by Jane Duncan
“You are not to start that crying!” said Alasdair sternly. “If you start that we’re done!”
“We’re not done! Dang it, she must be somewhere!”
“Where then?” he bawled belligerently. “You that always knows everything! Dominie’s pet!”
“Clevery clarty yourself! I’ll set Fly on you!”
I knew now how my grandmother felt when she felt anxious and told us ‘for goodness sake to get out of her road’. I could have felled Alasdair with my stick just for being there, saying things and asking questions. I hurled the stick ahead of me just to vent my feelings.
“We’re not behaving right for an emergency,” said Alasdair, as the stick spun through the air. “My father says the hardest thing to do in any emergency——”
“Poop to your old father and his emergencies!”
“WHAT MY FATHER SAYS IS,” shouted Alasdair, “is the hardest thing to do is THINK, and that’s what we have to do.”
“Think? What about?”
“I don’t know. That’s what’s so hard.”
We sat down side by side on a snowdrift and thought, “I can’t think of anything except Find Miss Violet,” I said at last.
“Neither can I. It’s all very fine the dominie saying Find Miss Violet like that. It’s not him that’s——”
“He said the places where you play.” I said.
“You and me plays over half the parish,” said Alasdair, “and he said to come up here.”
“You and me plays more between the smiddy and the school,” I said. “Together, I mean.”
“That’s right. Come on back that way—besides, maybe they’ve found her by now and the bell will ring any minute.”
We followed our ‘Robbers’ Roadie’ from the smithy to the cave in the Seamuir Burn, followed down the course of the burn and came out at last on the shore, east of the village, just beside Jock Skinner’s old abandoned croft. Still the bell had not sounded and the white silence and the black sea were on either side of us.
“Dang it!” said Alasdair. “The hospital will be no good for playing in next year—the roof’s falling in.”
“We’ll be at the Academy next year, you stupid goat!” I told him.
At the flapping door of the old house Fly barked then jumped back and raised her nose to the frosty sky in a long terrified, terrifying howling. We ran forward. Alasdair got there first and spun round, his arms extended from lintel to lintel. “Don’t! Don’t look!” he said. He was a ruddy, freckly, pink-checked boy, but his face now was the colour of pale winter cream with the freckles dark on his nose. Over his shoulder, I saw the blue coat and the feet, as the body swung from the rafter along by the far wall. Alasdair grabbed my hand and the two of us, with Fly in front, ran sobbing to Alasdair’s home, where the doctor, with the yoked pony tied to the gate, was arching up and down the front garden in the cold wind. I remember the doctor jumping into the trap, I remember Mrs Mackay gathering Alasdair and me in one panting bundle into her arms. I remember the hot taste of whisky and hearing the long, slow peal of the church bell.
I do not remember any more until I woke up, at home at Reachfar, in my own room, the next morning, and Doctor Mackay was there, holding my wrist, and my whole family was in the room, too. Tom was sitting on the end of my bed and I sat up and said: “This is a fine to-do, if you like!” The doctor laughed. “I’m not sick,” I said.
“Are you hungry, Janet?”
“Yes,” I said, and then I remembered. “Miss Violet?”
“She died,” the doctor said quietly. “It was better, Janet. You see, her mind was sick and it would not get better, and being alive and going about singing yon way was no pleasure to her, the poor craitur.”
“And thinking dolls was real babies,” said Tom.
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “A person that has a mind as sick as that can’t be happy. You see, Janet?”
“Where is she?”
“Oh, at home at the Miss Boyds.”
“Not at Jock Skinner’s?”
“No, no,” said Tom. “We would never leave her at yon dirty ould place! No, no. She is at her own home.”
“Can I get up?”
“Surely,” the doctor said. “You slept so long we thought you were sick.” He pulled out his gold watch that could ring chimes like a clock “Mercy! Eleven o’ the morning. Time I was off!”
“Eleven o’ the morning?” I shot out of bed. Granny Sandison, are you out of your head? Letting me sleep till eleven o’ the morning?What about school?”
