by Jane Duncan
I was far too interested in afternoon school to think any more about the Miss Boyds, and too busy paddling up the Reachfar Burn, with my shoes and socks in the basket, on the way home, to remember about my fight with Jean Stewart, so that when I walked into the house at about half-past five the whole of my family was there, and so was the news of my fight. My mother fired the first, and telling, salvo. “Janet Sandison! Look at your face, scratched like some tinkerwoman! How dare you behave like Bella Skinner in Achcraggan Street?”
I had not been aware of being unhappy all day, but I now felt very unhappy indeed. I sat down on the fender stool and burst into tears. I seldom cried as a child, for I seldom had anything to cry about. Indeed, the only people who, until now, could make me cry at all were my mother and my father, but this crying was different from any crying I had done before. I was not crying only because I had done something wrong that had made my mother angry. I was crying with a wretchedness that had in it some of the greyness of the first day of the coal boat, some of the sordidness of Bella hitting Jock on the head with the bottle and some of the dreadful numbness that had pervaded the Miss Boyds’ kitchen that day. I did not really know what I was crying about, but I could not stop. My faithful friends and allies, George and Tom, plunged headlong to my aid.
“Ach, the poor bairn!” said Tom. “As I was hearing the story from the shepherd that got it from the doctor himself, there was good provvycation——”
“Hold your tongue, Tom!” blazed my mother. “Provocation or not, I will not have my daughter fighting like a hooligan! You hear me? I——”
“Hey, Elizabeth, lass,” said George, making a good try, “you have to mind that there’s some o’ this coorse Reachfar blood in her too!”
“Stop! Stop, stop, George!” I sobbed. “Stop! Stop!”
Tom bent down, scooped me off the fender stool and made for the door.
“Dang the lot o’ ye for being at the bairn!” he bawled. “Ye thrawn black-haired booggers that ye are! I’ll not let ye be at the craitur and her sobbing herself seeck with ye bawling at her about a bairns’ row at the school! Did none o’ ye ever——”
“Come back here, Tom,” said my father suddenly. “Give her to me.”
He took me on his knee. “Come now, Janet; your mother was angry about you fighting and rolling in the dirt, but that’s all past now and you won’t do it again. Come now.”
“It’s the Miss Boyds!” I sobbed. “It’s the Miss Boyds!”
“That poor craiturs?” my granny asked in my granny’s voice. “What about them? Were they not nice to you when you took the basket?”
“Yes, they were nice, Granny. They were very nice. But—it’s the Miss Boyds!” I bellowed and began to sob all over again.
Everybody began to argue with everybody else and I did not, even then, blame them. I could not tell them what I meant, and none of the meanings they suggested were true, and, all the time, Tom was keeping up a running fire of “Dang ye all for being at the poor bairn!” and “Stop crying, pettie, stop crying for Tom“, until in a final scream of near-hysteria I yelled: “Granny, you’ll have to go and see the MISS BOYDS!”
“Kate,” said my uncle, “warm a droppie milk. Tom, go ben to the parlour and bring the whisky. I’ll calm that bairn down if it’s the last thing I do.”
On my mother’s lap, now, and very ashamed of myself and afraid of my own outburst which I did not in the least understand, and shocked, too, at the upset I had caused in my family, I sobbed and hiccuped my way through my cup of warm milk with the teaspoonful of whisky in it. When I think of it now, many child psychologists could have taken lessons from My Friend Tom, for he sat there with his dram of whisky, beside my mother and me, and said: “A lot of people will be saying bad things about the Miss Boyds. Now, I think myself that they are very nice craiturs when a body gets to know them.”
“And not hot-arsed-est!” I said between sobs. I did not know what it meant, but it had a derogatory sound. There was a pregnant sort of silence, but Tom took the matter in hand with what I now recognise as considerable courage.
“Not at all,” he said. “No, not hot-arsed-est in the least, although a person might have said so before knowing them right. No. I believe they are a very nice lot o’ leddies. Don’t you think that yourself, George?”
“Well, now,” said the other natural master of psychology, “it’s a good whilie since I saw them. What did you think o’ them the-day, Janet?”
