by Jess Smith
‘There now, I told you it will only move when the answers are in your own heads. None of you know anything about that murderer, therefore it’s unable to say anything, I knew it was all a bloody sham and you are all believing it.’
Thinking him right, we sat back, taking our fingers off the glass. What happened next would change forever my uncle’s attitude towards such things as spirits. I still had my pencil and this is what the glass, without a finger touching it, spelt out—‘there is a baby in this room!’ The dead man whom Joe had asked to come had included, among his victims, little children!
That was the end of that kind of entertainment for me. From that moment on, the dead, as far as I was concerned, would stay just that.
9
CHAPBOOK TALES
The whole area along the coastline of the Highlands is steeped in superstition. When the rest of the country was embracing religion, it still adhered to old druid ways. Into this rich seam of dark history I want us to travel now.
‘What’s a chapbook, Jess?’ I hear you ask, when you see the title of this chapter. Well, as far as clever folk have told me, it was the very first kind of book written for ordinary people. No words of great literature did it contain, just simple words with simple stories. A chapman would travel the land, selling his wee books to whoever could afford one. Centuries ago, gypsies were renowned for spreading news through ballads and poems, but so was the chapman.
I learned that this particular body whose story I am going to describe was also a gypsy wanderer. Travelling gypsies seldom drifted outside a certain area. I am part of the Perthshire travellers, who are known for a touch of blarney. Stewarts were mainly Highlanders. Young and Gordon were Borderers.
Not all travelling gypsies could read or write; truth is, they seldom did. Yet in every tribe one would aim to excel the others by teaching himself. Then, when stories were told, the writer would take down many a tale.
So here’s a wee snippet of folklore from an old travelling gypsy’s Highland chapbook. It’s about a lass and a werewolf; the greatest shapeshifter of the supernatural world.
Many are the times I felt unable to go into the forest or play by a pond after hearing tales of the shapeshifters. Travelling bairns never failed to lie wakeful at night if it was thought a shapeshifter had prowled through their campsite. It was said that witches and warlocks seldom walked at night if the wolf howl was silent. Werewolves were part and parcel of my parents’ upbringing, long before Hollywood got wind of them. But I’m losing the thread. Let’s go on with the tale.
Douglas loved Loarn greatly, yet how difficult it was for him, a mere woodcutter, to show her how much. Many times had he passed the big house where the master had her wearied by an enormous burden of work. One glance of affection in his direction was enough to cause her strict master to whip her hard. Only at night could she find time to slip away and meet him, yet night was also the time for the blessed relief of sleep, and her visits greatly diminished as she’d have to lie down upon her bed exhausted.
Douglas decided enough was enough, and that he would buy her from the evil man. He was met at the big house door by a manservant who ushered him in. When the master said that to buy her would take thirty pounds, poor love-torn Douglas knew it was impossible. Not in all his lifetime had he seen such an amount, nor was he ever likely to do so. As he walked away from the house, something floated from a high window. It was a small piece of paper, and on it were written the words, ‘she of night will unleash our love.’
Obviously it was from his beloved, but why did she wish him to go where few would dare—into the deep forest to take counsel with An Cheilach, the Old Woman. Long had rumours followed one another of how she flitted over treetops straddling a broomstick, cackling at the moon. Her spells, when uttered, could herald death and worse. Yet if Loarn wished it, then he had no choice. That night, alone and a wee bit scared, Douglas crawled through brushwood and briar, paddled moonlit streams, climbed hillock and glen, until beneath a canopy of forest trees he stood outside her dim-lit hovel. ‘Can ye lower yer heed when enterin’ ma hame, Dougie, ah’ve toads and bats, and een-gouged rats, hingin’ drying by the door.’
‘Mistress, ye have had word o’ ma visit?’
‘Aye, lad, I ken the thoughts in yer head afore ye have an inklin’ yersel.’
‘Loarn has sent me tae ye. Oor love will shrivel an’ die if yon maister o’ the Big Hoose is oucht tae dae wae it.’
The old biddy lifted her spirtle stick from a black stew in a cauldron from which nobody but Auld Nick from Hell would sup, and bade him sit. He obeyed and waited.
