And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  ‘No really. No ony mair.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  They turned to look at the hills again. Billy said, ‘How’s Charlie?’

  ‘Ye better ask your mither aboot that.’

  ‘Dae ye never hear frae him?’

  ‘Me? No. Dae you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Weel then. He’s written a couple of times tae your mither. She reads me bits frae the letters.’

  ‘And?’

  Don breathed out heavily. ‘It sounds like the army suits him.’

  ‘And he suits the army?’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  ‘Dae ye ken where he is?’

  ‘I believe he’s in Germany.’

  ‘You believe?’

  ‘Aye. And apparently he’s got his first tour in Northern Ireland coming up. Mair than that I dinna ken.’

  ‘Does he ever come hame?’

  ‘If he does I’ve never seen him.’

  ‘He didna keep the flat on in Granthill, did he?’

  ‘No. I don’t think he can go back there. I think he had tae get oot in a hurry.’

  ‘But he must get leave. Where does he go when he’s on leave?’

  ‘Billy, I dinna ken where he goes or what he does. Ask your mither.’

  ‘All right. Sorry.’

  They were leaning on the old stones not looking at each other. Neither of them was given to displays of emotion or affection, but now there was a slight movement, and Billy felt his father’s arm descend on his shoulders, a rough clutch instead of more words. He didn’t dare turn his head. He could feel the arm tremble. They stayed like that for maybe half a minute, long enough for the trembling to cease, and then Don gave him a couple of slaps on the back and said, ‘Aye, son,’ and that was him composed again. So they walked back through the woods, and Billy was thinking, why are we all so fucking closed up? Why can’t we tell each other our feelings? But did he say anything? No. No. No.

  §

  She said, ‘Remember that thing about tasting your menstrual blood? Germaine Greer said we had to do it. Not you and me. Us, women. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Once was enough for me. To be honest I found it all pretty revolting.’

  He said, ‘Wasn’t that the point – to be honest? To overcome your disgust and find your true self.’

  ‘It still tasted foul. How was your sperm?’

  ‘Not so good. A bit salty. How was your blood?’

  ‘Metallic. I could have done with a lot more salt actually.’

  ‘Och well. Just put it down to experience, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Billy.’

  He thought, how can we be having this absurd conversation and not laughing?

  He thought, after today I’m going to laugh. I don’t care what happens or if I don’t ever meet anybody else, I’m going to laugh. Even if I’m on my own till I die I’ll bloody well see the funny side.

  He thought of the football weekend in London, the ridiculous camaraderie, the fact that he’d laughed all weekend until he got home. He’d even laughed the next day, on his way to school, as he lobbed the Wembley turf into the Kelvin.

  Nevertheless, he was determined not to blame Barbara for the fact that he hadn’t laughed enough in his life so far.

  §

  Ellen Imlach wrote herself down as a story one day, to try to get some perspective. It was 1977. She’d been with Robin for more than a year. That was how she steeled herself to do it: get some perspective, put some distance between you and what’s happened to you. Use your journalistic skills. Use the typewriter. This is not about you, this is about somebody else. She set herself a timescale and a word limit. Good training for when she finally went back out into the world to earn a living – something she didn’t have to do till she was ready, Robin kept saying, although she knew the money was getting tight, that he’d had to put his own plans on hold and eat into his savings while she mended. And she was mending, she was stronger every day. She was going to be so fucking strong after what she’d been through.

  She’d submitted some articles to the two Scottish qualities and they’d used a couple, so she knew she could still write. She thanked God, in whom she didn’t believe, for Robin, in whom she fervently did. Then she sat at the kitchen table and plugged in the typewriter. Story time. Two thousand words max, two hours to complete. Go.

  Some girls get into trouble at a very young age. Others get away from it, only for it to catch up with them unexpectedly years later. Ellen Imlach was in the second category.

  As a teenager Ellen was far too smart to fall for the patter of good-looking boys at the dancing. If she let a boy walk her home that was all she would let him do. She was independent and ambitious. It meant she gained a reputation for being stand-offish, ‘nae fun’; but she could tolerate that. What she could not have tolerated was having her independence and ambition crushed by a marriage of necessity to someone who, by accident or with intent, had ‘bairned’ her when she was not ready for motherhood.

  The cottage rows of Borlanslogie, the mining town she grew up in, contained too many examples of young women whose lives, in her view, had been made narrow and miserable by the early arrival of children and the subsequent slow death of feeding, clothing and raising them in straitened circumstances. Ellen was not sure she wanted motherhood at all, but she certainly did not want it as the wife of a miner in a tight-knit community where everybody knew her business and she knew everybody else’s. That was indeed the limit of some girls’ ambition, and Ellen, sixteen in 1964, looked beyond that. Miners earned good money compared with many other workers, but who would want their life, or to be tied to their life? Her father hadn’t. He’d worked away from home since before she was born, in the Highlands mostly, out in the light. Ellen hardly knew him, but she thought she understood that part of him. The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.

  Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn’t owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one. The difference in the early 1960s lay in the sheer number of young people who thought likewise. This was the coming of age of the baby boomers. Since the war, and in many respects as a result of it, society had blown a series of fanfares for the rights and freedoms of all citizens: free health care, free education, freedom from poverty and bad housing, all these were considered, across the political spectrum, to be the marks of a civilised, modern democracy. Other freedoms, albeit more fiercely contested ones, were also gaining ground: freedom from racial and sexual discrimination; freedom of expression in the widest sense. And now the young had arrived to claim their inheritance. Was there ever a song more in tune with the age in which it was written than ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’?

  She was intelligent, industrious and eager. By rights, she should have sat her Higher exams and been a candidate for a place at university. Unfortunately, she attended a school that had no tradition of sending any of its pupils to university, let alone the daughters of a place like Borlanslogie. She was, to put it bluntly, from the wrong side of the tracks.

  Her English teacher, a Mr Green, recognised her facility with words and her ability to absorb and filter information. He also knew of her interest in journalism. He suggested she write to D. C. Thomson of Dundee, seeking a position that would give her a chance to demonstrate her abilities. The Thomson print empire ranged from comics like the Beano and Dandy, through a range of weekly publications for women, to the Sunday Post, which sold more than a million copies per week and was estimated to be read by some 60 per cent of the Scottish population. As a place of opportunity for an ambitious young writer, it could not be bettered. There was a problem,
however. The firm was notoriously conservative, and did not recognise any trade union representation when it came to negotiating pay and conditions with its workforce. Mr Green, being a thoroughgoing socialist, was obliged to dislike D. C. Thomson on principle, and knowing Ellen’s family background he assumed that she would feel similarly. He encouraged her to apply for an interview, but advised her, if successful, to keep her political opinions to herself. ‘If journalism is really what you want to do,’ he said, ‘the training they’ll give you will open doors all over the world.’

  Ellen liked the idea of doors opening. She was also a realist. She did write to D. C. Thomson, she was called for an interview, and in it she voiced no opinions of an alarming or incendiary nature. She had to sit an aptitude test and there was an information form to complete. One of the questions asked if she was a Roman Catholic, another if she belonged to a trade union. She had an idea what happened to your application if you said yes to the second of these, but what if you said yes to the first? It wasn’t an issue for her, but then suddenly it became one. She left a blank. The man who took the form off her said, ‘You’ve not answered a question.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s anybody else’s business. Do you?’ He looked at her. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. Two weeks later she was at a desk in Dundee, shadowing the work of older hands, learning how to write serials to strict formats, being asked for her opinion of unsolicited manuscripts and how she would improve them. After a while she was composing stories for My Weekly as if she’d been doing it for years.

  She worked on this and other titles for eighteen months, subjecting herself to the discipline of short sentences and three-sentence paragraphs, alternating between fiction and factual stories and sometimes writing a combination of the two. Her editors liked what she did and did not spurn her requests for more challenging work. After a series of small or sideways promotions she found herself subbing on the daily Courier and Advertiser. A few months later, she managed to persuade her editor that she needed first-hand experience of reporting. She was dispatched to parts of Angus, north of Dundee, that she’d hardly known existed, to chase local-interest news and write it up, three, four or five reports in the course of a day. Local they might have been, interesting they often were not, but that wasn’t the point. She learned more than how to turn in copy on time: she learned the art of self-effacement. Her reports carried no byline and she had to bite her tongue at the kind of editorial decisions she saw being made, some of which made no sense to her at all, but she could see that Mr Green was right: the education in journalism she got at D. C. Thomson would last her a lifetime.

  It was also at D. C. Thomson that she formed a firm but firmly platonic friendship with an illustrator on the Hotspur comic, a mild, unassuming boy from Surrey, recently graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, called Robin Piggott. That too, though she didn’t realise it at the time, would last her a lifetime.

  After Dundee and Fife she had a succession of more or less satisfying newspaper jobs and a succession of more or less unsatisfying boyfriends. The jobs took her to Falkirk, Manchester, Bristol and Cardiff. By the time she reached Wales she had ceased news-reporting and was writing what were loosely termed ‘women’s interest’ pieces. She went out with a journalist or two, a doctor, a college lecturer, a Welsh MP, a chef and a jazz musician. She had some good times and quite a few arguments. The relationships usually foundered on the rocks of male egotism or her own increasingly vociferous feminism. None of the men she shared a bed with objected to her being on the pill, but most of them found it difficult to accept that in principle she was their intellectual equal, and in practice usually their superior. The journalists drank and smoked too much and eventually tired of the fact that she drank moderately and smoked not at all. She thought she really loved the doctor but they parted because he opposed a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. The lecturer thought Enoch Powell was right about immigration; the MP wouldn’t leave his wife and kids; the chef was insane; and the musician preferred to go through life permanently stoned. All of these shortcomings took some time to emerge. Ellen longed for a man she could take at face value.

