The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  Every night he dreamed of the men he had killed. He saw their faces as they knelt before him, their hands together in supplication; he heard them begging him not to kill. He ignored their cries. Useless to tell himself that he had killed only once in arm-to-arm combat and his victim had been too busy trying to kill him to beg for anything. But still he saw them. He could smell them in the dream too. He smelled rotting putrefaction, the sickly sweet smell of warm blood. He gagged in his sleep.

  Now he had begun to dream again about Mairi and they were not the dreams that had kept him sane – he laughed aloud at the thought of sanity – during those terrible days and months and years. In these dreams he was killing Mairi, not making love to her, and he woke trembling and sweating, resolved to stay away from her as much as possible. For maybe the killer in the dreams was the real Robin Morrison and if he found himself alone with her, maybe that horror would become a reality.

  His father, so gentle so kind . . . could he tell him of the nightmares that plagued him? No, never. The Dominie was so happy to have his son home safe and well. Well. Robin sobbed again at the thought of being well. Dear God, how easy it was to fool everyone. Was there anyone in the world who knew him so well that he could confess his worries and feel relief and not guilt that he had added a burden to the loved one?

  Ian. Ian, who had been his friend since their first day at school, would listen and would understand, even about Mairi he would understand.

  Dear Ian,

  I think I’m going mad. There, I’ve said it. I fooled the poor over-worked medic who wanted me to go to Craiglockhart. (There’s someone there who specialises in people who’ve gone off their rocker a bit.) He said I would recover in time, but I’m getting worse, and what in the name of God will it do to my father if they lock me up in a loonie bin somewhere. Oh, Ian, why am I writing to you? You’re a P.O.W. I should be writing letters to cheer you but, in spite of your poetry, you’ve always been the most stable person I know.

  Does this letter sound fairly sane? See how clever I am but if I tell you about my dreams, night after night, that make me cry like a baby for my mother . . . I think I’m capable of killing someone I care for deeply . . . there, there it’s out, but I won’t. I stay away from everyone. My father believes the minister can help me but I can’t bear to be in the same room with him. I think, if he spouts one more damn cliché about forgiveness and turning the other cheek, I’ll strangle him with my bare hands. Father worries, I know he does, but he can’t find answers to me in any of his books and so he’s at a loss and the weight of guilt I feel is crushing me. He deserved a son who really was a hero, who deserved these bloody medals. Do you know, when I wore them, I felt them burning through my uniform into my flesh, but there are no marks. I can’t see the marks . . .

  He was crying. Bloody hell, he was crying and it would ruin his letter. He couldn’t send it anyway, couldn’t send such drivel to Ian in a prison camp, so it didn’t matter about tear stains. He had to get out. Such a beautiful day. Was it a beautiful day in France too, in Germany, in Russia? No, Russia was too far away. There, he was thinking rationally. He was not mad. He would walk to the sea, away from Mairi; he could not meet Mairi because he might try to kiss her. Oh, sweet, sweet Mairi. How often had he dreamed of kissing her, of loving her, so strongly that he could feel her in his arms? Now, if he kissed her, maybe the dream would come back and he would find himself killing her. No, he would walk to the sea. He must stay as far away from her as possible.

  His father saw his headlong flight down the road towards the coast as he stood at the window of the schoolroom listening to the primary four pupils reciting the six times table. As soon as he could, he rang the bell for an afternoon break.

  ‘You have all worked so hard on this fine afternoon,’ he told the surprised children, ‘that I have decided to award you a fifteen-minute playtime. Now, Maggie Stewart, you keep an eye on the wee ones while I go into the house for a book I need.’

  He hurried across the playground and into the house. It was empty and quiet. His heart was pounding. What had distressed Robin so much that he had been running, for it was not the run of an active young man out for exercise. It was terrified flight. He looked into all the rooms on the ground floor. Nothing. Everything was neat and tidy. Using the banister like an old man, he climbed the stairs and went into the room Robin had occupied since they had come to the village.

