Memory and Straw

by Memory

  Above all else, science was Mr Johnstone’s great mantra. The earth and the sun and the moon and the stars, he said, were to be studied scientifically. When they dared to ask him what that meant, he asked them if they knew what a frog was? They all remained silent, except for young James MacDonald, the daftie who knew no better, who put his hand up and said, ‘A king under a spell.’

  His brother Donald MacDonald said he was wrong, that it was a witch, while Archie Mackay said that he had heard tell that all frogs were devils.

  So Mr Johnstone took them all outside and led them down to the edge of the loch, where the frogs lived. He waded into the water and scooped one up from the sedge and led them all back to school, where he laid the poor terrified frog on his desk, took out a penknife and divided it in half, then into quarters and eighths, before asking them all to take a bit of the frog in their hands and then put that bit under the magnifying glass, where they could study it scientifically.

  Anna got the frog’s head, which she thought was beautiful under the microscope. Green skin, eyes of gold with blue streaks all around in the background. James was probably right. Even though Mr Johnstone explained that the frog was just an animal which could be described by colour and texture and behaviour and could not be anything except what it was. Which he knew was nonsense even as he spoke it, for nothing was as it was, and would he himself not go on the drink again soon and become that beast which he wasn’t, or maybe really was, beneath the sober external mask of the schoolmaster?

  ‘The difference between a cow and a sheep,’ he told them, ‘is not just that one bellows and one bleats,’ though he never went any further to explain what that difference was except to say the word ‘species’.

  ‘The origin of species, boys and girls. The origin of species!’ As if that explained everything.

  ‘Why don’t we have four legs?’ the Daftie asked, ‘because I’d like to be a deer and run very fast over the hills.’

  ‘You do,’ Mr Johnstone said, and everyone looked at Daftie to see if he also had antlers growing out of his head.

  Mr Johnstone tried to teach them the science of the sun and the moon and the stars, though they remained unconvinced, perhaps because he himself was unconvinced. For as he would tell them about the strength of the sun’s rays and about how the moon was merely the reflection of the sun’s light and how the stars were really big exploding balls of gas, he would diverge into stories about how Icarus flew into the sun and about how the moon came down to earth when she fell in love with her own reflection in the Atlantic, so that for the children it became one fantastic big story where anything was possible.

  ‘We are a small island in an ocean of nescience,’ he declared. ‘Vasco da Gama and Columbus enlarged the earth, Copernicus enlarged the heavens. And remember that Savonarola and Leonardo were born in the same year.’

  The marvellous names people had elsewhere, while here they were all called Angus and Donald and Peggy and Morag.

  ‘Sir,’ they asked, ‘Is there a man on the moon?’

  And though he instantly thought of telling them the truth he knew how partial that was, so he said, ‘Of course there is,’ and told them how the man on the moon got there, in the days when wishing was powerful.

  ‘One Christmas Eve, a man went out and stole cabbages from his neighbour’s garden. And when he was in the act of walking off with his load, he was seen by people, who wished him up to the moon. So there he stands till this day in the full moon, to be seen by everybody, carrying his load of cabbages to all eternity.’

  James MacDonald said he saw a goat in the moon, while his brother Donald argued that it was a bull, though Anna knew fine it was a rabbit, so she put her hand up and asked Mr Johnstone how the rabbit had gotten to the moon, and he said, ‘That also happened a long time ago, when wolves used to roam the whole country, and one day a big bad wolf spotted a little rabbit out of its burrow and chased her across the fields and hills and was just about to catch her and kill her and eat her when the rabbit, as a last chance of escape, made a desperate jump on to the face of the moon, where she remains safe and sound to this day.’

  He took to telling them riddles, which they loved. Little Nancy Etticoat, in a white petticoat, and a red nose, the longer she stands, the shorter she grows!

  Anna’s hand was always first up.

  A candle!

  As round as an apple, as deep as a cup, and all the king’s horses can’t pull it up!

