The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  27 November

  In this landscape, time races back and forth across the centuries. Last weekend Rory Low found a beautifully decorated Anglo-Saxon stud that perhaps formed part of a shield, or more prosaically a piece of furniture. It turned up in the field beyond the woodland strip that borders the Doocot Field. More and more evidence of an Anglian settlement, the place that probably gave Selkirk its name (Sele in Old English is a hall and circe is a church. In 1124, the name was recorded as Selechirche), is coming up out of the ground. Rory’s stud hints at richness, as does the brooch he found. Perhaps they belonged to the Anglian lord who built the hall and gave money and land to the church.

  Nearby, he has found relics of war: two belt buckles worn by soldiers in the War of the Three Kingdoms. They were almost certainly lost at the bloody slaughter that took place at Philiphaugh in 1645 and were probably dropped by two of General Leslie’s Covenanting cavalrymen.

  Two and a half centuries later, the landscape these troopers rode through was changing once more. By 1899 and the publication of the new Ordnance Survey, the tile works and the house that lay to the north of the long sheds had completely disappeared into the long grass of a park, what is shown as open farmland. But elsewhere there was bustle and activity, and according to the 1891 census almost sixty people lived and worked in and around Hartwoodburn Farm. It was the zenith of the age of high farming. Britain’s farms not only had a domestic market to feed, with railways reaching into the heart of the countryside and distributing animals, grain, cheese, butter, bacon and all the other goodness that grew out of the land, but they also supplied the Empire, its armies, the Royal Navy and the civil service in India and elsewhere.

  The texture of everyday life on these highly productive farms lies just within my own extended memory. In 1890 at Cliftonhill Farm near the village of Ednam and the town of Kelso where I was raised, my grannie Bina was born into the auld life and all of its richness and rhythms, daily and seasonal. From the time she could walk steadily, Bina took a basket to search the steading for hens’ eggs, went ratting in the stackyard with the terriers, and with a small stick and a loud voice helped herd the cows in for the evening milking.

  For six years, she lived at Cliftonhill, one of them spent walking down the hill into Ednam to the little primary school. Bina’s grandfather was first horseman, head ploughman, and she remembered him grooming the huge Clydesdales that pulled the swing plough through the heavy, fertile soil of the fields by the Eden Water. In the evenings, the work done, Bina sat with him on the corn kist, the secure chest where horse feed was kept out of the reach of the rats. Like many men, William Moffat smoked a pipe and I can remember Bina showing it to me. She had kept it after his death in 1897. On top of the bowl, it had a hinged silver cap with small holes in it, like a salt cellar, to slow down the burn of expensive tobacco. Very sadly, the old pipe was lost, perhaps thrown out when Bina died in 1971. All I have of my great-great-grandfather, the first horseman, is a small pale white and black box made out of ram’s horn. Beautifully carved, it closes tight and I wonder if William kept his matches in it.

  29 November

  Even though a cold, pale light was rising in the east, the dawn stars, the brightest – Sirius the Dog Star, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri – were still visible. Clear and still, the morning was spared the cackle of the crows and only a solitary buzzard’s piou-piou echoed across the grass parks. At 6 a.m. the sun was well below the horizon, but it backlit the bare trees on Greenhill Heights, even though it would be another hour and a half until its rays reached us. At minus five, there was a gossamer film of ice on the tracks, but I was sure it would shift as the morning warmed. Out on the Long Track, I watched the land change from a cold grey to blue and then pale yellow as the light strengthened. Even though it was cold, I walked slowly, letting Maidie sniff for as long as she wanted in the dieback. The colours are delicate, subtle, fleeting.

  30 November

  The world is white. No snow has fallen, but the hardest frost of the winter gripped the land last night. Twelve degrees below zero has frozen the puddles and the water troughs in the fields solid. The Old Boys can drink from the free flow of the Nameless Burn, but we will probably need to break the ice in the troughs that water the mares, the minis and the others who will go out later.

