The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  They helped him take off his rubber boots and empty out the snow and freezing water.

  ‘Good job none of your professors can see you now, Robin. You look like a drowned rat.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Robin tried to smile between teeth that were chattering together with cold.

  ‘We’ll need to make you run, Robin laddie, or you’ll take your death,’ said Colin. ‘Ian’ll take the one arm and I’ll take the other. You wouldn’t think on coming back to the farm afore you go home? Mairi always has water on and she’ll be making soup to keep her mind busy.’

  Robin shook his head and tried to get going under his own steam. He would love to go to the cosy little farmhouse, where a pretty girl would be waiting with hot food and maybe a warm welcome. Knowing Mairi though, he assumed she would be furious with him because her father and brother were in danger, but at least she would feed him and dry him off. He well knew that had the McGloughlins been a few minutes later he would have died out here so close to the town and yet so far away from safety. What friends they were. He did not ask them what had brought them out. It would be days before his mind would work on that. He accepted their presence, their strength, and thanked God for them. One day, when his body and mind were once more functioning properly, he would thank them too.

  They said no more as they struggled the rest of the way. The snowfall had stopped and it was fatigue that was their enemy now, but doggedly the farmers plodded on, holding the slighter man between them and, at last, when all three were deciding that they could take not one more step, they saw the schoolhouse with one little lamp shining from an upstairs window.

  Ian was the one with enough strength left to raise the knocker and they waited for several minutes until at last the door was opened. Mr Morrison stood in the doorway, a candle in his hand. He saw his son and, with a cry of joy, clasped the soaked young man to his heart.

  ‘She knew you’d come. “I’m waiting for my Robin,” she said. Take off your coat and go straight upstairs. Come in, Mr McGloughlin, and you too, Ian.’

  ‘I’ve left my lassie, Dominie,’ began Colin.

  ‘Mairi will understand. She’s going, you see, and I don’t know what to do.’

  Colin had lived through this night years before.

  ‘Go to your sister, Ian. I’ll stay here and see to what needs to be done.’

  He put his arm around the man he had always respected and of whom he had often been in awe. Tonight it was the man of learning who was so sadly in need of the man of the soil.

  ‘We’ll be fine the night, laddie,’ he said to Ian who had reached the gate. ‘Come back the morn and you’ll know what to bring.’

  Ian nodded. ‘Mairi,’ he said to himself. ‘I’ll bring Mairi.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Farmers from all over the area came to dig out the road for Mrs Morrison’s hearse. Robin, looking out of the schoolhouse window at the dawn spreading over a frozen landscape, was startled to see small moving black dots and, as he watched, the dots became larger and he saw that they were men; men and boys and even women, each with a shovel.

  Nature had not helped. It was as frozen as Robin’s heart and the roads were impassable. At first he did not realise why so many people were struggling through the deep frozen drifts and then when he saw the shovels he knew. Somehow the word had spread through the farms that the Dominie’s wife was dead and that the schoolhouse was cut off from the roads.

  ‘We’ll dig her out,’ someone had said.

  The local carpenter-cum-undertaker had dug his dignified way in and made the simple coffin in the front room. It was cold in there; even the usual feeble fire had been allowed to go out for the body was there and, had the weather been kind, would have been buried days ago. But the other downstairs rooms were warm and cosy. Had they ever been so cosy? Robin thought as he watched a silent Mairi McGloughlin cut large slices of bread to make sandwiches for the people who were digging the path from house to gate and the road from the schoolhouse to the kirk yard. The doctor had managed to get through almost twenty-four hours after his mother had died peacefully in her husband’s arms and the minister, too old and frail to be safe far from his own fireside, had arrived on the back of Charlie Thomson’s biggest Clydesdale. The horse had managed only part of the way. Even with his great feet wrapped in sacks, not to pay silent homage to the dead but to prevent him slipping, the animal was unsafe on the road.

