And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  Maybe Cochrane had a wee fancy for Mary, she thought he must because he was always speaking to her, distracting her from her work. It was disgusting really, he was three times her age at least, but Ina told her to play along with it and she’d get favours without having to give anything in return. Cochrane was married to an ugly old witch she saw in the town occasionally, who always looked like she’d just broken wind and didn’t like her own smell, Ina said, so the poor man was probably keen for a bit of civilised female company. And right enough, one day not long after the war was over he took the two of them aside and asked if they fancied a change of scene the next day. He and a surveyor called MacDonald were taking a company car over to Aberfoyle, where they were to survey a portion of forest that the Logie Coal Company had bought for pit props. They were to measure the area that was being bought, count the trees and mark the ones that were ready to be cut down. Aberfoyle was away to the west in an area called the Trossachs, very beautiful by all accounts, and it would mean a full day out of the office, so they both said yes at once and Cochrane’s face lit up like a wee pink pig’s at sight of a bucket of swill. And the next day a black car with leather seats and polished wood fittings took them, Cochrane, MacDonald, Ina and Mary, across the country to the wet green woods of Aberfoyle, where it poured with rain and the girls shivered and sloshed about in rubber overshoes while the men measured the forest with chains, and had Ina holding one end of a long cloth tape in a leather case while Mary wrote down the numbers they shouted out, and MacDonald daubed the letters LCC in white paint on the trunks of certain trees, and Ina swore every time the mud went over her ankles, and Mary nearly fell over giggling, and Cochrane winked at her whenever he thought nobody else was looking. And at dinner time they repaired to the Bailie Nicol Jarvie Hotel, a splendid, rich-looking place the like of which Ina and Mary had never been in before, and they all sat round a table in the lounge bar and had bowls of cock-a-leekie soup and a glass of whisky each – ‘Just tae warm ye up,’ Cochrane said, ‘and the Company can pay for it too, I think, eh, MacDonald?’ And MacDonald looked doubtful but it didn’t stop him having a dram, and in fact the men had a second but Mary and Ina were tipsy just with the one, it being the first time either of them had ever tasted whisky. And all the way back to Borlanslogie they rolled into each other on the leather seat, and Cochrane, who was in the back with them, told them slightly risqué stories till they were in fits, more at him than at the stories, because he was a sad wee grey man and the stories were tame compared with the stories Ina could have told. But there was something kind and good about Cochrane too, Mary thought, even in his sadness, and he never laid a finger on either of them. MacDonald the surveyor was altogether grimmer and more menacing, and had maybe thought there was to be more to the day than there was, a bit of fun away from the wives; at any rate he glowered at them occasionally from the front-passenger seat, and conversed in low tones with the driver, and maybe it was because he was thwarted that he stirred up the other surveyors next day to complain about the lassies going on the expedition, saying that they had no competence or training and were trespassing on their area of expertise, and the outcome was that such a trip was never suggested again. Mary and Ina stored it up as a precious memory, though, one of the best days of their working lives.

  Her wage was small but Mary saved what she could from what she didn’t hand over to her mother every week. She didn’t know what she was saving for except the future, and then she started going with Jock Imlach and she knew, and she realised too how important it was to keep her job: because Jock’s life and Jock’s earnings were erratic, and if they should stay together and get married her own wage would give her some stability. He was bold and different, Jock, which was why she fell for him in the first place, even though she was warned by her mother and all her aunts and sisters that he wasn’t steady and she’d pay for that in the long run. What she liked about him was that he’d made up his own mind what he did and didn’t want to do. He’d worked three years down the pit, aged fifteen to eighteen, during the war: it was a reserved occupation, he’d had no option, but once the war was done he chucked it in and refused to go back. It was the winter of ’45–’46: you went down in the dark, you laboured all day in the dark, you came up in the dark and you went home in the dark. ‘I’m no a bloody mole,’ Jock said. He and Mary were sitting having their Sunday tea with his parents before stepping out for a walk and a cuddle, and Jock said he’d had enough. He didn’t want to die young, crushed or drowned or gassed underground, or still alive but coughing his guts up, ancient at fifty. ‘What makes ye think ye’re special?’ his father had demanded. ‘Ye’re just feart o hard work.’ ‘I’m no,’ Jock had said, and it was the truth, because he wasn’t afraid of it, he just didn’t like it. ‘I’m no special. I’m just sane.’ He looked at his father, and Mary could see he was thinking, I don’t want to turn into you. And after that he took whatever job came along, he’d work for farmers or builders or the council roads department, short-term labouring work with no security, rain, snow or sun it didn’t matter so long as he was up on the surface, better to be there even if he didn’t earn what he could below ground. What was the point of good money if the getting of it killed you? ‘The miner that walked in darkness has seen a great light,’ he said. ‘Dinna blaspheme,’ his mother said. ‘I’m no blaspheming,’ he said. ‘The blasphemy’s in the life the rest o them lead.’ And he quoted Joe Corrie, the Bowhill poet, who’d written some fierce stuff back in 1926, the year of the Great Strike –

  Me, made after the image o God –

  Jings! but it’s laughable, tae.

