by Jane Duncan
‘His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form,
And dark is His path on the wings of the storm.’
The Thing let Sir Torquil and Lady Lydia climb down out of it, down some steps it had, and then it took the man with the handle down to the play-shed and suddenly stopped its noise, although it was still filling the air with its awful smell, and the children and the people, regardless of the smell and the danger that it might decide to move again, crowded round it. But not all, after all, I saw with relief. My grandfather, Tom, Johnnie Greycairn and several other of the grandfathers stayed in a tight group under the big tree, and I knew they did not like the Thing either, so I went over to join them.
“Tom,” I whispered, “I don’t like it.”
“Nor me neither, the stinkin’ thing!” said Tom.
“Are you frightened of it, Tom?”
“Och, no! Where would a person be frightened of a thing like that that canna move unless a mannie with a funny bonnet on him will be turning a handle?”
“It wouldn’t come at a person, Tom?”
“Where could it come at a person and it with no brains in it? No, no. Now, Dick would come at a person he didna like, but not that contrivance. It canna.”
“Well,” my grandfather was saying to old Mr Ramsay, “the Laird has to move with the times, but I don’t think it is as bonnie as the horses myself.”
“No, indeed, Reachfar, nor as wise either,” said Mr Ramsay.
Then the dominie rang the bell for the children and we all had to go in for roll call, and the people all had to come in too, but I noticed that the man that the Thing had with it did not come in. He had to stay beside it as if it would not let him go. I was not at all sure that he was not afraid of it, and that, in spite of what Tom had said, it would not come at him if he tried to leave it, like a spoilt child that would kick and scream at its mother and not go out to play by itself when she had visitors.
When the dominie began to call the roll from the oldest child in the school down to the youngest the next thing went wrong. The first three pupils answered “Present, sir” all right, but when he called out “Margaret Skinner” there was no answer. He tried again, sternly, with the more familiar name “Maggie Skinner?” There was still no answer. The dominie clicked his tongue and went on down the roll, then: “Thomas Skinner.” No answer. “Tom Skinner?” Still no answer. By the time he reached the end, all five Skinners who should have been there were missing. This was very queer. The Skinners might have to be ‘whipped in’ every other day of the school year, but they were usually there for their apple and orange at Christmas and ‘to see what they could pick up for nothing’ on Prize Day. However, after a colloquy and some nodding between the dominie, the minister and Sir Torquil on the platform, the proceedings went forward as usual. The speech was made, the prayer was said and the Baby Class was given its prizes first because it was difficult for the wee ones to sit still for too long and the lady teacher had them all near the door so that she could take them out to play if they became restive. At last, I went up and made my curtsy for First Girl in my class and as usual, too, Alasdair went up and made his bow for First Boy, and then they got started on the mass of Specials. I usually got the Special presented by Doctor Mackay for General Intelligence and Alasdair usually got the Special for Nature Knowledge presented by Captain Robertson of Seamuir, but here the schedule went wrong again and these prizes went to other people. Ever since the Armistice, it seemed to me, you could not depend on anything being as usual any more. I sighed and watched the bees in the honeysuckle at the window while the dominie droned his way through all the Specials.
“And now,” he said, “pay attention, everybody, for I have a situation here that has to be explained and I want everybody, young and old, to understand it. As you know, Mr Murray at the Academy sets the paper for the Top Class for the examination for the Dux prizes presented by Lady Lydia and Sir Torquil, and I send the written papers back to Mr Murray to be marked. Some of the older people may remember that some years ago Sir Torquil’s prize went to Hector Gunn, who was five years younger than some of the others who wrote papers. Hector Beagle, as we all know him, is now doing very well at the Marine Engineering in Glasgow, so we can all have confidence in the marking of Mr Murray and his Committee at the Academy. This year, the Dux prizes both go to a girl and a boy who will have to stay here for another year with me before going to the Academy, as they are both only nine years old. These two are Janet Sandison of Reachfar and Alasdair Mackay, the son of our good doctor.”
