The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  ‘If you’d stop wiggling that ridiculous tail,’ she would tell the lamb, ‘you would have more energy for eating,’ but it paid no attention and went on sucking and wiggling in a twinned ecstasy.

  *

  The Dominie reported, through Ian, that Robin was training near Dundee. He was learning to march, and to salute.

  ‘The Dominie’s no sure how much his learning will help him fight the Hun,’ reported Ian, ‘but he’s learning to dig trenches or to order other folk to dig them while he learns all about sending messages. Have you thought of that, Dad? If you’re a general sitting in one hole, how do you tell the general in a hole five miles away that you’re running out of ammunition?’

  ‘It’ll be a boy on a bike,’ suggested Colin. ‘It’s always a boy on a bike.’

  ‘I hope they’re teaching him to shoot,’ said Mairi quietly.

  ‘I wish them luck,’ laughed Colin. ‘Goodness knows, I tried and that boy couldn’t hit the barn door. You should be there looking out for him . . .’ he began and then, appalled at what he was saying, he turned away in embarrassment.

  ‘We can’t hide from this, Dad, at least not here by ourselves. I’d look out for Robin; I always have. But where do I stop?’

  ‘What about Mairi? How far would you go for Mairi?’

  ‘Ach, Dad, that’s different.’

  ‘Stop it, both of you. I can take care of myself, thank you, and both of you into the bargain, great lumps that you are. Now go, get to bed for you have to be up at the crack tomorrow.’

  They went sheepishly, almost happy to be bullied, and Mairi watched them and then sank into her chair by the fire. She sat for a while just watching the sparks jump from one piece of wood to another and then she slipped out of the chair and knelt down beside it.

  ‘Don’t let him be killed,’ she prayed, but to whom was she praying and who was the subject of her prayer?

  Wearily she picked herself up and climbed the stairs after her father and brother.

  ‘I’ll look in on the Dominie,’ she promised herself. ‘There’ll be someone in the farms happy to make a little extra money by doing for him. One fewer thing for Robin . . . or anyone else to worry over.’

  *

  The whole town of Dundee turned out to watch their men march away, and countless people from the farms and glens too. Impossible to tell a farmer from a fisherman in a kilt. They were all the same and the women of the town gave their kisses and hugs freely to all unless, of course, they had a man of their own to cling to, a husband, a son, a brother. Mairi stood on the street outside the West Station and remembered the first time she had seen the place when she had come to buy a dress with Ian and had given her money away to a little beggar girl. She looked around. Maybe that girl, grown older, was somewhere in this hysterical crowd. She could hear the pipes as the battalion marched out of Dudhope Castle, that ancient fortress that had once been the home of John Graham, Bonnie Dundee, the best of all the bonnie fechters. The bands were playing ‘Bonnie Dundee’. She recognised the tune as did the huge throng, the cheery cheeky notes brightening the heart and lifting the spirits. Were there braver, finer soldiers anywhere than these lads?

  Goodness, they must fairly be skipping if they have to march to that, thought Mairi and in a wee while noticed that the tune had changed, to give the pipers, or the soldiers, a slight rest. It was ‘Scotland the Brave’ that rang out and then again the music changed to a pibroch, a series of musical variations that Mairi did not know.

  A bent, gnarled old man beside her enlightened her. ‘Isn’t it the Pibroch of Donnil Dhu.’ He smiled up at her through blackened teeth as he began to caper around in the cold. ‘Does it not ever make you want to dance, lassie?’ and Mairi watched him jigging away among the crowds. She laughed, for a second forgetting why she was here and then she remembered that Robin was going away to war and she had to see him, had to.

  But she could not. She was too small and the crowds were too dense. She pushed and shoved and managed to force herself through the mass to see the men march into the station. He was tall, not so tall as Ian but taller than average. She should spot him easily but there were so many tall, strapping men among those men of the Fourth Battalion, the Black Watch. She waited until the troop train had pulled out of the station and then she felt such a sense of loss, of desolation, that she put her head down and began to cry.

  ‘Your sweetheart gone, my child?’ asked a gentle voice and she looked up through tear-filled eyes to see a clergyman peering solicitously down at her.

