The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  He looked straight into her eyes. ‘I heard. I’m asking you to go to the opera, not to get married, Mairi.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Jack. This “Martha” would be nice.’

  He grinned. ‘Good. I’ll get tickets.’ He took her arm and led her away from the horse with its perfectly content passenger. ‘How’re your lodgers getting on? My mother met Mrs Baxter on the school road. She seems a nice enough body.’

  ‘They’re not lodgers, Jack, not strictly speaking. Milly is working for me and the boys work after school and on Saturday and they both worked full time during the tattie holidays. Anyone over twelve can work. Wee Jean there was furious that she’s too young but I’ve said I’ll find something for her to do to earn a few pennies.’

  He looked at Jean who was leaning on the horse’s neck whispering into his twitching ear. ‘Seems a nice enough wee lassie. What are you going to do when your dad comes back?’

  ‘Corporal Baxter will probably get back at the same time, so it will all work out.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I hope so. You could end up with permanent lodgers.’

  Mairi had worried about that self-same problem herself many, many times. What if anything happened to Milly’s husband? She could hardly throw the poor woman and her children out on the streets again when their presence became a nuisance.

  ‘Jack, I’m in the middle of mucking out . . .’ she began.

  ‘I know,’ he said with a smile. ‘I could smell you from the gate.’ He turned away. ‘Tomorrow night then. It starts at quarter past eight so I’ll fetch you about half past seven. Don’t wear your wellies.’

  She laughed and watched him as he walked back to the horse. He did not lift the girl down immediately but, instead, led the old horse around the steading a few times, talking to Jean all the while. Where had Jack Black learned to get along so well with children? A new side. Mairi liked it and was smiling as she returned to her work.

  She wrote to tell Robin that she was going to the opera. He had been several times when he lived in Rome and had enjoyed himself.

  Damn, should I wait to let Robin take me? Should this be something I experience first with him?

  Too late to think of that and Mairi allowed excitement to build up as she prepared for her evening out. The boys were banished to the barn as she and Milly heated up kettles of water so that she could take a bath and wash her hair in front of the kitchen fire. Milly professed to be ‘good with hair’ and after Mairi had towel-dried her hair by the fire, Milly twisted the long auburn curls up into an elegant roll on top of her head.

  ‘You’re losing weight, lassie,’ said Milly as she helped Mairi into her best costume, the one she had bought for the picnic, and had rarely worn since. ‘You’ll need to do something about that. A man likes a nice armful in his bed and your Robin with his Latin and Greek is no different from any other man.’

  Bed? Mairi was shocked by the coarseness of Milly’s speech but then she realised that Milly was, by her own lights, merely being practical.

  ‘I’ll put more butter on my bread in the morning,’ she said lightly and Milly was scandalised.

  ‘At three shillings and sixpence the pound when it should only be just over the two shillings? You will not! You’ll just have to stop running around madly doing the work of three men.’

  ‘When the war’s over, Milly.’

  ‘Aye, we’ll both stay in bed all morning eating cakes.’

  This picture was so funny that they both started to laugh.

  ‘Goodness, isn’t a belly laugh good for you? There, lassie, you’re a picture.’

  Mairi had to agree. It was so long since she had made an effort that she was pleased with how she looked.

  So was Jack. ‘You look good enough to eat,’ he said.

  ‘Anything looks good after war rations, Jack,’ said Mairi lightly. She did not like the sudden gleam in Jack’s eyes.

  ‘Can you not take a compliment, lassie? Our Edith’s like that an’ all. You say, “My that’s a bonny blouse” and she says, “What are you after?”’

  ‘Sorry, Jack. I’m out of practice.’

  ‘And whose fault is that? Come on, we’ll away and see what this grand opera is all about.’

  They went to the Palace Theatre and found that they were not alone in seeking a respite from the cares of the day. Almost every seat was taken. Mairi sat beside Jack and enjoyed looking around at the rather care-worn opulence of the old theatre. Without exception, the audience had made an effort and she even saw a lady in a purple evening gown and a diamond necklace. At least she thought it was diamonds.

