himself laughing at the sight the two of them must be making, two battered men barely able to climb over the potholes on the moor, preparing to mount a revolution.

  “Would you really have hit him with the pick?”

  “I didn’t have one.”

  “Well, would you though?”

  “No, I don’t hit men with picks.” He was such an honest man, Gillon thought.

  “Well, I’m sorry for you anyway,” Gillon said.

  “Sorry? I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Once in the house, Mrs. Bone wrapped him in an old sheet as if he were a mummy, immobilizing the rib, and the pain was better. Miners understand broken ribs, as Mrs. Bone said. If you stopped work for every broken rib, a man would starve to death. He got out his quill pen and honed the point and thinned out his thick ink with water.

  “How do you address a lawyer?” Mr. Bone said.

  “They don’t like to be called lawyers, I know that. They’re advocates, I think. Or solicitors. Or law agents…”

  “Barristers, aren’t they?” Mrs. Bone said. In the end they settled for “Angus MacDonald, Esq.” and opened the letter “Dear Sir.” They told him what had happened, that their request for compensation had been made and rejected, and that they wished him to file suit in the Sheriff’s Court at Cowdenbeath against the Honorable C. P. S. Farquhar, the Earl of Fyffe.

  Although it was evening when they finished the letter, Gillon asked Sam to trot the five miles down to Easter Mungo and post it because it was understood that all the mail in and out of Pitmungo enjoyed the scrutiny of the Company, and after that Gillon went home and waited for the mill of justice to begin grinding the kernel of his complaint.

  It happened sooner than they were prepared for. No one in Pitmungo saw the Messenger-at-Arms come or go, so that moment when the summons was served on Lord Fyffe was never established. When the reaction to the summons was considered, many felt the messenger fortunate to get out of Brumbie Hall alive.

  Perhaps the paper had been handed over at the weak time, the drowsy time after lunch when the port had been put away and the Earl’s sheets were being turned down for his nap. Whenever it was, the impact of the summons was unexpected, sudden, and severe.

  That same afternoon, when the shift was over and the men were coming out of the pits, Lord Fyffe shut down his mines and locked out his miners.

  Lord Fyffe No. 1 and Lady Jane No. 2 and all the older, smaller pits in the valley were closed. By nightfall, thirteen hundred men, women, and children were out of work. By morning, the following notice was posted at the mouth of each of the mines:

  TO ALL MY COLLIERS

  One among you has seen fit to have a summons served upon your coal master, the effect of which would be to have him taken to court like a common criminal, thus risking the erosion for all time of the relationship that has existed through so much and for so long between his Lordship and his men.

  As all of you know, Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company, almost alone among coal owners in the area, has been generous in the extreme in compensating those among you unfortunate enough to suffer injury while at work. Let this much be known by all of you:

  No collier is hurt in any of his mines where that hurt is not felt in Brumbie Hall. Prayers for a successful recovery are said at grace and plans for an equitable compensation made at once.

  This relationship, his Lordship would wish to believe, has been not unlike that of a father to his sons, each contributing in his own way to the happiness of the family whole. Now that relationship has been soiled. One of his sons has been disloyal to his family and the hurt to his Lordship has been a true one, and cruel.

  As in any family, when one is hurt all must suffer, and that is even more true when the head of the family is the one hurt. Until the time when this contemptible suit is withdrawn and stricken from the Court calendar, this pit—these mines—will be shut for good.

  In the spirit of trust between us, in the knowledge that God will see that our ordained family will continue to exist, father with son, one with the other, in the old old way, I close:

  God Bless You, God Bring You Back Your Work Again:

  Fyffe

  5

  There had never been anything like it in Pitmungo before. Partly it was the lockout and the exhilaration of the men being together. But partly it was June and the sun coming out again. The men hadn’t experienced a June since they were small children.

  Once more winter had been defeated just when there was the feeling that perhaps this was the year God would forget and there would be no spring after all. The low smothering clouds that had been drifting down from the north since March, so heavy with wet snow they seemed to scrape along the High Moor, were beginning to break apart, and there were whole minutes of such a clear, bright blueness before the banks closed in again that it made a person light-headed and even giddy. The sun splayed down into dark corners of the town where black snow still hid, melting the snow to blackish water. Water was running, everywhere, down between the cobbles on the lanes and rows, taking the frozen coal scud with it, and then the town began drying, from Tosh-Mungo Terrace on down. Windows were opened, and all the accumulated sourness and smells of a miner’s winter began fading in the soft, sun-warmed winds drifting down the moors.

