8 December
In the night a rainstorm lashed the house and rattled the slates. By the time I was out and doing, the clouds had scudded past and across at the farm my neighbour had clanked his digger into the steading to lift steaming loads of silage into the cow byre troughs.
We drove over to Melrose to buy a Christmas tree, a journey that seemed much more recent than a year ago. Like birthdays, Christmases are annual signposts, accumulators of memory that loom up out of the mists of the future faster and faster. Up a winding road and down a farm track, trees were stacked, sheathed in white plastic netting. We asked for an eight footer that looked good bushed out. It turned out to be nine foot but we managed to fit it into the car, the top jammed between the front seats and brushing the windscreen. I changed gear by Braille.
When the tree was set up on its stand, Grace came over to help her grannie decorate it. Sitting nearby, watching, occasionally reaching for my hankie, I was much moved and taken back many decades to the time when our children were young and wide-eyed about Christmas. With great concentration, the three-year-old reached into old boxes, some dating from the 1970s, to unwrap glass spheres, ceramic redcoat soldiers, the star for the top, reindeer, glass bells and yards of tinsel and fairy lights. These decorations are as close to family heirlooms as anything else we might pass on. Some have been with us for forty years, others were bought on a visit to Berlin (where they understand Christmas and make very beautiful wooden carvings), and many are as old as our children.
The tree is a source of sparkling cheer, lighting the winter darkness, and it turns out to cheer others too. Across the Tile Field, in her cottage by the old Roman road, one of our elderly neighbours lives alone and last year she told us she smiles when she sees our Christmas lights twinkling in the darkness.
9 December
‘I was born in your house.’ Phil sat by a window with wide views over the Ettrick Valley, his own house perched high above the A7 as it winds downhill into Selkirk. ‘My family moved in in 1941 and we left in 1951.’ Just as with Bina, the place where Phil lived the first six years of his life stamped his memory indelibly. ‘The stairs were awful steep. Have you still got them?’ We do, and that remark came racing across the decades, the observation of a wee boy who probably climbed them on his hands and knees. ‘Do you remember they were red-leaded?’ I asked, and Phil nodded, turning away to look across the valley beyond his window.
His early memories of the Henhouse were sharp: a small cottage with no electricity and no running water. Dark winter evenings were lit by tilly lamps, ‘very bright’, paraffin lamps and candles, when they could be afforded. Instead of overhead bulbs clicked on by a switch, it was a childhood remembered in intimate pools of light and shadows behind, in the circle of firelight and in black darkness beyond the windows.
Water was drawn into the warm kitchen by a hand pump over the sink. About fifty yards to the west of the house was a well, the one plotted on the Ordnance Survey published after 1856. All traces of it have disappeared. Perhaps the springs upstream have been diverted with all of the building work and earth-moving done to rebuild the house and the new annexe. Water was heated in kettles suspended on the swee over the fire in the black cast-iron range and poured into a tin bath. No doubt the water was shared by several bathers and topped up to keep it warm.
Phil remembered that his parents slept in the kitchen and that the downstairs room on the left was a bedroom. Upstairs was another bedroom and a store. One of the four children avoided going into it because he felt ‘a presence in the room’. All of these descriptions and recollections speak of a long continuity. Anne Moscript, the Wilsons, the Harveys and the Cornwalls all lived in a house that had changed very little since it was built in 1821.
And other links are remade. After Phil’s birth in 1945 and the birth of Grace Moffat in 2016, a gap of almost sixty years has closed, as the Henhouse once again comes alive and nurtures children.
Vivid incidents lodged in Phil’s memory. His parents used the old looseboxes adjoining the south gable of the cottage as a place to store wood (‘I can’t remember coal burning. How would they have got it to the house?’) and also to keep chickens. The game-keeper at the Haining, ‘not a nice man’, had a polecat and it got into the loosebox and killed all the chickens before Phil’s dad could catch it. When he killed the polecat, it bit through his wellies and the wee boy remembered the blood. ‘When he brought the polecat into the house to show us, it stank the place out for weeks.’
