My Friends the Miss Boyds

by Jane Duncan

  The children went back to their ball games, but I did not go back this time. The sun had gone in and the afternoon was dull and grey, and I wanted to go home, so I went to the gate which Betsy was looking over—she wanted to go home too—and climbed from the gate on to her back. She gave a little whinny of pleasure at seeing me, and I sat there patting her neck and looking around at the darkening water of the Firth.

  The village women were calling their children now and drifting away back to their warm firesides; and then I saw the Miss Boyds help Jock Skinner to his feet and walk away, helping him, along the road. It was kind of them. His head must be sore. The children were laughing and shouting still as they went to their homes. I wanted to cry.

  But, with their way of never failing me, just then the men of my family came out of the Plough and I was happy again.

  “Bring Betsy over, Janet!” my father called.

  I got down, opened the gate, climbed up on it and up on Betsy again, and she went of her own accord and stood by her own cart. My father put her harness on, backed her into position and brought the trams down, talking to the village and farm men all the time.

  “No, Hughie, it’s very good o’ ye, man, but not the-night. Aye, Alex, we’ll have a dram tomorrow, maybe. No thank ye, Rory, I have to get home with my father and the bairn. I’ll see ye another day.”

  George and Tom, yoking Dick and Dulcie, were arguing in the same way, while my grandfather was talking to Sir Torquil.

  “It has been a great day, Reachfar,” Sir Torquil said. “When that destroyer came up with her bunting on, dammit, I couldn’t believe me own eyes!”

  “I knew,” my grandfather said quietly, “that there was something in the wind the-day. I knew it on the horses o’ the morning.”

  Sir Torquil did not argue the matter. Nobody did. How could they? What had the horses felt in the air that morning?

  It took a long time to marshal the Poyntdale and Dinchory strings and get the horsemen out of the Plough, but at last we were under way, the horses plodding steadily and quietly now towards their stables, and just as well, for in several cases the horse was in charge of his drunk driver asleep in the cart. The last thing I remember was the sound of the song that the sailors were singing in the Plough as we drew away into the twilight.

  “There were three something-something

  Hanging on the wall,

  Three something-something, hanging on the wall.

  If one something-something should accidentally fall,

  There’ll be two something-something hanging on the wall.”

  The same ‘plan’ of a song as Ten Little Nigger Boys, I thought, and a fine tune. What could the something-somethings be? A pity I had not heard it properly. I fell asleep in Tom’s lap in the gently swaying cart.

  We had four days of coal-boat holidays that year, because we had an extra two days because of the war being over, and just as well, because through celebrating the end of the war we had got ourselves, as Tom said, ‘all through-other with our work and the boat stuck on the beach and a-all’. The next day, though, Tom, Granda and I left Reachfar at dawn again, went to Poyntdale and loaded with wood from Sir Torquil’s sawmill and then on to the boat, stacked the wood on the pier, carted the minister’s coal, then loaded with our own coal and came home. It went on like that for two more days and became very dull. I had a feeling that the whole business of the coal boat had reached its climax at that moment when the destroyer had dashed up the Firth and that it would never be the same again. The greyness had come down, gradually, after that, and had ended in the dreary, sordid fight between Jock Skinner and his wife and the sad ugliness of Jock reeling down the road in a covey of Miss Boyds. I did not know it at the time, but that greyness was the grim dawn of a new era, the Post-War Period. All I knew was that the greyness and Jock Skinner and Bella and the Miss Boyds among them had sullied the bright joy of the coal boat and that the mark would be there for ever and ever. I remember thinking about it all deep inside the Thinking Place among the tall, close-ranked fir trees above the Reachfar well, and I must have done this thinking on a Saturday or a Sunday, for it was forenoon, and after I had settled it all with myself, and accepted the darkening of the bright coal-boat memory, Fly and I went round the moor and scraped the red paint marks off the trees with my knife. The war was over, the coal boat had been in and we would not have to cut the trees now. The trees were salvage from the wreck.

  Part II

  THAT winter of 1918 into 1919 was long and bleak and wet. The moor and field paths were so sodden with rain that they were almost impassable, and I had to go round the full three and three-quarter miles by road to school, morning after morning, plodding along in the driving rain, meeting no one between Reachfar and the County Road except perhaps the Poyntdale shepherd, who was always a little wetter than myself and a little more morose too. The rain continued on right through March and then, in a spiteful way, froze itself up and descended on us in blinding, driving snow, in a bitter ‘peewits’ storm’ as March turned into April. Throughout the long dreary wet winter my grandparents had been predicting a ‘peevies’ storm’ as they called it, and, as usual, about the weather and most other things, they were right.

  An old man of the Scottish Border, the opposite end of Scotland from my own, has told me that in the Borders they used to refer to these days when March turns into April as the ‘Borrowing Days’ and that they had this rhyme about them:

  “March borrowed from Apryle the first three days and they were vile.