“They were sad,” I said. “Very sad, and all alone, and just the three of them——”
George and Tom (and probably the whisky) had me talking now, and I poured out all I knew and felt and could find words for about the Miss Boyds, including the greyness when I sat on Betsy outside the Plough and watched them walk away supporting Jock Skinner. I even told of how I had ‘pooped’ them and said ‘dirt on them’ to myself and everything. I told them about Jean Stewart’s name-calling and, in the end, came back to their sadness and their loneliness and how I had told them to come and see Granny and how I did not think that they would come, because they seemed to be afraid of everybody now, even of me.
“The poor craiturs,” my granny said when I had finished. “But don’t you worry any more, Janet, for tomorrow Tom will yoke Dulcie and I will go and see them.” She turned to my family. “I haven’t been to Achcraggan on a weekday this twelvemonth. Aye.” She straightened her back and her face became very stern. “Iphm. We will leave after dinner, Tom, and fetch Janet from the school on the way back. Dulcie will do fine on that back green at the Miss Boyds.”
This meant that Tom was to take a nosebag for Dulcie. It also meant that Achcraggan was to have time to see that Mrs Reachfar was spending the afternoon at the Miss Boyds.
“What do ye think, Granda?” she asked, appealing to the only law that she ever recognised.
“Chust you do that, Mistress,” he said quietly. “We mustna leave the craiturs alone in their trouble.”
We all had supper after this decision had been taken, and after my grandfather had said the grace my ‘clown’ of an uncle, leaning back in his chair, spoke behind me to Tom. “Tom, I have a special grace of my own to be saying for us three the-night.”
“What’s that, George, man?”
“You have to shut your eyes, Tom. And you, Janet.”
“George!” my grandmother said in a warning voice.
“God bless the Miss Boyds,” said George, “for getting Tom and Janet and me a dram out of the parlour bottle and us not even sick. Amen.”
When we opened our eyes, my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother and my father were all looking hard at my ‘clown’ of an uncle, but they did not say anything. How could they? It had been a very nice special grace and had been spoken with all due reverence. I felt a lot better, ate a big supper and went off to bed as usual afterwards.
When I came out of school the next afternoon my grandmother, Tom and Dulcie were waiting in the trap at the gate.
“Did you see them, Granny?” I asked as I climbed up over the wheel into the trap.
“Yes, Janet, and I had a cup of tea with them and it was very nice.”
“Were they sad?”
“A little quiet, maybe.”
“Why are they like that, Granny?”
“We won’t be gossiping, Janet. . . . Tom, stop at Miss Tulloch’s. Maybe she will have some of these fancy buns from the baker west the country and we’ll take a few home for the tea.”
When my grandmother went abroad, which was seldom, there was always a special ‘eating’ treat. My fickle mind left the Miss Boyds and concentrated on the choosing of the buns—a whole two dozen of them, three for each member of my family—and there were three kinds: square gingerbread bones, round ones with big lumps of white sugar on their shiny brown tops, and queer ones like long snakes coiled up with currants inserted in the coils. While my grandmother talked to Miss Tulloch I put eight of each in the big white paper bag and then came over to where they were talking, holding the bag open.
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br /> “Look, Miss Tulloch—eight of each kind and three eights is twenty-four and that’s two dozen.”
“Yes, Janet.”
“And you’ll mind to write them in the book?”
“Yes, Janet. Now take two more, one for you and one for Tom to eat on the way home; Granny doesn’t want one. And give these sugar lumps to Dulcie for me.” I went back to the tray of buns and Miss Tulloch turned again to my grandmother. “Aye, I see what ye mean, Mrs Sandison. Och, yes. The poor craiturs. Och, aye, it’s true enough, I will be thinking. Lizzie Fraser saw her in Inverness that time she was up when her sister was sick and Lizzie said there was no mistake. Five months she would have said it was, she said, and Lizzie should know. She has nine of her own.”
My grandmother said something which I could not hear and Miss Tulloch spoke again. “Och, the bairn is busy with the buns, Mrs Sandison, although I’ll give you that she’s a lively little clip.” They were talking about me, and I thought how foolish grown-up people were, for now that my granny had been to see the Miss Boyds I was not interested in them, or would not have been if they had not talked about me in between. But now that they had brought me into it, where, before, I had been hearing without attending, I now began to listen hard to their low-pitched conversation.
