Telling Tales Read online

  To Liz

  Acknowledgements

  Without the good guidance of Black & White Publishing, the bright comments of my niece Ellie Tipple, my family’s tolerance, the help and support of Forres’s forWords writing group and my agricultural advisor, Brian McDonald, this book could not have been written.

  The books Leaning on a Gate and Clap Hands for the Singing Molecatcher by authors Elizabeth Macpherson and Roderick Grant were delightful keys to helping my recall.

  Jane Yeadon

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  1 Stormy Weather

  2 A Small Croft

  3 Mum Goes to Town

  4 Getting Out

  5 Granny Rules

  6 A Housing Matter

  7 A Training Session

  8 Cat and Bull Story

  9 Having the Last Word

  10 Red-letter Day

  11 Killer on the Loose

  12 A Journey Accomplished

  13 Mill Workers

  14 Work Share

  15 Ferret Affairs

  16 A Practice Run

  17 A Walk on the Wild Side

  18 Roma Rules

  19 To Market to Market

  20 Dressed for the Occasion

  21 A Wedding!

  22 A Little Help Goes a Long Way

  23 Showies Time

  24 School!

  25 An Educational Experience

  26 An Error of Judgement

  27 And the Rain it Raineth

  28 Harvest at Last

  29 A Harvest Thanksgiving

  30 A Bird and a Bike

  31 A Story Worth the Telling

  32 The Right Address

  33 A Tale of Another Time

  34 Changing Times

  35 A Cat Called Smiler

  36 Pansy’s Had Enough!

  37 Spinning a Yarn

  38 A Helping Hand

  39 A New Arrival

  40 Local Drama

  41 Let it Snow!

  42 Sledges, Trays and Slides

  43 Telling Tales

  Copyright

  1

  STORMY WEATHER

  ‘Janie! Go awa’ inside an’ pit on yer coat!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Jane. Go inside and put on your coat. Now!’

  ‘Do what Dod tells you,’ says my sister, smug in a tweed coat, so hairy it makes her look like a small but tidy haystack.

  Elizabeth has a two-year advantage over me. As she grows older, she’ll start taking bits off her name so that, by the time she’s grown up, she’ll be happy with the finished product, which is Liz.

  Right now, Elizabeth seems rather a large handle for a small six-year-old, although personally I find the name useful for breaking into syllables: a handy emotional register.

  ‘Eee-lizz-a-beth!’

  It’s wonderful how much rage and passion you can get into one word. But I’ve done it once too often today. Boredom has turned us into bickering monkeys. We might still be inside in the warmth of our home, but my sister, indifferently kicking the door, shutting us into the lobby, where our exasperated mother had incarcerated us, says, ‘This is all your fault. When Mum told us to be quiet, you should have listened to her instead of your own voice.’

  I get no further than a retaliatory ‘Eee-lizz-a-beth’ before Mum yanks the door open, shouting, ‘Right! That’s it! Outside . . . Now!’

  I must have reached a certain note and perhaps she’s feeling edgier than usual. Tomorrow is Monday, the day our widowed mother chooses to be herself, writing newspaper articles about everyday life on an upland Morayshire farm. Since family discord isn’t her chosen subject, we’re not useful material.

  Now, bonded in the adversity of having a mother who’s about to forget she is one, we hurry to grab our coats.

  ‘At least Mary’s here the morn.’ I think of the girl who comes to help on what could only be described as a tricky day. Comparing her to our neglectful mother, I add, ‘She’s nice.’

  Elizabeth sniffs and says, ‘Well, I won’t see her. I’ll be at school.’ She does up her coat buttons with careless ease. Her fingers are nimble and neat. Hopeless for shaping mud pies, which I so adore making. ‘Come on. Can you not do these yet?’

  ‘Course I can,’ I lie, and, anxious not to be left behind, add, ‘But I’m not bothering with a coat. It’s not cold.’

  ‘Jane! It’s the middle of winter and there’s snow on the ground!’

  ‘It’s all right. Let’s just go.’

