My Friends the Miss Boyds

by Jane Duncan

  I told them about the interesting things like the hare and getting our feet wet and paddling up the swamp and seeing the spoon and then the important thing came to me in a flash. “The cart—Jock’s cart! It went west! That way!” and I pointed.

  “Dang it!” said Tom with pride. “I knew she wouldna have missed anything that was in it. How do you know, Janet?”

  It was easy to show them the marks at the edges of the swamp below the spring. The policemen were very nice, thanked us and asked us to keep their bicycles at Reachfar for them and they went away west across the Greycairn moor into the bright evening sun which was nearly round to its bed below the Ben, taking with them, though, the spoon present that I had found for my mother. That school jingle about ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers’ was just a Pack of Lies, I thought.

  “If I had found it on Reachfar, it would have been mine to keep!” I told Tom.

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “But ye have to be minding that Jock Skinner wouldna have dared to cross Reachfar Moor with it at a-all, though.”

  That was true, too. The spoon was irrevocably Not Mine, seemingly.

  * * * * *

  One way and another, that summer holidays of 1919, my family gave me cause for a lot of thought. It seemed to me that since the Miss Boyds came, and we had had the Armistice, and I had had my ninth birthday in March, my family was Different in that it was doing things it never used to do. It did not occur to me that I was growing older and might be observing more and differently. It seemed to me that I was just the same, but that my family was Different. Take, for instance, this business of the Miss Boyds. Last summer, about this July-August time, my grandmother was calling them all sorts of silly craiturs, Tom was calling them ‘hot-arsed-est’, and George and even my father would dive into the Plough at the very sight of a Miss Boyd, and now, since their ‘trouble’, everybody was saying nice things about them and half my holidays were being spent in carrying compliments to them. All right, I told myself. My family usually said nice things about anybody who had trouble, and sent them compliments. But my family, now, if you please, was starting to be nice about Jock Skinner. Jock Skinner, mind you, that rascal! As week followed week and an Army spoon was picked up here and a fork in a pawn-shop there, my father, my uncle and Tom sat round the supper table and laughed like anything about ‘Jock leading the police and the Army a bonnie dance’. Then, when the police found Bella and the children living ‘off the fat o’ the land’ in a tenement in Inverness, and Bella swore blind that she had been a widow for two years and her husband’s name had been Robert Lawrie ‘when he was alive, the decent sowl, God rest him’ and called Constable Campbell ‘a dirty liar she had never seen before, thank God’, my grandmother started to laugh too, as if it was all just the nicest, grandest thing that had happened in years, and said: “Aye, Jock and Bella were well met and real fond of one another in their own way. Bella would never tell on him, and you have to like her for it, for goodness knows it’s not many women that would have been doing with Jock’s capers.”

  “I wish I had seen Campbell’s face when she called him a liar!” said my aunt and gave her joyous ripple of laughter, so that even my mother began to smile too.

  In the end I had to have serious speech with Tom on the whole matter and told him I was ‘being driven out of my head’ with the way my family was changing its mind about things all the time.

  “I wouldna like to see you go out o’ your head,” said Tom. “What things, in partecclar?”

  So I told him about all this laughing about that rascal Jock Skinner.

  “Och, weel,” said Tom, “he is still a rascal and will never be anything else. But you canna but laugh when you think on that wee craitur making a fool of half the police force and them such fine big fellows with their uniforms and a-all. You have to be laughing chust to encourage him, like. Mind you, if he was to come to Reachfar, your granny would stop laughing fast enough. She would be calling him all the rascals in creation again.”

  “Why?”

  “People only laughs if rascals is making fools of something like the Law which isn’t a real person, like a person you know, like.”

  “Well, I wish they would stop changing their minds all the time,” I said irritably.

  “I’ll tell you a thing I’ll be thinking, whiles,” said Tom. “It’s only fools and daft people that will never be changing their minds. People that’s wise will be changing them when they’ll be learning something that’s new, always.”

