This is her earliest memory. All through childhood, it rests just beneath the surface and she can haul it into consciousness at will. When Ruth becomes an adult, the memory vanishes, disappearing under the accumulation of other memories, but she never forgets the feeling of it, and sometimes, this is what surfaces still, the sensation of reaching for something that cannot be grasped.
Ruth is born at the end of January in 1915, in Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey, a scattering of houses on the edge of the North Downs, with a large pond at the centre of the village and a history that dates back to the Romans. Her father, Arthur, is in France, fighting, when Ruth is born, her consummation his last act before leaving for the front.
When Arthur returns at the end of the war in 1918, he has never met his third child, even though she is three years old at this point.
Before the war, Arthur worked as a chauffeur for one of the large estates in the area, but crouching in the narrow, muddy trenches in France has left him with a loathing for small spaces, and when he returns to England, he can no longer bear to be trapped inside a car or a house. He feels better outside, in the open country, so he follows up on a contact from one of his fellow soldiers and takes a job as a gillie in Brora, Scotland.
Ruth’s sisters sob on the train northward. They will miss their friends, their school, the pond in the village where they sometimes see swans and always ducks. Ruth’s mother, Annie, doesn’t cry but feels much the same as her two eldest daughters, for many of the same reasons. Only Ruth and her father are excited by the adventure. Ruth is too young to have real attachments outside of her family, and Arthur is hungry to make a new life to match the new person he wants to become after fighting in the Great War.
When they cross from England into Scotland, Arthur holds Ruth up to the train window, so she can see what he sees, the undulation of hills, the long stretches of heath.
“Nothing but blessed space, Ruthie,” he says.
The cottage that comes with the job of gillie is small and cramped, low-ceilinged and dark. It is not as nice as the house they left in Walton-on-the-Hill, and Annie knows this immediately and has to work hard at not resenting it. She sets about trying to make the rooms habitable, sends the older girls out to pick flowers for the kitchen table and bedrooms.
Arthur doesn’t really care about the cottage. Being indoors is just a kind of sufferance until he can be outside again. He hoists Ruth onto his shoulders and strides off in the direction of the river.
Ruth holds onto her father’s hair, which he usually minds and stops her doing, but today he doesn’t care. He quickens his pace on the downhill slope, stones skidding under the soles of his boots.
The river is dark and twisty, littered with rocks and backed by a line of hills. Ruth remembers the village pond, its smooth surface reflecting the overhanging trees, the gentleness of it. But this water is nothing like that water. The river moves, pulling itself along, arching over a small waterfall, then spiralling out into a shallow pool, where it gathers its strength to pounce again.
“Look at that, Ruthie,” says Arthur. “Look at the magnificence of that.”
At the river’s edge, Arthur lowers his daughter onto a rocky ledge, removes his shoes and socks, then hers, and wades out into the water, pulling Ruth with him. The water is cold and the stones wobble under her feet. She can feel the river current nosing her legs like the snout of a dog.
When they get back to the cottage, Annie has the bedding airing in the yard, has the cooker going and a pot of tea on the table with a plate of the special Christmas biscuits. Eliza and Marjory have claimed the bigger bedrooms, leaving Ruth with the box cupboard at the top of the stairs.
The cottage is furnished, but Annie has nothing but complaints about what has been left to them.
“The blankets are full of moths,” she says to Arthur. “The fireplaces haven’t been swept out. All the crockery is chipped. There’s no coal for the cooker. I had to use sticks from the yard. Two of the windowpanes upstairs are broken.”
“The river, Annie,” says Arthur, grabbing a fistful of biscuits from the table. “It’s a real thing of beauty.” He passes a biscuit to Ruth, who is holding onto his trouser leg, trying to stretch herself up to table height.
“The house is a disaster,” says Annie.
Arthur and Annie stare at each other across the table. Ruth knows that her mother is unhappy. She has seen that look before. She tightens her grip on her father’s trouser leg and nibbles at the chocolate covering on her biscuit, pretending to be a mouse. The cuff of Arthur’s trouser leg is wet from when they were standing in the river. It is cool where it touches the skin of her calf.
