The Shadow of the Sycamores (3 page)

From under his shaggy eyebrows, Tam regarded his brother with distaste. ‘If you canna say onything sensible, Geordie, keep your big mouth shut.’

With no proper schooling himself, Willie Rae had made sure that his son – on the register as ‘Tchouki (known as Henry)’ – attended school every single day. A healthy boy, he had a quick, receptive mind and was an exemplary pupil, which endeared him to his teacher, a forty-something-year-old spinster whose life had been spent trying to impart at least the rudiments of the three Rs to unwilling, uninterested children.

Because Miss Meldrum, who would take them as far as the Qualifying class, made no secret of how she felt about Henry’s abilities, he soon became the butt of snide remarks, ‘Top o’ the class! Teacher’s pet,’ being the most repeated, to which he usually responded, ‘Better the teacher’s pet at the top than a dunce at the bottom.’

There was no rancour in any of the repartee, however – just boys being boys and they all remained good friends.

It was when they finished the sixth grade, as far as they
could go at the Junior School, that the watershed came – the parting of the ways. Those who passed the examination, which qualified them to continue their education, transferred to what was known locally as the Big School at the other end of town but those who failed had to remain where they were.

Only five girls out of seven and, besides Henry, nine boys out of twelve made the transition in 1882. The others had to face the taunts of the incoming class – until they could legitimately leave. Luckily, Maxwell Dalgarno and Cameron Ellis, Henry’s two closest friends, moved up along with him. Unfortunately, the problems and temptations of adolescence – at first just joked about – were soon to disrupt the friendship.

The Big School was not as cosy as the one they had left. Instead of the fat round stove in the middle of the room, there was a fireplace on one wall, designed to heat only the teacher. Instead of the illustrations of poems and stories they had grown used to, the walls were covered with huge maps – The World, with British colonies marked in pink; The United Kingdom, shires shown in varying colours; two of Scotland, one showing the counties and towns and the industries for which they were noted (Glasgow for shipbuilding, Dundee for jute, jam and journalism and so on) and a physical map with contour lines marking heights above sea level.

Under the windows, glass higher that any pupils could reach, stood four waist-high cupboards for storing textbooks, new jotters, paper, boxes of chalk, white and coloured, bottles of ink, sheets of pink blotting-paper, boxes of pen nibs – anything that was best kept out of sight. On top of the cupboards lay piles of jotters that had been marked. A tall easel held a large blackboard, the top area so high that Miss Meldrum, their last teacher, could never have written on it, even if she stood on tiptoe.

The rest of the floor space was taken up by five rows of eight desks, each with its own inkwell, which the pupils took turns to fill, a groove for pen and pencil and a hinged lid that apparently could only be closed with a tremendous clatter. Apart from the jotters in current use and perhaps a wooden
pencil case holding a rubber and a rag for cleaning a pen nib – they had left slates and slate pencils behind in the junior school – the contents of the boys’ desks might include a match-box holding a spider to scare the girls at playtime, a bag of marbles, a Jew’s harp or mouth organ and so on. In the case of the girls, the desks would be more likely to harbour a small doll and its clothes, paper scraps to exchange and collections of fancy buttons or ribbons.

Pupils from the schools in Drymill and Corrieben, two nearby villages, also had to transfer to Ardbirtle Senior – only parents who wished, and could afford, to have their children educated further sent them to Ellon Academy. So there were new friends to be made, teams to be chosen for football or hockey in winter and cricket or netball in summer. There were, of course, new girls to pester, pigtails to tie together, blotting-paper pellets soaked with ink to be catapulted with a ruler. These pleasures, however, were the cause of arguments between Henry Rae and his very best friend, over one particular recipient of their blushing attentions. After letting it pass until his anger boiled up, Henry exploded one day as they walked homewards. ‘Maxie Dalgarno, would you stop pestering Millie Reid? Can you not see you’re scaring her?’

‘She only makes on she’s scared,’ the other boy defended himself. ‘She likes it.’

‘She does not!’

‘She does sut!’

‘She does not!’