  The letter was lying where Robin had left it and, at first, the Dominie ignored it. Letters were intensely private and not to be read by anyone but the intended recipient. The bed was neat, the window was open and the spring breeze was ruffling the letter so that it coquetted on the surface of the old school desk.

  ‘His legs are too long for that desk,’ thought the father practically.

  The Dominie went to the window and looked out at the children running madly around the yard. What a pleasure an unexpected playtime was. Oh, to be so young and innocent and so easily made happy.

  The letter. He looked at it. He had been writing a letter. Why would that upset him? Surely he might be upset by a letter he had received, not by one he was writing – unless, of course, he had to convey bad news.

  He snatched up the paper and read the words and they struck at him so fiercely that he had to sit down on the edge of the iron bedstead. ‘Oh, my baby, my boy,’ his heart cried. ‘What a burden of guilt and grief and fear. You couldn’t hurt Mairi, my wee laddie, just as you can’t disappoint me.’

  The last words came back to haunt him. When I wore them, I felt them burning into my flesh, but there are no marks.

  ‘Oh, Robin, my lamb, the marks are burned into your soul.’

  He sat for some minutes. He had to get back to the children. He had made up his mind. He folded the letter, put it into an envelope and addressed it to Ian. Then he slipped it into the pocket of his gown and returned to the school.

  None of the children dared to tell him that he had forgotten the book he had gone to the house to collect and the afternoon plodded on. He left as soon as he decently could that afternoon and walked into Arbroath where he posted the letter. He thought of Ian in prison receiving and reading such an outpouring of grief.

  ‘Robin comes first. He’s right. Ian has always been stable. If anyone can handle it, he can. Ian, Ian, help my lad,’ he cried across the miles and then turned, dry-eyed, and made the long walk back.

  As he had hoped, Robin had calmed down and had returned home before him.

  ‘You’re late, Father,’ he said and his voice was normal although he was paler even than usual.

  ‘I had to go to a meeting,’ the Dominie lied. ‘What did you do with yourself this afternoon?’ He hoped he sounded casually interested.

  ‘I went to the beach, had a grand walk. Clears the head no end.’ He stopped and looked puzzled and somewhat unsure. He looked at his father. ‘You know, sounds silly, I thought I had been writing but there’s no paper on my desk.’

  ‘Gracious, Robin, you’re beginning to sound just like me. I was quite sure I’d done the primary seven essays this morning and there they all were on my desk, untouched by human hand.’

  Obligingly, Robin smiled. ‘Some of that lot . . . perhaps yours was the first human hand that touched them.’ He shook his head as if clearing away a fog. ‘I was so sure . . .’

  ‘Come and help me burn the Shepherd’s pie we’ve been left for tea.’ He walked quickly into the kitchen and was relieved to hear Robin following along behind him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Colin was delighted to read that his local football team was strenuously recruiting juvenile players. He was not so happy to read that it was because many of the adult players had enlisted and too many of them were never coming back.

  ‘Here, Chay.’ He handed the boy in the dug-out beside him the three-month-old copy of the Herald that Mairi had sent out. ‘Were you no telling us you were a great goalie? Arbroath’s looking for you, laddie. You’re about the age they want, seve
nteen and never been kissed.’

  The boy soldier laughed and took the paper and Colin watched him painstakingly spell out the words, his young soft mouth forming every consonant, every vowel, as he tried to decipher the article.

  Eventually he finished the task. ‘I’m free the morn, sergeant. I’ll drop in and let them have a look at us.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll make sure nobody takes your space.’

  He sighed at his own pitiful attempt at humour. The boy beside him might well never have been kissed, but he had survived a bayonet wound, shrapnel in the shoulder, constant shelling, disease, hunger – and these all before his eighteenth birthday. Dear God in Heaven, this was all wrong. He remembered other articles in the papers his wee girl made such an effort to send to him. Pals’ Battalions: boys who had grown up together, enlisted together and fought and died together. There were the Bantam Battalions, later known as the Demon Dwarves, who were first deemed too small to fight, and later were anxiously conscripted into the army where they fought and died like tigers.

