Scar Hill

by Alan Temperley

  ALAN TEMPERLEY was born in Sunderland and educated at the Bede Grammar School. As a boy he played rugby, cricket and tennis, sang in a big church choir, had many pets, enjoyed the theatre and read his way through the children’s library. At the age of sixteen he joined the Merchant Navy and has sailed as deck officer, able seaman and trawlerman. Following two years in the RAF, he studied at Manchester and Edinburgh Universities and became a teacher of English in the northern Highlands. It was here his first tentative writings took shape, first prize-winning short stories and poetry, then volumes of folklore, and finally novels, particularly for school-age readers. Among them are the award-winning Harry and the Wrinklies (turned into three hit series for STV), Huntress of the Sea and The Magician of Samarkand (televised for the BBC). His books appear in eighteen languages. Although work and travels have taken him far afield, he constantly returns to the north. This wild landscape with its moors, mountains, headlands and ocean is the setting for Scar Hill. He has one son, a young solicitor in Edinburgh, and two grand-daughters. He lives in a schoolhouse in rural Galloway.

  By the same author:

  Tales of the North Coast

  Tales of Galloway

  Murdo’s War

  Harry and the Wrinklies

  Ragboy

  Huntress of the Sea

  The Brave Whale

  The Simple Giant

  The Magician of Samarkand

  Harry and the Treasure of Eddie Carver

  Scar Hill

  ALAN TEMPERLEY

  Luath Press Limited

  EDINBURGH

  www.luath.co.uk

  First published 2010

  eBook 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-906307-52-3

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-910324-03-5

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  The publisher acknowledges the support of Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume.

  © Alan Temperley 2010

  Dedicated to my mother, my cousin Elizabeth

  and my good friend Jean.

  Contents

  Ben

  Scar Hill

  The Soldier

  The New Arrivals

  The Village Shop

  The Good Dad

  Blae Fell

  The Hidden Photo

  Stuff School

  The Conger, the Cod and the Cumberland Sausage

  Bunny and Doctor Bryson

  Good Fair to Treasure Island

  A Heavy Cold

  Ferreting

  Late Afternoon, Saturday, 7th December

  The Body in Denmark

  The Lonely Peat Moss

  Asleep at his Desk

  Lights in the Window

  Bottle Blonde

  Money and Lies

  The Christmas Tree

  The Party

  Christmas is Coming

  The Snowplough

  Headlights on the Snow

  A Night to Remember

  Daisy

  New Year’s Day: Saving the Sheep

  Valerie Goes to a Dance

  Matt

  Cross My Heart

  The Blue Mondeo

  Wednesday – Scar Hill

  Sick Baby

  Could You Come Over?

  Breakfasty Fingers

  The Sheep Pen

  Reckitt’s Mines

  Owl Cottage

  Full Moon

  Helicopter on the Hill

  Return to Scar Hill

  Wild Daffodils and a Letter

  A Visit From Constable Taylor

  Four Miles on the Bike

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank the following people for their friendship, kindness and help during the writing of this book: David Mackay, Nancy Fraser, Gordon and Margaret Mackay, David Banks, Elizabeth Jobling, Christina Mackay, Frank Gourlay (father and son), Becky Gallagher, Dolan and Moira Conway, Neil Macintyre, Jeanne Hughes, Patricia Niesen, John Miller, my many friends in the north, and most of all Jean Slaven for her constant help and encouragement.

  1

  Ben

  THE BUS SLOWED as it neared the top of the Sandy Brae. Peter rose and swung his schoolbag to his shoulder. A friendly magazine batted him on the head as he made his way to the front.

  ‘See you, Winnie.’

  Peter Irwin, twelve years old. They had called him Winnie since primary school.

  He bent to see through the windscreen. His dad’s old van was not waiting at the gate. Peter hadn’t expected it would be.

  The bus crunched into the passing place and stopped. The door hissed open. Ignoring the driver, he descended to the verge and hitched his bag comfortable. The few children left aboard looked down as the bus pulled away. A six-year-old made a face. The bus drove on. A stink of diesel hung in the air as Peter crossed the road to the five-bar gate. It was broken, fuzzy with lichen.

