The Cold Blast

by Mary Easson

  ‘Milk,’ he said. ‘Guid.’

  ‘Drink,’ I told him.

  Mrs Gowans watched us together then flushed a bright shade of pink. ‘Jings! Yon fire’s gey hot!’ She fanned her face with a tea towel.

  ‘It was guid o’ ye tae gie me employment when ye did, Mrs Gowans. Efter the bairn was born. Lettin’ me gae hame at nicht an giein me a day aff a week. It was kind o’ ye an I’m gratefu’.’ I dabbed the child’s mouth with a handkerchief though he resisted.

  ‘Ye’ve been a guid worker, Minn. If ye need a recommendation I’ll be happy tae provide it. Mebbe when the singlin’s needin’ done, or at tattie howkin time, we’ll see ye again.’ She took my boy’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘I hope ye get somethin’ else, lass. For the bairn’s sake.’ She hesitated, studying the child all the while, taking in the colour of his hair, his eyes, the look of him.

  ‘Aye. There’ll be somethin’ for us. Whit dae ye think, Robbie?’ I took the child’s hand from her grasp. ‘Ye niver can tell whit’s comin’ yer wey, eh?’ I gave him the last of the milk from the cup.

  ‘By jings! That’ll be him comin’ up fur three, is it no?’

  ‘Aye, come the spring. Three.’

  The boy held up three fingers. ‘F-r-ee,’ he said proudly.

  ‘One, two, THREE,’ I corrected but just as proud.

  ‘Fower, five… nine, ten,’ he added quickly, holding up both hands, looking pleased with himself.

  ‘My, yer a clever lad!’ said Mrs Gowans. ‘Robbie... Robert. A fine name. Is it a faimily name b’ onie chance?’

  ‘Thomas Robert Graham. Efter his grandpa and my mither’s faither. But we’ve a’ready a Tommy in the hoose so Robbie it is.’

  ‘Minn, dear,’ Mrs Gowans began slow. ‘I hope ye dinnae mind me sayin’ but I speak as an aulder wuman wi’ some experience. Weel, the truth o’ the maitter is, the lad needs a faither an’ you’re a fine lookin’ lass...’

  I made to go, thanked her for the tea and the scones.

  ‘Guid,’ Robbie said. He pointed at the ones left on the plate in the middle of the table, couldn’t take his eyes off them. ‘Guid scones.’

  I began dressing the child for the outdoors.

  Mrs Gowans bustled into the pantry, returned with a large paper bag. She filled it with scones and gave it to Robbie.

  He took it in both hands. ‘Ta,’ he said.

  Mrs Gowans patted his knitted tammie down around his ears. ‘Gie Mrs Graham ma best, will ye?’

  ‘I’ll dae that. Thanks, Mrs Gowans.’ I was keen to be on my way.

  ‘Come an’ see us again,’ she called from the doorway, watching us cross the cobbled farmyard.

  ‘Safe hame, the pair o’ ye. There’s snaw in the air, for sure.’

  Robbie stood pointing in the direction of the farm kitchen where he knew warmth, milk, and good scones were to be had. I pulled him alongside me. We started the long walk down the farm track that led past the stable yard at Parkgate House, towards the road into the village. The track was rutted and pitted with large puddles that Robbie found fascinating. I made him walk beside me, along the grassy verge where it was drier, and I thought about what Mrs Gowans had said about the boy needing a father.

  Out of the blue, a motor car bounced past, spraying me and the bairn with muddy water. I peered after the vehicle. The driver was Andrew Brownlee, newly returned from the Front, and beside him was his fiancée, Daisy Gowans, now a teacher at Blackrigg School. They were laughing and blethering to each other. They probably hadn’t noticed us in by the hedgerow, I told the child as I brushed the worst of the wet from his knitted coat. He began to cry so I lifted him up for a cuddle. He was heavy but he needed comforting. I brushed away his tears and wiped his nose. Told him everything would be fine.

