The Farm Girl's Dream

by Eileen Ramsay

  Victoria recognized the bitterness in his voice and was distressed. She fished in the pocket of her dress. ‘Look, Father.’ She held up two perfect halves of a walnut shell.

  He took the shells from her with a pitying look. ‘No, don’t tell me, that nonsense about the walnut shell. “Put your nice day in here, wee John, and when the cold wind blows, bring it out and it’ll warm ye.” Silly notion, Victoria. It’s good hot coal and fine foods and wines that warm ye, and coats and boots with fur linings. And you won’t get those by struggling away in this patch of mud, till they cart you off dead to throw you into more Angus mud.’

  Desperately she tried to repair the day. ‘No, Father, it’s a lovely idea. This could be our first walnut shell day – yours and mine. We’re here together; we have had our picnic.’ She looked up at him with those eyes so like his own and smiled shyly at him. She really was a fetching wee thing. ‘I always wanted to know you, you know. I used to worry so much that you didn’t want me. Maybe,’ she began tentatively, ‘we could really get to know one another.’

  He smiled at her, his well-practised, devastating smile that never failed. It didn’t fail him now. She tucked her arm into his and sighed happily.

  ‘Don’t hang on to idle dreams, lass. Life is tough and you have to fight for what you want. Come on, we had better be getting back. I’m out of cigarettes. Eight pence they asked me for ten State Express yesterday. I had to have Black Cat at fourpence-halfpenny.’

  Without thinking he stopped and swung his arm, and Victoria saw her grandfather’s walnut shell sail in an arc through the air and land far out in the silvery waters of the Tay. She choked back a sob. She guessed that he would not appreciate tears. Tears were for babies, not modern young women. It wasn’t his fault. She had not told him that that particular shell had actually been given to her by her beloved grandfather. He didn’t understand, but she would make him understand. Like so many women before her, Victoria forgave him. She stifled her fears and vowed to change him. She could do it, she just knew she could, and how happy Catriona would be.

  *

  That same afternoon Dr Currie threw her car through the wonderful wrought-iron gates of Professor Dobson’s home on Perth Road, narrowly missing two Italian flowerpots, a gardener, who swore under his breath with amazing fluency, and two of Dundee’s matrons, who had had to walk to the soirée and were therefore doubly annoyed.

  They could not, of course, let their ire show. Not only was Dr Currie Dundee’s leading female medical practitioner but, gossip had it, she was related to several of the finest families, not in Scotland – insular, surely – but in England, and her little eccentricities like motoring and smoking cigarettes were therefore to be tolerated. The good doctor knew exactly what was going on in their minds and despised them for it, while at the same time she admired such virtues as they undoubtedly possessed.

  ‘Got more than enough patients, Maudie,’ she yelled to Mrs Lionel Brewster, who was in jam. ‘Never hit anyone I didn’t want to yet,’ she added to Mrs Samuel Taylor, who was in jute. She forced the car to a halt just the right side of her host’s prized rose garden, jumped out with an amazing show of well-shaped and expensively stockinged leg and swept the bewildered ladies before her down the fairly steep driveway to the door, where several attendants waited to take their wraps.

  ‘Price of sugar must be playing hell with jam-making,’ she went on for no apparent reason, except perhaps to add to their shock with her use of the common word for the Kingdom of Beelzebub. The huge entrance hall was already full of all the local dignitaries, whom the university’s professor of music and his wife, Jessie, had gathered together at an extortionate two shillings a head to drink tea and listen to a little music, all in aid of the Boxes for Jocks campaign.

  ‘I hope to God if I have to listen to music, Archie,’ said Dr Currie as she kissed her old friend, ‘that it’s you playing the piano and not some ghastly soprano screeching away.’

  ‘Both, except that she doesn’t screech.’

  ‘Spare me, Archie, you old liar. Every soprano screeches – the only bearable human voice is a basso profundo. Well, I’ll park myself in the back row so that I can escape if it’s unbearable. Being a doctor does have some advantages. If I leave, no one will know whether I’m on an errand of mercy or merely bored out of my tiny mind.’ She knew perfectly well that her host would not be insulted by her pre-performance criticism of his entertainment and turned to his wife. ‘You’ve done wonders with this hall, Jessie, and those stained-glass windows are a delight.’

