by Mary Easson
Something that did cheer my father was news of the industrial disputes rumbling on around the country that first year of the war.
‘Tae be expectit, when prices are gaun up an’ employers are cashin’ in,’ he said.
The men on the Clyde were speaking up. Engineers were complaining about profiteering by companies that were bringing in skilled men from America and non-union labour, including women, to depress wages. The leaders of the strike at Fairfields were put in the gaol, showing the lengths to which employers were prepared to go. The stakes were high. Closer to home, shale miners in Broxburn were prepared to strike for an increase of 4d a day, and the oil workers were threatening the same; same story at the Bo’ness woodyards, over non-union labour; women at the Regent Works in Linlithgow, doing the work of men away at the Front, had downed tools in March over low levels of pay. And women were at the vanguard in the fight against profiteering landlords in Glasgow who were capitalising on the rising demand for accommodation from labour doing war work. Families were even being threatened with eviction, whilst their husbands and fathers were fighting in France!
‘Aye, an a’ the press has tae say is there’s a war oan,’ complained Davy.
Davy took it all in, passed the information onto men at the steading or at the pit head. He was starting to sound like the font of all knowledge. When others were quiet, unable to speak the names Loos, Neuve Chappelle, and Gallipoli, Davy spoke them loud, lecturing about armaments, profiteering and injustice. Whilst his star continued to rise, he fell into his old ways and was seen in the Village Inn, staying out till late as it suited him, in the company of shady characters or lassies with reputations that went before them. I could tell how it vexed my mother but she could not say anything to him directly. Alex would always take against her, in spite of her warnings that it would turn out for bad in the long run. And it pleased Davy no end to see our mother put in her place.
One day, we came home from the pit to find her absent, the house like the Marie Celeste floating on an uneasy sea. She had left two pots of warm water on the hearth and the kettle whistled loudly on the swey. We wondered why she wasn’t there by the fire as usual. It riled my father but it worried me profoundly until Mags Cherrie stuck her head round the door to explain that Chrissie Brown was in labour and things weren’t going well. The doctor had been sent for from Rowanhill. We were glad that she left before saying any more. Davy marched off in a temper to the public baths in Main Street, a towel tucked under his arm, whilst Jim and me, and our father, took it in turns as usual to bath in front of the fire. We were surprised that we managed by ourselves, and when we placed the tin bath for drying outside the door, it was done with a degree of self-congratulation. But who was going to make our dinner? I spotted the ingredients for brose soaking in a bowl high up on a shelf and rolled up my sleeves. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I made a cup of tea while we waited but there was no sugar any place though I searched high and low. Alex complained bitterly, as if I had removed all traces from the house by myself. He sucked up the bitter liquid with a face in danger of curdling the milk and he had to force himself to have two more cups to finish the pot.
After what seemed like an age, I dished out the brose. The smell wafted up and Alex raised an eyebrow. Things were improving. He blew hard on a spoonful, breathed in the steam. We watched as he tasted the first morsel. His nose wrinkled up, his mouth turned downwards. He almost spat into his plate but held back, slavering peas down his chin.
‘Ye niver put saut in it, ye stupid arse...! It needs friggin saut!’
‘There’s nae saut either,’ I explained. ‘I’ve looked a’ place an’ there’s nane.’
‘Nae saut!?’
The door opened. Mother stepped in from the rain. She took the wet shawl from her head, carefully hanging it up to dry on the string above the fireplace. We watched her in silence.
‘There’s nae saut,’ Alex said.
‘I heard ye when I was oot by.’ She reached into her basket and took out a small packet, filled the salt cellar before handing it to me.
She sat on a low stool, her back close to the fire to get dry, and ate her portion of brose straight from the pot, all the time watching us tuck in.
‘Or sugar,’ Alex said after a while.
She took a few more mouthfuls before answering. ‘If ye’d been wi’ Chrissie Broon thur three – fower ‘oors past, ye mebbe widnae be complainin’ aboot the want o’ a wee bit sugar for yer tea, Alex Birse.’ Mother worked intently with her spoon, removing every last morsel of brose sticking to the bottom of the pot.
‘She had her bairn then. Lad or lassie?’
‘A wee boy, the spit o’ his faither. She cried him Duncan afore she passed.’
‘She’s deed?’
‘Aye, she is that, puir lass. A helluva time she had bringin’ thon bairn intae the wurld. An’ he’ll never know her.’
‘Spare us the gory details,’ growled Davy, coming in through the door just then.
She shook her head and sighed. ‘A hell of a price for lying wi’ a man.’
‘For the Love o’ God, Mither,’ insisted Davy.
‘The doctor cam late but said there was nuthin that could’ve been done onieweys. A’ he could dae was sign the certificate.’
She took the sugar bowl, went to see if Mrs Duncan could spare a few spoonfuls till Friday. We were quiet as we chewed over the last of our brose.