In the long and drifty winter of 1947 the Henhouse was snow-bound for weeks, and food and other necessities were brought over the frozen fields by a horse and a sleigh. In all sorts of weather, Phil walked through the grounds of the Haining to school in Selkirk and walked back each afternoon. There was no Top or Bottom Track at that time; instead the cottage was reached by a path across what is now the Home Paddock. It sometimes shows up on early maps. There was no road or track for any sort of vehicle, except a sleigh. Phil’s mum used to ask him to look for the Co-op travelling shop stopping up at Brownmoor so that she could walk up the path to Windy Gates, which was as close as the van could reach. Milk was left in a small churn down at Burn Cottage and one of the wee boy’s chores was to walk through the fields and carry it back home.
In 1939 the Haining estate was put up for sale. As well as the mansion house, the farms at Hartwoodburn, Howden, Greenhill and what became Brownmoor were all up for auction. Phil’s wife, Janis, had tracked down the particulars and a series of black-and-white photographs of the farms for sale. The Deer Park is parcelled up with the East Meadow, confirming its ancient, medieval extent, including the course of the Nameless Burn, a necessary water supply for the overwintering does.
Lot 30 is ‘An Attractive Stone, Lime and Slate Detached Cottage known as Park Cottage’. On the accompanying map, I read clear evidence that we have been living at the wrong address. As Phil confirmed, the posh name and the postal address was Park Cottage. And yet the Ordnance Survey of 1900 clearly plots it as the Henhouse, as do earlier and later maps. Was the use of Park Cottage an attempt by the estate owners to airbrush a disreputable episode in the Pringle family’s history? It certainly looks that way.
After the sale of 1939 and the great disruptions of the Second World War, the ownership of the Haining estate passed through three pairs of private hands. One of these attempted to evict Phil’s family, four children and their parents, from Park Cottage. Clearly as tenants they had rights, perhaps even a long-term lease, but strong-arm tactics were tried. The little house stood in the open grass park with no fencing around it or the path to the Top Track, so the estate manager put a bull and some cows into the field. Since the only access the Cornwalls had to their house was the path, this was a clear case of intimidation. To keep warm and out of the wind, the cattle came right up to the front door and the walls of the cottage. Phil’s mother went to see a solicitor in Galashiels and a fence was at last put up, but soon afterwards the family moved out.
It seems that the bullying new owner of the Haining wanted all of the cottages to be occupied by estate workers (Phil’s dad worked for the county council as a lorry driver) but it appears that after 1951 Park Cottage was never reoccupied. Eventually the slate roof was breached and the pretty semi-circular porch vandalised when a previous farmer at Hartwoodburn cut away its supporting pillars to be reused as fence posts.
Phil never forgot the cottage where he was born and Janis gave me a copy of a photograph taken in 1989 with his mother and two children. Phil smiles broadly and they stand in the long grass with their collie panting on a summer afternoon. Two years later we drove down the track with another set of particulars, and immediately fell in love with this remarkable little house and all the spirits that seemed to swirl around it.
10 December
Yesterday afternoon I came upon a little bird sitting on the track outside the porch. It did not move as I approached and, thinking it was a chick (in December?), I picked it up gently, moments before the c
at ran around the corner. With olive green feathers, short wings and a needle-like beak, it had remarkable markings on its head. Minute orange, black and yellow stripes ran from between its eyes to the crown of its head. In my cupped hands, its heart was trembling. To keep it safe from the cat, and in the warming, reviving sun, I put it on the roof of Lindsay’s car.
While its downy feathers and tiny size had fooled me into thinking this was a chick for a few bewildered moments, I soon realised that the bird had probably clonked itself on the glass of the porch and was dazed. Nearly fatally. Looking through the Book of British Birds, I discovered it was a Firecrest, a close relative of the little Goldcrest that taps on the window frames of my office to flush out tiny, tasty insects.