“The trouble is there right enough,” Miss Tulloch said.
“Are they saying who?” my grandmother asked.
“Aye.” Miss Tulloch smoothed her apron and brushed a little flour off the counter.
“Iphm?” said my grandmother, very much as the Inquisition might have asked a question.
“Jock Skinner—the night o’ the Armistice, they say.”
“Mercy on us!” My grandmother rose from her chair and spoke in a louder voice. “Well, it’s myself that would take it kindly, Miss Tulloch, if ye was to be calling on the Miss Boyds when you’ll be having the time, just to pass the time o’ day. Aye. You, and Mrs Gilchrist and the postmistress and a few o’ the local leddies. It’s lonely for them, and Reachfar is a fair way and I’m getting a little old for a lot of jaunting.”
“Yes, Mrs Sandison,” said Miss Tulloch.
“And if there should be any bother or any remarks passed that you don’t care for, chust let me know. I’m getting old, but I’m not fair done yet. . . . Come, Janet. Thank Miss Tulloch for the buns. We have to go home now. Good day, Miss Tulloch.”
I gave Dulcie her sugar lumps—she always got the ones that had fallen on the shop floor or something like that and were a little dirty—and then we drove home. I gave a little thought to the Miss Boyds and their ‘trouble’ but not a great deal, for it was a fairly common occurrence that people would be having babies without getting a father for them first, which was the proper way to have them. People were different from horse persons like Betsy. Betsy could have a foal fathered by the Poyntdale stallion, and we at Reachfar would help her to look after it and feed it, but people were different. People, partly because of what it said in the Bible, and partly because human children needed more pennies to bring them up properly, ought to have both a mother and a father there all the time—the mother to wash the baby and look after it, and the father to go out and work to earn the pennies to buy things like clothes and sugar (that did not grow on the place) for it, and some extra pennies to put in the bank in case the baby might grow up to be clever and able to take the Higher Eddication, at a university, maybe. I had known all about this ever since I could remember, and thought it all very simple and ‘only reasonable’.
Of course, the Miss Boyds would manage very well for pennies for their baby, I thought, even without a father being with them, for they had a ‘puckle money among them’. It was the Bible side of it that would be the trouble in their case. What the Bible said made it a Disgrace to have a baby in the house with no father for it. That was what the village people said, although my grandmother thought differently in that queer way of her own of thinking differently about all sorts of things that offended against the village laws. I remembered, about a year back, when Mary Junor that worked in the canteen at the soldiers’ camp had a baby with no father, one of the village women said it was because she was a bad girl, and my grandmother said in her sternest voice: “You hold your Bad Tongue, Kirsty Graham. Bad girls don’t have bairns.” And she looked at Kirsty as if she could see a Bad Girl right there in front of her. Kirsty held her tongue after that and my mother made clothes on our sewing-machine for the baby and I sewed the little buttons on. Mary’s baby had been, somehow, Because of the War. The war was such an upset that it caused people to have babies without fathers for them, even, but the war was finished now and probably the Miss Boyds’ baby would be the last one of its kind that we would have in the district, I thought.
When we were home, and my grandmother had gone into the house, and Tom and I were unharnessing Dulcie, I said: “Tom, which one of the Miss Boyds is it that’s having the baby?”
“God be here!” said Tom. “Don’t let your granny be hearing you!”
“If I’d wanted her to be hearing me, foolish, I’d have asked herself!”
He looked down at me over Dulcie’s neck. “Why are you needing to be knowing?”
“Just to be knowing.”
“You’re far too danged knowing already!”
“Tom Reachfar, that’s a Bad Thing to say! My father says that people can’t ever be knowing too much. Not even the minister can’t still be learning, he says!”
“There is good knowing and bad knowing, though.”
“Babies is not bad! My grandmother says that no baby can be bad!”
“Ach, to the devil with it!” said Tom. “You would argue the leg off Johnnie Greycairn’s Diamond. They tell me it’s the young one, the one they’ll be calling Vi’let.” He put Dulcie’s small trap harness collar on its peg. “Away and open the gate of the Wee Fieldie and put her in for me.”