‘Loarn, as ye ken, is a MacLennan. Dae ye ken whit that name means?’ she said, adding a long worm to her pot.
‘That I do, it means “son of the wolf.”’
‘Well, you’re a clever yin, I’ll gi’e ye that. Now listen tae me, Dougie, and listen well. Loarn is the daughter of John MacLennan, who was a “son o’ the wolf”. Her very name, Loarn, means wolf. There is more in a name than we ken, lad.’ She stared upwards at flickers of moonlight coming through a crack in the roof, where spirals of unearthly smoke were allowed to escape. ‘Time is slipping by. Now, I can see ye lo’e the lass, but how much? That will be the test.’
‘Dinna doubt—ma heart will love nae other. If she escapes me, I’ll gi’e up ma ain life.’
The old hag could see a determination in his face, etched there by his longing for Loarn. ‘Come with me then, laddie, an’ meet yer fate.’
Not understanding, he followed behind as she half-floated over the moss-carpeted floor of the dark forest, lit only by the spreading moonlight. An owl hooted eerily, then rose in slow motion to surprise, then rob some small unsuspecting creature of its last breath.
Douglas soon found himself in a clearing facing some form of den. Sticks and broken branches knitted together made a door. ‘Go inside now, Dougie, and may the Earth serve you both well.’ At those words she floated backwards, and was swallowed by shadows.
How long he waited for whatever was to come to him, he could not tell, yet all the while he felt eyes watching him, staring into his very soul. Then, from the den, he heard a low growl. His heart beat loudly like a drum, he wanted to run, to scream, to fight, but his body had frozen. It was like a dream. Just when he thought his heart would burst in his chest, a face loomed from the darkness. Eyes yellowy-red, fangs dripping, jaws open wide, it pounced and sank great teeth deep into the flesh of his neck. Then the wood was gone. He was fleeing into some long black passage, pursued by hundreds of howling wolves. He ran and ran until a mountain stood before him; he leapt upon a pinnacle of rock and began to fight the wolves—one by one they fell as he ripped their bodies in shreds. As the last one lay broken and bleeding, he stretched his head towards the clouds that skipped past the full moon and screamed. Mountain and earth shook. Then a smell entered his nostrils, one that called to him to follow and seek out. With speed never before afforded him, he leapt through the forest until he stood outside the big house. With the same haste he bounded up the stone steps, kicked open the front door and leapt the stairs to a small room. With brute force he pushed the door, which fell from its hinges to the floor. Loarn was waiting. Together, side by side, they left the big house and disappeared into the cover of trees.
Next day the master was unable to speak, let alone eat a morsel of breakfast. Later, when more composed, he asked if any of the servants had seen what he had seen, running over the gardens in the moonlight?
When asked what that was, he answered with eyes terrified and staring: ‘Why, the wolves of course. Did naebody see them, the big black brute and the slender white yin?’
The seal too was known to shape-shift, under cover of dream-time, to become, once again, a human. In North Uist were found the origins of the seal folk. It is believed that the name MacCodrum means ‘the son of the seal’. The song ‘Mhairi Dhu’ is the seal song. Mhairi was betrothed to Donal the boatman, but one night on the eve of her wedding she set off in a dream state
and met a seal man. He transformed her into a seal, so that every night she would shape-shift into one. From this union, folks say, were descended the MacCodrums of North Uist, who were brown-haired, brown-skinned, had curiously-set ears and round, bullet-shaped heads. This is in contrast to most folk of that place, who have more of a Scandinavian appearance, with blonde hair and blue eyes. As I say, this is only a snippet from a chapbook, and I cannot confirm what are the real facts.
Hares too were shape-shifters. Once upon a time Donald, who had more than one run-in with a nasty old hag of a neighbour, was cutting peat when a monster hare ran past him, pursued by two hounds. Donald lifted his spade and brought it down so hard upon the beast that he split it in two. What a fright he got when the animal turned into none other than the old woman who lived nearby. When he got home, imagine his horror when his wife met him with the news that the old woman had been killed by a kick from a sheltie. He didn’t tell his wife what he had seen on the bog—it was, in fact, the old woman’s soul being chased by the Hounds of Hell.
