by Jane Duncan
“Mr Sk? What? Jock Skinner? That twisted boogger? Beg your pardon, Miss Tulloch!” said Tom.
Miss Tulloch lifted up the flap of her counter. “Chust come through, George—and you too, Tom. That thing you were going to look at for me is chust ben the back.” She dropped the flap again, separating the three of us from the Miss Boyds whom she now addressed in a business-like way: “Then that will be a-all for you the-day, leddies? Oh, here’s your basket from Reachfar! Good day to you a-all. Good day!” The bell tinkled and the Miss Boyds disappeared into the street, while Miss Tulloch ran through to the back shop to us, looked at Tom and George and gave herself up to helpless mirth.
“Well, I wasna born yesterday,” she said, “but I never thought to see the day when the men o’ Reachfar would be feared for their very lives! Aye, Geordie, maybe you better marry myself after a-all—you would be safe, then, maybe!”
Tom and George stood in the middle of the floor among the sacks of flour and barrels of herring, looking shamed to death, but she gave another squeal of laughter. “Ach, it’s a sin to be teasing you, that’s what it is! But you’re not yourselves in trouble. Every man in Achcraggan is running as if the devil was in it—even Bill the Post is sending Farquhar’s wee laddie up to the house with their letters!”
“They canna be right in the head,” said Tom.
Miss Tulloch dried the laughter tears from her eyes with a corner of her white apron. “Ach, you know what old maids are—the poor silly craiturs!” she said, and added soberly: “It’s a sin to laugh at them and them giving parties for Lady Lydia’s soldiers and a-all. I fairly believe they would take some poor fellow with no legs if he was to make an offer. And not a thing to choose between the old ones and the young ones o’ them—there’s nothing in any of their heads but chust the one thing. Aye, you’ll have to watch yourself, Geordie, boy! . . . Are you for the bank? Here, chust go out the back way there and through to Mr Foster’s garden. . . . Mind the rat-trap there beside the drain!” She turned back to Tom and me. “The place is chust fair rotten-infested with rats the-year. It’s that Jock Skinner and a-all his old iron and dirty rags and trock that he’ll be keeping in that old ruin o’ a barn of his, the dirty, poaching rascal.”
Jock Skinner, being the Achcraggan dog with a bad name, was hanged every day and sometimes twice a day for all the village sins, regardless of whether he had committed them or not, so that even the very rats were laid at his door.
“Och, you should have let Janet know before now if you are plagued with rats, Miss Tulloch,” said Tom.
“Janet?”
“Aye, surely. She’ll come down with Fly and Angus and sort them for you. She charges a penny a tail at home, but maybe, you being a friend, she will give you a special price.”
“I’ll do Miss Tulloch’s rats for nothing, so there!” I said.
To the horrified Miss Tulloch it was explained that Fly was my collie bitch and Angus my ferret, and Tom recommended us as the best rat-exterminating combination in the country.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Miss Tulloch,” he ended. “Next Friday Janet will come down in the morning with Fly and Angus and she can be going home in the evening with me as usual.” And this was agreed.
Shortly after that, Tom went away about his business and I went to Mrs Gilchrist’s Drapery Warehouse, where the men’s working shirts and cards of lace hung from the ceiling, and matched the thread for my mother.
“And Granny said to put it in the book, please.”
“Och, yes, surely, I’ll be putting it in the book. . . . And how many of you are down the-day?”
“Just George and Tom and me.”
“I hope your mother is well?”
“Oh yes, quite well, thank you, Mrs Gilchrist.”
Nobody ever asked if anyone else at Reachfar was well—they asked, always, only about my mother. It worried me a little this.
“We are all well, thank you,” I added with emphasis.
“That’s fine. And I hear the Miss Boyds was calling on you Sunday last?”
“Yes,” I said. “They did call.”
“George would be showing them the place, I’m sure—or one o’ them, whatever.”
