The Farm Girl's Dream

by Eileen Ramsay

  *

  Europe went mad and the glorious harvests of 1914 and 1915 were obliterated by marching feet and tanks, and by all the other implements of mass destruction. Not in the Angus glens, though, where Jock Cameron stood sucking his empty pipe contentedly, as he watched the final gathering of his most successful harvest. Victoria, her hat falling from her tangled hair and her skirts kirtled up about her legs – best make sure Catriona did not catch her ewe lamb looking like that – waved to him from Glentanar’s back.

  ‘I’ve eaten all the brambles I was supposed to collect for jam, Grampa.’

  He laughed. She had no need to tell him. Were her lips not stained with the evidence?

  ‘Best slip down and tidy yourself afore your mother catches you, young lady,’ he said in mock seriousness, but Victoria did as she was bid.

  When she had dismounted from the gentle giant she ran to his side, shaking down her dress. ‘Oh, Grampa, was there ever such a walnut shell day. It’s the best ever.’

  For a moment she almost took that back, for was not yesterday the best day ever, because a scrap of paper had arrived from Somewhere on the Front.

  No, she could not share that even with Grampa. It was too new, too precious, too achingly sweet.

  They went back to the farmhouse. Catriona took one look at her hoyden of a daughter and began to fill a bathtub with boiling water from the kettles on the gleaming range.

  ‘I do not know which of the two of you is the greater child, Father,’ she said crossly. ‘I’ll never get her fit for the harvest dance.’

  But she did, and three hours later a model of propriety stood with tapping foot beside her grandfather. Catriona and Bessie Menmuir, wife of Grampa’s senior stockman, had laboured for hours the previous night, after Victoria had gone to bed, to finish a dress fit for this first dance. No couturier ballgown this, but still a hand-sewn work of art. Where had they found the material? The dress was, in fact, made from tartan tablecloths that Jock’s wife, Mattie, had made long before the turn of the century, and which had been discovered in a trunk in the attic. The neck was cut lower than Catriona could permit, so she had ripped cream-coloured lace from her late mother-in-law’s one and only evening-gown and filled the neck with that. There were lace bows at the cuffs of the sleeves, which sat just below the girl’s sun-browned, dimpled elbows, and more lace disguised the hem of the swirling skirt, where one tablecloth had had to be tacked to the other.

  Conscious that she had the most beautiful dress in the room, Victoria sparkled with a young girl’s joy as she waited impatiently while her grandfather welcomed neighbours and workers alike to his home. Oh, if only there was some way to capture her image in her lovely dress and send it to Somewhere on the Front to warm the heart of a soldier boy. Victoria smiled and looked at the tables sagging under the weight of the pies that Catriona and her helpers had spent days preparing. When the dancing started, whisky and ale would flow more readily than the water in the parched Tay. Would it be in poor taste to write a description to Robert, who was existing ‘somewhere’ on meagre rations?

  It was the most joyous evening. Victoria danced with everyone, young and old alike: Tam Menmuir, Davie (his oldest son, home on leave from the war), ploughmen and cattlemen, Bessie, Catriona, Elsie, and finally she forced her Grampa away from his whisky and his cronies.

  ‘A dance, Grampa, come on. Sandy’s away to play “Strip the Willow”.’

  Surely only a man with shoes nailed to the floor could have resisted the fiddle that night. Jock Cameron whirled his granddaughter round as if she were no heavier than the small treasure he held tight between his gnarled fingers. One of Elsie’s brothers, the only one of the seven not already in the Forces, his eyes almost blinded by the mad sweep of Victoria’s lacy petticoats as she whirled past him in her grandfather’s arms, stood waiting to snatch the girl for the next dance.

  Suddenly Jock stopped his mad dervish whirl. He looked across the smoke- and dust-filled room at his daughter-in-law.

  ‘Forgive me, Catriona,’ he said. ‘I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name,’ and he fell forward. The walnut shell he had been clasping slipped from his fingers and rolled to the feet of the girl, who stood like a statue frozen in stone. It was then that she screamed.

