by Anne Doughty
Well, it would take a lot of tractors to put Harvey through his seven years. He’d set his heart on being a doctor and the sixth form master at the new school said he had every chance of passing his exams. That had really pleased Edna. In fact, since the move from Ballymena, things had been easier there. She had joined the Church ladies and went out more. Sometimes on a Saturday when he was decorating or fitting up shelves she would bring him a mug of tea. At times she seemed almost content.
‘Did you always come this way when you went to school?’
George glanced down at the small figure skipping along at his side. She never walked unless she was thinking about something and then you would see her move one foot at a time, with a dogged deliberation, her brow deeply furrowed. On her first day at her new primary school down the road she had walked solemnly off with her mother and then come skipping home with a friend. That was typical of Jenny. The surprise in his life, the daughter he never expected, closer to him from her earliest years than the son of whom he had had such hopes.
‘No, usually I went down beside the stream till I got to the road. I only came this way to see Granny McTaggart.’
‘Didn’t you get your shoes wet going down by the stream?’
‘I didn’t wear shoes.’
‘But you can’t wear Wellies for going to school,’ she protested. ‘Did you take your shoes in a shoe bag?’
‘I didn’t have any shoes or Wellies. Lots of children didn’t in those days.’ He looked down again and saw the familiar furrow as she considered this piece of information. She was walking now with her eyes focused on the toes of her boots and the rough surface of the almost overgrown path.
‘Didn’t the stones hurt when you tramped on them?’
‘Sometimes, but your feet got hard and you didn’t notice, mostly.’
At that moment they reached the first of the two streams that crossed their path.
‘How did the stream know where to go under the ground?’
‘It didn’t. It just felt around and wherever it found a hole or a crack, in it went.’
‘Do you think it likes being under there?’
George smiled to himself. She could go on like this for hours. And he would be happy to let her for the workings of her mind never ceased to intrigue him. But it made Edna angry. Always asking questions, and such silly nonsense too. She blamed him for encouraging her.
‘Look, Jenny, you can see Scotland now.’
‘Where?’
He saw her bend down and peer out to sea between two gorse bushes. He laughed at himself, picked her up and felt the soft touch of one arm as she wound it round his neck. She waved the other towards the sea, greeny-blue and flecked with white caps after the passing shower.
‘Is that Scotland?’
‘Yes, love. That’s the Mull of Kintyre.’
‘Mull of Kintyre,’ she repeated solemnly as if she were learning it by heart.
He stood and pointed out the landmarks of his childhood world, and then, still carrying her, strode up and across the stepping stones to the abandoned house where the thatch had fallen in at one end and been overwhelmed by a tangle of roses, a few of which were still in bloom.
‘The door’s not locked, Daddy, but Lottie wouldn’t let me go in. She says there might be a ghost.’
The door had never had a lock. What was there to steal and who was there to steal it? Andy McTaggart had said it would make a storehouse for potatoes, but young Harry, always more practical, said it was too far away and not worth the carrying. So, after his mother died it had stood empty. He had removed her few possessions, put away the few pieces of delph as keepsakes for his brothers and sisters and planted fuchsias in the couple of three-legged pots which had survived.
He pushed open the door. He was surprised that there was no smell of damp, but then the back windows were broken and it was summer, the flagged stone floor was dry and only slightly dusty. Jenny walked in under his arm and stood regarding the empty hearth.
‘What’s that, Daddy?’ she asked, pointing her finger at the metal crane which still stood over the hearth, the chain dangling, untenanted over the absent fire. He saw flames spring up and shadows move and smelt the soda farls fresh from the griddle. It wasn’t all hard. There had been happiness in this place too. He knew now why his mother would not leave when he married in ’31. All the things she had loved were here. She had insisted firmly that she would stay and Mary McTaggart, ten years younger and now widowed herself had backed her up. Edna had said these old people can’t move with the times. It was better to let them alone.
‘Mmm, what’s that, love?’ he said, collecting himself and looking down again at the two bright eyes that regarded him unblinkingly.
