And the Land Lay Still (58 page)

Her Dey had his own chair that he alone sat in and nobody else. Nana had her own chair too but she was seldom in it and other people could use it when she wasn’t. There was a table beside Dey’s chair for his library books and papers and tea. For all that they were hard up they always had newspapers in the house: in the morning it was the
Scottish Daily Express
and in the evening it was the
Daily Worker
, delivered by Polish Patrick who liked to sit and dissect the day’s stories with her Dey over yet another mug of tea. Sometimes Nana used to join in too. She was as sharp as any man when it came to politics. When she was wee Ellen couldn’t understand how human beings could spend so long looking at all the tiny print in the papers without exploding with the amount of information they took in. For a long time the only bit she liked to read was the Rupert Bear strip in the
Express
. But her grandparents’ habits laid down a pattern for her. In later years she recognised that it was from them, at least in part, that she had inherited her voracious appetite for facts and explanations. From them, too, her ability not to let a political principle obstruct her appreciation of the wider world: so long as capitalism lasted, her Dey would say, there was no harm in the pleasures afforded by Beaverbrook’s
Express
; you just had to understand it was all propaganda, even Rupert Bear.

By the time she was eight she never went anywhere without a
pencil and notebook, in which she recorded anything of interest or importance. She had several pages devoted to Polish Patrick, who had fought the Nazis when they invaded Poland in 1939, escaped to Denmark, then, when Denmark was occupied, slipped away to Norway where he’d rejoined the Polish forces fighting alongside the Norwegians. Eventually, when the Allies withdrew from Norway, he’d come to Aberdeen on a listing ship packed with angry, dismayed Poles, Danes and Norwegians, and had spent the next two years building coastal defences and preparing to fight the Nazis when they invaded Scotland. And all this, Ellen learned over many hours in Patrick’s company, he had done with no expectation of success or reward, but simply as a small detail in the great saga of human history. With Patrick’s help she drew a map of his adventures, and a picture of him, improbably Herculean, straddling a cluster of concrete tank traps on a beach in Fife. He worked for the roads department now, in a depot full of great mounds of gravel and sand, a neat, sombre, sober man with a shiny bald head. He had a voice that came from deep in his chest, that was both purer and yet more guttural than the way everybody else spoke in Borlanslogie, and he said very little but what he did say seemed always to be of grave import. There was never the leg-pulling, the deadly earnest that turned out to be a joke at your expense, the daftness or downright deceit that other grown-ups dealt out: Patrick was kindly and attentive and he took Ellen as seriously as she took herself. Patrick had married a Scots girl but she had died soon after the war and he had not married again. Of his family in Poland, if he still had one, he never spoke. He appeared to have no close friends and yet everybody liked him. At social gatherings he would sit quietly on the edge of things, making the odd dry comment, and in the corner of his mouth would be a cigarette, which occasionally he’d light and take two or three short puffs from, then pinch out till the urge came on him again. He could make three cigarettes last a whole evening like that. He was unfailingly polite and well turned out, the smoking his one concession to self-indulgence. Yet the control he exercised over his appearance and manners seemed not to come from within himself but from somewhere else, as if he polished his shoes and shaved his chin and stood up in the presence of women because he could not help it. He lived his life as if it were in the hand of
some great invisible force that he, as an individual, could neither influence nor escape. And maybe this was true, and maybe this was how he’d ended up a Communist, delivering the
Daily Worker
to the proletariat of Borlanslogie.

Stuffed away on a shelf under her Dey’s table was a tartan travelling rug. ‘I dinna ken why it’s cried a travelling rug,’ he said, ‘it never gangs onywhaur.’ Ellen was an Imlach and he was a Murray; the rug was a Murray tartan, which was red with dark bits, it was hard to tell in the poor light what colours they were. He’d unfold it in the cold winter and wrap it round his knees, which ached with the rheumatics, or he’d let Ellen hap herself up in it till just her nose was poking out, being tickled by the fat woollen tassels of the rug’s fringe. ‘Ye look like a spaewife,’ he said. ‘Will ye tell me my fortune?’ She said one day he would find a pot of gold under a tree and be richer and happier than a king, and he said that would be fine, he could do with the gold but he was already better off than any king could ever be, because he didn’t have the blood of working people on his hands. She loved chatting away to him and listening to his stories, and scribbling down things that he said. ‘Ellen Imlach, Ace Reporter’, her Dey called her, and she liked that and wrote it on the inside cover of her notebook while he told her of John Reed, an American journalist who had written
Ten Days That Shook the World
about the Russian Revolution. Maybe one day, he suggested, she would write a book like that herself. She blew at the tassels and said she probably would. That travelling rug may not have gone anywhere, but
she
did when she was happed up in it.

