Snowflakes in the Wind

by Rita Bradshaw

  Abby had sailed through the entry examination and had been one of the few children to obtain a bursary. The school ran courses for three- or six-year periods of higher education, and it had been decided that Abby would take a six-year course owing to her aptitude. Wilbert had duly bought his granddaughter a stout second-hand bicycle on which Abby had cycled the seven or so miles to school each day, although in the worst of the northern winters the school had arranged for her to board with another pupil’s family in the town, the country roads being impassable at times.

  Wilbert would rather have cut out his tongue than admit to a living soul that during the periods when Abby was boarding in the town, he experienced a different, happier state of mind than when his granddaughter was there in front of him pricking his conscience about Molly. He and his grandson managed perfectly well, he felt, even though Abby inevitably lamented the state of the cottage on her return to the farm.

  Like most men of his generation, Wilbert would rather be hanged, drawn and quartered than so demean his masculinity by doing ‘women’s work’, and once he had reached a certain age Robin was more than happy to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. In one particularly bad winter, when Abby had been gone for over six weeks on the trot, she had come back to a filthy house with dirty dishes piled high on every available surface and mice droppings competing with thick dust and grime.

  Having had no joy about the mess with her grandfather, Abby had tackled Robin about it when they had five minutes alone. ‘You can’t live like this if I’m not here.’ She’d sniffed at his clothes, wrinkling her nose. ‘You smell, the house smells, it’s disgusting. If you just do a little bit each night it won’t get so bad.’

  Robin had glared at her. ‘Real men don’t do housework.’

  ‘Well, when you’re a man we’ll have this conversation again, but as you’re a boy when I’m away there’ll be extra things for you to do.’

  His glare had deepened. ‘Granda and me are too busy to bother about menial stuff.’

  ‘I’ll give you menial stuff!’ Abby had narrowed her eyes at him which Robin knew meant trouble. ‘If you don’t pull your weight when I’m not here I swear I’ll never cook you a meal again or wash your clothes or darn your socks. You’ll soon find out how much “menial” work matters, my lad. I’ll just look after Granda and me, and you can starve in your own muck.’

  ‘Huh!’ Knowing she meant every word, Robin turned his back on her. ‘All mouth and no drawers, she is,’ he muttered under his breath, an insult he’d heard used by his cronies at school.

  Content she had put her point across, Abby pretended not to hear, and from that point on the house had never got in such a state again.

  But now it was the middle of December, and this particular winter was different from the ones that had gone before. Abby had completed her studies at the high school in the summer, and to Wilbert’s surprise and her teachers’ disappointment had resisted all attempts to persuade her to follow a career in the academic world.

  Abby could fly high, the teachers had stated, perhaps ending up as a headmistress in a select private school somewhere. Times were changing; the female sex was coming to the fore in a way that would have been impossible before the Great War and the suffragette movement. Abby was so bright that it was her duty, one impassioned lady teacher had declared earnestly to Wilbert when he had answered a summons to the school, that she strive for greatness.

  Wilbert had been polite but non-committal. He had had a long talk with his granddaughter before attending the appointment, and like her mother before her, Abby knew her own mind.

  ‘I want to train as a nurse, Granda,’ she’d told him. ‘And this isn’t a whim. I’ve got my secondary education certificate so I know I’ll be accepted somewhere. I’d hate to be a teacher, to be stuck in a classroom every day. Please, Granda, please.’

  Privately Wilbert was in agreement with Abby’s teachers when they’d said she was wasting her scholastic achievements by taking up nursing as a profession, but he didn’t voice it. What had been the point of her six years at the high school, something that was still rare for country girls, he had asked himself. Especially when she could have gone into the respected and highly thought-of world of education. Certainly among his kind, nursing was still tainted by the old days when it was felt that nurses worked for love or gin – never both – and that girls who followed Florence Nightingale’s ideals (admittedly an extraordinary woman but one of a kind, virtually a winged and haloed angel who could never be tempted by anything as filthy as mere money) were more to be pitied than the latter, who inevitably turned into old soaks. There was something ‘not quite nice’ about a young woman working among the diseased and ill, especially if the unfortunate patients were male, and to do so for the pittance nurses received as salary meant they were further suspect. Who would choose to do that if they weren’t barmy or a bit odd?

  Wilbert was well aware that he was already held up as something of a fool by allowing his granddaughter to continue at school long after she could have left, rather than putting her into private service or farm work where she could earn a wage. Now to further compound this error of judgement by permitting her to take up nursing was seen as sheer weakness. The hardy and tough Border community didn’t believe in illness for a start; such feebleness vanished if you were firm enough with it or ignored it completely like a naughty bairn. Any small complaints were always arrested before they got bigger with tried and tested remedies handed down from mother to daughter – brimstone for bowel trouble; plenty of cold water from the well to drink if a cold was brewing; butter and sugar worked together with a drop or two of vinegar for a cough; and home-made embrocation slapped on any ache in any part of the body. For more serious complaints, like accidents with scythes or turnip cutters or other farm equipment, there was always a slice of mouldy cheese to coat the wound, tied down firmly with a large clean handkerchief or a piece of old boiled linen cloth.

