by Jane Duncan
“The poor craiturs,” my father said. “It would be a kindness to them if you were to go down and see them, Janet.”
“Do that, Janet,” said my aunt, who was now married to Hugh, the young grieve who had taken my father’s place at Poyntdale, and who was also mistress of Reachfar. “I’ll put up a basket and you’ll go straight and not be gawping about you.”
I laughed back at her. “Ach, poop to the Miss Boyds! But all right. I’ll walk down this afternoon.”
They would not know me, of course, I thought, as I pushed open the broken-down gate to the overgrown garden, for Miss Iris and Miss Daisy had never seen a great deal of me, even as a child. I went round, knocked on the back door and it was opened by Miss Daisy. I was wearing a tweed suit and a white blouse, and at that time I wore my longish dark hair piled in the neo-Edwardian fashion on the top of my head. Miss Daisy stared at me and gave a nervous giggle. “You—you’re Mrs Sandison’s—you must be her granddaughter Janet.”
“That’s right,” I said. “How d’you do, Miss Boyd? How clever of you to know me.”
“Anybody would—that ever saw your mother and your granny. But come in, come in.”
I followed her into the kitchen. It had always been a dreary villa-ish kitchen—grey and darkish—not a sunlit, firelit, cheerful place like our kitchen at Reachfar, and it was even more cheerless now. Miss Iris, the joints of her hands and arms knotted, her jaw-bones curiously distorted by the grotesque work of the arthritis, sat in a corner in an armchair, while, between the dresser and the table, Miss Annie was extremely busy laying a place at the table for one person.
“You know about my sister Annie?” Miss Daisy asked quietly.
I nodded and said: “Good afternoon, Miss Annie.” She looked at my face for a moment and then smiled brightly. “Well, good morning, Janet!” she said. “So it’s yourself with the eggs.” She took a bowl from the dresser. Just you unpack them for me till I lay Andra’s dinner. And how is your mother today?”
“She is very well, thank you, Miss Annie,” I said and began to take the eggs from the basket and put them in the bowl.
She had a curious dignity as she went about her task, in her long skirt and high-necked blouse of about 1910, with the little grey shawl about her shoulders.
“After he’s had his dinner”—she looked at me pleadingly—“maybe you and him and me will go for a wee walk up the town?”
“Yes, Miss Annie,” I said.
She bustled off through to the scullery very busily, and Miss Daisy said: “She is always wanting to go up the town and I can’t let her go alone and I don’t like to leave Iris too much.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “That’s all right.”
I talked to Miss Iris and Miss Daisy while Miss Annie waited upon the imaginary Andra who had come in and was now eating his dinner while we had our tea, and then Miss Annie and I, with Andra, went up to the village street and walked from the Plough at one end to the doctor’s house at the other. All my old friends, Bill the Post, Mrs Gilchrist, Miss Tulloch and the doctor, knew that we had Andra with us, of course, and were punctilious about bidding him the time of day, and then we made our way slowly back to the Miss Boyds, for, of course, Andra had to be going back to his job in Inverness.
“What is Andra’s job, Miss Annie?” I asked, after we had seen him safely away on his motor-cycle.
“Oh, he’s in business and doing very well,” she said and bustled away to take off her hat and coat.
During the war I did not have many leaves that were long enough to allow me to make the journey from Buckinghamshire, where I was stationed for most of the time, all the way to Reachfar, and when I was at home time was too precious, or I was too selfish, to give it to walking round Achcraggan with Miss Annie and the imaginary Andra. Of the real Andra not a word had ever been heard.
At the end of 1947, however, I married, and after a short honeymoon by car in Sutherland and Caithness, my husband and I came back to Reachfar for a few days on our way south to Ballydendran, near Glasgow, where our new home was waiting for us. My husband, whose nickname is Twice, is a Scottish Borderer who had never seen the Highlands until I first took him to Reachfar, but he is a great connoisseur of people and was fascinated from the first by the seeming imperviousness to change of the people of my district. Tom’s attitude to the wireless set, which I had given him before the war and which sits on the little table that used to hold my ‘bitties drawer’, is typical of what Twice appreciates with such glee.