  Sweetheart? What could she say?

  She shook her head. ‘It was Robin,’ she said, ‘just Robin, and I couldn’t see him.’

  ‘No doubt he saw you, my dear, and that surely is the more important thing. He knew you were here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you were anywhere near the front of the crowd he saw you. Think of that and go home and write the first of many letters.’

  Mairi smiled a wavery smile as she decided to walk into the town to look at the shops. Her train would not be leaving for another hour and by the time she got home, Colin and Ian would be in from the fields reading a note that said: Soup keeping hot on the grate.

  She had better have some purchases to explain her trip to Dundee. But they saw her face and asked no questions.

  *

  By mid-September 1915, the Fourth Battalion, the Black Watch, were down to some four hundred men and twenty-one officers. Second lieutenant Robin Morrison was still alive, at least his body moved and did as it was asked to do, but he himself was gone. He had come under fire first at a place called Neuve-Chapelle, and then there had been Ypres where the Germans had used poison gas as a weapon.

  April, and instead of a sky full of larks there had been a sky full of choking, burning yellow smoke. He had remembered Ian’s frst letter in which he had tried to explain his position and he had scoffed. But now, after six months that had changed him from a loving, cheerful boy to an automaton, he did not scoff. He could not think; he could not pray. He had even stopped worrying that he might disgrace himself by showing fear. For the first few months that real terror had marched or crawled through the trenches beside him. He did not want to die but he was not afraid of death and he did not fear pain. He had met pain before and conquered it but he was afraid and he did not know what he feared.

  Perhaps it was the noise. Noise was constant, whining, shrieking, thudding, swishing, screaming, sobbing. But worse than the noise was that endless fraction of a second of utter stillness between the dull thud that said a shell had landed and the appalling roar it made when it exploded. Robin had prayed once that a shell might put an end to this misery but instead he endured the silent eternity, then the roar, then he felt his head almost jerked from his shoulders and he picked himself up out of the muddy blood bath or the bloody mud bath, face scorched, hair singed and he screamed why but no sound came from his mouth.

  Would it never end? They were all dead. He looked around and the carnage made him vomit and that dry retching only made him feel worse. Surely, surely he was not alone; far better to be honourably dead than to be here in Hell alone.

  ‘What did you call this place?’ a cheery voice asked behind him, adding ‘sir’ as an evident afterthought.

  Robin looked through the blood that was pouring down his face into the dirty but unmarked face of his corporal, a regular soldier who had run away from the jute mills twelve years before because soldiering was at least a regular job.

  Robin found a fairly clean handkerchief in his pocket and wiped the blood from his eyes, anything to stop him throwing his arms around the older man for comfort. ‘Loos,’ he said at last. ‘As in “All Hell’s let, et cetera, et cetera,” ’ and they laughed together for a moment as only soldiers can.

  ‘You’re no hurt, sir?’ asked Corporal Wallace. ‘Bad, I mean, for I think it’s just the two of us in here.’

  Tentatively Robin felt his head, his ears. No holes that he could find. ‘No,’ he sai
d. ‘Surface stuff, I think. The head always bleeds like mad.’

  He was himself again and he was responsible for this man and this trench, or what was left of it. He would not lose his nerve again.

  Of the twenty-one officers of the Fourth Battalion, the Black Watch, twenty were killed or wounded at Loos together with two hundred and thirty-five of the enlisted men. It was the end of the battalion which was forced to amalgamate with the Fifth Battalion. For Dundee and parts of Angus and Fife it was also an end, for almost every home, from closes in the city itself to stately homes in the countryside around, was affected. Death had no favourites. His selection was catholic, indiscriminate. He did not ask, Is there anyone at home to feed the children left behind? He spared no thought for the old mother left alone with no child to succour her last years. He did not care how many prayed to join their loved ones soon.

  But on a wee farm near Dundee in the lovely fertile Angus countryside, the Dominie proudly told Mairi that Robin was now a captain.

  ‘He says because no one else was left alive, Mairi. What sights my boy has seen. You will write to him, Mairi, keep him normal. He must know there is some point to this.’

