Janie lagged behind, eyeing the children playing round cottage doors, with a sense of triumph and pity. They were confined to their doors, they weren’t going on to ‘the next town’. Passing carters grumbled goodnight and rumbled out of sight up farm roads. Clusters of lights foretold another village, enclosing and cheering the travellers, letting go of them suddenly out into a darkness intensified by the remote glint of a lamp in an isolated farm house.
‘I’ll carry you on my back for a while,’ Liza offered, when the next four villages didn’t turn out to be the ‘next town’.
The darkness was more frightening from the height of Liza’s shoulders than it was on the ground. Branches tugged at Janie’s hair. The one shadow the two of them cast was taller than the trees themselves. A long hunchbacked stranger loping beside them.
‘Let me down, Mam,’ Janie begged. ‘I’m not tired now. Honest I’m not.’
‘I can see the lights of the next town now,’ Liza said. ‘We’ll be there in no time. And mind, Janie, when we reach the Diddle Doddle, we’re just there because we missed our last bus home. And our name’s Sinclair. Mind you don’t forget that if you’re asked any questions.’
* * *
The Diddle Doddle was filled with light and noise and people. A hot-plate glowed redly, sizzling with frying pans, the overpowering smell of onions tantalised hunger. Men spat on the sawdust on the floor. Women clattered enamel mugs on a table. Voices rose in laughter, song, oaths and temper. The owners of the voices were all vagrants. Janie instantly and warmly felt at home. An at-homeness which helped to cover Liza’s bewildered lostness.
A small tinker mended dishes on the table, her slim, brown fingers controlled her whirring, whirling mending wheel, setting her eyes free to watch the ever-opening Diddle Doddle door. She seemed to know everyone who came through it, greeting them like an unofficial hostess who also happened to be a true friend. The rare combination lit her with charm.
‘Strike me down stone dead, Mairi,’ she greeted a newcomer. ‘I thought you was bound for Mosstowie. The last time I saw your face it was set in the direction to Kinross. And is Lindsay with you this time at all, now?’
‘Never him.’ The newcomer resignedly slung her pack on the table. ‘He got himself mixed up with some whoreson of a McPhee at New Pitsligo. They were all set up to hawk the Bullers of Buchan airt when I last saw them. And I’m no’ sorry. I can tell you that, Aggie. I had my bellyful of the breed of him.’
‘It’s as I’ve always said, Mairi.’ Aggie’s wheel purred round with contentment. ‘The road’s always easier and faster when you take to it on your own. And there’s always a man to be had when the need for one comes over you. But the need’s not always over you. And, when it isn’t, any cove’s just a dead loss to you.’
The Diddle Doddle dimmed down with heat. Thick pipe smoke curled round it, padding its noise into a hum. Its occupants looked as hazy and relaxed as Janie felt. Voices made the most comforting sounds in the world.
‘You’re going to cross water within a three, my dear.’
A fortune teller peered down into Liza’s tin mug.
‘A sad crossing, my love. But you’ll survive it. I can see that in your face, as well as in your leaves. There’s a dark man here, too. He has crossed your life before. He’s in your path again. Still after you.’
‘That’s the Cruelty Man,’ Janie realised to herself. ‘He’s got a great big black moustache.’
‘This dark man has got an S in his name,’ the fortune teller continued. ‘You wouldn’t recognise a man with an S in his name, would you, now?’ she urged.
‘It isn’t the Cruelty Man.’ Janie turned away with relief. ‘He hasn’t got an S. His name’s F. Murray.’
A man with no legs startlingly propelled himself through the door.
‘It’s the Railway Tramp,’ the Dish Mender shouted gladly. ‘Bless you, Thoomikies, my wee love. You all set for the Timmer Market too?’
The legless man grinned. A great, black hairy grin.
‘Thoomikies is taking the short cut to the Market. Aren’t you, old Cock? Nipping over the sleepers, and all round the junctions,’ a man teased. ‘And don’t you fall asleep on the slag heap either. Old Thoomikies did that one night, and felt so burned up that he thought he was in hell at last. Didn’t you, son?’