  At last the gas lights were turned down and the music started. Oh, how different from dances at the kirk hall. This was Music with a capital M. Mairi sat and let it flow over her. At first she was distressed that she had no idea what the cast was singing about but she read the synopsis in the programme at the interval and then sat back just to enjoy the rest of the performance. John Ridding’s English opera and his Welsh tenor were an unqualified success.

  ‘Pity they didn’t say their words between their big songs,’ was Jack’s comment as they drank a cup of strong, sweet tea before setting off on the dark road home.

  ‘Oh, I loved it,’ said Mairi thoughtlessly. ‘I kept wondering whether Robin had heard this when he was in Italy . . .’ Too late she realised what she was saying.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Jack. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, Jack. I told you about Robin.’

  ‘You told me you were writing letters to him, not that you swoon about him every minute.’

  ‘I don’t and I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m very grateful that you took me to the opera, Jack.’

  ‘All right.’ He drained his cup and stood up. ‘We’d best get on the road.’

  Chastened, Mairi stood up. How stupid. She had never intended to hurt him and she was grateful that he had taken her out for the evening. She wanted to go home and write to Robin, telling him that she had loved the music and the singing and that she would love to go again. For two hours she had been lifted right out of herself, aware of nothing but the sound and the knowledge that even remotely she was in touch with the man she loved. One more thing, one more thing that they could share. She chattered inanely to Jack, trying to make amends, going over the costumes and the scenery and the cleverness of the lighting effects but he said nothing and eventually she gave up and they made the rest of their way in silence.

  Mairi thought the journey would never end. She could hardly wait to see the lamplight shining out of the darkness. Milly would be there, and the children. Their homework would be done and the boys, no doubt, would be arguing about bedtime.

  She was wrong. Angus and Bert had been so well behaved that, had their mother not had a great deal to think about, she might well have wondered why they had gone off so uncomplainingly after their sleepy sister.

  Angus and Bert did not like Jack. They did not know why and would have argued fiercely if it had been pointed out to them that they were jealous. They knew only that Mairi belonged to them: her father, her brother, even her love were far away. She had given them a home and their mother dignity and they were her champions.

  ‘He puts one finger on her and I’ll have his head off,’ whispered Angus as they crept from the house.

  ‘But what if she likes it?’ argued Bert. He had seen a film and he knew that girls liked to be kissed.

  ‘Likes it? Likes Jack Black when there’s . . .’ He realised in growing maturity that he had been about to say: ‘there’s me’, and he shied away from such an admission ‘. . . when there’s Robin Morrison.’

  Bert said nothing but nodded his head in the dark. Yes, there was Robin Morrison. He crept along behind his big brother until they were well clear of the steading and then he walked boldly beside him towards the town.

  Unaware of his reception committee, Jack stopped the buggy when they were almost within sight of the farmhouse.

 
‘So you’re grateful, Mairi. Show me how much,’ he said and, putting his arms around her, pulled her to him and began to kiss her.

  At first Mairi was too shocked to move and when he thought that she was acquiescing, Jack began to kiss her more brutally and, to her horror, she felt his tongue thrusting into her mouth.

  She gasped and pulled back, struggling, but he paid no attention. He held her with one hand as his free hand sought for the buttons on her coat and she began to struggle even more wildly.

  ‘Oh, I like a bit of a fight, Mairi,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ Now his hands were inside her coat and she could feel him fondling her breasts through the thin wool of her best dress.

  He took his mouth off hers for a moment. ‘Christ, Mairi, it’s months since I’ve had a woman.’

  He pushed her down on to the floor of the buggy and his hand was lifting her dress. She would die. She knew she would. She tried to cry out but his mouth, his horrible tongue choked her and then suddenly Jack stopped and she heard a voice.

  ‘Get off her right now, you bloody bastard or I’ll blow your head off.’