The box room slopes down on one side, but Ruth can stand upright in the junction of roof and wall, so it isn’t an impediment. It makes the room feel normal sized, made for her. She is not stopped by the roof line. The window opens to the hills, soft and low, burnished with the last of the evening sun.
The bed is hard. The pillow smells like bad breath. The summer dark, when it comes, is absolute. Ruth can’t even see her hand when she raises it in front of her face. But if she turns onto her side, she can watch the stars criss-crossing the heavens, and the bright coin of the moon in its pocket of darkness. She is almost scared, but not quite, and can hear the low murmur of her parents’ voices in the next room. She puts a hand on her leg. The skin still feels cold from the water of the river.
School is torture. The girls gather together like birds in the yard, squawking over every shiny thing. The boys are loosely attached to a football, unravel from it along the weedy edges of the school field.
Ruth plays an invisible game with stones. She counts to a thousand, forwards and backwards. She keeps on the move, shuffling along the walls of the school, then arcing out into the field. If she stands still, then the other children will know that she is without friends, but if she keeps walking, it won’t be so obvious. She won’t be called out.
Inside, she is bored by the Kings and Queens, is good with numbers, likes the memorization of poems, the way the words bounce around in her head, bumping up against each other, like fruit rolling in a wooden bowl. How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, / Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow.
When the bell rings, Ruth is out of the building and running down the lane, her cardigan unbuttoned and rising behind her like a cape. She heads not for home but for the river, where she knows she will find her father fishing the salmon pools with a client. If it is a sunny day, she will look for Arthur at the loch, and if it is cloudy, she will search him out at Stoney Pools. His territory is the south part of the River Brora, running from the loch down to the sea.
Today, Ruth finds Arthur just below Stoney Pools, on his way to the Fannich Pools. He is walking with a client, a tall man in a tweed cap and green wax jacket.
“Daddy!” She calls for him long before she gets to him, likes to watch him turn towards the sound of her voice, see his wide smile.
He waits until she has caught up, puts a hand on her shoulder. “My youngest,” he says to the tall man. “The keeper.”
The man nods to Ruth. “Help your father out, do you?” he says.
“She knows the river almost as well as I do.” Arthur squeezes Ruth’s shoulder. “Tell your mother not to wait tea for me. I’m going to be out here until dark.”
Ruth breaks from the men, runs along the bank of the river before heading overland to the cottage. She dodges tufts of heather, pretending that they are rocks and she is a salmon swimming around them. Nearing the cottage, she listens for the sharp bark of the collie, Shep, who always hears her coming, whether through the fields or by road, and comes down to meet her at the gate.
Tea is baked beans on toast, Ruth’s favourite. She eats alone. Annie is darning socks in a corner of the kitchen. Eliza and Marjory are giggling over the pages of a magazine in the sitting room. Their jokes never include Ruth, but she doesn’t mind. She likes the background sound of their laughter. It’s reassuring, like bird
song.
“I’ll feed the chickens, Mummy,” she says when she’s finished eating, scooting off her chair and pocketing the last bit of crust for Shep, who isn’t allowed indoors and sleeps on a bed of straw in a little wooden house near the hens. At ten, Ruth is still small enough to be able to squeeze through the door of Shep’s house and likes to go outside and lie with the dog sometimes after tea. It is surprisingly comfortable on the straw, curled up against the warm, friendly body of the collie.
Shep gently takes the scrap of toast from Ruth’s hand, trots after her as she fills the tin pail with grain and walks down to the end of the garden where the chickens live in their wood and wire prison. Ruth scatters the feed from the pail, then bobs her head in imitation of the birds pecking at the ground. She runs round the outside of the enclosure, being a chicken, Shep at her heels.
Arthur isn’t home when Ruth goes upstairs to bed, and she listens for the click of the gate, the fall of the latch on the kitchen door, but drifts off to sleep before she hears either sound. She wakes to a small knock on her bedroom door.