Alasdair and I went up to Lady Lydia and I got the brooch, which is a little circle of river pearls, and Alasdair got the watch. It was indeed a very, very queer Prize Day and my mother seemed to have got a cold in her head or something the way she was blowing her nose, and Tom and George were smiling the foolish way they smiled sometimes if their business at the Plough took a little too long.
When the Prize-giving was over, with a short prayer from the minister, we children usually lined up again to see Sir Torquil and Lady Lydia drive away, but not me this year. They could all say what they liked, but I did not trust that Thing, so I gave my book and the blue velvet box with my brooch to my mother and went away into the school garden and had myself a swing. I heard the noise of the Thing going away, and then I came back into the playground where my grandmother was standing talking to the three oldest Miss Boyds and Tom was yoking Dulcie to the trap.
“I am very pleased you came out to the Prize Day,” my grandmother was saying. “It is a nice outing and the bairns are always amusing with their sewing and woodwork and all.”
I thought she would never stop gabbing so that we could get along to Miss Tulloch’s for the tea and cake that she always provided to tide us Reachfar people over on Prize Day, and all the other women kept going over to join them and my grandmother kept calling this one and that one over and they would all chat for a little longer. In the end we were the very last people to leave the playground, my mother and the three Miss Boyds, if you please, riding in the trap with George at Dulcie’s head, then my grandmother and Miss Tulloch walking behind, then my grandfather and my father, then Tom and me. And where do you think we went? Not to Miss Tulloch’s at all. We went to the Miss Boyds’, and had a proper dinner, in the room they called the dining-room, round a big table, Miss Tulloch and all. It was a first-class feed, of soup, then fried haddock and potatoes, and then a cold pink pudding, and then tea and fancy biscuits and all carried in by Bella Beagle’s Martha, who was very handy about the house, and had been in the kitchen at Poyntdale before her mother brought her home to be handy about their own house in the Fisher Town. On the way home Tom and I agreed that we had never been to such a Prize Day in all Our Born Days.
“My, but I am chust terrible full,” Tom said. “I think it was that third droppie of the pudding that did it. . . . We must tell Auntie Kate about that pudding—maybe she would make it for us of a Sunday, sometimes.”
“Bella Beagle’s Martha could teach her,” I suggested.
“We-ell.” Tom was doubtful. “I wouldna say anything o’ that the-now. No. We’ll chust tell her that it was a by-ordinar’ good pudding and it that bonnie pink colour and a-all.”
“All right,” I agreed. “Anyway, it was very good of the Miss Boyds, Tom.”
“Yes, indeed. Aye. They’re a puckle very nice leddies, the Miss Boyds. . . . Would you be giving me a wee bit turn of your brooch to wear in my bonnet when I’ll be going to the market next?”
“Ach, stop your foolishness!” I told him.
When we reached home I was taken out of my white clothes and put into my kim-oh-no and the holidays had started, so Fly and I after tea went off to have a Look Round the moor. Now that I did not have to go to school for a while, and it was summer, I was allowed to stay up till nearly nine o’clock if I was clever—half-past eight if I was not—instead of having to go to bed right after supper-time. We went by the Picnic Pond and inspected the double butter cups, and then we
nt up by the edge of the swamp that fed the pond and where the ragged robins grew, and Fly started a rabbit or two here and there, but merely in a playful way, for they were young ones that were not worth catching. Then we went on again until Fly flushed up a cunning old hare who had been there for years, and of course it got away again with only two of us there, but we accidentally got into the swamp in the excitement, so I took my shoes off, hung them on a tree to dry and went on barefooted through the soft, gurgly moss of the swamp, which flowed up in a pleasant way between the toes. The swamp went all the way up to the march dyke between Reachfar and Greycairn, but the trees stopped at the dyke, and the Greycairn moor on the other side was stony, with heather and tussocky grass, and the swamp became less interesting from there up to the Greycairn Spring, with no ragged robins or marigolds or double buttercups, only a few bog cottons blowing their tattered white banner-heads in the hill breeze. Fly and I decided not to cross the dyke, but to have a sit-down on its loose, warm, brown stones and then have another paddle down the Reachfar swamp.