  And Jock gave a bitter, ironic laugh himself, and threw in a look that made Mary like him all the more although she saw trouble in it too.

  They wooed and they wed, and ordinarily that would have meant the end of her job as a tracer, but she had a nagging mistrust that Jock wouldn’t always provide, so she went to see Mr Cochrane. Now Cochrane knew she was a good worker, one of his best, competent and reliable, and he liked having her around of course, and he said, ‘Aye, Mary, we must move wi the times, I’ll no pit ye oot o a job just on account o ye being a mairrit woman.’ So she stayed on, right through till January 1947 when the coal industry was nationalised and she became an employee of the National Coal Board, and on Vesting Day there was a bonus for all the workers in the industry. Which was fine, except that Jock, who was well out of it by then, but cynical as ever, said, ‘Aye, but look how much they’re giein the Logie Coal Company in compensation. Your wee bonus would slip through a hole in their breeks and they’d never ken it was awa.’

  Well, he’d given her a Christmas bonus himself by then, and all through January, February and March of that cold, cold winter, when the best thing you could do to keep warm was go to your bed from dusk till dawn, she grew the new life in her beneath the blankets, and all through the spring she kept going to her work, saying nothing about it until it was too obvious to be denied. Then Cochrane called her in and said, ‘Aye, Mary, we’ll be letting ye go soon, I see.’ She said, ‘Aye, but I’ll want tae come back. Will ye keep a place for me?’ Cochrane gaped at her. ‘But ye’ll hae a bairn tae look efter.’ ‘The bairn’ll be looked efter,’ she said, though she’d no idea how, ‘but I’d like tae come back tae my job.’ Cochrane huffed and puffed, and said it was unthinkable, but he’d think about it, the main thing was she was to go away and have the bairn and they’d talk about it after.

  So she went away and Ellen was born, a hard birth it was but it didn’t change Mary’s mind, it made her more determined than ever to go back, because she knew by then she’d have to fend for herself and the lassie, she couldn’t depend on Jock, he was good for a joke and a story but not for providing life’s essentials. Jock seemed to measure freedom by the number of miles he could put between himself and the pits; he went further and further afield for work, anything that promised good pay and plenty of overtime, although more often than not the reality didn’t live up to his expectations. He had no
staying power, and was always on the lookout for something better. It was the age of the hydro schemes in the Highlands, and Jock worked on one after another of them. Postal orders came home with reasonable regularity, and sometimes they were big, but more often they looked like they represented the scrapings from his wallet on a Monday morning. He spent plenty on drink and gambling, Mary knew it. He’d always been one for the horses. It was one of the reasons he kept taking work at a distance – so she couldn’t take his wage packet off him unopened as happened in most other households. If she challenged him about it on one of his brief returns home he got angry and defensive: wasn’t a man away from his family and friends to have a few wee pleasures from time to time, and what business was it of hers how much he was earning? ‘I’m your wife,’ she said, ‘and this is your daughter.’ ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I ken who ye are. I’ll no see either of ye starve.’ ‘No, because ye’ll be away in Inverness or somewhere,’ she said. Then he slammed out of the house on his way to the pub. He was back later with a wee drink in him, daft for her then, and he charmed her in spite of herself, but she knew very well to put no faith in his charm.

  So she spoke to Cochrane again, and asked if he’d keep her in mind for getting her job back in a year or so. She had the notion that her mother would take the bairn through the week – somebody would have to, Ellen was that inquisitive and demanding she required full-time attention – but a year seemed an age away, and she could see Cochrane calculating that she’d change her mind or fall pregnant again before she was back at his door, and he said, ‘Aye, fine, Mary, in a year,’ thinking that would be the last of it. But no, every time he saw her she’d say, ‘I’ll be back in nae time, Mr Cochrane,’ and the months went by fast enough, and in the summer she was at him again, ‘Now, Mr Cochrane, Ellen’s nearly one and my mither’s tae take her frae noo on, so I’ll just come in tae start next week, will I?’ And he hadn’t the heart or the courage to stop her, she was a good worker and he missed her spirit in the office, and another tracer was leaving anyway, they were all away to get married and have bairns, it was like a national epidemic. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘if ye can dae the work I’ll be glad tae have ye.’

  §

  Ellen came home one day, during her first term at school, to find her twin cousins, Adam and Gavin, in the kitchen, drinking milk as if it were about to be abolished. Her mother was there and didn’t seem to care how much of it they drank. They had the bottle on the table between them and were filling up glasses, knocking it back, filling them up again, and when the bottle was finished her mother fetched another from the pantry and let them set about that too. Adam and Gavin were eight, three years older than Ellen, and every gulp of milk they took seemed to make them swell up so she thought there soon wouldn’t be space in the house for them all.