They squared up to each other, fists flying, and, when Cameron Ellis tried to separate them, his right cheek took a blow not meant for him. It had developed into a three-way fight by the time Mr Shinnie, the headmaster, cycled past them unnoticed. Their scrap soon petered out due to lack of breath in all cases.

When they arrived at school the following morning, they were surprised to be ordered to report to the dominie, but Mr Shinnie spent no time in explaining why. ‘Line up!’ he barked, lifting his leather tawse to shoulder height. ‘Right hands out!’
His next words were delivered one at a time as he swung the three-tongued weapon down on one palm after the other. ‘I … was … shocked … to … see … pu … pils … of … this … school … braw … ling … in … the … street.’ He stopped for a moment, having given each boy five stinging strokes, then glared at them malevolently, his nostrils flaring. ‘Do you understand me?’

Right hands tucked under left arms in agony, they chorused, ‘Yes, Mr Shinnie.’

Rested, the man raised the tawse once more. ‘Hands out! No, no, my fine fellows! The same hands as before. I … will … not … tolerate … such … behaviour!’ Ignoring the silent grimaces of pain, he finally flung the instrument of punishment down on his desk. ‘I trust I will not have to summon you here again!’

They said not a word as they hurried along the corridor and up the stairs but their white faces and obviously painful hands when they tried to write told their classmates why they had been late.

The three were the centre of attention during the half-hour dinner break. Quite a crowd of boys gathered round them, wanting to know more.

‘Did he gi’e you the strap?’

‘How many did you get?’

‘Was it awful sore?’

Heroes in all eyes now, their pain was forgotten. ‘Seven each,’ boasted Henry.

Mouths gaped as Maxie added, ‘On the same hand and we hardly felt them.’

Having had time to think, Cammie pouted, ‘It wasna fair, though. I shouldna’ve gotten the strap. It wasna me that was fighting.’

All heads turned to him now. ‘What was they fighting about?’

‘About a …’ Cammie began but Maxie butted in.

‘We was arguing about being biggest. I said it was me but Henry said it was him.’

This caused much hilarity – Henry was at least two inches shorter than Maxie – and, in the argument that developed between other pairs of boys over who was the taller, things got back to normal in the tarred playground and dinner pieces were gobbled before the headmaster came out to ring his handbell for afternoon classes.

Going home was not as much fun that day as it normally was. There was a new constraint between Henry and Maxie. And Cammie, still outraged at being embroiled in a fight that had nothing to do with him, refused to speak to either of them.

This state of affairs eased off a little after a few days but they never got back to being quite as close as they had been before – not even when Millie Reid, the reason for their quarrel, bestowed her affection on the top boy who had been in her class at Drymill.

Henry and Maxie remained friends but it was a delicate, tenuous friendship which neither did anything to revive.

On his way home from The Doocot, Willie’s thoughts were in a slightly maudlin state although he certainly hadn’t drunk much. Even one dram seemed to have him feeling sorry for himself these days, that was the trouble. He had made a poor bargain, getting wed to Nessie Munro. She didn’t really care anything for him. She had led him to believe she did, but she had just been on the lookout for a man to keep her and had plumped for him. She had thought, with him having his own smiddy, that he was a wealthy man so she hadn’t got a great bargain either, now he came to dwell on it.

Their life together did have its compensations, of course, for she was a buxom woman who needed a man as much as he needed a woman. Unhappily for him, she held him to ransom at times, refusing him his rights if he did anything to annoy her. What was more, she picked on poor Abby, made her do all the chores and the cooking, while she, herself, stravaiged about the town with her friends. Strangely enough, she wasn’t as hard on Henry so that was one blessing.

Nessie wasn’t his only problem, though. His eldest daughter, Jeannie, twenty-four now, had been married for four years and was living in a tenement in Aberdeen’s George Street with her husband Pattie – a long streak of uselessness, to Willie’s way of thinking, not that he’d seen much of the man – and their daughter.

Bella, two years younger, was also in Aberdeen. She was also married but had beaten her sister by having two girls. Her husband seemed to be a hard worker, moving them out of their first home – a room-and-kitchen on the top floor of Black’s Buildings – within a year of their wedding. In her very
occasional letters, Bella wrote proudly of their cottage in Holburn Street, ‘a lovely area away from the dirty centre of the town’, and their garden, ‘big enough for the girls to take their friends in to play’. Willie’s only comfort from all this was that neither Jeannie’s man nor Bella’s had managed to make a son so they weren’t as good as he was.

