by Jane Duncan
I knew it was all lies, every word of it, so I thought to myself that I would teach them to be going telling a person a Pack of Lies and I would find out about that baby whatever, and poop to them; so on Sunday evening, when they were all sitting at the tea-table and I was finished, I asked to be excused and called Fly and went off up to the moor. Then I came round in a long sweep to the east, along the north wall of the house, made Fly lie down at the west gable and crawled along the south wall till I was under the kitchen window. Sure enough, they were ‘at it’.
“But, Granny,” my mother was saying in a trembling voice, “maybe if you went down there to them you could make them see what a sin it is.”
“An orphanage in Glasgow, of all places, Mother!” said my aunt.
“God’s sake.” Tom’s voice sounded sick. “There will be all kinds o’ mongrel Irish and trash in a place like that!”
“And they have money, Granny!” said my mother.
“But listen, lassies,” my father said; “it’s not our business! It’s all very well Granny trying to help people, but she canna go poking her nose——”
“No,” my granny said. “That’s right.”
“But, Granny, the lassie Violet is breaking her heart for the bairn——” said my mother.
“Aye, it must be hard, hard for her,” my granny said. “But, Elizabeth, lassie, we canna go interfering in folks’ private business. And what kind of life would she have with the old ones with the baby there, anyway? It’s the old ones that have the money, you know. The young ones is dependent on the shoppie, and if the other two in Inverness has put her out, she has nowhere else to go. No. If they are hard enough to have put one of their own to an orphanage-place, what can a stranger like me do with them? I canna see my way clear to do a thing about it, although it is such a sin. No. The best thing we can do is try to forget all about it—that’s what they seem to want.” I heard her rise, pick up the poker and make a vicious attack on the fire. “But, mind you, they’ll wait a danged long time before I put Janet down with another pot of jam to them!”
I crawled away along the side of the wall, flicked my fingers at Fly and we both ran away like deer up to the Thinking Place among the tall trees above the well. It was all very sad. And it was all very hopeless, too, for if my grandmother said that she could not do anything, it meant that there was nobody in the Wide World that could do anything, for my grandmother, if not enough in herself to deal with things, would ‘speak to’ Lady Lydia, Sir Torquil or the minister or anybody who could help her. My grandmother once got old Sir Turk—Sir Torquil’s father—to ‘speak to’ the Member of Parliament, who ‘spoke to’ Queen Victoria about something that was not pleasing her. My grandmother, if ‘she could see her way clear’, took a lot of stopping, and now that they had aeroplanes I felt it was possible that even God might find Himself getting ‘spoken to’ by her in person. But this time ‘she could not see her way clear’ and that was the end of it. It was hopeless. And there was the poor baby in this orphanage, like the place that we took a penny to school for on a day before Christmas, so that the dominie could send the pennies to buy things for the orphans.
After I had cried a bit I decided that all I could do was take some of my rat-tail money and give the dominie some extra pennies this year, although that was not the same as having the baby down at the Miss Boyds’ where I could have gone and seen it sometimes. This baby would never be the same as any other baby now, no matter what you did. It would always be sadly, hopelessly different from other people, for even years and years after this moment, and when it was big and grown up and able to work, people would always talk about it as ‘that laddie—or lassie—down at So-and-so, that came to work there a year or two back. That might be who’s at the hen-stealing. He was an orfant, you mind, and you’ll not be knowing what’s in them.’ Even if you had no father, it was different. People would say: ‘That laddie that Mary Murdoch had—the father was that wild young ploughman that was at Dinchory but a fine worker—he’ll be all right.’ But when you had nothing but an orphanage behind you, you were quite naked alone and people took advantage of it to vent on you all the nastiness and suspicion they had in them, whether you deserved it or not.
