My Friends the Miss Boyds Read online

  Jane Duncan

  MY FRIENDS

  THE MISS BOYDS

  IN MEMORY

  of my best and finest friend

  A. C.

  who died on 22nd March, 1958

  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Jane Duncan

  Part I

  MY FRIEND Monica has a small daughter called Janet-Lydia, known to her intimate friends as Jay-ell, who between the ages of four and five worried her parents a good deal by her preoccupation with the word ‘house’. Jay-ell refused to accept a great number of words common in the English language, and replaced them by ‘house’ words of her own construction. A matchbox was a ‘matches house’, a handbag a ‘money house’ inside which there might be a ‘lipstick house’, the stable was a ‘horse house’, and the cutlery drawers of the sideboard were ‘spoon houses’. The principle seemed to be that any container for anything was a ‘house’, so that a book was a ‘story house’, which led to the complication of a ‘story houses’ house’ for bookshelf, and Jay-ell would invite you, if she liked you, to ‘let a story out of its house’ for her at bedtime, and at the end would say: “Finished now. Put it back in the house for next time.” With which you had to close the book.

  “She must be made to stop it,” Monica would say. “Drives me mad—it’s so unnatural. You’d think I had been frightened by a house before she was born!”

  Shortly after she was five Jay-ell ‘stopped it’, and began to refer to stables, matchboxes and handbags like everyone else, but it is my private belief that she has never really ‘stopped it’ at all, that she never will ‘stop it’ and that in the private part of her mind she will still, as a very, very old woman, use the word ‘house’ in a thousand unorthodox ways. Thought language can be entirely different from the language spoken aloud between two people—the words can have different meanings, different connotations, significances entirely personal to the mind that is using them. ‘House’ for Jay-ell has a thought meaning, probably, that she may never disclose to another person, partly because she may be shy of disclosing it and partly because she may never be completely aware that it has a special thought-meaning for her at all.

  I am fortunate enough to be a partner in a marriage in which, in slang parlance, ‘anything goes’—by which I mean that there are not, between my husband and myself, any concealments of deed or feeling, any restrictions of thought or speech, any guardedness of opinion or expression, and one day, after I had described something as ‘old-maidish’, he said to me: “Just what do you mean by old maid, old-maidish? You apply it in so many ways, to so many different things, that it certainly doesn’t have the conventional meaning for you, and I’m starting to wonder if you know yourself what you mean by it.”

  I could not answer this question straight away, any more than could Jay-ell, at the age of four, have told, you in concise terms what significance the word ‘house’ had for her, and, very much as Jay-ell might have done, I stared at my husband, waved my hands about in a gormless way and said: “Oh, you know—just old-maidish!” The more basic a thing is, the more difficult it is to describe or explain. My dictionary, which is a very good one, deals with the unlikely word ‘bdellometer’ (look it up for yourself) in four lines, but requires no less than eighty-four lines to deal with the word ‘be’ and another thirty-three lines to deal with ‘be-’ used as a prefix. ‘Old-maidish’, occupying as it does a basic place in my thought structure, was, therefore, difficult for me to explain, and it took me a long time to decide precisely, for my own information, what the word connotes for me.

  This word is one that, for me, has become a victim of transference of meaning—it is a displaced person of a word. In my mind it is not descriptive of an unmarried woman, or of any woman at all. No. For me it is descriptive of the ugly, spiteful things that ‘They’—that monster that is always speaking out of turn and usually thoughtlessly and cruelly—say about unmarried women. In other words, ‘They’, in its remarks about unmarried women, is what I call ‘old-maidish’. The word conjures up for me a thoughtless social attitude, a cruel mental climate and a lack of human kindness that are utterly repugnant to me in their smug complacency, their inhuman cruelty and their mindless and heartless insensitivity. The ‘old-maidish’ remark is, for me, the smug or cruel or scornful or patronising comment, made out of sheer malice, where no effort at understanding has been made, and its main characteristic is that it should, in human decency, have been left unsaid.