Kitty was still single at eighteen. After working for a time in a draper’s shop in Aberdeen, she had found quite a good job in a hotel in Glasgow but was always too busy working – or so she made out – to come home.

Taking his silver watch from his waistcoat pocket, Willie gave a start. He hadn’t realised it was that late and he had best get a move on. There would be hell to pay if his wife got home before him.

Fourteen-year-old Abby Rae picked up another of her father’s socks and slid her left fist inside. She didn’t know how he did it but he always managed to get great holes where his big toes had poked through. It was just a matter of weeks since she finished knitting this pair and there was more darn than sock already. Giving a long sigh, she bit off another length of the wheeling wool and threaded the big eye of the darning needle.

Henry’s twelfth birthday was less than a month away and he had taken to going to the mart as often as he could, looking for a job, and she was really worried that he might get a fee. None of her sisters cared what happened to her. Jeannie and Bella had their own families to worry about now, God knows when they were here last, and Kitty said she couldn’t afford the fare to come home more than once or twice a year.

A lump of self-pity obstructed Abby’s throat for a moment. If Henry went away, she’d be left here on her own every day with Nessie! It would be worse than working for a mistress, not that she’d ever had that experience. She’d had little schooling since her father’s new wife moved in and she hadn’t been allowed to take a job when she was old enough. She’d been kept at home supposedly to look after her brother, though a hundred and one chores had fallen on her as time went by and
she hadn’t had the courage to complain. Nessie wasn’t the kind of person you could complain to. She was big, both lengthways and roundways, with a chest on her that would knock you flat if she turned round on you quick, a backside that made her long black skirt wobble when she walked, hair that was a yellowing-white like her teeth and her eyes …

Abby shivered. She couldn’t really describe the woman’s eyes. They were the darkest she had ever seen, almost jet black, and there was something in them that scared her, as if they held a threat. And yon big hands of hers always seemed to be ready to clout you round the lug if she wasn’t pleased, and it was difficult to know what it was that displeased her. Just the same, it was good to be able to sit quietly like this, knowing the woman had gone to visit her sick mother in Corrieben. Father had taken the chance to slip out for half an hour, for a breath of fresh air he said, but he’d likely be having a quick drink with his old cronies at The Doocot.

Henry was out as well – she was sure he was up to something. Nessie didn’t seem to mind
him
going out, Abby thought resentfully, but, the minute
she
said she would like an hour off, there was an almighty row. As far as she could see, the only way she would ever escape Nessie’s clutches would be to get wed to some suitable man as soon as she was sixteen. But how could she meet any men, suitable or not, if she was tied to the fireside like this?

Abby jumped nervously as the back door rattled but it was only her brother. ‘You’d best wash yourself and get up to your bed afore Nessie comes back,’ she warned him, noticing that his eyes were dancing with excitement.

He lifted his shoulders and tapped his nose, grinning secretively. ‘No, I’ve got something to tell Father and I want her to be here and all. I canna wait till morning to see her face.’

Abby’s stomach started to churn. She knew by his smug expression that, whatever he wanted Nessie to know, it was something she wouldn’t like and Nessie in a bad humour was … ‘D’you have to tell them tonight?’

‘Aye, I have.’ His smile broadened even further. ‘Ach, I’m
bursting to tell somebody. Jim Legge wants me to start at Craigdownie on Monday.’

It was worse than she thought. Telling Nessie that would be like throwing a lighted match into a barn full of hay – or worse, into a barrel of paraffin. ‘You’re not twelve yet, Henry, can you not just wait a while afore you …’

‘Craigdownie’s one o’ the best farms there is. If I say no this time, I’ll likely never get another chance.’

‘But it’s miles and miles – you’ll have to bide in.’

‘There’s a bothy for the single men.’

‘You’re not a man yet and, any road,
she’ll
not let you go.’

‘She canna stop me. She’s not my real mother.’