by Jess Smith
‘He’s dead,’ I told the group, ‘don’t listen to her.’
‘He is nut,’ she screamed at me.
Calmly I enlightened my cousin that the German heid yin was found feet up in a bucket!
‘Bunker,’ said wee Tommy, ‘he was found dead in a bunker.’
‘Well, is that no the German word for a bucket?’ asked Sooky.
Both Tommy and I agreed we didn’t know and left it at that.
Any road it was a mystery to us what this couple did, and we just had to solve it. After much consultation we decided to follow them and hide in some trees just over from the dyke. We’d crouch down behind the oakies and watch. Right reason or not, the mystery would be solved that very night.
Now, just as they had done each night, the couple appeared on time and they seemed oblivious to our folks cracking round the fire as they walked past arm in arm, gazing into each other’s eyes. As usual, approaching the end of the road, they went over the dyke, into the clover, and down they went.
‘Right, now are you lot with me?’ I asked. My comrades nodded in unison. ‘Then let’s go.’
One by one, like sojers of the SAS, we stealthily slid our bodies over the dyke, one on top of the other in the thick green clover.
‘Mind out, would you,’ said wee Tommy, as Sooky’s right foot landed him one in the face.
‘Sorry, Tommy,’ she apologised, then stuck her cardigan back in her mouth.
‘Quiet, you two, or you’ll give the game away,’ said Cousin Berta.
Our Babs was sneezing with the pollen off the cloverheads, and I knew if she came any further into the field, the couple would hear us, so I ordered her to stay put!
‘Jessie, would you take me back into the wood for me needing the lavvie?’ said my wee sister, looking awfy desperate.
‘You’ll just have to be needing a whiley longer, because we’re on a secret mission. Now sit down there and don’t move until we get back.’
I went first, creeping on all fours, until I could hear moaning sounds. I turned, and said in a whisper to Cousin Berta whose nose was glued to my right buttock, ‘Can you hear that?’
‘Aye, what do you think is going on?’ she whispered back. Then came another moan, louder this time, then a scream.
‘God almighty! The wimmin’s gitten murdert,’ roared wee Tommy, with his right eye blinking out of control.
At this we all got to our feet to see the man lying on top of the poor woman, and her thrusting her legs up into the air, trying with all her might to breathe.
We turned and ran like mad through the field, over the dyke, grabbing wee Babs on route. Down the road we raced, to summon the help of the big folks. ‘Mammy, Daddy, hurry, for the love of Moses, there’s a poor cratur getting murdered over yonder in the clover,’ I squealed at the top of my voice, and so did the rest of us. We were making such a din nobody could make out what we were saying.
‘Wheesht, bairns,’ said Katy’s mother Helen, ‘now, one at a time.’
Berta, as usual, managed to get her words out first. ‘Do you know yon quine and loonie who stroll arm in arm up the old road every night, them that passed no more than several minities ago?’ Helen folded her arms and nodded. ‘Well, he’s got the cratur flattened, every mouthful o’ air is gettin squashed out o’ her!’
Now, the strangest thing, all the women laughed. I thought they were thinking we were pulling at their legs.
‘You better get up there before she turns into a corpse!’ I blurted out, practically foaming at the mouth.
My mother came over, folded her arms and smiled. Then said, in response to this heinous crime, ‘Now, weans, I’m sure there’s nobody getting hurt. I think thon two are having a wee bit o’ a private cuddle.’
‘Na, na, Mammy, I know what I saw—thon woman was being strangled.’
By this time the men were getting to hear snippets, and I couldn’t understand why they were all sniggering. So I pushed my comrades aside, jumped on a wooden stool and proclaimed to the whole gathering, ‘You’ll be sorry when the polis find her body, then you’ll wish you’d listened tae us.’ I was adamant a murder had taken place, so with certainty I added in my loudest voice, ‘Well, he’ll not get far, because I’ll tell the polis his name.’
My father, who’d been reading a newspaper up till then, tried to keep a straight face as he said, ‘His name Jess, and what was his name, pet?’
Positioning my two fists firmly on my hips I drew in the biggest breath and said, ‘His name was Dinnie.’
