My Friends the Miss Boyds Read online

  “See anything of Dick and Betsy, Janet?” Tom asked, coming to the gate and starting to fill his pipe.

  “They were west there in the whins a little ago,” I said, and stood up on the second-top bar of the gate. “Betsy! Cah-up! Dick, cah-up!”

  The two big Clydesdales came through the heather and between the trees towards us, their shiny necks arching, their manes tossing after their fine summer night spent among the fir trees of the home moor. Tom swung the gate open with me on the bar, and as Betsy came through she stopped and looked along her side as much as to say: ‘All right—climb on’, and I caught her springy mane and climbed on to her broad back. Dick tossed his head, did a little dance on his big hairy feet, gave a sprightly nicker and cavorted his way down the yard to the water trough, pretending to be dying of thirst and then blowing about at the surface of the water and not drinking at all.

  Tom gave him a slap on his shiny hip. “Be off to the stable with your capers!” he said. “A day at the hay will take some of the steam off ye!”

  “Ach, Tom!” I was finally disgusted. “You’re not going to start leading the hay?”

  “Aye, we are that.”

  “But, Tom, I have to go to the Miss Boyds! Who will tramp the stack?”

  “Granda and I will chust have to manage, I doubt,” said Tom.

  By this time Dick had cavorted his way past the stable door, through the gap between the granary and the cart-shed and was racing down the road, mane and tail flying, head tossing drunkenly in the summer morning breeze.

  “Dang it!” said Tom. “A person would hardly believe that that ould devil would caper like that and him six-year-old come the back-end.” He took off his old tweed hat and handed it to me when he had lifted me down from Betsy’s back. “Here—take this and go and get me a little oats from the barn. Oats! The ould devil!”

  Betsy, the orderly creature, went to her stall in the stable and began to champ away at her breakfast that lay in her manger while Tom and I went out to the north side of the steading. Dick, having come to a closed gate a hundred yards clown the road, was now dancing back uphill, for it was a fine morning and Dick did not want to go anywhere in particular—he merely wanted to dance a little. He was really a law-abiding, hard-working person, but some mornings are dancing mornings.

  “Come, lad,” said Tom in seductive tones, holding out the hatful of oats. Dick came close in, blew on the oats, savoured their smell and took himself a smart fouetté or two round the rim of the midden. “Come, there’s a clever fellow,” said Tom, when Dick paused to look back at us. Dick remembered the seduction of that smell, looked at the old hat which always held something good when offered to him, resisted temptation, tossed his head, bent down gracefully and bit a little at something on his off fore-leg and then looked away west at Ben Wyvis, as if contemplating a trip to a far country. “Bonnie lad!” said Tom, in the oily tones of the traitor. “Janet, look at Dick, the bonnie, clever fellow!”

  Almost against his own will Dick stepped daintily round the smooth grass edge of the midden towards the hat, and then, the smell getting the upper hand of him, plunged his muzzle into the oats. But the rope halter in Tom’s other hand was quicker than the plunge of that greedy muzzle.

  “Ye ould boogger!” said Tom and looked down at me. “Here, carry the hat, and not a word to your granny about me saying that word to Dick.”

  “Oh no, Tom,” I said in solemn promise, while I with the hat, Dick with his muzzle in the hat and Tom holding the halter made our way to Dick’s stall in the stable. I led the hat to the manger and transferred Dick’s muzzle from oats as bait to oats for breakfast, while Tom tied the rope of the halter to the hay-rack.

  “He’ll do now,” said Tom, sitting down on the chest at the end of the stalls. “Let them eat in peace and then we’ll put the harness on them. A person is always the better of a little peace before the harness.”

  This, dear reader, is how I was brought up, surrounded by ‘persons’, some two-legged, some four-legged, some having skin, some hide, some wool, some feathers, but all ‘persons’, and comments of the higher philosophical nature were part of the lives of these persons and me.

  “Tom, who is the Miss Boyds?”

  “That three ould maids that’s come to live for good now in that housie down near the Manse at Achcraggan,” said Tom.

  “But, Tom, what about them?”

  “About them?” said Tom thoughtfully. “Well, now, I don’t know that I know very much about them. Their father was ould Andra Boyd, the unctioneer o’ Inverness, as big a rascal as ever sold a pig.”

  I knew that what Tom called an ‘unctioneer’ was really an ‘auctioneer’, the big fat man with the red face that stood at the high desk in the sale ring and said: “Now, gentlemen, here’s a nice lot. Six stirks put in by Sandison, Reach-far. You all know Reachfar, and you never saw a bad beast come off it yet. Well, gentlemen, who’ll give me a start? What-am-I-bid-what-am-I-bid? Twenty-five? You are making chokes, Mr Anderson! Thirty, Mr Donaldson? Come, now! Thirty-five? Forty? Forty-five? Thank you, Mr Crombie—that’s fine for a start. Where are the gentlemen who know a cattle beast? Fifty? Thank you——”

  And as the heads nodded and fingers were raised on all sides of him his sharp little eyes saw everything and the voice spoke more and more rapidly until, as the bidding slowed down, it became softer in tone, insinuating, as the ‘unction’ flowed into it.

