The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Welcome to the world of Eileen Ramsay!

  A Letter from Author

  Mairi’s Shepherd’s Pie

  Extract from The Convent Girl

  Tales from Memory Lane

  Memory Lane Club

  Copyright

  For my sisters,

  Anne, Nancy and Kathryn

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the spring of 1900 Mairi McGloughlin discovered that she loved the land. She was just nine years old: in fact she had just passed – not celebrated – her ninth birthday. With her best friend, Violet Anderson, she was walking home from the village school. They skipped and walked down Pansy Lane and then Mairi saw the first of the year’s snowdrops, virginal white, the lovely heads standing straight and tall on delicate stems, their dark green leaves cradling them protectively.

  ‘Look, Violet,’ she said, her voice full of awe, ‘snowdrops.’

  Violet skipped on the spot, not losing the beat. ‘Seventy-eight, seventy-nine – they’re just flowers, Mairi – eighty-four, eighty-five.’

  Mairi knelt down in the damp soil beside the flowers and she spoke for herself. ‘No they’re not, Violet, they’re more, they’re harbingers of spring.’

  She was top of the class and had seen that posh word in one of the Dominie’s reserved books.

  ‘Harbingers of spring,’ she said again, liking the sound of the phrase. ‘Look at them, Violet. They’ve come up out of the ground and they’re pure white; the muck hasn’t stuck to them.’

  ‘Ach, you’re daft, so you are, Mairi McGloughlin. Of course dirt doesn’t stick to them.’

  ‘Well, why not, since you’re so smart, Violet Anderson? Why doesn’t muck stick to them?’

  For a moment Violet was perplexed. She had not expected to be questioned on something unquestionable, on an irrefutable fact. ‘It just doesn’t because . . . because God made them.’

  ‘Aye, and he made Billy Soutar too and all the mud in Angus is stuck to him.’

  At the thought of Billy Soutar, the little girls dissolved into laughter and ran giggling down the path, all thoughts of flowers and muck and their place in the great scheme of things gone from their minds.

  They parted at the end of the lane. Mairi had to continue another mile to the farmhouse but Violet’s father’s tied cottage sat four-square to the road almost beside the path. Her mother was in the garden throwing potato peelings to the hens that bustled frenetically around her feet as if terrified that there would not be enough for all.

  ‘There’s scones just out the oven, lassies,’ she called as she went on feeding the hens, ‘and a nice jug of fresh milk in the larder, our Violet.’

  Mairi sighed. Pheemie Anderson was a fine baker. ‘I cannot today, Mrs Anderson. I’ve a pot of soup to put on for the week.’ The pot of soup would have been ready if her brother, Ian, had not let the fire go out. Ian’s head was usually busy with anything but what he was supposed to be doing and yesterday he had got so involved watching a blackbird building a nest that he had forgotten not only to keep the range stoked but also to bring in the cows. Mairi had gone for the cows but too late to save her brother from their father’s righteous anger. This morning Ian had been too sore to go to school and Mairi had lied and told the Dominie that he had a cold. Mr Morrison had said nothing but at hometime he had given Mairi a lovely bound Shakespeare.

  ‘If Ian is still unwell tomorrow, tell him to read Richard II and I want him to go on with his history book and the composition he was going to write for me.’

  Glowing, Mairi had put the precious book carefully in her bag. She and Ian and the teacher’s horrible son, Robin, were the only children who were allowed to read the reserved books. Ian and Robin had fought for the position of top of the class for seven years since the day they had entered the little school together. Sometimes Robin was top, sometimes Ian. Robin always beat Ian in the arithmetic examinations and Ian beat Robin at compositions. Aggregate scores were what counted for top place and Mairi was hoping that Ian would be Dux. Then maybe, just maybe, Father would allow him to stay on at the school beyond the date when most farm boys left.

  ‘He’ll need to count well enough to buy in seed, not be diddled, and to pay his men what they’re worth. He doesn’t need to speak poems.’ That was Father, who would never understand his son, mainly because he would not try.

  Mairi carried on up the road until she reached the farmhouse. The dogs, Ben and Dog, rushed out to meet her and she hugged them both, careless of the fact that they were working dogs and not, according to Father, to be petted like lap dogs. Dogs were the most satisfactory of all animals. They loved totally and without question; everything these strange human creatures did was perfect and Mairi, with her cuddles and scratching of just the right spot under the ears, was the most perfect of all. They even tolerated Ian’s forgetfulness and waited patiently when he forgot to feed them. Their master did not have the same forgiving nature.

  ‘Oh, you beautiful babies,’ crooned Mairi. ‘Have you missed me, then?’

  Their tails wagging vigorously, to show her how much she had been missed, they followed her into the house.

  ‘You’d best lie down in the kitchen while I see where Ian is.’

  If they could have, they would have told her that Ian was ploughing with his father. Mr McGloughlin had promised his wife that the children would attend school but here was Ian, perfectly well and doing nothing. He did not have to sit down to help with the plough.