  Maidie led me up a rabbit track through the dieback in the Top Wood and we stood for a few shivering, precious moments at the summit of the ridge as the white land glinted below us. In the dawn light, our panorama was graphic, from the hill and hummocks of the Deer Park to the east, around to Greenhill Heights with the unrisen sun glowing yellow behind, to the tall TV mast due south and its five red warning lights, warm and beautiful, then to the west our little valley unfolded and rose up the motte and the hills of the Ettrick Forest beyond. Completing the winter landscape was Newark Hill and Peat Law to the north.

  Wingbeats whooshing, necks outshot spear-straight, two swans wheeled below us and flew over the Haining Loch.

  December

  1 December

  Even though she died almost fifty years ago, my grannie Bina and I sat down together to have breakfast this morning. Last night Maggie and Archie Stewart came to a talk I gave and they had a gift that moved me very much. They farm at Cliftonhill now and brought me a bag of porridge oats grown in the fields once ploughed by William Moffat, where Annie Moffat hoed the weeds and where Bina helped at harvest time. These are the fields of memory for my family, a landscape of loss and renewal, sodden with winter rains and then bright with ripening corn. Their soil is grained into my hands. Part of the harvest was given to families in the cottage row as their ‘gains’, and so when the pan of oats began to seeth and steam I took my bowl to the kitchen table and sat down where Bina was waiting for me, her words echoing across the years. ‘Get something hot and substantial into you first thing,’ she said to me – every morning.

  Some of the fields below the farm steading border the Eden Water and I noticed that the porridge oats were branded as produce from the Eden Valley. When I am going that way, I always stop by a field entry at Cliftonhill to look out over the southern vistas that Bina knew so well. They are unchanged and, to my eye, Edenic.

  The prodigious harvests of the golden age of high farming were increased even more by benign climate change in the middle of the nineteenth century. Between c.1300 and 1850 the global climate became very cold, frosty and wet in a series of long periods that became known as the Little Ice Age. The first recorded Frost Fair was held in 1608 on the thick ice that covered the River Thames and the last took place in 1814. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting The Hunters in the Snow showed a scene common across Western Europe in those wintry centuries, and the most apt image for Scotland is Henry Raeburn’s portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch in Edinburgh in the 1790s. Along with curling, it was a winter pastime that became very popular, since in the colder weather rivers, ponds and lochs could be relied upon to freeze regularly.

  On the Ordnance Survey map made after 1856 for our farm, there are three strange rectilinear shapes that seem to have no agricultural purpose. They look like ponds that were dug out to gather water from the Nameless Burn that runs at the foot of the East Meadow. Under the thick dieback, I was able to make out at least two embanked lines of mounded earth when I went looking with Maidie this morning. I am certain that the three areas were allowed to fill with water so that they formed a skating and curling rink for the Pringles and their children from the big house. On the plan made for John Pringle in 1757, they are marked as a long pond, perfect for creating alternate ends for teams of curlers. The Nameless Burn now bypasses these depressions, but it would be a simple operation to dam it and divert the flow. But I suspect we have enough ice to deal with.

  2 December

  When the nights began to close in and the first flurries of snow fell, Bina used to stare out of the sitting-room window and talk of ‘drifty days’. It was a phrase from the auld life on farm places. As it
s name suggests, Cliftonhill is perched on a ridge above the Eden Water and the village of Ednam. Exposed to the snow, those who lived there in the 1890s must have thought that the time of severe winters had come back. In 1891 the first use of the word ‘blizzard’ was recorded, and it appears to derive from the German blitzartig, a storm that comes like lightning. When Bina was three years old in the winter of 1893–4, a great deal of snow fell and many mature trees were blown down across the Border country as the blizzards blew. The following winter saw unrelenting frost from 30 December to 5 March 1895 and many days of heavy snowfall. A year later, the blizzards came roaring back. Like all who worked on the land, Bina feared the extremes of the winter and prolonged periods of snow are what planted the image of drifty days indelibly in her memory. There were long days when she sat staring out of the cottage window at the still, white landscape where all that moved were hopeful robins hopping around the branches of bushes, looking for frozen berries.