  “Now then, gentlemen, I see one or two here who know better than let this lot go past them! Come now—guineas, Sir Alex? Thank you? Well, you local gentlemen, is Sir Alex to get to take this lot away west the country there? Five more, Mr Crombie? Thank you!”

  There would be a glance towards where we sat, a nod from whichever man of my family was at the sale that day, and the hammer would fall. All ‘unctioneers’ were reputed to be rascals, so, so far, Tom had not told me much about the Miss Boyds.

  “Aye, ould Andra made a lot o’ money one way and another,” Tom continued, “and he built that housie down at Achcraggan there, and the wife and the bairns used to be coming to it for the holidays in the summertime. Then the second wife used to come too—she was a terrible silly craitur, the second wife, I mind.”

  “Tom, people don’t have two wives!” I protested. “They can’t. It’s against the law. My mother said so when I was reading about Bluebeard.”

  “It is not against the law if they’ll be having them chust the one at a time,” said Tom. “You see, with ould Andra it was this way: he got married and him and his first wife had three lassies and then the wife died. And then, a good whilie later, he got married to another wife and dang it if she didna have another three lassies!”

  “But that makes six Miss Boyds!” I said.

  “Aye, there’s six o’ them right enough, but it’s only the three old ones that’s down bye at the Miss Boyds, mostly. The younger ones is all working in this shoppie they have in Inverness, I think. Aye, they have quite a bittie money among them.” Tom rose from the chest and put his pipe in his pocket. “Well, it’s time I got them yoked,” he said, and took Betsy’s big collar down from its wooden peg on the wall.

  “Janet!” came the voice of my grandmother. “Janet!”

  “Here I am, Granny.” I ran along the yard to the home. ‘Poop to the Miss Boyds!’ I thought once more.

  “Come through here till I brush your hair,” said my mother.

  I followed her into her room on the ground floor. This was almost Too Much. It was the holidays, I had already brushed and plaited my hair that morning, and even although I did not make a very good job of it, I was not, after all, going to school. I was only going on an errand to these Miss Boyds. My mother undid the pig-tails, brushed the hair, re-parted it right into two halves, from the middle of my forehead to the middle of my nape, re-plaited each half and tied my school ribbons on the ends.

  “What’s that on your kimono?” she asked.

  My ‘kim-oh-no’ was the calico dress, of which I had half a dozen, made
like a sack with holes for my head and arms to go through and a belt tied round the middle. In summer I wore this and a pair of calico knickers underneath and nothing else. In winter I wore my ‘kim-oh-no’ on top of my woollen skirts and jerseys when I was at home.

  “Some of Dick’s slobbers,” I said. “Tom and me had quite a caper catching him this morning.”

  “Tom and I,” she said. “Run up to your room and put on a clean one, but wash your hands first.”

  When I had done What I Was Told, I said: “Mother, who are the Miss Boyds?”

  I do not know when I discovered—but it was fairly early in life—that if you made enquiries round all the members of my family on a subject you could often end up with quite a lot of information, and some of it contradictory, which was very interesting, and being committed to the Miss Boyds this morning, in any case, I might as well find as much interest as possible in them.

  “They are three very nice ladies who live in Achcraggan,” said my mother.

  “Tom says they are old maids.”

  “Maybe they are, but you and Tom mustn’t gossip. Now, go out to the milk-house and get the basket from Granny and off you go.”

  In addition to giving me the basket, my grandmother gave me a lot of instructions—to be careful this way and that way, to go ‘straight’ to the Miss Boyds, and to mind my manners when I got there, and off I went.

  * * * * *

  Once I was on my way down the hill I felt better. It was a beautiful day, and on a beautiful day it did not very much matter what you were doing as long as you were out in it. When you were carrying butter and eggs the thing to do was to look ‘far’. If you looked ‘near’, you might see all sorts of things that would cause you to put the basket down and have an even ‘nearer’ look, and, once you did that, you were no longer ‘going straight’, time simply disappeared, and when you returned to the basket the butter would be melting. I had a long experience of the tribulations that followed on ‘not going straight’ when doing an errand. So I looked ‘far’ as I went on a long north-easterly slant by moor and field paths down to Achcraggan, which was a little huddle of reddish houses around the crescent of a bay, with, on its east side, round a secondary little bay within the bay, a huddle of whitewashed houses which was the ‘Fisher Town’.

  The ships of the Fleet were lying in the Firth, swinging round on the tide, and the morning mail train to Wick was running along the north shore of the Firth like a little black caterpillar, giving off a plume as long as itself of white smoke. I wondered what a train was like when you were really close to it, for I had never seen a train nearer than this one was now. Probably, I thought, it would be bigger and longer than even Poyntdale’s ‘string’ of six pairs of horses and carts when they were all lined up nose to tail when the coal boat came in to Achcraggan.

