1913
THE SEASONS CONTINUED IN ALL their varying splendour and the world moved just as steadily towards madness. Victoria finished at the little local school and went, every day, in the horse bus to the Harris Academy in nearby Dundee.
Grampa and Catriona, but not Victoria, had had many discussions about the form that the young girl’s further education should take. It was a momentous decision to make. After all, no one on either side of the family had ever gone beyond an elementary education.
‘Our lassie has a brain, Catriona,’ murmured Grampa in awe. He himself had had to leave school, where he had not been known for perfect attendance, just after his twelfth birthday. ‘Third prize and a special certificate for music. Clever and musical.’
Catriona was not sure that an ability to thump out marching tunes for the Boys’ Brigade on the old upright piano in the parlour could be classed as musical, but she, as well as her father-in-law, was quietly pleased with Victoria’s achievements.
She was, however, full of doubts about this new stage in her daughter’s development. ‘I wouldn’t want to push, Father. Victoria’s never talked about staying on at school. It’s not as if she’s always said she wanted to be a teacher, or a missionary or anything. Just happy to spend her days reading books and walking around the farm.’
‘I’m talking about a university education for my wee lassie, Catriona. So it’ll be the Harris Academy. I’ve met some fine people that got their schooling there. We don’t want to send her to the high school. I’ve walked by there some days when I’m in at the bank and, I’m sorry, but some of those bairns get a bit above theirselves. I wouldn’t want anything rubbing off on our wee lassie, but you’re her mother. If you want her at the high school, I’ll be more than happy to find the money, you know that, and I’ll rely on your good sense to keep her feet on the ground.’
Privately, Catriona thought there would be obstreperous children in every school, but Victoria herself had shuddered at the idea of going all the way into the city centre to Dundee High School. One or two of the friends she had eventually made at Birkie would be at the Harris. She wanted to be with them.
As it happened, her best friend at the Harris Academy was to be a girl she met on her first day. Elsie Morrison was the only girl in a large family and she fascinated Victoria. Her life, surrounded by parents and grandparents, brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins, was so different from Victoria’s own rather narrow existence. Every spare minute that the girls had they spent together, for while Victoria loved being exposed to the rough and tumble of Elsie’s overcrowded life, Elsie loved the peace and quiet of Priory Farm. In the evenings they would sit in the comfortably upholstered farm parlour (or sitting room, as Elsie insisted on calling it) and play the piano and sing, or wind up the old Victrola, put on a record and dance. Elsie knew all the latest dance steps; she had seven brothers, after all.
On Sundays after church, when Grampa was too tired or too busy, Victoria and Elsie would go rambling all over the countryside. Sometimes they took a tram and then walked to a well-known beauty spot, or they would pack a picnic tea into their saddle-bags and venture farther afield on their bicycles. It was during one of these rambles that Victoria met Robert.
*
It was one of those September days when the world was warm and golden. The trees were just beginning to turn, and green, yellow, scarlet and brown leaves danced, it seemed, on the same branches; brambles hung fat and juicy on the hedgerows, and rowans and rosehips vied with each other in colour and number; the friendly smell of wood smoke from a hundred cottage gardens hung on the air. It was a walnut shell day.
The girls, like countless other Dundonians, took the ferry across the Tay to the village of Newport, in the Kingdom of Fife. They left the others happy to laze on the Newport Braes, those pleasant grassy slopes, and were soon deep in woods near the estuary of the great river. Rowan, oak, pine, birch, beeches – everything that was beautiful – was growing in those woods and the girls were going to sketch them. At least Elsie was. Victoria played with her charcoal and then wandered off.
She sat down on a mossy bank, trying to memorize the colours and, as always, feeling inadequate. She could not possibly paint the autumnal tints, let alone the sighs that the boughs made when a breeze moved them or the rustle, like golden coins, as they fell.
‘Quite something,’ said a voice beside her.
His voice was what Grampa termed ‘county’. It belonged to the crested carriages that occasionally came to the wee village church. Normally Victoria would have curtsied quickly and moved away, but there was a power in the golden day that made her stay.
‘Quite lovely,’ she agreed, and looked up at him as he stood silhouetted against the pale autumn sun.