  A snell wind was blowing in from the north and the sky was heavy with cloud. Without Paddy’s Wood, there was nothing to shelter Redburn Farm from the weather. I looked back into the teeth of the blast, seeing empty moorland where the wood had once clothed the valley all the way to the Whinbank Road on the northern side of the ridge. I minded what Billy Dodds’ grandfather had said when I first arrived at Redburn. The Black Moss was reclaiming the land it had lost more than a hundred years before. The farmland had been hard won from the bog, by dint of the work of generations. It was protected by the trees of Paddy’s Wood, planted on the instructions of a laird intent on increasing production in an earlier age. It was a well-known procedure for the improvement of soil, employed by those who understood something of the battle between Man and Nature. Old Mr Dodds reckoned the present Major Melville would have something to say about the loss of the wood when he returned from his army service.

  I scanned the parks and meadows of Redburn. The wind whipped along without mercy. Pools of water lay on the flattest land, and threshes grew where rich pasture and root crops had supported a large dairy herd and many sheep in the past. Nearby Home Farm did not seem to be faring much better. The steading was in a state of disrepair, and sat in a sea of trampled mud. As the first snowflakes began to fall, I drew my collar up around my neck and hurried Robbie along, telling him the weather was closing in and we’d better get home.

  John

  I’d waited so long for the war to end that, when I heard the Armistice had been signed, I could scarce believe it. The Swiss were quick to organise our transport out of the country but there were delays further up the line with so many men being repatriated along the damaged transport system, and Germany was in chaos. The delays as we travelled home gave me time to think about what had happened since I’d come out to France as a naive young soldier with barely a few weeks training under my belt.

  Our backs were up against the wall in the early part of 1918. The enemy had the upper hand for a while. But things weren’t good back in Germany and morale amongst their troops began to waver. There were many desertions and, by the summer, it was obvious their ability to make progress against us was waning. As we went over the top that last time back in March, I lost sight of Jim when I took a bullet to both the neck and the hand. I was left for dead whilst the rest of my company, and hundreds more besides, were taken prisoner. On another occasion, they might have been shot as an inconvenience but Fate intervened and Jim was taken to Soltau POW camp where he recovered from minor wounds. Meanwhile, I lay in the mud of no-man’s land, my throat shot to pieces. It was a German raiding party that came out the following day, found that I was still alive despite my wounds, and a night in the freezing mud. Why those men decided I was worth saving, I will never understand but they took me to a field hospital where a German doctor operated on my injuries. He took cartilage from my hip and repaired my throat. He was also able to repair the blood vessel that had been ruptured in my neck. In the chaos of battle, when their own people were lining up to be treated, they found room for a young Scotsman with life-threatening wounds. Maybe their mothers had given them the same message my mother had given me all those years before. Life is precious, John. Maybe they saw past my uniform and saw only the human life inside it.

  After but a few days in the POW camp, my health began to deteriorate because of infection, though the doctor had done his best to strip out the dirty damaged flesh around my wounds. That’s when an inspector from the International Red Cross found me, half-frozen at the bottom of a dank cell soaked in my own urine, and splattered by the thin soup they sent down a chute at me but which I was never strong enough to eat. That man from Switzerland arranged my transfer to Konstanz where I was nursed back to health before being taken to a camp surrounded by mountains whose beauty is etched on my heart.

  I came home in December to what I thought was an empty house. It was evening so I surmised that Alex and Davy were probably at a meeting of some sort. I’d thought about this day many times. Over and over again, I’d lived the moment when I would walk up the Station Road to Stoneyrigg and push open the door of
the end cottage in the Back Row where the fire would be lit and the smell of broth would fill the air. It had never occurred to me that my mother would not be there to welcome me and, although the room was warm and everything was in its rightful place, the house seemed desolate at first.

