by Anne Doughty
‘Yer mather, Jenny, wos always a great un fer progress,’ said Aunt Mary one day when she was baking soda bread at the kitchen table. ‘But what yer mather mint by progress wos muney. Gettin’ muney, or havin’ muney. That wos what wos importan’ ta her. She’d no time atall for yer pur feyther whin he wos oney a prentice in tha smithy. Oh no, deer no. Amerikay wos tha whole go thin. Annie wos goin’ ta send her a tickit. But Annie got married insted.’
I could see her kneading the bread, her touch so light, her fingers knobbly and bent from farm work.
‘I alus mind yer mather cornin’ in fra work wi’ somethin’ some young man or ither had give her. Sweeties, or choclits, or some wee gift. “Oh,” says we, for Annie and I were powerful nosey, “are ye gane out wi’ him thin?” “We’ll see,” says she, as cool as ye like. And ye know, Jenny, she niver went out wi’ anyun less she thought they’d a gude bit a muney ta spend. She wos very hard.’
Aunt Mary had dusted the flour from her hands, laughed easily, and slid the cake of bread onto the waiting griddle.
‘A right eejit she thought me for marryin’ yer Uncle Paddy. She’d a skipt the weddin’ if yer grandfayther hadn’t put his fut down.’
And then she had showed me her wedding picture, a studio portrait with Grecian pillars and ferns in pots, Patrick McBride looking handsome but uncomfortable in a stiff collar and Mary peering over a huge circular bouquet of roses that looked exactly like a wreath.
Quite suddenly, I saw myself back in the kitchen at Rathmore Drive, in my hand a spray of five perfectly-matched roses. It was the Saturday morning after the May Ball and the roses were Colin’s first gift. Now, sitting here, in Alan’s cottage, remembering my Aunt Mary’s words, I saw again that coy look on my mother’s face. I couldn’t remember her exact words, but it was about how much the roses had cost, ‘a pretty penny from that florists’, was what she’d said.
I got up quickly and climbed the steep wooden staircase to the larger of the two small bedrooms. Everything was exactly as it had been when I last saw it by the light of the paraffin lamp on Saturday night. The room might look the same, but everything else had changed. I saw now that it had all begun that morning when Colin had sent the roses. Now it had ended the only way it could.
I crossed to the window to open it and look out at the sea, but as I put my hand to the catch, I heard a noise below. I peered down through the branches of the rose and saw a tall figure struggling with an aluminium step ladder. So thick was the foliage that it was only as he began to climb I could be quite sure it was Alan.
‘Young man,’ I began severely, in my best Betsy Trotwood voice. ‘Are you trying to gain access to these premises?’
He laughed and climbed higher. We regarded each other across several feet of rose canopy. He was looking at me quite directly and for the very first time I noticed that he had splendid grey eyes. They were full of surprise and delight.
‘I wondered where you were when I saw the car,’ he said, smiling. ‘I thought you might have gone down to the beach.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘I didn’t for a moment. I thought it might be the estate agent. Then I used my superior powers of deduction and decided he probably wouldn’t have brought his Panda with him.’
I laughed and ran downstairs. He met me in the doorway, caught me in his arms, kissed me and held me.
‘Jenny, I’ve been thinking of you all day,’ he said, his voice full of relief and tenderness. ‘You were so steady on the phone this morning, but I was afraid it might all catch up on you and you’d be distraught.’
I shook my head gently. ‘That may come, Alan. I’m sure it will. I’m going to be so very sad at times, but right now I’m just so grateful Daddy’s gone. He’s free. And so am I,’ I added, simply. I reached up and kissed him again.
‘Jenny,’ he began tentatively. ‘Do you remember the day we went to the old church at Meevagh?’
‘Yes,’ I said, puzzled.
‘I made such a bad mistake that day. I knew what I felt and I hadn’t the courage to tell you. And you’ve been so unhappy . . .’ He broke off, looked away from me, as if he couldn’t bear to put into words what was troubling him.
‘Alan,’ I said, ‘I think we both got it wrong.’
He hugged me, but the look on his face was still one of utter distress. I could not bear to see him so upset.
‘How would it be, Alan, if we didn’t blame ourselves for what’s happened? There were things out against us. Things from your past and things from my past. But we’re together now. Why don’t we just start here, friends and lovers, and see what the future brings?’
I saw a look of such relief sweep across his face and then he smiled. ‘Yes, Jenny. Yes, let’s do just that.’
He drew me out of the doorway where we’d been entwined in each other’s arms and over to where the stepladder stood abandoned.
‘Alan, what are you doing?’ I cried as he began to climb.
But it was perfectly obvious what he was doing. He took from his pocket a brand new pair of secateurs and began to cut the roses he hadn’t been able to reach from the bedroom window on Saturday night.
We carried them back up to the road in a bucket of water and wedged them carefully in the front seat of his car, because there was no space at all left in mine.
‘If you follow me up to the crossroads we can go back the quick way,’ he said as he walked beside me to the Rover.