  A well!

  How is the lazy man’s bed too short for him?

  Because he is too long in it!

  But Mr Johnstone was beginning to waver. He began speaking in Latin, which was his own warning signal to be off on the great Roman road north. Which he was, one late spring evening. The next morning there was no sign of him, the schoolhouse empty and the sea-chest gone. Bushy-bearded MacKenzie arrived to tell them that Mr Johnstone had gone north and that he himself would have to teach them for a while. They all quivered, for they knew what that meant, with that thick tawse belt hanging from his waist. So the stories ceased, except for the resurrected single story that the cat sat on the mat and that one plus one made two and – thwack, you stupid boy – did I not tell you to speak English in this class?

  The scholars drifted off, stayed at home to milk the cow, or to fetch water from the well, or to gather the peats, and only the cruellest of parents forced their children to attend school to be beaten into submission. Elizabeth was not one of these, for she was horrified when Anna came home with dark bruises on her wrists and arms saying that Mr MacKenzie had given her twelve lashes of the tawse for getting an answer wrong. Finally her mother forced the issue out of her –

  ‘He asked me to say “the cat sat on the mat” and I said “the cat shat on the mat”, but I didn’t mean to.’

  Anna didn’t even know what she’d done wrong, for she was unfamiliar with the word in English.

  Her mother just said, ‘Don’t you worry. If he comes here to complain that you’re not at school, I’ll just ask him to repeat this fast one hundred times: she said she should sit so she sat.’

  And they both said it, she said she should shit so she shat, until they fell down, exhausted.

  So Anna stayed at home, learning other things. Her mother was not that well and her survival into the dawn of the twentieth century was entirely due to Anna’s knowledge and use of herbs. There was a useless doctor over the hill in the adjoining glen, but who on earth had any money to use him? So Anna became expert in vulneraries, febrifuges, emetics, cathartics, irritants and tonics, everything from kidney-vetch to the petty spurge, which was wonderful for removing warts. Dog violet boiled in whey was good for allaying fevers, while house-leek mixed with cream got rid of earache.

  But maybe it was simple touch that mattered. She noticed that the more she visited people to give them the remedies, the better they got if she herself rubbed the ointment on to them or fed the treatment to them rather than leaving it with them or watching them supping it themselves. And she just knew that medicine was as much social as biological, and that things worked better when people sensed they were loved. Which is why she eventually trained as a nurse. She would have been more than able to have been a doctor and maybe would have been, had not Mr Johnstone left that day to go further north in search of whisky.

  At least Mr Johnstone had prepared the ground for alternatives: those who had been with him for the year he was there could all read and write. And papers began to arrive and to be read. From Wick, Iain occasionally sent a copy of The Northern Ensign, which was full of news about the herring fleets, while the girls down in Glasgow regularly sent copies of the Glasgow Herald and the Weekly News, which Anna read out loud for her mother and everyone else who gathered round to hear the great words.

  They always insisted on everything being read, from front page news of the death of Grand Duke Louis IV to the advertisements for Carters Little Liver Pills, which also relieved distress from Dyspepsia , Indigestion and Too Hearty Eating. A
perfect remedy for Sick Headache, Dizziness, Nausea, Drowsiness, Bad Taste in the Mouth, Coated Tongue, Pain in the Side. Anna read carefully and precisely. They regulate the Bowels and prevent Constipation. Forty in a phial. Purely Vegetable and do not gripe or purge, but by their gentle action please all who use them. Established 1856. In phials at 1s 1½d. Sent by post. Illustrated Pamphlet Free. British Depot: 46, Holborn Viaduct, London, E.C.

  The old crones would listen carefully, as if they were listening to a story. Even though half of them didn’t understand a word of English, they would nod their heads sagely or shake them in disbelief, imitating the few who understood. And wasn’t it strange that there was so much crime out there when there was none here? All these wars and murders and assaults and robberies when none of that happened here.