  Which was upsetting, because it seemed they weren’t just passing by on their way to their own house, they would be staying the night. In fact, her mother explained, they’d be staying a few nights, till Auntie Alice was better.

  ‘Is she no weel again?’ she said. Auntie Alice was always catching her breath and coughing, and complaining of a sore chest and faintness. She wasn’t a strong woman like her own mother.

  ‘Aye, she’s very poorly,’ Mary said.

  Adam, whom she liked the better of the twins, said, ‘She fell doon when she was daein the washin and noo she’s in the hospital.’

  ‘How can they no stay wi Auntie Meg?’ Ellen asked, because they’d done that the last time Alice was in the hospital.

  ‘Because Auntie Meg’s got her hands full,’ Mary said. ‘It’s oor turn tae help.’

  ‘Is Auntie Alice gonnae die?’ Ellen said, because it had happened before. Uncle Harry, whom she hardly remembered, had died in a terrible accident at the pit.

  ‘No, she’s no,’ Mary said.

  ‘Aye, she is,’ Gavin said.

  ‘No, Gavin,’ Mary began, but he pushed away from the table and ran from the house. ‘She is!’ he shouted. He didn’t want them to see him greeting, that was what that was, Ellen thought. And she knew who was telling the truth.

  Adam finished the milk in his glass, wiped his milk moustache on his sleeve and without a word went after his brother. If Ellen had used her sleeve as a clout or left the table like that she’d have been shouted back, but Mary let the boys go, following them with a look that was almost tender.

  Ellen said, ‘Is that them away then?’

  ‘No,’ Mary said. ‘They’ll be back. And ye’ve tae be kind tae them, Ellen, till your auntie’s back on her feet again.’

  But Auntie Alice didn’t get back on her feet. She had bad lungs and the broon katies but in the end it was the pneumonia that did for her, about a week later. It could have been worse, it might have been TB, there were folk in the city slums dying like flies of TB, and if you coughed you gave it to everybody else and you had to go to a faraway place in the hills where they wheeled your bed out in the snow and left you to freeze all day and night and sometimes it cured you although usually you died. If you had TB nobody wanted to be near you. When Auntie Alice coughed people looked fearful in case that was what was wrong with her. It wasn’t but she died anyway and then they all came to her funeral and the boys were in black suits and their hair was stuck down with water and Ellen heard someone say that they were cursed, first their father now their mother, what next?

  Uncle Harry had died in an accident in the pit along with six other men. They were still down there. They’d had a funeral for him but Ellen was too wee, she wasn’t at it and neither was he, he was buried already, miles underground. They didn’t put Auntie Alice deep enough to meet him but he was already away, they’d meet in heaven, that was what the minister said. When the boys left the church they held hands. They were brave. Gavin said he didn’t think there was such a place as heaven and Auntie Meg said there was, but Ellen was pretty sure Gavin was telling the truth again.

  People still spoke about Uncle Harry, he was a kind of hero and he couldn’t help being in the accident, but soon people didn’t speak about Auntie Alice, it was as if she’d done something wrong by being weak and not coping. Ellen felt sorry for her but also she resented the fact that her aunt had left her own mother no option but to take Gavin and Adam in. Because her Nana and Dey couldn’t take them and Auntie Meg’s house was full and one thing was for certain, they weren’t being taken away to an orphanage. ‘Over my dead body,’ Mary said. So they stayed, allied in their orphaned state against the world, and became to Ellen like two older brothers. They all got on well enough. Ellen tolerated the new arrangements partly in the belief that if she behaved herself the boys would eventually leave and things would be as they’d been before, just her and her mother and from time to time her father. It took a while – a year or so – before she finally twigged that they were there for good. By that time there was even a fondness between the twins and Ellen. The boys were big but subdued and Ellen was wee but bumptious, yet somehow it worked, maybe that was why it worked, and just as well, Mary said, there wasn’t room in the house for fighting. Adam and Gavin slept in the back bedroom that had been Jock and Mary’s, and Mary and Ellen slept in the box-bed in the front room, and if Jock was home Ellen got a shakedown in front of the fire, or she went round to her Dey and Nana’s on 7th Street and slept there, which was better for everybody and especially for her. In fact, she spent more and more time there, so much that it began to feel as if that was her home, and 2nd Street was a place she visited occasionally for a change of clothes or the weekly bath in front of the fire.

  For Mary there’d been no choice in the matter. With Jock seldom home she was the one with the space, and the boys were family. It would have been a betrayal of Alice if she hadn’t stopped them from being put in a home. Jock was irresponsible but not cold-hearted and he agreed with her. He grumbled at the extra costs and complained that there wasn’t room for him in his own house, but the new situation gave him all the excuses he needed to stay away more or less permanently. He neede
d to earn more, he said – not that much more appeared on the postal orders. He liked Gavin and Adam, but not enough to make him settle.