Glitter of Mica

by Jessie Kesson

  For most of his working life Hugh Riddel’s father had known but two days off in the year. The Term Days, at the end of May and November.

  Golden days though. Hugh Riddel could recall them still with an uprising of excitement. The unfamiliar smell of bacon filling the kitchen, his mother clucking around the range, warning and worrying in the same breath.

  ‘Dip your bread in the fat, Hugh. But the bacon’s for Father. He’s for the Town.’

  And his father big with the good humour that was over him.

  ‘My best suit. The blue, the day. Pressed beneath the mattress three nights hard running. And how’s that for a crease in my trousers, Hugh? It would just cut your throat, wouldn’t it not now? It’s as sharp as that! My bonnet, Hugh. Jump to it, son. Not that bonnet, you gowk! My Sunday bonnet. For I’m for the Town.’

  Even now, such excited preparation seemed just as it should be to Hugh Riddel. For it was a wild town, a wanton town, that farm-workers set out for on Term Days, and wide-eyed on the watch for country men. Though blind, its nose could still have sniffed them out with sharn for sweat, and deaf, its ears could still have recognised their tacket-booted tread, and their laughter rising ribald in Dobb’s Café, and Dobb’s market too, where siren women lurked behind the stalls, big bosomed, blonde, and honey-mouthed, or so they seemed to farm-workers on Term Days, luring their hard-won penny Fees with tartan trinkets.

  ‘Come on now, Jock. This pouch should hold your six months’ siller. In your own tartan too. “By Dand”, and up the Gordons!’

  And teasingly, with bits of fripperies, would confront the lumbering red-faced men, whose hands had seldom fumbled anything finer than flannelette.

  ‘This pair should fit your best lass, Jock. Think of the fun you’ll have fitting them on her. Come, buy—for love’s sake!’

  Dobb’s market was all for love’s sake. Postcards showing How. Books telling When. ‘The Chemist’—Quack—doing business all day long with herbs and pills and special advice in after hours. But dark and dear. And not for country men, grinning but stubborn, rejecting such abortive practices.

  ‘We’ll risk it yet. For the pill was never made would empty Bogie Bell of what Tom the Ternland gave her, six months come Friday, at Boynlie Ball.’

  Free of Dobb’s market. Swerving to Baltic Cross—traditionally their own, and freemen of the Town for this one day. And down by Baltic Cross, teeming but islanded alien townsfolk caught in hurried passing the warm dissenting talk of cattle.

  ‘We’re tackling Ayrshires up our way.’

  ‘Dangerous vratches. Far too fond of hooking, Ayrshires. They rip each others’ flanks to bits.’

  ‘For safety, give me a Red Poll.’

  ‘Never, man. Great fat hornless lumps, the Red Polls. Granted they don’t hook each other, for they’ve got damn all to hook with. But, by God, they make up for that by lashing out. For a quiet-natured cow, now, give me the Guernsey.’

  ‘Too delicate a brute for this part of the country. A Guernsey needs as muckle care as a thoroughbred horse. Fair-weather beasts, Guernseys. No, no. For a good all-round cow there’s just nothing to touch the Shorthorn. They’re tough beasts and their yield’s aye consistent.’

  And in the more exclusive haunts, the farmers talked of this and that. Of subsidies and costs, and how they were rising all the time. And never once, not even in trust amongst each other, confessed to profit. But down at Baltic Cross, made bold by beer and strengthened by each other, their workers claimed the leases of their lands by right of deed, and tenanted them with new ideas.

  ‘If I was in Clayacre’s shoes, I’d sell at Whitsun. For yon land’s souring. It’s fair worn out.’

  ‘High time too that Lower Ardgye grew less grain. Yon’s not mixed farming. It’s just grain forever up in yon place!’

  ‘He’d need to let such land lie fallow for a while.’