  *

  Jock would have enjoyed his funeral – the biggest in Angus for many a long day. Crested carriages and farm carts jostled for room and, even in her grief, Victoria could see how much he had been loved. Although her eyes were swollen and red, she did not cry in public. Nor did her mother and yet her grief was as great as, if not greater than, the girl’s. And to that grief was added worry for the future, for in her head were echoing the words: ‘I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name.’

  A few weeks after the funeral, Victoria came back from school to find an unfamiliar pony and trap in the farmyard. Old Tam had been watching for her and he came out of the stable, comb in hand.

  ‘Away to the scullery for your tea, Victoria. The mistress has a lawyer fella with her.’

  In the scullery, perched on a scrubbed stool, Victoria ate scones with jam and drank hot, sweet tea and tried to taste them. ‘The best baker in Angus.’ Was that not what Grampa had said about her mother? Grampa? She felt again the hot tears squeezing up and she struggled to force them back. Would she ever, ever be able to think of him without crying?

  ‘Oh, Grampa, Grampa,’ she sobbed to herself. ‘Why did you leave me?’

  Later, Catriona came into the scullery while Victoria was at her homework, and sat down at the table beside her.

  ‘Victoria, my dear,’ she said. ‘The time has come to talk, a little, about your father.’

  Victoria looked at her expectantly, but with misgivings. Her father? She cared nothing about her father. It was Grampa she cared about.

  Catriona understood what was going through her daughter’s mind and ached to be able to spare her pain. She began to speak in a clipped, almost cold voice – emotionless. How else could she cope?

  ‘Your father, my husband, was . . . is, as you know, your grandfather’s son. I . . . I . . . divorced him ten years ago.’ Once again Catriona thought with gratitude of the love and care of the old man, who had insisted that she be freed from his own son. Thank heaven, he had always said, that Scots law was light years ahead of English law. All Catriona had had to do was prove that John had deserted her. And since he had never been seen in Angus since the day that his father had thrown him out, desertion had been cited as the just cause. She had found out later about the fees old Jock had had to pay, first to Arbuthnott Boatman and then to the very competent Edinburgh advocate, whom the canny Scots lawyer had recommended to handle the case. But, however much it had cost, he had paid them willingly.

  Catriona continued. ‘Since then I have been housekeeper here for Grampa. He always meant to make a new will, in your favour, Victoria, but he never got round to it. However, he – without my knowledge, needless to say – has paid me an extremely generous wage all these years, and it has accumulated at a good rate of interest. We will be able to cope, but we must leave the farm. It now belongs to . . . Grampa’s son. As yet we do not know where he is, but Mr Boatman will find him. Lawyers are very clever, Victoria. Anyway, I want to leave as quickly as possible. I will not be here when . . . It is better to make a clean break. Do you understand, Victoria? Mr Boatman is arranging to buy a house in Dundee for us, on Blackness Road.’ She stopped, and in her mind’s eye she saw once again the house she intended to buy. So different, so very different. She went on, ‘It’s a respectable area. You will be able to continue at the Harris Academy, Victoria, and so all your friends will remain the same.’

  She stopped and looked at her daughter expectantly but, in the depths of her own grief, Victoria was too numb to think. Nothing registered, but that awful moment of silence when Grampa had stood there staring at Catriona, clutching at his heart, his voice gasping. What had he said? What did it matter? He was dead.

&nbs
p; ‘I don’t care where we live,’ she said and Catriona winced, but she knew the child was putting up her defence mechanisms just as she, with her cold, unfeeling voice, had done.

  Victoria always wondered how her mother managed to be out of the farmhouse within the three days that followed the signing of the contracts between Catriona and the lawyers of the late owner. She must surely have stayed up all night, for the following Saturday found them ready to leave Priory Farm.

  Had the farm ever looked lovelier as it sat nestled among its carefully tended gardens? Redcurrants that Catriona had been unable to put up were still hanging like rubies on the bushes. The sun sparkled on the early-morning spider’s webs strewn across the hedges. Already, smoke from the fires in the tied cottages was drifting out of the chimneypots and Victoria could tell which of Grampa’s workers were already up and ready for the day.

  I can’t bear the pain, thought Victoria. I can’t leave here. I’ll die, away from this air, these scents.