  When Mairi realised that the house was empty, she cut herself a slice from a loaf of bread that she had baked herself. She spread it liberally with their own butter and sat down at the scrubbed kitchen table to eat it. Then she changed from her school frock into a working day dress and began to prepare vegetables for the soup: carrots, turnips, leeks and a cabbage all grown either in the garden or on the farm. She washed some of their own barley and left it sitting in a bowl of water while the stock simmered on the range. The stock she had made from the bone of the mutton joint that had been their Sunday and Monday dinner. The soup started, she peeled potatoes and then went out into the garden to gather some of the last of the Brussel sprouts. How good it would be when the spring vegetables began to appear; Brussel sprouts were, unfortunately, such a serviceable vegetable. Mairi could not think of one good thing to say about them and, in fact, sometimes wondered why farmers bothered to grow them. She was only nine years old, not a great age, but, in all that time of living and experiencing, she had never met anyone who admitted to liking them.

  ‘When I’m choosing the garden vegetables,’ Mairi informed a particularly tough plant, ‘there will be no sprouts.’ She sat back on her heels beside the plants. There would be flowers. That’s what there would be and something called asparagus that she’d seen in one of the Dominie’s books, and strawberries, of
course, which grew beautifully in Angus soil under Angus skies, and potatoes, even though Father grew them on the farm. The Dominie had a book about growing vegetables and it said that potatoes cleaned the ground and left it nice and ready for the next crop. Yes, asparagus. Mairi had never eaten, never even seen asparagus, but the gentry liked it and so it must be good. The laird had a glass house called a succession house and he grew peaches in it. Peaches. Mairi had seen them when the laird had given a picnic for his tenants. Oh, earth, soil, good clean dirt was a marvellous thing; it grew potatoes and peaches both. Even the word peach was good. Peach. When she was a farmer she would have a succession house and she would have a peach tree in it. The laird would help her. He was a nice old man. He did not chuck her under the chin and expect her to like it as so many elderly and not so elderly men did. He had spoken to her, one gardener to another. Yes, she would not be afraid to ask the laird. No doubt he had asparagus. She would go to see it at the next picnic.

  Mairi jumped up. She had better get the sprouts and the tatties on. If Ian had done nothing to annoy Father they would have a nice time sitting around the table together, even though the soup would not be at its best until tomorrow. But if she made a nice Shepherd’s pie and that and the sprouts were ready to be served just as Father walked in from the fields, maybe he would speak to Ian with the soft voice he always used for Mairi and that her brother very rarely heard addressed to himself. She stopped at the back door, her eye caught by a glimpse of white against the garden wall – more snowdrops.

  ‘When I’m the farmer,’ began Mairi, and then she stopped, for she would never be the farmer. She was a girl. She would grow up and keep house for her father until Ian married and then, unless she herself married, she would share the chores with her sister-in-law, for it was Ian who would be the farmer, Ian, who was only completely happy when he was reading a story or scribbling away in his secret notebook.

  ‘It’s daft,’ said nine-year-old Mairi McGloughlin, ‘but it’s the way it is and there’s nowt I can do about it.’ She thought for a moment and smiled a slow, sweet smile that was older than time. ‘I’ll marry Jack Black and bully him.’

  Her future decided, Miss McGloughlin hurried into the kitchen and finished preparing the evening meal. Then there were a few precious minutes to do her homework. She was clever like Ian and the horrible Robin and so the sums took her no time at all. The parsing and analysis of the three sentences took her a little longer because she was happier just reading and understanding lovely words than cluttering up her mind with parts of speech and suchlike nonsense. Ian now, and that spoiled brat who lived in the schoolhouse, could happily parse and analyse all the day long. She was about to say that such a failing showed just how horrid was Robin Morrison when she realised that the same label would have to attach itself to her beloved Ian. She vented her spleen on Robin by viciously slicing two sprouts into slivers and tossing them into the soup pot. Father would have been sure to ask her what on earth she was trying to do to his laboriously grown vegetables. Sprouts were cooked whole. Everybody knew that.

  Colin McGloughlin and Ian were welcomed home by the smell of good food, beautifully cooked. Ian had managed to keep his mind on his work all afternoon long and so his father was as pleased with him as he ever got. A good hammering had done the boy the world of good, which proved that Ian did not need ‘patient understanding’ as the Dominie was always saying, but discipline. There was a time for books and a time for remembering to mend the fire and, of the two, the fire was the more important. Without a fire, wee Mairi could not cook and he had never yet seen Ian ready to eat his books instead of a succulent Shepherd’s pie. For a moment Colin toyed with the idea of approaching the school board to allow Mairi to stay at home. There was necessity; he was a widower with two children. Ach no, he had promised Ellen and besides, the lassie was only nine. She could finish the primary school and then she could stay at home where she belonged and take care of the house. She would not do hard farm work, not his wee lassie. Too much work had killed her mother, a shop girl from the town who should never have married a farmer. But Mairi should be spared the hard work that was the lot of every daughter of the farm and if she did marry, and she had to he supposed, she should marry onto a farm that was owner occupied where there was a bit of extra money for a kitchen maid as well as a dairy maid. But not yet, not for a long time yet.

  The little family ate their meal and washed it down with mugs of hot sweet tea. Then Colin went to the fire and sat down, the dogs at his feet. He would sit for an hour or two and then, once he had seen the children to bed, he would take himself off to his lonely room.

