My Friends the Miss Boyds

by Jane Duncan

  Tom, my aunt and I came out to the berries again in the afternoon, for you had to catch the bramble crop before the first frost came down and it could come any night now that we were getting into October, which was the real ‘backend o’ the year’, and, while we picked, my grandmother already had the big brass-lined jam pan with the first lot of berries swinging from the crook over a big fire. We picked until it was dark and had three big baskets full, but there were still more, we told my grandmother, when we reached home.

  The next day, being Sunday, we went to church as usual in the morning, but after dinner, when my grandfather had gone off for his Sunday sleep, Tom said: “What about the brambles, mistress?” Tom was very, very fond of bramble jam—not jelly, like the ‘fushionless’ stuff that the shops sold—but thick black jam with whole berries in it. “It’s going to freeze, mistress. Did you notice the Ben this morning?”

  “Aye, and I could count the windows in the train across the Firth yesterday,” my grandmother said. She glanced at the ceiling where my grandfather was moving about above. “There is frost in it, right enough. Look, take the baskets and be off—don’t let Granda hear you. What he doesna know won’t be on his conscience and the fruits o’ the earth weren’t given to us for us to let them get spoiled. . . . Just put the baskets in the milk-house when you come back and come in and don’t say a word. . . . No, Kate, you canna go. If you’re not here for early tea he’ll think it funny, but he’ll not bother himself about that three.”

  That Three, of course, was George, Tom and me, so my grandmother gave us a picnic tea to carry and off we went, tiptoeing and giggling just for fun along the yard, for my grandfather would probably already be asleep. I had been sick and tired of picking berries the evening before, but picking them with Tom and George on a Sabbath Day was different. When we reached the gully they made a great to-do of stripping off their second-best jackets and rolling up their shirtsleeves, and Tom said: “The way to go about a chobbie like this, George, man, is to get started and not be stopping to gawp about you or light your pipe or anything, but chust pick like the devil and when the baskets is full your time is your own.”

  “That’s chust the way,” George agreed, and reaching up far, far, with his stick he bent down a great big branch, loaded with berries, which spread itself across the grass. “Would ye be having a staple about ye, Tom?” he asked.

  Tom reached into his trousers pocket, produced a big fencing staple, and George pegged the branch to the ground with it and put a heavy stone on top of the staple. “There, Janet,” he said, “chust you sit down there and fill your little baskety at your ease,”

  This was a magnificent way to pick brambles, sitting on the grass, no danger of being scratched or getting your hair caught, simply reaching round you and picking the berries off one big plume after another. This one big branch filled my basket and I tipped it into Tom’s and went to take out the staple to release the branch again.

  “No, Janet!” George called. “Come out o’ that! We’re not needing you stuck up in the air like a bramble.” He took me out of the centre, we stood back and he hit the stone off with his stick. “Watch for our staple!” he shouted and with a whoosh the released branch went up in the air. I retrieved the staple from where it had flown and we pegged down another big branch. Trying to be helpful, I placed the staple over the main limb for him, but he said: “No, not that way—this way,” and he set it at a different angle. “Your way we’d lose our staple down the gully when we let the branch go. This way, it will fly back out to us.”

  “Why?”

  “We-ell, it’s the angle o’ the top o’ the staple, like. I canna tell ye the areethmeic of it. ... Tom, man, what would be the Latin for bramble, now, think ye?”

  “Brambellum, man! I was thinking you would be knowing that. Magnum bonum brambellum!” said Tom, eating a great big crown berry.

  “Stop your capers!” I said in my grandmother’s voice. “And put them in your basket.”

  In spite of all their capers, though, George and Tom with a little help from me had filled four big baskets in no time at all, and then we filled my little basket with Special Select berries to make a tart before sitting down to have tea.

  “Well,” said George, “the frost and the village people can get the rest, but I doubt it will be the frost. Still, there’s not many left. My, it’s a grand day for the backend. Now then, Mistress Janet, where’s this tea you have for us hard-working men?”