  Abby knew how the farming community would view her decision, but just in case she didn’t, Joe McHaffie had taken great pleasure in informing her that she was being held up as daft and dizzy. ‘You’re a disgrace to the Craggs name,’ he’d growled over the garden wall, where he’d appeared as she was working on the vegetable patch one autumn day. ‘Your grandma’d turn in her grave for sure, you know that, don’t you?’

  She had learned years before how to deal with Joe McHaffie. Straightening, she had looked at him steadily. ‘I’m not a Craggs, I’m a Kirby,’ she said coolly, ‘and what my grandmother might or might not think is none of your business.’ She’d left him cursing and muttering under his breath as she had marched away, but in truth she had to admit to herself that Joe McHaffie was perhaps the main reason she would be glad to leave the farm when she began her training at the Hemingway hospital in Galashiels in January. His hate of her had not lessened as she had got older, but now there was another, more sinister aspect to it that turned her stomach. She had caught him on more than one occasion running his hand up and down the inside of his thigh when he had stared at her, working at the obscene bulge in his trousers as he had watched her with hot eyes.

  Although she would rather die than have him know, Joe McHaffie frightened her more and more as time had gone on. Since she had finished her schooling in the summer, she had been helping with the farm work besides her normal chores and she had been very careful not to be put in a position where she was alone with the steward’s son, especially at harvest time. Every minute she had worked building the neat round stacks of oats and barley she had kept one eye on where Joe was, and she had made sure she walked home from the fields with one of the other women when the day’s toil was done.

  The worst time of the day was when she took her grandfather and Robin their lunch of cans of cold tea and fried ham sandwiches and found them in the fields or wherever they were working. There were too many lonely spots, too many quiet and secluded hedgerows where a man with evil intent on his mind could wait unnoticed. When she milked
Lotty she made sure it was in the company of the other women, and as much as possible any work in the garden vegetable plot was undertaken when she knew that Joe would be occupied elsewhere. She was constantly on edge, only really relaxing when she was in bed at night. It hadn’t seemed so bad when she was still at school. Once she’d arrived home in the evening the cooking, cleaning and other numerous jobs had kept her too busy to worry, and after she’d finished them there had always been homework to complete. She’d mostly fallen into bed about midnight and then had risen at five to get the three of them breakfast, pack up lunches, and prepare the evening meal. She’d left on her trusty bicycle only after she’d milked Lotty, fed the hens and collected any eggs from the enclosure at the bottom of the garden.

  Her grandfather and Robin had built the enclosure shortly after she and Robin had arrived at the farm, after Wilbert had bought some hens from the farmer along with a fine cockerel. This acquisition was a mixed blessing as far as Abby was concerned. The hens kept them well supplied with fresh eggs, it was true, but as they were allowed to roam during the day, rounding them up at night took valuable time. The cockerel in particular was an awkward bird.

  But today, the snow being thick on the ground and the low sky threatening more, the hens were safely tucked up in their pen and Abby was busy baking. Christmas was just days away. Sliding a tray of mince pies into the range oven, Abby dusted her floury hands on her hessian apron and then walked across the room to stand staring out of the window.

  This time of the year was always painful with its dark memories, but she was careful to give no hint of how she felt to her menfolk. She didn’t know if her grandfather and Robin thought about the terrible events of that Christmas Eve that had changed their lives. It wasn’t the Border folks’ way to indulge in what they would term as sentiment. ‘Least said, soonest mended’ was their attitude to life regarding matters both great and small. If anyone saw her now, blinking away the sudden rush of hot tears, they’d simply ignore her until she was ‘herself’ again. But she missed her mother as much as the day she had died, Abby admitted silently, and the ache in her heart was just as fierce in spite of what people said about time being a great healer. And her poor father; he was as much a victim as her mother. She couldn’t bear to think about how he must have felt, knowing he had killed the woman he loved and just waiting for the hangman’s noose to release him from his torment.

  Thanks to Mr Newton and then the library at the high school, she had read in depth about the after-effects of the Great War. Its deadly new weaponry – bombs, landmines, torpedoes, tanks, flame-throwers, machine guns and poison gas – had brought an era of mass killing never seen before. One post-war psychologist had written that it was patently obvious the hitherto unknown horrors would affect men’s minds as well as their bodies, but whereas wheelchair-bound amputees were given every sympathy, those men without obvious physical injuries were at best ignored and at worst branded malingerers and cowards, even sometimes by their nearest and dearest once the war was over.

  Abby had devoured books on the subject and had come to the inescapable conclusion that if her father had received help and understanding from the medical fraternity, he and her mother would still be alive. And with this certainty had come the passion to take up nursing.

  The same psychologist had gone on to say that it was the ordinary doctors and nurses, the ones dealing with these damaged war veterans, who would bring about change in the medical system, once they themselves accepted and understood it and in turn convinced their colleagues of the reality.

  That one sentence in a book had determined the course of her life, Abby thought now. It had been like a light going on in her mind and she had known what she wanted for her future. Her grandfather and Robin and the rest of them at the farm wouldn’t understand, but that didn’t matter.