‘Have you seen a ghost, Daddy?’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps I have, Jenny. It depends what you think a ghost is. Some people think ghosts are just what we remember inside our heads. I was remembering your Granny Erwin and your aunties and uncles in Scotland, and England, and America. I’ll tell you about them on the way home in the car if you’re a good girl. But we must go now. All right?’
‘All right, Daddy, but can I walk across the stepping stones all by myself?’
He hesitated. There was only a little water over the stones, hardly enough to wet his own shoes, but they were always slippery. She might fall and the boulders were rough in the stream bed. She could hit her head. How could he bear to lose this child, never to see those eyes again watching him, trusting, questioning. He felt tears mist his vision. What you love most you fear to lose. But you must face that fear or you destroy something of what you love. That was what his mother always said.
He nodded shortly and saw her run out of the cottage and across the rough grass. Before he had pulled the door behind him and opened his mouth to say a word of warning she was away and across. Standing on the far bank, a small, self-contained figure, she was waving to him.
‘Come on, Daddy, hurry up, you said it was time to go.’
He followed her cautiously and reached for her hand as she skipped along beside him.
Remember that, George. Let it be a lesson to you, he said silently to himself. Don’t ever try to put her in a cage to keep her safe, he added, as they moved together along the valleyside where the heather murmured and shook with the passionate harvesting of the bees . . .
George woke abruptly, the buzzing still in his ears. Pain oscillated in his chest. Suddenly the room seemed very warm. He leaned back in his chair, wiped beads of perspiration from his brow and thought longingly of the cool air of the glenside in the early morning, of the path he had walked with Jenny in his arms only moments ago in his dream.
The pain began to subside and his breathing became easier. He settled more comfortably in his chair. Lulled by the quiet, the warmth of the fire and the powerful drugs that dilated the arteries of his chest, he dozed off again. As the minutes of the long afternoon clicked past on the broad face of the clock on the mantelpiece, he moved far away in time and place.
The rain came in the night. It swept down the deep glen in soft grey curtains, catching fragments of light from the half-obscured moon. At first, the fine droplets slid over the summer dry grass, then, as the few dark hours of the short night passed, the thin soils became sodden and tiny rivulets began to trickle into the dry stream beds. By the time the sun rose and the sky cleared, the air was full of the splash of brown, peaty water as a dozen streams dashed headlong to the valley floor.
It was not the sudden bustle in the deep-cut watercourses that woke young George Erwin from his dream-filled sleep. It was the steady drip from the thatch and the bright dappling on the ceiling, where the sunlight reflected from the pools of water shimmering in the morning breeze on the swept stone flags outside the cottage. He lay, warm and still, only his eyes moving round the familiar features of his small, bare room.
The tiny window that looked south across the great trench-like hollow of the glen was spattered with raindrops and shadowed by the
climbing rose his father had planted for his mother long ago. When he brought his young bride away from the comfortable, slate-roofed house where she had lived with her parents, and taught in the village school, she had come without regret, and made no complaint at the hardness of her new life, but down there, near the sea, where the soil was deep and had been worked for centuries, she’d had a garden and an orchard and he knew that she missed them. To comfort her for the loss of which she never spoke, he sent all the way to Antrim for a pink rose like the ones she had left behind.
Exposed to the strong wind on the valley sides and the thin soils of the crumbling basalt, it had struggled to get its roots down. Seeing its need, his father had collected soil from the lowland stream banks and manure from the farm where he laboured. He’d carried it up on his back and tended the young root with the same warm affection he offered to her and his children. The rose had flourished as their life had flourished. Now, when he was gone, it was his mother’s greatest joy. Apart from her children, all grown and gone away except for himself, there was nothing she loved more dearly than her climbing rose.