Pinned to the wall behind her Dey’s chair was a bright yellow tea towel on which a fierce red lion stood on its hind legs with its paws up like a boxer, only there was nobody for it to box. ‘That’s the flag o Scotland,’ he told her, ‘it’s cried a lion rampant,’ and she thought a ‘rampant’ must be a special kind of flag till he explained that that was the proper word for the way the lion was standing. She wrote LION RAMPANT down in her notebook. ‘But is the Scottish flag no blue,’ she said, ‘wi a white cross on it?’ ‘That’s the
ither
Scottish flag,’ he said. ‘It’s cried a saltire. We’ve twa because we’re a special country. We should be independent but the English made us join in wi them and slaughtered us if we objected, so we hae twa flags tae mind us no tae forget we’re Scottish.’ The blue flag had come about
in the olden days when the Scottish tribes were at war with the tribes from England, and just before one particular battle the clouds in the blue sky had come together in the shape of the cross of Saint Andrew, and the Scots had taken this as a sign that they were going to win a great victory, which they did. And ever after Saint Andrew was the patron saint of Scotland, which was fine because he was also the patron saint of Russia, which was the only decent, free and fair country in the world for poor folk. And Ellen wrote down SALTIRE and SAINT ANDREW and RUSSIA very carefully in her notebook, with her Dey spelling the letters out for her in his big, broad voice.

At school the next day she put her hand up and asked her teacher if she could tell the class something interesting and important. Miss Pearson was suspicious of volunteers since they usually had ideas above their station, but she also knew Ellen to be her most precocious pupil and that it was better to lift the lid off her occasionally than have her bouncing like a steamy pudding at her desk, so she granted Ellen her request, and Ellen stood up and repeated the story of the miracle in the sky. When she’d finished, Miss Pearson said Ellen had told the story well, and gave them another, about when the Vikings came to conquer Scotland in their longboats. They came ashore one night very quietly and took off their shoes and crept up on the Scots in order to massacre them where they slept. And they would have done it too, only one of them stood on a jaggy purple thistle. He let out a scream and the Scots woke up and drove the Vikings back into the sea, and ever since then the thistle had been the emblem of Scotland.

Ellen asked about the lion rampant and wasn’t
it
the emblem of Scotland? Yes, it was another one, Miss Pearson said, you saw it on flags in places like Edinburgh Castle. It was a
royal
emblem, though, it belonged to the Queen and you could only fly the lion rampant if you had permission from a very important person called the Lord Lyon, who was spelled with a Y not an I. The Lord Lyon, Ellen imagined, was a grand old man who stayed in a castle, not Edinburgh but one out in the country surrounded by a huge forest full of deer and squirrels. He had a tawny beard like a big ruff around his face and neck, and long flowing hair, and yellow checked trousers and a red jumper like Rupert Bear on the cover of the annual, the same
colours as the flag, and he was usually quite kindly but he could also be fierce, especially if he found out you had a lion rampant when you shouldn’t.

Back to her Dey she went, to ask if he had permission to have the lion rampant on his wall. He was breaking the law if he didn’t, she explained, and the Lord Lyon would come and arrest him.

‘Haivers. Wha tellt ye that, lass?’

‘Miss Pearson. She’s my teacher.’

‘Aye weel,’ he said, and seemed about to say something derogatory about Miss Pearson but restrained himself. ‘I doot we’ll no fash aboot the Lord Lyon. His heid’s ower big for him tae come doon here and arrest me. If ye ask me, the Lord Lyon maks things up in his heid as he’s riding alang on his muckle horse. I’ll gie ye some advice, Ellen, that’ll mebbe stand ye in good stead when ye’re aulder. Never trust onybody whase name has a “Lord” in front o it. Beaverbrook, Lyon, Nelson, it disna maitter. He micht hae a voice like silk and a bonnie wee wife and a parcel o deeds and documents in ablow his oxter but he’ll steal the shirt frae your back if ye tak your een aff him for a second. Oh, and while I’m aboot it, that applies tae
the
Lord tae. Aw ye need tae ken aboot kirks is that the folks that gang intae them are aye gaun aboot crying their god
the
Lord. As if we owe him rent.’ And he spat blackly into the hearth.