  With my breath showing as small clouds of vapour, I’ve pushed past her and gone outside, glad of wellies. Even if they might be on the wrong feet, they’re fine for taking the path cut through thick January snow leading from the house to the farm steading. I finish the icicle grabbed off the house eave and open my mouth skyward to catch a falling snowflake. It settles on my tongue first, then tastes sweet and cold and even purer than the icicle. I wonder if I’ll remember this when the summer sun pricks my skin and covers it in freckles.

  In final protest, we’d slammed shut the house door and now, here we are, watching Dod, the farm grieve, shovelling pitchfork-loads of hay through a hole he’s cleverly cut in the steading wall to feed the cattle inside.

  Their noses are wet and their pink tongues reach out like fingerless hands. They grab the hay and it disappears. I think that feeding hay into the maw of the wall must be keeping Dod warm because he’s not wearing a coat either. Maybe I could get a shot of his pitchfork. It looks like fun and I could always menace my sister with it. I move closer, hoping that Dod and the cattle will appreciate kindly interest.

  ‘Put on your coat, Jane.’ Second time around the words are clear. Dod, stooped over a loaded fork, stops, whilst Elizabeth starts reversing and I catch another snowflake.

  I swallow it and because Dod’s maybe deaf, shout, ‘No!’

  Our ancient duck comes out of nowhere. She doesn’t look anything like the ones in picture books. This one is fat and wheezy, wears a different colour of white from the snow, and she’s loud and demanding. With startling originality, she’s called Duck and must be one of the few creatures on our farm without a proper name. Unmoved by any potential drama, she flounders through the snow towards us. Like the cattle, she considers humans useful only as food providers. As she advances, she readies her flat and predatory bill.

  ‘Come on, Duck,’ says Elizabeth, unrecognisably hearty. ‘I saw some cold tatties in the kitchen that Mum’s left out for you. Let’s go and get them now.’

  And she’s off, Duck quacking disapproval at having to struggle to keep up with her leader.

  Dod, meantime, has plunged the fork into the ground and comes towards me.

  ‘I said, for the third and last time, put on your coat!’

  I might be feeling the cold seeping through my thin-soled wellies, with an icy wind searching out vulnerable areas with forensic skill, but it’s nothing to how fed up I am of people always telling me what to do.

  Swamped with the unfairness of my life, I repeat, ‘No!’

  The word is clear. It rings out with the same defiance as I show in stamping my feet.

  In the distance from over the moor that is part of our farm comes the chuff-chuff of the train steaming towards Grantown-on-Spey. Nearer, I hear the busy gurgle of the wee Knockack burn that runs at the bottom of one of our farm fields. But much closer is the odd squelching sound of wellingtons coming fast towards me.

  They’re Dod’s and he’s close enough now to aim a careless swipe, which, thanks to my kilt pleats, is painlessly absorbed. But I am outraged. I shake a cold fist and, in the absence of meantime-motherly support, yell, ‘I’m telling Mary on you!’

  And then the man who will be around our lives for a very lo
ng time completes the indignity. He laughs and goes back to feeding the cattle.

  2

  A SMALL CROFT

  Our farm, Tombain, lies halfway between Forres and Grantown-on-Spey. In time, pylons will march on metal legs across moors bringing electricity to Dunphail, the parish of which our croft is part. I’ll be ten when power comes to our house, and the smell of paraffin and the hiss of our tilley lamps will give way to a noiseless, reliable light. However, Tombain’s name stays and, being Gaelic for ‘white hill’, is a reminder of the past.

  I like the name. It lends the hill farm a history, suggesting that it was a long-ago people with a different language who named it and made a living from it. I wonder who they were.

  They’ve left little mark, other than some cultivated fields flanked by a wine-red moor only useful, my mother believes, for heather and sheep. Maybe it’s because, seen from the road, the farm, standing high above the Moray Firth, gets snow early, unlike the green fertile land far below: the Laich of Moray. But at least, shawled by fir trees planted after the war and now growing so dense they can only manage a sigh in the wildest of storms, the farm gets added shelter from the lee side of the Knock of Braemoray.