My grandmother used to, and still does, come into my mind quite without my calling her into it sometimes, and I had once overheard her say that ‘Teenie Gilchrist’ was ‘a good enough craitur in some ways but a wicked-tongued old limmer if you’d let her be,’ so I now recognised the presence of my grandmother in my mind and said the words that the presence inspired: “Oh, no, Mrs Gilchrist, not at all. My uncle had business with Lady Lydia—she came up on Sunday too, with her visitor Mrs de Cambre. I am glad you had the thread my mother wants. Good day, Mrs Gilchrist.”
I left the shop, smiling and ‘Good day-ing’ my way through the crowd of female customers round the counter, and went back to Miss Tulloch’s.
I do not imagine that you are familiar with the word ‘palter-ghost’, which is a private word of my own, but I feel almost sure that you are familiar with the phenomenon which I use it to describe. A palter-ghost is a thing that comes to as follows, as My Friend Tom would say, when explaining something in a logical, scientific way. Imagine that one day you wake up with a pain in your knee, go to the doctor with it and he diagnoses housemaid’s knee. When you emerge from his consulting-room, it is about a hundred to one that the following events—or something very similar to them—will happen.
The woman cleaning the doctor’s front steps will have a bandage on her leg that simply shrieks ‘housemaid’s knee’.
The magazine that you buy to read on the bus on the way home will have a Home Doctor article on housemaid’s knee.
A woman with a shopping basket on the seat in front of you will be telling her companion a grim story of a second-cousin twice-removed who had a complaint, diagnosed as housemaid’s knee, but which was really gangrene and how, in the end, she died in agony.
In the evening paper there will be banner headlines on the latest murder, and on reading the ghastly details you will discover that the unfortunate victim, far from deserving her gory end, had been a patient life-long sufferer from housemaid’s knee.
Through the night, it goes without saying, you will dream that every joint in your body is afflicted with housemaid’s knee and that you are engaged in mortal combat with a murderer who is trying to bludgeon you to death on the steps of a bus with, for a weapon, a bandaged human leg which is afflicted with housemaid’s knee.
That, that I have very baldly described, is housemaid’s knee in the form of a palter-ghost, that phenomenon that palters in a mischievous, supernatural way with your daily life and your very reason. Anything, anything under the sun, given certain conditions which I am at a loss to tabulate, can suddenly take on the character of a palter-ghost and, although when I was eight years old I had not yet added this word to my vocabulary, ‘old maids’ became a palter-ghost to me. The expression recurred and recurred. No doubt it had always been used in family conversations, but it is a main characteristic of palter-ghosts that they always arise out of expressions which, hitherto, had no special significance, in precisely the way that poltergeists suddenly begin to haunt respectable suburban houses in Manchester or God-serving country rectories, instead of, as you might expect, some bloody-historied Norman keep or Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
“No, no!” my grandmother would say, identifying some old acquaintance. “Not Lizzie Mackay—the older sister, the one that died an old maid west Ullapool way.”
Or—“No, it was from the aunt that Robbie’s money came—the one that was housekeeper to that man in Glasgow that left her the house and a-all and not a penny to his old-maid sister.”
Or—“Yes, Maggie was a bonnie lassie—it’s funny she was an old maid.”
Or—“Och, she was always far too pernickety and parteeclar, poor Ina. She could never have made anything but an old maid, an old maid from the day she was born.”
Then, one evening, I rememb
er, my father read aloud a letter to the editor of the county newspaper which was a diatribe against the schoolchildren of Dingwall for making a noise in the street on their way home in the afternoons. After reading this aloud, signature and all, my father said: “Och, aye, poor old Annie. The bairns are ill-brought-up, she says. Well, well, they always did say that old-maids’ bairns are aye perfect.”
This statement was Too Much Altogether, and at the earliest possible moment I conducted an enquiry into the whole matter, with Tom, in the comfortable privacy of the straw barn.
“Tom, what is old maids?”
“Leddies that isn’t married.”
“So Auntie Kate is an old maid?”
“Wheesht!” said Tom, with a frightened look in the direction of the kitchen. “Hold your tongue! Saying a thing like that about your auntie!”
“But she’s not married and you said——”
“I never said a word about your auntie!”
“But if she’s not married and——”
“Your auntie is a young lassie that’s not married yet—an old maid is quite a different thing.”