He bent down and kissed me again. I got in and switched on, waited till he came slowly past, then swung out after him. I could see he was watching me in his driving mirror. At the crossroads, we turned onto a road I had driven a hundred times with my father. He drove steadily, making sure I was never far behind. The light was fading fast and long shadows fell across the road, but the car was warm from sitting in the sun. It was full of the smell of lemon geranium and fallen rose petals.
Ahead of us the road swung right, straightened and ran along the Strangford shore, heading north, smooth and empty but for Alan’s car and mine. He put his foot down and a few moments later so did I. The Rover moved smoothly forward, and as it did, I heard again the sound of my father’s voice: ‘Life is full of surprises, Jenny. And some of them are great.’
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Turn the page for another heart-warming saga from Anne Doughty. . .
CHAPTER ONE
Ardtur, County Donegal
April 1845
Hannah McGinley put down her sewing and moved across the tramped earth floor to where the door of the cottage stood open through all the daylight hours, except in the coldest and stormiest of weather. She stood on the well-swept door stone, looked up at the pale, overcast sky and ran her eye along the stone walls that enclosed their small patch of potato garden. Beyond the wall, the hawthorns partly masked the stony track, which ran down the mountainside.
There was no sign of them yet. No familiar figures walked, ran, or skipped up the narrow rocky path leading steeply up the mountainside from the broader track that ran along the lower contours of the mountain. Below that, the final, bush-filled slopes dropped more gently to the shore of Lough Gartan. The only movement she could detect in the
deep quiet of the grey, late April afternoon were flickers of light reflected from the calm surface of the lake itself, just visible between the still-bare trees and the pale rise of smoke from the cottage of her nearest neighbour.
Dotted along the mountainside above the lake, clusters of cottages like Ardtur itself huddled together in the shelter of the mountain, its brooding shape offering some defence against the battering of westerly winds from the Atlantic, westerlies that brought both mildness and heavy rain to this rugged landscape.
She moved back to the hearth, hung the kettle over the glowing embers of the turf fire and took up her sewing again. She paused to push back a few strands of long, fair hair that had escaped from the ribbon with which she tied it firmly each morning. Touching the gleaming strands, she smiled to herself, thinking of her daughter. Rose was as dark as she herself was fair, her eyes and colouring so like Patrick, her husband, while Sam, a year younger, pale-skinned and red-haired, so closely resembled her father, Duncan Mackay, far away in Scotland where she had been born and grew up.
They were good children, always willing to help with whatever task she might have in hand; Rose, the older, patient and thoughtful; Sam quick, often impatient, but always willing to do as she asked. Even now, though he was lightly built and only eight years old, he would run to help if he saw her move to lift a creel of potatoes or turf, or to pick up the empty pails to fetch water from the well.
She thought for a moment of her everyday tasks and reflected that she had not become entirely familiar with the harsh, yet beautiful place where she’d lived for the ten years of her married life. It surprised her that she still woke up every morning thinking of the well-built, two-storey farmhouse in Galloway and the view from the south-facing window of the bedroom she had shared with one of her older sisters. Then, she had seen a very different landscape: green fields and trees sloping gently towards the seashore, rich pasture dotted with sheep, well cared for and prosperous, the delight of her hard-working father who loved his land as well as or perhaps even better than he loved his God.
Duncan Mackay was seen by many as a hard man, one who did not suffer fools gladly, shrewd in his dealings, strong in his Covenanter beliefs and not given to generosity, but, to his youngest daughter, Hannah, he showed a gentleness few others ever saw. It was Hannah’s sorrow that in making her own life she’d had to leave him, widowed and now alone, her brothers and sisters married and moved into their own lives, two of them far away in Nova Scotia. Only her youngest brother, Matthew, running a boat-building yard on the Galloway coast close to Port William, was near enough to make the journey to their old home near Dundrennan, once or twice a year.
She knew her father still grieved for the choice she had made, though he had long ago accepted the quality of the man she’d married. But it had been hard for him. Patrick McGinley was a landless labourer, one of the many who took the boat from Derry, or Belfast, or the small ports nearest to the Glens of Antrim and went over to Scotland and the North of England to provide extra labour on the farms through the long season from the cutting of grass for silage, to the final picking and storing of the potato crop.
From early May till late October, or even November, if there was other farm work that needed doing, the ‘haymakers’ came. They lived in a barn cleared out for them each springtime, and worked on the land, labouring from dawn to dusk in the long summer days, and they sent home money each week to support their families on rough hillsides with tiny holdings like this one. The only source of food was potatoes from the small patch of land behind or beside each cottage and what could be bought with the earnings of the few women who had the skill to do embroidery such as whitework, or sprigging.
For three years Patrick had come with a group of men and boys from Donegal, all good workers, as her father freely acknowledged. While they frequently worked on neighbouring farms, their base was Mackay’s, the farm south-east of Dundrennan, the one her father had bought after long years of working with his brother in the drapery trade in Dumfries.