“This is my sound boxie that Janet gave me,” Tom told him the first time they met. “It is a wonderful contrivance, if you’ll be minding to get its battery from the garratch at the smiddy on Saturdays. It’s a sort of engine, like. You would be knowing about it maybe?”
“A little,” said Twice, who is an engineer by profession.
“When you’ll be turning this knobbie, you can hear the mannie as plain as if he was beside you, and him speaking in a roomie away down in London. It is a wonderful thing. But, av coorse, only if you’ll be using it for a good purpose. If a person will be using it for badness, like that mannie Hitler was doing, it is a very bad thing indeed. Being chust an engine, like, it has no more sense, and some of the capers and nonsense that will be coming out of it whiles, you chust would hardly believe.”
Twice had heard me speak of Tom often enough—as has everyone who knows me—and of George too, but in spite of all I had said he was not quite prepared for the shock of their outlook. My father and George, a little younger than Tom, had, by 1947, long since accepted the motor-car as part of life, but Tom, with magnificent resistance, had never so far set foot in one of the stinking contraptions. He had travelled, as far as Inverness, by train and by motor ’bus, his theory being that these contrivances were driven by men wearing ‘snooted bonnets that had proper control o’ the engines’, but a car, driven by a ‘civilian’ as it were, and especially a member of the family, Tom regarded as a lethal weapon put into our hands by the devil for our destruction.
Twice, in the past, had driven my father and George down to the Plough in Achcraggan in the evening, and had greatly enjoyed the conversation that took place there between them and such cronies as Donald Beagle, who still carried the name of the long-defunct family boat, Doctor Mackay, the drunken Captain Robertson of Seamuir and Bill the Ex-Post, who sat in a corner with his melodeon.
The Plough was now quite a different place from the dark mystery that I had feared would blow up on Armistice Day. It was owned by an English ex-Air Force officer, with a limp and green corduroy trousers, whose pretty, lip-sticked young wife served behind the bar, and it had a steady clientele of ‘arty’ people who came by car from all sorts of places, especially in summer, for it was no more than a pleasant evening run from Inverness, that cross-roads of the North. ‘The Cronies’, as Twice called the older local men, were vastly entertaining in their comments on the bearded young men who wore velvet trousers and coloured sweaters and on the sprightly young women in their slacks or shorts, and Twice was fired by a burning ambition to get Tom into the Plough of a Saturday evening. After much argument and persuasion, Tom gave way, and was got into the front seat of the car between Twice and me, while my father and George sat in the back. My aunt, a widow since the war, stayed at home, of course, to look after the place.
The road down from Reachfar to Poyntdale was better than it had been in my childhood, but still bumpy, but Tom conceded that the car did not ‘loup about’ as much as the trap, on the whole.
‘Mind the bridgie at the Poyntdale dam, though, lad! Don’t let her get away from you!” he warned.
“I wish you would buy me a snooted bonnet, Flash!” Twice said to me.
At ten miles, or less, per hour, we crawled down the Poyntdale road and made the eastward turn on to the County Road at the shore.
“My, but what a rate to be going at!” said Tom.
Twice pointed to the speedometer. “Ten miles an hour, Tom—see it there?”
Tom was fa
scinated. “That clockie? That is miles that it is saying on it?”
“Miles an hour,” said Twice.
“Make her go a little harder, lad—chust a little, though, mind!”
The needle of the powerful, though old, Bentley crawled to fifteen.
“I’m not feeling much difference, lad.” The needle crawled on again. By the time we came into the long clear sweep round the bay to the Plough Tom was crowing like a six-year-old and shouting: “Geordie, man, the clockie is saying sixty mile an ’oor—a mile a meenute! Faster than the aeroplanes!”