  The last bus home. The thought of it ettling in their minds, like chaff that itched against their skins on threshing days. And all eyes cocked against the sky for a reprieve, or even extension. Then watches, turnip-faced, dragged out to check the stars; their minds would stray to that wild pub down by the docks, and linger there, where women were as bold as brass, offering you all they had for one and sixpence. Near forcing’t on you. It was just such women’s haste, and the price they put upon it, made it immoral in farm-workers’ eyes. Since they preferred it given, just for the love of it. Or, for at most a dozen new-laid eggs, and that but hansel. And, though their thoughts might linger in such places, their feet invariably but unsteadily led them buswards, yet with a kind of virtue. ‘For, God Almighty! You never can tell. With women such as yon, you never know what you’ll get left with.’

  * * *

  But it was his father’s homecoming on Term Nights that lay within Hugh Riddel’s own remembrance, and still could move him in the minding of it.

  God! But what a difference a drink and a day off had made to the man. Hard to reconcile the dour everyday father of the fields and byres with the huge genial man who stood swaying and singing in the doorway, flanked by his fellow farm-workers on Term Nights.

  Her brow ’tis like the snawdrift.

  Her neck ’tis like the swan.

  Her face it is the fairest

  That e’er the sun shone on.

  And dark blue is her e’e.

  And she’s a’ the world to me.

  And for bonnie Annie Laurie

  I wad lay me doon and dee!

  That was another of the times when Hugh Riddel, the boy, had felt all the glamourie of manhood tugging at himself. The Annie Lauries and Bonnie Peggies of his father’s songs had come across to him even then as something more than idylls of time gone past; they became the lush promises of his own future. Strange, though; strange that they should still have remained idylls when the future had become the present.

  Like dew on the gowan lying

  Is the fa’ o’ her fairy feet.

  And like wind in the summer sighing.

  Her voice is low and sweet!

  ‘Keep your voice down, then. And come on inside the house with you. For it will be the clash of the countryside that you couldn’t stand on your fairy feet on Term Night.’

  Down all the years Hugh Riddel could still call up his mother’s capacity for diminishing his father. Not even the presence of his father’s fellow-workers had ever prevented her from putting on the hurt, white face of martyrdom. A right bad wife could ease a man’s conscience, and so set him free. But a good wife could bind you prisoner forever, with the swaddling bands of her goodness. God! but I had to burst myself out and free, Hugh Riddel thought. His father had never brought himself to do likewise. For this, his son could pity but also envy him, and saw him still in all his huge, blustering futility.

  ‘Well, well, woman. If everybody’s tongues are clashing about me, it stands to reason that they will be leaving some other poor sinful bugger to a bit of peace. And that’s surely a something to be thankful for! Come in, about then, all of you. Come on, now. Draw your chairs up to the fire, and we’ll have a bit of a crack and a song to ourselves.’

  That was another of the times when Hugh Riddel had felt insulated in a comfort of spirit. Curled up in the kitchen bed, in the dim flicker of firelight and lamplight. Within hand’s touch of a world of men. Yet still safe onlooker, with the voices of his father and his father’s friends droning over and round him.

  Oh, never were harvests so wet and wild as those they recollected in their cups on Term Nights. And still miraculously ingathered. For they could see themselves in their young years, through such a space of time that personal identification left them altogether. And it was giants, immune to wind and weather, who rode the rigs; and scythed the ‘inroads’ to epic harvests.

  But, despite all their exaggerations, and for all his own youngness at the time, Hugh Riddel had instinctively recognised their underlying truth. It was simply that words had caricatured their thoughts. And, by God, words could do that, right e
nough. Look and touch and feel should suffice to allow you walk wordless all your days. Hugh Riddel remembered one small such instance of his own, on the farm near Stonehaven, where the hill slopes had lain under grass through living memory, till one morning on his road to school he had stood arrested, staring at the sharp gleaming coulter of the plough cutting into the hill slope and leaving the first dark furrow. That had struck him with an almost physical sense of pain. And the image of the virgin land with the gash of a wound across it had lain unvoiced in mind for a long time. Small wonder, then, that with the nowhereness of words, his father and his father’s friends had grabbed them and twined them and stretched them this way and that, in a kind of anger at their impotence.