  After we had had our tea and scones and butter and jam and the pieces of Sunday cake that my grandmother had put in, wrapped in a special paper bag, Tom and George filled their pipes and sat looking away down the slope to the hills at the other side of the Firth. I took off my shoes and went away to have a paddle in the Burn with Fly. The water was very cold, but it was fun to stay in until you felt you had no feet at all and then hop out on to a warm stone or the warm grass. After a spell at this, and having paid a call on Donald the Trout, I hopped my way in and out of the water upwards again, and suddenly thought of a way of giving Tom and George a good fright. I would creep up the course of the Burn into the gully and see if I could sing like a bodach keening just under the place where they were sitting. So Fly and I made a proper, silent, poacher’s approach, and soon we were inside the tunnel of bramble fronds, right below where they were sitting, yarning.

  “Aye, it’s a terrible thing right enough,” George was saying, “Clean out of her head, they tell me she is, the poor craitur.”

  “Och, fair fearful, man,” Tom was saying. “You’ll often see a cow go that way when they’ll be taking the calves away and them moaning like to break your heart. That’s the way I am in favour of the hand feeding from birth with the milking cows—apart altogether from the calves sucking making the teats tough. Aye. A man person canna understand it right, but it is a cruel thing.”

  “Aye. It is that.”

  There was a silence between them, and into it I put my first keening note, making it as good an imitation of that bodach I thought I had heard as I could. There was a jerky, uneasy movement up above. It was working—I was going to get them on the run. I crouched lower, opened my mouth and had a second, even more artistic go, that made Fly look at me as if she could not believe what she heard, her head on one side, her tan-fringed ears cocked forward above her amber eyes. I had to end a fine, long, ululating trill in order to have a silent giggle.

  “God sake, man, George, there’s a kelpie in the Burn!” said Tom.

  “Michty me! Where’s the bairn, Tom? We must be off!—Fly! Fly here!” He gave a long, piercing whistle and I tried to hold Fly, but this was too much. Fly had been trained from my infancy to respond in some way to that whistle which would tell my family where we were and now, even though I tried to hold her muzzle, she jerked her head free and barked.

  “Ye danged wee deevil!” said my uncle, peering down through the brambles. “What a fright to be giving us and us taking our ease on the Sabbath Day!”

  “It’s me that thought for sure that it was a kelpie that was in it!” said Tom.

  It was a grand joke, and they seemed to have had a right good fright, and shortly after that we started for home with our baskets of berries.

  “Have you seen anything o’ that Miss Boyds this whilie back?” George asked casually of Tom when we were well on the way.

  “Not since long, to be speaking to, whatever, George,” Tom replied. “Why was you asking?”

  “I was hearing the other day that Doctor Mackay was thinking maybe the youngest one—what’s her name now?”

  “Miss Violet?” I said.

  “Aye—Miss Violet has the measles or something o’ that kind. He was saying that people—especially bairns—should keep away from their house for a whilie, for he’s not wanting the school full o’ the measles. If you get the measles, you have to be stopping out of school for a month or more.”

  This was Awful. Imagine missing a whole month of Latin! “Doctor Mackay is just a foolish mannie!” I said d
efiantly—defying all measles and all infectious complaints that could keep a person out of school. “Miss Violet’s not got measles! Measles is red spots! She’s just had her teeth out, that’s all!”

  “Oh, is that it?” said Tom. “Was you seeing her, then?”

  “Yes, just yesterday, when I was out at the berries, and she had no spots on her. She was fine!”

  “Was she now? I’m pleased to hear that. Was she picking berries too?”

  “No. She was making flower chains and then she went away.” “So you was speaking to her?” Tom asked.

  “Surely! . . . But she just sort of smiled, like Miss Dickson before she got her new teeth. She hasn’t got measles at all.”