We had not been sitting long, ‘gawping about us’ as my grandmother called it, when I saw something glittering in a tussock of grass in the Greycairn moor. Down near the shore, and nearer the village, you often saw pieces of glass glittering in the sun near the roadside or on the beach, but you seldom saw anything like that up here, for the people in the farm lands had ‘more sense’ than to leave a broken bottle lying in the sun among dry grass, heather or fir trees. That was how fires started, like the one in Dinchory Spruce Plantation, that cost a lot of very valuable trees before it was put out, not to mention Tom’s scarf which I had knitted for him, which he had hung, with his jacket, out of range, as he thought, and which had been overtaken by the raging fire. Fly and I went over to the glittering thing to take it away, but it was not glass, it was a bright metal teaspoon. This was indeed an odd find, but we could not think of an explanation, so I put it in my kim-oh-no pocket, and, being now on Greycairn ground anyway, we went on to have a look at the water bubbling up through the heather by the big grey boulder where the spring was. I sat on the boulder while Fly had a drink and gave her muddy feet a wash, and ‘gawped about me’ again, and then I noticed the cart tracks that went east to west through the swampy ground that ran south to north below the spring. That too was funny. What would a cart be doing in here on the rough slope, when there was a road going east to west, that bridged the swamp too, just a few yards to the north, on the Reachfar side of the march dyke? Hamish the Tinker, likely, the foolish old craitur, I thought. You never knew where Hamish and Cripple Maggie and their old cart would turn up next. But no. The hoof-prints were those of a shod horse and Hamish’s little hairy Sheltie had never worn a shoe in its life. Johnny Greycairn and Diamond? No. The wheel-marks were too close set for Diamond’s cart. No. It must be some new travelling tinker in the district—that would account for them travelling on the moor instead of on the road by the dyke. If they had come in through Greycairn from the south side, they would not even know that the road was there at all, if they were strangers.
Fly and I made a big round of the moor before we went home, and saw sundry other things of interest on the way, and then marched back side by side in time for supper to a new song that I had been making:
“On the Greycairn Moor
I found a silver spoon.
It must have lain there many nights,
Underneath the moon.
I found it in the sunshine,
Lying in the heather.
I’ll put it in a parcel for
A Present for my Mother.”
At the end of this stanza we would halt smartly like the soldiers, Fly would do three barks: ‘Ow! Wow! Wow!’ and then we would set off marching and do it all over again. Fly was very good at learning to do her bit of any song we happened to have, and we worked the last repeat of the stanza so that it took us right to the door of the house and Fly did her three barks inside the porch.
“The fiend’s in that dog of yours today, Janet Sandison,” said my aunt, who was coming down the stairs in her pretty blue dance dress with the big bow at the back. “She barked the whole morning, nearly.”
“Is Tom putting you down to Poyntdale with Dulcie?” I asked.
“Can I get coming?”
“Ask your mother,” she said and gave one of my pig-tails a tweak. But she smiled, so I knew I would be allowed to go, because she would help me with the asking. So, as an end to a great day, Tom and I drove off to Poyntdale with my aunt in her pretty dress and her big white shawl and handed her over to Bobbie Mitchell from Drurntosh to go in his trap to the dance and then Tom and I drove up the hill home in the dusk, long after bedtime, singing ‘Over the Sea to Skye’.
The next morning, at breakfast, the table was agog with the news that my aunt had brought home from the dance. Jock Skinner and Bella and all their children had upped and run away and the policeman was looking for Jock because he had been ‘dealing’ with the Army people when the camp was broken up and he had run away without paying them the money for the things he had ‘bought’.