Her heart seemed to stop beating. He was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen – tall and slender; an aquiline profile with deep blue eyes and hair the colour of a raven’s wing, blue where the sun struck it. And how the sun was shining that day in September 1913.
She was suddenly breathless, and fought for control of her heart, which was beating so rapidly that her blood seemed to be rushing around her veins in the strangest, and yet most pleasant, way. ‘I was trying to sketch it,’ she managed at last, holding up her sketchpad with its virgin pages.
He looked at it measuringly, as once she had seen her art teacher do when the First Year Art Appreciation class had walked into the Dundee Art Gallery to view its masterpieces. ‘You sketch as well as I do,’ he said laughing, and they laughed together.
He helped her up, and at the touch of his hand her whole body seemed to burst into flame. She was afraid that her normally pale skin had turned red – so unattractive – but he appeared not to have noticed, and she turned away to pick up her drawing materials. Somehow it seemed right that he should stay beside her as she continued her walk. They talked easily of the beauty of the woods. The splendid boy (what was his name? Oh surely, surely, Hector or Lysander – something poetic) pointed out some especially fine specimens and Victoria wondered at a boy who could speak so easily and serenely about nature. Grampa might say that he liked flowers, but he was old. She could not imagine Elsie’s brothers admitting to a fondness for flowers.
They talked too of the ugliness of war, for the boy said that his father knew someone who said that there were evil people in the world, who would stop at nothing to force their views on others. Then, too soon, because the tides of the River Tay wait for no man, and certainly for no wee lassie who has just met her Sir Lancelot, it was time for Victoria to go home.
He watched her walk off through the great bushes of rhododendrons and then, as she reached the turning that would take her out of sight, he called, ‘What’s your name?’ She turned and saw him again, outlined against the sun as if he were not quite real, and she knew that this moment and this boy were important and had changed her for ever. She called back, ‘Victoria.’
‘I’m Robert.’
‘Robert.’ Not the name of a knight in a picture book. ‘Robert.’ Such an ordinary name for such an extraordinary boy. No, it was right, perfect. She had never met anyone who wore their name so well. She whispered Robert over and over again on the long journey back to Dundee. She wondered where he lived, and where he went to school, and whether she would ever see him again. For Robert’s face was the one she had given every knight and hero she had ever read about, and Robert’s slenderness and grace were theirs too. She did not say ‘I am in love’ because she was only thirteen years old, but wherever she went after that she looked for Robert, and each time she returned to the enchanted woods she felt a dull ache of disappointment that Robert was not there.
*
Not, that is, until Easter 1914. Victoria and Elsie were looking for spring flowers, and Robert’s woods were full of them. Elsie sat on a fallen log, happily sketching primroses while Victoria wandered off, as usual.
‘Hello, Victoria,’ said a voice, and there he was.
He was taller and thinner and even more beautiful than she remembered.
‘Hello,’ she said as calmly as possible, for her heart was beating so loudly that she felt he must hear it.
‘No sketching today?’
She gestured back to where Elsie was sitting. ‘I was, but I’m no better at sketching now than I was in September, so I decided to walk a little.’
He fell in beside her and they began to pick up where they had left off in that golden autumn.
‘There will be real trouble soon, Victoria, you’ll see,’ said Robert. ‘Lots of chaps at school are joining up. I wish I were old enough. I’d go, and we’d soon rout those Huns.’
The Huns. Everyone talked about them, but no one talked with relish, not in the the way Robert was talking, as if what was happening was a great game. Tam Menmuir, Grampa’s best worker, had sons, and Victoria had heard them talk about these people called Huns. They talked with sorrow, with anger, with despair. They worried that if these Huns were not controlled, there would be trouble. Then they went on to talk about record harvests and yields, and about the things that really mattered.
Suddenly Victoria felt older than Robert, older than Catriona, older than Grampa. ‘How old are you, Robert?’ she asked.
‘Sixteen – almost – but I’m tall enough for sixteen, don’t you think?’
He grabbed her hands and whirled her round in a mad dance. ‘That’s what I’ll do. I’ll lie about my age.’
How could he look so happy at the prospect of going to war? Victoria fought down a rush of fear. She hated the very idea.