  Once there had been a sign, Scar Hill, the croft house where he lived with his father, but beetles and the years of wind and rain had worked their destruction and now not even the post remained.

  There had been a second sign also, in better repair: Three Pines, the house of their nearest neighbour – indeed their only neighbour. But the woman who had moved in eighteen months earlier, Bunny Mason, liked privacy and had pulled it from the nail. Now nothing but two unmarked post boxes – the Irwins’ falling apart, Bunny’s stout and weatherproof – remained to indicate that somewhere out there in the rolling moor there existed two homes.

  Peter’s dog, Ben, stood waiting beyond the gate. He was a grey lurcher, like a skinny Irish wolfhound. On the days Peter’s dad didn’t drive down, Ben loped along the two and a half miles of track to meet him off the bus. As Peter drew close, the tall dog barked once, bouncing in welcome.

  He went through and hooked the gate shut at his back. Impatiently Ben danced around him and jumped up to put his paws on Peter’s shoulders. As he stood on his hind legs, his whiskery head was higher than the boy’s.

  Peter staggered to support him. ‘Hello, Ben. Hello, lovely.’ He buried his face in the dog’s neck and felt Ben’s bony skull against his own. Awkwardly the dog’s tongue slopped his ear. ‘Who’s my best boy!’

  Greetings concluded, he pushed Ben down, brushed the dirt from his jacket and started the walk home. Most days his dad drove him to the road in the morning and was there to pick him up after school. Sometimes Peter drove himself, in the old white van or on the tractor if his dad didn’t need it, parked in the abandoned quarry, and drove back again at teatime. Occasionally he took his bike, bucking over the potholes.

  It had been raining, the track was puddled. He scanned the sky; the clouds were opening. The bracken glowed red in a shaft of late afternoon sun.

  A couple of hundred metres into the moor, a side track turned downhill between rocks and thickets of gorse. This was the road to Three Pines – though two pines and a stump would be more accurate, for in a great gale years before, the third tree had been snapped clean off. Bunny had planted a replacement, ringed by wire to protect it from deer and the goats and other animals which wandered round her cottage.

  ‘Like a bloody gipsy encampment,’ his dad had said not long after her arrival. ‘Hens, cats, pony an’ all the rest of it. What’s she want all that lot for?’

  ‘She’s painting them,’ Peter said. ‘You know that fine. Supposed to be for a book.’

  ‘A book, aye. Like Willie there, down by the shore. I’ll believe it when I see it.’

  But Peter had been to the house and seen the paintings scattered around the kitchen where Bunny worked. For a children’s book she said. He thought they were great. He had called just the once, to give her a lobster they’d caught in
the boat, still cold from the sea.

  Bunny couldn’t accept it. ‘Drop it into boiling water?’ she had said, dog at her feet, cat in the chair. ‘I just couldn’t, Peter. It’s very kind of you but sorry.’

  Some weeks prior to this she had called at Scar Hill to introduce herself as their new neighbour. They had made her welcome and chatted by the fire with tea and cake, but Peter’s father, Jim Irwin, was a private man and she seemed to understand that. She had not called again. In fact they rarely had a visitor, and neither did she as far as Peter knew, apart from a daughter who came to stay from time to time. Despite this, he liked Bunny Mason with her thick grey hair chopped short and her public school accent – more like Lord Rimsdale and the rich folk who came for the stalking and the fishing than people in the village.

  Only the chimneys of Three Pines were visible from the track but Bunny appeared on the hill in her green anorak and knitted hat, calling ‘Molly! Come on, Molly!’ It was time to take the cow down for milking. Seeing Peter, she waved a vigorous arm and he waved back.

  But Peter’s thoughts that afternoon were elsewhere. What would he find when he got home? What state would his father be in? Had he spent the day at the Cod and Kipper, the shabby inn down by the jetty? That was his usual retreat when depression struck, when the black snakes, as Jim called them, came slithering from the drains and up through the floorboards to hang their heavy coils around his neck. Peter loved his dad, it wasn’t his fault he was sick, but how drunk would he be tonight? How long would the mood last? It used to be two days but he seemed to be getting worse. How long this time before the snakes dropped from him and wriggled back the way they had come? It was Friday. The whole weekend lay ahead.

