A Seaside Practise

by Tom Smith

  I didn’t doubt for a second that Archie was the ‘panther’: in our chats in the yard behind our cottages he explained his calling to me. It was his job to produce as many pheasants as possible for each Autumn’s shoot, and any animal, cat, dog, fox or man who dared to meddle with that would face his retribution. I didn’t see him with any mantraps, but I had no doubt that he would use one if he felt the need. He generally made do with vicious ‘pole’ traps, which he would set on top of gate posts and bait with small portions of meat. As the bird settled on the pole to take the meat it sprung the trap, and two iron-toothed jaws would close on the unfortunate animal’s torso, crushing it to death. He caught owls, kestrels, falcons and even buzzards like this. Hares and cats he caught in similar traps set in their ‘runs’ in the undergrowth, and rabbits he caught in snares. You had to be very careful walking through the woods that Archie tended.

  He had his good side: when he was sober he taught me the rudiments of fly fishing in the burn just in front of the cottages. I still have the small black-and-white photograph of the first trout I caught, and Archie grinning beside me. He reasoned that if I could be introduced to country sports I would be his ally in the never-ending fight against his enemies. It didn’t work out that way.

  Agnes was a very different person. Where Archie was overweight and ruddy-faced, the result of his constant exposure to the wind, the sun and alcohol, Agnes was thin and cowed, face pale and lined well beyond her years. Her eyes were still bright, though, and anyone could see that she had been, when younger, a good-looking woman. I was astonished to see from her medical notes that she was only thirty-seven: she looked fifty or more. She dressed as cleanly and neatly as she could on the meagre amount she was given after Archie had drunk most of the wages. There was always a pot of soup on the stove made from the vegetables she had grown in the small garden, with a piece of rabbit or hare, provided by Archie, thrown in ‘for a wee taster’, she would say. She would share that soup with anyone, despite her very limited means, provided they stayed and talked a while afterwards.

  The day after we arrived Agnes walked into our cottage kitchen with a big, steaming pot of her soup. I’d never tasted anything so delicious. She beamed when I asked for a little more, then turned her attention to Catriona – her real reason, I’m sure, for coming in. She and Archie hadn’t been able to have children themselves, she said, and she just loved babies.

  Mairi gave her Catriona to hold. Agnes beamed again, holding the baby to her breast and, swaying gently, looked down at Catriona’s sleeping face.

  ‘When was she born?’ she asked.

  I replied, ‘The Ides of March – the thirteenth.’

  ‘No, doctor,’ she said, in a way that gently chided me for my inaccuracy. ‘The Ides of March are on the fifteenth. Just as they are in May, July and October. It’s on the other months that they’re on the thirteenth.’

  I looked at her in a new light. Here was a woman, as poor as there could be in Britain, teaching me about the Roman calendar. It turned out that she had done well in the village school, and had loved the classics. The old head teacher, Clunie MacPherson, who still lived in the village, told me later that Agnes had been one of the brightest pupils he had ever taught. She could easily have gone to university: instead, she had been forced to leave at fifteen to make her living as a maid in the ‘big hoose’. Clunie had smiled ruefully at the thought of Agnes, with an IQ fifty points above anyone else in the house, wasting her life below stairs, cleaning, washing dishes and bringing in the coals and logs. The only available male in her life had been Archie, and she had jumped out of the frying pan of servitude (virtually slavery) into the fire of Archie’s alcoholism and violence. It was a hard life, said Clunie. But once a week, he and Agnes, and a few older former pupils, still met to discuss philosophy and the classics in his small front room. That lightened her load a little, in the process making Clunie happy, too.

  We didn’t have Archie and Agnes as neighbours for long. Late one July evening, we heard a knock at the back door of the cottage. It was a boy I hadn’t met before. Alan Gordon was eleven years old. He was small and wiry, with sunken cheeks and a wheeze I could hear clearly as he was standing a few feet in front of me. He plainly had asthma, but that wasn’t what he had come for.