* * * * *
What with Alasdair and playing at pirates at Jock Skinner’s and the Latin, though, I forgot about the baby mostly, especially that I was not now being sent with any compliments to the Miss Boyds which might have made me remember. Tom, George and I, on our side of the table at supper every evening, were very busy with the Latin, for Tom would say: “Keep your elbows off the mensa, George, and you eating in eddicated company!” and when it was fried haddock after the porridge for supper George would say: “Amo a fried haddie, Tom. They are very bonum”; and my father used to take a fair amount of interest in the Latin too, although not showing any ambition to speak it himself. Then, one night after supper, he said: “Well, we’ll have to be thinking about the seedsman’s list for the spring. The same turnips as usual, Tom?”
“Aye. The Great Purple Tops and the Maggie Borems—you’ll not do better,” Tom said and returned his interest to George and me and the Latin.
“Janet,” my father said, “have you ever heard, of a Maggie Borem?”
I looked at him. You would have to be deaf at Reachfar or anywhere in our district not to have heard of a Maggie Borem, for everybody grew them: “Surely, Dad,” I said, “it’s an early yellow turnip.”
“Spell it for me, then, till I be writing it on the order for Mr Dickson.”
So I spelled out Maggie Borem for him and he looked at the paper that Mr Dickson sent every year that told you the seed prices, and then he said: “Well, it’s not on the price list. I doubt we’re not going to get them the-year.”
“Maggie Borems?” said Tom. “Who ever heard of Dickson not having the Maggie Borem seed? They must be in it!”
“I’m not seeing them. My, that’s terrible. Look for yourself, Tom.”
He handed us the list, “You’d better pick out another early for me.”
Tom, George and I forgot all about the Latin, for this was next year’s turnip crop and extremely serious. There were only five turnips listed under ‘Yellow, middle-early’, so we looked through ‘Yellow-early’ and ‘Yellow-late’ too, but there were no Maggie Borems.
“Dickson wouldn’t have bothered to write it on the paper,” said George, “for everybody buys the Maggie Borems whatever.”
And then I saw that look on my father’s face that it wore when he was ‘taking a rise’ out of a person. I took the list from Tom and went over beside the lamp and had a right good look at these turnip seed names. ‘Golden Ball,’ it started, ‘Carse Yellow, Magnum Bonum . . .’ I read the words again, in to myself. “Magnum Bonum—Maggie Borem!” I shouted.
“Where?” said Tom.
I showed him and George too. “Dang it!” said George. “A Maggie Borem is a Latin turnip and me thinking all this time that it was called after Old Cripple Maggie the Tinker!”
This was more or less what I had thought, and George was teasing me too, just like my father. I felt very annoyed, until my father said: “Well, if you’ll all study your Latin you’ll not be like me, whatever. I don’t like to be writing words I don’t understand, so I had to be asking the dominie once what this Magnum Bonum was, away back when I first went to Sir Torquil.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He was very nice. He told me it was the Latin for great good, or much good or very good, if you like, and that was the only Latin lesson I ever had in my life. But it is very interesting how you will mind on a thing that you like. I have always thought it was a fine name for a turnip.”
I was even more interested in my Latin after that, and so were Tom and George, for as Tom said: “It was fair remarkable how these old Romans from a long time back was even in among the turnip seed.”
The Latin was also an excellent language for songs, for, indeed, quite a lot of it was a song already without you hav
ing to do anything to it at all, and Fly and I could march over a fair bit of the moor to the oft-repeated: ‘Bellum, bellum belli, bello, bello, bella, bella, bellorum, bellis, bellis,’ and there was the additional fascinating corollary knowledge that Jock Skinner’s wife Bella must have been called by the name because of her liking for fighting. I thought it a little odd that her parents had christened her in the plural, however, and discussed the matter with Tom, who put forward the very sensible suggestion that probably Bella’s parents ‘either chust hadn’t minded on their Latin very good, or maybe they chust did not know that Bella was the Latin at a-all’, and we decided to go on referring to her as Bella and not Bellum, although we were agreed that the latter would be more correct.