  “Still, it’s not like Doctor Mackay to make a mistake,” George pursued after a moment. “He is a very clever man, writing yon medicine papers in the Latin and all. Maybe the measles is in her right enough, although the spotties isn’t showing yet. Anyway, it’s not me that’s going near her or to the house or anything.”

  “Nor me neither,” said Tom. “Indeed, if I’ll be seeing her, the best thing to do would be to go home and tell Granny. People shouldn’t be going about on Reachfar ground with that measles in them.”

  “That’s quite true, Tom, man. It would be a devil of a chob if Dick or one o’ the cows was to get the measles,” said George. “Tom, man, what would be the Latin for measles?”

  “Measlums,” said Tom. “Measlum, measlum, measli, measlo, measl-oh! That’s the way it goes.”

  It made a very good song, along the lines of ‘There was an old man called Michael Finnegan’.

  ‘George and Tom each had a measlum,

  On their nose and on their chin again.

  The wind came out and blew them in again,

  Poor old George and Tom.—Begin again ...”

  and we sang it all the way home, but stopped well out of hearing of the house, of course, because of the Sabbath Day, and sneaked quietly to the milk-house with our baskets.

  I came to the conclusion that the Miss Boyds must have the measles in their house right enough, though, for I did not see any of them around the village for the next week or two. I thought of asking Alasdair about it, for he would know, but I decided not to, for I often had a kind of feeling that it was better ‘chust to be taking no notice at a-all’ of a thing like measles, in case they might hear you and come and land on you, the way the bees would come and settle in a big ball on Danny Maclean’s hand when he made a certain noise.

  And, of course, I had a great many other things to think about, for, as I mentioned to Tom, the more you became grown-up and the more things you learned about, the more things there still seemed to be that required to be learned about. There seemed to be no end to it, I told him.

  “That’s so,” Tom agreed. “That’s chust the way of it. It is very interring. It is chust like the way the more you have to do, the more you will do. If people has only a little to do, they get lazy and don’t want to do even that little.”

  “Why is that, Tom?”

  “I don’t know right. I think it is chust contrariness. Life is very, very contrary, like yon bittie in the Bible that I can never get the hang of, about ‘from him that hath not shall be taken away’. The “best a person can do is chust do their best. As the Reverend Roderick will be saying, there is some things that is too wonderful for me a-altogether.”

  There was a sadness about Tom and George these days. There was a sadness in everyone round Reachfar, indeed, but, naturally, I noticed it more in Tom and George than in the others. It was a bleak, grey sadness, which made them frown and stare away across the Firth to the hills with eyes that seemed to search for some hidden explanation. It was a dumb, closed sadness, as if they were shutting their minds against some injustice which they did not want to recognise, as if, not finding recognition, it would clear away like mist before the sun.

  ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes,

  From whence doth come mine aid . . .’

  That is what they made me think of when they gazed away to the Ben in that puzzled way, but the aid did not come. The greyness remained, lurking, ready to spread through the air around us like a fog at some chance word or action, as on the day when I said: “Look here, you two, what about the Harvest Home this year? It will soon be time, won’t it?“

  The greyness came down. “I don’t think there is going to be a Harvest Home this year,” George said.

  “That’s foolishness, George Sandison!” I was indignant. “There is always a Harvest Home!”

  “Wheesht! I Not so loud,” said Tom, although we were away up in the stackyard where nobody could hear us and it wasn’t Badness to talk about the Harvest Home as it was to imitate the minister, anyway.

  “Why isn’t there going to be?”

  George leaned on his rake and stared away at the Ben in that searching way, and Tom said: “Well, ye see, since the War things is not the same. Apples and raisins and things is very, very dear, and your father says that the Laird kind of feels that he canna afford it like he used to——”

  “But we don’t have to have raisin dumpling! We could sing and dance——”

  “Listen,” George said. “I don’t think we should be speaking about it. If Sir Torquil feels that he canna afford it, to be speaking about it and showing that a person is disappointed will chust make things worse for him. For me, I am chust going to go on as usual as if I had never even heard o’ such a thing as a Harvest Home.”