“None of the Top Class is at school today—they’re all sleeping like you. I’ve seen the whole boiling lot o’ them.”
“Not Alasdair?”
“He was still sleeping when I left home.”
My mother put my jersey on on top of my nightgown. “Come down and have something before you go, Doctor,” she said.
We all went down to the kitchen. It was fine being at home on a Tuesday at school-time as long as Alasdair was not getting away from me at the Latin, I thought; and while the doctor and all the men of my family had a dram out of the parlour bottle and the women had tea, I had a big plate of porridge. Then I remembered something, and after waiting for a long time until they were all quiet so that I would not be making an interruption, I said: “Please, Doctor Mackay, you promised to tell me something.”
“What was that, Janet?” he asked.
“It was the day Miss Violet was here and she thought the doll was a baby and——”
“Och, Janet, lassie, be quiet!” my granny but not my grandmother said. “With your ask, ask, asking about Miss Violet!”
“That’s all right, Granny,” Doctor Mackay said. He often called her ‘Granny’, especially at times when she was helping him with some sick person or to get somebody’s baby born. “Poor Miss Violet! It’s nice to be speaking about her a little. We mustn’t forget her too soon, poor craitur. Yes, Janet?”
“It was when she was nursing the doll and she gave you an old bittie heather out of her hair and you put it in your buttonhole and said something.”
“Did I?” The doctor’s face got funny, as if he were shy, but, of course, I knew it was not that, for how could Doctor Mackay ever be feeling shy? “I don’t remember.”
“It was something bonnie, you said, and you said you would tell me.”
The doctor looked round at us all, and my uncle came up behind him with the parlour bottle, put some whisky in his glass and then some water. The doctor held the glass up between his face and the window and looked through the whisky at the snow outside. “Can you remember now, Doctor Mackay?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes, I remember now. It was a few words of an old story that I read once, Janet. The story was about a young woman that went out of her mind when her father died. Miss Violet went out of her mind because she thought her baby was dead, you see.”
“What was the name of the person in the story?”
“Ophelia. And she was like Miss Violet, picking flowers and making chains of them——”
“And singing that funny way?”
“Yes. Ophelia sang too. And she would give her flowers to people, just the way Miss Violet gave me the heather.”
“Miss Violet gave me a chain too, down beside the Reachfar Burn.”
“She did, eh?”
“And what were the words? The words you said?”
The doctor held up his glass and looked through the whisky at the white world outside the window again. Then he looked down at me. “The words, Janet, were: ‘There’s a daisy—I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died’.”
These were the words, right enough, dying away, sad and lonely at the end, like the last notes of Danny’s fiddle. The doctor swallowed his dram and put the glass on the table beside my porridge plate.
“God rest the poor young craitur,” said my quiet grandfather.
“Aye, Reachfar. . . . One or two of you will come down for the funeral?”
&n
bsp; “All of us except Tom and the bairn, Doctor,” my grandmother said.
“That’s very good o’ you in this terrible weather.” The doctor pushed his arms into the sleeves of the overcoat that Tom was holding for him. “School again tomorrow, Janet!”
“Yes, Doctor. Please, what is the name of the story that Ophelia is in?”
“The doctor has to go now to see Granny Fraser’s rheumatics,” my mother said.
“It is a story called Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by a man called William Shakespeare. He wrote it long, long ago. You will read it for yourself when you are a little bigger. Good day, now, Janet.”
My uncle went out with him to his trap, and I was told to go upstairs and put my clothes on properly, for it would soon be dinner-time. I Did As I Was Told, but while I did it I was repeating to myself the words that Ophelia said in the story. They had, when you said them, pausing in them as the doctor had paused, some of the quality of Miss Violets queer little song—they had its eerie, broken sadness—but they made you feel, somehow, that you need not be afraid of the song or of the thought of Miss Violet any more.
* * * * *
You will realise that that story that I have told you happened long years ago in a world that was quite different from the world of today.