“Oh. Older? Like Miss Grant? Is she an old maid?”
“Hold your tongue, for God’s sake!” said Tom. “You’ll have the both of the two of us in Bother!”
“But Miss Grant is older than you and she’s not married and——”
“Miss Grant is an unmarried leddy and much respected,” said Tom, “and if you’ll be saying that things about her I’ll tell your granny on you.”
“Ach, Tom! Is Granny Fraser an old maid?”
“Where could a woman that’s a granny be an old maid?”
“You know fine that Teenie was a baby without a father—Granny Fraser isn’t married although she had Teenie!”
“Well, she’s not an old maid, anyway.”
“Because of Teenie?”
“Ach, be quiet with your ask-ask-asking!”
“I will not! . . . Is it only people like the Miss Boyds that’s proper old maids?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s myself that’s half-deaved with you,” said Tom, and then he sighed. “There’s some things that a person chust canna tell about right, but it’s something this way. Weemen like the Miss Boyds gets known as old maids because they are for ever in among the men and making themselves cheap-like and none—o’ the men is wanting them. Your auntie isn’t like that—you know fine yourself that plenty o’ the lads will be coming about and taking her to the dances and things and she will chust be pleasing herself the ones she will be taking notice of.”
“And some man must have come about Granny Fraser before she had”
“We will not be speaking gossip about Granny Fraser at a-all, the decent ould craitur, though misfortunate as a lassie.”
“All right. What about Miss Grant?”
“Nor Miss Grant, neither, forbye. Miss Grant was a very fine young leddy and it was a sad, sad thing when young Mester Colin o’ Poyntdale was killed in India, away back before you was in it at a-all.”
“Mr Colin was going to marry her?”
“Aye.”
“So she’s not an old maid?”
“No.”
“Will I be an old maid?”
“I hope not!” said Tom.
“It’s a bad thing to be?”
“Well, not bad, ecksactly. It is chust better for a woman person to be married if she can and have a man to be looking after her.”
“Mick the Ditcher west at Dinchory doesn’t look after Molly very much—he gave her a black eye again last Saturday.”
“God be here! It’s try the patience of a saint you would do! Forbye, Mick’s an Irishman.”
“Well, Jock Skinner and Bella aren’t Irish and they are always getting drunk and fighting. If I was Bella I’d rather be an old maid.”
“Jock and Bella have no business to make a public exybeetion o’ themselves.”
“You mean they should just not speak to each other at all like Mr and Mrs Macrae and sit one at each end of the house?”
“Well, maybe that would be more decent.”
“I would rather be an old maid than be Mrs Macrae.”
“I daresay,” said Tom. “It would be a devil of a chob if you couldna be at the speaking. . . . It’s a whilie since you was last at the poetry-writing. That’s far more interring than a-all this speaking about old maids. The most o’ them is very foolish craiturs with their everlasting cuppies o’ tea and that one in Dingwall that was writing to the paper about the bairns is as daft as a ha’penny watch, sitting in yon roomie o’ hers with yon old parrot and the cat with a red collar on it as if it was a good, sensible dog and feeding carrots out through the window to the coalman’s horse. Yon is terrible foolishness and I canna be doing with it at a-all. . . . No, you would be far better to be at the poetry-writing.”
“You can’t be at the poetry when things is bothering you,” I told him.
“What things?”
“Things like old maids.”
“No. No, I can see that,” he agreed solemnly. “There’s nothing much o’ poetry about old maids. The best thing to do, then, is to be forgetting about them. . . . Is that the rain off? Because if it is we’d best take a puckle straw round to the old sow, the craitur.”