  When the land was hard and frozen with deep snow, Cliftonhill simply survived, as pathways were shovelled clear, ash from old fires thrown down as winter grit and hammers taken to smash open the solid water troughs. The plough horses, the great Clydesdales, needed to be led out of their looseboxes and even if the fields were deep, it was better that these equine engines kept their muscles moving, if only for an hour or two. As time’s wheel turns, we find ourselves doing similar things, as winter closes in around us and the drifty days are not far off.

  3 December

  A smoky golden dawn brought milder weather, a welcome break from ice and a brisk wind to dry the sodden fields. This morning’s sun picked out the sheep my neighbour has put into the Deer Park and it is good to see that herb-rich grass being eaten down, bitter though it will be.

  4 December

  The 1891 census listed ten people packed into the Henhouse. First was the Head of the House, Andrew Harvey, a ploughman, and with his wife, Catherine, he had six children in the tiny cottage to feed and clothe. Noted as being between the ages of twelve and one, five had been born at regular two-year intervals, with the youngest, James, perhaps an afterthought. He was three years younger than his brother, George.

  In an age before reliable contraception, this intense pattern of procreation was not uncommon. Most women are unable to conceive while they are breastfeeding and it looks as though Catherine fell pregnant as soon as she had weaned each successive baby. In such crowded conditions, life must have been a series of never-ending demands on her time and attention: feeding, potty-training, endless washing of clothes and keeping an eye on toddlers in such a tiny space. But in the late nineteenth century farm workers were encouraged to have large families. More hands could help at harvest, in the stackyard, with hens, gathering the wild harvests of berries, roots and fruits, and much else. When a ploughman like Andrew Harvey was negotiating a fee at a hiring fair, into the bargain would go any and all of his children who could lend hands when needed.

  Such crowded living conditions limited privacy, and it will have been difficult for Andrew and Catherine to be alone and undisturbed so that they could make love, especially in the winter. The unrecorded reality is that most couples, married or not, had sex out of doors. Lovers’ Lanes and phrases like ‘begotten in brake and bush’ and the building of bowers are the memory of that social necessity. The wonder is that the Harveys managed to conceive six children, given the bad weather of the 1890s.

  For the first time, there is a traceable continuity at the Henhouse. The Valuation Roll of 1885 shows that the Harveys were in the cottage at that time, and sixteen years later they were still living there. The 1901 census lists only two children who had not left home: the youngest, James, was eleven and at eighteen, his brother, William, was apprenticed to a tailor in Selkirk. Catherine’s sister, Jane, had come to live with the Harveys and Andrew had changed his job. Having given up working with the heavy horses at the ploughing and carting, he had a job in the garden at the Haining. Perhaps at fifty-six his strength was not what it had been after forty winters in the fields. But not quite yet a ‘done’ man, Andrew could plant kitchen crops, dig potatoes and water the greenhouse plants.

  In both the 1891 and the 1901 censuses, gamekeepers lodged with the Harveys, probably sleeping in the downstairs room in the south gable. Four adults and six children crammed into a tiny kitchen around the warming range will at least have had each other’s body heat to supplement the glow of the logs. And in summer life will have been lived outside, as much as the weather and work allowed. Where they all slept in the tiny cottage is a matter for conjecture, but it is likely that all eight of the Harveys slept in the two upstairs bedrooms under the eaves. These were small, with an east-facing dormer window in each to give morning light. The younger children probably slept with their parents and the older boys kept each other warm in a big bed through the long, cold winter nights. Modern single beds are the nineteenth-century invention of hoteliers. Until relatively recently almost all beds had room for more than one and children were used to sleeping together for warmth and company, no doubt bickering over space and who was kicking whom, or pulling the quilt away.