  ‘But there isn’t,’ said Ian and turned away from his sister and his former schoolmaster, the father of his friend, who sadly watched him go.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hard work, good weather, and better luck brought in a good harvest in 1915. While Robin was suffering in France, Ian suffered, in a different way, in Scotland. He knew that 1916 would not bring the end of the war. He read every paper he could get his hands on, talked with the Dominie, and could see no end at all. He kept away from the village as much as possible but Colin insisted on Sunday morning appearances at the wee kirk in the village and that was where everyone met in the pleasant sunshine to talk about, not the harvest, but the war.

  And the talk was always the same.

  ‘Did you hear that Jimmy Simpson from the Knock, him that’s married on Bert Thomson’s eldest lassie, has joined the navy?’

  ‘And Angus Watson’s two eldest boys have gone to try for the airforce. Seems old Angus can manage fine with his youngest and the wife.’

  And the lads from . . . here, there, and everywhere in between. War was exciting, better than following the back end of a horse up and down the fields in the same old monotonous way. Soldiers, sailors, and these brand-new exciting airmen, got regular wages which were sent back to mothers and wives at home.

  And at last the question that had worried some for a time was uttered aloud. ‘You’ll be going now, Ian. Your dad and old Charlie and Mairi can manage. You’ll be wanting the Black Watch like the Dominie’s Robin. You always were as thick as thieves.’

  ‘I won’t be joining the Black Watch,’ answered Ian quietly and felt his father tense beside him.

  ‘Don’t say you fancy flying through the air in a wee bit machine? Rather you than me, laddie.’

  ‘I won’t be joining anything.’

  ‘Ach away. Your old man’s no needing you and your country is.’

  Colin tried but to no avail. Ian had wanted to utter the words for months, had longed to hear them said aloud so that he and everyone else could adjust.

  ‘I don’t believe in war as an answer to international problems,’ he said quietly and then he looked squarely at his interrogator. ‘I won’t go, even when they tell me to go.’

  No one knew what to say. They stood edging from foot to foot, coughing discreetly, and then found an excuse to hurry away. And then one turned, spat in the road, and uttered one word.

  ‘Scrimshanker.’

  ‘What the Hell does that mean?’ asked Colin furiously. He did not know the word but he certainly recognised the tone in which it was said.

  ‘Let’s get home, Dad, Mairi,’ said Ian. ‘It’s just ignorance. I’m not a coward and some people are saying that people like me are cowards, shirkers, scrimshankers.’

  Mairi had been avoiding Edith since she had stopped walking out with Jack but now she saw the look of disdain that passed between Edith and her mother and it made her very angry. She hurried after her brother and slipped her hand into his. He smiled down at her.

  ‘Brave wee Mairi,’ he said. ‘I’m not a coward. I thought all this out independently of anyone and now I have to act fearlessly on my own moral convictions. It is wrong to kill another human being. Men are making money out of death. There’re men all over Europe retiring as millionaires on the money they’re making out of misery. That’s wrong; that profiteers, safe and warm far from the battlefields, should make money while men die in horror.’

  He stopped talking, the longest speech he had ever made in his entire life, and Mairi could only squeeze his arm in comfort and support.

  Colin caught up with them. ‘Can you bear it, laddie?’

  ‘Aye, Dad. The question is, can you?’

  ‘No more, no more,’ begged Mairi. ‘Listen, Dad. Did you hear Willie Webster’s Clydesdale made eighty pounds at the sale yesterday?’

  Colin was so shocked that he stopped walking. ‘Away! It never did. That’s twice the annual wage of the man that looks efter it.’

  ‘A good Clydesdale is irreplaceable, Dad. Men are expendable.’

  Was there nothing they could talk about that would keep this hideous war away?

  ‘Mr Morrison missed the kirk this morning,’ said Mairi after a while.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ said Ian. ‘An old friend of his has come out of retirement to teach in Dundee. The Dominie’s away through for the weekend. That’s a nice wee break for him.’