“What a scandal!” said my grandmother. “What a Disgrace and a Scandal! As if he hadn’t done enough harm already without bringing the police about the place!”
Dirt on Jock Skinner, I thought. I had my silver spoon in a parcel in my pocket for my mother, but it would go practically unnoticed if I gave it to her in the midst of this how-d’ye-do about Jock Skinner. Poop to Jock Skinner! So, after breakfast, I put the spoon parcel back in my room in my hidey-hole and went out with Fly and Angus to look for a few rats to sell to my grandfather, and did not give the spoon parcel to my mother until supper-time in the end, for I wanted my whole family to be there for the presentation, but even then it was spoiled, for before my mother could open the parcel Fly and Moss and Fan and Spark started barking and going a fearful length until as Tom said, ‘you would think it was the Chermans that was in it’.
And it was nearly as bad as an invasion of the Germans at that, for it was Constable Campbell and another policeman, and none of us at Reachfar caring over-much for policemen, things became so serious that Tom and I had to lock all the dogs in the barn, while Dick came to the moor gate and stamped his big hairy feet at the strange men as they wheeled their bicycles along the yard to the door. My grandmother gave them tea and scones and boiled eggs, and then they started asking a lot of questions and asking the names of everybody we had seen yesterday.
“God bless me, Campbell!” my father said. “We were all at the prize-giving—the whole district was there.”
“Dang it!” said Constable Campbell. “So nobody was on Reachfar at all?”
“Oh, Kate was here. We always leave somebody on the place.”
They started to question my aunt, but what with my grandmother hissing about scandal and the dogs howling in the barn, you could hardly hear a word.
“Nobody at all, all the time!” my aunt almost shouted.
“And you heard nothing?”
“No.” Then she thought for a moment. “But Fly—the bairn’s bitchie, you know—barked for about two hours solid.”
“When was that?” my father asked.
“Shortly after you all left, she started. I went out to the end of the house to see who was coming, but there was nobody.” “Would you be knowing the time, Miss Sandison?”
“I’m not sure. I had just fed the young pigs. Wait a minute—the mail train was just at the end of the Firth, turning north, you know.”
“That’s fine. And the dog barked for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“Dad,” I said, “Fly would be looking at where she was hearing.” “Which way was she looking, Kate?”
“Up to the moor. She was at it until after the clock struck twelve. I was half deaved with her.”
They went on and on with their questions until I was half deaved with them and thoroughly tired of the whole thing and their foolishness. Where would Jock Skinner run to Reachfar when he knew he was nev
er allowed to set foot on our ground?
“Mother, open the present, Mother!” I said.
So, with a Look at me, she opened it, but not in a nice way—only in a way to keep me quiet—so that I wished I had not given it to her until the next clay or else had held my tongue.
“Janet, where did you get this?” she asked, without saying Thank you first, which was very unlike her.
“I found it on the moor last evening.” I was frightened now, because her face was so serious, and backed myself in between Tom and George, even although I did not see how there could be a Bother if you told the Whole Truth. My mother handed the spoon to my father.
“Whereabout on the moor, Janet? All right, nobody is angry.”
“Not on our moor. The Greycairn moor, Dad.”
“Could you be showing me the very ecksact spot if I was to be walking up there with you and the policemen?” Tom asked.
“Yes, surely.”
“See the crown on the back of it?” the questioning policeman asked Constable Campbell. “Can the lassie show us the place, Mrs Sandison?”
“Surely. Janet, you and Tom go up and show the policemen where the spoon was.”
I was delighted. It would be long past bed-time before Tom and I got back from away up there. I showed them the exact place, and then this questioning policeman who would speir a hole in your hide asked:
“And did you find anything more, Janet?”
“No, sir.”
“Chust a minute,” Tom said. “Janet, what more did you and Fly do on your Look Round last evening?”