  He took a deep breath as he walked and tried to be positive. There was football tomorrow and they were playing away. That would take up much of the day.

  Ben put up a hare. Yelping with excitement, he shot off in pursuit. Ben was faster but the hare was more agile. Provided it made no mistakes, it would get away. If it did not, they might have hare casserole on Sunday.

  If his dad was eating by then.

  Peter walked on. In minutes the tarmacked road was hidden from view. Mile upon mile the ridged and rolling moor spread around him, right to the horizon. Familiar to Peter for most of his life, he hardly saw it: the long grasses bleaching with autumn, brown heather, red bracken, grey rock and white tufts of cotton grass bobbing in the wind. Far to the west a range of mountains, saw-toothed and hump-backed, formed a frieze against the sky. At his back, beyond the road and rugged headlands, lay the deep blue sea.

  A distant scream made the hairs on his neck stand on end. He waited and after a minute or two Ben reappeared, trotting round the side of a hill. He looked pleased with himself.

  ‘Come here.’

  The big dog scrambled down some rocks and jumped a stream.

  ‘Good boy.’

  Ben was panting, his eyes bright, mouth flecked with foam. He trotted in a circle, too excited to stand still.

  ‘Let’s see you.’ Peter caught him by the collar. ‘What have you been up to?’ Doggy breath hit him in the face. Peter wiped his muzzle with a hand. Mixed in with the saliva was a tiny tuft of grey-brown hairs, short hairs like a rabbit’s. Ben had run down his hare. ‘Good boy!’ Peter clapped his muscular back. ‘Go on, now, fetch.’ He pushed Ben back the way he had come.

  But Ben was not a retriever and he was not very well trained. Some words, like come here … good dog … sit … no … and his name, he understood perfectly. But fetch, when the object he had to fetch was half a mile away and out of sight, was beyond him. Knowing that something was required of him but not sure what, he looked around in confusion.

  ‘Come on then.’ Peter slipped his rucksack on to both shoulders and stepped from the track.

  There had been a lot of rain in the past week and the ground was boggy. Though he stayed on rising ground and the sheep-nibbled grass as much as possible, for a hundred metres at a time he had to plough through drenched heather. Soon his grey school trousers were sodden to the knee. His foot sank in a hidden hollow. Icy water filled his shoe. Peter pulled it out and surveyed the clinging peat. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said. ‘Bugger! Bloody dog!’

  Ben realised where they were heading and bounded ahead over a rise. Peter followed. As he reached the crest, the wind that blows on the high moors hit him in the face, lifting his hair.

  A short distance away, Ben was snuffling something on the grass by a big bank of gorse. It was the dead hare. He planted his feet and threw it in the air then danced all round.

  ‘Ben, leave it!’ Peter shouted. ‘Leave it!’

  Ben looked up. The turf was torn. This was where he had made his kill. The hare, confronted by the wall of thorns, had jinked sideways and in that split second the dog was on it, bowling it over, snatching a leg. It had squealed in terror.

  ‘Good boy. Fetch. Fetch!’

  At last Ben realised what was expected of him. Briefly he pushed the dead creature around then caught it across the back, settled his grip and bounced back to Peter, shaking his head as he ran.

  It was a young hare, just fully grown. Ben had done well to run it down. Its head dangled on the broken neck. Its bright black eyes saw nothing.

  ‘Give it here.’ Peter took hold but Ben was reluctant to part with his prey. Peter made a fuss of him. ‘Good boy. Let go now.’ He pulled gently. ‘Come on.’

  Ben let him take it and looked up with eager eyes.

  ‘Clever dog.’ Peter praised him some more then turned his attention to the hare – its warm body, pink ears, big dirty feet. He was sorry it was dead, all that strength and vitality snuffed out in a moment. More to the point there was plenty of meat on it, it would be good eating. With luck his dad would be pleased, he liked the gamey taste of hare. Peter grasped the strong back legs in one hand. The hare’s ears trailed on the ground. He shifted his grip. Red drips gathered at the hare’s nose and fell to the grass. Ben sniffed at it then lifted his leg against a nearby rock and resumed hunting through the heather.