  The Baxter boys, such unprepossessing figures of legendary knights in shining armour, were standing beside the buggy and in the strong hands of thirteen-year-old Angus was Colin’s favourite shotgun. It was pointing at Jack’s stomach. No doubt Angus felt that ‘blow your head off’ sounded better than ‘blow your stomach off’.

  Mairi started to laugh hysterically and then to cry.

  ‘Come on, Mairi,’ said Bert. ‘Give us your hand and come down off there. Mam’s waiting up for you and we thought we’d come and meet you. She doesn’t know that, mind, so don’t tell her.’

  Mairi found her hand held in the warm, soft grasp of a twelve-year-old but there was strength there for he helped her down from the buggy and, as she wavered, his grip strengthened. Little boy Galahads. She loved them.

  She stumbled away from Jack with the boys and then she was at the house and, before the boys could hide, the door was open and Milly was there.

  ‘Mercy. What happened to you?’ she asked, taking one look at Mairi’s face and then another at those of her sons. She did not fail to notice the gun in her eldest child’s young hands. ‘You put that back right now afore I leather your backside. Just wait till your father gets home.’

  ‘We saved Mairi, Mam,’ explained Bert as Angus, too dignified to explain himself to his mother, stalked off to shut the shotgun in its cupboard. ‘That man was trying you know what and we thought Mairi was liking it and then Angus saw she was trying to fight so he stuck the gun in his ribs. He got a real fright, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did,’ said Milly and began to laugh and Mairi started to cry and found herself wrapped in a woman’s arms and comforted.

  ‘Away and tell your brother I think he’s a wee treasure and I’ll not tell your dad, and then put the kettle on and we’ll all have some cocoa.’

  ‘I was so lonely, Milly,’ sobbed Mairi, ‘and I wanted to put up my hair and go to the theatre and feel like a woman, not a farmer, and to forget Dad and Ian and even Robin just for a while.’

  ‘I know, lassie, but listen to me. If you was a millionaire what would you rather have, a bit steak or a quarter of mince?’

  ‘Steak,’ sniffed Mairi.

  ‘Well then, men are like steak and mince, lass, and once you’ve found the one for you he’s the steak and so you don’t bother with mince. You wait for your steak, even if you have to wait a long time. Look at me. I met my Jim when I was in the Mills at fifteen and he joined up to get a regular job. Twenty year we’ve been married and he’s been away most of that time but do I go the dancin’ with other soldiers’ wives and maybe pick up a wee man for a night or two, I do not. I wait for Jim and it’s more than worth the days and nights of loneliness. He’s my top steak.’

  ‘And Robin’s mine.’

  ‘Then we’ll wait together.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Good, now go and wash your face and I’ll make some cocoa and then we’ll away to bed for there’s work waiting.’

  Mairi thought of Jack and the unexpected or unwanted end to a pleasant evening for only a few minutes and then her healthy young body demanded sleep.

  She woke early as always and washed and dressed in the dark before opening her curtains to look out at the farm and the sea way, way beyond. There were still some stars in the sky and a glimmer of moonlight stroked the water. As Mairi watched, the blue-grey of the sky became tinged with pink as the sun struggled to oust his sister moon from his place in the sky.

  ‘Sun, moon and stars in the sky together. Maybe I should wake the bairns to let them see.’

  She decided to leave the young Baxters, deciding that the moon and the stars would have quite disappeared before the children’s tousled heads could be forced from their pillows. It was pleasant to sit alone watching the play of light in the sky. The pink turned red, great huge burning banners stretching across the sky just where it met the grey-blue of the sea.

  ‘Shepherd’s warning? No, that’s only when the red is in the sky late in the morning, not now at the birth of the day.’

  The remembrance that the world was at war cut across Mairi’s day-dreaming. She thought of her father, her brother, and Robin. How beautiful was the sky under which they were waking to another day? She prayed that it was as lovely as this one. Colin and Ian were aware of the sky and the games the sun and the moon played at four-thirty on a winter morning. Was Robin? Had he ever seen the birth of a day? Or were all the soldiers from all the armies awake and alert as they waited for the sun to rise to show them how best to attack and kill their enemies?