  She said nothing of her agonies as they spent the day carrying out their last duties, for Catriona was determined that the new owner would find no trace of the previous occupants. At last it was time to eat one final meal and, for the very last time, climb into the old phaeton that Victoria and Grampa had used for their forays. She could still, she was sure, smell his familiar, much-loved presence. She did not look round as Tam bowled them out of the farm and along the road to Dundee.

  ‘It’s a nice area, Victoria,’ said Catriona desperately. ‘Near Elsie and the Harris. We’ll make it work.’

  Victoria said nothing as they raced along the road, past Templeton Woods and into Dundee. Had the river ever looked more beautiful, stretching for miles like a long, silver ribbon? Had the sun ever burnished the leaves on the trees to such splendour? No one in the phaeton noticed the beauty of the road; no one cared.

  ‘Keep going, keep going for ever and ever until we run off the edge of the world,’ Victoria silently told the horse.

  But eventually it stopped and the two passengers looked at what was to be their new home.

  ‘Ach, mistress,’ Tam said, before he remembered that he was only a servant, ‘you cannot live here. It’s nae better nor a slum.’

  Victoria looked up and saw a three-storey stone house almost buried beneath its overgrown garden. The gate was hanging on its hinges and all the ground-floor windows were broken.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks, Victoria,’ said Catriona, desperately trying to reach inside the unblinking statue that her daughter had become.

  Victoria climbed like an old woman from the phaeton. She helped Tam unload, much against his wishes, since he had strict ideas about what was right for masters and what was expected of men, and she carried some baskets into the house. Catriona had gone ahead to light some lamps and set a match to the fire she had laid earlier in the week. She did not light all the lamps – lamplight is flattering and welcoming, but better perhaps to keep the real state of their new home from Victoria until the girl had slept.

  Victoria said nothing as she put baskets in the kitchen and wicker hampers of clothes in the bedrooms. Catriona carried a small leather steamer-trunk, which really belonged to John, but which he had given her for their wedding trip. Most of the labels had peeled off over the years, but one still said Hôtel St-Etienne, Paris. Had she realized it was there, Catriona would have scraped it off too.

  ‘We’ll make some cocoa afore you go back, Tam,’ she said as he put down the biggest and heaviest of the boxes.

  ‘Mistress, come on back tae the Priory. We’ll think on something. This is no right, and it’s no what he would have wanted. We can talk to the new boss.’

  ‘I’ve made my bed and I mun lie on it, Tam. We’ll be fine, Victoria and me. We’ll manage, you’ll see. What was it Jock used to say, when we complained about anything? Pull yourself together, laddie. Ye’ve never died a winter yet. Well, we’re not going to die this winter either, Tam. We’re going to manage.’

  Victoria stood at the dirty window and looked out on to the darkened street. How strange to see houses, side by side, some with soft lamplight glowing, most in darkness.

  ‘Oh, dear Grampa,’ she whispered, ‘definitely not a walnut shell day.’

  3

  AN ARTIST WAS BUSY OUTSIDE her bedroom window. The huge beech trees were just struggling into their green spring coats – how many tints and shades there were. Mother Nature never ceased to astound her. Soft green shoots were bravely pushing up their heads, like so many watchful sentinels, out of the ground, away from the weakening grip of winter and towards the young sun. She could see two – no, three – of Jock’s beloved Clydesdales in the far field, their heads bent as they grazed. Suddenly one, his particular favourite, The Cutty Sark, threw up her tail and her heels and went skittering away across the field. Catriona peered to see what had excited the horse.

  It was Jock, his hands full of carrots, his pockets full of apples. He looked up, but his face disappeared and in its place Catriona saw . . . horror! She woke up with a start, and at her anguished cry the rat that had been chewing the wainscotting in the corner whisked out of sight behind the wardrobe.

  Victoria, beside her mother in the big bed, moaned softly in her sleep. Catriona leaned over, as she had done so many times over the years, to soothe her child.

  Victoria fell quiet and Catriona lay back again and tried, as she had always done before rising, to make a list of all the tasks she hoped to accomplish during the day. First thing was to light a fire. At least Victoria would be warm. She slipped out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and crept quietly down to the kitchen.