Never trust The Lord
, she wrote in her notebook.
He will steal your shirt.
Her Dey had a worn old book called
Our Scots Noble Families
. It had been written fifty years before by Tom Johnston, the Secretary of State for Scotland during the war and now the man in charge of building hydroelectric power stations in the Highlands to bring heat and light to the poor folk of the glens. That was what her father was doing, her Dey said, she should be proud of him being involved in such a great work. Her Dey said Tom Johnston was a good man but he moved in higher social circles than he had when he wrote that book and was probably a bit embarrassed about the things he’d put in it. Back then he’d been one of the Red Clydesiders and had run their weekly newspaper, and hadn’t been afraid to tell the truth about the bloodsuckers, tax-gatherers and pickpockets who made up the Scottish aristocracy. The history books made out that these people’s ancestors were heroes but they weren’t, they were thieves, bandits and murderers. The real heroes in Scottish history came
from the working class, men like the socialists of Clydeside, and none more heroic than the schoolteacher John Maclean, who’d been sacked for his politics and imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War, and whose health had been broken by the way the authorities had treated him. He’d died a young man still fighting for justice, he was made Soviet Consul in Great Britain by Lenin but that didn’t stop him criticising the failings of the Russian Revolution and it didn’t stop him breaking away from the Communist Party and calling for a Scottish Socialist Republic. And then Ellen’s Nana chipped in from the other side of the fire saying Maclean might have been a saint but he had the faults of a saint too, he believed he was always right. ‘Awbody’s oot o step but oor John,’ her Nana said, and her Dey said that wasn’t true, it was just he was the only clear-sighted one among them, and that was the reason he didn’t get on a train to go and be a Member of the imperial Parliament in London along with Jimmy Maxton and Davie Kirkwood and Manny Shinwell and John Wheatley and the rest. ‘Weel, that’s why he didna achieve onything,’ her Nana cried, ‘the ithers were realists. Whaur was his sense of solidarity?’ ‘His solidarity was wi the people,’ her Dey shouted, ‘and that meant no compromise wi the system he wanted tae destroy.’ ‘No compromise?’ her Nana shouted back. ‘That’s easy. The truth is ye just love John Maclean because he’s deid. Ye’d hae found plenty wrang wi him if he’d lived. Like ye find wi Wullie Gallacher.’ ‘Wullie Gallacher?’ her Dey snarled. ‘Lenin’s gramophone, that’s what Maclean called Gallacher.’ ‘Ach, ye’re like a gramophone yersel, ye daft auld bugger,’ she said, and she poured him more tea and told Ellen not to pay him any heed, and Ellen knew that for all they argued they did it because they loved and respected each other. They enjoyed arguing, and Ellen enjoyed seeing them at it. If politics was something they could get so angry and passionate about, it must be important.

§

One day when she arrived at her Nana’s the Hoggs’ house was quiet for once and Nana told her Auld Mrs Hogg had passed on in the night. Ellen sat and read her book for a while,
Heidi
, about a lassie from the Swiss mountains who was happy till she had to go to the city where she was sad, and Heidi in the coloured picture at the
front of the book looked like Ellen only she had curls and a red dress. But when Nana was busy making something to eat Ellen slipped out on to the street to see what, if anything, was happening next door. And Denny stuck his head out at the same moment, as if he’d been expecting her, and gestured her over. They were both eight or nine, no more. Denny’s mother was at the undertaker’s, seeing about a coffin, and all the men were at work, and Denny had been instructed to stay put and make sure his granny wasn’t left alone. Which Ellen thought odd, because Nana had said she’d passed on, so surely she wasn’t there any more? Denny said it was just her soul that was away, the rest of her was still there and his mam would go daft at him if he didn’t keep his granny company. That was odd too, Ellen thought, because Auld Mrs Hogg had often been abandoned by everybody while she was alive, so why would she care now she was dead? But Denny’s mother was fierce when roused, so she could understand why Denny was doing as he’d been told.