Читать книгу The Weatherhouse - Nan Shepherd - Страница 6

The name of Garry Forbes has passed into proverb in Fetter-Rothnie.

One sees him gaunt, competent, a trifle anxious, the big fleshy ears standing out from his head, the two furrows cutting deeply round from nostril to chin, his hands powerful but squat, gift of a plebeian grandfather, and often grimed with oil and grease—hardly a figure of romance. Of those who know him, to some he is a keen, long-headed manager, with a stiff record behind him in the training of ex-service men and the juvenile unemployed, tenacious, taciturn, reliable, with uncanny reserves of knowledge; to others, a rampageous Socialist blustering out disaster, a frequenter of meetings: they add a hint of property (some say expectations) in Scotland; to some he is merely another of those confounded Scotch engineers; but to none is he a legend. They are not to know that in Fetter-Rothnie, where the tall, narrow, ugly house of Knapperley is situate, his name has already become a symbol.

You would need Garry Forbes to you. It is the local way of telling your man he is a liar. And when they deride you, scoffing at your lack of common sense, Hine up on the head of the house like Garry Forbes and his twa fools, is the accepted phrase. As the ladies at the Weatherhouse said, A byword and a laughing stock to the place. And married into the family, too!