The Diddle Doddle lifted up one voice and laughed. The Railway Tramp grinned in echo, squeezing himself compactly into the corner by the hot-plate and the wall, filling it so exactly that the room seemed only to be completely furnished at this moment. Janie stared at him fearfully. Their equal size brought their eyes level with each other. The tramp held a penny between his teeth. His great head nodded, beckoning Janie to come for the penny.
‘Go on, Littl’un,’ the Dish Mender coaxed. ‘It will please Thoomikies terrible if you take his penny. He’s fond of littl’uns, but they’re all so feared of him.’
But Janie couldn’t. Not even to please Thoomikies. She turned frightenedly away from his eyes.
With the entrance of Blind Jimmy, the Diddle Doddle began to sing.
The summer’s gone
And all the flowers are dying.
Led by Blind Jimmy, they all sang. As if in a sleep, their eyes closed, their bodies sagging across the table, or stretched in corners by the hot plate.
‘He can sing like an angel,’ the Dish Mender said sadly, ‘especially when you consider that he hasn’t got his sight. But for all that, Jimmy’s a bit too free with his hands the moment he gets within an inch of a woman.’
‘Aye,’ the Fortune Teller agreed drily. ‘Blind or no’ blind they always know their road in that direction.’
But the blind street singer’s voice transcended his natural instincts:
For I’ll be there
When summer’s in the meadows.
Or when the valley’s hushed
And white with snow.
The entrance of two policemen with the Warden of the Diddle Doddle brought Danny Boy to a premature close. The singers loved the law too little to serenade it. They closed up, condensing themselves along the forms, busying their fingers with the tools of their trades. The policemen examined the backs of their heads, recognising one here and there:
‘Been taking a turn through Balvenie woods lately, Joss?’
‘No, Sergeant. To tell you the honest truth, I’ve gone kinda off rabbits these days. They don’t agree with my digestion no more.’
‘You’ll no’ have gone off venison too, Joss?’ the Sergeant asked heavily.
‘I’m no’ sure, Sergeant. It’s so long since I’ve tasted a steak, that I forget if it speaks back to me now or no’.’
‘All signed in for the night, then?’ the Sergeant turned to the Warden.
‘Aye. Here’s the book. House full the night. Most of them are moving on the morn, though.’
‘The Bobbies have come for me and Mam,’ Janie thought, afraid, watching the policeman gaze down on the signatures in the book. Her fear communicated itself to them. They looked down at her curiously.
‘You’re a bit on the young side for this game, are you no’?’
‘She’s mine,’ Liza said. ‘She’s with me. We missed our last connection home.’
The policeman stared down on the book again:
‘Is your name MacVean?’
‘Yes,’ Liza answered with a voice that had no fear in it. ‘MacVean of Laverock.’
‘I thought we were Sinclairs now, Mam,’ Janie said, as they followed the Dish Mender and the other women up long stone steps to bed.
‘I know, Janie. I shouldn’t have told them who we were. But I just had to. It made me feel real for a minute just hearing to myself who I really was.’
The Diddle Doddle folk said goodbye to each other in their goodnights:
‘If I don’t see you in the morning before I go, Aggie, I’ll be catching up with you again at the Timmer Market.’
‘Aye. Or on the road to Foggie, maybe. I havena’ hawked that road fo
r years now.’
Their reunions were chance. Their goodbyes, being chance too, were without the regret that tinges ordinary goodbyes:
‘Good luck, Mairi, if you’re on the road before me in the morning. I’m bound for the herring town myself. I hope to get there before the season starts up.’
‘Janie,’ Liza whispered, when the lights were out. ‘Are you sleeping yet, Janie? You and me are going to give ourselves up the morn.’
Diddle Doddle life, wonderful to Janie, had frightened Liza more than the summons to court.
‘The years will birl bye in a blink,’ Liza assured Janie, as they sat together in the anteroom of the Courthouse, waiting for the Vigilance Officer to come and take Janie to a Home.