I opened the gate of the Wee Fieldie, Dulcie ran through and I closed it behind her. “Tom, will you swap me your sugary bun for my ginger one?”
“Aye—if you’ll be holding your danged tongue about things,” he said.
* * * * *
The sun swung round on its high summer course. My Red-Crossing apron, which I had outgrown and which I did not need now because there was no war and never going to be another war, was turned into a cloth for polishing the spoons, and my mother unpicked the Red Cross from Tom’s Saturday bonnet. The soldiers’ camp was all broken up and the heather began to grow again where the huts had been, west on the Dinchory moor. At Poyntdale House the big ward had all the beds taken away and the billiard-table was brought back in from the coach-house and set in place. It seemed to me that the only person whose life was not changed in some way was Janet Sandison. I had no Red-Crossing to do now, but the Miss Boyds were practically a Red Cross in themselves, the number of baskets and things I was always having to carry for them. However, they were not sad now, although they still did not giggle and nudge as they used to do, and their house was always quite cheery when you went there, with Miss Tulloch or somebody in having a yarn with them. And the schoolchildren—even Jean Stewart—seemed to have tired of the sport of calling after them in the street.
June came along, and with it its big event of school ‘coming out’ for the summer holidays and Prize Day. Prize Day at Achcraggan School was something like the coal boat, for Everybody was there. Lady Lydia presented the prizes, Sir Torquil and the minister made speeches, and Dominie Stevenson called out the name of the child and what the prize was for and handed it to Lady Lydia. But the great thing about Achcraggan School was that, by the time they had finished, every child had a prize and some had several. There were first and second for each subject in every class, and then all sorts of ‘specials’. The minister gave a Bible as the Special for Scripture, Miss Tulloch gave a Special for Fancy Sewing, Lewie the Joiner gave a Special for Woodwork, my grandmother gave a Special for the Best Bouquet of Wild Flowers (as chosen by Lady Lydia, who got it to take home as her presentation bo
uquet), and I was not allowed to enter for this. My grandfather gave a boys’ Special for the Best Tray of Vegetables grown in the school garden, as selected by himself, and he presented it to the minister. And then Lady Lydia gave a Special (always a small but good brooch) for the Girl Dux of the school, and Sir Torquil gave a silver watch for the Boy Dux. Among some fifty children nobody came away from it all empty-handed.
On Prize Day I did not have to be at school until eleven, but Tom, George and I set off together at nine, for Tom and George, of course, had a little business to do with their cronies at the back door of the Plough before coming to the school, while I had to go to Miss Tulloch’s and sit still and not move in order to keep my white Sunday clothes clean until it was time to go up to the school with her. The school playground today was full of traps, and the minister’s glebe field was full of horses, and among them was the Reachfar trap which had brought the rest of my family except my aunt. She had been left to look after the place, but she was always allowed to go to the Prize Day Dance in the Church Hall in the evening.
All we children had to form up from the gates to the school door to welcome the Poyntdale wagonette, and then, while the minister welcomed Lady Lydia and Sir Torquil, we all had to go inside and the dominie called the roll right through the whole school. Today, at the appointed time, instead of the smart trot of the wagonette greys down the road, there came a noise far more frightening than the sirens of the ships at the Armistice; all the horses in the glebe field rushed away up to the far corner and plunged about wild-eyed, and round the corner came Sir Torquil and Lady Lydia, sitting in a Thing, with a man in front holding a handle, and there were no horses near it at all. This dreadful Thing came at the school gates, where I was standing, in a cloud of dust and an inferno of noise, and I was so frightened that I would have run away up the hill to the horses if the bones of my legs had not melted. I could not move; I could not even look away from the dreadful Thing, for even my eyes would not move. “It’s a motor car! It’s a motor car!” shouted My Friend Alasdair who was beside me. “Hurray! Sir Torquil’s got a motor car!” All the other children were far quicker-witted than I was and they all took up the cry, even the wee ones in the baby class, so, of course, I who was in the top class in the Dominie’s Room could not show my terror. But I could not cheer either. I held grimly on to the bar of the school gate, while the Awful Thing thundered past me, up the playground to the school door, and the words of the Frightening Hymn that we had sometimes in church echoed through my mind: