Читать книгу Land Of The Leal - James Barke - Страница 9

Andrew Ramsay had eight sons and four daughters. The eldest sons, Adam and Samuel, fished on Loch Ryan. Richard was sailing before the mast. Alexander was working a pair of horse with John MacMeechan of Achgammie. Bell was in service in Stranraer to Doctor Gebbie. Mary was cook to Achgammie. Sarah, at fourteen, was serving at the farm of Gowanlea near Portpatrick. John, aged twelve, was helping in the Achgammie byres. William, aged ten, was labouring in the Achgammie fields. Agnes, aged eight, was helping her mother. Peter, at six, did seasonal work in the fields. David, the youngest, at four— But what could a child of four do – even for the king of heaven?

This morning, as every morning, there was the breakfast to get ready: porridge. There were eight helpings of porridge to be on the table before five o’clock. And as Peter was ill with a bad cold there was nothing for it but that David would have to stir the porridge while Agnes greased the boots, set the table and engaged herself in odds and ends of early morning household tasks. Mrs. Ramsay never got up in the mornings now. The change of life was upon her and though she was thus relieved of further procreative labour she was exhausted and wearied to the point of death. And her husband never stirred from her side until the porridge was on the table and cool enough to be supped.

It fell to Agnes to wake the household. Had she slept in, the calling of her mother would have wakened her. But Agnes always wakened with a start about four o’clock. Always she was certain she had overslept and so bounded out into the middle of the floor.

The child had a pinched fear-drawn face. The terms of her duties and obligations, only part of the obligations she must pay back to her parents for the gift of life, had been carefully instilled into her from the moment she had ears to hear and sufficient comprehension to understand what was being said to her. She must work from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning till she closed them at night.

At eight years of age Agnes did not even question far less harbour any thoughts of rebellion against her lot. She might sleep in: the household might sleep in. The extent of such a possible disaster was beyond her imagination. But the possibility haunted her even in her sleeping hours so that she always awoke at the same hour and with the same nervous start.

But even when she was up, there was a lot might go wrong. It was not sufficient to be up. The porridge had to be made: her brothers wakened in time to dress and eat and be out of the house in time for Achgammie – for John MacMeechan was as hard and relentless a taskmaster as any to be found in the parish of Kirkcolm.

Barefooted and in her coarse shift, Agnes ran to the fireplace and saw with relief that there was still a red glow beneath the white ashes of the peats.

Pulling up her shift, for she had been carefully trained, the child knelt down and applied the bellows to the peats. She did not stop till tongues of bright flame leapt from the fresh peats.

Then she lifted the heavy cast iron porridge pot in which the oatmeal had been steeping from the previous night and hung it on the biggest hook on the chain. The effort took all her strength: her thin arms as they strained upwards seemed pathetically unfitted for the task and her calf muscles as she pressed upwards on her toes were gathered in a puny knot. She looked the more helpless and pathetic in the flickering light from the fire. Outside in the daylight she appeared wiry and strong – but with an aged look about her eyes that belied the innocence of her years and shewed clearly how much they lacked of tenderness.

Only when Agnes had the pot on the hook and was certain that the fire would burn could she snatch a moment to pull on her clothes. This did not detain her long. First a grey flannel petticoat with the edges scalloped in red wool; then over this her rough dress that had been handed down from Sarah; then a hessian apron of her mother’s that tied just under her armpits and above the faint outline of her breasts. She had a pair of boots and a pair of stockings – but they were only for church or for some rare occasion. As she ran about the house her bare toes slapped coldly the beaten earthen floor.

The moment she was dressed she ran to the door, slipped back the wooden bar noiselessly and ran round to the back of the house.

It was a cold November morning: the wind blew in from Loch Ryan, cold and salt-tanged. There had been much rain through the night but for the moment it was dry. She did not stay a moment longer than was necessary. But she looked across in the direction of the Achgammie cot-houses and was reassured to find that there were no lights shewing. She had not slept in.

Back she went to the fire and blew the peats to greater life with the bellows.

She was sorry for David. She went over to the bed. He had snuggled into the place she had vacated and was sleeping deeply and peacefully. She did not like to waken him. But there was Peter flushed and restless with a high temperature on him. There was the strict injunction of her mother not to waken him but to get David to stir the porridge. John or William lying at the top of the bed might have got up and stirred the pot. But then they had to go but to work and needed all the sleep they could get. From the side of her eyes she took a glance at her parents’ bed. She knew from the low and regular snore from her mother that she was asleep. And then she lifted David from the bed without wakening him and hugged him to her for a moment. She was wasting time! Picking up his clothes with her free hand she ran over to the fire with him. The boy wakened suddenly, his eyes wide open. He turned sharply in her arms and looked round him. Seemingly assured that he was in his own home he said:

‘I want back to my bed: it’s no’ time to get up yet.’

‘Wheesht, Dave. Do you mind what mither told you last night? You’re to steer the pot – Peter’s no’ weel. Come on now, son, and I’ll dress you.’

‘It’s no’ morning yet.’

‘Wheesht, now, or you’ll waken mither.’

The thought of wakening his mother was enough for the child. He allowed his sister to dress him with quick deft hands.

A gust of wind tore round the house and the rain spattered in the wide chimney. The child raised his eyes as the old white-washed guano bags rose and fell between the rafters in the draught, causing shadows to ripple across the billowing guano-sack ceiling.

‘There now, Davie son. Stand up here on the stool and steer the parritch like a wee man.’

She stood him on the bucket stool and put the wooden spurtle in his hand which was still the chubby dimpled hand of a child.

‘Steady yourself on the jamb o’ the fire, son, and watch and no’ coup yourself.’

But David’s wide eyes were already on the porridge that was beginning to bubble and splutter in the huge pot.

David was used to having his porridge at five – the hour was not an unearthly one for him. What was strange was being up before his father and his brothers, John and William. But now that he was up the sense and worth of his importance intrigued him. He didn’t want Peter to get better and so rob him of this new importance. He could stir the porridge all right – as good, if not better, than Peter. And surely he would win a word of commendation from his mother. Child he was indeed; but his child sense told him that his mother was not as she should be. For he was unable to get any response from his mother. She had neither the time nor the disposition to nurse him.

She had reared twelve children and buried three. She was already exhausted with the labour of child-bearing and the labour of nursing and mothering them. And only last year had she managed to free herself of the early morning rising and preparations for breakfast that had now fallen to Agnes.

The peats blazed and burned on the crude ribs of the fire and the porridge stottered and bubbled in the pot. David slowed in his stirring to watch the tiny craters erupt and the bubbles explode. He was fascinated. His world was a small, circumscribed, but active and populous one. From the moment he wakened till he went to sleep, usually exhausted, there was activity. The coming and going of his brothers and sisters; the endless coming and going of the hens, either to lay under the bed or to forage for crumbs and scraps; the wag at the wa’ clock with its swinging exposed pendulum and its weights and chains; the bucket stools constituting his toys when the most of his brothers and sisters were absent; the odds and ends of domestic lumber stacked about the four corners of the house.

But the gaunt and weary figure of his mother dominated his world. Her irascibility irritated and thwarted him. He carried his head on a tautened neck: tautened against the continual cuffs from his mother as he either got in her way or got into some mischief or other.

And his outside world? It lay in a little hollow in a dip towards the sea. From the doorway a rough pathway wound towards the cart-track to Achgammie farm, lying grey and dour among its bare stony fields. All around the house was rough pasturage and out-croppings of stone. There were no trees and the only cover the bare land provided was that of innumerable little whin-covered knolls. There was the garden: about a quarter of an acre of ground running from the back of the house. It also was bare and devoid either of flower or shrub.

The sea was at hand. But the heughs of the coast line were hard and cruel: the grey sea crashed and spumed on its crags. Even on the calm of a summer’s day the sough of it could be heard in the Suie; and after a storm the sea-foam would be flecked across the roof thatch.

The outside world was cold and menacing to David: he clung to the dim but more homely world of the cot-house. He was only beginning to recognise the bare outlines of his world: only beginning to cast child glances across its restricted boundaries: only beginning to glimpse its more distant horizons. He was beginning to realise that the water had to be carried in pails from Achgammie, three-quarters of a mile away. Only dimly beginning to realise that he had brothers who went out on the sea and sometimes brought back fish – and occasionally a crab for him to play with.

And yet already something of the slavery and cruel tyranny of the life around him had impressed itself upon him. He had already known the pain of hunger and cold and neglect. And his instinct for life had driven him to face and overcome his difficulties in his own child fashion. He supped the monotonous meals of porridge and brose with hungry avidity and would have supped more had there been more. Already he had begun to rely upon his own resources and avoid his mother.

But childlike, he was quickly able to forget pain and distress in the bliss of a happy moment. As he stirred the porridge by the warmth and comfort of the fire he forgot everything in the warmth of his own immediate happiness. Cold, wet, hunger; scoldings and cuffings were all forgotten: his parents, his brothers, his sisters were forgotten. The moment was timeless: without past or future – save perhaps, for the dim, unconscious anticipation of breakfast.

And then there came to Agnes’s olfactory sense the knowledge that the porridge, due to the lethargic and inadequate stirring of David, was burning. The realisation of such a major calamity and the dire consequence that would accrue from it, caused her to lose her control. She dropped the heavy boot she was greasing with pork fat.

‘Dave: the parritch’s burning!’

The shrill terror of her voice shattered David’s dreamworld. He started for an instant, lost his balance on the bucket stool and toppled into the fire. The high-pitched hysterical shriek of Agnes carried almost to Achgammie.

In a moment the house was in an uproar. Every one was out of their beds including Mrs. Ramsay and the child Peter. Agnes had rescued David even before her shriek died in her throat.

It was her father who took the child from her, called loudly for the castor oil and when it was brought to him applied it liberally to David’s abdomen, chest and left shoulder. Both his hands were blistered. John and William stood gaping at David: stood silent and almost imbecilic-looking in their coarse shirt-tails.

Across David’s crying and sobbing cut his mother’s scolding and bullying of Agnes, until she broke under the strain and commenced to cry. At this, her mother seized her thin arm, swung her round and rained blows on her head and back.

The wind, rising suddenly to an angry bluster, tore away from the thatch the cries of child-pain and fear and torment.

A light appeared in the kitchen at Achgammie: the dreaded signal that another day of toil had commenced.