About the end of September or early October Fly and I went out early one Saturday morning to pick brambles in the Reachfar Burn, which, in its upper reaches, flowed down from the spring into a deep gully on the softer land of the hill face and this gully was overhung with long trails of thorny, heavy-yielding bramble bushes. There was a tremendous crop this year of big, black berries and we were equipped with a big basket with our ‘half-yoking’ scones in it to eat when we were hungry, a smaller basket to pick into, which would be emptied into the larger one after we had had our half-yoking, and my father’s ashplant with the crooked handle for pulling the long, thorny branches within reach. Fly carried the small basket and I the bigger one, and I was wearing the ashplant over my shoulder like Dick Whittington as we marched to the burn. I had a plan that we must fill the little basket heaped up before we had our half-yoking, told Fly so, and as we began to pick the berries I began to make a song, for berry-picking is a job that is splendid when you first start, but gets very tedious in a very short time. The basket never seems to get any fuller.
‘Bella is a dealer’s wife, Bellum is a war,
Magnum Bonum is a turnip growing on Reachfar;
Puella is a girl like me, Homo is a man,
We are picking berries for making bramble jam!’
This song went very nicely to the tune of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and was a considerable help in the filling of the smaller basket, and Fly and I could sit down, before too long, to have our half-yoking with a clear conscience, for we now needed the big basket before we could pick any more berries. We had finished eating and had tipped the berries into the big basket when Fly cocked her head and gave a short, low bark. I put my hand over her muzzle to keep her quiet, for it was just about the time for Bill the Post to come this way and we could jump out of the deep gully at him and give him a fright, but it was not Bill the Post. It was somebody else, somebody singing a song like me, but not my kind of song at all. It was a queer eerie song, like the wind in the roof of the barn in a storm, but not lusty or boisterous or mischievous or angry like wind. This song was weak, lonely and sad, ineffably sad, but the thing about it that made my neck go stiff as a post and made Fly lay her cars back along her neck and huddle close against me was that it was not a sound that belonged to the world that either of us knew. we huddled, terrified, at the bottom of the gully under the long bramble fronds, beside the friendly, chuckling Reachfar Burn and heard it go past away above us.
Tom had often told me how, in the old days, the ‘old people’ before the ‘eddication came’ used to believe in fairies and ghosties and little people and witches and whigmaleeries and all that foolishness, and he told me how, when he first came to work at Reachfar, as a boy long, long ago, he had been to Achcraggan for a message and was coming home by the light of a frosty full moon, by the short, direct way, on a long south-westerly slant across the face of the hill. He had passed through the field below the Smithy, east of which was a hump of ground known as the ‘Wee Hillie’, and the big frosty moon was at his back and he was coming along whistling when, suddenly, on the ground in front of him there formed a huge, ghastly, black shape, an animal shape, with four legs and a head, but legs so long and a body so big that it blotted out with its blackness the whole frosty silver of Reachfar Hill in front of him. Terrified, Tom turned to run back to the friendly Smithy and safety, and then stopped dead, for, between him and the big moon, on the top of the Wee Hillie, was the Smith’s little horsie, which lived out of doors all the year round and had simply woken from sleep and was giving his legs a stretch on the hill-top. “I never felt so foolish in a-all my life,” Tom said, “and I thanked the Almighty that nobody was there to be seeing me. I made up my mind then that there was no such thing as ghosties in it, and that’s the truth of it for I never saw a ghostie yet.”
But this was not moonlight. This was broad daylight, among the familiar brambles at the friendly Reachfar Burn, and I was not seeing a thing, but hearing it, and Fly was hearing it too, and shivering. The old people used to believe too in the ‘bodachs’, the sad ghosts who ‘keened’ around the Churchyard over the dead people buried there. That is what this was. It was a ‘bodach keening’. I clutched Fly close to me, my right hand sunk in the comforting strong hair under her neck, my left hand gripping the handle of the berry basket. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. We waited for what seemed a long, long time before I decided to climb up the steep bank and go home. I did not know what I was going to say about having picked only the little basket of berries. I did not care. I was Going Home to Reachfar. I put the little basket of berries inside the big one, took my father’s ashplant in my hand like a club—or a talisman for battle like King Arthur’s Excalibur—and Fly and I climbed up the bank. There was nobody. There was nothing. Only the stubble field under the sun, and a rising covey of startled partridges which had been feeding. Like Tom, I felt a fool and was glad that nobody was there to see Fly and me.