Cats haven’t escaped a reputation for shape-shifting either.
There are better-known stories of shape-shifting like ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and tales of water kelpies. Even Shakespeare told tales about such mythological beings. There’s no end of stories about them—of goats, peacocks and rats which transformed themselves. It was said that the old witch who turned herself into a rat was recognised by the lack of a tail. This is interesting, because folk tradition says that for every limb in the human body there is one to correspond in the rat except for its tail. So a tailless rat would clearly be a witch.
My favourite shape-shifter is a drunken man on a Saturday night. It always amazes me, the difference in him from earlier, when sober and sensible, to his downright mental state with the alcohol in him.
We will no doubt wander back again through the pages of my chapbook, but meanwhile let’s see what is happening on the home front.
10
FATTY
Davie and Daddy found the painting-jobs drying up—in both senses of the word—so what did my water-hating husband do? He took a job on a fishing-boat, and boy, did he learn the hard way that it’s not an easy life on the choppy sea.
He looked terrified out of his skin standing on board that first day. We had walked the few hundred yards with him from our house to the harbour. Johnnie said, ‘Daddy has a green face, Mummy.’ And that he did, as the waves almost swallowed his vessel. My poor man, what he did to put food on the table. The boat was a trawler, with a crew of grand lads, especially the cook, who had his own ideas of the best way of filling my man’s belly, and just as odd a way of causing him to empty it over the side of the boat.
Yet not being there out on the briny I have only what Davie told me to go by. In his words, ‘it was a hard life, catching wee fish, big fish, and giants o’ fish’. So let’s leave him to the ocean for a while, and I’ll tell you how that blasted weight problem of mine left me with more than a fleeting resemblance to the biggest fish Davie was netting on his trawler. I will take you on some of Davie’s trips as a fisherman later on, but firstly we’ll go through the tale of a fatty.
The Macduff folk were right proud of their swimming pool, Tarlair, a mile from town and lying on the brink of the ocean. Everybody from nine months to ninety swam in this man-made dam. The only problem was when the tide came in—there sometimes came with it an odd fish or jellyfish, you know the kind of thing. Not many big ones got in, because local lads were employed to clean the pool regularly. ‘Nothing gets past us,’ I once heard a guy say, and he wasn’t kidding. Parents would sit about sunning themselves; picnics were enjoyed as the wee ones ran in and out of the sea-green water. My boys loved it, and so did I.
However there was a difficulty, not a big one, but a difficulty nevertheless: where would I purchase a swimming costume to accommodate my massive frame, all fourteen-and-a-half stone of it?
You might ask how I knew I weighed this amount? Well, one morning as the boats were unloading, I went down to the harbour for some free fish. It was usual for the man weighing in the catches to give a freebie to whoever was there. ‘You’re an awfy breadth for sic a wee quine,’ the weighman said looking me up and down. To be honest, I’d never given my weight-gain that much thought, because my man said he loved me no matter how fat I got. He’d laugh and add—‘more of you to cuddle.’ So imagine my horror when the weighman told me I was too heavy for his scales. Of course he was kidding, but when I stood on them the needle did a jig.
‘Fit are ye scoffing tae mak a bonny quine like yersel sae swelt?’
‘Pavement, swallow me up,’ was all I could think as I walked away. Suddenly I thought all eyes were on me, what a shaming it was. I turned and pushed my children back home, feeling every cursed pound of unwanted flesh.
‘Get some exercise done, lassie.’ This was Mammy’s remedy for fatties.
Yet I seemed to walk miles every day, and although we’d a telly it only got switched on for Johnnie’s programmes. But how could I bear to stay this weight? From that moment I decided I would lose the unnecessary flab.
‘I saw some swimming costumes, Jess, there’s a sale of them in the Co-op,’ said my wee sister Babsy. ‘All sizes, even ones to fit you.’
How awful she sounded, but she was only trying to help, I knew that. So I bought a Speedo, a nice black number. ‘It slims one, they say,’ said the assistant—who was three times fatter than me, cheeky imp.
