Another Time, Another Place

by Jessie Kesson

  * * *

  The stubble fields crackled like spun glass beneath their feet as they made their way to the gate. The field stood stooked. Golden tents in a serried array.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ Kirsty said, ‘for another year.’

  The contentment in her voice reached out to touch the others. As if she had handed each of them a gift of unlimited leisure.

  There was nothing, the young woman realised, as they leant over the gate, reviewing the scene of their ended labour, nothing in all the world that could ease your own tiredness like watching others still at work.

  ‘You would think Finlay hadn’t another minute to live! The way he’s hounding the Italians.’ Kirsty didn’t blame him for that. For they had no idea, she claimed. None at all. ‘Look see,’ she commanded, ‘they’re missing the stack every time. The sheaves are slipping off their forks before they reach the stack.’

  ‘Ah, well then.’ There was a hint of satisfaction in Meg’s voice as they turned to go. ‘That’ll give Finlay a few gray hairs. That’ll teach him who his real workers are.’

  Turning now on the young woman who was lagging behind, Kirsty demanded to know what ailed her, that she had so little say for herself the night. If it was the stooking that had knackered her, then God help her at the lifting of the tatties, Kirsty prophesied. She’d know then what tiredness was, walking around for days with a broken back.

  It was the thistles, the young woman said, they had started to scratch her all over. There was, Meg agreed, more thistles than corn this year. But it was no wonder the young woman was scratched all over. Anybody would be scratched, Kirsty pointed out, if they were daft enough to go to the stooking in a short-sleeved blouse. And a skirt up to their knees. Kirsty had never, she claimed, ‘seen the like’. But, by God, the young woman would know all about it when she got into bed the night. The heat of the blankets would see to that.

  They were right, Kirsty and Meg, and that was the trouble, they were right about everything. And the righter they were the more resentful the young woman became. Their cottar houses, ‘tied cottages’, only partially described their way of life. They were ‘tied’ to each other. Dependent on each other, in the very isolation of their habitation.

  The change that had come over the young woman since the arrival of the Italians might have escaped their microscopic eyes, if it had been gradual. But it hadn’t been gradual. It had overwhelmed her, taking herself by surprise. A key which had opened a door that had never been unlocked. And herself becoming the prisoner, stumbling blind, into the light of a new awareness, bursting out of her body in response to Luigi’s admiration, shouted in the fields, whispered in the bothy . . . Bella. Bella. Bella ragazza . . .

  It wasn’t for Luigi that she had donned her short-sleeved blouse, or kilted her skirt up to her knees. And Paolo hadn’t noticed. She could have been Kirsty or Meg, concealed within their woollen grays.

  She ran, now, where once she would have walked, leaving them behind to their own middle-aged pace, ignoring their tight-lipped comments. ‘For she could,’ they observed, ‘fairly shift when the Italians were around. Flaunting her bare legs in front of them. Showing off, just.’

  They were right about that too, about ‘showing off’. It was just that she had never before been aware of all the things she had to ‘show off’ . . .

  * * *

  ‘God almighty, Beel,’ Kirsty protested as the tractor roared round the corner sending them scurrying against the dyke. ‘You damned nearly had the lot of us head first into the ditch!’

  ‘You wouldn’t have drowned,’ Beel assured her. ‘We drained the ditch the other day.’

  ‘If Finlay caught you taking round the corner at a lick like that, burning up the tyres . . .’ The threat implied in Kirsty’s voice took the grin off Beel’s face, reminding him of more serious matters.

  ‘Finlay,’ he remembered, shouting down from the tractor, ‘Finlay says if you see Elspeth at the grocer’s van, you might tell her he’s expecting her to lowse to the threshing mill, first thing Tuesday morning.’

  ‘Finlay’s got a hope,’ Kirsty snapped. ‘Some nerve.’ Elspeth, she reminded him, had refused to set foot in a field with the Italians, and she for one didn’t blame Elspeth for that. She would have felt the same herself if her Alick had been missing in Italy.