  But there was the other side of it. The times when threadbare words could cast a shadow, far greater than the substance of their meaning, across your mind, mantling it for the rest of your days. A small memory too, and gleaned on a Term night.

  ‘Oh, but he was a hard farmer to work for,’ God Knows had said. ‘You durst never be caught straightening your back when yon one came in sight of you. And God knows, many’s the time I have seen myself, after ten hours’ forking to the threshing mill, bend down just to pick up some straw, knowing that the wind would blow another in its place, when I’d hear the sound of his footsteps.’

  That was when Hugh Riddel had first known the true meaning of physical tiredness, even before experiencing it. And, ever afterwards, the ultimate weariness was indeed just to ‘pick up some straw, knowing that the wind would blow another in its place’.

  But he had been infatuated by the speak of the life on the land on those far-off Term Nights. For those nights were Hugh Riddel’s initiation into a society to which one could only obtain membership by right of birth. A comparatively secret society too. One which had its being scattered unmarked on the teacher’s map at school, where Scotland was made up of Highlands and Lowlands, mining and shipbuilding, cathedral towns and university cities, and all their world ending abruptly ‘over the Border’.

  It was his father and his father’s friends who crammed the blanks of that map on Term Nights, till Scotland became a continent on their tongues and famous for things that never found their way into the Geography lesson at school. The fine tattie-growing soil of Easter Ross. South of the Mearns where the land was more mellow, the farmers easier, the darg lighter, and fees higher. Up Inverness way, where the last battle fought on British soil was forgotten, and only the democracy of the ‘folk’ remembered.

  ‘I kent a ploughman once,’ Dod Feary had pointed out, as impressive proof of this to his incredulous listeners, ‘who used to get blind drunk every Saturday night with the local Doctor, up Culloden way.’

  For nowhere was ‘Keeping one’s proper place’ so strictly adhered to as in our shire. Even his mother, Hugh Riddel remembered, had once commented on this:

  ‘If the farmer’s wife passes the time of day with the cottar wives, it just makes their day. Poor, silly bodies! You would think that the Lord above had looked down from Heaven, and greeted them personally, so overcome are they.’

  Hugh Riddel smiled at the recollection. But there was a kind of pain and protest at the heart of his amusement.

  . . .Oh, Burns. Was it to suit the fine sentiments of the Edinbro’ Gentry, once cursed by you, and always half despised, that you wrote such smarm as The Cotter’s Saturday Night?

  From scenes like these

  Old Scotia’s grandeur springs . . ..

  The lines grued in Hugh Riddel’s mind. It was easily seen that such a poem was written by a man who ploughed his own furrows. Never by a fee’d ploughman. And although farm-workers’ conditions had improved beyond all recognition now, Hugh Riddel’s pain, though momentary, was ever recurring. It was just that no man could come into good estate free of that which and those who had preceded him.

  Far more true of their way of life were the songs of his father and his father’s friends on Term Night. Songs of their own countryside, composed by themselves for themselves; and having their origins in the very farms they worked on.

  When I gaed doon to Turra Market

  Turra Market for to fee

  I met in wi’ a wealthy fairmer

  Frae the Barnyards o’ Delgaty!

  He promised me the twa best horse

  That was in a’ the country roon

  But when I gaed hame to the Barnyards

  There was nothing there but skin and bone!

  It was when they reached the singing stage on Term Nights that they really tried his mother’s patience. It was then that they sent her sighing ‘God be here’ round the kitchen, and ‘there will be no word of this in the morning’; and, as the night advanced and the songs grew coarser, would set her to redding up the kitchen. As if by the very act she could also redd up the dirt rising round her ears. For how the men loved dirt. That which his father had always protested was ‘Clean dirt, woman!’ And Hugh Riddel himself had always been in alliance with the men over this.