  She moved away and joined a group of local businessmen and their wives, who were all bemoaning the atrocious rise in prices.

  ‘Do you know, I told Jessie I would make her some egg salad sandwiches. Three shillings a dozen for local eggs. Can you believe it? Still, I’ve done my bit.’

  ‘It’s not just the prices,’ said Alistair Smart, owner of a local jute mill. ‘It’s the shortage of manpower. I can’t get an office boy for love nor money. Three weeks I’ve advertised in the Courier, but nothing but the halt, the lame and the lazy have turned up. And no, don’t tell me I shouldn’t turn away someone who’s lame – the poor man didn’t have any of the skills I need. I did give him a chance, but every time he added up a row of figures, and it took him all day, he got a different answer and none of them right.’

  Dr Currie moved closer. ‘What else does your office boy have to do, Alistair?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, adding up accurately is vital. Then he mustn’t be afraid of the new telephone system – up-to-the-minute my firm is – a neat hand, of course, and an ability to look a customer in the eye without being shy or bold. Impossible to find.’ He looked at her hopefully. ‘Don’t tell me you know a boy with all those talents, Flora?’

  Dr Currie smiled at him and slipped her arm through his. ‘I may just have the answer to your prayers, Alistair. Let’s slip out before the singing . . .’

  They wandered out into the lovely garden, which sloped down towards the Tay. Flora led her reluctant escort down to a seat under some gnarled old apple trees.

  ‘This had better be good, Flora. Archie and Jessie always have the best musicians.’

  ‘It’s a soprano, Alistair,’ replied Dr Currie, as if that explained everything. ‘Don’t fret. We’ll hear her down here and with less damage to our eardrums. Now, this job. I just happen to know someone who is young, smart, intelligent, able to use the telephone, very good at figures and with a fine, legible hand.’

  ‘And why isn’t this paragon in the army?’

  Flora Currie held up her cigarette for him to light and gave him a straight answer. ‘Because she’s a girl.’

  ‘A girl. I’ve never heard of an office girl. How old is she?’

  ‘Sixteen. She’s my landlady’s daughter – really university material, but the family fell on hard times. Give her a chance. I think the only thing she can’t do is make tea.’

  He laughed. ‘Miss Jessop makes my tea. It will be hard enough having another female around the place, without having one who might usurp her rights.’

  ‘Good. Come on, there’s your soprano. I’m going to stay down here to smoke. When may I bring Victoria in?’

  ‘Just an interview: I’m not promising. If Miss Jessop objects . . . Very well. Tell her to come tomorrow at eleven.’

  Dr Currie smiled and lit her cigarette. She had done her part. It was up to Victoria to win round the formidable tea-making Miss Jessop.

  *

  Victoria was too tired to eat that night when she came home from the mill. Catriona had made a rabbit stew, with two rabbits that Tam Menmuir had brought her, together with some carrots that ‘will nae last the winter, missus’ and an earthenware bowl containing eggs that had been preserved in glass water. Catriona had wept over the simple goodness of her friends, who had little themselves but were always ready to share. But even the enticing smell of the stew could not tempt Victoria’s appetite.

  Catriona looked at her. The girl wa
s too thin. My bairn is fading away in front of my very eyes, she thought. She’s gone from wee lassie to auld woman, and what can I do to stop it?

  She heard the sound of the front door opening. Dr Currie was home. That should encourage Victoria to make a pretence of eating.

  The doctor came in. ‘Come along, Catriona,’ she ordered, as she saw the state of apathy in which the girl sat. ‘Major surgery required. Put that wonderful stew to the back of the boiler, pour me a cup of tea to hold me and then – we are going to give Madame Victoria here a bath.’

  Victoria jumped up. It was years since she had had to be bathed. She looked at her mother in alarm, but Catriona looked just as puzzled as she.

  ‘I’m clean, Dr Currie. I’ll have a bath on Saturday night for the kirk.’

  ‘You’ll have a bath tonight, my dear, for the office.’

  She laughed at their expressions and told them of Victoria’s opportunity and, as she had known, Victoria brightened up and, her fatigue forgotten, became once again an excited sixteen-year-old.