11 December
Yesterday’s rainstorms persuaded me to light both woodburners. High winds always find their way into old houses. But the log pile is dwindling rapidly and it will not last beyond the middle of January at this rate. Having heaved one of the thick lengths of Scots pine from leaning against the gable of the barn into the wood yard, I propped it over another thick log and fired up my chainsaw.
The pine was soaking, only the core dry. This presents me with a real problem because that wood had seasoned longest, having been cut in 2017 – it was my reserve supply. I cut the length into seven shorter logs and stacked six of them under cover to see how long they would take to drain. Meanwhile I put the axe through the seventh to see how long the split logs take to burn in a hot fire. They almost put it out and had to be removed.
12 December
Last night Adam, Kim and Grace came over to discuss plans for Christmas and we sat around the blazing woodburner as Lindsay noted down menus, likes, dislikes and a timetable. As ever, manufactured deadlines and crises will flare up between now and the arrival of Santa and, as ever, they will melt away. Quite why this Christmas tradition exists, I have never understood.
13 December
When the Cornwall family lived in the Henhouse, revolutions were gathering pace in the fields around them, the new obliterating the old with dizzying speed. At the beginning of the Second World War, the Haining estate and house were requisitioned by the army, first by the Welsh Fusiliers and later by the Polish Free Army, accompanied by their famous bear, Wojtek. The soldiers left two legacies. Under the soil of the Deer Park, buried in the surrounding fields and elsewhere, Rory Low has found the hidden debris of war, mostly bullet and shell casings, and on my desk sits the brass base plate of the Mills bomb, the hand grenade that he dug up not far from the ruins of the doocot. The second legacy was accidental.
One of the photographs in the sale particulars of 1939 shows the formal, neo-classical frontage of the Haining, with its row of six statues on their plinths between it and the loch. In the foreground, two men are boating near a circular, artificial island with a small tree growing on it. The Canaletto-style composition is ruined by a somewhat ragged-looking old building standing hard up against the west wall of the self-consciously stately mansion. Rubble-built with small windows and not a column to be seen anywhere, it looks as though a stray image from another age has somehow wandered into the photograph. And that is exactly what it is – the old house built by the Pringle family and expanded in the seventeenth century. All out of keeping with its surroundings, the crow-stepped gable end of the three-storey main building faces the loch, its frontage deliberately turned away from the view. Like the Henhouse and all of the farmhouses in our little valley, its entrance faced east, out of the prevailing west wind, keeping the winter draughts manageable. Shelter mattered more than a vista. Abutting the old house is a two-storey annexe and, in the angle created, what looks like a later porch. Apparently, it was used as servants’ quarters. But in 1944, while the Polish army was in residence, the old house was burned to the ground, miraculously leaving the new undamaged.
In the fields beyond the loch and the policies, farming was changing. During the Second World War, it was essential that Britain was as self-sufficient as possible and farming was forced to adapt, largely successfully – although no one saw a banana for five years, rationing meant that no child or adult went hungry. In fact, general health improved. After the war, the policy of self-sufficiency continued but instead of increasing agricultural employment, workers began to leave the land. The auld life was being quickly dismantled as a direct consequence of the policies of the new and radical Labour government. Mechanisation was seen as the route to greater productivity and the 1947 Agricultural Act made that possible. By guaranteeing minimum prices for grain, meat, milk, eggs and all sorts of output, the government enabled farmers to invest in machinery.
The principle agents of change were the little Massey Ferguson tractors. Designed by an Ulster Scot, Harry Ferguson, they had a three-point linkage at the back end. This device enabled the tractor’s engine to power whatever implement was attached behind. In the past, early tractors had merely pulled implements with more power but less precision than the big Clydesdale horses. Ferguson’s tractor became affordable and widely available after the war and well over half a million ‘wee grey Fergies’ were turned out by the Standard Motor Company in Coventry.
The effect of the Fergie was to bring the ancient skills of horseworking to an abrupt end and by the late 1950s it was unusual to see Clydesdales in the fields of Border farms.