Her father had always wanted his own farm. His elder brother, Ross, had once told Hannah that even as a small boy in their home in the far north-west of Scotland, he had talked about it. He’d explained to Ross when he was still a boy that he wanted good soil and fine pasture so he could keep cattle or sheep, that would be plump and well fed, not bony like the few animals they had on the poor piece of land they rented from an English landlord they had never seen.
Years later, Ross and Duncan arrived barefoot and penniless in Dumfries, two victims of the Sutherland clearances; they’d been turned out of their croft and land in Strathnaver, with only the clothes they wore and what few possessions they could carry. As they tramped south looking for a means of survival, it seemed that Duncan’s dream had remained intact.
Hannah would never forget the way her father told parts of their story over and over again, throughout her childhood. Every time they sat down to eat, he would give thanks for their food, even if it were only a bowl of porridge. He reminded them time and time again that he and their uncle Ross had travelled the length of Scotland on ‘burn water and the kindness of the poor’, with no place to lay their heads but the heather on the hill.
*
By the time the Mackay brothers arrived in Dumfries they were famished, their boots long disintegrated, their clothes tattered, stained and faded from sleeping in the heather, being drenched by rain and exposed to the sun. When they’d seen the notice in a draper’s window asking for two strong lads, they’d tidied themselves up as best they could and tried to look robust, despite their thinness.
The shop, in the main street of Dumfries, sold fabric but its main purpose was as a collecting centre for woven materials brought in from outworkers who spun, or wove, in their own homes – small cottages with a tiny piece of land, a potato garden, or a cow, as their only other support. The older man, the draper who ran the business, needed strong lads to hump the bales of fabric coming in from the home workers, the bundles of handkerchiefs and napkins going out to merchants in England and the heavy webs of woollen cloth going much further afield. The brothers were weak with hunger, but both now in their twenties and knowing well how much depended on it, they managed to heft the heavy bales as if they were merely parcels.
They got the job. The hours were long, but there was a loft to sleep in and a daily meal as part of their small income. Neither of them knew anything about fabric, about the mysteries of spinning or weaving, but they learnt quickly, grew stronger in body and more confident in mind. According to Ross, even in those first years when they earned very little, Duncan had already begun to save for ‘his farm’ from his meagre salary.
Hannah’s father took pride in telling her how they had helped the older man to expand the business and make it so very profitable that he regularly increased their wages. Some five years later, he offered them each a share in the business as well.
With no son of his own and well pleased with their commitment to their work, Mr McAllister, the draper, regularly said that when he retired he hoped they would be able to buy the business from him. In the meantime, he did all he could to make that possible for them.
He was as good as his word. A few years later, when Sandy McAllister finally decided to retire, the two brothers bought the business and Duncan then sold his share to his brother. With the money released and his savings Duncan then bought a small, neglected farm just a few miles outside Dumfries itself.
Hannah had never known that first farm. But her father had told her the tale of how it had been owned by an old woman, long widowed, her sons all in America. Although the sons had sent her money, it was only enough to buy food; she had none left over to pay for labour.
She had watched the few small fields fill with rushes and weeds, her only comfort the memory of happier times with her husband and children. They’d never had much money but the boys had been fed and clothed and walked barefoot to the local school. There, they became star pupils. By the time Duncan Mackay bought t
he farm from the old woman’s executors, and learnt the story of its previous owner, her sons were wealthy businessmen in Detroit who barely noticed the small sum of money from the sale of their old home, their inheritance from a life long-forgotten.
*
The fire was burning up more brightly since Hannah had added a few pieces of fresh turf, but there was still no sound of children’s voices. It was too soon to make the mugs of tea that welcomed them home at the end of their day. She spread the patterned damask on her knee, smoothed it out and began hemming the last side of the napkin as her mind wandered back to her father’s stories of his younger days.
Duncan Mackay’s second farm was much further away from Dumfries. It was there that Hannah herself was born, the seventh and last child of Duncan and the former Flora McAllister, the daughter of the draper who had taken Duncan and Ross barefoot from the main street in Dumfries, fed them and given them boots and clothes for their new job.
Duncan loved Flora dearly but he had so wanted a son he could hardly contain his impatience in the tiny farmhouse where his three daughters were born one after the other. He was overjoyed when his first son was born, to be followed by two more. Hannah, as everyone used to tell her when she was a child, was ‘the surprise’ – an unexpected, late child born many years after her nearest brother. It was always Hannah’s sadness that she never knew her mother. She had died within a year of her birth, perhaps – as so many women were in those days – worn out by the daily drudgery of work on a farm and the continuous demands of miscarriages, pregnancies and births.
She pushed away the sad thought and remembered instead her three older sisters: Jean, Fiona and Flora, who had all taken care of her and played with her, the wide gap in age making her almost like their own first child. She had been loved and cherished by all three of them. What surprised all of them, as baby Hannah got to her feet and walked, was the way in which she attached herself to her father from the moment she was steady enough to follow him around.