‘You mean Danny?’ chipped in old Docherty, who’d been grooming one of his four lurcher dogs nearby.
‘Or perhaps Donnie?’ came a voice from a caravan over by the dyke.
‘No, it was Dinnie,’ I called out, totally exasperated. ‘I clearly heard the woman saying, “Dinnie stop! Dinnie stop!”’
Well, the whole campsite went into a fit of laughter. Us bairns thought our folks were mad and should be locked up. Mammy, on the other hand, really was mad because our Babs had filled her knickers, and the contents by this time had caked hard onto her wee backside. Two guesses who got the job of taking her and the carbolic over to the burn to wash it off.
For the duration of our stay at Kindallachan we played on our rope swing and told ghostie stories in the wee tree house, but as for fields of clover, they were strictly out of bounds. Well, were they not filled with murdered women?
The couple—we never saw them again, so you never know.
The Dochertys took themselves off to somewhere in Fife. Auntie Anna, cousin Berta and Uncle Robert never said where they had planned to go, so there was a good chance we might run into them again.
The other good folks who we met later that summer at the Berries seemed to speak of nothing other than our murderous couple—strange, do you not think?
‘Did the hornies [police] find Dinnie, Jess?’ was the first thing they asked me!
Soon it was time for Daddy to sit behind the wheel of the bus and Mammy behind the wheel of the Fordy. ‘Where to now?’ ‘Horse on, Macduff, we’ll camp at dawn.’ That was the type of conversation my parents had whenever we were ready to go. I can see them now as I sit here writing this down; my, they didn’t half make us lassies laugh. They were a pair right enough.
That day, though, we went up to Pitlochry to visit with our two Grannies. Mammy’s mother Granny Power who stayed at the Bobbin mill, on the other side of the railway station, and Daddy’s mother Granny Riley who lived outside Moulin in a bonnie wee croft called ‘Leattoch Beg’.
A pot of raspberry jam and two loaves later, we headed on up the A9 toward Inverness, but a stop-off at Blair Atholl found me in my Mammy’s bad books. Listen now while I tell you what I did.
7
THE HUNTRESS
We stopped there at quiet Blair Atholl by the burnside, and this, folks, is a wee tale from the week I spent among the surrounding fields and hillsides.
Auntie Anna, Uncle Robert and ken-it-all Berta pulled on at our backs. Within an hour my cousin and me fell out about a rope-swing the local weans left on a nearby tree. I told her she was too heavy and would break it. ‘Na, na, it’ll take the weight of a dozen men,’ she called, as she duly ran at the poor thing. I can still hear the crack of the branch splitting in two. Aye, she broke it! I had planned to play on that rope all day, hence the moody with our Berta, so instead I went into the village with Mammy and my wee sister Mary.
The plumpy lady who ran the village post office was more than pleased to crack with our mother that morning, on account of them knowing each other, while Mary and me had a blether with some scaldy laddies.
‘What you doing?’ I asked, watching them carrying a bucket and a ball of string up towards a clump of trees behind an old derelict house.
‘We’re catching birds,’ answered one lad.
‘What for?’ Mary asked.
‘Cat’s fur, stupid,’ answered a wee fat one (who looked more like a red and brown turnip than a boy), obviously offended by our u
nwelcome intrusion. Do you notice that short men, even at a young age, always have more to say for themselves than the rest?
‘We’re going to trap birds under this bucket, but we have no intentions of harming any,’ said the tallest laddie. (See, I told you, only the wee chaps are lippy!)
‘Come on with us,’ he continued, ‘you can watch how it’s done.’
‘Don’t let them come, giggling women give the game away!’ said the neep-on-legs.
‘No we won’t, we can be quieter than laddies,’ I promised.
The neep stared into my face and then gave the real reason for excluding us. ‘Well, if you lot come, then the smell of you tinky stinkies will send the birds shrieking to the moon!’
I looked at my sister, knowing full well what her response to this uncouth laddie was about to be.
‘Say your prayers, you flea-ridden dung heap!’ she roared as she lunged, sinking talons into the wee fat lad’s two lugs. Rolling in among the grass and gravel she clung onto the lugs as if it were them that had offended us and not their owner.