  It was twilight, but in the glow from the kitchen behind me I could see he was pale and was grimacing with pain. He was clamping his right forearm firmly between his left upper arm and the side of his chest, hiding it from my view. He was on his own. He kept glancing towards the McLaren’s cottage, as if he was afraid to be caught near it. It was then I noticed that he was shivering, violently, although the night wasn’t frosty, and he was warmly dressed in a thick overcoat and long trousers tucked into his boots.

  ‘You the Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘come on in and get warm. You look as if you are freezing.’

  ‘I’m no cauld, Doctor, I’m just scared.’

  He walked past me into the kitchen. I shut the door and he turned to face me. He took his hand from its hiding place. Clamped around his wrist were the jaws of a gin trap. It wasn’t man-size, but it was certainly big enough to damage pretty severely the thin wrist of an eleven-year-old boy. Surprisingly, there was no bleeding.

  I took him into the lounge, where Mairi was seated on a couch. I must say here that the last thing she had wanted to be was a nurse. Her subject at college had been hotel management, which was great training for running the business side of a family doctor’s practice, but hardly appropriate when dealing with medical emergencies. Give her credit, she rose up and managed to clear a space on the couch for young Alan before she fainted clear away on the floor. I now had two casualties in the room – one a boy in shock (the cause of the shivering) and the other an unconscious woman lying on her back with her heels drumming out a steady beat on the wooden floor.

  Alan was so concerned that he came instantly out of his shock. He forgot about the trap on his arm and stared at her.

  ‘Whit’s wrang wi’ her? Is she havin’ a fit?’ he asked. ‘Is it ma fault?’

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ I said to him. ‘She has only fainted. We will see to you first.’

  Luckily, the trap hadn’t been strong enough to break a bone, and the stiff cloth of his coat had stopped it from tearing the skin. I was able to prize the jaws of the trap open and relieve the pain. His wrist was bruised, but he could move his fingers and wrist normally.

  ‘No real harm done,’ I said to him, and we both turned to Mairi, who was groggily raising herself from the floor. She took a little longer than Alan to recover, and I went off into the kitchen to make a cup of tea for the three of us. I don’t think any medicine has yet been devised that’s better than hot sweet tea for shock or a faint.

  Mairi and I took our time to get to know Alan that evening. He was one of five brothers and two sisters who lived with their parents in a council house in Kilminnel, just across the road from the village policeman. That was unfortunate for the Gordons, because they were not, to put it delicately, always on the side of the law.

  That wasn’t to say they were criminals exactly. They saw the taking of a few rabbits and hares from the large estates in the surrounding valleys as a form of pest control. The fact that the asinine laws of Scotland at the time stated that this was illegal didn’t impinge on their ethical or moral feelings on the subject. Generations of Gordons had taken their meat where they could and had never harmed anyone in doing so. Alan was just following in the family tradition. So when he had put his hand down a rabbit burrow to check on the snare he had set there, it was a painful discovery to find a gin trap in its place.

  Archie McLaren must have known about the burrow and the snare, and that his gin trap might cause severe injury to whoever had set it. I didn’t like that at all. Alan had walked the four miles from Kilminnel to Braehill to tend his snares: I decided to take him home in my car,
and talk to his parents about it.

  They were happy to see us, and thanked me profusely for bringing Alan home. I told them I would support them if they wanted to bring charges against Archie: after all gin traps of any kind were now outside the law, and setting one where a child, poacher or not, could be trapped by it was unacceptable. They politely refused to take things further. No, the villagers around here do things in their own way, they said, McLaren will learn his lesson.

  And learn he did, the hard way. The last weeks of July are crucial for pheasants. It’s the time when the new season’s chicks are big enough to be set free from the pens in which they are reared. Pheasants are particularly stupid birds: they will walk anywhere without a care in the world. It’s impossible in the Stinchar valley in the late summer and the autumn not to come across dozens of them in the roads and hedgerows. I wonder sometimes if they commit suicide by running in front of cars just so they will miss being shot later.

