SCENE TEN
(LIZA, MAGGIE, SARA, TOTTIE, JENNY … and later ELLEN. They are stopping for a piece-break, milk or water, and bannocks of some kind. MAGGIE has brought the food along to the field for them)
TOTTIE: He was shouting — in the turnip shed. Shouting at the neeps. Nobody there, just neeps.
MAGGIE: It’s a speech. For the meeting! He’ll be practising his speech.
JENNY: For the Soirée!
LIZA: (the title — an official one — sounds glamerous to her) The Plooman’s Soirée!
SARA: Go on, then, Tottie, tell us — what did he say?
TOTTIE: He said — we are not penny pies.
LIZA: ‘Gentlemen! We are not penny pies. We must continue to press for the six-pound rise!’
TOTTIE: Yes, that’s what he said.
SARA: Six pound!
MAGGIE: Rowat of Currivale gives farm servants a grand wage, and lost time.
SARA: Lost time?
LIZA: What’s that?
MAGGIE: I dinna rightly ken. But he gives them it.
SARA: Dunlop of Smiddyhill’s promised to mend up his houses. Planks on the floor. And in the loft.
MAGGIE: Every year the maisters promise to mend up the houses! But syne it’s time for the Speaking, and syne the Hiring, and syne the Flitting — and where are the promises?
MAGGIE and SARA: Snowed off the dyke!
SARA: If we didn’t flit every year, they’d have to mend up the houses.
MAGGIE: If the houses were mended up, we wouldn’t want to flit ae year.
SARA: (quite cheerful) Tinkers, that’s all we are!
TOTTIE: Penny pies. We are not penny pies.
MAGGIE: A six-pound rise would do me fine, and a new house even finer — but what we really need is an end to the bondage.
(Surprise from the others)
MAGGIE: (slightly abashed) Lots of folk are beginning to speak out against the bondage.
(Others not convinced)
MAGGIE: I’ve barely a shilling a week to spare for her.
LIZA: I earn my keep!
JENNY: A shilling! Is that all we’re worth?
MAGGIE: Barely a shilling for all that food —
LIZA: I’m aye starving —
JENNY: Even a horse can’t work without food!
MAGGIE: She takes the bed from my bairns, and the warmth from my fire —
LIZA: (furious) Where d’you expect me to —
SARA: (restrains her) She doesn’t mean you — (To MAGGIE) Maggie! (To LIZA) It’s the bondage she’s angry at!
MAGGIE: Flighty, giddy bits o lassies! Pay no heed to the hind, or his wife!
LIZA: I’m not your servant!
MAGGIE: I’m not your washerwoman!
SARA: This’ll never do now, fraying like — tinklers!
TOTTIE: Penny pies!
MAGGIE: Remember Rob Maxwell two year ago at the Hiring? Pleading with a bondager — a woman he didnae ken from Eve — begging her to take the arle as if his very life depended on it!
SARA: Well, but it did. For his ain wife had bairns, and without a female worker who would have hired him? No maister round here.
MAGGIE: And remember how that young bondager turned out? Remember a’ that?
LIZA: What?
MAGGIE: Never you mind. But a poor unsuspecting hind shouldn’t have to hire by looks. A sweet face won’t shift the sharn.
LIZA: And what about us? It works both ways.
JENNY: Ay, both ways. How can we choose a decent hind by his looks?
MAGGIE: That’s just it — the farmer should hire you lassies, not the hind.
LIZA: We’d still get picked by our looks.
MAGGIE: Andra’s picked by his looks too, come to that.
LIZA: They’d still pinch our arms and gawp at our legs!
JENNY: We’d still have to sleep with the bairns — or worse!
MAGGIE: The maister should hire all the bondagers himself — ay, and lodge them too.
SARA: Now, where could he lodge them, Maggie?
JENNY: In the big bed! Oooh-ooh!
LIZA: We should have a meeting!
SARA: Who?
LIZA: Us! The lassies! There’s as many of us as them! More lassies than men, come harvest!
(MAGGIE and SARA shrug off her anger, won’t see the point)
LIZA: We should make the speeches!
MAGGIE: What do you want? A six-pound rise? And what would you spend it on? Ribbons, niching? (To SARA) Do you know how much this besom owes the draper?
LIZA: We don’t get much!
MAGGIE: I wish I had it. I hunger my bairns, whiles, to feed you! And you spend your money at the draper’s!
JENNY: We don’t get much compared to the men.
MAGGIE: A man’s got a family.
LIZA: Sara’s got a family.
SARA: Oh, but we’re not doing men’s work. We canna work like men.
ELLEN: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ellen,’ says the maister. ‘We can’t do away with the bondage. I can’t employ a man who hasn’t a woman to work with him. One pair of horse to every fifty acre, one hind for every pair of horse, one bondager for every hind. That’s the way it’s done,’ he says. ‘I’m all for progress,’ he says, ‘but I won’t do away with the bondage,’ he says. ‘We need the women. Who else would do the work?… Women’s work, for women’s pay.’
LIZA: (or all, taking phrase by phrase, in turn. She is kirtling up her skirts, putting on the sacking apron) Redd up the stables, muck out the byre, plant the tatties, howk the tatties, clamp the tatties. Single the neeps, shaw the neeps, mangle the neeps, cart the neeps. Shear, stook, striddle, stack. Women’s work.
ELLEN: Muck. A heap of it — higher than your head. Wider than a house. Every bit of it to be turned over. Aired. Rotted. Women’s work.
LIZA: (forking the dung)
Shift the sharn, fulzie, muck
Sharn, sharn, fulzie, muck.
Shift the sharn, fulzie, muck… etc.
ELLEN: (on top of LIZA’s words) Muck is gold, says the maister.
LIZA: (forking, digging)
Sharn, sharn, fulzie, muck
Sharn, sharn, fulzie, muck.
ELLEN: Muck’s like kindness, says the maister, it can be overdone.
LIZA: (to ELLEN) You mind what it was like, cleaning your claes after this? My new bonnet — it stinks. My claes, my skin.
SARA: It’s Maggie who washes your claes.
LIZA: (to Ellen) What was the job you hated most?
ELLEN: Howking tatties. I’m long — here — in the back. At the end of the day I used to scraffle on all fours. I couldn’t get to my feet till I was halfway down the loan. Can you shear?
LIZA: Aye.
ELLEN: Striddle?
LIZA: Aye!
ELLEN: Are you good?
LIZA: Aye. It’s the corn I love best. It’s the whisper it gives when it’s ripe for the sickle.
ELLEN: I love the speed of it all, the fury. Faster, faster, keep up with the bandster; faster, faster, and better your neighbour. I felt like yon Amazon in the Bible. No one could stop me, if Mabon himself had stood before me, I’d have cut him in two with a swipe o my sickle. I gloried in the shearing. I’ll miss the hairst.
(LIZA and ELLEN smile at each other)
SARA: I remember my mother and her neighbour each had a rig of corn on the village allotment. My mother was gey thrang, all her life. Too much to do, no time to do it. One night, when the corn was ripe, she couldn’t sleep. The moon was full. So she went out to shear her corn. And as she sheared, every now and then, she’d take just a bitty from her neighbour’s rig, just as much as would make bands to tie her sheaves. Syne she went home and slept the last hour or two till day, glad the work was done. But in the morning passing the field, she saw she’d reaped the wrong rig, her neighbour’s rig. The corn she’d stolen to bind her sheaves was her own corn — and she still had her own rig to shear. O, but she grat! It was a punishment, she said.