  ‘Now, you haven’t got the job yet, but he’s fairly desperate. Gosh, how rude! I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded, but Mr Smart has a secretary, a formidable elderly spinster, whom he inherited from his father, and she’s the hurdle over which you, my dear, will have to jump. As far as I can gather, she won’t mind how much office work you do, just so long as you don’t run round after Mr Smart. She likes to do that herself. She is also unbelievably efficient and may make you wish you were back in the mill. She is, although you are to pretend you don’t know, a teeny weeny bit afraid of the telephone.’

  Victoria clasped her thin, reddened hands together. ‘And I’m not, thanks to you, Dr Currie.’

  ‘If I needed an office girl, I would hire you myself, Victoria. But now we need to get the smell and stour of jute out of that lovely hair of yours, and out from under your fingernails.’

  ‘And out of my nose, Dr Currie. Oh, just think, Mamma, if I get this job, I may never sneeze again. Did you know, Dr Currie, that lots of the mill lasses take snuff to clear their nostrils?’

  ‘Well, it’s a blessing that’s a bad habit you never developed.’

  An hour later a very sweet-smelling, happy girl with a rediscovered appetite sat down to eat. Victoria looked at her mother and at their lodger, who in such a short time had become such a part of their family. What could she say? What could she do to let them know how much they meant to her?

  Dr Currie looked at her and smiled softly. ‘Don’t fret, Victoria. Words aren’t always necessary between people who care for one another.’

  6

  THE BRITISH ARMY LOST 60,000 men in 1916, 19,000 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Almost everyone had someone ‘out there’ or knew someone whose brother, uncle, father or sometimes, God forbid, all three were there. Davie Menmuir came back to Angus with lungs blackened by smoke and his mother told Catriona a little of the horrors he had experienced. Catriona listened with sympathy and patience, but tried to shoo Victoria away. She had the same argument with herself over Dr Currie’s vast learning and was in a quandary – on one hand approving of the pursuit of knowledge, but on the other disapproving of most of the knowledge that the lady doctor had.

  ‘It’s not fitting that Victoria should hear such things,’ she had explained diffidently at the dinner table, and now she certainly did not want her daughter to hear, almost at first hand, of the horrors of war.

  But Victoria was fascinated, for Robert was out there, wasn’t he? She had told him of her new job. He had said in one of his letters that it was so wonderful to hear of everyday things. She had told him of her interview with Mr Smart, and of the much more frightening Miss Jessop.

  But I got the job, probably because there was no one else, and there is so much work and I love every minute. Miss Jessop is really very sweet and thinks I should go to a business college to learn shorthand . . .

  But Robert did not write back to say how pleased he was that she was out of the mill – he had hated, he had written in one letter, to think of her in a jute mill, but her being there had helped him, in a way, to be accepted by the rank and file. With his accent, his education and that honourable before his name (which a sergeant had discovered and used, not unkindly, but in fun) Robert should have been an officer and at first the men hadn’t accepted him. But his girl worked in a mill – everybody’s girl worked in a mill – so Robert became one of the boys. But he did not write, although Victoria refused to believe that anything was wrong. She wrote again, telling him that she had actually written a letter to Calcutta, India.

  And then, in late April, when she had almost given up hope, there came a letter of beautiful parchment quality, so stiff that it crackled in her hands.

  ‘It’s from London,’ she breathed in awe, looking at the envelope and the postmark but making no attempt to open the letter. ‘Who do I know in London?’

  ‘Open it and find out, girl,’ said Dr Currie with her usual cool common sense, and Victoria did so. A small blood-stained piece of paper fell out as she withdrew the letter from its beautiful envelope. She bent to pick it up and then, recognizing the almost indecipherable spidery writing, held it against her breast as she read the other letter.

  Dear Miss Cameron,

  The enclosed letter was found in my son’s battle-dress at the military hospital in France some time ago, but I only now find myself able to deal with it. The news of course was so appalling that, if you can understand a mother’s love, I was quite unable to cope . . .