In the thirty years between 1919 and 1949 many things changed, and people and places changed too. My mother died in 1920. I grew up, my grandparents died, and down at Achcraggan Miss Lizzie and Miss Minnie, the two oldest of the Miss Boyds, died too. And the two youngest of the Miss Boyds, Miss Iris and Miss Daisy, getting older, sold their shop in Inverness and came to live at Achcraggan where Miss Annie, as Tom put it, was ‘making a right old maid’s mess o’ bringing up that laddie, Andra’. But let me put it all in chronological order.
By the early 1930’s, Andra, as Andrew Boyd, called after his ‘unctioneer’ grandfather, was known, was the bad boy of the district, but in the eyes of Miss Annie and her two older sisters until they died he could do no wrong. Our district had seen many of what it called ‘weecked’ loons, notable among them My Uncle George in his time, and, in the next generation, My Friend Alasdair Mackay when he grew a little older than when we last met him in this chronicle. Alasdair, in his time, constructed a spring-mounted ghost that jumped over the churchyard wall when a courting couple up the lane by the Manse leaned against a certain gate which they favoured, and succeeded in scaring the whole parish, including the Reverend Roderick and three policemen, half out of their wits. Alasdair and I, too, at the age of about eighteen, when we happened to meet when I was on my way home from Achcraggan one winter Saturday evening, chanced to see the roadmen’s tar boiler by the roadside and were inspired to tar the seat of old Lewie the Joiner’s outside lavatory, so that his sons had to detach him from it by force in the winter darkness of the next early morning, but that is another story. What Andra Boyd went in for was not ‘weeckedness’ but ‘pure badness’, and between the two sins our district draws a distinct line. I suppose it is a laughter line. You could laugh at old Lewie stuck to his lavatory seat, but you could not laugh at the fire in the Seamuir stackyard. At least, our people could not. They could laugh at Marion Innes and Hugh Donaldson running into the bar of the Plough to escape the ghost, but they could not laugh at the gate being opened that let the Reachfar sheep through to eat all old Granny Fraser’s young turnips. They did laugh, however, at George, this time, arriving in Achcraggan with Sir Torquil’s riding crop, and for a long time told how you could have heard ‘not only Andra, but his three aunties forbye howling west at Ben Wyvis’. This was probably the only thrashing that Andra ever had in his life, for he did no more damage to Reachfar, and our people at home will tell you that ‘that was the only thing that was wrong with him’. He was the child who had the two great deficiencies by their standards—that of being actively spoiled and that of being passively spoiled by having the rod spared as well—and they were not surprised that he was ‘as full of badness as a clockan egg is full o’ stinkin’ meat’.
In the early 1930’s I went away to the south of England to earn my living, but every year I came home to Reachfar for long enough to catch up with the major local events. Reachfar was the one unchanging place in a world of constant change. In 1934, I think it was, there was a local tragedy that shook the district as it had not been shaken since the death of my young, gentle mother in 1920, when Master Anthony, the young heir to Poyntdale, was killed in an accident with his car one frosty winter night. Poyntdale was now no longer the place it had been, and the loss of the heir was the one more cruel blow that carried Sir Torquil and Lady Lydia into old age in the space of a night. During the 1920’s all the out-lying farms and the houses in Achcraggan had had to be sold off, and now even further sales took place, so that the once Great Estate was reduced to the cumbersome ‘Big House’, a few cottages and the lands of the Home Farm. My father had long ago left the service of Sir Torquil, for Poyntdale no longer needed—nor could it afford—the services of a grieve of my father’s calibre, and a younger, less experienced man had taken his place on the sadly reduced estate. The ties between Reachfar and Poyntdale were not breakable, however, and young Master Torquil, who was a year younger than his brother who had been killed, was brought home from the Army in India to train under his father for the taking over of the depleted inheritance, with George and Tom to act as tutors-extraordinary whenever they and Master Torquil could get together. The 1930’s, up there, were sad years—the time when, in that backwater, the aftermath of the war that ended in 1918 showed its full destructive force. Only Reachfar, on its rocky hill, and Greycairn above that, managed to weather the long storm and emerge outwardly unscathed. Nearly all the little crofts were submerged in the bigger land-holdings, and the sheep that my grandmother had hated—the sheep that took the land from the people—were prowling, grey, over the land that had once carried the fine crops and the fat, black cattle.