  ‘Oh, let them all see beauty,’ Mairi thought sadly as she turned from the window and went downstairs and outside to the barns to the softly lowing cattle who pushed up their heads and blew softly at her as she walked across the steading.

  Later that morning Mairi intercepted the postman on his bicycle. There were no letters for Mairi but two for Milly from friends in Dundee.

  ‘She’ll need them,’ said the postie as he told Mairi grimly that among the list of names in the post office window was that of Corporal James Baxter – killed in action.

  This time it was Mairi’s arms that did the comforting.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Would the misery never end? Fourteen-year-old Angus Baxter ran away to join the Army. He was going to kill the German who had, according to the distraught boy, murdered his father.

  It was the Dominie who went to Edinburgh to bring him home.

  ‘He’s a bright lad, Mairi,’ he said when they had Angus upstairs and in bed, his mother sitting by his side. ‘Another Ian. No poetic talent but a very good mathematical mind. I hoped to encourage Mrs Baxter to keep him at the school.’ He looked at Mairi. ‘Things are going to be very difficult now.’

  Mairi sighed. ‘They’re all right here for now, Mr Morrison, and by the time the was is over we’ll have thought of something.’

  Things are going to be very difficult now. She supposed he meant that when Colin came home there would be no room for Milly and her children; one more problem. For herself Mairi could hardly see that things could get any worse than they were already. Both Colin and Robin had been wounded and were recuperating in the same hospital in France. Ian was somewhere in Italy – she could hardly bear it that war had taken him to the land he had dreamed of as a boy – and now, just as it seemed that Milly was able to walk around as if she no longer saw an unbridgeable chasm opening at her feet, Angus had frightened her like this. He was a big strapping lad and had fooled several people before one over-worked recruiting officer had taken a second look and sent him home to grow up.

  And I can’t even write Robin a loving letter, thought Mairi as she sat staring into the fire after the Dominie had left. How nice it would be to explain the difference between steak and mince but Robin had no real idea of how Mairi felt about him. His letters were the letters of a friend, as if he was somewhat embarrassed by
his behaviour on his last leave. And she had taken her lead from him, as she had done all through their childhood. Robin and Ian led and Mairi followed along behind.

  It would soon be the holidays. The school was closing for ten days, and, despite war shortages, there was going to be a party for the children in the kirk hall. Rumours abounded to the effect that Sir Humphrey was coming home for the holidays and that he intended to give every child in the school an orange. Mairi had been asked to help with the party; Edith Black, whose fiancé was a prisoner of war in Germany, was going to play the piano for games and even Violet, Mairi’s first friend at school, was going to be there since she had four children who each spent some time at the school.

  ‘Bert, you must try, for your mother’s sake, to enjoy this party,’ she told Milly’s younger son, who was showing every sign of defying them both by not attending.

  ‘It’s a bairns’ party. I’m not going near the place.’

  ‘Yes you are,’ said Angus. ‘Because I told the Dominie we’d both come to keep the bairns in order.’

  Mairi, who was sure she was going to hate the party as much as Bert did, watched anxiously to see how he would deal with being ordered around by his brother. Bert looked at Angus and saw how big and strong he was.

  ‘You and me, the both of us?’

  ‘Oh, aye. The Dominie thought you’d come for the orange but I said you couldn’t be bought,’ said Angus blandly as he tied his laces round and round his legs.

  ‘Have I ever had an orange?’

  ‘Aye, hundreds of them,’ lied Angus, ‘but not since this bloody war started.’

  Mairi was so glad that they were going to do what their poor mother wanted them to do that she turned a deaf ear to Angus’s language. It would be good for Milly to get out of the house, which she had not left since the telegram had arrived. It was fitting that Christmas should be the time for her to start her painful journey back to a life without the hope of her husband returning.