‘Mary, get up out of there, that’s a disgusting way to behave. A’ these lads can see the big tear in your knickers,’ I said, worried that Mammy was about to come out of the shop and find her daughter wrestling in the dirt and gravel with a local laddie. Too late, she did, and was she not fury on fire!
‘Get that stopped this instant, you’re shaming me to death,’ she shouted.
Mary drew back, but managed a fine kick into the right shin of her opponent, who I’m more than certain wished he’d kept his mouth shut that quiet afternoon. Mary was not a big bairn, but by God, she was a fiery one, and it wasn’t the first time she flew at someone for calling her a tinker!
Mammy dragged the both of us along the river bank by the scruff and muttered away to herself at the same time, ‘Lord, I can’t turn my head for a shaking of a lamb’s tail and look what you two are up to. The village is out of bounds to you both, now are you hearing me?’
I nodded, but Mary did a fool thing by saying, ‘If you hadn’t appeared when you did, Mam, that wee cack-pot was a dead duck.’
‘She’s for it now,’ I thought. One thing we did NOT do, was answer Mammy back. Realising too late what she just said, Mary, in an attempt to make amends, blurted out, ‘Sorry, Mam, I didn’t mean that!’
Mammy was roused to the point of no return. Staring Mary in the eye, she told her, ‘You’re grounded!’
With Cousin Berta and me not speaking and our Mary kept in, I had nobody to play with. Our wee Renie was swingeing about a sore bellyache, so she was no use. And there was no way I would take Babsy to play, after her fouling her breeks back at Kindallachan, I didn’t want a repeat of that.
I told Daddy about the bird-trapping the Blair Atholl lads were planning on doing, and which they were going to show us until our Mary put a stop to that.
‘Och, we used to trap birds when I was a laddie,’ he told me. ‘Come, I’ll show you how it’s done.’ He took a piece of twig, a bitty string and a saucer, then proceeded to skill me in the art of a ‘Bird-Trapper’ of the highest degree.
‘Courie yourself flat on the ground,’ he said. ‘The first rule is don’t be seen. No bird will fly within a mile if it can deek [see] you, so rule number one is hide. Number two, make sure the string is long enough so when it is tied round the twig it can be concealed in the grass from there to your hand. Three, when you have your bird under the saucer,’ (this was only a guide, he reminded me, I’d need something a lot bigger than a saucer) ‘yank at breakneck speed and walla, a pet bird!’
Auntie Anna who was listening to us said, ‘You don’t want to be lying in among the undergrowth for fear of the wee throat-ripper, lassie!’
‘What was that, Auntie?’ I asked, pulling my collar up under my chin!
She leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘He’s a Dracula beastie, drinks rabbit blood, in fact any kind a blood at all, he’s no’ fussy. Folks say through the years over a hundred weans were sucked dry by the fiend, aye, right here in this very place. King o’ the weasels he’s known as, the Blair Atholl vampire!’
‘Auntie, for God’s sake, you don’t say!’ I burst out laughing, and so did my Daddy.
‘There’s a wee fat lad with two swelt lugs in the village, I doubt the bloodsucker must have missed him,’ I told her, ‘because you should have seen the blood Queen Mary (Mrs Dracula) removed from him!’
‘Aye, you may well laugh, but there’s many a tale about the cold-blooded beastie. Just make sure you and him dinna come face to face one of these days, bairn. Mark my words, it will stay the whole of your life with you!’
That evening I spent ages lying on my back watching the first of the swallows winging by on the first stage of their long journey to the other side of the world. I remember thinking, ‘How in the name do these tottie wee craturs stay up in the sky? Surely the angels help them.’ Whenever I didn’t understand things, I always found the answers my young brain sought in the work of the angels, then changed the subject of my thoughts.
I walked up the sandy bank of the burnside, tiptoeing as rabbit upon rabbit scooted in and out their burrows, and I thought on the dreaded weasel, father’s snares and, not least, the Gamey. What I didn’t know then was that the dreaded mixi disease was lingering in the shadows to almost scour the poor beasties from the face of the earth.