  ‘Better dead than missing,’ Meg concluded. ‘You know where you are when you’re dead.’

  * * *

  ‘The seaplanes! The seaplanes!’

  The bairns, shouting in the distance, quickened their pace. Either they were late, or the bairns had got out of school early.

  ‘The seaplanes! The seaplanes!’

  ‘That damned thing’s on the go again.’ Meg brushed all interest in the weapons of a world war aside, turning to admonish the excited chil­dren ‘Never mind the seaplanes. Get yourselves in amongst the stubble there. And gather up some corn for the hens.’

  They were flying low, the seaplanes, skimming huge and heavy across the firth. So heavy, the young woman stood wondering how they could ever raise themselves up into the sky.

  ‘You’re just as bad as the bairns,’ Kirsty admonished her, ‘standing there gooking. As if your man wasn’t expecting his supper the night.’

  * * *

  Out now from the hard brightness, into the dead dimness of her kitchen, the contrast caught at the young woman’s throat. And stuck there, tangible. A lump, preventing words from coming out. If words could be found, for the worst thing about working in the fields was getting geared up again, to tackle the work lying undone in the house.

  ‘Moonlight becomes you

  It goes with your hair’

  the singer assured her when she turned on the wireless,

  ‘You certainly know

  The right thing to wear.’

  She did too, but only in her imagination, and in an absorbed study of Kirsty’s mail-order catalogue. But two shillings a week—the limit of the instalments she could afford—defied imagination, and whittled choice down to bare essentials, working boots for her man, wellingtons for herself.

  ‘If I say I love you

  I want you to know

  It isn’t because it’s moonlight

  Though . . .

  Moonlight becomes you . . .’

  ‘You’re early, surely.’ The unexpected arrival of her man set her off on the attack. ‘I’m just this minute in. And the supper’s not on yet.’

  ‘A cup of tea will suit me fine.’

  His mild acceptance increased her resentment. It was not a fitting apology for an intrusion into her rare moments of privacy. Intrusions that seemed to surround, and close in on her—Kirsty, Meg, Beel, Finlay, the lee-long day. Himself, the long night.

  ‘The heifer’s at the drop of calving,’ he said, easing himself down on the settle. ‘Her udder’s swollen. Gey and big, we could be in for a night of it. It being her first calf, you might take a turn up to the byre later on. I’ll maybe need a hand.’

  ‘Aye. All right,’ she agreed, wondering where her resentment had disappeared to, and why it had ever been there in the first place.

  ‘You’d be better of the lantern,’ he suggested, as he rose to go back to the byre. ‘I’ll away and fill it up for you.’

  * * *

  She had no need of the lantern. Real darkness never fell down out of the night. It was when it rose up out of the ground that you could lose your bearings, and yourself.

  Besides, she liked walking in the dark. There was something nocturnal in her. Atavistic. Something that had never had a chance.

  The reflection of Meg’s fire flickered against the window. Enough edge to the nights now for a fire. The time of fires, she remembered, stopping to watch the flames rising up from the burning of the whins, that snapped and crackled in protest to the night.

  Unprepared for the voice whispering behind her. ‘Cara . . . cara mia . . .’ She turned to confront Luigi. Grasping her by the shoulders, he pulled her against himself. ‘Possee
ble . . . posseeble . . . one time posseeble . . .’ Taken by surprise, anger lent harshness to her voice. ‘No possible. No time possible . . .’

  ‘Scusi, signora. Scusi, scusi, mi scusi.’

  The supplication in Luigi’s voice, his instant humble acceptance of rejection dissolved her anger. Fear had done that to Luigi. She knew that, as she watched him clinging to the fence, fumbling his way back to the bothy. Fear always had the power to humiliate.

  ‘I thought I smelt burning.’ Flinging open her door, Meg crouched within it, her head thrust forward, peering accusingly out into the night. ‘I could swear I smelt burning.’

  ‘Wrong spy, Meg.’ The young woman’s laughter relieved her tension. ‘You’re right about one thing, though,’ she conceded. ‘Your nose would be worth five pounds in a pointer pup! They’ve made a start to burning the whins up at Achullen.’