Her scarf had slipped down from her neck and he bent to retrieve it from the carpet of leaves.
‘I shall keep this, Victoria, as a favour from a lady. Perhaps I shall tie it round my rifle.’
Again he bent, but this time he picked two perfect primroses. ‘Take these in exchange.’
‘These are private grounds. It’s against the law to pick flowers here,’ said Victoria primly, although she took them.
Robert laughed. What a joyous laugh he had. ‘They’ll forgive a knight going off to the Crusades.’
Perhaps many of the boys and men who went to the carnage that was the Great War thought of themselves as Crusaders – knights in shining armour, fighting evil. Right was on their side and they would win. But at what cost?
‘I must get back to my friend,’ Victoria replied conscientiously, instead of expressing all the sensible things she wanted to say about the futility of war.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Victoria, may I write, if I get in, I mean? And you could write to me, about home fires and all that rot. Here,’ he snatched her sketchpad and tore a sheet from it. ‘Write your name and address and I’ll write mine.’
She scribbled them down, then they swapped papers and she blushed furiously when she saw his name. Of course he could pick the primroses on his own father’s land.
‘Au revoir, Victoire,’ he said grandly, and, taking her hand, he raised it, in what she thought of as a very Gallic gesture, to his lips.
‘Goodbye, Robert,’ she answered softly and another blush swept over her cheeks.
She returned to Elsie and very carefully put the primroses between the pages of her sketchpad. Later that night she gently pressed them between the pages of Mansfield Park. Her Bible, she thought, would have been a worthier repository, but she used it often and the primroses would have been sure to fall out.
*
Europe went mad and the glorious harvests of 1914 and 1915 were obliterated by marching feet and tanks, and by all the other implements of mass destruction. Not in the Angus glens, though, where Jock Cameron stood sucking his empty pipe contentedly, as he watched the final gathering of his most successful harvest. Victoria, her hat falling from her tangled hair and her skirts kirtled up about her legs – best make sure Catriona did not catch her ewe lamb looking like that – waved to him from Glentanar’s back.
‘I’ve eaten all the brambles I was supposed to collect for jam, Grampa.’
He laughed. She had no need to tell him. Were her lips not stained with the evidence?
‘Best slip down and tidy yourself afore your mother catches you, young lady,’ he said in mock seriousness, but Victoria did as she was bid.
When she had dismounted from the gentle giant she ran to his side, shaking down her dress. ‘Oh, Grampa, was there ever such a walnut shell day. It’s the best ever.’
For a moment she almost took that back, for was not yesterday the best day ever, because a scrap of paper had arrived from Somewhere on the Front.
No, she could not share that even with Grampa. It was too new, too precious, too achingly sweet.
They went back to the farmhouse. Catriona took one look at her hoyden of a daughter and began to fill a bathtub with boiling water from the kettles on the gleaming range.
‘I do not know which of the two of you is the greater child, Father,’ she said crossly. ‘I’ll never get her fit for the harvest dance.’
But she did, and three hours later a model of propriety stood with tapping foot beside her grandfather. Catriona and Bessie Menmuir, wife of Grampa’s senior stockman, had laboured for hours the previous night, after Victoria had gone to bed, to finish a dress fit for this first dance. No couturier ballgown this, but still a hand-sewn work of art. Where had they found the material? The dress was, in fact, made from tartan tablecloths that Jock’s wife, Mattie, had made long before the turn of the century, and which had been discovered in a trunk in the attic. The neck was cut lower than Catriona could permit, so she had ripped cream-coloured lace from her late mother-in-law’s one and only evening-gown and filled the neck with that. There were lace bows at the cuffs of the sleeves, which sat just below the girl’s sun-browned, dimpled elbows, and more lace disguised the hem of the swirling skirt, where one tablecloth had had to be tacked to the other.
Conscious that she had the most beautiful dress in the room, Victoria sparkled with a young girl’s joy as she waited impatiently while her grandfather welcomed neighbours and workers alike to his home. Oh, if only there was some way to capture her image in her lovely dress and send it to Somewhere on the Front to warm the heart of a soldier boy. Victoria smiled and looked at the tables sagging under the weight of the pies that Catriona and her helpers had spent days preparing. When the dancing started, whisky and ale would flow more readily than the water in the parched Tay. Would it be in poor taste to write a description to Robert, who was existing ‘somewhere’ on meagre rations?