  So they heard that Gladstone was once again elected Prime Minister and that Edison had invented an electric lamp; and nearer home, from the Northern Ensign, that the sailing ship The Copeland of Leith had run aground at Langaton Point, Stroma, when homeward-bound with a full cargo of Iceland ponies. Most of these were got ashore and fed, Anna read, and everyone smiled and clapped their hands. And the ponies were then also all reshipped and the crew were all saved though the ship itself was hurled over the reef and sank in deep water. One of the passengers, the paper said, was Sir H. Rider Haggard, an author who had gone to Iceland to gather information for a book he was writing.

  Some of the people listening realised that these were all just like their own stories, except that they were written. The news items and the advertisements and the deaths and births and marriages read out by Anna brought to mind so many things, and they would tell again of people long dead, and the children who had been born and the marriages that had taken place, or should have taken place, or could have taken place.

  Most of it was information, but intricately laced with comment and moral judgement, so that it was difficult to work out what actually happened and what should have happened. Like that time Flora had a child, though it was obviously a changeling for it withered away and died within weeks of having been born looking as healthy as an autumn berry; or the time that Fiona was promised to George, who then disappeared on the evening of the wedding and was never seen again, and that very night a silver rainbow was seen hovering over Fiona’s house before slowly moving westwards towards the sea. What would these fancy foreign papers make of that? Things happened to women and children which only those who guarded the secrets of the language understood.

  Inevitably someone would allude to Calum, though one look from Elizabeth would silence them. So the ghost stories would begin instead, which made you shiver because you knew that out there in the dark all kinds of horrors waited for you unless you prayed in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, in the name of Mary, Bride, Peter, Paul, or unless you carried bits of iron or threads of coloured wool or the pearlwort; and even then they would get you if your time was due, despite every precaution and charm and rune. Such as poor Seonaidh, who carried every known incantation and amulet yet fell and drowned in the tiny hill pool one night, as predicted by Dòmhnall Mòr. There was hardly enough water there to drown a mouse, yet there he was face down, dead, in a few inches of mud in the morning.

  And trying not to believe didn’t help one little bit. You could walk along saying to yourself ‘Ach, it’s just the wind in the trees,’ but the next thing you were lifted and taken to a strange place. The bogle’s power wasn’t extinguished by your atheism, for it was sustained by habit. Who were you to think you could erase belief overnight, by just thinking differently?

  Anna had her mother’s dark looks and her father’s stature and as far as the neighbours could judge a mixture of their personalities. Though they didn’t say that, for fear of tempting fate. And there were suitors – old Archie MacIntosh tried his hand, and the laird’s factor, a pock-faced man called Souter, would leer at her at every opportunity, but Anna withered him with a look. It wasn’t the evil eye, for evil is in the eye of the beholder. They said his balls shrivelled.

  And then the water-horse got her. She was out on the moor one evening gathering herbs when he appeared out of the fog by the lochside, pale and sleek and neighing. She knew it was him and tried to run away, but it was boggy and difficult underfoot and he caught up with her by the time she reached the rocks west of the valley. She knew that if she managed to get hold of the bridle and keep it from him he would lose all his strength and power, but he was slippery and wet and strong and easily overcame her. It was only by the skin of her teeth that she managed to escape being drowned at the end as he tried to drag her with him into the loch where he disappeared with a splash, leaving her all covered from head to toe in slime and dirt and blood.

  Elizabeth knew what had happened as soon as she arrived home, bruised and crying. She washed her and comforted her and said nothing, in the hope that Anna herself would acknowledge the truth. Surely it was hers to tell? And she did: how he had come at her out of the dark, and how she had fought, but the power he had – the strength of a horse – and how everything all blurred into one, of skin and slime and hair and dirt, and Elizabeth hugged her close, whispering, ‘Sush, sush, sush, my dear child.’ The two of them slept that night in each other’s arms, mother and daughter.