At first, I could not get that picture of Mrs Brown out of my head, her lying in the back room of a damp cottage with my mother in attendance, giving birth to her first child. I’ve begun to think of her again, these several years later after the horror of the battlefield. There is blood and pain in that image of a woman writhing on a white sheet, screaming and grunting like a wild thing, biting down on a piece of leather, scant relief from the horror of her predicament. It makes me think of what I witnessed on the battlefield and behind the lines in casualty clearing stations, men screaming and cursing and pleading for God’s Mercy. Yet all the time, it went on in my street, the cottage next door, and I had never given it a thought at the time, never at all. It was part of the natural order of things, something men did to women. Duncan Brown was still an infant when I left for the Front. His mother brought a fine, strong lad into the world for her pain. I have seen many like him, though older, blown to pieces by the war machine. They were all bairns once and they still cry for their mothers. What kind of world is this that sends men, borne of women, to kill and maim each other across a stretch of muddy ground in a land that is not theirs? What kind of world will be wrought by our struggle and sacrifice, at home and abroad, when we come to our senses and the guns stop?
Elizabeth
Though I feared that he might, having been put up to it by my unscrupulous brother, Ernest Black never quite plucked up the courage to broach the subject of marriage when we were alone, briefly, on several occasions over the following months. As I have often said, Ernest was a man of principle and conscience. He understood, without my having to say the words, that marriage was out of the question, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future. I do believe he was very fond of me and, though I cannot be sure of how far his feelings ran, I often saw sadness in his eyes when he looked at me. As for Richard, I am sure he was quite frustrated with Ernest at times, as much as he was with me since my presence in the manse was preventing him from joining the mission in France. Eventually, a solution was found however.
Much later in the year, Rose was sitting in the kitchen with Sarah when I emerged from the study and my latest confrontation with Richard. Our elderly relative, whom he had hoped would look after me for the duration, had passed and he had decided that my reluctance to live with her earlier in the year had contributed to her demise. Had I not been so selfish, the old woman might have survived a while longer, he claimed. The sounds of our raised voices from behind the closed door of the study
must have horrified Rose but Sarah was sure to have explained the situation in her own inimitable way.
By the time I showed face, she was giving Rose a detailed description of her extended family. This included the details of Uncle Peter’s latest letter from Gallipoli, though as always, his letters didn’t give much away about what was actually happening to him, except that he was well in spite of the heat and was thinking about everyone back home. Sarah said that Uncle Peter’s sister – that’s Mrs Graham – had told her that letters from the front had to be read with care. You had to read between the lines. You couldn’t just take what they said as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But they were a version of the truth, sent by somebody who cared about the feelings of the person they were writing to, and Jean had to content herself with the knowledge that her brother was fine at the moment he had written to her. As the days and weeks passed till his next letter arrived, she had to believe that he was still fine, though it didn’t stop her from wondering and worrying in the quiet moments of the day about what he wasn’t telling her.
‘Mrs Graham is a very wise woman,’ said Rose. ‘And you must be a great comfort to her, Sarah.’
News of the rout and retreat from Gallipoli had shocked the nation. Rose surmised that the letter must have been written in the heat of the summer of that year, 1915, when dysentery had been as deadly an enemy to Uncle Peter as the Turkish forces in the opposing trenches. Newspaper reports of conditions and casualties had made for horrendous reading, an unsuitable topic for discussion in the warm kitchen of the Blackrigg manse and it was a relief when Sarah got up to answer the door bell.
She returned to say that Mrs Hyslop was in the parlour.
We rushed to hug Phee before asking her how it was possible to look so composed having battled with the rain and wind of a Scottish winter’s evening to get there. Phee said that a motor car, and the ability to drive oneself wherever one wished, must have something to do with it. She told us that David and Eric had arrived in the Balkans with their regiment and both had written to say they were safe. Rose turned to me – flushed after my latest encounter with Richard – and suggested that there was plenty to talk about. We positioned three chairs around the small fire crackling in the grate and settled down for a long chat.
When the tea tray had been brought in and Sarah had retreated for the night, Phee produced a silver flask from her bag. She poured a small amount of whisky into each of the cups.
‘For medicinal purposes,’ she explained. ‘To keep out the cold.’
I tried to make excuses but my friends said ‘Drink!’ so I did.
I began my long sorry tale, starting with Richard’s approach to the schoolmaster and the need to remove me from the manse whilst he joined the mission in France. In the beginning, I had wondered if I’d imagined it: he couldn’t possibly be encouraging someone to consider marrying me, just because he wanted to go away for a time. Could he? But it made sense on many levels. As long as I was there, I would be an embarrassment to him as a minister of the Kirk; what with my history of association with, first Neil Tennant, and then Donald Maclean, not to mention my insistence on helping Highland Mary in Stoneyrigg, and my letters to the authorities about housing conditions in the area. Richard continued to stress the importance of staying out of temporal matters. Charity was all very well but it could be misdirected, according to him. The poor must come to us, he would say, not the other way round. We are here in the House of the Lord and they must make their choice. The Scriptures tell us so.
‘But even if you were married, you would still be living in this village, in the schoolhouse.’ Phee faltered, ‘... with Ernest... virtually next door to the church.’ She was trying hard to get inside the minister’s head, to understand things from his point of view.
‘Yes, but then I would be a respectable married woman, the wife of the local schoolmaster.’ I explained.