  We think it’s big but our mother is dismissive. She says, ‘It’s just a frumpy wee hill.’

  I’m sorry that the charm of its gentle shoulder-like contour is lost to her but when the bonny days come and we grow older Elizabeth and I’ll climb it. Afterwards we’ll boast, ‘From the top you can see the whole of Morayshire, its Firth as well as the Cromarty one, and even beyond that to the Sutherland hills.’

  In that matter-of-fact way that Elizabeth imparts knowledge and which is as impressive as it’s annoying, she’ll add, ‘You can even see Morvern, Embo and the Sutors of Cromarty. They often look as blue as the sea between us.’

  It’ll sound as if a spell’s been cast over places whose names enchant me and might say so, only our word-alchemist mother is lost to any magic on this particular day. She’ll glance up from scouring clothes in the scullery’s white heavy-duty double sink and say, ‘I can see that every day if I get a minute to look through the window and it’s not misty or snowing.’

  It couldn’t have been like that when she and our father, beguiled by the views, decided to give up a precarious living writing books and flogging vegetables in Badenoch. Their Happy Hawkers book chronicles these days and I try to connect the young, carefree couple illustrated in the pages with the childless pair in their thirties who came to this tenant farm two years before the war.

  When Elizabeth was born four years later, she was something of a surprise. And not only to our parents, who’d been married long enough to imagine they’d never become ones, but to their family doctor as well.

  A good bedside manner is hardly needed for appendix removal. It’s an operation at which he apparently excelled and for which (this being pre-NHS days) his charging fee was small. Still, his approach to a breech birth bordered on something like callous indifference.

  ‘Expect her to be dead,’ he’d said, dealing with the unexpected appearance of a baby coming backwards. Then, subject closed, he sucked on his filthy, smelling pipe whilst watching over an experienced midwife who would eventually manage the miracle of a safe delivery.

  Two years later, I took the more conventional route.

  Smithy was Tombain’s resident land girl. Apparently, my father told her, ‘The new baby’s got navy-blue eyes.’

  Before she joined the land army, Smithy had been a Norland Nanny so, thanks to her fancy training, she probably knew it’s a common enough colour for a newly born baby. Still, she was tactful enough not to say so. Anyway, she’d worked long enough on the farm to know that my father wasn’t big on being corrected.

  With her own first name lost to the additional ‘y’ on her surname, she’d been curious. ‘What are you going to call her?’

  ‘Jane. Betty thinks it’s a bit plain but I like it.’

  As Elizabeth is our mother’s name too, I’ll grow up thinking that our wordsmith parents have had lapses in originality. Could they not have thought of Margaret? She’s a real princess. I’d love that name and bet if she shared my title she wouldn’t suffer the usual introductory reaction.

  ‘Jane, eh? That’ll be Plain Jane, and No Nonsense then. Ha ha!’

  You think you’re so original, I think, amazed at how much fun people can get out of so few words.

  But all this will come later. When I’m born, there’s little to laugh about. My mother may have found birth easier this time, but six weeks later she was widowed.

  When Elizabeth and I are older, and despite the armour of stoicism we’ve come to recognise in our mother, she is still only able to speak, just once, about this time.

  ‘You know, when I was asked to identify your father after the fatal motorbike accident and saw the body’ – she paused for a moment in recall – ‘I only looked for a second. Then I said, “That’s not Ian.” ’

  ‘But it must have been!’ cried Elizabeth, who remembers only a shadow but holds the memory dear.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. It was just a shell. This is where he is.’ She tapped her head and we wonder if that’s what’s made her hair the white we’ve always known and watch as she tightens her mouth, the lines around it deepening. ‘And I was left to bring up you bairns and mind the farm. Anyway there was a war on with no time to grieve and lots of people far worse off than me.’ She sighed, then brightening, added, ‘But I’m glad to say that at least on Tombain we always had food, grew it for others, and we were never called upon to man any engine of death.’