  She let him in sae cannily

  To do the thing you ken, Jo!

  She chased him out syne cried him back

  To do it once again, Jo!

  But the bottom fell out o’ the bed

  The lassie lost her maiden-head

  And her mither heard the din, Jo!

  It always meant some other new song for Hugh Riddel to go racing schoolwards with, the wind in his face; and a pack of loons panting behind him to hear the rest of it, syne flinging themselves face downwards on the grass with the exhaustion of their laughter, and laughing long after they had forgotten the cause. Pure laughter that, Hugh Riddel realised now, for it had needed no reason.

  God! you could stand out here in the dark, and listen to the youngness of your life singing away past you there, as if it had been conceived in song. His mother had never realised it was like that with him, though. She was always protecting him from his father and his father’s cronies, their songs and their talk.

  ‘That’s fine language to be on you all! And the bairn Hugh there, lying in his bed.’

  ‘Well! Hugh’s got to find out for himself one of these fine days,’ his father would defend. ‘For fine he knows that he wasn’t found at the back of a cabbage plant, as you would like him to believe!’

  And fine he did know. Ever since he could remember, Hugh Riddel had discovered that sex was the great topic and the huge laugh, the joke that the farm-workers seldom tired of, and rearing itself up at all odd times in all kinds of places. The bulls serving the cows. And the stallions serving the mares. And ill-favoured Annie Coultrie, whom no man had tried to tempt for years, drawing her cardigan fierce around her shoulders, like to protect her virtue, and screeching across the steading.

  ‘There’s the stallion man. Just coming up the road yonder, with that great muckle brute of a stallion. But I’m not going to put him up for the night. Not me! He can just go to the bothy for a bed, or to some woman that’s his own like. For they’re saying that the man has gotten as randy as that stallion he treks around the country with. They have it that no woman under sixty is safe with him now.’

  And the deep satirical laughter her indignation evoked in the men.

  ‘You’ll be safe enough then, Annie, for you’ll not see sixty again. Though you was always safe enough, Annie. Even when you was sixteen!’

  But there was always a quality of cruelty in the laughter evoked by sex. A quality which Hugh Riddel recognised in himself, and which was maybe contained to an even greater degree in men far beyond the parish of Caldwell. Take the war years, now, and the time when the Polish airmen were stationed over there at Balwhine. What a clash of tongues they had caused in the countryside. God Knows had been fair flabbergasted by their methods. His fiery denunciation of the Poles still burned in Hugh Riddel’s recollection.

  ‘The Cottage Hospital is fair full of queans with festered breasts the now! For it seems that plain fornication is just not good enough for that Polish chields. Na. Na. They’ve got to bite a
s well. And that, mark you, with all their fine polite words and ways, their kissing hands and all the rest of their palaver. Surely to God a decent man can have a quean without wanting to take bites out of her.’

  Laughter shook Hugh Riddel at the recollection, and metaphorically flung him face downwards on a grassy bank, thirty years away in time. But, like laughter of that kind and quality, it left him empty enough for tears. O! My love Annie’s wondrous bonnie. It was the idyll one’s spirit always wept for.

  ‘It’s when there’s neither lust nor liking,’ his father had once confided, ‘that a man’s marriage has got nothing.’ Lust nor liking. He had never heard his father use the word ‘love’, except in song. But it was all going to be very different with him. Hugh Riddel had made up his mind early about that.

  ‘A quiet decent lass,’ his mother had said, approving his ultimate choice of a wife. Though, come to consider it now, Isa was not unlike what his mother had been. It was her small white quality of chastity that had first attracted Hugh Riddel. Novel enough in a time and place where there was nothing for the young to do in the little free time they had to themselves but ‘Away to the whin bushes, and into it’, as the older men still described it.

  Strange that he had been so deluded. The onlookers weren’t.

  ‘Isa Mavor! Yon mim-mouthed quean. God, Riddel, but I’d imagine yon one would be on the cold side to bed with, if her thin pernickety walk is anything to go by.’