  ‘Do you know, I walked clear across the dyke,’ Robin heard one farm lad say to another. ‘The drifts are that high the dyke’s buried and I knew I’d lost my way when I ended up to my neck in snow. Luckily our Bob was with me and pulled me out, and him laughing like a loon. When this is finished I’ll see how he likes freezin’ snow down the back of his neck.’

  ‘My mother is dead,’ thought Robin, ‘and they can dig through appalling conditions and still have fun.’ He had been to school with the lads and knew that they could find joy in almost anything. But they had not found joy in school and none at all in his mother who had had few of the skills of which their mothers were justifiably proud. ‘I’d dig for them,’ he thought, ‘but would they ask me or would I even find out that they needed help?’

  He looked across at Mairi who smiled at him. ‘They’re good people,’ she said. ‘They mean no disrespect by laughing.’

  ‘Mum would like to hear them laugh. She always regretted that she couldn’t communicate well.’

  Mairi turned away, embarrassed. Some of the children had thought that the Dominie’s wife believed herself a cut above them because of her education. Many had revered her just because of it. Probably she would have preferred something in between.

  ‘How is your father this morning?’

  ‘She had prepared him,’ said Robin bitterly. ‘I should have been here.’

  ‘She was so proud of you, Robin. She wanted nothing to get in the way of your education, your degree. She’ll be there with you, when the roses bloom, always.’

  She had no idea why she had said that but she knew it was true. When Robin Morrison stood up at the grand University of Edinburgh in his cap and gown, when the roses bloomed in voluptuous abandon all over the country, his mother would be there.

  ‘Robin, Robin, laddie.’ It was the Dominie. ‘Have you seen them? Boys – and girls – I taught, now grown men and women, are here with us, caring, helping.’

  Robin suddenly pulled himself out of his daze. ‘And I’m in here, warm. I’ll away out to help, and I’ll send your dad in, Mairi. He’s worked like three men, the past few days.’

  Mairi smiled. ‘That’s the way he always works,’ she said and went back to her sandwiches.

  Edith came later, and Mrs Black, and they made soup and Edith’s famous stovies, and the men and women of the farms sat quietly, ill at ease in the schoolhouse, and ate their dinner, and then went back to work again. The older men struggled back to their own yards to feed animals but at last the work was done.

  ‘It’ll be the morn’s morn, Dominie,’ said Charlie Thomson. ‘There’s more snow coming and we’d best get her buried.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Thomson. I appreciate all your efforts. And you, Robin, my boy, I want you on the first train to Edinburgh after we’ve said goodbye to her.’

  ‘I can’t leave you, Dad, not yet, not alone.’

  ‘I’m not alone, laddie, and the children will be back as soon as the roads are passable.’ He put his hand gently on his son’s shoulder. ‘Who can give up with a school full of children to teach? You’re going back to work for your degree; that’s the only thing in the world she wanted.’

  *

  Robin did return to Edinburgh on the first train to get through and in June he graduated with First Class honours. Mairi and Ian read about it in the local paper under the heading: LOCAL BOY’S SUCCESS.

  Mairi looked out on her patch of garden where the roses danced in all their splendour. ‘What now?’ she asked her brother.

  ‘Oxford. Can you imagine, Mairi? Robin’s going to Oxf
ord, and then probably a fine job in a great school somewhere in the city. The Dominie’s so proud. He wanted me to go with him, you know, to the graduation, and if I could have got to Edinburgh and back all in the one day . . .’

  ‘With two rivers to cross? There’s a dream to write a poem about, Ian. Eighty miles and two rivers and back in your own bed on the same day. Pigs might fly.’

  They laughed at the old childhood joke.

  ‘I’ll go to Oxford,’ said Ian. ‘I’ll stand there and I’ll touch the stones and I’ll breathe in the poetry. You can come too, Mairi. I bet Robin would like that.’

  Mairi turned away. Robin had said nothing to her since he had stood watching her cut the sandwiches. She had known that he was too distressed, too incapable of thinking, and he had walked away from the kirk yard without turning back.

  ‘Jack’s asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘I doubt he’d be keen on his wife going off to some English city to see another man.’ She turned on Ian angrily as he looked as if he was about to question her further. ‘Away out from under my feet, you and your local boy’s success story.’

