Maja

I hope she made it, that’s all. I hope Elspeth made it.

Whenever I think of her I see her, even though I never saw her in my life. How can this be? I never saw her in my life or in hers, but I see her now. She is walking out of the only world she knows, heading into another, stepping out bravely even though she must feel fear inside. How could she not feel it? But hope, too. Fear and hope go together, and the combination makes her tremble with excitement. She is going down the road that wasn’t even a road then, just a track. I see her bonnie face, her black hair, her hard wee feet. She has no shoes on, but she must have taken some. Just one pair of shoes. Did she have them in a bag? She had some kind of bag, surely? She was taking her whole life away with her, and she wasn’t coming back. Elspeth wasn’t a tail-between-her-legs kind of lass. She couldn’t get what she wanted by staying at home, not with Sandy dead, so she took off. There was no hope left in the glen for her, if there ever had been, and not much fear either; only the fear of growing old and not having seen that other world, not having been in it. The glen was not a sanctuary for Elspeth, it was a prison. She had to go. And once she was away, she was away.

She ran off with a soldier; they probably said that about her whether it was true or not. I am sure there was plenty said about them: the soldier and the maid; the wicked Captain and the silly lass; the bold MacKay and the strumpet. But maybe she was not so wanton or stupid or innocent; maybe she only went with him because she knew she would need a man to begin with, she would need him for protection on those first steps into that other world. Was that it? Did she just lean on him for a while? Maybe he forced himself on her, maybe she resisted. Maybe she let him have his way, maybe she wanted him, welcomed him, maybe he let her have her way. Maybe he made her happy! Maybe he was a decent man and didn’t take advantage. It need not all have been bad, even if it ended badly. But maybe it ended well. Maybe whenever she got to wherever she was going he was still with her, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe they parted on good terms, maybe she ran away from him. Maybe she found what she was looking for, maybe she found something else that was better. Wherever she went, wherever she stopped − Dundee, Edinburgh, Newcastle, London, Lisbon, Paris, Boston, Sydney? − maybe there was something worth stopping for. I don’t know.

But one thing I do not see: Captain MacKay and Elspeth Carnegie, together, years later. I don’t see that.

Did word ever come back about Elspeth? Did somebody recognise her face, still bonnie but with new lines on it, her black hair streaked with grey? Did she have bairns at her feet, another at her breast? Did somebody say, ‘Is it you, lass? What are you doing here?’ And, some time later, was the news of her carried homeward to the glen?

Maybe. But I don’t see that either. I think she was away for good, or not for good, and she was not seen again. She became an other. She was not herself any more.

I like that idea, that her escape was permanent. I hope she kept herself safe, if safety was what she wanted. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she knew fine that she wasn’t heading for safety, and danger was what she wanted. Not like Hugh Pirnie, the young lad who took fright and turned for home and whose descendants were still here a hundred and fifty years later. No turning back for Elspeth. If she did want to live dangerously, I hope she didn’t come to regret it. It’s not a choice, that’s the trouble. Risk is a choice. Danger is what happens when you don’t have a choice.

And then there was the schoolmaster, Daniel, who went looking for the lions’ den. After Sandy died, the glen changed for him just as it did for Elspeth. What did he find when he went out of it? Another man’s love? A bayonet in the belly? Comrades shoulder to shoulder, or blown apart by grapeshot? Who knows?

Maybe he and she stayed together for a while, safe with each other. Maybe they became friends, strong because they were not lovers, because they did not have to be lovers. Elspeth and Daniel.

I hope things worked out for them both, whatever happened.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. So many maybes. And what does that mean, things worked out? Things were, things are. There is no plan or system, divine or scientific or any other kind. No way of knowing if things ‘work out’. A plan that nobody thought of makes even less sense than God, I think. God didn’t have to have a plan. God could just have created everything and set it going and then sat back to see what happened. God doesn’t have to know any better than the rest of us how things will be.

I don’t believe in anything except this one thing: where you are. Everybody has a place: that’s all I believe in. Whether you call it home or not, whether it is where you end up or where you started or somewhere in between, everybody has a place. Like where animals go to hide, to sleep, to die.

One day you wake up and it’s the last day of your life, though you don’t know it. Not in that moment, maybe not later, maybe not even in the moment that is the end. More maybes. Do you get a presentiment? Not even that, a hint? I wonder if Geordie Kemp got a hint when he sat down with his dram at the end of that last day of hard labour.

One day you wake up and you are an old woman and you do know it. I know it. An old woman. If Elspeth lived long enough that realisation would have come upon her: I am old. That’s not such a bad thing to know, that you survived. I hope she found her place to hide, to sleep, and I hope she had some days or maybe even years to appreciate it, to be able to close her eyes and say, thank you for having me. Before it was time to go.

But still there is the dumb lass. I will come to her. Or she will come to me.

It was after a war that the dumb lass came to the glen. Imagine what it is like after a war. Even after one battle. Imagine the night of Waterloo, the ground covered with bodies, dead men and wounded men from so many countries, so many towns, villages, cottages. Thousands upon thousands of men lying dead or dying, thousands of horses too. Moonlight glinting on the steel, men moaning and weeping and screaming. And the next day other soldiers went among them and brought out any who might still be saved by the surgeons, who sawed and sewed with their arms red to the elbows, who for every one arm they amputated cut off sixteen legs, who saved some men to be beggars and killed others because they did not clean their implements between one patient and the next. But the living soldiers were not permitted to bury the dead, there were too many; the living soldiers were ordered to march away. The local peasants were paid a few coins to dig trenches and throw the bodies in, and if they refused they were told they would be shot and thrown in the trenches themselves. And by then another army had been over the field through the night and in the misty morning, an army of ghouls, sometimes the same people who would later dig the trenches. They had stripped the dead and the dying of their boots and belts, their shirts and tunics, they took their purses and rings and tobacco pouches and if there were some who protested too loudly their cries were stifled. No waste! And all the dead heroes and all the dead cowards and the ones who were neither but who were also dead, all robbed of their clothes and their dignity, all naked when they were rolled and shovelled into the pits. And although the battle was over, shots rang out through the day as they slaughtered the torn, broken horses and left them turned with their legs to the sky so the farriers could recover their shoes. No waste! And it was June, and hot, and days passed and there were too many soldiers still to bury, so they built their naked bodies into funeral pyres and set them alight, and later the peasants spread the ashes on their fields for the next year’s crops. No waste!