Well, summer was upon us, and off I went with my laddies to Tarlair, Johnnie toddling by my side, Stephen in his pram which was loaded with goodies to eat, buckets and spades and swimming gear. Just in case I got stuck undressing, my Speedo was on under my clothes. Mammy came along too. Everybody from Macduff was of the same mind, and the place was heaving. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘of all days to introduce my body-filled Speedo to the Moray coast, I have picked the worst.’
For ages I watched Johnnie paddling and splashing, running over to Mammy and me for a digestive biscuit, only to drop it into the water and cry for another one. Since his close escape with illness I would have given him the world, and he knew it, the fly wee devil. So after handing him a few digestives I gingerly stepped out from under a rainbow-coloured beach towel (another Co-op bargain), and while Mammy sat doing a word puzzle next to sleeping Stephen, I slid under the water at the deepest end.
It had been a long time since I swam, and in no time I was in my element. I always was a good swimmer, and could keep up with many a powerful travelling laddie with frog arms and lizard legs. Ever since my uncle threw me in one year at the Lunan burn pool at Gothans outside Blairgowrie, I have had the water powers of a mermaid.
At first I swam like a butterfly down the length of the pool, until a baldy man with the body hair of an ape began doing dives under me, emerging to smile into my face. ‘What a show-off,’ I remember thinking. Suddenly after his umpteenth dive, it dawned on me that this twit of a water zebra was having a good look at my bulk. And everybody knows we look twice as big under water as above it. That old cliché, ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ came to mind, so I too took to diving and soon felt a lot more comfortable. The hairy one, obviously exhausted, left the deep end to me and one old woman. She also got out of the pool and my happiness returned when it was apparent I was the only one left in. Not so at the shallow end, it was filled with squealing weans. As I threw everything into my swimming the crawl, diving, floating, backstroke and butterfly, I spoke to my bellies wobbling buoyantly under the fabric of the Speedo. ‘I shall come up here everyday,’ I told each pound, ‘until every ounce is shed. Oh aye, you’re for the chop, nothing surer.’
‘One more length, then I’ll call it a day,’ I thought, swimming into shallower water. Suddenly the pitch of kids’ noise grew louder and louder. I stopped swimming and stretched my head above water to see what alarmed the wee ones. My heart skipped a beat, thinking my lad was sick again, but when I saw Johnnie sitting beside Mammy my anxiety diminished. I
took one more dive, then headed towards where my mother and kids were. Even under the water the screams were deafening. As I emerged onto the grassy bank, a pool attendant approached me. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘the weans thought you were a basking shark. I’d get rid o’ that black costume and wear a coloured yin, quiney!’
Well, definitely slimming was the order of the day after that awful experience. But a wee word of warning: if you too are feeling the effects of being overweight, then seek professional help. I didn’t, and here’s what happened.
Round the corner from where we lived was a chemist’s shop. It had just received a batch of so-called slimming biscuits. These tasty treats had just entered the world of dieting. Women were scoffing them like hot cakes, they were flying off the shelves. A friendly assistant said that, if I wished, she’d sell me at a big discount a box of the biscuits which had come in wrongly coded. I bought the whole lot, and if memory serves me right it contained four months’ supply. One biscuit instead of a meal, and the weight problem would disappear. Within six months I would see quite a visible difference. Aye, right!
What did greedy me do? Well, these tasty treats went down no bother with a cup of tea. Then, after a plate of my favourite stew and tatties, I enjoyed one as a pudding. Also, I’d better confess to you about something else. There was a chippy down a flight of stone stairs at the rear of our house, and if one bought anything after ten o’ clock at night they got it half price. You must know by now I’m not one to snub a bargain, and my favourite was a ‘polony supper’. Yes, I know, I know.
Another stone later, I was so depressed I could hardly put a foot over the door. My wee boys also were suffering, not getting the fresh air growing children need. Davie still never complained, not even when he came home one day after three weeks at sea and I threw myself into his open arms. The result was, he spent four days in bed with a strained back and sported a thick lip after coming in contact with my podgy nose. Ochone, ochone, what a mess I was in; totally out of control.