  This story that I am going to tell you about My Friends the Misses Boyd will show you, I hope, why the term ‘old maid’ has such a thought structure in my mind, for the phrase is tied up inextricably with things I saw and heard and felt at an age when the perceptions are still groping among the wonders of the great world and yet, when an impression is received, it is very sharp and indelible.

  At the time when the events which I shall try to describe took place I did not know what I thought about the Misses Boyd or the community in which they and I lived. Now, forty years later, I know what I think of the community, although the Misses Boyd remain, as all human beings do, an unsolved mystery.

  And now, if the gentleman who is setting this up for printing will kindly let us have a row of asterisks to denote a gap in time—just here, thank you—

  * * * * *

  —I will begin my story.

  In my young days there was a class of women known as ‘old maids’, or, if you like, once upon a time there was a class of women known as ‘old maids’, for now, in the late 1950’s, the very name has about it the fairy-tale atmosphere that hangs about poor swineherds, princesses and other romantic figures that are dying away in our mundane times. Mark you, in the days when old maids still existed they were regarded by the general run of people as the very opposite of romantic, but that is part of the general shortsightedness that is part of the character of every age. There is always a prevailing belief that to be romantic or interesting in any way at all a thing or a person has to be unusual or different, but, in my opinion, this is a mistaken belief. The commonest, most everyday thing becomes interesting and even romantic if you take the time to look into it.

  Now I, probably, would never have thought of looking into the question of the Miss Boyds at all—and although ‘the Misses Boyd’ may be more correct, they will be referred to throughout this story as ‘the Miss Boyds’—but for the fact that I happened to be born in the year 1910 at Reachfar in Ross-shire, which is a quiet unhurried part of Britain which gives people time for looking into things, and I happen to be by nature a bit of a looker-in to what are probably unconsidered trifles to other people. At least, that is the sort of person that people tell me I am. For myself, I do not agree. My own contention is that, left to myself, there are dozens of things I would never have looked into at all had they not been thrust upon me as, we are told, some people have Greatness thrust upon them. The time when the Miss Boyds were first thrust upon me was the year 1918, the place was my home, Reachfar, and I was eight years old, which is where this story really starts.

  As this story deals mostly with things that happened when I was between eight and nine years old, and the happenings are told as I saw them and understood them, I may as well tell you now that I was no infant prodigy. You will not find in this chronicle any startling revelations of an unusually brilliant child mind surveying its world, or anything of that sort. No. In sober fact, I think I was rather a slow-witted child although what was known as ‘clever at the school’. This may be because I did not have any of the kindergarten play-therapy practised on me which is so common nowadays, for in my family there was no money to spare for ‘toys and such-like capers’. I do not mean that we lived in dire poverty—far fro
m it—but the view taken was that a normal child would play, anyhow, and that it was no more necessary to provide things for it to play with than it was to provide special equipment to make the lambs, calves and foals skip about the fields. The way to deal with a child, my family thought, was to stop it playing to excess and try to turn its energies into sensible, useful channels. My family found this quite difficult enough, without providing any special playing equipment. I cut a piece of the plough reins to make a skipping-rope and skipped when I was supposed to be cleaning the henhouse; and I dressed Chickabird, my pet hen, in my grandmother’s sun-bonnet and let her walk about the yard in it, so that my uncle said: “It made a fair ruination of the Ould Laddy’s bonnet but you couldna but laugh when she wasna looking.”

  The women of the tight little community of the village down on the shore of the Firth used to ask me periodically if I ‘never thought long up on that hill with no other bairns to play with’, and when they asked me such questions I used to think to myself that the village people in general must be weak-minded. I had never ‘thought long’, wearied or felt bored in my life. I am now of the opinion, in my maturity, that there was indeed a weakness in the reasoning of the village women when they said there were no other ‘bairns’ at Reachfar, for youth of mind has little relation to years of age, and I had two companions at home, then, in Tom and George—the former our handyman and the latter my uncle who did not like the title of ‘uncle’—who had never lost their youth of mind, and now, forty years later, have still not lost it.