  How can anyone tell what happened? The afternoon was rainy and cold, though when the story was told later it was dry and sunny. And not because it wasn’t dry and sunny, but that was how the miller recalled it – hadn’t the sun shone brightly as he’d left the mill to go and gather the sheep? For no-one tells lies. And as he walked down by the loch it began to rain and a sort of fog descended, and maybe it was the echo of his boots, but he thought he heard voices and as he trudged through the sedge there she sat, bathing by the river, combing her long hair. Anna, whom he’d known since she was a child. The widow’s daughter. And how she’d grown. Johnny the miller’s head was full of voices. These stories he’d heard since he was born the miller’s son: Johnny the miller’s son, Johnny, son of Johnny the miller, son of Johnny the miller, son of Johnny the miller and back and back unto a thousand generations when the first Johnny had established the mill, right here by the tumbling river. She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain.

  Some millers were good and some millers were bad. You should have heard the songs and tales that had been made about them, such as the story of the carpenter and his lovely wife and the two clerks who are eager to get her into bed.

  And once there was a miller who was poor and had a beautiful daughter and the miller and the lass, a pretty little maid so neat and gay, to the mill she went one day, a sack of corn she had to grind, but there no miller could she find, tiddy fol, tiddy fol tiddy fol le day, rite fol lol lol tiddy fol le day! Oh!

  At last the miller did come in, and unto him she did begin:

  ‘Come, grind my corn so quick-e-ly, around your stones my corn must fly.’

  ‘Come, sit you down,’ the miller did say, ‘For I can’t grind your corn to-day; my stone is high and my water’s low, and I can’t grind for the mill won’t go.’

  So this couple sat down to chat, they talk’d of this, they talk’d of that, they talk’d of things which you do know, and she soon found out that the mill would go.

  ‘Oh! it’s now, I says, young miller-man, you grinds all flour and no bran.’

  Then an easy up and an easy down – she could hardly tell that her corn was ground.

  ‘Now I think I will make my best way home, if my mother asks me why I’ve been so long, I’ll say I’ve been ground by a score or more, but I’ve never been ground so well before.’

  And everything rose inside Johnny’s head, like the tide rising on a wild winter’s day. The way it surges over everything, sending spume flying, making you deaf in the wind and blind in the spray. The miller was a powerful man, and given extra strength by the force of the oncoming waves. A girl had no chance in these circumstances except to turn into flotsam on the surfac
e of the tide. There was no name for it, unless her brothers found out and killed him, but they were away at work and war. He was nothing, but needed to be named as much more than nothing, so he was given the ancient name of each-uisge, water-horse, which came out of the dark sleek and wet, unearthly, devilish. You could know one truth and yet confess another, or a lie. For you were as innocent as the corn in the storm or the child before the man.

  Elizabeth worked hard at erasing the poison that not to be conceived in love was to be under a curse, because love was not born, but given. So she sang to Anna, and told her about the nightingale who was given the voice of a crow but still sang like a nightingale, while the crow, when granted the voice of the nightingale, still croaked like a crow.

  She was a white swan, as in the great song: Guile, guile! Guile guile! And the song took all the anguish and, as with all magic, transformed it into what had been there before the deception. For nothing emerges from the magician’s cloak other than what is there before. No rabbit comes out of the hat that wasn’t secretly placed there before. So she was pure and blameless and could not be punished.

  They went down to the stream and filled a jar with water taken with the current. (It must never be taken against the current.) And in the water in the jar Anna placed seven bits of peat, and seven handfuls of meal and seven cloves of garlic while Elizabeth said the rhyme. And when the bairn was born he was as bonny and good as the May sun. Fair-haired with blue eyes, just like Johnny the miller’s son, so no wonder folk said the fairies themselves had given him to Anna as a gift, for that was how the good people sometimes chose to work, for Johnny was such a good fine lad, with an inheritance coming his way too. At least it wasn’t a changeling. And Elizabeth and Anna named the baby John, and they put a triple thread of white, rose and black round his wrist.