He could tell by the strength of the light and the shadow of the window thrown on the whitewashed wall that it was late. Usually by this hour he had milked the cow and searched for the eggs laid in strange places by the hens who had gone broody. Sometimes he would light the fire before he set off for school, or dig potatoes for their supper, or tether the goat in some new place where it had not already eaten all the meagre grass. Today there would be no time to do any of those tasks and he wondered why she had not called him an hour ago.
Just at that moment, she did call. A light, soft voice unmarked by the hardship of her life and the loss of so many she had loved.
‘Georgie. Time ye were up. It’s a grate mornin’.’
He jumped out of bed, poured water from the delph jug into the basin on the washstand, gave his face and hands a perfunctory wipe and pulled on his shirt and trousers. As he opened the door into the big, dark kitchen, he saw his mother was sitting outside. She was already at work. While she sat on one kitchen chair, another close by held her workbox and a pile of napkins. She was turned towards the light, her needle flying, her movements so fast he could hardly follow them. She heard him come, let the damask drop in her lap and reached up to kiss him.
‘How mony more?’ he asked, returning her kiss.
‘Seven forby. But ’tis early yet. He’ll not likely be here a while yet,’ she said, reassuring him. ‘Are ye weary the morn?’ she went on, looking at the droop of his shoulders and eyes filmed with sleep. ‘Ye were way late last night,’ she added gently.
‘No, I’m nae tired at all,’ he said brightly.
She smiled at him and took up her work, knowing now that he was tired. And how would he not be tired with the jobs McTaggart gave him, and him not strong. She felt her eyes mist as she looked at him, twelve years old and trying to do a man’s work with a child’s body. ‘Away now an’ eat a bite, I left it ready for ye,’ she said quickly as she concealed the end of thread at the back of her work and trimmed it off neatly with her fine scissors.
‘Have ye had yourn?’ he asked, his eyes on her hands and the small practised movements she made as she picked up the next napkin and checked that the tracing was in the right place and on the proper side of the fabric.
‘Oh, long since,’ she laughed as she squinted into the light, moistened the white thread and manoeuvred it into the eye of the crewel needle.
He knew she hadn’t eaten, just as she had known that he was tired. But neither felt any shame in their deception. In the important things of their life, their love for the hard but beautiful place in which they lived, their joy in the creatures who shared their bare hillside, and the pleasure of the few books which had survived the struggle to make ends meet, they could be honest. There was between them both friendship and love.
The fire was not lit, though there was turf in the basket and kindling stacked in a corner by the wooden settle. No need of warmth on such a fine summer morning, but without fire there could be no cooking. The empty hearth told him that both the flour sack and the meal barrel were empty. Unless there were some dollars from Nellie in America or a postal order from Glasgow or London, they would remain so. The few shillings from the man who collected the white work would have to go on baker’s bread. And in June and July they had to buy potatoes till the new crop were ready to dig. In all the old stories they read on winter’s nights, July was the ‘hungry month’. As he bit into the dry crust of bread, Georgie wondered why it was only July, for June was just as bad.
Most mornings they had tea, made weak and brewed well over the fire, but he knew that there would be no more tea till after Friday’s cart. He looked at the glass of buttermilk set by his plate and winced. He hated its sour taste and the little globules of fat that settled on your upper lip as you swallowed it. But he knew she would be anxious if he left it untouched and drank instead a glass of spring water from the white enamelled pail in the cupboard.
‘Drink it, Georgie, ah do. ’Tis good for ye. Ye hav tae build yer strength.’
He imagined he heard her voice, even though she was outside, bent over her work, the sunlight catching the grey in her once dark hair. He knew what she was thinking when she said that, too, though the words were never mentioned between them.
Three years ago, for weeks of the summer he had lain side by side with his younger brother in the room now used only when some of his brothers and sisters came to visit. Between the two narrow beds his mother had sat, hour after hour, wringing bits of cloth in a pail of water cold from the stream to wipe their faces and bodies. He had felt sweat pour from his brow and found his limbs ached so much he could hardly manage to use the chamber pot. It had gone on for weeks, sleeping and dreaming and not knowing which was which. He had had nightmares, called out in his sleep and seen them move his brother to another room. Only at the end of it, when he could just manage to stand again, did they tell him that Jamsey had died from the same rheumatic fever from which he was beginning to recover.