  ‘More than profiteers doing well out of the war then,’ said Mairi. ‘If more men join up they’ll be desperate enough to have married women teaching in the schools.’

  ‘Ach, it’ll never get that bad, lassie,’ laughed Colin and lightened the atmosphere. ‘No, let’s have our dinner and then I have paperwork to do. You should maybe have a look at it with me, Ian, and you too, lassie. I’m bringing my rotation records up to date because we’re due for a new seven-year lease and I want the factor to see that everything’s been done right. The war’s good for farmers, Ian. I can sell as much food as I can grow. We’ll maybe look into getting a bit more land. My best field has to lie fallow this next season.’

  ‘Maybe the government will lighten the rules, Dad. Isn’t producing food more important just now than letting the land rest?’

  ‘Short-sighted, lass. You have to look ahead on a farm, not just what’s growing this year but what the land will bear in ten years.’

  When they reached the farmhouse, Mairi hurried upstairs to change out of her best Sunday dress and then came downstairs to dish up the scalding hot soup made from the carcass of the old hen that would provide the second course. Sunday dinner was always the same: soup, then a roast of some kind with homegrown vegetables, followed by heavy pudding in the cold months and lighter milk puddings in the summer.

  ‘Isn’t it a shame the strawberrries and rasps are over?’ said Mairi to her father who was sitting at the fireside, his fingers scratching the ears of the dog who lay devotedly at his feet. ‘There was that much fruit I’ve way too many jars of jam in the store cupboard.’

  ‘Aye, but you’re right, lassie, soft fruits are better the way God made them. There’s nothing better than fresh fruit.’

  ‘I had raspberries in white wine at the Big House last year at the picnic,’ Ian announced as he came in from the steading.

  His father and sister looked at him, one in awe, the other in amazement.

  ‘What did they taste like?’ asked Mairi.

  ‘How did they get you to drink such a daft thing as wine, and white at that?’

  Ian laughed. ‘There’s some as doesn’t see a great country yokel when they look at me.’

  Colin looked at his son and saw a tall, well-formed and, yes, good-looking young man, with wide clear eyes and a firm, well-shaped mouth.

  ‘The laird’s niece? It was her, wasn’t it? Oh, you sly old thing, Ian McG
loughlin.’

  ‘They asked for you, Mairi. The laird had peaches in his wine; he said you would have liked that, rather than the strawberries. He gave me a peach for you but I put it down somewhere and forgot it.’

  Over a year it had taken him to tell her. Typical. Mairi smiled as she turned away to attend to her sauce. This strong, brave Ian was still her brother who could forget everything if his mind was stirred by something beautiful. Miss Arabella Huntingdon was beautiful. Ian and a lassie? No. He had never been interested in the lasses.

  ‘Come on, let’s have dinner and this year I’ll go and get my own peach.’

  ‘The picnic is usually in August and here we are at the beginning of October. Maybe there won’t be one this year, not with the war.’

  But there was and neither Mairi nor Ian realised that it was because Miss Huntingdon had persuaded her uncle, much against his better judgement.

  It was to be different. In former years everything had been provided free for the tenants but in 1915 the laird charged a shilling for each family and a halfpenny entrance to all the games. All monies collected were to go to war charities.

  ‘You go, Mairi, and pay our shilling. I don’t think it’s a good idea for Ian and me to go and there’s too much work here.’

  ‘I’m going, Dad,’ said Ian. ‘I’ll do all my chores before I go but I’m not ashamed of my stance and people can say what they like.’

  Colin looked out of his windows, windows that Mairi kept clear and shining, no matter how dusty or dirty the steading became. ‘I don’t want to provoke anything, not in the laird’s grounds. Some of the other tenants have already lost kin.’

  ‘I won’t provoke anything, Dad, and I’m happy to explain my point of view to anyone that wants to talk to me.’

  ‘We must go, Dad, and you have to enter the shooting and throwing the hay bale and you too, Ian. It’s for the war effort. We can’t have our neighbours saying we’re not doing our part. The Blacks will be there and the Sutherlands and the Dominie. It’d be a good time to talk to him about taking a lassie into service if he’s needing help.’