  The first o’ them was wild and weet, the second o’ them was snaw and sleet,

  The third o’ them was sic a freeze, it froze the birds’ nebs tae the trees.”

  At Reachfar, during these March-end days, after a snowless winter, we expected the peewits’ storm, which was so-called because the lapwings, having laid their eggs in the hollows of the bare plough-land, would call and call with their eerie cry as they flew low among the ‘wild and weet and snaw and sleet’.

  But after the peewits’ storm was over spring broke in beauty over the countryside like a fresh young girl who had, after circumventing angry parents, arrived a little late but flushed with triumph at her first ball, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks glowing, her breath coming fast with expectation, and I, affected by the spring in my own fashion, began to inspect the rabbit families in the Bluebell Bank and dance down the Strip of Herbage again. I was dancing to a new tune this year—

  ‘Six something-somethings hanging on the wall . . .’

  I had discovered that starting with six and working down to ‘one something-something’, jumping on to certain stones the while, I could go from one end of the Strip to the other without having either any stones or any song left over. The only unsatisfactory thing, now, was, what could the something-somethings be? I thought of six Betsy’s collars, and six Granny bonnets, but these things never fell, either accidentally or any other way, and then the white light of the poet’s inspiration was vouchsafed to me:

  “Six Miss Boy-idds sitting on the wall!

  Six Miss Boy-idds sitting on the wall!

  If one Miss Boy-idd should accidentally fall,

  There’d be five Miss Boy-idds sitting on the wall!”

  I was pleased with this as children (and poets) are with their own songs, and I danced the Strip of Herbage to it, collected the eggs to it and did all my small jobs to it for several weeks, until one day my gentle mother called me into a quiet corner and said: “Janet, the song is not about the Miss Boyds. It should be six green bottles hanging on the wall.”

  “But, Mother, I like it with Miss Boyds in it.”

  “I don’t. And, Janet, please don’t sing it that way.”

  “But, Mother! Why not?”

  “Never mind why, this time. Just don’t sing it that way, to please me.”

  “All right, Mother.”

  My mother had never before given me such a reason for doing or not doing anything. One of the nice things about my mother was that neve
r did she say like my grandmother: ‘Do it because I tell you.’ My mother would say: ‘You have to curtsy to Lady Lydia because she is a fine and good lady and a little girl like you has to have some way of showing her respect.’ The great thing about my mother was that she was full of Real Sense.

  SoI gave some thought to her spoiling my song about the Miss Boyds which, I felt, was not a very harmful or rude song compared with some of the things the schoolboys shouted after the Miss Boyds in the village street, but I would probably have given up thinking about it, in my usual fickle way, except that, the very next week, on the Tuesday morning, when I was ready to leave for school, my grandmother said: “Janet, take this basket, and at your dinner-time go round to the Miss Boyds and hand it in.”

  “What’s in it, Granny?”

  “A bittie butter and some jam, and carry it canny.”

  “Are the Miss Boyds buying jam next?” I enquired. It was a disgrace to buy jam from the shop or anywhere else. People had to make their own, unless they were too old, like Granny Fraser.

  “Janet!” said my mother. “That will do. Take the basket to the Miss Boyds and tell them that Granny sent it and come away and don’t stay chattering. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  I set off in silence for school, my satchel on my back, the basket in my hand. This was Awful. My mother had even been Cross. Poop to these Miss Boyds! They meant nothing but Bother. In fact, dirt on these Miss Boyds!

  The dominie kept the basket by his desk until dinnertime, and then I had my sandwiches and milk in the play-shed with my friends and set off. It was skipping-rope time, and I wanted to play, but I had to go on this (danged-into-myself) errand.

  “Where are you off to?” Jean Stewart asked.

  I did not like Jean Stewart much. She was a fisher girl, with a tongue as sharp as an east wind as Tom would say, and always teasing the ‘wee ones’ in the baby class at play times. I was already bad-tempered enough about this errand and it was none of her business anyhow, but Reachfar people were supposed to be ‘civil’.

  “To the Miss Boyds,” I said.

  “What for?” she pursued.

  This was Too Much. This was Pure Nosiness. “Nothing to do with you!” I snapped and walked towards the school gate with my basket.

  In a second Jean’s sycophantic clique of friends seemed to spring from the ground around her and took up the cry that she gave them. “Jock Skinner’s weemen! Jock Skinner’s weemen! Bairns wi’ nae faithers! Jock Skinner’s weemen!”

  I stopped in the wide gateway. “Shut your mouth, Jean Stewart!” I said.