  He would have to write to Ian and tell him that he had been right all the time and that his father had been too thick-headed to see it. This wee laddie should be at home trying out for his team, not dodging bullets, and my wee lassie should be married to some nice lad, Robin Morrison maybe, and having healthy babies. Instead she’s working like an Irish navvy. I promised her mam Mairi’d have it better than she did and what have I done to her? And her Ian, her son, her pride and joy – and mine too? Our laddie with his scribble scribble about sunsets and sun on the water and the beauty of spider webs. Spider webs, for God’s sake. I never took the time to let him show me beauty in a spider’s web. But I’ll watch them with him yet. I’ll listen to him, and I’ll try looking at things with his eyes. Dear God, does he even know I love him? Did I ever show him, tell him? I’ll put it in the letter and he’ll cringe with embarrassment, or maybe he’ll not.

  He sorted through his pockets but there was nothing and he called across to the boy who was still making heavy weather of the newspaper.

  ‘Chay, you don’t have a bit of paper?’

  The boy looked through his pockets. ‘Not really, sarge, but you can have my mam’s envelope. I don’t need that.’

  He handed it over and Colin tore it open with his capable farmer’s hands and smoothed it out gently. ‘I need to write to my son,’ he said as if an explanation was expected. ‘There’s such a lot I never told him.’

  The boy looked at him. Sergeant McGloughlin with a son? He had thought that the man had been born an iron sergeant in the Fifth Battalion the Black Watch. Impossible to think of him out of uniform, out of mud and sweat, fathering a baby.

  ‘What’s his name, sarge?’ he dared.

  ‘Ian. Grandest son any father could ask for.’

  ‘Is he in the regiment?’

  Colin looked at the thin, undernourished, tired little face in front of him and saw instead Ian’s handsome, sensitive face. ‘No, he’s a conscientious objector,’ and he said it loudly and proudly. ‘He fought two wars, Chay, the enemy and his own side and he won. He’s in a prison camp in Germany now. I write to him when I can but I just realised’ – and here he was talking to himself and not to the young private – ‘that I never write about anything important, like how much I love him, and admire him, about how proud I am that he can make beautiful images with words, that, when this is all over, I’ll be the first one to tell him it was all wrong.’

  He turned back to his envelope and did not see the boy soldier squirm with embarrassment at the use of a word like love and neither did he see the embarrassment replaced by a look of envy on the boy’s face. He was trying to find the words. He knew that men on all sides were disillusioned with the war and were calling for peace talks. Colin no longer believed in what he was doing and he could see no way that the war could end in honour. For a while this year he had even believed that Britain would be defeated.

  The Germans had mounted a terrible offensive in the west and had come close to Paris. They had lost 800,000 men but the Allies had lost more than a million troops.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, a million men not returning to their mammies, their wives, their bairns. The world cannot recover. There cannot be many men left at all . . . if there are any. There’s my Ian . . . in prison.’

  He licked the tip of the pencil and bent again to his letter, but his ears, attuned to the soft bleating of a lost lamb, heard the whistle of the grenade as it flew over the rim of the trench. He saw it as if in slow motion. He felt himself unfold from the ground; he saw the startled look on young Chay’s face as he became aware that death was seeking him.

  ‘No!’ screamed Colin. ‘Not him, you bastard!’ He threw his body over the boy and his back took the full impact of the explosion.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Corporal Russell some time later as he helped the injured soldier out from under. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘The sergeant, corporal, the sergeant!’ screamed the boy. ‘Where is he? I felt him pushing me out of the way.’

  The corporal turned away for a second to school his heaving stomach. Then he turned back to Chay. ‘You’re wearing him, laddie,’ was all he said.

  *

  Thirty-six hours later, on 11 November 1918, the last shot was fired in France.