  If you are a gamekeeper, the only way you can guarantee to keep your pheasants around your own fields and woods is to keep feeding them grain in specific places, so that they always return, morning and night, to them. Archie had around a dozen of these places strategically placed in the shooting fields and hills. He would drive to them each morning and evening on weekdays to replenish the grain stocks. He was supposed to do so, too, on Friday and Saturdays, but his fondness for John Barleycorn sometimes got in the way.

  When word about what had happened to young Alan got about, plans were hatched. Archie had a few more enemies than he knew about in the village. There were those who were suspicious about their lost cats and others, including the storekeeper, to whom he owed money. They weren’t exactly scared of him, but they were aware of his strength and his temper, and knew that picking an argument with him would end in violence. The Braehill and Kilminnel people are gentle folk – until spurred into action.

  So it was that certain residents of the two villages decided to treat Archie one Saturday evening to a few extra drinks. Archie was never averse to being treated: he was dimly aware that this was unusual, but reasoned that they might be wanting to bribe him for jobs as beaters when the shooting season started. That was fine by him.

  Other worthies were on a stealthier mission. At each of the pheasant feeders they replaced the grain with corn they had especially prepared beforehand, laced liberally with whisky, that had been, how shall we say, ‘manufactured’ from a certain large copper vessel up in the hills above one of the villages. When the Customs and Excise eventually found one of the bottles a few years later it was measured at one hundred and ten degrees proof.

  It is a common belief that animals don’t like alcohol. If laboratory rats are given the choice between alcohol-laden and alcohol-free food, we are told that they always choose the latter, unless they are put under severe stress.

  Well, Archie’s pheasants were either under severe stress, or the laboratory results do not extrapolate to pheasants in the wild. Once one pheasant had tasted the delicious new feed, it gave the clarion call to the others to share in its good fortune. Within minutes all the pheasants for miles around were gobbling up the feed as if it were Christmas. Within an hour they were all doing a passable imitation of Archie, who at that moment was gently snoring on the padded bench that passed for seating in the back room of the Braehill Arms.

  Avid readers who know their Paul Gallico may be reminded here of his story of drunken pheasants. It was about a man and his son who, having put out alcohol-soaked feed for them in a wood, waited until they had fallen off their perches in the trees before harvesting them from the ground. Archie’s pheasants couldn’t have made it to their perches – they were far too sozzled to attempt to fly. They stayed woozily on the ground, within yards of their feeding stations, until they fell asleep.

  So it was simple for the men (and boys – I have heard, though of course I had no proof, that Alan and his brothers were among them) to pick the pheasants up and place them in the backs of their trucks. It is difficult for anyone who lives near a thousand pheasants to imagine that they could be transported silently through the night on open-backed trucks, but I am assured that that is exactly what happened. All that could be heard from them, it is said, were a few gentle snores, as the birds dreamed their night away.

  The Kilminnel men could have sold their haul to hotels around Britain for a large profit. After all, they were already marinaded. But that wasn’t the plan. They were not thieves and didn’t, as far as anyone knows to this day, harm a single pheasant. Instead they picked a perfect spot from which the pheasants could be retrieved. Kilminell Church has a walled garden beside it, in which there is plenty of room for a thousand pheasants to puddle about happily for a day or two, eating the wild grass and flower seeds, but with no chance of escape. It’s said that they took a day or so to get over their hangovers and to be able to walk with some sense of balance again.

  The minister was amazed to see them all on the Sunday morning, as were the county folk from the ‘big hoose’, Archie’s employers, as they walked up to the church door for the morning service. Minister and laird alike had no idea how the pheasants had got there. Nor did they know whose pheasants they were, at least until after the church service, which was unusually well-attended that morning. Could it possibly have been that people wanted to see the laird’s face when the truth dawned? Surely not.

  Archie woke later on that morning to a worse than usual Sunday hangover, and to an irate landowner who wanted to know why his land was empty of any evidence of pheasant life and smelled like a distillery, and why the minister appeared now to have a thousand pheasants in his garden. Could there possibly be a link, and could Archie kindly provide it?