* * * * *
The following Friday, as arranged, I left Reachfar at a little after six in the morning with Fly and Angus. Fly was a dainty person, black, with a white ‘shirt-front’, tan paws, ear edges and eyebrows and the underlining plumes of her high-borne tail were also tan. She was a small collie of the Shetland breed, a daughter of Old Fly, my grandfather’s bitch, and related to Fan, Moss and Spark, who belonged to my father, Tom and my uncle respectively. Her father was Fionn, the chief dog of Mr Macgregor, the Dinchory shepherd, and Fly, as a pup, had been trained to follow me as a toddler who was beginning to roam about the moor a little. Fly had pulled out the tail feathers of the turkey-cock who tried to attack me, she had hauled me back from the rim of the well by my dress, and she and I had had many morning sleeps in each other’s arms in the ‘caves’ she could dig in the bottoms of the haystacks on the sunny side. Fly was delighted to be ‘going a place’ with me now, this fine summer morning.
Angus was a little different. Everybody liked Fly, but poor Angus nobody liked except me and then Tom. Angus had been given to me by the Poyntdale gamekeeper for no better reason than that he, Robbie, had never before seen a little girl who was not afraid of a ferret, and Angus lived in a box with a wire-netting top, in the cartshed, and had a bowl of bread and milk daily. Everybody, while sitting in the kitchen, far from the cartshed, would tell you that ‘Angus is the most useful craitur about the place’, but it used to give me a pain in my heart that, even so, they did not like him. Of course, Angus was not bonnie. He was exactly like a white weasel with pink eyes, but, somehow, I felt that everybody could not be bonnie—I was not bonnie like Jean Macintosh myself—and I loved him. And Angus loved me, which was nice of him, so, of course, as soon as I was out of sight of the house, I took him out of his bag which he hated and put him round my neck—which he liked—and wore him, head on one shoulder, tail on the other, as ladies often wore the skin of a dead squirrel which they had never known alive and which did not even have a name. If other ladies wore dead squirrels, why couldn’t I carry Angus round my neck instead of in a bag? And my grandmother could not see me now, anyway.
Thus the three of us progressed, by all the field paths on my school route, until we came out at the ‘Smiddy’ above Achcraggan, where big John-the-Smith was smoking his pipe in the doorway and awaiting his first customers.
“Aye, good morning, Janet! And what are the three o’ ye going to be at the-day?”
I took Angus from my neck and dropped him into his bag. “Good morning, Mr John-the-Smith. We’re going to be catching Miss Tulloch’s rats.”
“There, now. Come on in and get a sweetie.”
I went into the smithy and had
a hard ‘mint imperial’ that carried a faint, pleasant flavour of tobacco out of the tin box.
“Och, aye, and another one for the road,” said the smith in his big, musical precentor’s voice, so I took another and put it in the pocket of my kim-oh-no. “You’ll take a message back to your granda for me?”
“Surely, Mr John-the-Smith.”
“You tell him to bring his horses in for shoe-ing this very next week. Tell him all the mules from the Army Dee-pott is coming the week after and I’ll be short o’ time.”
“All right, Mr John-the-Smith.”
He went to his cupboard on the wall in the darkest corner of his dark smithy and took out his flat black bottle and the cracked cup and had himself a dram, smacked his lips and put the bottle and cup back into the cupboard. John-the-Smith was ‘inclined to be fond of a droppie’, and sometimes people like Mrs Gilchrist would be critical of him, but, as Tom said: “It’s all very fine for them in their wee shoppies and housies selling a bittie lace or sweeping the floor, but the smiddy is hard, hot work that makes a man dry.”
In a way, John-the-Smith was like the smith in the poem that started ‘Under a spreading chestnut tree . . .’ except that there was no chestnut tree at his smiddy but a very bonnie row of rowans. John was a ‘mighty man was he’ and he had ‘large and sinewy hands’, but he did not feel the same as the smith in the poem. The one in the poem had what Tom would call a ‘goody-goody’ feeling about him, and there was nothing of that about John-the-Smith. No. John-the-Smith, although mighty, large and sinewy on the outside, might easily go stealing the Poyntdale apples or some laddies’ caper like that, and very often, when he was not busy, he would stand outside his black cavern, throwing a horseshoe into the air and catching it while the whole hillside rang with his voice singing ‘Annie Laurie’ or some song like that, in just the way that I would bounce my ball to one of my own songs. You could not help liking John-the-Smith, and also I had heard Sir Torquil say that he was ‘one of the finest craftsmen in the North’.