  Even though the 1890s in particular and the Edwardian period before the outbreak of the First World War saw the apogee of high farming, the children of the ploughmen and the farm labourers were beginning to drift off the land, leaving forever the auld life that Bina loved so much. Nicholas Wilson from the 1861 census in the Henhouse, easy to trace because of her quirky Christian name, moved to work in the textile mills in Galashiels, and William Harvey worked in a tailor’s shop in Selkirk. By 1911 my great-grandmother, Annie Moffat, had given up the hard manual work of a bondager and moved into Kelso and domestic service. Bina became a seamstress because, as my mother used to say, she had clever hands.

  Now only two of us live in the house that once rang with the clamour and chatter of generations of children, and sometimes I think it feels empty. No doubt Catherine Harvey would have liked that, wanting a moment or two to herself, some peace from all the demands made on her.

  5 December

  Walking in the winter dark, even on familiar ground, can be hazardous. I often set out with Maidie before first light and sometimes trip or stumble, occasionally splashing through an unexpected puddle. But this morning I fell headlong over a stone in the track that was definitely not there yesterday. Skinning the balls of my hands and banging my knee, I fell hard and jarred myself. But that was the least of it. The injury to my dignity was grievous even if no one witnessed the pratfall except Maidie. She simply stood and looked at me, my face suddenly at her level, cocking her head from side to side.

  The dark landscape is lit by winter headlights swinging across the flanks of the western hills and on the road down from Greenhill Heights. Like Nicholas Wilson and William Harvey, these are people who live in the countryside going to work in the towns. But they do not have to walk, and risk injury.

  6 December

  No one could have known it at the time, but the 1911 census was a snapshot, a bright and sudden light on a world that was about to change utterly. Despite the glittering ceremonial of the Dehli Durbar in December that year, when George V and Queen Mary were proclaimed Emperor and Empress of India, war clouds were gathering over Europe and cracks were beginning to appear in the vast British Empire. As the King-Emperor and the Queen-Empress sat in state under a gorgeously decorated canopy, their ermine and velvet cloaks cascading down the dais, they received the homage of native princes and potentates. But one was less respectful, and the Gaekwad of Baroda, Maharaja Sayajirao III, delivered a calculated insult. He approached their imperial majesties without wearing his jewellery and in a simple costume before bowing from the neck and turning his back to walk away from them. It was an omen, and thirty-five years later the Raj was dissolved and the British Empire began to crumble.

  What accelerated this spectacular decline was the shock, wreckage and slaughter of the First World War. Britain lost a generation of young men, ‘the best of them’,
and the nation’s vitality and resilience seemed to drain away. Almost three hundred young men from Selkirk and the surrounding farms have their names carved on the war memorial in the town. Many died in the debacle of the Dardanelles, an abortive attempt to invade Turkey and attack Constantinople, the capital of Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire.

  In May 1915 my grandfather was home on leave in Kelso from the trenches in Flanders when he met my grannie Bina. She and Robert Charters had a brief affair that left her pregnant with my father. Soldiers knew that survival rates were low and an air of now or never may have swirled around them that summer as they walked down a lovers’ lane. Who knows what promises were made. Soon after his return to the front, Robert found himself in a tunnel when the Germans filled it with mustard gas. Before the poisonous cloud reached him, he heard men screaming and somehow managed to crawl out. Badly blistered but not fatally affected, Robert spent many months convalescing, although he never made a complete recovery and remained a semi-invalid all his life. It was at that time he heard Bina was expecting his child.

  More than a century later, and never having spoken to my father about his father, it is impossible to reconstruct the circumstances that led my grandfather to marry someone else, leaving my grandmother to raise her son with the help of Annie, her mother. War not only saw the slaughter of millions of men, it could also change the lives of women utterly.

  7 December

  Walter and his friend, Jean Wood, helped me to find Phil Cornwall. I was told that as a little boy he lived in the Henhouse at the end of the Second World War and now he has a house in Selkirk. Unknowingly, I pass it most days on my way into town. When I phoned Phil this morning to arrange to meet, he told me that many years ago he had walked down the Bottom Track to see the remade house. But when he met my daughters, Phil said it had been ‘a wee bit awkward’. That is a shame. We shall talk on Monday and I shall invite him back to his old house.