  I sat staring into the fire glowing in the grate, hearing familiar sounds like the tick of the clock and the purr of the flames in the coals, and the scrape of a man’s boots on the gravel road outside in the street. I was glad to be back, grateful to be sitting there in a warm room – a simple pleasure so many had been deprived of – and my face was soon wet with tears. The rush into my head of what I had seen and done made me dizzy and I wanted to vomit. I shut my eyes, breathing slow and deep, banishing the trembling ache from my arms and my hand, and the dark thoughts from my head. That’s when I knew that I had to get busy. I had to get back down the pit and get on with my life. What I had done, what we all had done was in the past, and I couldn’t dwell on it or it would crush me. I wouldn’t forget what I’d been asked to do but I had to forgive myself and would pray that the boys who came after me would be spared the horror of war.

  I heard a different sound just then – a feeble cough and the wheezing breath of someone fighting for life in the box bed behind where I sat. I pulled back the curtain and there was my father staring upwards, fear in his eyes and sweat on his brow. He glanced at me briefly, tried to breathe slow and steady as if trying to banish demons from his head, like I’d been doing only a moment before. But the disease that had ravaged his lungs in all those years down the pit would not let him be. He was soon wracked with the coughing again. It was the kirkyaird hoast and it terrified him. I put my hand under his head then a cup of water to his dry lips, watched as the liquid seeped into his mouth and saw the coolness of it salve his red-raw throat when he swallowed. He mouthed a few words but, to this day, I do not know what they were because there was scant breath behind them and they only brought on further wheezing. As I sat on the bed beside him, looking at his skin, taught across the blue bone of his skull, and his eyes darting beneath closed lids, I felt his hand on mine. I saw in his hand the hard work he’d done all his life, the tons of coal and clay he had shifted each day for forty years, and I guessed that touch of my hand was the hardest thing it had ever done.

  My mother saw it as she took off her wet coat. She wrapped me in her arms in a way she hadn’t done since I was a bairn and I buried my face in the warm smell of her.

  ‘Yer back, John,’ she said and I said that I was.

  When Davy burst in through the door sometime later, I was sitting quietly at the table with a book.

  ‘Yer back,’ he said taking his bunnet from his head, slapping it into the palm of his hand like a schoolteacher warming up the tawse.

  He went over to where our father was lying, told him what he’d been talking about with Steeny and the other union men. He talked about a commission to look into miners’ pay and how the masters were up to their old tricks, complaining about the cost of labour and the loss of profit when the war was just by, and some boys were yet to come back from the Front.

  When Davy got busy about the fire, I was taken aback. I had been away a long time – my elder brother was making tea! Not only that but he was whistling a happy tune, telling our mother to sit still and rest, he would manage by himself. He even set out the cups, the milk jug and the sugar bowl and put the tea cosy on the pot. He didn’t ask anything about where I had been or what I had done. He didn’t even mention the wounds to my neck and my hand and for that I was grateful. He poured me a cup of tea, gave one to mother.

  As he made for the back room with a cup for himself, he turned to me. ‘Ye’ll be doon the pit office the morn’ I expect. There’s jobs for them that’s been at the Front. Imrie’s kept his word an’ for that we are truly thankfu’.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said though I must have sounded hesitant. I was just in the door.

  ‘Ye’ll want tae pey yer wey noo that yer back,’ he replied.

  It wasn’t a question. But had it been, my answer would’ve been, yes. I desperately wanted to get back to my life in the Rows and move on.

  Chapter 26

  Elizabeth

  Last night went well. We didn’t want a fuss, and definitely no gifts, so they tagged thank you speeches onto the end of a recital planned some time ago. Richard seemed genuinely sad that I was leaving. He said how much he would miss me when I was gone, how he hoped I would visit often because I had many friends here in the village and was held in such high esteem – in fact, much higher than he had realised for long enough. When it came to the presentation, he apologised profusely, explaining that so many people had insisted my leaving should be marked in the proper fashion and he could not persuade them otherwise. When I made my reply, I told everyone how touched I was, more than I was prepared for, and my voice wavered throughout. But I managed to say that many people had already given me the priceless gift of their friendship and that was something I would keep with me through the days to come.