  I was prepared to consider this at a later date, as I always considered anything that My Friend Tom told me, but at the moment I was busy with Jock Skinner.

  “It was Jock Skinner that made the Miss Boyds’ trouble!” I said accusingly.

  “So they tell me. So they tell me,” said Tom. “But I’ll not always be believing all I am hearing. It takes two folk and maybe more to make trouble. Aye. Even if it is only a wee bit lie. Ye canna be telling a lie—not sensible and reasonable-like, whateffer—if you have nobody to tell it to. Aye, there’s aye more than chust the one person where there is trouble. . . . Well, I better give the byre a bit muck oot. I didna get at it o’ the morning. Ye would give me a bit hand, maybe?”

  “Och, surely.”

  We set to work in the byre. “Was I ever telling you about the time Sandy Bawn bought the horsie?” Tom enquired.

  The higher philosophy got lost among the cow-dung and the story of the ‘dealer’ who sold Sandy Bawn a horse which was so old that its hide turned out to be grey after the brown boot polish had worn off. That, dear reader, as I told you in the early pages of this chronicle, is how I was brought up. At one moment I was hearing the wisdom of the ages in the idiom of My Friend Tom, and at the next I was deep in the dung making the byre fit for our cow-persons to live in, and in other moments there were a million gradations in between.

  All too soon, in one way, the summer holidays were over, yet, in another way, I was delighted to be going back to school, for I loved school, and especially this time, for Alasdair and I would be a little class of two, sitting together in the dominie’s Big Room, where he was going to start to give us special, different lessons that would help us when we went to the Academy next year, For instance, we were going to learn Latin, which was a language that people spoke long, long ago, but the English language that we spoke now was flavoured with it, the way a potato carries some of the distinctive flavour of the particular soil in which it has grown.

  In my family Tom was the one who could tell you the most interesting things about the Latin. Tom could read, write and count, which was more than many men of his age and who were ploughmen could do, and he was very proud of all these accomplishments, as well he might be, for they were hard won. Tom read the local newspaper, and everything he could lay his hands on when he had the time, and he had three favourite books, which were, in his order of preference, my father’s eight-volume encyclopaedia, my father’s big dictionary, and his own Bible. Tom’s store of knowledge was literally encyclopaedia, and quite remarkable in another way, for, indeed, the encyclopaedia was all the better for the slanting light which Tom’s keen intelligence shed on its dry facts.

  “The Latin,” Tom told me, was the tongue invented by a race of people called the Romans, and the thing about the Romans, Tom thought, was that they were called that because they were always roaming about all over the place. Their proper home was in a city called Rome, pronounced Roh-am, in that country called Italy shaped on the map like one of Sir Torquil’s riding boots, but they chust would not stop at home in Rome. No. They would be gallivanting all over the place, even up to Inverness one time, long back. Oh yes. Impudent kind of craiturs, they must have been, Tom thought, but very, very clever, and very good soldiers, nearly as good as the Seaforths nowadays. Wherever they went they made a camp for their soldiers, but somehow they had not lasted very long in Scotland—the camps, he meant. Maybe it was the hard winters that did it, especially at Inverness, for after all Tom had nearly had his own nose blown o
ff with the wind in the High Street, even in these clays, so what would it be like when the Romans were there? Down in England, though, they had got on better and had stayed there a long while, long enough for towns to get known as Such-and-such-a-Caster, which was their word for a camp. To this day, in England, there was a town called Doncaster, where, Tom understood, there was a fine market, though maybe not up to the standard of the Perth Cattle Sales. In addition to being great hands at the soldiering and making camps, Tom said, the Romans were awful handy at the building trade—making roads and houses and all the like o’ that—and their other great speciality was The Law. Now, Tom himself, he would tell you, was not much of a hand for The Law. He could not see, indeed, any need for The Law at all if folk would chust be reasonable, but you had to remember that, in the old days, folk maybe were not so reasonable as they were now—not that some folk was all that reasonable even yet, when you thought of the Chermans and people like that. . . . The Romans had not cared for the Chermans either, of course. . . . So, anyway, the Romans had The Law, and everywhere they went The Law went with them, chust like Willie Macintosh taking his kilt to Canada, he said. And the other thing they always took with them, Tom said, was their language, and they just made other people speak this language of theirs, for they, the Romans, were danged if they were going to learn any other one.