‘You’ve just got no idea how quick the years fly,’ Liza insisted, thereby also reassuring herself, as she sat there, carefully picking small digestible scraps off the bare bones of the Court’s decision and handing them to Janie.
‘The Home’s a hundred miles away. Three hours’ journey by train. The longest time you’ve ever been on a train. You’re going to like that fine, Janie.’
Liza’s voice increased the desolation of those last moments together. The anteroom smelt sharp and clinical as all Janie’s preconceived ideas of ‘a Home’. Its austerity more fearful than any pool of blood that had ever incarnadined the Lane. Its silence more ominous than all the curses coursing through the causeway.
Liza, feeling the chill of the anteroom too, floundered through it, falling back on a more familiar facet:
‘Poll and them fair got one in the eye. Thought all they had to do was to flock down to the Court and cock themselves up in the gallery, getting an eyeful of everything. But, no faith you. Nothing doing. They werena’ even allowed a foot across the door. I bet you a pound to a penny though, they’ve all draped themselves along the railings outside. Just waiting to gape when you come out. And that’s another shock in store for them. Like as not you’ll be taken out by the side door.’
Liza chuckled at the small triumph of it. And Janie was momentarily lifted out of bleakness into importance. I don’t want to go out by the side door, she thought protestingly. I want them all to see me. I’ll just cry and kick up something terrible, if they’re all there looking.
The Lane’s instinct both to provide and appreciate ‘a show’ was deeply ingrained in Janie. Such a moment came only once to the children of the Lane. Like the time when the Probation Officer had come to take Tom Shoggie to a Training Ship. How the Lane had lifted up its voice in lamentation.
‘God help us all. Mind you, there’s no gain-saying but thae Tom was a bit on the wild side. Still, he was just Maggie Shoggie’s craittur for all that.’
One would miss one’s epitaph completely, huddled out by a side door!
‘The Home’s in Aberdeenshire,’ Liza was saying. ‘Just a small home it is. Though all I can mind about Aberdeenshire is a hill called Lochnagar. There’s a song to that hill:
O for the crags that are wild and majestic.
I sigh for the valley of dark Lochnagar.
The Home’s in a place called Skeyne,’ Liza went on, ‘though I’ve never heard tell of Skeyne myself.’
Skeyne. Janie turned the sound of the place round and over in her mind. It was familiar. Like the bedcover that the Duchess crocheted on summer days. It had never reached an end in all the summers. Blue skeins. Yellow skeins. Red skeins. ‘All out of stock,’ the Duchess would grumble, ‘just when I needed skeins of that colour for my pattern.’ And the bright bedcover would disappear, bereaving the causeway of colour. But, on some other summer day, it would blaze back to the causeway, shimmering and rippling against the Duchess’s large bosom in triumphant folds. ‘I got the right skeins at last,’ she would inform the Lane. ‘And no’ before time neither.’
There was some magical quality to the Duchess’s bright bedcover. You felt it would never come to an end and turn into a real bedcover. And all because of some elusive skein. Skeyne. Janie liked the sound of the place where the Home was.
eight
SKEYNE never had the colour of its sound. It lay on the threshold of Deeside, a doormat against which hurrying tourists wiped their feet, their eyes straining ever forwards towards the greater glories of the Moor of Dinnet and Lochnagar. Skeyne lay sulking eternally under this slight, its grey face lined and loured with the perpetual shadow of the Cairngorm Mountains.
The Orphanage of Skeyne folds itself back from the main road, withdrawing into a huddle of trees. Tall trees, top-heavy and shaggy with crows’ nests, loud with their rancour. Trees that shuddered and whined throughout Janie’s first night in the Orphanage, twining their shadows across the walls of the dormitory.
It had been a long day. Still spring. But it seemed to have been spring in Grandmother’s country ages ago. A white, quiet spring, then. Now it was loud and yellow. The glare of daffodils crowding out the Orphanage garden still beat hotly under Janie’s heavy eyelids; the smell of them hovered through her senses. The suddenness of their impact had imprinted itself in her being. I’ll never smell a daffodil in all my life again without minding how I first saw the Orphanage.