  Ian too left the table and after assuring himself that his father was safely ensconced in the inglenook, he took the book that Mairi had brought him from the Dominie and carried it with pride and care to a seat on the other side of the roaring fire. He was soon deeply involved in the fourteenth century and totally removed from the world around him. Mairi accepted that she would clear the table and wash the dishes; that she would put the oats to soak for the morning’s porridge and that she would fill the stone pigs that warmed the beds. That was woman’s work. She could barely keep her eyes open by the time her jobs were finished.

  ‘I’m away to my bed,’ she announced to her father and to her brother but neither heard her. She was not hurt. She did not expect a loving and protracted goodnight ritual. She smiled fondly at her menfolk as if they were her children and took herself off up the oak staircase to her little room under the eaves. She liked her room with its view over the fields towards the Firth of Tay. It was dark and she was tired and cold, but once she was stripped to her vest and knickers she pulled the handmade patchwork quilt from her bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and sat on the window seat looking out at the night. There were one or two fishing boats on the water. In the moonlight, against the dark sky, they looked like etchings. Mairi waited and waited and there, at last, was the train. It ran like a wheeled jewel box between the fields and the sea. It was going to Dundee, to Edinburgh, to York, maybe even to London itself.

  ‘I’ll be on you one day, train,’ she told it. ‘Maybe all the way to London, but at least as far as Dundee. You wait and see.’

  Satisfied that the nightly ritual had been concluded successfully, she went to bed.

  She was able to sleep late for in those days of late February it was still dark at six o’clock. No need to wash in cold water. Was there not always – well, nearly always – a kettle murmuring away beside the soup at the back of the black iron range? She made tea – Father liked a really good strong cup of tea first thing in the morning – before she carried an ewer of hot water back up to the basin that sat on her dresser. She pulled on her petticoats and her hand-knit stockings. It was far too cold to stand there in her knickers just to make sure that her neck was clean.

  Ian was coming in from the byre when she went downstairs again to stir the porridge.

  ‘Did you do your composition last night?’ she asked him as he slumped tiredly at the table.

  His face lit up and he sat up straight, his early morning labours already forgotten. ‘Aye, and it’s grand. I’ll easy beat Robin. I’ve used near every big word I know.’

  ‘Mr Morrison says a wee word can be better than a big one.’

  Ian looked up at her from the superiority of his eleven years. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mairi McGloughlin. Big words, correctly used, show an educated mind.’

  ‘But you and ratty Robin only look up big words in the Dominie’s dictionary. I cannot see much education in that. I think one of those parrots could do the same.’

  Ian refused to answer which was usually a sign that he knew he was beaten but refused to accept it. ‘Hurry up with the porridge, Mairi. You still have all the pieces to make.’

  ‘Your wee sister has only the two hands, lad. Get off your backside and pour the tea.’

  The children had not heard their father come in but when they did, they sprang up; Ian to do as he
was told, Mairi to her brother’s defence.

  ‘Ian’s just in from the byre, Dad. We’ll have calves and lambs soon. Lambs first, do you think? I hope I can raise one this year. Wouldn’t that be nice?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, lass, because it would mean that I had lost a ewe, most like.’

  ‘Well, if it was like Snowdrop refusing one of her twins again, I could raise that.’

  ‘If she does and if we find it before it starves to death or the crows get it.’ Colin turned to his son. ‘There’s a good job for you on Saturday, Ian. Take the shotgun and get some crows.’

  ‘Teach me to shoot, Dad,’ begged Mairi. ‘I bet I’d be better than anyone.’

  ‘Shooting’s not for girls, lambkin.’

  ‘There were women shooting at the laird’s ne’erday party.’

  ‘Gentry’s different.’

  ‘Women shot in the Wild West, Dad,’ put in Ian.

  For a moment Colin looked angry and then he started to laugh. ‘I’m picturing my wee Mairi like one of they women on the Wild West Show. Who are you going to shoot, Mairi Kathryn McGloughlin, if your daddy teaches you?’

  Mairi smiled. She had won, as usual. ‘Stinky Robin Morrison and even stinkier Billy Soutar.’

  ‘I don’t know what you have against Robin. He’s really very nice.’

  ‘He’s a pain. He thinks he’s special just because his father is the Dominie.’

  Ian jumped to the defence of his friend. ‘That’s not true, Mairi. Robin is great.’

  ‘Robin’s great. Robin’s great,’ Mairi sneered. ‘Well, think what you like, Ian McGloughlin, but I don’t like him.’

  ‘If the two of you don’t get your porridge eaten,’ said their father mildly, ‘it’ll be Robin’s father you have to worry about.’

  Mairi looked at her father quickly and then at the wag-at-the-wall clock. ‘What a panic you gave me,’ she laughed. ‘We’ve hours yet.’ She ladled out the porridge and the children sat down and began to eat. Their father took his bowl and ate from it as he walked to the door.

  ‘Straight home the pair of you,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be ready for my tea as soon as the sun goes down. Mind you feed the stirks, our Ian, just as soon as you change out of your school clothes.’