  Instead of being given toys, then, I was given animals, which carried with them a responsibility from me to them. My nursemaid was my dog Fly, and as soon as I could carry her dish I had to feed her myself every dinnertime. I had Chickabird, my hen (really a series of hens), who hatched a flock of chickens each spring—I had to attend to their going out, their coming in and their feeding. I had a pet lamb every year—I had to see that he was fed and kept out of mischief and see that he was safely in the Little Fieldie with his triangular wooden collar on before I left for school. Someone once gave me an albino rabbit in a hutch which I did not like very much—although white, it was part of the family of vermin which Fly, Angus my ferret and I killed all the time. I neglected to keep it clean, and my father took it up on the moor and set it free. If a thing was mine I had to look after it or it was mine no longer.

  I had, too, opportunities to earn pennies to put in Mr Foster’s bank in the village that they might save and multiply in case I did well enough at school to be able to ‘go on to the Higher Eddication’. My grandfather would pay a halfpenny per half dozen for rabbits, a penny a tail for rats and twopence a tail for moles (he had a particular hatred for moles) if Fly, Angus and I would catch them. I would be given a setting of duck or turkey eggs and a mother hen in the spring and be allowed to sell the production in the village at Christmas if I looked after them and got them good and fat—the food for them was free. But If I neglected them, even for a day, they were put with the general flock and I had lost the trouble and work I had put into them as well as all prospect of the money for them. My father, my uncle and Tom would pay twopence a week each to have their working boots cleaned for six days of the week—cleaning materials were free. But that was sixpence for eighteen pairs of boots, which would be turned back to me if the job was not up to standard with the words: ‘Do it right or don’t do it at all!’

  Although there was no money to spare for ‘toys and nonsense’, there was always enough for plenty of books and writing materials, wool for knitting and cloth and thread for sewing, and my young aunt, in secret, would pay a farthing-for-small and a halfpenny-for-big for darning the holes in the heavy woollen socks that our menfolk wore. These occupations were all largely winter ones, for we were out-of-doors and busy as long as it was light in the fine weather, but the reading and writing went on on Sundays all through the year. The reading and writing had the approval of one and all as a pastime and every one of my family took an interest in it. Reading, writing and ‘the areeth-met-ic’ were, you see, the basis of that Tremendous Thing, ‘the Higher Eddication’, which was now open to people of only average ability even, and at small cost. This was a modern miracle, and, as such, put the reading, writing and areethmetic on the level of the holy things, like going to church, psalm-singing, Bible-reading and other practices which were permissible on the Lord’s Sabbath Day. Money spent on a ‘useless toy’ would have been a Sinful Waste, but money spent on books, paper, pencils and the material of ‘the Eddication’ was of the same character as money put into the collection plate at church on Sunday. It was money dedicated to a God of whom nothing but good could come. Until this day and age no child born on the harsh ground of Reachfar had had what my grandmother called a ‘right chance’, but the millennium was now here, and ‘the Bairn’, as I was called mostly, was to have that ‘chance’ which had been withheld from her forebears. As I have said, I was not a brilliant child, but from my earliest days I was aware of my opportunity, was grateful to my family for it, and repaid them by trying, even at eight years old, to maintain the standards they had set for me.

  This then, in 1918, was the background of my life at our croft of Reachfar—in modern agricultural terms, our marginal smallholding of Reachfar—the home of my family, where lived, in order of seniority of age, my grandfather, my grandmother, Tom, my father, my Uncle George, my mother, my Aunt Kate and me, but, as you may know, age has nothing to do with command, and the Reachfar strength was commanded, in the main, by my grandmother, who, strangely, could be brought to question and sometimes even overruled only by the most unexpected members of my family, namely, my gentle, delicate, dark-haired mother with the beautiful soft eyes, and my tall, silent, white bearded, eagle-nosed grandfather.