‘Ahh! No longer the young temptress, ready and willing to snare any man who comes along.’ Phee nodded her understanding of the situation.
I squirmed. That was exactly what the village gossips, including my own brother, probably thought of me.
‘Your past sins would be forgiven,’ said Phee. ‘But not forgotten, I’ll wager!’
‘You would be defined by your husband’s role and standing in the community,’ continued Rose. ‘Rather than your brother’s role, as you are defined now.’
‘And as soon as any children came along, I wouldn’t have time to associate with the poor or to interfere with matters that didn’t concern me, especially political matters.’
‘And did Ernest propose?’ Phee’s eyebrows were raised in anticipation.
‘He came to see me more than once. He started in a very long, roundabout way but I was forewarned. I steered our conversations away from the possibility of a proposal from him.’
‘He is a rather sweet man,’ offered Rose.
‘Yes he is. And a good friend. Eventually, I confided that I loved someone else. He understood my point of view. He did not press me further, said that he would be eternally grateful for our friendship.’
‘Thank Goodness,’ said Phee, taking another sip of the whisky.
‘I am glad. There are many who would take exception to rejection,’ Rose said before asking, ‘So the matter of your accommodation remains unresolved?’
‘Ernest has been good enough to ask the lady schoolteachers if there is room in their lodgings for me but, unfortunately, there isn’t. He has two spare rooms in the schoolhouse but, of course, it would be completely out of the question for me to stay there.’
‘There’s plenty of room at Parkgate,’ announced Phee. ‘You’re always welcome there – I wish you’d said about all of this before. I would’ve offered!’
‘But you’re not there that much anymore. I couldn’t possibly live at Parkgate without you. Isabelle scares the life out of me. And Catherine.... well, she can be terribly sweet but...’
‘You could work on her, Beth. Get her to spend some of her father’s money on decent housing and so on.’
I wasn’t convinced. ‘I’ve gone through all the possibilities in my head: working somewhere else for the Red Cross, going to stay with a relative for a bit. Actually, that was what my discussion with Richard was about. Our elderly cousin, twice removed... has just passed away…’ I gave my nose a loud blow.
Rose had been quiet. ‘I have a plan.’
I looked in her direction, hoping.
‘I’ll come and live in the manse with you.’
I was thrown. ‘How?’
She explained that she had visited her father in Rowanhill earlier in the day. She had been shocked at how tired he looked, sitting in the kitchen all alone, with his head in his hands.
‘He’s been trying to serve Blackrigg like he did in the past, in addition to Rowanhill. Dr Lindsay will be with the Army Medical Corps for the duration of the war. The population has soared since the old days when one doctor covered the whole area. There are far too many people for him to cope with on his own and it’s killing him.
‘He kept going on about a birth he’d attended in Stoneyrigg recently. You were there, Beth, weren’t you? The mother died. He said if only he’d been able to get there in time but he’d been delayed at the brickworks – an accident – a man lost his hand and a boy was badly burned. He said he probably couldn’t have saved the woman in any case but he’d never know either way. And a child will grow up without a mother.
‘He shouldn’t be thinking that way, don’t you see? It’s the tiredness taking its toll. He’s losing confidence in himself, starting to blame himself for things beyond his control. When a doctor does that, he’s finished.’
She paused staring into the fire. ‘My father is very dear to me. I can’t stand back and see him suffer through overwork when he has so much left to give. So, I’ve made up my mind... I will be taking over
the Blackrigg patients for the time being.’
She waited for my reaction.
‘And I need a place to stay. I don’t have a vehicle so I will have to stay in the village. Why not here with you, Beth?’
‘What about Spittal Cottage?’
‘No. It’s damp and run down. Dr Lindsay’s ordered renovations in his absence so the place is uninhabitable… for a while, at least.’
‘What about the visiting ministers? They’ll need a place to stay. Could they live here too?’
‘Not here with you two! God, no!’ gasped Phee.
‘I’m sure Mr Ernest Black could be persuaded to put them up in the schoolhouse if he was approached.’ Rose had all the answers.
‘Perfect solution,’ agreed Phee. ‘Richard cannot possibly be seen to prevent the new doctor taking up her post by denying her accommodation in the manse when there’s nowhere else. And Mr Black will happily accommodate men of the cloth, if only to assist his dear friend, Miss Fraser.’
She replenished everyone’s cup from her flask and we toasted the new arrangements.
‘How soon can we pack Richard off to the mission?’ she asked.
‘He’s going in a fortnight,’ I said, cheered by more than the alcohol.
‘Good Health!’ said Phee.
‘Cheers!’
We hooted with laughter as the evening wore into night. If Richard was aware of the raucous story-telling taking place in the parlour, he paid no heed. Inevitably, however, mirth fuelled by strong drink descended into melancholy as Phee reminisced about her first year of marriage with Eric. She began to wonder about where he was at that particular moment, asking whether we thought he was safe. Of course, he was safe we told her, and she had to remember that he was with David and they would both be looking out for each other; which had her in floods of tears, crying for the two men in her life that she loved most dearly.