  “And,” said Tom, “the only people that would chust not learn this language of the Romans was the very thrawn people like the Chermans and your granny—but we won’t be saying that in the house—and the Chermans stuck to their Cherman and your granny’s people stuck to their Gaelic, but reasonable people, like you and your father and me, we would be the better of a little of the Latin because it would help us with this English that we are speaking all the time. So chust you listen careful to what the dominie says about the Latin, and come home and tell me, for if it is not too outlandish, I am willing to be learning a little of it myself.”

  I promised that I certainly would listen very carefully to everything that the dominie said about the Latin and would be willing to teach Tom everything I knew.

  “Indeed,” he said, “I am knowing a little of it already, and it seems to be a very simple kind of tongue—not near as outlandish as the Gaelic whateffer. It was in a story I was reading once, about a Roman Pope-mannie—Gregory, his name was. It seems it was the way of these Roman soldiers that would be roaming about to be catching prisoners and taking them back to Rome with them and making slaves of them. . . . When ye think on that, ye can see why the Romans didn’t do so good with your granny’s people. Your granny’s people would have been making very thrawn kind of slaves, I’m thinking, always supposing the soldiers was fit to catch them in the first of it. . . . But it said in this story I was reading that the soldiers had catched a puckle prisoners doon bye in England and took them back to Rome and they was all light o’ the hair, like Lady Lydia, most likely. And when the Pope-mannie saw them, he was fair surprised at their light heads, for the Romans, from what I will be reading, was a dark-haired people and he asked who they were, and the soldier that had them said that they were Angle-eye, which is their word for English. And the Pope-mannie said: ‘Non Angle-eye sed An-jelly’. Did you hear me at that? That’s the Latin. And it meant ‘Not English but Angels’. Apparently he was thinking that they must be Angels because of their light hair, but, for myself, I think that is foolish. I’ve never seen right what is to happen to us Highland People in the hereafter if all angels has to have light hair, so I doubt the Pope-mannie had a foolish kind o’ notion there. Av coorse, Popes is of the Catholeec releegion, and different releegions has different notions about Heaven. But that’s the Latin of it—‘Non Angle-eye sed An-jelly’. Can you mind that?”

  I ‘minded’ it and told it to My Friend Alasdair on the first morning of school so that he and I would start equal on the Latin. Alasdair had two big brothers at the University in Edinburgh learning to be doctors and they were home for the holidays, and Alasdair had also, apparently, been going into the Latin question with them, for he said: “I know some too!”

  “Tell,” I said.

  “Amo, amas, amat,” said Alasdair.

  “Away with your capers!” I said. “That isn’t the Latin—that’s a song!”

  “It’s a Latin song,” said Alasdair. “This is it:

  Amo, amas, I loved a lass

  And she was young and tender;

  Amat, alas, she fell on her ass

  And hit her head on the fender!”

  It was a fine song, but after we had repeated it several times we began, somehow, to doubt the true Latinity of it, so that in the end ‘Non Angle-eye sed An-jelly’ became suspect too, and we decided that when the first Latin lesson came that afternoon we would not ‘let on’ to the dominie that we knew any Latin at all.

  Alasdair and I, this September, became, as the French would have it, ‘un peu snob’ about the rest of the school and played a lot together at dinner-time, and, in a gallant sort of way, Alasdair would ‘see me a bit of the way home’ in the evenings. It is a well-known axiom that the distance between two points is shorter or longer according to the company one is in, and although, in the winter terms, the school came out at three, I was seldom home at Reachfar before dark, that September, and having run the last mile or two at that.