  She arrived at the byre in the nick of time. One of the older calves, overcome by curiosity, had got out of its loose box, hell-bent on making the acquaintance of its newly-born kinsman, to the fury of the cow, butting and lashing out at friend, foe, and all inanimate things alike.

  ‘Hold on to the daft devil,’ her man commanded, ‘till I get the cow settled.’

  A safe place the byre, lacking the competitive­ness of all other areas of farm work. No ‘knacks’­—implying that there were several methods—needed here. There was only one way to milk a cow. And the young woman had mastered it. Only one way to calve a cow, and her man was familiar with it.

  A fine place to be born in, the byre. Sweetened by the cows’ breaths, and the tang of newly-sliced turnips. The relationship between her man and the brute beasts he worked amongst becoming intimate, at times like these. A warm ‘mash’ for the cow, a gift for her motherhood with a touch of black treacle added as a treat ‘for a good lass’.

  The newly-born calf was beginning to find its balance. Staggering to grope under the cow in search of its udder. Licking her calf from end to end, almost knocking it over in an excess of maternal devotion. A pity, the young woman thought, watching her man guiding the calf to its urgent objective, a pity. It was to be a sucker calf, a pity it was a bull calf. Not well enough bred to enjoy a lifetime of lascivious freedom. ‘You’re a fine calfie,’ she assured it, stroking its damp head. ‘A fine calfie.’ Pity to end up a stirk, for prime beef. But she didn’t mention that to the newly-born calf.

  ‘It’s lucky in a way though,’ she reflected, as her­self and her man made their way home from the byre. ‘It will be left with its mother. Sucking for a long time.’

  ‘But God help us the day it stops sucking.’

  Her man was right, she remembered. The crying of the cow when its calf was weaned would make of the byre a place of lamentation. For endless days.

  * * *

  She had spent the whole of yesterday evening on her knees in her yard, untangling her sweet-peas. Persuading them to climb up the tiers of twine she had woven between the posts, in an attempt to give them individuality, to discover this morning that they had defied her efforts, scrambling through each other, their tendrils in a twist, clutching at each other’s hair, as if they couldn’t bear to grow up apart.

  She would, Kirsty suggested, peering over the fence, have been a lot better with a bit of netting wire. For Kirsty ‘hoped to God’ that the young woman wasn’t expecting to win a prize at the flower show in the village ‘with rogue sweet-peas. Running riot all over the place’.

  She had no intention, the young woman snapped, offended by such unwanted criticism, no intention in the world, of setting foot within a mile of the flower show. Nor of ‘exhibiting’ sweet-peas.

  She must go, Kirsty insisted. They always went. It was expected. They all went together. The young woman would have to put in an appearance. Maybe, maybe she only imagined a tone of desperation in Kirsty’s voice. A plea for reinforcement.

  It hadn’t been imagination. The young woman realised that the moment she stepped inside the marquee. For, although the village lay little more than a mile away from them, the cottar wives had no real part in its integral life. They could have ‘dropped in’ from another planet, to find themselves invisible, in a marquee. Huddling closely together, they began to wander round the different ‘sections’, their voices rising loud in praise of each and every exhibit on show. As if the sound of themselves could merge within that of the folk who surrounded them.

  ‘Miss McCarthel, from Burnside, for her foreign mission,’ Kirsty whispered as a woman homed towards them, rattling a collection tin. ‘She gives herself to the poor.’

  She would never, the young woman reflected, confronted by a large, weatherbeaten woman, brown from her felt hat down to her brogues, be asked to give herself to the rich.

  ‘Come on!’ Kirsty nudged the young woman. Elbowing her towards the home baking section. ‘Come on and see how Elspeth got on this year.’

  ‘If she entered, that is,’ Meg qualified. ‘If she had the heart. Considering . . .’

  Elspeth had the heart, and hadn’t lost the ‘knack’. Two yellow tickets and a red. A first prize and two second prizes adorned Elspeth’s entries. Setting their seal on her proficiency as a baker of scones, oatcakes and pancakes.