As tractors pulled ploughs and harrows, farmers began to change radically the look of the countryside. More than half of all the hedges in the Borders were grubbed up and flower-rich hay meadows almost completely disappeared. The landscape lost much of its variety and texture, and its flora and fauna fled or died out. What the census called ‘agricultural labourers’ left the land in large numbers. More than three-quarters of the country population migrated to towns and cities.
Phil Cornwall told me that after his family left in 1951 no one lived in the Henhouse. When he and Janis came down the track on sunny afternoons to visit, it grew ever more ruinous after each passing winter, becoming the resort of pigeons and pheasants. Janis remembers finding many nests and pheasant eggs in the old kitchen and the downstairs bedroom.
14 December
The dawning light in the winter sky has moved around almost to south-south-east, and by the solstice in a week’s time the sun will rise close to due south. I dislike the early dark and the closing down of the days. We have to bring the horses into their stables at 3 p.m., change their rugs, feed and settle them for a long night. After all these chores are complete, it is dark and I find it difficult to go back to my office to restart work. It feels less like laziness and more like a midwinter slowdown.
15 December
There has been no rain for four days and the bitterly cold west wind has dropped. With Maidie, I went out to the East Meadow to check on the Old Boys, the mares and the mini-Shetlands, knowing that we would not be wading through the clatch, the cloying mud of the last few weeks. I also wanted to look at the fencing and report back to Lindsay any breaches or bits missing.
Some years ago, we divided the seventeen acres of the East Meadow into five large paddocks. The farthest east is by far the largest and its undulations are good for the Old Boys. Not only do they stretch their arthritic legs up a few gentle inclines, one of the deeper dips offers good shelter from all but a north wind. And we also made a kink in the fencing to incorporate about ten yards of the course of the Nameless Burn. Fast-flowing fresh water rarely freezes and in all our time here that has happened only once. In the terrible Arctic winter of 2009–10, the temperature dropped to minus twenty for a few days and even though I managed to hack through the ice in the burn with an old axe, it froze again each night. We had to take out big water containers and pour the contents into buckets for the horses to drink there and then.
In the middle paddocks, we had a large field shelter built for the mares. In periods of bad weather, especially wind-driven rain, they also seek refuge in the lee of the sitka plantation at the top of the meadow. In their paddock on the flank of the Deer Park, the minis h
ave no bield against the winter winds. Their two-ply coats keep them warm.
Perhaps what attracts me to this place and its fields is an ancient sense of harnessing the land, of growing food for people and animals, and, where we can, encouraging the return of the flora and fauna that fled in the face of the revolutionary changes in farming after the Second World War. We have planted hundreds of trees, left acres of wetland around the Nameless Burn untouched and run about a mile of hedging around the home paddock and elsewhere. So that birds and small mammals like hedgehogs, stoats and others come back, we mixed hawthorn, some holly, hornbeam, crab apple and blackthorn. The latter has turned out to be very invasive, sending shoots and suckers underground into the paddocks; its vicious long spikes are dangerous for horses, but it is also good protection for small birds from their predators. In full summer lustre, leafy and dense, the hedges are very beautiful and brim with life. When October winds blew away the last of the leaves, a perfect blackbird’s nest was revealed, its twigs interwoven in a delicate, symmetrical tracery, something that had been completely hidden all summer as eggs were laid and chicks hatched and fledged. Even the frosted winter fields looked welcoming this morning.
16 December
At eight hundred feet, another world glowed pale white in the half-light of dawn. On the uplands behind Hartwoodmyres and the Thief Road lay a covering of snow, and yet here, two hundred feet lower, there was nothing except a sheeting of thin ice. The world looked like a Christmas cake topped with white icing. I hope we stay down amongst the sultanas, the mixed peel and the almonds.
The two living children of this place met this morning. When Adam brought Grace to walk the big dogs, Phil Cornwall arrived at the same time and they greeted. The three-year-old wee lass did not turn to her dad in shyness and they smiled at each other. I felt the tears prickle.
The Secret History of Here Page 33