  Then a chance conversation led to the offer of a post, on a retained basis, as Scottish correspondent with one of the London heavyweights. It was the mid-1970s, the peak years of the devolution debate, and a weekly column and supplementary dispatches from North Britain, as that portion of the island trudged towards its destiny, was required. She wanted to be away from Wales, and thought she would risk it, building up other freelance work to supplement the weekly retainer. She returned to Scotland, heading for Edinburgh, with some savings as a cushion and arguing with herself that being alone and approaching thirty was a mark not of failure but of feisty success.

  She rented a room in a New Town flat and set to work. She decided to come off the pill for a while. She’d read that it was advisable to have a break, and this was a good time since it wasn’t protecting her from unwanted anything. She felt a little panicked by the speed with which she was getting through the money she’d put by. The absence of a regular, full-time wage was not so liberating. She didn’t get on that well with the woman who owned the flat and didn’t see much of anybody else. She wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake.

  She went to Borlanslogie to see her mother. They argued and she came away again. She wrote to her father, who was apparently somewhere between Peterhead and Aberdeen, laying pipelines. Over the years she had kept up a sporadic correspondence with him, interspersed with even more occasional meetings. This time she did not hear back from him.

  Being alone and approaching thirty began to bother her.

  One day she was standing in the queue in an Italian deli on Leith Walk when a voice behind her said, ‘Hello, Ellen.’ It was Robin Piggott. She had not seen him since Dundee days. They went for a coffee. He worked near by, as a graphic artist for a medical publisher. He’d been there five years and was thinking of going freelance. He had a house on the shore out at Joppa, and was slowly doing it up. He’d just finished creating a studio space in the attic. ‘You should come and see it,’ he said. She said she would like that, and they exchanged address details.

  She wrote a few columns, tedious stuff about the slow grind of devolutionary politics, and they duly appeared, but she was dissatisfied with them and her editor received them with indifference. ‘What else is going on up there?’ he asked. She looked about for something more exciting for the mainly English readership, and wrote a couple of pieces about the underbelly of the country, the Scotland that was neither affected nor engaged by mainstream politics. Then she started to disturb a story of suitable grit and squalor. The details of this story are no longer important, indeed she has wiped most of them from her memory, but it concerned protection rackets and gangs in Drumkirk – a place one of her Edinburgh newspaper contacts derisively referred to as ‘Dodge City’. Ellen went there. It wasn’t far from Borlanslogie, but it was not a place she knew well. The natives weren’t particularly friendly. The people at the Drumkirk Observer resented her intrusion into their territory and didn’t think her story amounted to much. She asked questions and got very few answers, was shunted on to somebody who ‘might be able to tell her something’. And then one day she turned a corner, and there was her past coming down the street to meet her, in the shape of Denny Hogg.

  It was a surprise, but not really a big one, to find Denny when she lifted the stone under which her possible story lay hidden. He was her age, and had grown up next door to her grandparents in Borlanslogie. She might have described him to a third party as a childhood friend, except that even in childhood she hadn’t really trusted him. She’d always thought it likely he’d fall into bad company: now, this very thought made her pleased to see him. That and the fact that he was a familiar face, and she was on unfamiliar ground. They talked about Borlanslogie. He still stayed there. He’d been working down the pit the last time she saw him, but he’d been out of that for years.
She remembered her mother telling her that he’d been mixed up with a tartan terrorist plot a few years before and that he had done some time for it. He did not mention this. Neither did she. Instead, she established that he was still consorting with dangerous people, and that some of them were probably players in the story she wanted. Denny was too, but he was on the periphery. She thought he could be her conduit to the centre.

  She was right, but wrong to think she could stay in control of the situation. Denny said she should speak to somebody he knew. This was a tall, handsome, powerfully built young man called Charlie Lennie. He was rough but very pleasant, in fact he was charming. To her horror she found herself flirting with him. He responded. He said he could help her.

  Of course he could. As it transpired, he knew everything she needed to know. He just wasn’t going to give her information for nothing. In fact – although she didn’t realise it at the time – he wasn’t going to give it to her at all.

  She did a quick estimate: she was way over her target length, but surely she could find three hundred words to chop. She felt quite pleased with herself: it hadn’t taken that long at all. Then she slumped: what she’d written seemed pedestrian and false, she’d nowhere near finished the story and, anyway, knocking that out shouldn’t have been much of a challenge for someone of her experience. So what was it she was trying to achieve?

  She hadn’t appreciated how exhausted she still was. Feeding Kirsty, changing Kirsty, bathing Kirsty, playing with Kirsty, just generally being with Kirsty took it out of her. And Kirsty was easy, according to her own mother, who came to stay for a few days. ‘No like you, Ellen. Ye didna want tae come oot and when ye finally did ye liked the world ower much. Ye never seemed tae sleep. By, ye were hard work.’ Kirsty was, apparently, not hard work. She slept through the night and a good proportion of the day, and when she was awake she was usually happy and placid. Nevertheless, Ellen felt permanently tired.