  No one minded the lockout then. Each time the sun broke through the people poured out of the but-and-bens and bathed in it, faces to it, barely moving in it, performing without knowing it some old Druidic rite, seized by the sun the same way the salmon were. It was something in the blood and it had been denied them too long. There was a feeling of festival in the air those first weeks, of carnival and carelessness.

  All those days the men filed up to Tosh-Mungo—there were no Uppies and Doonies any longer—to give Gillon their hand and assure him they were behind him and what he was doing. Clerks from the Company were writing down the names of the men coming and going from Tosh
-Mungo Terrace and then one of the miners masked his face with coal dust and that ended the name taking. He became what a miner so often is—an invisible man. After that the others blacked their faces, and then a “committee” of men went down to the walk, caps low, faces black, and took the notebooks away. It all added to it, days plashy with sunshine and the feeling of all being together. As much as the compensation, Gillon soon found, it was the Sportin Moor that still inflamed the men.

  “Now he’ll pay for that, the son of a bitch. Be sure you bring that up,” they would say, pointing down at the moor.

  But the compensation loomed as large. Hardly a family hadn’t waited for days and weeks to see what the Laird would lavish on them, if he wished to lavish anything at all.

  “Och, how I wish my daddie was here to see this day, to see what you have done,” a young miner said. “Rob Hope, remember him? He lost a hand and starved to death because he wouldn’t take a crumb from us. It makes me cry the now. Five pounds croo he got, and had to crawl to Brumbie Hall and put a please note on a plate at the door to get it.”

  The stories were endless, there was one for every house in Pitmungo it seemed. Even Maggie was touched. She knew what she was hearing was true, and she knew that it was only by luck that it hadn’t happened to the Camerons. Of course, for the Camerons there was always siller in the kist to fall back on. None of the others had that.

  As the days passed, the real issue became focused. It wasn’t the money Gillon wanted that disturbed Lord Fyffe, but the fact that he was demanding it. It was the threat to his fatherly right to decide how much to give and if to give at all. In the end it was the struggle to hold on to the past against the desire to bury it and find new ways. The pick in Gillon’s arm and the pain it caused him came to mean nothing at all.

  The solution rested in the Courts, but in other places as well—mainly in money. No one had counted on that at first. Every day the men didn’t work cost them a few shillings, but every day the mines stayed closed, the people at Brumbie Hall—Mr. C. P. S. Farquhar, as the people had begun calling him, and his tall dry wife, Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo—lost hundreds of pounds. It was a question of how long pride could come before profit.

  * * *

  “Now, listen, I wouldna worry too much if I was you,” Archie Japp came and said. Japp, who for so many years had been so hard on Gillon. “I wouldna’ fash mysel.’ I know these people better than you. When the people down in London don’t get their dividend checks there’ll be strange letters coming to Pitmungo. They have their habits to attend to, do you understand what I mean? If Mrs. Cameron wasn’t in the room I’d tell you about a few of them.”

  “Such as?” Maggie said. “It isn’t a child sitting over here.”

  He thought about it for a time. If he wasn’t such a dark man, such a true Pict, as Maggie would have described him, a person might have imagined that he blushed.

  “Would it surprise you to know that one of them keeps a house—an entire mansion, mind you—for young—young…”

  “Bosh, do you think I can’t imagine a world like that?”

  “Boys?”

  “Oh.”

  “Beautiful young boys. All dressed in silks and satins and some of them dressed like young ladies?”

  The room was very still after that.

  “I mean to say, you asked and all. It wasn’t that I … scandalmonger and all. Oh, well.”

  “And that is where our money goes,” Gillon said.

  “It makes you want to fight the harder,” Mr. Japp said. The two old enemies shook hands.

  “What would he do with them?” Maggie said, when Mr. Japp was gone.

  “Who?”

  “The man with the boys in the house.”

  Gillon thought about it. The question annoyed him because it took his mind away from the speech he was writing in his head. Sometime he was going to be asked to make a speech rallying the people to him and he wanted to be ready for the challenge.

  “I don’t know what he would do. Whatever it is it couldn’t be healthy.”

  “Maybe you are doing the right thing, Gillon. Perhaps.”

  “Oh, my God, that is big. Every important man in town comes up here to lend his support and his own wife allows there might be something to it. Och! I should summon the family.”

  Surprisingly, the one person pessimistic about the outcome of the struggle was Henry Selkirk.

  “Do you remember what I said about those well-meaning people down in Edinburgh, that they didn’t understand about hunger? They never should have thrown the challenge down at this time. The people are feeling the pinch already, and the battle barely begun.”