  When he was gone she picked up the paper and read the item through again. There was a picture of Robin, even more formal and somehow remote than the one she had seen in the front room of the schoolhouse. ‘I’d like fine to go to Oxford, Robin, but would it be to see you or to see the city?’

  She put the paper away and hurried on with her tasks, for Jack was coming and they were going to a tennis party, and she knew that he would find a way to get her on her own to ask her again, and she would go because being with Jack was exciting.

  He arrived just as she was finishing washing up the dishes from their evening meal and was forced to sit in the front room with Colin while she hurried upstairs to put on her tennis dress of heavy white cotton. She had altered an old one the better to resemble the lovely dress worn by the celebrated Mrs Mavrogordato during her mixed doubles match on the hallowed greens of the All England Tennis Club.

  ‘It’s a wonder she could play, let alone win,’ mused Mairi as she buttoned hundreds of little white buttons, down the front and on the cuffs of her dress. ‘At least I look nice and it’s not so hot in the evenings.’ She blew her damp hair up from her forehead, wished desperately that she had some lip rouge and then descended the staircase. Well she knew the effect she was creating, but if she had expected to captivate her father as well as Jack, he gave her no satisfaction, telling her only that it would be impossible to get the dress clean if the courts were dusty.

  ‘No one will be able to play for looking at you, Mairi,’ breathed Jack, getting as close to her as he dared. ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘She’s well enough,’ said Colin, ‘And she’s to be back by eleven at the latest. It’s early up these mornings.’

  ‘I may not bring her back at all,’ said Jack daringly.

  Colin looked at him for a long cold moment that made Jack sweat in his long-sleeved white flannel shirt.

  ‘Then it’s me will be after you with a shotgun, not that I’ll need it.’

  ‘Och, Dad, Jack’s only joking. We’ll see you later,’ said Mairi crossly and almost pulled Jack out of the door.

  ‘I don’t know that I am, joking I mean,’ said Jack and he in turn pulled Mairi into his arms and kissed her firmly, his tongue trying gently to force open her lips.

  She pulled away. ‘Don’t be silly, Jack, not here, at the very window.’

  ‘I’ll wait until after the tea,’ promised Jack, ‘and then I want an answer, Mairi McGloughlin.’

  She looked at him provocatively and took to her heels like a hoyden as he came after her and it was two rather breathless tennis players who arrived at the little local club.

  ‘You didn’t get chased by Tyler’s bull, did you?’ asked Sinclair, who was chairman. ‘You’d best sit down and draw your breath and hope you’re not on first.’

  They played singles and doubles and enjoyed themselves heartily until ten o’clock. The long evening still stretched clear before them but most of the young men were ruled by the soil and their animals and knew that they would have to be up early next morning.

  ‘We’ll have our tea now,’ decided the chairman and Mairi was delegated to pouring, not tea, but the cool and refreshing barley water made by the minister’s wife.

  ‘I told Robin all about you and Jack,’ smiled Edith. ‘I thought it only right to wish him well at Oxford and to bring him up to date with local gossip.’

  ‘That was kind.’ Mairi forced a smile. ‘But you can’t have given him gossip about me, Edith, because there is no gossip to tell.’

  Edith laughed archly. ‘I know my brother. He always gets what he wants and . . . so do I.’ She danced off to press sandwiches on the other players, leaving Mairi to fume with rage.

  ‘What have you been saying to Edith about me?’ she asked Jack furiously when he came to sit beside her. She flushed as she thought of things that Jack might have said, private things between two people who cared for one another.

  ‘Just that I’m mad about you,’ said Jack. ‘What else is there to tell?’

  ‘Nothing, and that’s how it will stay.’ Mairi got up and went to do her share of the dish washing. She wanted to go home and she wanted to go alone.

  Jack followed her. ‘Mairi, wait. What’s Edith been saying to upset you?’

  What had Edith said? Nothing really. Except that she had been writing to Robin Morrison.

  ‘I don’t like being gossiped about.’