We walked a little way up beside the gully where the burn ran, and there, sitting in a little bay among the brambles, was Miss Violet Boyd, making a daisy chain. I was never so pleased to see anyone in all my Born Days.
“Good morning, Miss Violet,” I said.
She looked up at me, just a glance, smiled without opening her lips, but did not speak and went on busily with her chain. It was not a real daisy chain—it was all sorts of things chained together—a thistle flower, a dandelion and a golden-red bramble leaf or two. Then I noticed that she had a late-blooming wild rose in her hair at one side and a bunch of rowan berries at the other side, and chains on her wrists and several chains of flowers and leaves round her neck already. . . .
In the time that has elapsed since that day, I have seen several performances of Hamlet, but I have never seen an Ophelia who really broke my heart as an Ophelia should do. I know, now, that this is because, at nine years old, I saw a real, not-being-acted Ophelia. . . .
At nine years old, though, I had never seen tragedy and did not recognise its grim face when I found myself in its presence for the first time. The Miss Boyds had always been ‘different’, and now this one was at this caper of making flower chains. It was a game for little children that I myself had long outgrown, and my aunt, who was about Miss Violet’s age, would never indulge in it, but I had known the Miss Boyds to giggle and nudge one another in the street, just like the wee ones in the Baby Class when the minister spoke to them, so the flower chains were not too surprising in a Miss Boyd.
“Did you hear the singing a little while ago?” I asked her in a hushed voice.
She looked at me again with that fleeting glance, smiled again without opening her lips and went back to her concentration on her chain.
She was not wearing her spectacles and her face had a soft, unprotected look and a stillness that was not usually in the fluttering-glance faces of the Miss Boyds.
“Did you hear it, Miss Violet?” I persisted, but she merely sighed and added another dandelion to her long chain.
Suddenly I knew what was the matter with her. She had had to have her teeth out, and was shy about it, like Mr Dickson, Ironmonger and Seed Merchant’s sister had been when her teeth had had to come out, and my mother had told me just to wish Miss Dickson Good Day, not bother if she did not
speak to me, and Not To Gawp At Her. I Did As I Was Told, and then, one day, when Tom and I went to buy some nails at the shop, there she was, all smiles, having grown a lot of beautiful white new teeth. When a hen was hatching chickens, I knew, you must not chase her off the nest, for the eggs had to be kept warm all the time, and I thought it must be very much like that when you were growing new teeth. I could remember growing some new teeth myself when I was about six and a half and some of them had been sore when they were coining; so if you were grown up they would be bigger teeth and probably sorer still.
Then Miss Violet rose from her seat among the bramble bushes, gave me her soft, closed-mouth smile again, reached forward and hung her chain of flowers round my neck and walked away down the slope of the field in the direction of the County Road and the shore. “Good day, Miss Violet!” I called after her, but she did not seem to hear me.
I felt better now, though, and Fly was no longer shivering but had her ears cocked up and was poking about around the bushes after rabbits as usual. I began to think that I had never really heard that singing at all, and that my Imagination Had Run Away With Me again, as it had done the night the eagle came in through the skylight of my room to carry me away in its claws to its eyrie up the Ben, tear me apart and feed me to its eaglets. I screamed until the whole house was awake, and my mother told Tom and George to get their guns and have a good look for this eagle, but all they found was a young swallow that had mistaken my skylight for the nest-place under the eaves of the house, and having come into the room could not find its way out. Tom brought it down from the far rafter where it had perched and gave it to me and then held me up to the skylight with it in my hands so that it could fly away. Everybody agreed that a person’s Imagination Could Run Away With Them sometimes, and could give a person quite a fright, but you soon Got Over It. I had Got Over It now—it had been lucky meeting Miss Violet, but the thistle in her flower chain was pricking my neck, so I took it off and hid it away far down in a rabbit-hole in the gully so that her feelings might not be hurt by finding it discarded. Then Fly and I filled the little basket three times more with berries before we heard the Poyntdale sawmill away down the burn stop its whining, which told us it was time to go home for dinner.