  “But you are disappointed all the same, George?”

  “Och, aye, surely. But when a person’s disappointed it’s better to be disappointed in to yourself and not be bawling about it at people. That only makes it worse. . . . Man, Tom, I wish I had a sweetie! You wouldna have a black-strippit ball about you?”

  “If it’s my jar of black-strippit balls that Mr Macintosh gave me that you’re hinting at,” I told him, “Granny has it away on the top shelf of the kitchen press and you know fine that she’s in there, baking.”

  “If she wasna there you would be willing to give us one, though?”

  “Surely.”

  “That’s fine.” George hung his rake on the nearest stack. “Come, Tom.”

  The two of them clattered away down the yard in their big boots and disappeared round the end of the loosebox. In two minutes my grandmother was in the stackyard.

  “Where are they off to?”

  “I don’t know, Granny. They just took a notion and went off.”

  “I’ll notion them!” she said.

  She too turned eastwards out of the stackyard and went off down the outside yard. I ran swiftly down the west side of the garden, into the house, up on to a chair and extracted a dozen black-strippit balls from the jar. As I ran back up to the stackyard, concealed by the garden hedge, my grandmother was returning along the yard, her apron gathered up in front and a pleased look on her face.

  “I knew that speckled hen was hiding her eggs,” she was saying. “I am real pleased the two of you happened to notice her, the brute!”

  It was remarkable what a number of our hens developed this habit of ‘laying away’, and more remarkable still how it was always George and Tom who could find their hidden nests. I knew at this time that George and Tom ‘had the knack’ of making a hen lay in some spot that they chose, so that they always had a trump card of eight or nine unexpected eggs up their sleeves to be played as and when required, but in spite of a lot of study of hen habits and all sorts of efforts with decoy eggs in nice-looking places, I never developed this knack myself.

  Having seen my grandmother into the house to take the eggs out of her apron, the three of us sat down in the lee of a stack and had four black-strippit balls each, but even now I cannot see these mournful-coloured sweets or smell their sugar-peppermint scent without feeling again that searching, wandering sadness, which was my first knowledge that the world I knew was subject to change and was not, as I had thought, a steady, constant thing created to wait, ready and beautiful,
for me to explore it as if it were some treasure-box of bright jewels.

  Near the end of October, on a cold, windy day with sleety showers, Fly and I went out to the East Moor on a Saturday morning to bring the ewes in-bye for Tom, for my grandmother said that, early in the winter as it was, she was smelling snow.

  “It’s two score that’s out east,” said Tom. “Be sure you have them all, Janet.”

  Fly and I set off, while Tom went to the west to get the other flock. The three moors of Reachfar were distinct in character. The West Moor, which Tom had gone to gather, was hillocky and scarred by a deep water-course like the Reachfar Burn, but more rough and rocky, and the sheep would hide in the crannies, which made them difficult to find. The Home Moor was the one with the trees, just above the house, with the high heather, the wild flowers in summer, and was the winter shelter for the sheep. The East Moor, to which I was headed, was a long slope of grassy hill, bleak, stony and unsheltered, and when you emerged on to it from the trees of the Home Moor you could round up the sheep with ease. Its only feature of interest was the spring that was the rise of the Reachfar Burn which, up here, was only a stony trickle among the boulders. The sheep would come in gladly from the East Moor when there was a threat of bad weather, and as they filed through the little gate into the wood, they could be counted easily, for I was not as clever at counting sheep in a packed, moving flock as Tom and George were.

  When I reached the little gate the wind came lashing up from the north-east, edged with stinging sleet that poked like needles through my woollen hood and the backs of my woollen gloves, so I crouched behind a juniper bush and sent Fly out over the grey-green hill. She did not waste any time, but gathered the ewes in and brought them to the gate, and they filed past into the shelter, I counting them carefully. Thirty-eight.