  The hare was heavy. Shifting it from hand to hand and trying to keep the blood from his trousers, Peter started back to the track.

  2

  Scar Hill

  PETER KNEW THINGS were bad even before he reached the house. The van had gone off the track and got bogged down in a peaty ditch. Hard revving had chewed the verge to mud. The front wheels were buried. It would take the tractor to drag it out.

  The driver’s door hung open. He looked inside. The passenger seat was wet, the air reeked of whisky. Otherwise all was the same as usual: the floor covered with grit, a few empty cans, torn wrappers, a sack of sheep nuts. His dad was gone so he must be OK. Able to walk, at least. Ragged handholds and a slither of knees in the ooze showed where he had clawed his way up the bank. Peter shut the door, banged it to make sure the lock engaged, and picked up the hare.

  Ten minutes brought him to the cottage and cluster of outbuildings that had been his home for almost as long as he could remember. Scar Hill, as it was called, derived its name from a jagged outcrop of rock that ran down the face of a nearby hillside. A more fanciful claim was that centuries earlier, in the days of the clans, a battle had been fought on the spot, a battle with claymores and much mutilation. The river had run red. For a generation the men of the area had scarred faces and missing limbs. Jim had looked it up in ancient records and much to Peter’s disappointment pronounced the story untrue. All the same, sometimes in the evening, when light was fading, he gazed at the surrounding slopes and imagined them echoing with the shouts and screams of warriors.

  Nearer two centuries old than one, the cottage was built of grey stone and sat comfortably in the heart of the moors. It was a building that belonged. The roof, which originally had been turf, and then tin, was blue slate and covered with lichen and moss. Two dormer windows had been added, currently the bedrooms of Peter and his dad. The woodwork was green, the paint starting to curl. It gave the place a run-down appea
rance which was not improved by the earth yard, rusting shed roofs, oil drums which had been waiting five years to go to the dump, and shepherd’s debris which lay on all sides. Despite this, Jim ensured the house was weather-tight against the gales and rainstorms that raged across the moor at any season of the year, and the blizzards of winter that cut them off for a week at a time. Peter liked those days, helping his dad to feed the snowed-in sheep, working until he could hardly stand, then retreating indoors to drink hot chocolate and scorch his face at the glowing peat fire.

  As he reached the yard, Meg appeared in the doorway of the barn. She was a Border Collie, his father’s working dog and inseparable companion. Meg adored his father and Jim loved her right back. One of Peter’s earliest memories was a blazing row between his mother and father: ‘You think more of that bloody dog than you do of me,’ she had screeched.

  ‘Aye, happen you’re right,’ he had replied.

  At which she had snatched up a treasured photo of his parents and flung it at his head. His dad, usually a quiet man, knocked her to the floor.

  Meg greeted Ben and sniffed the hare, then crept close to Peter and pressed her head against his knee. Jim’s darkening moods distressed her. She thought she had done wrong but did not know what. She thought she was in disgrace. When his brows were drawn and in grim silence Jim set off for the Cod and Kipper, she shivered and whined.

  Peter pulled her close. ‘It’s all right, beautiful,’ he said comfortingly. ‘There.’

  The front door was shut but not locked, it was never locked. No light shone at the living-room window. No smoke blew from the chimney.

  Jim had kicked his boots off outside, and when Peter went into the house his mud-caked trousers lay on the slabs in the hall. He dropped the hare beside them. Ben and Meg hovered at the entrance. He shut the door on them, hung his rucksack over the banisters and went through to the living room.

  It was in gloom, the darkness of an October teatime. Breakfast dishes still lay on the table. His dad, in working jersey, underpants and socks, was stretched out on the settee. He was asleep, dead to the world and snoring softly in his throat. A scatter of cans and empty half-bottle of Bells lay on the carpet. A full-sized bottle, part drunk, was wedged at his side.