“Ruthie?” The door opens. “Did I wake you?”
“No,” Ruth lies.
“I have something for you.” Arthur comes across the room, bends over Ruth’s bed.
Ruth scooches up until she is sitting, puts out a hand.
“Mind, it’s sharp.” Arthur places the salmon fly in his daughter’s palm. “It’s called a Blue Charm. Good for low water.”
In the dim light of the bedroom, Ruth can’t decipher the details of the lure, but she can feel the softness of the feathers, the sharp spike of the hook.
“Is it really blue?” she asks.
“Like a piece of the sky.” Arthur lifts the fly from Ruth’s hand and places it gently down on the little table by her bed. “I’ll put it here and you can have a good look at it in the morning.” Ruth slides back down in her bed, and he pulls the covers up to her shoulders, leans over to kiss her on the forehead. “Good night, Ruthie.”
“Good night, Daddy.”
In the morning, Ruth inspects the Blue Charm, running her finger lightly along the top feather and the bright blue hackle. She holds it up to the window and the sun catches the brightness of the blue and makes it sparkle. Turning it over in her palm, Ruth examines the layer of thread that winds around the shank. The fly is so pretty, like a small bird, like the picture in her mother’s room of a tiny bird stalled at the throat of a flower.
Arthur isn’t much good at tying flies, but his friend Richard is. Richard is a fellow gillie on the Sutherland estate. He works the upper reaches of the River Brora, and it was he who tied the Blue Charm that Arthur gave to Ruth.
“You’re young to learn,” he says, when Ruth proposes the idea to her father, and Arthur presents it to Richard.
“I’m a good learner,” says Ruth. “I can multiply anything, and I know all the words to ‘Sweet Afton’ and ‘A Red, Red Rose.’”
She stands up tall and begins to recite. “O my Luve is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June; / O my Luve is like the melody / That’s sweetly played in tune.”
Richard holds up his hand to stop Ruth from going any further. “I don’t need to hear any more of that bloody poem,” he says. “We’ll give it a go.” He opens up his salmon fly wallet and takes out a Blue Charm, passes it to Ruth. “I want you to take this apart and put it back together again.”
Ruth uses the Blue Charm that her father gave her as a model to guide her when she has the lure that Richard presented her with in pieces. He has shown her how to wind thread onto the hook from a bobbin, but otherwise she is without instruction. She crouches at the little table in her bedroom, in the path of the window light, trying not to grip the pheasant feather too firmly so it doesn’t bend or clump together.
The elements of the fly, when separated from the whole, look like bits of scrap, like nothing of consequence. A tip of a feather. A fingernail-sized piece of black wool. A bit of tinsel that isn’t long enough to drape over a branch on a Christmas tree. But when they are assembled correctly, these scraps make something pretty enough to tempt a fish to leave the river.
“Not bad,” says Richard when Ruth presents him with the rebuilt Blue Charm the next afternoon. “Must be your small fingers. Let’s try you with something a bit harder.” He gives her a Wilkinson.
This time, Ruth doesn’t have a model for the fly, so she has to concentrate on the way the lure is put together before she starts to take it apart. She steals a sheet of drawing paper from Eliza and makes a rendering of the fly, labelling where the feathers go, and the wool, and the tinsel and the floss. It’s a much more difficult task than the remaking of the Blue Charm, and Ruth is proud of her rendition when she hands it back to Richard the following day.
“Well, well,” he says, turning the salmon fly over. “You’ve done a fine job, little lassie.” He digs in his pocket, passes a half crown over to Arthur.
“I had money on you, Ruthie,” says Arthur somewhat sheepishly.
Father and daughter walk home together that evening, going through the village so that Arthur can buy Ruth an ice cream from the new Italian shop that has recently opened in Brora.
“It’s only fair,” he says, handing over the half crown as payment for their two vanilla cones.
