My Friends the Miss Boyds

by Jane Duncan

  Since that time I have seen many performances of one kind and another, but I have never seen anything more satisfying to the heart than those three couples revolving round the small boy with the pipes while all around them the happy people sang the song and swayed to and fro in time to the music.

  When it was over, Sir Torquil came back to the corner and said: “Well, supper now, I think,” but the minister came up and whispered something to him and eventually he nodded and said: “Oh, all right, all right!” He then announced: “Our friends, the Misses Boyd, who are now among us, will now entertain us with a song.”

  Fluttering and giggling, the six Miss Boyds rushed into the middle of the floor, separated, giggled, coalesced into a covey again, giggled some more, rushed over to whisper to Danny and the other musicians, rushed back, separated again and at last faced each other in two rows of three. By this time an uneasy titter was running round the big barn, George was rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand, and my mother’s long nervous fingers had taken a grip on the back of my white blouse that was almost stopping my breathing.

  The Miss Boyds, accompanied by the fiddles and melodeons, got started. Their choice was a ballad, called, I think, ‘Huntingtower’, which was usually sung as a duet between a man and a woman, but in this case three Miss Boyds were the man and three the woman.

  ‘When ye gang awa’, Jamie,

  Far across the sea-ee, laddie!

  When ye gang tae Germanee,

  What will ye bring tae me-ee, laddie?’

  carolled the female section, not quite in tune and not quite together.

  ‘I’ll bring ye a braw new goon, Jeanie . . .’

  the male section promised in an off-key contralto.

  It was agonising in every way. Six Miss Boyds, all overdressed and badly dressed; six pairs of steel-rimmed spectacles flashing in the slanting last light; three Miss Boyds simperingly coy and another three dashingly swashbuckling. My mother’s hand took a strangle grip on the bunched-up back of my blouse; Mrs de Cambre’s knuckles pulled her gloves to splitting point as her hands gripped the stem of her ostrich feather fan; Lady Lydia and my grandmother, side by side like twin queens enthroned, stared straight ahead and kept at bay, by sheer personal force, the rising tide of tittering and giggling from the young farmhands and the pink-cheeked servant girls.

  At long last it was over. There was an immediate burst of applause from Sir Torquil, the dominie, the doctor, and the men of my family, which was quickly taken up by the rest of us, and then Sir Torquil announced supper.

  Alasdair and I went away to join some of our school companions, and ate an enormous supper of roast beef, raisin dumpling and apples, but just as we were starting on our fourth apple my grandmother’s voice, from the table where she was sitting, said: “Janet, Alasdair, come here.” We looked at each other. “You heard me,” said the voice. It was not loud at all. I had wondered if I had imagined it, but Alasdair, from his face, had heard it too.

  “Yes, Granny?” I said.

  “Just sit there, the two of you. That’s all.” She indicated two chairs in a corner beside her and turned away to her table companion again, so that we could do nothing but sit down. There were no more apples or anything within reach. Mrs de Cambre looked at us, gave us her one-eyed Brink and said to Sir Torquil: “They tell me that Miz Sandison is a wi-itch. Is that true?”

  “Quite true,” said Sir Torquil solemnly. “Like your fortune told, Maddy Lou?”

  “Ah surely wou-ould!”

  “Tell her fortune by the yaavins, Mrs Reachfar?”

  “Surely,” said my grandmother with her queer, secret eye-smile.

  “What’s that, for goodness’ sakes?”

  Sir Torquil reached up to one of the barley sheaves on the wall and pulled off an ear with all the yaavins or whiskers on it. “You do like this,” he said, and rubbed the ear between his two cupped hands until they were full of grains and broken yaavins when he held them out. “Then let the grains run off like this.” He tipped his hands forward and the grains fell to the floor, but some of the broken yaavins clung to the skin of his hands. “Then hold your hands out to the spae-wife.”

  “Spae-wife?”

  “Fortune-teller. In this case, Mrs Reachfar.”