  It was startling to Gillon. He walked up and down the Terrace and Moncrieff Lane. The timing had not been right. The kail yards behind the homes were all planted with the root crops, potatoes and turnips and beets, and the greens and beans and salads were in the ground, still vulnerable to a killing frost, but it would be months before any of them would be ready to eat or be canned and stored and pickled. Had the lockout begun in August or September the people could have lived off their gardens for months, with the heavy coal-buying and mining time coming on.

  But nothing was up now but a few radishes, and even miners couldn’t live on radishes alone. Then Lord Fyffe closed down the Pluck Me and the bakery and for the first time in Pitmungo there was no credit, which had always been encouraged before as a way of making the men beholden to the Company. For the first time Gillon had his doubts, but then a letter was delivered by hand from Cowdenbeath.

  Dear Cameron:

  Don’t think that we don’t know what you are going through. This is not the first time this has been done in Scotland. But this is the first time it will succeed.

  Great victories such as yours demand great courage and endurance. Nothing worth earning is easy. You have much to lose; they have more. It is a comfort in hard times to remember that. You have much to lose in character by giving in; they have little. It is a comfort also to consider that.

  Together, to all of us here, these two factors spell success. Do not think that you fight alone. The eyes of Scotland’s miners are on you. The hopes of Scotland’s workingmen go with you and the men of Pitmungo.

  Your comrade,

  Keir Hardie

  Copies of the letter were made and passed down through the rows and lanes.

  “They’ll help us, you’ll see,” Walter Bone said. “The Scotch Miners’ Union will see us through the pinch.”

  It was so strange to Gillon, this turning about of ideas in Pitmungo, how what was dark and unseeable, what was even disagreeable and dangerous, was suddenly seen in its new light. A few months ago the word “union” had frightened them and now they all knew that in their unity was their hope and they spoke about it not as revelation or some new concept but as an ancient truth a man would have to be a sumph not to go along with. The tyranny of rightness. Here was Archie Japp wanting to know how a chapter of a union could be established and Andy Begg, once the strong arm for the Company, wheezing up the hill, the black lung had him now, asking that when the collieshangie began in earnest he be given Mr. Brothcock to handle—or manhandle—all by himself.

  Gillon could still smile in those days.

  “There are others in line ahead of you, my son Jem for one, but you have waited the longest. Aye, I give you Brothcock for your own.”

  What worried Gillon about himself was the sense of power he felt when he said it.

  6

  The pinching, the cutting back, began in earnest after the first weeks in June. There were still turnips and barrels of oats left over from the winter before and so there was still life. Neep brose, oatmeal mixed with turnips, was the big meal of the day. Piss-a-beds were popping up on the moor, which the world beyond Pitmungo knew as dandelions, and they were good as field salad and boiled and in stew, if anyone had anything to put in stew. There was cockcrow’n’ kail, chicken soup without any chicken, just boiled moor grass, but it was acidy and made a man�
��s stomach sour.

  “And now it’s time for the women,” Selkirk said. “I’ve seen it before in other towns. You can’t blame them. When the children start to cry themselves to sleep from hunger you would be amazed how small a principle can suddenly appear.”

  “Oh, these are good women,” Sam said. “We’ve known hunger here. They’ll stand fast behind our dad.”

  “Only those who haven’t gone without are afraid of hunger,” Andrew said. “We all know hunger here.”

  “Hunger by choice?” Mr. Selkirk said.

  It bothered them when it was put that way. What was he trying to do, anyway? Why did Selkirk have to come up here and damp every fire they lit?

  “But what the hell, the people have no choice,” Sam said. “The decision lies with Daddie. It’s up to him to withdraw the suit and he’s not about to do it.”

  “No, the women will stand fast behind the men,” Gillon said, and looked at Maggie and knew she didn’t believe it. But then she had always had a very low estimate of Pitmungo women when it came to denial and doing without.

  On Sunday, in kirk, he saw the first of the looks, felt them as much as saw them, the questioning looks, the faintly hostile and accusing looks of some of the older women, who didn’t understand why Gillon was doing such a thing to the Laird or to them, upsetting the reliable balance of their lives.

  The sermon for the day was an old and tested one with Mr. MacCurry—knowing one’s position in the order of things. There was a ladder in this world stretching all the way to eternity, as it were—not literally, he spelled out—and on that ladder there was a rung for every man and woman. In his infinite wisdom God placed each person on his proper rung and every man knew when he had reached it because he found himself happy there and experienced a feeling of contentment and satisfaction with his life and his duties in it. Knowing one’s place on the ladder was the font of true happiness, Mr. MacCurry said.

  One great sin in the world was backsliding, because when the Lord placed a person on His ladder, He put him there at the peak of his powers and responsibilities and one owed a duty to live up to them.