I am wandering. I have had books about Waterloo from the library and I remember the details but I can see the battlefield as well, the way I can see Elspeth. If Captain MacKay stayed with his regiment he would have been there. If Daniel Haddow did become a soldier, if they let him enlist because he looked young enough, and if he survived for five and a half years, he would have been there too. Even Elspeth might have been there, a camp-follower, a soldier’s wife, perhaps a picker of dead men’s pockets. I can see it, that carcass-strewn field, like something out of the Bible, stretching away to the horizon. One battle.

Now imagine that multiplied over and over, across a whole continent. Not thousands of dead, but millions. Millions of displaced, millions of homeless people. Homes flattened in flattened cities, ruined towns one after another, ruined roads between them. Homes from which families were ejected, never to return, or if they returned they found others living in them. Homes people occupied and made their own, only for the tide of war to turn and wash them out again. Roads crowded with convoys of lorries, lines of people walking, old, young, sick, crippled, blind. Blinkered horses and lame donkeys pulling carts piled high with broken lives. Broken men and women in a broken world. Broken, filthy, starving children. Children keeping their heads down, people avoiding eye contact. People made mad by what they had seen, by what had been done to them, perhaps by what they had done. People crying, arguing, shouting, fighting. People speaking in different languages, or not speaking because their language would mark them, betray them as the oppressed, or as the oppressors. People with suitcases and bags or with nothing. Children clutching broken toys. People with their papers hidden from sight, but ready if they should need them. People with no papers, no identities, no proof of who they were. They were not themselves. How would they manage if they were not themselves? How would they repair themselves? How would they make themselves into other people?

Even before that war, in the weeks before that grave announcement came over the wireless, I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany, but especially once war was declared, bairns came to Glen Conach. But these ones were still themselves, they had not lost their identities, they came checked and labelled, carrying their little cases and their gas-masks. Mostly they came from Dundee, which expected to be bombed. Thousands of Dundee bairns put on trains to Fife, to Perthshire, to Aberdeenshire and to Angus. If you took in an evacuated child you were paid a weekly sum, if you took in a second or a third you were paid a smaller sum for each one. I have read all about this and had it told to me too. So folk in Glen Conach did their duty and calculated that they would not be out of pocket but they had not reckoned on the Dundee bairns, a separate tribe altogether from their own. The Dundee bairns spoke a different language from that of the bairns of the glen, and each tribe regarded the other with wonder and suspicion. The glen bairns were clean and apple-cheeked and knew how to live here; the Dundee bairns had nits and impetigo, and were disturbed by the hills and the wild-eyed cattle. There were some taken into cottages and some into the Big House and none of them had their mothers or even their big sisters with them, for the mothers and sisters were all at work in the factories of Dundee. After a week or two of nightmares, wet beds and other incidents and accidents, things settled down, but it was not a happy time for most of the city bairns. Later, when it became clear that Dundee was not to be bombed after all because, so it was said, Hitler had a granny from Dundee and had forbidden it, they went home again, and they were hardly back when the Germans tried to destroy the Tay Bridge but their bombs landed on the West End and some buildings were hit and some people killed. But for all that none of those bairns came back to Glen Conach.

The dumb lass, though, she came after the war. Sometimes I find myself wondering, which war? Sometimes she seems unreal to me, more myth than flesh and bone. It is as if she has been walking into the glen all through history, with her ragged grey dress and her dirty hair and her bare legs. She’s like somebody not from modern times at all. And when I see her like that she is barefoot, like Elspeth on her way out, but the dumb lass came from so far away it seems impossible that she could have walked the whole distance without shoes. Just thinking of the journey she made, hundreds of miles across Europe − the roads she was on, the bridges she crossed, the deranged countryside, the sullen towns, the kind people and the cruel − just thinking of all that is exhausting. And not to know where she was going but to keep going anyway, always into the setting sun. And not to ask for help or guidance once she was on her own because by then she could not speak to ask for anything. As if she sleepwalked her way across a continent. Just to imagine it is heartbreaking, but actually to have done it! I think of all the wars she could have come from, all the violence and suffering she could have witnessed and experienced and escaped, and it doesn’t seem to matter much which war or which century or which continent. An innocent child walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and then into the glen of Conach, the place that would be hers, the place to hide and sleep and maybe in the end to die. Like a pilgrim, or a person seeking refuge. Maybe Shirley Darroch is right when she talks about a retreat. Maybe it’s not the spirit of Conach she feels, but the spirit of the dumb lass.

But then I have to shake myself because that is not how it happened. She did not walk in shoeless, she came on a bus. Such an ordinary method of travel when so much else about her was extraordinary − even the fact that she came at all, that one day she was not here and the next she was. Found on a bus! That is what she was, a foundling. How can such a word exist? Children are born, not found. And yet the fact that it does exist shows that she was not quite so extraordinary. There have always been foundlings, and there always will be. We humans have our waifs and strays like any other species of animal. We probably have far more.

Now I am tired again. These thoughts make me tired. She will have to wait a little longer. There is still time. Not as much as there was, but it is still out there in the trees, sniffing about.