  “Let the leddy choose her own ear o’ barley,” my grandmother said, and Mrs de Cambre went to a sheaf and chose an ear. “Now, be careful not to get yaavins on your dress. They’ll stick for ever and you’ll be finding yourself with one itching you next time you wear it. All right—rub it out.”

  Mrs de Cambre rubbed carefully with her pretty small hands, after taking off altogether the long gloves that had been dangling from her wrists, let the grains run to the floor and then held out the two hands across the table.

  “The hands of a leddy,” said my grandmother, putting her own strong but shapely hands under the small fingers. “There is nothing sudden or startling in any way in your fortune, madam, but a bonnie, happy fortune for all that. A woman’s fortune. Your life will be a long and a very happy one. You have a son, madam?” “Yes, Miz Sandison.”

  “And a big boy, and you so young.”

  “He is eighteen, Miz Sandison.”

  “Well, I have told you you will have a long and happy life with all your own people around you. And there is a big happiness connected with a son of yours—it is the one boy you have?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is through him that the happiness will come. I cannot tell you what it is, but something that you and your husband have wished for. It takes the form here of a three within a three—will you mind on that?”

  “A three within a three, Miz Sandison?”

  “Aye. That’s right.”

  “Ah’ll remember.” She looked down at the broken yaavins on her hands. “A three within a three.”

  “Aye, madam,” said my father’s voice, “is the ould spae-wife at her capers?”

  “Please tell mine, Mrs Sandison,” someone else was saying.

  “Surely. Pick out your own ear o’ barley, lassie.”

  The rest of us went out to the threshing barn again for the rest of the concert, but my grandmother stayed in a corner of the straw barn telling fortunes. Truly, people brought the strangest gifts to the Harvest Home.

  All too soon Tom and George—the latter dressed in a skirt, blouse and bonnet of my grandmother’s—had danced their reel, I had danced my Highland Fling to my father’s pipes and it was time for my mother and me to go home, but I was tired too, never having been out of bed so late, and my mother said that I would not enjoy the crowded grown-up dancing.

  “Before you go, Elizabeth,” Sir Torquil said to my mother, “come and see the stackyard—there is a fine moon.”

  Lady Lydia and a lot of the others came out to see the stackyard too. We went to the end of the Square, along the gable of the barn, where, facing us, were the nine front stacks. These would be the last of the big stackyard to be threshed, and they were all securely thatched against the winter, but woven into the thatch of each stack in dark-green broom, which showed black in the moonlight, was a letter, so that the front row of stacks spelled ‘Poyntdale’.

  “My, but that’s pretty!” said the voice of Mrs de Cambre. “I nevah saw a thi-ing like that befoah!”

  “And you probably won’t again, Maddy Lou, anywhere in your travels. Stacks like that are a dying art.”

  “Who did it?” some man’s voice asked.

  “Duncan Reachfar, the grieve. He and his brother and Tom, their man, are the only men left about here that I know who can do it now. Old Reachfar taught them. But the very art of good stacking is dying out. That’s only the finishing touch to a high-class job, but it’s bonnie.”

  I thought that Sir Torquil’s voice was unduly sad when he said that only the men of my family, in our district, could thatch and mark his stacks like that, for what was he worrying about? Even if my father got sick (a thing I had never known to happen) at harvest-time, Tom or George would come down
and thatch his stacks for him, for it was impossible that they could all be sick at once. ‘Dying out,’ he had said. Dying. Did he mean that when my father, George and Tom died there would be nobody left who could——? But that was not possible! These men were not mortal! They had always been there, they were never sick, people like a person’s father and a person’s friends did not die! Only old, old people died—people like old Granny Macintosh, maybe. . . . But everybody was getting older all the time. Even I was Big Enough now to come to the Harvest Home! And if I was a year older my father was a year older, everybody was a year older than last year—a year more like old Granny Macintosh . . .

  Suddenly, from the dark shadows among the stacks, came the voice of my father, in no way weak and enfeebled with age but raised in anger and yet hoarse with fury: “In God’s name! Are ye mad, smoking in there? And them danged cigarettes at that! Come out o’ that, ye senseless booggers!”