  Elspeth, herself, seen now in a dimension beyond her croft at Achullen, belonging to the parish, accepted by the village. Her five acres of land entitling her to that privilege.

  They made no attempt to join Elspeth, chatting easily with a group of her own kind. ‘We’ll see her the morn. At the butcher’s van,’ Meg said as they turned away towards the cut flower section. There was a time and place . . . Meg had the sensitivity to recognise both.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ Kirsty reminded the young woman as they stood admiring the sweet-pea display. ‘Yon things of yours would never have stood a chance!’

  But the young woman’s mind lingered on other folk’s sweet-peas. As she stood, eavesdropping on the tale of a miracle, that would, for her, always retain its mystery.

  ‘Madam Beaver isn’t always reliable,’ a lady was assuring a man with a first prize red ticket in his hand. ‘Not always true to colour. But congratulations! She came true for you.’

  * * *

  Kirsty’s mail order catalogue had taken on a new dimension from the moment Finlay had offered the young woman ‘a week’s lowsing at the threshing mill. Providing the weather keeps up. Seeing as Elspeth—a contramashious bitch at the best of times—she decided against.’

  She had never before lowsed at the threshing mill. An admission that Finlay had swept aside, assuring her that there was nothing to prevent her from trying. Not at the going rate of tenpence an hour. ‘And that,’ he had reminded her, ‘was not to be sneezed at.’

  Neither it was, the young woman conceded, as she sat studying the pages of the catalogue, which had now assumed its true function. A purveyor of goods, luring a customer, who now had a prospect of purchasing away and beyond the section marked ‘footwear’.

  Always she had been aware of her potential as a female, given the essential transformation.

  And you shall walk in silk attire

  A chain of gold you shall not lack . . .

  ‘But why you? You’ve never lowsed at the threshing mill before.’

  Her man’s reaction to her good news was only to be expected. But never quite condoned. If there was a crock of gold lying ready to be lifted on the other side of Achullen Burn he would ‘have his doubts’ about reaching it because the burn was in spate.

  ‘What about Kirsty and Meg?’ he demanded. ‘They’ve got experience . . .’

  So much experience, the young woman discov­ered, that they had both rejected Finlay’s ten­pence an hour. All hell, Kirsty recollected, was let loose at the threshing mill. You could neither see yourself, nor anybody else, for that of it, with the chaff flying all over the place. Into your eyes. And blinding the young woman. You thought the thistles was bad enough, she reminded you. But wait you. Just wait you, till the yavins got at you. You’d be scratchi
ng yourself to the bone.

  It was her back that lowsing always went for, Meg remembered. She could hardly straighten herself up, after a day at the threshing mill. The hardest ten­pence an hour she had ever earned, and never wanted to earn another the like!

  Her neither, Kirsty confirmed. Finlay knew better than to seek her! And as for old Randy Rob, him that owned the threshing mill. Eighty, if he was a day. And only two things on his mind in eighty years. And one of them was the threshing mill . . .

  ‘All hell’, as Kirsty had described it, was let loose as the traction engine, reeking with smoke, shuddered its way into the corn yard. The threshing mill, rattling and swaying behind it, seemed in a mood to part company with the engine, dragging it unwillingly along, piloted by ‘the devil himself’. The young woman’s first glimpse of Randy Rob completed Kirsty’s impression of hell, as black as his own engine. His curses rose darkly up with the smoke.

  ‘Watch out for Randy Rob there,’ Beel advised her, as he rushed past, shouldering the forks. ‘He’ll have his hand up your skirt the minute you turn your back.’

  ‘Fine lot of micies nesting in the sheaves,’ Alick warned her as he passed, bending beneath a burden of empty sacks. ‘They’ll run as far up your legs as possible!’

  ‘You’d better keep an eye on Possible,’ the casual workers suggested, choking on their own laughter.

  Only the Italians, isolated by their idleness from the frenzied busyness of all the other workers, seemed to share her bewilderment at the chaos in front of them.