  ‘It’s from Robert’s mother,’ Victoria whispered, lifting a white, drained face to Dr Currie. Her mind leaped swiftly to the obvious conclusion. ‘He’s dead,’ she moaned, as the awful reality of the dried blood forced itself on her consciousness, ‘killed, in France.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Dr Currie, but Victoria had gone back to the letter. She read on.

  ‘I don’t understand. No, wait . . .’

  The sight of my beautiful baby, his face swathed in bandages, his sensitive hands smashed . . . I can’t bear to see him and, for his sake as well as my own, I have left him with his father at the hospital at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh. I felt, although I am at a loss to understand how you can even have met one another, that a visit from you might cheer him up. I enclose, together with his letter to you, a banker’s draft to cover any expenses you might incur.

  Julia, Lady Inchmarnock

  Victoria sat in a crumpled heap in the chair by the fire, where Dr Currie had unceremoniously planted her with her head between her knees, and she handed Dr Currie the letter. The blood-stained paper she kept to herself to read later on, if she could decipher the words. Had he been writing to her when he was hit? Had he been carrying the letter when they had gone into action? It did not matter. Recently, when she had almost believed that he had forgotten her, Robert had been thinking of her and writing to her.

  ‘Well, you’ll go, Victoria?’

  To Edinburgh? Going to Fife was an adventure. Victoria tried to remember what Robert looked like. How often had she met him? How often had they written? She still clutched the blood-stained piece of paper with the half-written letter. She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, of course I’ll go. But, oh, Dr Currie, I’ll be so scared.’

  ‘We’ll go together.’ Dr Currie also made instant decisions but, unlike Victoria, she had years of experience of doing so. ‘I’d quite like to see how they’re handling things at Craiglockhart – should be jolly interesting. It was a spa, you know, before the war, a fearfully expensive watering hole for the idle rich who ate or drank too much. We’ll stay the night, Victoria, and make a holiday of it. I have a cousin who’ll put us up. We’ll have an adventure. I wonder if your mother would come . . . a ladies’ day out? Afternoon tea at The George. We all deserve some fun. Work, work, work – ruins more than just your lily-white hands, Victoria.

  By the time Dr Currie had finished talking, Victoria no longer looked as if she was going to be viol
ently ill. ‘He’s alive, Dr Currie. Robert’s alive.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ was all the doctor said.

  Catriona could not possibly go to Edinburgh. With two of them out of the house, it would be a good chance for a thorough spring-clean. The house pleased her now: she no longer felt as if she did not belong and, although everything was in pristine condition, she would enjoy re-establishing her old tradition. The Priory had been spring-cleaned every year. It would be the same with Blackness Road. Catriona smiled quietly to herself at the thought of the pleasures in store.

  She tried not to show her hurt that Victoria had been corresponding with a young man and had never even told her own mother. ‘It is the twentieth century,’ she reminded herself. ‘Things are different from how they were in my young day.’

  Instead of scolding Victoria for deceit, she did everything in her power to make sure that her daughter enjoyed this first exciting train journey as much as possible. Even though Catriona was quite sure that sandwiches made with her own bread would be infinitely superior to anything the railway company could manage, she gave in to Dr Currie’s plea that Victoria should be allowed to be her guest for the day. The banker’s draft had been sent back to London, with a short note signifying that it might better be used for one of the many war charities – Catriona was embarrassed and angry that anyone should think her daughter could not afford to travel.

  Victoria slept not a wink the night before the impending journey. She took out her few letters from Robert and read them, desperately trying to remember him. They had been children, and it had all been so long ago. When she did conjure up a picture of him, he appeared dressed in silver armour like an illustration by Alma-Tadema, and with a halo of light around his beautiful head.

  It was a groggy Victoria who boarded the Edinburgh train the next morning. Even the lovely new Border tweed costume that Catriona had bought for her from D. M. Brown’s in Dundee, at the unforgivable price of five whole carefully saved guineas, failed to cheer her. She had never been in a hospital; she had never seen anyone hurt or injured; and the lovely old spa was said to be full of terribly injured young men. What would she do if she started to cry, or ran screaming from the place at her first sight of horror or pain? More terrifying still was the nightmare thought: what if she did not recognize Robert? She had met him only twice, and his mother had said that his head was bandaged.