They sit outside the shop, on a low stone wall, watching the passing of the horse and carts on their way to and from the salt flats in the harbour.
“Daddy,” says Ruth, “what’s the hardest salmon fly?”
“What do you mean?”
“The hardest to tie.”
“Ah.” Arthur thinks for a moment. “The Popham,” he says.
Ruth works her ice cream cone, trying both to savour it and not to finish it quickly, two things that operate against each other.
“I’ll try that next then,” she says. “But this time, Daddy, I think you should bet a pound on me.”
School is sufferance, but the school leaving age has been lowered because of the post-war depression, with children needing to work to help their families out, and Ruth escapes the academic world at fourteen. She leaves without a backwards glance, tossing her school books in a hedge as soon as the school building is out of sight.
Arthur has secured her a job, her first real job, refreshing the flies in a tackle box for one of his clients. She works at the family kitchen table after breakfast has been cleared, her mother insisting that she put a layer of newspaper down first.
“We eat here, Ruth,” she says.
Annie is a strict believer in not mixing the outside with the inside, although this is a constant battle with her youngest daughter, who tries to fill her bedroom with birds’ nests and coloured leaves, stones from the river, the empty husks of insects.
For the rebuilding of the flies in the tackle box, Ruth is paid the generous sum of five pounds.
“That’s enough to set you up proper,” says Arthur. “Enough for bobbins and skins and a good tying vise.”
Ruth has already thought of this, has priced out what she’ll need to begin making salmon flies for a living, knows how much of the money she’ll have left over once she’s purchased feathers and thread, different sizes of hooks.
“I’m going to buy you a new suit too, Daddy,” she says.
Arthur has worn holes in the fabric of the one suit he has now. It was the suit he married in and his girth has increased since that time, so that now when he goes to work in it, he can’t button up the jacket and the wool strains over his backside when he bends down.
When Arthur goes to London to buy the new suit, he takes Annie with him for the weekend. It is the first time she has been there since they moved north and the visit lifts her mood for weeks to come.
“Just being on the streets with all the people made my heart sing,” she says to her daughters when she returns, and Eliza and Marjory are pestering her for details of the fancy clothes in the shop windows. She hums while she cooks the tea, something Ruth cannot remember her mother ever
doing, even before they moved to Scotland.
Ruth goes outside. Her father is down by the henhouse, smoking a cigarette. His new suit looks sharp against the boards of the coop, all the colours of the cloth bright and clean.
“You look very smart,” says Ruth.
They stand side by side at the end of the garden. Before them is the grassy slope of the river valley, the soft shapes of the hills like fallen horses.
“I couldn’t breathe,” says Arthur. “It was so noisy. There were crowds of people trapped together, jostling for space. I thought I’d never get out.”
Ruth isn’t sure if her father is talking about London or the war.
“Well, you’re out now,” she says.
“Aye.”
Arthur takes a pull on his cigarette. Soon his new suit will smell like his old one, of smoke and sweat and fish.
Ruth tugs his sleeve, like she used to when she was a small child.
“Shall we go and show the salmon your new duds?” she says.
Her father laughs. “I’ll be surprised if they recognize me.”
He grinds his cigarette end under his boot heel and they start down the slope together, towards the river.
Durham Ranger
THE HOUSE CAN’T BE SEEN FROM THE ROAD.
“The longer the drive, the larger the castle,” says Arthur, as they walk through the fancy iron gates and past the stone pillars flanking the carriageway.
Ruth, who has polished her old school shoes for this occasion, looks in dismay as the dust from the drive starts to film across the leather.
“But it’s not really a castle, is it?”
“He’s a Lord, so it might as well be.”
The Lord isn’t home, but the Lady is. She makes them wait on the steps and then re-emerges in boots, carrying a walking stick, three enormous hounds nudging her heels.
“They’re Russian,” she says, as though that’s meant to explain everything about them.
Arthur worries the brim of his cap in his fingers. “It’s very kind of you,” he says. “We are very grateful. We are . . .”
Machine Without Horses Page 9