  Widowed, she now had a new role as a she-crofter. Italian prisoners of war were already working on the farm. They must have been a help and, despite losing their youth to a war and living in a land surely alien to them, she said they brought her a little of their home’s sunshine. They communicated in pidgin Doric to my mother’s ungrammatical Italian whilst Elizabeth, of whom they made a great fuss, learnt a little of both.

  And of course, for a time, there was Smithy. Not only was she used to the farm’s routines but her classy training also made her well able to care for us.

  ‘Smithy used spit on it to fix it,’ Elizabeth says to explain her curly hair when we get older. But I’m not convinced. Although she’ll always be Smithy to us, she’s now a Munro, having married Beel, who farms over the moor from us. No matter how much I try to copy her shining example of Norland Nanny care, my hair remains straight and hostile to the ribbons which sit so biddable and prettily on my sister’s head.

  ‘Why do you think your sister got all the curls?’ people sometimes ask.

  I have no answer but Elizabeth springs to my defence.

  ‘Well, she got a dimple.’

  Starting to realise that, confident of right on her side, my sister will face any army single-handed, I’m torn between admiration that she feels strong enough to do so and a fear of landing on the army’s side by mistake.

  3

  MUM GOES TO TOWN

  The Italians manage fine when it comes to farming but struggle working the farm’s metal-wheeled Fordson.

  ‘We’d be lost without Belldie,’ says Mum, tapping the machine’s flanks in an encouraging way. The prisoners of war probably have another name for something with a temperament more suitable to a diva troubled by asthma. She only revs into action if nursed and, after coughing and spluttering, clatters in discordance, as if protesting at being driven over the cobbles covering the byre’s square.

  When she does make it to the fields, an eddying cloud of gulls arrive. They try to out-scream the bronchial whee whee whee of Belldie. But hers is a steadier noise and easily carried on the wind as she hauls a plough, better than her at obedience, as faithfully it follows, turning furrow after furrow.

  Belldie’s mechanical challenges are, however, nothing compared to the uncertain temperament of Frankie, the farm’s Ayrshire bull. With a ring in his nose, he’s handsome – in a flashy sort of way: looks that are lost on
the Italians. Unlike our mother, who is on amiable terms with Frankie and surely tuning into his feminine side, they reckon he’s plain dangerous.

  ‘Mio dio! Guardare quelle corna! (My God! Look at those horns!)’ they cry, blocking their ears to shut out the bull’s shrill screams of frustrated testosterone. A new level of aggression comes with the sighting of any possible rival and when, in the absence of any, the men see him gore a wooden tripod used for making haystacks, they take note.

  ‘He’s nothing to do at the moment but eat,’ Mum declares. ‘He’s just bored.’

  But they’re not convinced, nor sure that his barbed-wire field’s enclosure’s as safe as she says it is. Have they not seen men come to visit the farm only to be trapped in their car by an advancing bull? And have they not heard a petrified bawl? ‘Hey, wifie! Come an’ tak’ awa’ yer bull!’ What, the Italians wonder, will they do if Frankie escapes and she’s not around?

  On a day she’s to go into town, and recognising that male pride versus fear of a bull might stop farm work, she calls her team together. ‘Look, boys. We need pink petrol. You know Belldie won’t go without it, so I have to go to Forres to get it, but don’t worry about Frankie. I’ll shut him in.’ Then, making a point about girl power, she adds, ‘And Nell will help me.’

  ‘Ah si si! The collie,’ they say, sounding relieved, and disappear until La Signora Macpherson assures them that she and her fearless dog have safely incarcerated Frankie in the byre.

  ‘So! Eesa in his preeson?’ they ask as she climbs into her old battered saloon Hillman car.

  ‘Och yes, but dinna go near him. He doesn’t need your company.’ She is sanguine as she leaves.

  This is a pity because when she comes back there’s trouble.

  ‘Eets Frankie! He no like our voices,’ the bravest Italian tells her, his eyes wide with horror. ‘Come!’ He beckons, then slinks behind her as they near the byre. Undaunted and guided by the shrieks of fury coming from Frankie’s quarters, Mum makes the distance as if she too is pink petrol-fuelled.