  There were endless places to play and an infinite number of routes between Achcraggan School and Reachfar, but our favourite place was Jock Skinner’s abandoned croft house at the corner of the Seamuir lands. It consisted of a tumble-down ‘but and ben’, with a decayed thatched roof, an equally tumble-down barn and a little dark wooden shed with a rusty zinc roof. Alasdair had a theory that Jock had buried some treasure in the barn and we spent a lot of time moving the old iron about looking for it. Other evenings we would be pirates or smugglers in their den, and other evenings we would be castaways on a desert island, for the sea came lapping up almost to the back wall of the house. At other times it would be a big and busy hospital, with Alasdair as the surgeon and me as the nurse, and we would ‘operate’ on a dead rat out of the trap we had found and set, or on a slightly decayed haddock found on the shore near the Fisher Town. Not being ‘An-jelly’, we had the occasional fight too, usually on some point of protocol or scientific knowledge, like the time Alasdair ‘operated’ the bit out of the rabbit that he said was a kidney and I said was the heart, with which he said: “Who’s the surgeon here?“, picked up the patient by the hind legs and nearly brained me with it. We washed my hair in the sea afterwards, quite amicably, but my mother still gave me a slap on the bottom when I got home because of the smell I had on me.

  Alasdair was purely a school companion, however, and on Saturdays and Sundays I reverted to my own solitary Reachfar amusements and did not miss him. Tom, George, Fly and Angus were my earlier companions, and I still preferred them, for I had a vague feeling that Alasdair, being ‘village’ and the doctor’s son and having a big family of brothers and sisters, was basically different from me. He was interesting enough in many ways, but not the same as George or Tom; and although he was ‘quite clever at the school’, he was no use at things like making songs at all. Indeed, he was fair foolish at it. I was making a song one day about Miss Tulloch’s cat that started:

  ‘Miss Tulloch’s shop window

  Has a big yellow cat . . .’

  and I said to Alasdair: “Do you know any words like window?

  And he said: “Surely! There’s plenty—there’s skylight and door and chimney and”

  I called him a danged fool and we had another fight, but as soon as I came home I asked Tom the same question and he thought for a moment and then said: “Well, the cattie’s name is Belinda—I’m sine it could be Belindow for poetry, like Blow, blow thou winter wynd.”

  And there you were, you had your song:

  ‘Miss Tulloch’s shop window

  Has a big yellow cat,

  Her name is Belindow,

  Just fancy that!’

  I did not pla
y with Alasdair on Friday evenings either, for when I came out of school I had to go straight into the village and find the trap and come home with Dulcie and whoever of my family had come down with her, and I think it was the second Friday of being back at school that I found the trap at the Miss Boyds’ and it was my mother and my aunt who were there, for Tom and my grandfather were too busy cutting the corn to come down. And there were four Miss Boyds there—the two old ones and Miss Annie and Miss Violet, who was sitting very quietly in a corner looking down at her hands in her lap. I looked round, but I did not see any cradle with any baby, and she certainly did not have a baby inside her, for you could always tell that, and I decided that the whole thing about that baby was nothing but a Pack of Lies, I was extremely disappointed and annoyed, having an interest in babies whether people had fathers for them or not, so when my aunt was driving us home I said: “Mother, what happened to Miss Violet’s baby?”

  “Be quiet, Janet”

  “Mother, did it die?”

  “No.”

  “Was it all a Pack of Lies about it?”

  “Yes. Now, that will do, Janet.”

  It was not true. My mother had never told me a lie before, but this was a lie, and she and my aunt were far too quiet—not talking about the new cloth for the winter at Mrs Gilchrist’s Drapery Warehouse or anything. Something Awful had been done with that baby. The next morning I asked Tom about it when we were down in the corn-field, but after a lot of questions he got quite nasty and snapped: “Hold your tongue and stop deaving a man with your ask-ask-asking! I’m telling you I don’t know nothing about no baby!

  That was another lie. He did know. In the evening I had a go at George when he came home, but he simply became clownish and said: “Where would a poor hard-worked craitur like me that’s got nothing but the Dinchory oats in my head be able to answer a-all your questions? I never even heard there was a baby in it at a-all myself.”