  Mairi received the notification of her father’s death several days after what soon became known as Armistice Day; his name, with too many others, was posted up in the local post office and the minister cycled out with the news. At first Mairi refused to accept it. Death was impossible. The war was over. They had seen it in the paper. They had participated in modest celebrations at the kirk hall. The war was over and prisoners of war would be released and soldiers would soon be returning to the bosom of their families.

  ‘It’s a mistake, Milly,’ she said, pushing away the shot of Colin’s whisky that Milly had unearthed from under the sink. ‘The war’s over. But you mustn’t worry about you and the children; we’ll work something out. That’s what Dad will want. He was . . . he is so grateful that you’re here. And Ian too. You’ll like Ian. It will take a while for him to get home, I suppose. They’ll have to go to Germany and find the prisoners, won’t they? They’ll hardly just open the doors and let them walk home. If they do,’ and she started to laugh, ‘we’ll never find our Ian because he’ll find a view somewhere and he’ll sit down to write a poem. Did I tell you he was a poet?’

  And Milly, with her age-old common sense, let her talk and talk. Eventually she slept and the young girl who had been Mairi McGloughlin died in that sleep, and the woman, Mairi, was born. There had been too much sadness: Ian, Robin, and now Colin.

  *

  The Dominie had read the name Sergeant Colin McGloughlin and walked wearily home to tell his son. This would surely move him, show that, somewhere, Robin Morrison was still there.

  But Robin looked horrified at the thought of offering Mairi his condolences – or anything else. ‘You’ll do the right thing, Dad. You’ll tell her what we feel.’ Robin, taller and thinner than ever, was hanging on to the mantelpiece for fear that his knees might buckle and he would fall forward into the flames. He swayed and his father made as if to support him.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Robin snapped. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

  Euan Morrison looked at his son. He was not all right. His body was healing but what about the wounds that he could not see?

  ‘You’ll come with me to pay our respects?’

  Robin turned away almost violently. ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to say, how to say it.’

  ‘Maybe it will be enough for you just to be there, Robin.’

  ‘I can’t.’ He moved towards the door, to escape.

  ‘Robin, I don’t know what happened between you and Mairi but her father is dead and her brother is in a camp in Germany and God alone knows if he is still alive or when he’ll come home if he is. She needs her friends.’

  Defeated by a lifetime of habit, Robin sto
pped but he did not turn to look at his father. ‘You won’t leave me . . .’ He was the child Robin again, afraid in the dark.

  ‘I won’t leave you. Come on, get another woolly jumper and your coat; it’s tipping it down out there.’

  Robin did as he was told, climbed upstairs to his room where the bed for some years had been too short and he took a woollen pullover out of the chest of drawers, pulled it over his head and went back down to where his father was standing, Robin’s coat in one hand and an old farm lantern in the other.

  Robin allowed his father to help him on with his coat and then he took the lantern and walked first out of the schoolhouse. He stood at the top of the steps waiting for the Dominie and remembered the time – a lifetime ago – when he had kissed Mairi, been slapped hard for his pains, and had then fallen ignominiously down the steps.

  His father’s hand was on his shoulder but instead of calming him, the touch seemed to fill him with panic.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t,’ and he sank down at his father’s feet in the rain and began to sob.

  The Dominie dropped to his knees and put his arms around his child. ‘It’s all right, Robin lad. It’s all right.’

  He helped the young man to his feet and into the house. Then he half carried him up the stairs, undressed him as if he was indeed just a little boy, and tucked him in.

  ‘You have a rest, Robin. I’m going out for a wee while and when I come back I’ll make some tea.’

  Robin said nothing but his sobs had almost subsided and his father sat for a few minutes until all the shuddering had stopped and then he left.

  But he did not turn right and head towards the McGloughlin farm. He turned left to the village and the doctor’s house and was admitted to the front room where the doctor was sitting toasting his socks at a roaring fire.

  ‘I hope you’ve come for a game of chess, Euan.’

  ‘No.’