It had taken his brother to the churchyard behind the grey stone church at the valley’s mouth. From his place in the schoolroom in the shadow of the church he could see the gleam of the marble stone. The names he could not see, but he had no need, he knew them by heart for they were the history of his family. Despite the rain and wind of these three years, the new letters were still sharp: ‘And Jamsey, aged 7, youngest son of Ellen and the above James Erwin.’
He drank the buttermilk as quickly as he could and wiped his lips on his sleeve. On the scrubbed wooden table next to his plate were two brown eggs in a paper bag. He took them up reluctantly, fetched his satchel and reading book, and went out into the sun.
‘Tell Mary I’m behind wi’ my allocation, I’ve not baked a bite yet. She’ll give ye a piece for school.’
Mary McTaggart was a kind neighbour and had been good to them in many ways. But her husband was a different matter. He had been amiable enough when James Erwin was his tenant and hired labourer, working long hours without overtime and paying his rent without fail. But young George could only manage half a man’s work, and even when the hours after school and at the weekends were enough to pay the rent, it no longer brought it in cash. If there was one thing Harry McTaggart liked, it was cash. On the nail.
‘Have ye learned yer poem?’ she asked, her needle poised over the initials she was working on the damask.
‘Aye. Will I say it over tae ye?’
She shook her head. ‘Nay, nay, ye’ll be late. Ye’ll say it for me the night, when the work’s away tae Belfast.’ She smiled up at him and held out the napkin she had just begun. ‘Look, Georgie, these must be for ye. There’s half a dozen for G.E.’
He stood looking down at the intertwined letters with their broad satin-stitch bodies and delicate chain-stitch swirls. It had never happened before. In all the allocations, the dozens of pieces she had worked, there had never before been a G.E. He reached out a f
inger and touched the letters cautiously, knowing full well that a dirty mark would mean a deduction in the payment. She held out the others, five more large squares of finest damask, each traced lightly in blue with his own initials.
He looked at them wistfully. By the end of the afternoon they would be finished, and long before he got back from the farm they would be wrapped in clean cotton rag, tied into a bale with the others and carried up the track to the waiting carrier. He would take them to Belfast and somewhere in the crowded streets of the city, in a warehouse or in a factory shed, they would be smoothed and folded, tied with fine green ribbon and put in boxes lined with soft white tissue. Made in Ireland. Hand finished. In tiny gold letters. So she had told him. And then they would go on their way to those who could afford to buy such things, to some great house in some other part of Ireland, or to England, or across the ocean to America.
‘Some day, Georgie,’ she said quietly, breaking into his thoughts, ‘ye’ll have napkins, an’ books, an’ things of yer own. Make sure ye lissen hard to all the master says. What gaes into your head, Georgie, belongs to ye, e’en when you’ve nae piece to take to school.’
There were two ways down to McTaggart’s farm. You could climb upwards on a rough track till you struck the metalled road and then follow it along for a mile or more, till it dipped into the head of the glen and then rose up out of it again to strike across the plateau to Ballymena, or you could drop down the hillside and pick your way along a narrow path which followed the valleyside just where the overlying basalt met the underlying chalk and the rough, hungry land of the dark rock became suddenly gentler and greener.
George chose the low path and set off downhill between the gorse bushes, the rush of water in his ears. Their own stream from which he carried the buckets for washing and cleaning was in full spate and the broad flat stepping stones his father had placed there were well covered. He stepped gingerly across, the cold water tugging at his ankles, concerned for neither his much-mended clothes nor his bare feet but for the book tucked inside his battered satchel. Once safely across, he took to the straggling grass, still wet from the rain and scattered with wildflowers. Soon the walking became easy. With chalk beneath, the turf was short and springy, dry already after the rain and sprinkled with the yellow stars of tormentil and the blue bell flowers of milkwort.