1910
IT HAS BEEN SAID BEFORE, and will, no doubt, be said again, that the time before the Great War was very special.
Certainly it was for Victoria Cameron. She was a most important small person, at least in the eyes of Grampa, for whom she could do no wrong. Mamma was firmer, but that was the way, Victoria knew, of both mothers and grandfathers. She loved them both fiercely, and she loved the old stone farmhouse with its magic kingdom of the walled farmyard, where Grampa would groom the Clydesdales. There were always six huge, broad, gentle beasts with noble names – Scottish Maid, Glentanar, Thermopylae, Stornoway, Queensberry and, of course, the Cutty Sark. Grampa never used these grand names; to him the horses were always ‘hen’, ‘lass’, or ‘ma wee laddie’.
To the end of her life, Victoria could recall him as he polished their coats before hitching them up to the carriages, which local children took on their annual Sunday school picnics.
‘That’s it, hen, good lass. Aye, that’s ma own good lass.’
Sometimes he would hoist Victoria up and put her on the broad back of a large horse. She would clutch the mane with her little hands and look down, down from the broad, gleaming shoulders of the horse to the ground so far, so very far below; and she would look into Jock’s whiskered face and she would laugh. Fear? She did not know the meaning of the word, not with Grampa there, with his strong brown hands.
Did the sun always shine in the years before the war? There must have been rain and snow, but Victoria’s memories were full of sun-filled days, days when she would wander out of the farmyard and follow one of the drystane dykes to the burn. There were two stiles between the house and the burn. Years later she could still feel the sense of adventure that she experienced each time she climbed a stile and wandered farther away from her mother. She never went too far, though, for in later years she recalled that she had always been able to see the house.
Her mother worked the whole day long. Everything in the house, including Victoria, was scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Like the linens, Victoria was also starched and ironed.
Mamma baked, preserved, cured and dressed, and in the evenings she sewed and mended, knitted beautiful woollens for the three of them and somehow found time to do exquisite embroidery.
Her day of rest was Sunday, and so Sunday was Victoria’s favourite day of the week. Jock would hitch two of the Clydesdales to the carriage, and everyone, masters and maids, stiff and starched in their Sunday best, would set off for their beautiful little country church.
But it was the time after the traditional huge Sunday midday dinner that Victoria relished. It was then that she and Grampa would escape. For this truancy they had a beautiful little phaeton, which was always pulled by the Scottish Maid, the lightest of the Clydesdales, and off they would go, Grampa in his black frock-coat and hat and the child stiff and starched in her pinafore and best Leghorn hat.
There was not a nook or cranny in Angus that they left undiscovered. The old man was never loquacious, but their silences were companionable. Every now and again he would say, ‘Whoa, maid. Whoa, ma lass,’ and together old man and young child would sit and drink in the view. Wherever it was, there were always trees somewhere in the landscape.
‘Breathe deep, Victoria,’ he would say, ‘there’s no air in the world to match this. It’s a perfect walnut shell day.’
The little girl looked up at him with those clear, grey-blue eyes – Mattie’s eyes. It was bearable to think of them as Mattie’s eyes.
‘What’s a walnut shell day, Grampa?’
‘A day that’s beautiful because you’re with the person you love most in all the world. Everything is so perfect that you want to keep it for ever, so you put it in a walnut shell and save it for the days when nothing is good. Then, my wee Victoria, you take it out and all the joy and peace is there just as you remembered it. Oh, my wee Victoria, is life not hard at times, and does that not make these walnut shell days a’ the mair precious?’
He looked gently down at the much-loved child and knew that she did not really understand.
Momentarily his heart sank – for Jock Cameron knew that, in time, God love her, she would know only too well what he meant.
‘Let there be plenty of walnut shell days for her, Lord,’ he prayed, and for months afterwards he would save walnut shells for Victoria to attempt to fill.
Memories of past picnics were enclosed in them. Wrapped in a clean, white linen napkin would be their shivery bite. They would sit on their tartan rug in the shadow of a ruined abbey and eat their scones and talk of the holy men who had lived there, and of how they must have enjoyed just the same trees, ‘but, never the same scones, Victoria.’ Grampa would laugh, for everyone in Angus knew that there was no finer baker than Catriona Cameron.
*
Victoria Cameron was so used to being the centre of attention that it came as rather a shock to find herself ostracized at the local primary school. Only the other social outcast, Nellie Bains, who wore ragged clothes, smelled and had a constantly dripping nose, wanted to play with her. And Victoria, who had been brought up to know her own worth, did not want to be anywhere near a dirty, ragged child like Nellie Bains. When she was small, Victoria saw only the rags, the tangled hair, the runny nose. She did not see the smile of pure friendship; she was too young and self-centred to glimpse the reflection of a loving heart.
‘Nobody plays with me, Mamma,’ Victoria complained. She did not mention Nellie, who was a nobody and therefore did not exist.