  Rose returned from her new position at the women’s hospital in town for the occasion. When he thanked her for her diligent service in his absence, Dr Lindsay told everyone what a fine doctor Rose Matheson was and, if proof was needed that a woman could be suited to the medical profession, then she was surely it. I stood up to lead the applause and the assembly followed in genuine appreciation of her time in the community. Rose wished everyone well before pointing towards the supper laid out at the back of the hall, saying it was time to tuck in and no one disagreed with that. She seemed anxious to get back to her new life and not dwell on the past so she left with her father straight away but not before she put a key in my hand. It was the key to the rooms she had organised on our behalf, the key to my future beyond Blackrigg. She told me there was no hurry, to take my time, and move in at a time of my choosing.

  I was excited and nervous in equal measure but mostly I was grateful to my good friend for helping to smooth the first faltering steps on my future path. Though I was unsure of exactly what the future held, Rose had helped me open the door to a new life. Now I had choices, the chance to seek opportunities beyond the four walls of my brother’s house, where I would no longer be at his beck and call. As I made my way around the hall, conversing with this one and that, I promised to keep in touch and to let everyone know how I was getting on if they did the same in return. Mrs Maclean had a special gift of her own for me. Did I remember those books belonging to Murdo, the ones about botany and gardening, that she’d shown me before the war? Well, I was to have them all. They were no good to her and Donald had given his blessing. I held out my hand to him and he took it firmly. He wished me well, said I knew where he lived, and I wasn’t to be shy about dropping in for my tea. I looked into his eyes and knew I had a good friend in him. I promised that I would take him up on his offer, once I was settled.

  Today, the excitement of last night has been replaced by a dull trepidation at what lies ahead. I decide that I have to get on with my packing or it will never be done on time. It is quite incredible how many things even a church mouse like me can accumulate during a relatively short life span. A trunk and one small valise, the latter enough for me to carry on the train journey, stand in the middle of my room. I have packed the heavy things, like my books and mother’s china, into the bottom of the trunk and have added the linen and other textiles from my bottom drawer. A single woman has need of such things when setting out on a new life. I open the dressing table and wardrobe and begin filling the valise with essentials for my first few days of freedom until the trunk arrives. My hairbrush and silver mirror will be the last to go in.

  I notice Sarah hovering in the doorway and wonder how long she has been there. I feel a sudden pang of guilt. I hope she does not think I am abandoning her to Richard but she knows her job better than he does and will stick up for herself. Besides, I have noticed a handsome young man waiting for her at the bottom of the la
ne of an evening. She has a spring in her step that suggests he is someone special. I understand it is Peggy’s younger son, Sandy. From what I know of him they are a good match for each other.

  ‘Can I help ye, Miss?’ she asks at last.

  I hum and haw. Actually, I would like this time alone to consider what the coming days will bring and to think about what I am leaving behind. I spot a dress at the back of the wardrobe and pull it out. It is the grey one I wore to Phee’s engagement party.

  ‘Would you like it, Sarah?’ I hold it up.

  Her face tells me she’s not keen.

  ‘Mrs Graham could take it to pieces and make something nice out of it.’

  ‘It’s kind of ye... but... no thanks, Miss.’

  I don’t want to force it on her so I put it back in the wardrobe unsure of what to do with it. Sarah stands stubbornly refusing to leave me be so I ask if the vegetables are ready to go into the soup for the midday meal. She nods her head and I can see she has something to say.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘It’s Neil Tennant, Miss. I thought ye’d want tae ken.’

  ‘Neil?’

  ‘He cam hame yisterday, Miss. I hear he’s at the Smiddy the now.’ She turns to go and I can tell she feels sorry for me.

  ‘Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for telling me.’

  My head is swimming as I go over to the window and notice, for the first time, that the garden is clothed in a blanket of glittering frost. The temperature must have dropped in the night. The view reminds me of those early years when I laid out the garden with so much hope in my heart for a fruitful outcome. And Nature did not let me down. I remember how much that garden kept me sane when I felt that my world had ended without Neil by my side. I have come so far from those days of my youth and I know that I cannot go back there. I am strong and independent and I will not be otherwise. I must make my own decisions.