So many things lay in mind. Urgent elusive scraps. The sense of lostness when the train screamed past Loch Na Boune, the last known landmark in Janie’s world. Screaming out of time and place altogether. I’m leaving my Mam. I’m leaving my Mam, it had panted. A loud thing in a living hurry. The places it had flashed through focusing in fragments now. Bending boulders like old men groping round a high hill. Dead Man’s Bells fleeing whitely from their own wood, shivering down the banks, bowing the train out and past. OYNE in big white letters on a small, black station. A strange name for a place, the only name I remember now. I’m sure I saw it though. Some day I’ll go back to see if it’s real.
All things seemed unreal to Janie. The dormitory most of all. She looked anxiously over to the chair beside her bed. Her new hat lay safely. So huge that it hid her small bundle of underclothes. She felt her head, still with a small sense of shock, although it had been shaved hours ago, after she left the Courthouse. This morning. Or was it yesterday morning? Time had leapt out of bounds. She lay trying to catch time and return it to its proper place. Its hours eluded her. How enviably Peggy’s long hair scattered itself on the pillow there. If I got one wish I’d just ask for all my hair back again. No, I wouldn’t. I’d just ask to get home to my Mam again. Not having any hair wouldn’t matter if I could just get home again.
But home lay too raw and tender to the piercing touch of thought yet. There was escape from thought in listening to the whispers flitting frighteningly like small bats through the dim dormitory.
‘Did you have to read the inscription above the front door, Janie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve got to remember it by heart as well, though.’
‘I do. “Proctor’s Orphan Training Home 1891”.’
‘If ever you don’t do your work right, Mrs. Thane will take you round to the front door to read it again.’
‘She makes you say “training” three times. That’s so’s you’ll never forget.’
‘And you’ve got to learn Table Manners off the Card as well, Janie. But you’ll get a week to learn them in.’
‘I’ve learned a bit of them already:
I must not talk about my food,
Nor fret if I don’t think it good.’
‘Do you know something, Janie? We get porridge for breakfast every morning except Sundays.’
‘And we get fish on Sundays. Haddocks. I just can’t abide them. You get an egg on Easter Sunday though, Janie.’
‘And an egg on Christmas morning. Don’t forget, Peggy, we get an egg on Christmas morning.’
A panic seized Janie and forced her upright in bed:
‘When will I get home? I’ve asked everybody. The Court Man and the Vigilance Officer and Mrs. Thane and just everybody. They all let on they don’t hear me. But somebody must know when?’
‘When
you’re sixteen, most likely.’ Peggy’s casualness distressed Janie. ‘At least that’s when I’m getting home. When I’m sixteen.’
‘But that’s ages!’ Janie’s distress increased. ‘That’s just years and years. I’m not nine yet. Not till October. I’ll have to stay here for eight years.’
‘Only seven and a half years, Janie,’ Peggy corrected. ‘If you’re eight and a half now.’
‘But it’s still years and years.’ Janie was disconsolate. ‘My Mam could die by that time.’
‘You can write a letter to her once a month, Janie.’
‘Mind what you write though. Mrs. Thane reads all the letters before they go out.’
‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll mark every day off on the calendar till I’m sixteen. It will pass quicker that way.’
‘That’s what I thought when I first came, Janie. Then I just forgot.’
‘I won’t forget.’ Janie felt very certain. ‘I’ll never forget to count the days off.’
‘Wheesht! Janie!’ Peggy admonished. ‘The boys’ dormitory has gone quiet now. Mrs. Thane will be shouting up for silence if we don’t go quiet too.’
Janie pulled herself down under the sheets, and lay staring for a long time at the changing flecks of colour that always danced into vision when she shut her eyes very tightly. ‘I won’t forget,’ she thought, staring. ‘I know fine that I’ll never forget to mark the days off.’
nine
YOU’RE right lucky, Janie. Leaving and every-thing.’ The wistful whispers had echoed enviously through the kitchen all morning.
The White Bird Passes Page 8