  Reachfar was a busy place. My father and my uncle, at that time, did not work our own land, for my father was grieve—a sort of farm manager—to Sir Torquil Daviot of Poyntdale, our neighbour on the north march, and my uncle was grieve to Mr Macintosh of Dinchory Farm, our neighbour on the west march. My grandfather, who was about sixty-five, and Tom, who was about fifty (I think), worked the ground of Reachfar, and my grandmother and my aunt did the milking, the churning, the cooking, the baking, the cleaning and hen- and pig-feeding and a thousand other things. My delicate mother did the sewing, the light weeding in the flower garden, most of the letter-writing to the members of the family overseas, and generally kept the peace. I did What I Was Told, mostly, and when I did not I got into Bother. As I remember it all, Bother in a variety of different forms caught up with me fairly often.

  I am now quite an old woman, but a thing I have never come to understand is how Bother can catch up with one out of a clear blue sky, as it were, in a most unexpected way, and how it is usually generated into one’s ambient atmosphere through somebody or something with whom or with which one did not realise that one had any connection at all. For instance, the Miss Boyds, whom I did not even know when I turned eight years old, were destined to cause me Bother in what My Friend Martha would call No Ordinary Quantity at one time and another during my life.

  At the end of June 1918 my school, which was the village school at our village of Achcraggan, down on the shore of the Firth, ‘came out’ for the summer holidays. I liked school very much, but I also liked my home at Reachfar, and I looked forward to being at home for the holidays, because I had so many things to do. I had all sorts of special places to visit, like the newt pool in the old quarry, Donald the Trout’s pool in the Reachfar Burn, the pond in the moor where the double buttercups grew, the Waving Tree to climb and the Thinking Place to crawl into. In addition to these things, I had a certain amount of reading to do; a poem or two to write; probably, if the feeling came over me, rabbits, rats and moles to catch; and, of course, I would have to do the million-and-one errands that my grandmother was always requiring to have done. At the age of eight I was sure that there was no other person in the Whole Wide World with so many errands needing doing as my grandmother.
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  Usually for the first few days of the holidays her requirement for errands to be done was less great, but not this holiday apparently, for after Prize Day on Friday she allowed only Saturday and then Sunday to elapse—and Sunday did not count because errands never got done on Sundays—and at six o’clock breakfast on Monday morning she said: “Oh, and Janet—don’t you go off hiding in some hole this morning. I want you to run down to the Miss Boyds with that butter and eggs they asked for.”

  “I don’t know any Miss Boyds, Granny,” I said, knowing as I said it that it was within an inch of being a Back Answer.

  “Then you’ll never be younger to learn,” said my father in a voice that indicated that I had come too close to giving a Back Answer at that. “Just you be here when Granny needs you, Janet,” and he and my uncle went off to work.

  In silence I mixed the oatmeal, salt and water and went off up the yard with Fly to feed Chickabird and her chickens, and, when out of earshot of the house, I told Fly and Chickabird, in so far as I could find the words, just what I thought of the Miss Boyds. Not that I knew much about them. In fact, now that I came face to face with them in my mind, while outwardly I was face to face with Fly’s intelligent golden eyes and enquiring cocked ears, all I knew about the Miss Boyds was that there were several of them, known collectively as ‘the Miss Boyds’, and that they lived in a biggish house, inside a wall, down in Achcraggan, and that this house was called ‘the Miss Boyds’. So after I had used up my two ‘swear words’ and had said “Och, poop to the Miss Boyds” and “Ach, dirt on the Miss Boyds” several times, Fly seemed to lose interest, so I left her and went to sit on top of the moor gate and apply my swear words to butter and eggs and errands in general.

  All the way to Achcraggan, I thought. It was nearly four miles there and nearly another four back and all right for a sensible purpose like school, but a Bother to do for the sake of these Miss Boyds. And butter and eggs! Just about the worst basketful a person ever had to carry! The slightest jolt and an egg would crack, the slightest knock and the thistle print on the butter would be blurred in outline. And on a Monday! Why couldn’t the Miss Boyds have had their butter and eggs delivered on Friday when Tom went down with the trap to deliver butter and eggs to the Dominie, the minister and Miss Tulloch’s shop? Poop to the Miss Boyds!