  “Great God!” bawled Sir Torquil and sprang over the gate. “Where are they, Duncan? Who is it?”

  “I think, Elizabeth,” said Lady Lydia, “we had better go.”

  But before we could move, my father, very silent now, was opening the gate in the stackyard wall and ushering through it three sailors and the three youngest Miss Boyds.

  “It’s all right,” my father was saying. “Just mind, though, lads, that a stackyard can go up as fast as your ship’s powder magazine.”

  The Miss Boyds, giggling, ran along in the shadow of the barn wall, followed by the sheepish-looking sailors, while my mother’s nervous grip on my hand was squeezing my fingers in a vice, before she expelled a long breath and said: “Janet, we must get home and let Auntie Kate come down to the dance. Say goodnight to everyone.”

  I made my curtsy and thanked Lady Lydia and Sir Torquil. For me the Harvest Home was over.

  For George, Tom and me, however, a thing that we had enjoyed was never really over and we talked about the Harvest Home for days, until my grandmother said she was ‘fair deaved’ with us, although she would still laugh, almost against her will, at the recapitulation of one or another incident by Tom or George.

  The day after the Harvest Home, which was a Saturday, Tom and George, not having been to bed at all but having just arrived home in time for breakfast, decided that it would be a fine day to thatch the Reachfar stacks while my grandfather was ‘sleeping himself clear o’ the night before and would not be bothering them’. Being further up the hill, and on less fertile land than Poyntdale, the Reach-far harvest was always a week or two later. Tom and George were in fine form, with ‘skirts’ of sacking tied round them to protect the knees of their trousers from the sharp ends of the sheaves on the stack sides, reliving the events of the night before while they worked and Fly and I helped them. At one point, while Tom was up the ladder, George nudged me to keep quiet, cut off a short piece of hairy rope and applied a match to the end of it, holding it between his fingers like a cigarette.

  “What was your father saying last night?” he whispered.

  Seeing what was required, I started to shout: “In God’s name! Are ye mad, smoking in there? And them danged——”

  I could go no further. George, in his sacking skirt, went cackling and giggling and running through between the stacks in classic imitation of the Miss Boyds, while Tom clung, helpless with laughter, to the slope of his stack at the top of his ladder. Having started on the Miss Boyds, there was no stopping them, and Tom descended from the ladder to take the female part in a rendering of ‘Hunting-tower’ and was unbelievably coy in his sacking skirt.

  “Man, George, yon was terrible,” he said soberly when they had finished.

  “It was something like Miss Iris at the old quarry, but not so bad,” I put in.

  “Well, it was bad enough,” George said. “It was like as if you and me had set ourselves up to sing the Psalm like John the Smith, Tom. It is an awful thing when folk has no idea what’s expected o’ them.”

  “How does folk know, George?” I asked.

  “Ach, if a person has any sense they can see for their-selves what they should do and what they leave alone. You wouldna be dancing your Sword Dance if Sir Torquil wasna asking your father. And Tom and me wouldna be at that capers o’ the reel if folk wasna at us to be doing it. It is chust common sense”

  “Av coorse,” said Tom, “anybody that’s kind o’ good at a thing gets asked to do it—like wee Alasdair with his pipes. He is a grand piper for a wee fellow. But when Sir Torquil has all that fancy visitors there, he’s not needing people to be making fools of theirselves, except the like o’ George and me. People knows we canna dance or sing good, and they know we are being foolish at it on purpose. There’s a-all the difference in the world between being foolish on purpose and being foolish because you are too foolish to know you are being foolish, like.”

  “Would you two be going to thatch the rest o’ the stacks the-year or chust leave them till next back-end?” my grandmother enquired with heavy sarcasm from the top of the garden.

  “Aye, aye, Mistress,” said Tom. “We was chust sorting a puckle straw.”

  “I never heard o’ men that sorted straw with their tongues before,” she said and went back into the house, carrying the big cabbage for the dinner.

  ‘I hope she’ll be boiling a bittie suet with the cabbage the-day,” George said. “A bittie suet with it makes a-all the difference. What more is for the dinner, Janet?”