  She had been gazing unseeing out of the window, lost in her thoughts, but suddenly she became aware of a dark figure standing motionless in the whiteness, the fine hairs on the back of her neck prickling. As her eyes focused, she saw that Joe McHaffie was watching her over the brick wall that separated the two long narrow strips of garden.

  She had to force herself not to spring out of sight as instinct dictated, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he had intimidated her. Instead she stared back at him for a moment, her chin up and her expression calm and composed, before turning slowly away into the room. Once out of sight of him, however, she leaned against the table, her heart pounding.

  It was always the same, she thought wearily as she gathered herself together. Some sixth sense kicked in even before she physically saw Joe McHaffie, alerting her to his presence and warning her of danger. There had been hundreds of such instances over the years and she was tired of always looking over her shoulder. But soon that would finish.

  She straightened, her shoulders going back. Much as she would miss her grandfather and Robin, she longed for Christmas to be over and the start of the new year when her new life would begin.

  Making her way upstairs to her bedroom, she walked over to the pile of clothes folded neatly on top of the battered old trunk that would transport her belongings to the hospital. Besides underwear – including navy-blue knickers, black woollen stockings and other ‘unmentionables’ that had caused her grandfather to blush when he had read the list the hospital had sent to them with the contract to start her training in January – the inventory had included two pairs of house shoes, winceyette nightdresses, a dressing gown, wristwatch, fountain pen, propelling pencil and other items that they could buy in any town. On top of this formidable expenditure, the matron had included a separate list of clothes to be obtained from a firm specializing in nurses’ uniforms, and also the name of a publisher for books on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, and a nurses’ dictionary. All had been sent for and subsequently delivered.

  Abby was determined she would pay her grandfather back every penny he had taken from the biscuit tin on top of his wardrobe that contained his old-age nest egg, even though he had insisted he wouldn’t hear of it, and now she brushed her hand along the top of the pile of clothes before picking up, for the umpteenth time, the neat little wristwatch with a second hand – the matron had been very specific the watch had to have a second hand – that reposed on the books she read through every night. All the new things had filled her with wonder, but the watch most of all. No one at the farm possessed the luxury of a watch, except perhaps the farmer although she wasn’t sure about that, and this more than anything spoke about how different her life was going to be. Galashiels was only twenty or so miles away as the crow flies, but it could have been hundreds to Abby and the farm folk. The furthest most of them had travelled was to Kelso on market days. It had dawned on Abby over the last years just how much her mother must have loved her father to leave everything she’d ever known in the close-knit Border community, and run off with a man she’d only just met.

  ‘You were so brave, Mam,’ she whispered softly, stroking the small glass face of the watch. ‘I’ll try and make you proud of me, I promise.’ There was a lump in her throat and her eyes were smarting, and she clasped the watch tightly, bringing her hands against her chest. She would give up all thought of this new life with its escape from the farm and Joe McHaffie, for one day with her mother. One day of seeing her, touching her, hearing her voice . . .

  And then she wiped the tears from her face with a swift rub of her hand, replacing the watch beside the pile of clothes.

  It was no good crying for the moon, moreover it was weakening, bringing with it, as it did, a whole host of regrets. If only she had asserted herself with her father that Christmas Eve and brooked no refusal about waiting up for her mother; if only she hadn’t gone to sleep and had heard her mother return and had gone down to the kitchen; if only she hadn’t been too late in running downstairs when the screaming and shouting had begun, but it had been her father’s voice and she had thought he was having one of his turns and so it was best to leave him to
her mam . . .

  ‘Stop it.’ She whispered the words out loud. She knew from experience this train of thought took her into a downward spiral of bitter anguish and remorse, and then the whole world became a grey place. Squaring her slim shoulders, she told herself to go downstairs and take the mince pies out of the oven and get on with the rest of her housewifely duties. Life had to be faced looking forward – it was the only way.

  Chapter Ten

  It was Christmas Eve, and it had started to snow again in earnest the day before, adding to the mounds piled up from the previous weeks. The fresh fall swiftly covered the ground around the farm that had been cleared previously to make daily life a little easier, piling itself on windowsills and forming drifts against the barn doors and outbuildings.

  When Abby had awoken that morning the farm had become white and hushed, and when she’d peered out of her bedroom window she’d groaned softly. Beautiful as the clean new world was, the snow meant the walk to the parish church at Morebattle where the bairns’ Sunday school Christmas party was being held at midday would be heavy going. The party took place in the church hall and the ladies of the congregation organized the annual treat. She had promised to help on the day, along with Tessa, one of the labourers’ wives who had two young children who attended Sunday school.

  At least she was now too old to be expected to go to the farmhouse on Christmas Day though, she thought, as she pulled on her clothes in the icy room. Every year the farmer’s womenfolk entertained the workers’ bairns to a fine tea, but before they were fed they were expected to recite poetry or sing the songs learned at school, and she had hated that. When, after her first Christmas at the farm, she had told her grandfather she didn’t want to go again, he had replied that all the bairns on the farm went to the farmhouse on Christmas Day, and that was that.