It was the most joyous evening. Victoria danced with everyone, young and old alike: Tam Menmuir, Davie (his oldest son, home on leave from the war), ploughmen and cattlemen, Bessie, Catriona, Elsie, and finally she forced her Grampa away from his whisky and his cronies.
‘A dance, Grampa, come on. Sandy’s away to play “Strip the Willow”.’
Surely only a man with shoes nailed to the floor could have resisted the fiddle that night. Jock Cameron whirled his granddaughter round as if she were no heavier than the small treasure he held tight between his gnarled fingers. One of Elsie’s brothers, the only one of the seven not already in the Forces, his eyes almost blinded by the mad sweep of Victoria’s lacy petticoats as she whirled past him in her grandfather’s arms, stood waiting to snatch the girl for the next dance.
Suddenly Jock stopped his mad dervish whirl. He looked across the smoke- and dust-filled room at his daughter-in-law.
‘Forgive me, Catriona,’ he said. ‘I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name,’ and he fell forward. The walnut shell he had been clasping slipped from his fingers and rolled to the feet of the girl, who stood like a statue frozen in stone. It was then that she screamed.
*
Jock would have enjoyed his funeral – the biggest in Angus for many a long day. Crested carriages and farm carts jostled for room and, even in her grief, Victoria could see how much he had been loved. Although her eyes were swollen and red, she did not cry in public. Nor did her mother and yet her grief was as great as, if not greater than, the girl’s. And to that grief was added worry for the future, for in her head were echoing the words: ‘I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name.’
A few weeks after the funeral, Victoria came back from school to find an unfamiliar pony and trap in the farmyard. Old Tam had been watching for her and he came out of the stable, comb in hand.
‘Away to the scullery for your tea, Victoria. The mistress has a lawyer fella with her.’
In the scullery, perched on a scrubbed stool, Victoria ate scones with jam and drank hot, sweet tea and tried to taste them. ‘The best baker in Angus.’ Was that not what Grampa had said about her mother? Grampa? She felt again the hot tears squeezing up and she struggled to force them back. Would she ever, ever be able to think of him without crying?
‘Oh, Grampa, Grampa,’ she sobbed to herself. ‘Why did you leave me?’
Later, Catriona came into the scullery while Victoria was at her homework, and sat down at the table beside her.
‘Victoria, my dear,’ she said. ‘The time has come to talk, a little, about your father.’
Victoria looked at her expectantly, but with misgivings. Her father? She cared nothing about her father. It was Grampa she cared about.
Catriona understood what was going through her daughter’s mind and ached to be able to spare her pain. She began to speak in a clipped, almost cold voice – emotionless. How else could she cope?
‘Your father, my husband, was . . . is, as you know, your grandfather’s son. I . . . I . . . divorced him ten years ago.’ Once again Catriona thought with gratitude of the love and care of the old man, who had insisted that she be freed from his own son. Thank heaven, he had always said, that Scots law was light years ahead of English law. All Catriona had had to do was prove that John had deserted her. And since he had never been seen in Angus since the day that his father had thrown him out, desertion had been cited as the just cause. She had found out later about the fees old Jock had had to pay, first to Arbuthnott Boatman and then to the very competent Edinburgh advocate, whom the canny Scots lawyer had recommended to handle the case. But, however much it had cost, he had paid them willingly.
Catriona continued. ‘Since then I have been housekeeper here for Grampa. He always meant to make a new will, in your favour, Victoria, but he never got round to it. However, he – without my knowledge, needless to say – has paid me an extremely generous wage all these years, and it has accumulated at a good rate of interest. We will be able to cope, but we must leave the farm. It now belongs to . . . Grampa’s son. As yet we do not know where he is, but Mr Boatman will find him. Lawyers are very clever, Victoria. Anyway, I want to leave as quickly as possible. I will not be here when . . . It is better to make a clean break. Do you understand, Victoria? Mr Boatman is arranging to buy a house in Dundee for us, on Blackness Road.’ She stopped, and in her mind’s eye she saw once again the house she intended to buy. So different, so very different. She went on, ‘It’s a respectable area. You will be able to continue at the Harris Academy, Victoria, and so all your friends will remain the same.’