Inside the Plough there was no holding him. Flown with his wonderful experience, he held forth to the crowded bar about the remarkable age we lived in and ended: “And a-all you bonnie leddies in here having your dram. Aye. It is myself that likes to see it. There was a time when a-all the leddies would be stopping ootside and only the men-folk would be enchoying themselves.”
I had a vision of the Miss Boyds, sitting in a row on the sea wall, on the grey afternoon of Armistice Day.
It was growing dark outside now, but the lounge bar-was bright with firelight and the ‘bonnie leddies’ were very colourful in their bright slacks and brighter sweaters, and as delighted with Tom as he was with them. To him they were visitors from a strange, new world—they might have come from Mars—and to them he was a remarkable survival of an age that they had never known. I have never met a person who did not ‘take to’ Tom, and the ‘bonnie leddies’ were no different, in this way, from the women who had been their mothers and their grandmothers.
We had a very gay evening, but just before closing-time, when the last song was being sung by a young man from Edinburgh who had come in with My Friend Alasdair, to the accompaniment of Bill the ex-Post’s melodeon, the air outside was rent by the sound of a high-powered car, the door swung open, and a short, thin, blue-chinned, flashily-dressed man said: “Double whisky,” and threw a five-pound note on the bar.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the landlord’s pretty wife. “I can only let you have a single—the last of tonight’s bottle.”
“Hell—all right.”
He took the drink, pushed a half-crown of the change at her, at which she said: “Thank you, sir,” and turned away about her duties. He then opened his padded-shouldered, dark coat, pushed his black felt hat to the back of his head and, reaching into his inner pocket, brought out a glittering cigarette case of gigantic proportions. Under cover of the singing, Twice whispered to me: “Who is the spiv? Know him?”
I have told you that in 1918 there were old maids. After the 1939-1945 war there were ‘spivs’, the offal-eaters who grew fat on the ugly byproducts of war, such as food and clothing shortages, and ‘dealing’ in surplus stocks that the Government had for disposal. I suddenly felt that the greyness of the long-gone Armistice Day had invaded the cheerful room.
“Let’s get the old fellows home, Twice,” I said quietly, as the spiv looked round with shifty eyes from beside the wooden pillar that went from bar to ceiling. Twice collected my father, George and Tom, and the young people bunched round to see them to the car and say goodnight. I summoned the thought of my grandmother and stared through the sneering ferrety face at the bar until, like the face of the Cheshire Cat, it disappeared, first behind the pillar and then out into the darkness beyond the door. Then I rose, thanked the landlord and his wife for their hospitality, said goodnight and went out to join my family.
The next day Twice and I drove my aunt, Tom and George down to Achcraggan for the groceries. Traditionally my father had stayed at home to look after the place, although nowadays there was very little to look after, for much of the land had been let to the surrounding larger farmers. Nor were there butter, eggs and honey to exchange for the groceries now, for my people kept only cows, hens and bees enough for their own household supplies and were living mostly on their savings and their pensions, but the ‘marketing’ was the same leisurely business that it had always been. My aunt disappeared into Miss Tulloch’s, whose niece now helped her aunt in the shop: Tom disappeared into the post office and George into the bank, it being agreed that we would all meet at the Plough at its forenoon opening time.
Twice and I, having provided ourselves with a bottle of the ‘Finest Port Wine’ from Miss Tulloch, went to pay a call on My Friend Bella Beagle, who was now very old and seldom left her home, which, however, still maintained the clean whitewashed inside-and-out standards of the old Fisher Town, and had a row of the dark-green glass balls, which were once used as floats for the fishing-nets, sitting on the mantelpiece between the brass candlesticks. After we left her we walked round the back of the Fisher Town and the village, which led us past the ruins of Jock Skinner’s croft to the Plough.
“It all seems so terribly long ago,” I said to Twice.
“But this hasn’t changed as much as my part of the country. Just after the war, when I went back to my parish in Berwickshire, there was literally nobody left that I knew. They seem to live longer up here.”