  ‘Gossip? My dad says if I don’t stop talking about you he’ll move into the barn for some peace. Is that gossip? Edith’s jealous because I’m always talking about your hair or your scones, or your light hand with a sponge. Come on, let me walk you home.’

  Mairi hesitated. She liked Jack. She liked walking home with him and stopping in the shade of some great tree where they could sit for a few minutes until Jack’s lips and hands became too demanding. It was exciting, a little naughty, but nothing wrong. ‘I don’t know, Jack. I did want to, very much, but now I don’t want you to ask me to marry you again. I’m not ready.’

  ‘Oh, you’re ready all right,’ laughed Jack and it was not a pleasant sound. ‘Let me show you just how ready you are.’

  She pushed him away and he made to catch her, then he thought of her father’s eyes when he had said, I won’t need a gun, and he let her go.

  ‘Don’t think I’ll hang around waiting. There’s a wheen of girls ready and willing to take your place.’

  ‘Then let them,’ said Mairi coldly.

  She hurried home up the lovely country lane, taking no pleasure in the briar roses intertwined among the hedges. She went over and over the evening in her mind.

  ‘Robin Morrison,’ she said out loud. ‘The evening went wrong when Edith talked about horrible, nasty Robin Morrison.’

  She managed to let herself into the farmhouse and up to her room without disturbing her father or her brother.

  As usual she stood at the window to watch the train.

  She played her game. ‘I’ll be on you one day. I’ll go to Edinburgh, to London, maybe even to Oxford. And what will I do in Oxford? I’ll walk in the sunshine and I’ll pretend I don’t see the imploring eyes of Robin Morrison.’

  But why that thought should make her cry, she did not know.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘It’s not right,’ said Ian quietly. The words fell into the hot air that had been flying around the room and hung there like grubby washing on a line. No one wanted to look at them.

  ‘War’s not right either,’ said his father quietly, ‘but there is a war and we’re in it whether we like it or not.’

  ‘Keir Hardie says we should be for peace not for war.’

  ‘Aye, and he chose to make his peace speech from the plinth of Nelson’s column. That’s what clever fellows like you and Robin would cry. Irony, is it not, him being such a great fighting sailor?’

  ‘Why can’t you ever say, “Clever
fellows like me”, Dad? Everyone else, according to you, is clever but you’re the one that’s saying it. There’s nowt wrong with your brain.’

  ‘There something up with yours if you think that helping the oppressed is wrong.’

  Ian stood up, his huge frame sending the room scurrying into its own shadows. ‘That’s not what I said and tell me, Mister Clever, who’s the father that skelped me for fighting with Robin at the primary school? Violence doesn’t solve anything, Dad.’

  ‘I walloped you because you were bigger and stronger than Robin and wrong into the bargain. Belgium’s wee. Germany’s big and needs skelping.’

  ‘Your argument is too simple, Dad,’ Ian started again but Mairi interrupted. She was tired of this war that had been raging since some prince or other had been assassinated in a place called Sarajevo and by a boy scarce nineteen years old.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘since neither of you will be involved; you’re needed here on the land.’

  That was true but many, many young men from the area had already enlisted, anxious to be part of what they saw as an exciting moment in history. By September of 1914 the Scottish Division of Lord Kitchener’s First 100,000 or K1 as they were called, had begun to assemble. They were sent away from the hills and glens of Scotland to Bordon, near Aldershot in the south of England. They had thought to win the war quickly, whip the Germans, and return home, with medals for bravery, to their sweethearts, their mothers, their wives. But too many were already dead in places called Ypres, the Marne . . . One farm boy had been on a ship, a submarine, that had dived under five rows of mines, torpedoed a Turkish battleship, Messudiyeh, and got back safely. The news that he had been killed not by the enemy but in a freak accident had reached his elderly parents on the same day that a letter had informed them that he had won this brand-new medal, the Distinguished Service Medal, that the king himself had established.

  ‘Where in the name o’ God is the Dardanelles and what good is a medal going to do his mam at her age?’ had been the feeling of many of his friends who had stayed at home on the land.