Change came to the Miss Boyds, too. The house at Achcraggan was their own, but the ‘puckle money that they had among them’ had lost value and was losing value steadily every day. Old Miss Lizzie and Miss Minnie, having done their fair share in ‘making a ruination of Andra, gave up and died about 1935, although, as Tom said, ‘they were chust in their seventies and had chust made the allotted span of it and not much more’. About a year later Miss Iris and Miss Daisy sold their shop in Inverness and joined the household at Achcraggan, thus consolidating the ‘puckle money’ in one place. I was at home for a holiday just shortly after this, while it was still the fresh news of the district, and went over it all with Tom and George one Sunday afternoon.
“You canna,” said Tom, “but be sorry for the craiturs, down there with that rascal of a laddie not doing a thing o’ good, although they have put him to the Academy and a-all and chust the old man’s bittie money and not a penny coming in.”
“And it’s not younger they’re getting,” said George.
“How old are they?” I asked. “When I was a bairn, the time Miss Violet died, they all seemed to be about a hundred, except poor Miss Violet, and she seemed to be just about twenty. I can see her yet, sitting at the fire with the heather in her hair and nursing yon damned doll.”
“Aye. Yon was terrible,” said Tom. “Mind you, Miss Violet was young.”
“Aye,” George said. “She must have been just about the last kick o’ that dirty ould boogger Andra when he was on his death-bed.”
“He was a terrible man for the weemen, George, man. A right randy ould boogger—the Bull o’ Inverness, they used to be calling him.”
“Aye, that’s right—Andra Bull.”
Tom began to laugh. “Lord, George, man, do ye mind on the time at the Sales that the leddy from the south that was a stranger called him ‘Mr Bull’ to his face?”
“If Miss Minnie and Miss Lizzie were over seventy and Miss Violet would only have been about thirty-five now if she were alive, he must have had a long and productive life,” I agreed.
“Aye, and them si
x old maids wasna the whole of it by a long chalk,” said Tom. “Andra Bull’s bairns is scattered from Perth to John o’ Groats.”
I began to understand, only at this late date, why so many men had taken refuge from the Miss Boyds in the Plough in the old days. People whose lives are closely linked to the breeding of animals have a strong belief in heredity.
“How old will Miss Annie be now?” I asked. “I always thought she was the best of the bunch.”
“Aye, and so she was,” said Tom. “And I can put an age on her too, for she is chust about ages with myself. She’ll not be less than sixty-four and not more than sixty-seven, for I can mind when they were building the hoosie at Achcraggan and I was at the school and seeing her down there with Ould Andra looking at it. The two old ones was grown-up weernen even then—they were a big bit older than Miss Annie. And, av coorse, the young ones was a lot younger. There was the spell between the two wives, ye see, when Andra was——”
“Free for all?” I suggested.
“Aye. It’s well seen the Ould Leddy is in her grave when ye dare to be speaking like that!”
In 1939, just before the newest war broke out, I went home to Reachfar, taking with me all the books and possessions that I wanted to store in a place of safety, and up there the imminence of war had a horror less real for my people than the fact that Andra Boyd, who was now twenty and had been ‘put to’ this trade and that and had made nothing of anything, had committed the final sin. He had got a girl west the country in the family way, come back to Achcraggan through the night on his motor-bicycle that his aunts had given him, taken all the loose money, jewellery and small saleable articles that he could lay hands on out of the house, and had disappeared as completely as Jock Skinner had done when he crossed the Greycairn moor on that Prize Day long, long ago. By this time Miss Iris was a cripple with rheumatoid arthritis; Miss Daisy, who had always been particularly feckless, was now more so; and Miss Annie, who had always borne most of the family responsibility, celebrated this latest family disgrace by going gently but completely mad. This took the form of a refusal to believe that Andra had done anything wrong and a determination to believe that everything was perfectly normal and that Andra would be home for a meal when he was hungry.