  Of course, Archie couldn’t. It was a nightmare from which he never recovered. It turned out to be much more difficult to move the now sober and hyperactive pheasants back to their home, and the numerous helpful offers of special grain to calm them down seemed somehow to enrage him further. He couldn’t face the future in Braehill. He and Agnes left for pastures new a few weeks later. Except we heard that they weren’t pastures, but a city flat where the views were of sandstone, bricks and mortar and where no pheasant, drunk or sober, ever showed its plumage.

  We were sad to lose Agnes, but we heard later that she had become the breadwinner. Clunie still had some influence in educational circles. Agnes won a University bursary, and after pursuing her studies further, went on to become first a lecturer and then a reader in classics. She has written books on philosophy that are beyond me. I presume she left Archie far behind. As for the new gamekeeper, the laird had to make a fast decision. He was in the middle of the pheasant-rearing season, and had to fill the job quickly. So he gave it to Alan’s dad Callum, on the basis that a poacher would know the ropes. Alan became his apprentice, and I’ve watched him and his children grow up, spending as much time taking visitors and birders around their far-flung parts of Scotland, pointing out the birds of prey, and showing them the red squirrels, the otters and pine martens, as they do rearing pheasants.

  Chapter Seven

  Clunie’s clocks

  After having met Agnes I was curious to meet her mentor, Clunie. In those days in country practice, doctors had a monthly visit list for all their ‘elderly frail’. It’s a part of practice that I much regret has been lost in the last few years. As workloads have expanded, visits have taken a back seat. It is more efficient to bring people in to the surgery. We can see six people an hour that way, against two an hour when visiting. Efficiency is today’s mantra, but it’s a mantra for those who didn’t experience the old ways of doing things. We have lost a lot, in 2011, by building all practice around the surgery, and not round the home.

  To get back to my first visit to Clunie. He lived in a beautiful stone house set in a well-tended garden just at the beginning of Braehill village. Built in the 1890s, when the boom in woollens and mohair had made the village prosperous, it
had the living space for a large family and two or three servants. Clunie lived in it alone, but he wasn’t in the least lonely.

  He had all his family around him. There were his parents, grandparents and five maiden aunts. Obviously they weren’t alive; they were in oil paintings and alabaster busts, in fading photographs and in framed embroidery. There were mountains of books, diaries, and letters in blocks bound in ribbons. There were also three pianos, two cellos, three sofas, half a dozen leather armchairs and the same number again covered in velvet. The chairs and sofas bore pristine, creaseless, lace-trimmed white antimacassars. There were three dining room tables, several writing desks and two legal partners’ desks. The floor was thick with carpets, laid one on top of another. The upper ones had obviously been made to measure for other rooms, as their edges and corners didn’t fit: they showed intriguing glimpses of even finer carpets below the ones Clunie and his guests walked on.

  Then there were the clocks. In each room there were two or three grandfather and grandmother clocks, and on every table and desk were collections of mantel clocks, carriage clocks, and clocks in glass cases or gilt cases with rotating balls or swinging pendula. There were old circular railway station clocks on the walls of three of the rooms. They were all at the right time. Once, when I visited him around noon, those that could strike out the twelve hours did so. It was like having an orchestra of glockenspiels in the house.

  This was all on the ground floor. I never did find out what was upstairs, because the staircase was filled with Victorian and Edwardian bric-à-brac. There were piles of cases, boxes, books, crockery and vases all the way up to the landing. You couldn’t have gone up the stairs if you tried. It was difficult enough to walk into the front room from the front door: you first had to wend your way between two gigantic Chinese vases, then between stools, chairs, standard lamps, music stands and piles of clothes. Once in the front room, it was tricky to place your feet one after another without stepping on some precious ornament. Clunie must have held his meetings with Agnes and her friends in the kitchen, the only room in which it was possible to sit.