“Oh, a lot of them are gone, though. Still, this arty, beauty-spot tourist influx is a good thing, and the electric scheme up the Glen should help when it gets going—except that the whole place will probably change its character.”
“Not as long as George and Tom are alive.” Twice laughed as we went into the pleasant bar-parlour of the Plough. “What will you have?”
“Beer, I think, please. We’ll probably have to wait for hours. Tom and George never had much sense of time, but now they have retired, as they call it, they are worse than ever.”
“An old shepherd I once knew,” said Twice, “said that the Man Who Made Time made plenty. I just wish more people could remember that.”
We had been sitting for about half an hour when I heard a powerful car stop outside. “Is that the car that was here last night?” I asked.
“No,” said Twice.
“Are you sure?”
“Certain.” I moved to look out of the window. “Oh, ye of little faith in my ear for an engine!” Me smiled, leaned back in his chair and looked out. “No. This one has an American registration——”
An old lady, but elegant to the last blue-tinted curl of hair, in a wide-swinging tweed coat above nylon-clad ankles and tiny feet, came into the room, followed by a large, pink-faced, white-haired, distinguished-looking obvious husband. I smiled good morning at them as they went to the bar and turned back to Twee.
“By the way, who was the bloke in the big car last night that you didn’t like? We never got around to it.”
“Cross my gullet with another beer and I’ll give you practically his life story,” I said.
Twice went to the bar for the beer and I sat looking out of the window at the old pier where I could see again the coal boat, the destroyer dashing up the Firth and Betsy’s head rise between me and the distant hills on that far-off Armistice Day.
“There you are, my dear,” said Twice, and put down the glass half-pint mug in front of me. “Give.”
But before I could speak the white-haired lady was standing in front of Twice, laughing up at him. “Young ma-an, is this yo-ah wife?”
“Yes, madam,” he said. “She is.”
“Ah can tell you two thi-ings about her that every husband oughta know-ow!”
“You can?” Twice smiled. “Please sit down.” Twice has a great ability for taking things as they come. He turned to the white-haired man. “Won’t you join us, sir?”
We all sat down, the lady laughing at me while my mind went back frantically over the 1939–45 war and my working life before it, as I tried to remember all the Americans I had ever met.
“Ye-es.” She smiled at me with dancing dark eyes under the blue-silver hair and then turned to Twice. “Yo-ah wife is a poet and she is also pra-abably a wi-itch—but the kind, clever sorta wi-itch!”
“Mrs de Cambre!” I said.
“That’s right, honey.”
“But—how in the world did you know me?”
She laughed. “Did’n�
�� I know your mother and your gran’mother?”
We talked for a long time, and for another long time after George, Tom and my aunt joined us, and in the end came back to that Harvest Home which, although we did not know it that lovely night, was the last Harvest Home in the old lavish tradition to be held at Poyntdale.
“It’s a sha-ame you weren’t there, Henry,” Maddy Lou told her husband. “It was the grandes’ party I ever been to.” She then turned to Twice. “An’ the mos’ remarkable thi-ing happened. Miz Sandison, Janet’s grandmother, tol’ my fortune. She said a great happiness would come to me through my son. He was jus’ eighteen at the time. Henry’s family is an ol’ French Southern family and I was very unhappy at that time because we had only this one boy—I was kinda haunted that some thin’ would happen to him. We-ell, Miz Sandison said this happiness would come through my son and that it took the form of a three within a three. She was dead certain about it an’ tol’ me to remember it, and when Ah went back to London I tol’ Henry.” Her husband nodded. “He jus’ laughed at the time, but it made us sorta feel better, an’ then the queeres’ thi-ing happened. Our boy married at twenty—an’ when he was jus’ twenty-one his wife gave birth to triplets, three boys! Can you imagine tha-at?”
“The three within the three years, see?” said Mr de Cambre. “It certainly was queer.”
“Ach, it was only a lucky shot in the dark!” said George. “The Ould Leddy was as fly as a badger at that fortune-telling caper. Three within a three could mean nearly anything!”