They certainly had little going for them, the poor souls. But that was in their future and mine. That evening was so beautiful, so peaceful. The ‘too-too-the-noo’ of the wood pigeon and the water wriggling on its never-ending journey down the burn were the only sounds to be heard. Then another sound filled my ears: ‘Jessie, Jessie, cocoa!’
‘That will do for me,’ I thought, ‘I hope Mammy’s made scones, I’m dying o’ hunger.’
Next morning the sun hadn’t made up his mind if he wanted to shine or not, but it was fairly warm.
‘There’s thunder in the air the day,’ said Uncle Robert. Like his brother Wullie, he was never wrong with his weather predictions.
‘Will it be worth my while hanging out a washing then, Robert?’ asked Mammy.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, Jeannie, I think you’ll be a’right, it’s heading over from the west south-west,’ he added, sticking one finger in the air, wetting it on his tongue, then thrusting it back up again.
‘Strange,’ I thought. ‘How would that tell him if my mother should do a washing or not?’
‘It will reach us by the late afternoon,’ he concluded.
That news had her hurrying out the washing tub, as Uncle put the thickest sticks on the fire.
Daddy had left before we stirred, to do a bit of moling round the local farms. I tried to break the ice between Cousin Berta and myself, but she huffed her eyes shut and turned her back. Honestly, she could be right throng, that lass, when she put her mind to it.
‘You please yourself,’ I told her, adding, before striding off, ‘life’s too short for that carry-on.’
Mary had positioned herself halfway up the tree that Mammy hung her washing-line from, and sat there, legs dangling over a branch, so that she could keep an eye on her.
So it looked like I was on my own to go bird-trapping.
The ball of string I took from the handy box kept in the bus boot seemed okay for the job. A broken stick flung down by Mary from her perch would be fine, but what was I going to use to trap the birds?
‘Jessie,’ called my suds-covered mother, ‘before you go playing, pet, can you do me a big favour and wash the dishes?’
‘Och! Mam, do I have to?’
‘Would you look at the mountain of dirty clothes piled at my feet, lassie. Now, if you don’t want to join the craw in the tree,’ (meaning Mary) ‘get washing the dishes!’
I looked up at Mary and thought she did resemble a crow. Rather than sit arguing with her all day, then the cursed dishes it was.
This, though, was a blessing in disguise, for with each porridge plate plonked into the water, a b
ig smile spread over my face. I had found my ‘trap’! Why, of course, the dish-basin, none other.
‘Mam, can I use the basin?’ I asked, approaching her gingerly.
‘What for?’ she asked, rubbing the soapsuds from her rolled-up sleeves.
‘Something.’ I answered, keeping my eyelids lowered.
‘No!’
‘Please Mammy, It’s not for anything dirty, like keeping baggy minnows in.’
‘Go and play. Dish-basins are for dishes, and nothing else!’
I remember a countrywoman we saw once washing her baby’s nappies in her basin. Mammy called her a filthy, clattie manishie (woman) and refused a cup of tea from the kind wife. ‘I’d rather die o’ the drouth than take tea from a cup that’d been washed in the same basin as shitty hippins,’ she said.
But the trapping was on me and I had to have the basin. Anyway, there was a big difference between a bum wrap and a bird trap.
‘Mammy will kill me for sure,’ were the thoughts racing through my head as I found the perfect spot, with basin securely held under my arm. I quickly set about propping it up with the string-tied twig. Lastly, a sprinkling of breadcrumbs finished the job. I stood back, and when I thought it looked right, took the loose end of the string and found a braw bit in the undergrowth to hide in from any suspicious birdy.
I may have lain in that spot for hours, for I soon lost all track of time, when a flutter of wings caught my attention. A blackbird was filling itself to its brim with my tasty crumbs. ‘Jings, I’m not needing a bird of that size,’ I thought. ‘And if it bides under the basin it’ll not leave any bread for wee-er birds. Away with you greedy blackie,’ I called out, ‘the free meal’s not for you, go!’ Instantly it flew off to pastures new.
Just when I thought my luck was out at this trapping carry-on, a wee curious bird settled itself at the mouth of the basin. It was, of all birds, my favourite: a wee cock-sparra. The hoppitty-hop curiosity of the tiny bird at the basin told me Blackie had left some crumbs, and yes, the little visitor was making his way under my trap.