Catriona’s eyes filled with tears. How dare they make her child suffer? She hugged her daughter so hard that the little girl pushed herself away. She put her balled-up handkerchief into the front pocket of her hand-embroidered apron and tossed back her dark hair.
‘Nellie Bains said a bad word, a really, really bad word. She said I was one and none of the nice girls is allowed to play with me.’ She leaned towards her mother and whispered the offending word so quietly into her ear that Catriona, taken by surprise, asked her to repeat it, and was then both shocked and mortified that her little daughter had ever uttered such a word.
‘You are not,’ said Catriona angrily. ‘Shallow minds, with not enough to do but make up stories. Just never you mind, Victoria. Some day a really nice little girl will want to play with you.’
‘Why some day? And what does that bad word mean, Mamma?’
But Catriona refused to tell her, saying that well-brought-up children should not know such words. Victoria was looking both upset and slightly mutinous. Catriona desperately tried to find a solution and then she found one, but one that frightened her, for she was not used to confrontation. ‘I know, Victoria. I’ll come into the school and have a word with Miss Spencer.’
But the word with Miss Spencer did not mend matters, for Miss Spencer looked down her educated nose and told Catriona that it was all highly irregular and she could not control what the children learned in their own homes.
Catriona had never disliked anyone in her entire life. Even her philandering husband had received no criticism from her, but this was different: this concerned her child.
Narrow spinster, thought Catriona angrily. No wonder no man’s wanted her. Thirty years old, if she’s a day, and trying to look like a lassie.
But she was no match for the contempt of the other woman. Besides, Catriona had been brought up to think teachers superior to ordinary mortals. Were they not full of book learning? Some had even been to a place called the university. That inbred feeling of inferiority, however, was warring with her own very justifiable anger.
‘Just make sure you control what they learn here, miss,’ she said furiously and, head up in defeat, she walked away.
And then Nellie, angry that her offers of friendship were constantly being spurned, took matters into her own rather grubby little hands and told Victoria exactly what the bad word meant.
‘You’ve no pa, you stuck-up wee child, and your ma’s no better than she should be.’
Victoria looked at Nellie, at her dirty face and her snotty nose. She was not quite sure what Nellie was saying, but she recognized the vindictiveness with which it was said. She slapped Nellie hard across her wizened wee face. Then she turned and ran crying from the playground, and she did not stop running until she reached the haven of the farmhouse.
‘Where is my father?’ she blurted out as soon as she could draw breath.
Catriona, who had felt the heart stop beating in her body as her distraught daughter almost fell in through the door, sat down on a kitchen chair, something she seldom did during the day. She took a deep breath and tried to steady the wild clamour of her heart. It had to come, of course. Father had warned her that she should have spoken of John, so that the bairn could grow up accepting his absence. But it was hard, so hard, to admit her failure. She took the angry, distressed child on her lap.
‘Your father was not a very good . . . not a very dependable family-type of man, Victoria, not like Grampa; but I loved him very much . . . Maybe I still do,’ she added sadly. ‘He had charm, you see, like Grampa, but he was never meant to be a farmer – more a man of the world. He has gone away: he went away before you were even born. He was Grampa’s son, but we don’t speak of him.’
‘Where is he? Didn’t he like me? Grampa likes me.’
Catriona looked at her daughter. Which question to answer? The memory of that awful evening when John had turned up at the farmhouse, only to find the door barred and his father standing there with a double-barrelled shotgun in his hands, made her wince. She could almost hear the angry voices. At first John had cajoled, in the way he usually did, to worm his way back into his wife’s or his father’s affections.
‘Father,’ Catriona had begged. ‘He’s sorry. He’s Victoria’s father. I cannot deny my bairn her father.’
‘I’ll see Boatman about more than my will the morn, Catriona. Lassie, you cannot still love him after the way he’s treated you.’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I hate him . . . sometimes . . .’
Jock had looked down at her compassionately. ‘That goes, lassie, believe me. You’re better off without John. He’ll break yer heart.’ He had turned back to the window and pushed the barrel of the shotgun through the opening. The blast had shattered the silence and caused the sleeping baby to awake, screaming.
Catriona had stared at her father-in-law and the blood had receded from her cheeks. ‘John,’ she had gasped on the point of fainting.
‘Lassie, lassie, away to the bairn. It was only a rat that was sunning itself at my very byre door. I was wanting to mind John on who it was that taught him to shoot.’
And now Catriona turned to her daughter. ‘He never knew you, sweetheart. When he did come home after you were born, Grampa wouldn’t let him in the house. He left us, sweetheart, but I will never leave you, never.’
Victoria had stopped sobbing. Still she shuddered, but now she was calmer.
‘And I will never leave you, Mamma, never.’
There was an earnestness in the young voice that almost frightened Catriona as the child added, ‘That’s a really truly promise, Mamma.’