  They began to dance round me like gadflies, their ragged black hair flying, their sallow, spindly legs kicking, Jean’s mouth emitting shrill word after shrill insulting word. “You’re anither! You’re anither! Jock Skinner’s wee-men!——”

  The words, in the shrill fisher accent, were extraordinarily obscene to me. Raw, red rage swelled in my brain and chest and my gentle mother’s voice saying: “Decent people don’t fight—especially ladies. Decent people don’t fight——” was becoming fainter and fainter. Suddenly my mind could no longer hear that voice. I hung the basket on the gate-post in icy calm, and then, whirling round, I had Jean Stewart by the wiry black hair and down on the ground while her mouth was still forming its latest insult. She was a year older than I was, and wiry, but the small fisher breed was no match for the brawn I had inherited from Reachfar. Before the doctor came along, going on his afternoon round, pulled up his pony and jumped down, I had Jean senseless, with blood flowing freely from her nose and from her head where it had struck a stone when I pulled her down. Her sycophants were all bellowing as if they were being murdered. One of the boys got the doctor’s bag from his trap and opened it and the doctor held a bottle under Jean’s nose and gave her a good shake. She opened her eyes, saw me, cringed and started to bellow.

  “Janet Sandison!” said the thunder of the dominie’s voice. “Did you do that to Jean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “Hold on, Dominie!” said the doctor and called sternly to his own son. “Alasdair, you and the boys were here. What happened?”

  “Jean was calling names at Janet and Janet hit her.”

  “What names?”

  Alasdair kicked a stone about with the toe of his boot.

  “Speak up, boy! What names?”

  “Names that you told me I wasn’t to say about Jock Skinner’s weemen, Dad.”

  The doctor gave Jean another shake. “Stop that bawling, you little besom, or it’s a dose of castor oil you’ll get! Go into the cloakroom and I’ll come and wash that cut. . . . Come here, Janet!” He took some cottonwool from his bag, put stuff from a bottle on it and wiped the three big claw marks on my cheek. “You’ll do fine,” he said and gave me a friendly slap on the bottom.

  “And any more name-calling among you girls, or fighting——” said the dominie, “and I’ll take the boys’ cane to you! Disgraceful, on the public road. . . . Whose basket is this?”

  “Mine, sir.”

  “Well, here you are. Get back into the playground.”

  “Please, sir, Granny said to take the basket to the Miss Boyds.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. All right, be off then! . . . John Watson, what are you doing with that catapult? No catapults in the playground—hand it over. . . . Good day, Doctor. Thank you. Good day.” Grumbling to himself, the dominie went back to his interrupted dinner and I went off to the Miss Boyds.

  I could not tell you how it was, but the Miss Boyds’ house and the Miss Boyds’ garden and the Miss Boyds themselves looked different. Only the two old ones and Miss Annie were there, and the two old ones did not speak at all. There was no fluttering or nudging or giggling now, but they were not like ordinary people either. They seemed very anxious that I should come in, so I did, but then they did not seem to have anything to say. Miss Annie took the basket, unpacked it in a wondering, startled sort of way, as if she had never seen a basket before, and then said: “But why did your granny send us some of her butter and jam, Janet?”

  They were funny people. They did not know any of the ordinary things that everybody knew.

  “Oh, it’s just a compliment,” I explained. “My granny sends people compliments all the time.”

  I knew, for I had to carry these compliments most of the time, or Tom and Betsy and I had to carry them when it was the minister’s firewood or the dominie’s light oats for his hens.

  “A compliment?” Miss Annie asked, still not seeming to understand.

  “Yes. And all you have to do is give me back the basket and tell me to thank my granny for the kind compliment or something like that.” I knew all about this business of compliments. Very slowly, Miss Annie folded the napkin, put it into the empty basket and handed it to me. “There, then, Janet,” she said. “And tell your granny that we are all thanking her for her kind—kind—kindness” she got out at last.

  Dominie Stevenson would not think much of her as a scholar, I thought, when she could not remember two words like ‘kind compliment’ from one minute to the next. She would not make much of a job of reciting ‘I to the hills——’ at Scripture Lesson, I thought. And then I noticed that her face had gone all twisted and funny the way Lady Lydia’s did when she came to tell my grandmother about her young brother being killed at a place called Mons, and I was sent out of the kitchen.

  “I have to go now,” I said, and went to the door. “But when you’ll be having a little time you should come up and see my granny. Good day, Miss Boyds.”

  I could not think of anything better to do or say, so I closed their door and then their garden gate and went back to school. That was the best thing they could do, I thought. People who were in trouble so that their faces got twisted and funny like that could not do a better thing than come and see my granny. My grandmother who made you behave, and Mrs Sandison who was much Respected in the District, and Mrs Reachfar who was a gra
nd vet, a devil for a bargain and a Bit of a Witch besides, were all quite different people from my granny, although they all lived inside the same person. You did not see my granny very often, but she was very, very good for people who had trouble.