SKEYNE never had the colour of its sound. It lay on the threshold of Deeside, a doormat against which hurrying tourists wiped their feet, their eyes straining ever forwards towards the greater glories of the Moor of Dinnet and Lochnagar. Skeyne lay sulking eternally under this slight, its grey face lined and loured with the perpetual shadow of the Cairngorm Mountains.
The Orphanage of Skeyne folds itself back from the main road, withdrawing into a huddle of trees. Tall trees, top-heavy and shaggy with crows’ nests, loud with their rancour. Trees that shuddered and whined throughout Janie’s first night in the Orphanage, twining their shadows across the walls of the dormitory.
It had been a long day. Still spring. But it seemed to have been spring in Grandmother’s country ages ago. A white, quiet spring, then. Now it was loud and yellow. The glare of daffodils crowding out the Orphanage garden still beat hotly under Janie’s heavy eyelids; the smell of them hovered through her senses. The suddenness of their impact had imprinted itself in her being. I’ll never smell a daffodil in all my life again without minding how I first saw the Orphanage.
So many things lay in mind. Urgent elusive scraps. The sense of lostness when the train screamed past Loch Na Boune, the last known landmark in Janie’s world. Screaming out of time and place altogether. I’m leaving my Mam. I’m leaving my Mam, it had panted. A loud thing in a living hurry. The places it had flashed through focusing in fragments now. Bending boulders like old men groping round a high hill. Dead Man’s Bells fleeing whitely from their own wood, shivering down the banks, bowing the train out and past. OYNE in big white letters on a small, black station. A strange name for a place, the only name I remember now. I’m sure I saw it though. Some day I’ll go back to see if it’s real.
All things seemed unreal to Janie. The dormitory most of all. She looked anxiously over to the chair beside her bed. Her new hat lay safely. So huge that it hid her small bundle of underclothes. She felt her head, still with a small sense of shock, although it had been shaved hours ago, after she left the Courthouse. This morning. Or was it yesterday morning? Time had leapt out of bounds. She lay trying to catch time and return it to its proper place. Its hours eluded her. How enviably Peggy’s long hair scattered itself on the pillow there. If I got one wish I’d just ask for all my hair back again. No, I wouldn’t. I’d just ask to get home to my Mam again. Not having any hair wouldn’t matter if I could just get home again.
But home lay too raw and tender to the piercing touch of thought yet. There was escape from thought in listening to the whispers flitting frighteningly like small bats through the dim dormitory.
‘Did you have to read the inscription above the front door, Janie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve got to remember it by heart as well, though.’
‘I do. “Proctor’s Orphan Training Home 1891”.’
‘If ever you don’t do your work right, Mrs. Thane will take you round to the front door to read it again.’
‘She makes you say “training” three times. That’s so’s you’ll never forget.’
‘And you’ve got to learn Table Manners off the Card as well, Janie. But you’ll get a week to learn them in.’
‘I’ve learned a bit of them already:
I must not talk about my food,
Nor fret if I don’t think it good.’
‘Do you know something, Janie? We get porridge for breakfast every morning except Sundays.’
‘And we get fish on Sundays. Haddocks. I just can’t abide them. You get an egg on Easter Sunday though, Janie.’
‘And an egg on Christmas morning. Don’t forget, Peggy, we get an egg on Christmas morning.’
A panic seized Janie and forced her upright in bed:
‘When will I get home? I’ve asked everybody. The Court Man and the Vigilance Officer and Mrs. Thane and just everybody. They all let on they don’t hear me. But somebody must know when?’
‘When you’re sixteen, most likely.’ Peggy’s casualness distressed Janie. ‘At least that’s when I’m getting home. When I’m sixteen.’
‘But that’s ages!’ Janie’s distress increased. ‘That’s just years and years. I’m not nine yet. Not till October. I’ll have to stay here for eight years.’
‘Only seven and a half years, Janie,’ Peggy corrected. ‘If you’re eight and a half now.’
‘But it’s still years and years.’ Janie was disconsolate. ‘My Mam could die by that time.’
‘You can write a letter to her once a month, Janie.’
‘Mind what you write though. Mrs. Thane reads all the letters before they go out.’
‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll mark every day off on the calendar till I’m sixteen. It will pass quicker that way.’
‘That’s what I thought when I first came, Janie. Then I just forgot.’
‘I won’t forget.’ Janie felt very certain. ‘I’ll never forget to count the days off.’
‘Wheesht! Janie!’ Peggy admonished. ‘The boys’ dormitory has gone quiet now. Mrs. Thane will be shouting up for silence if we don’t go quiet too.’
Janie pulled herself down under the sheets, and lay staring for a long time at the changing flecks of colour that always danced into vision when she shut her eyes very tightly. ‘I won’t forget,’ she thought, staring. ‘I know fine that I’ll never forget to mark the days off.’