  The table was a seething mass of mice. They were everywhere. Already they had eaten their way into the bags of flour and sugar, the packages of good farm butter, the loaves of yesterday’s bread. Some of them jumped from the table at Catriona’s arrival, but the bigger and bolder ones looked at her with their malevolent, beady eyes and went on chewing.

  It was too much . . . to be brought to this. All her life, every day, every moment, Catriona had worked and cleaned, and tried to keep up the standards instilled in her by her mother. Now . . . to come to this.

  I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name.

  Dear God, would the words always be there to haunt her, to poison her love for the old man, to tarnish his memory? She could bear no more. For the first time since Jock’s sudden death, Catriona began to cry. Great choking sobs were wrenched from her and scalding tears chased one another down her cheeks.

  ‘Oh, why, Father, why? I cannot bear this; I cannot deal with such dirt and damp, and neglect.’

  A mouse, startled by her cry, ran across her foot on its way to its hole and the delicate touch was the final straw. Catriona screamed and screamed and screamed. The vermin ran to their holes and Victoria, terrified out of her sleep by her mother’s distress; jumped from the big double bed and, without waiting to put on dressing gown or slippers, rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  She was nearly fifteen years old and suddenly she grew up. She threw her arms around the wailing woman and Catriona felt their strength.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ soothed the girl. Never before, no matter what had happened, even on that dreadful night when Grampa had died at her very feet, had Victoria seen her mother unable to cope. She held her mother and was no longer a child; she would never again be a child. At the sight of her mother’s distress Victoria had stopped thinking only of herself. She had grown up. She felt a million years old. ‘We’ll cope. We will. We’ll make it work, together. I’ll help. Don’t cry, don’t cry.’

  She pushed her mother down into the chair beside the range and, putting her arms around Catriona’s waist, laid her head in her mother’s lap, but still she was the comforter, not the comforted.

  ‘We’ll cope, Mother. A cup of tea. I’ll make you a nice hot cup of tea and then we’ll start.’ She looked around and repressed a shudder. ‘It’s only dirt. Dirt has no respect for anyone, ric
h or poor, but boiling water and good carbolic soap’ll sort it. You’ll see. You won’t recognize this place when we’re finished with it.’

  She looked fearfully at the wainscotting and observed the tell-tale holes. She had seen the mice rushing away from her mother’s screams. No mouse or rat had dared to disturb the peace of Priory Farm. Had they done so, they would have met a timely end. Victoria took a deep breath.

  ‘We need a good mouser and we’ll get one, but first we need tea. That was what Grampa used to say, Mother, do you remember? ‘I can handle anything, if I get a decent cup of tea. None of your holy water here.’ Do you remember, Mother, how he loved his tea?’

  She got up and Catriona, calmed by her daughter’s strength, watched her at work. The set of the head on the thin, young shoulders was John’s; the flashing grey-blue eyes that had vowed to do battle with dirt and poverty were John’s; but, oh dear God, thank you, the courage and character were Jock’s. That they were also hers did not occur to Catriona Cameron.

  ‘Tam will tell us how to deal with vermin, Mother,’ said Victoria later, as she held the teacup so that her shaking mother could drink the reviving brew. Oh, so nearly had she said, ‘Grampa will tell us.’ Sometimes her grandfather seemed still to be alive. She could almost hear his voice, almost smell his pipe. But here she could smell only damp and a strange, rotting smell that had to be the mice. Tam would know how to deal with mice. And might there be rats too? Victoria shuddered and tried to smile at her mother. Had Grampa still been alive, of course, there would have been no need to learn how to cope with such horrors.

  ‘Now, Mother,’ said Victoria as Catriona made no move, ‘have some more tea and I will find something for us to eat.’

  Catriona retched. ‘No, child, there were mice in everything. Everything’s contaminated. We can’t eat.’ Her voice rose hysterically and Victoria heard the warning signs of distress and tried to deal with them.

  ‘We must eat, Mother. We have a great deal of work to do. See, the eggs are untouched. Wasn’t that nice? The mice left the eggs to have as their second course and now they’ve lost them. I’ll make something nourishing. You go upstairs and wash and dress. Here, there is water in the kettle. We’ll get this range cleaned and then it will stay lit twenty-four hours a day and there will be water, lovely hot water. And in two shakes of a lamb’s tail there won’t be a germ anywhere.’