  “That hen the red cow kicked and broke its leg.”

  “That dirty ould Leghorn brute? That hen’s near as ould as maself!—Och, well, Tom, we might as well tie another rope or two.”

  Having got on to the subject of food, we ate again in memory the supper of the night before, which started Tom and George off again.

  “Have a little more of the dumpling, Miss Boyd,” said Tom.

  “Oh, well—well, chust a sensation!” said George coyly. “Gawd be here! Who ever heard o’ a sensation o’ dumpling?”

  With all the talk about the Harvest Home, I quite forgot that we were into October now and that there was no mention of the coal boat, and I do not know how long I would have forgotten about it if my father had not come home and announced one evening that Sir Torquil was not certain that the coal boat would come at all this year.

  “Tom,” he said then, “you’ll have to take a walk through the moor and mark a good puckle trees for cutting.”

  “Ach!” said Tom disgustedly. “Hack, hack, hacking away at the trees! The Home Moor is the only bit of high shelter in three parishes an’ with all your hacking away you’ll have it fair useless.”

  “It’s not my will to cut the trees, Tom, man! But if the coal boat canna come, it’s not chust ourselves—there’s all Achcraggan looking for fire for the winter!”

  “Achcraggan?” Tom was outraged. “Where in the world have we got trees for the whole place?”

  “We are not being asked to serve the whole place, Tom,” said my quiet grandfather. “Sir Torquil and Mr Macintosh and Captain Robertson will do their best, like always, but Reachfar has a little wood too. You will mark the trees, Tom.”

  “The railway?” Tom asked. “Surely the railway can be bringing in a puckle coal?”

  “You know the railway can hardly carry the sailors coming north, far less coal, Tom,” said George. “I’ll stop home on Saturday and mark the trees with you. There’s no need to take young ones or straight ones. The wood will be better clear o’them old twisted ones.”

  “We-ell, maybe,” said Tom. Tom loved trees, young, old, twisted or straight, and still loves them. “Dang this war!”

  “Aye, dang it, right enough!” said my grandfather although nobody was allowed to say ‘Dang’ in the house and it was a word he seldom used anyhow, and I was not allowed to use it at all.

  “Yes, indeed. Dang it!” I said.

  “Janet!” said my mother. “That is enough.”

  The great thing about the discipline at Reachfar was that, no matter what the crisis, as far as I
was concerned my family never let up on it for a moment.

  It was a queer feeling to know for the first time in your life that you could not be certain of having the coal boat to look forward to. It left the year looking very naked of things for looking forward to. There would be the tattie holidays in October as usual, which the village children liked but which I hated. It was all very well for them, but I would have preferred to be at school. If they handled as many potatoes as I did in the course of a year, what with hens’ pots and pigs’ pots and people’s pots, they would not be so anxious to gather them in a field either, even if they did get pennies for doing it. It was the ‘tattie holidays’, I think, which were originally responsible for my still-firmly-held belief that some money is not worth its weight in potatoes.

  So, the next Saturday, which had to be cold and showery, just for spite, George, Tom and I spent a long dreary morning on the moor, ‘marking trees’. Usually, if George, Tom and I went to the moor—to count sheep or cut a few old dead trees for the Reachfar fires, or plant a young tree or two, or mend a fence or a dyke or anything—we had a riotously happy time, out of hearing of my grandmother, with George and Tom clowning about and telling yarns about old Sandy Bawn who had gone to America in the long ago, had come back and fold fearful stories of the size of the trees there.

  “And he would tell them as solemn as if it was the God’s truth he was telling you, man!” Tom would say.

  “Aye, yon one about the redwood tree—was that the name of it? That he said was as big around as the steeple o’ Achcraggan Church!” George would add. “What a danged liar the man was, Tom, when you think on it.”

  “Och, something terrible, man. And him swearing on his Bible oath it was the truth. Av coorse, there was always a soft bittie in Sandy Bawn, George—he was for ever thinking-he was far cleverer than others, and a man has to be gey soft to be thinking like that.”