She stopped and looked at her daughter expectantly but, in the depths of her own grief, Victoria was too numb to think. Nothing registered, but that awful moment of silence when Grampa had stood there staring at Catriona, clutching at his heart, his voice gasping. What had he said? What did it matter? He was dead.
‘I don’t care where we live,’ she said and Catriona winced, but she knew the child was putting up her defence mechanisms just as she, with her cold, unfeeling voice, had done.
Victoria always wondered how her mother managed to be out of the farmhouse within the three days that followed the signing of the contracts between Catriona and the lawyers of the late owner. She must surely have stayed up all night, for the following Saturday found them ready to leave Priory Farm.
Had the farm ever looked lovelier as it sat nestled among its carefully tended gardens? Redcurrants that Catriona had been unable to put up were still hanging like rubies on the bushes. The sun sparkled on the early-morning spider’s webs strewn across the hedges. Already, smoke from the fires in the tied cottages was drifting out of the chimneypots and Victoria could tell which of Grampa’s workers were already up and ready for the day.
I can’t bear the pain, thought Victoria. I can’t leave here. I’ll die, away from this air, these scents.
She said nothing of her agonies as they spent the day carrying out their last duties, for Catriona was determined that the new owner would find no trace of the previous occupants. At last it was time to eat one final meal and, for the very last time, climb into the old phaeton that Victoria and Grampa had used for their forays. She could still, she was sure, smell his familiar, much-loved presence. She did not look round as Tam bowled them out of the farm and along the road to Dundee.
‘It’s a nice area, Victoria,’ said Catriona desperately. ‘Near Elsie and the Harris. We’ll make it work.’
Victoria said nothing as they raced along the road, past Templeton Woods and into Dundee. Had the river ever looked more beautiful, stretching for miles like a long, silver ribbon? Had the sun ever burnished the leaves on the trees to such splendour? No one in the phaeton noticed the beauty of the road; no one cared.
‘Keep going, keep going for ever and ever until we run off the edge of the world,’ Victoria silently told the horse.
But eventually it stopped and the two passengers looked at what was to be their new home.
‘Ach, mistress,’ Tam said, before he remembered that he was only a servant, ‘you cannot live here. It’s nae better nor a slum.’
Victoria looked up and saw a three-storey stone house almost buried beneath its overgrown garden. The gate was hanging on its hinges and all the ground-floor windows were broken.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks, Victoria,’ said Catriona, desperately trying to reach inside the unblinking statue that her daughter had become.
Victoria climbed like an old woman from the phaeton. She helped Tam unload, much against his wishes, since he had strict ideas about what was right for masters and what was expected of men, and she carried some baskets into the house. Catriona had gone ahead to light some lamps and set a match to the fire she had laid earlier in the week. She did not light all the lamps – lamplight is flattering and welcoming, but better perhaps to keep the real state of their new home from Victoria until the girl had slept.
Victoria said nothing as she put baskets in the kitchen and wicker hampers of clothes in the bedrooms. Catriona carried a small leather steamer-trunk, which really belonged to John, but which he had given her for their wedding trip. Most of the labels had peeled off over the years, but one still said Hôtel St-Etienne, Paris. Had she realized it was there, Catriona would have scraped it off too.
‘We’ll make some cocoa afore you go back, Tam,’ she said as he put down the biggest and heaviest of the boxes.
‘Mistress, come on back tae the Priory. We’ll think on something. This is no right, and it’s no what he would have wanted. We can talk to the new boss.’
‘I’ve made my bed and I mun lie on it, Tam. We’ll be fine, Victoria and me. We’ll manage, you’ll see. What was it Jock used to say, when we complained about anything? Pull yourself together, laddie. Ye’ve never died a winter yet. Well, we’re not going to die this winter either, Tam. We’re going to manage.’
Victoria stood at the dirty window and looked out on to the darkened street. How strange to see houses, side by side, some with soft lamplight glowing, most in darkness.
‘Oh, dear Grampa,’ she whispered, ‘definitely not a walnut shell day.’