  It was a wonderful thing when the coal boat came in, but it did not come until after the harvest and just before the winter, but everybody went to the coal boat. Poyntdale’s ‘string’, of course, was the big sight of the day, and always made me want to burst with pride because my father was responsible for it, although the horses and carts belonged to Sir Torquil Daviot. The big Clydesdales would be shining to the last hair, their manes and tails plaited and tied with golden straw, their harness glittering, their carts bright blue with red wheels and every cart with its brass plate gleaming the words ‘Sir Torquil Daviot. Poyntdale’. The next biggest string at the pier would be the five pairs whose brass plates said ‘Wm. Macintosh, Dinchory’, for which my uncle was responsible; but the best string of all, to my mind, was one of the smallest, the three carts behind Dick, Betsy and Dulcie, which were as smart as any with their brass plates saying ‘Sandison, Reachfar’ and were driven by my grandfather, Tom and me. That was what had happened last year. Before last year my grandfather had always managed two of the Reachfar carts, while Tom handled Dick, who never came down to the ‘County Road’ if it could be avoided, for he was a ‘hill person’ and did not like the sea and boats and a lot of strange people and horses all around him. Then last year Dulcie, the lighter mare who was used for the trap for church and for the smaller cart, was new, and none of us knew what she might feel about the coal boat either. So Tom said: “We’ll put the bairn on Betsy’s back and she’ll stand like a lamb. You’ll see.” My family was inclined to argue a little, but they ‘saw’. Betsy was the best-behaved horse person on the pier.

  Dominie Stevenson, the schoolmaster, always declared a special two-day holiday when the coal boat came in—unless the ‘tattie holidays’ were on, in which case we got a two-day extension. He did this because he was a clever man, who could always recognise a force greater than himself. None of the boys would come to school while the coal boat was in if they could help it; if forced to come to school they would learn nothing, and the girls were very little better. And if the ‘tattie holidays’ were on, nobody would dig and gather potatoes while the coal boat was in either. In addition, Dominie Stevenson loved beyond anything a convivial dram, and a convivial dram with a visitor from the big world outside was even better, so when the coal boat was in he, the doctor, Captain Robertson of Seamuir, my grandfather, Sir Torquil and a few other cronies formed a nucleus round the plush-covered table in the parlour of the Plough, at the head of which sat the captain of the boat, and round which eddied and flowed a vast number of more temporary visitors, such as my father, my uncle and all the farmers and crofters who had carts at the boat.

  The coal boat did not bring coal alone. Indeed, it was one of these miracles of country organisation, in which, probably, Sir Torquil had been the leading brain. The boat was a little tramp steamer, which was chartered for this trip to Achcraggan each year, her main cargo being the coal for the community, but she also carried the winter stocks for the grocer and general merchant, who was Miss Tulloch; for the drapery and general warehouse, who was Mrs Christie, and for the ironmonger and seed merchant, who was Mr Dickson. In addition to this she would have some barrels and cases of bottles for the Plough Inn; maybe a new binder or some other piece of equipment for one of the farms; and one time she brought a beautiful brass bedstead, with the mattress, pillows and blankets done up in a waterproof bale, which was a present to old Granny Macintosh from her son who was doing very well in the police force in Glasgow. The great thing about the coal boat was that you never knew just what she might bring, and the men who sailed her were an adventure in themselves, with their outlandish tongues that spoke in the accents of Aberdeen and Glasgow, while some of them were even Englishmen, and all of them with their rakish caps and their faces and hair salted by the sea.

  Although the boat only stayed in Achcraggan for three or four days, the work connected with her went on for about a week or ten days. The ‘clean’ cargo, like Granny Macintosh’s bed, was taken off first, and delivered amid much jollification and with a horde of children running alongside to Granny’s cottage by one of the bright clean carts with its proud horse in shining harness, and then the driver of the cart would give Granny’s daughter Jean a ‘bit hand’ to set the bed up and lift Granny, in her clean nightgown, mutch and shawl, into it. Then everybody would have a ‘droppie tea’, and the small boys, who were now all ‘holding the horse’ outside, would get scones and jam. Something like the bed occupied one man, one yoke and a dozen small boys for a whole morning, but in the meantime the other carts would be carrying the stocks for the shops. This was almost as leisurely as the business of the bed, for Miss Tulloch, Mrs Christie and Mr Dickson would all be dispensing some kind of hospitality to the men who delivered their goods. Tom and I usually made the delivery to Miss Tulloch, and she always had a big dram and water biscuits and a big hunk of cheese for Tom, and my portion was a big cube-shaped box of fancy biscuits, to sit beside on the counter, dig into and eat as many as I pleased, while some were also put in a bag to take away. And the horses had the broken biscuits that she had been saving for them for the last month or so.

  As soon as the clean cargo had been removed from the pi
er the coal would start ‘coming out’ and the excitement really set in, for the principle was to get as much coal as possible out into the carts and the ‘dump’ on the pier while the boat was riding on the high tide, for the time would come when, amid much shouting, she would blow her whistle and rush out to deeper water, to lie there and wait for the tide to fill again. The coal boat was a flighty difficult female who was understood only by her captain and the men who sailed in her, and we land-people with our horses and carts could not understand her mysterious sea-going needs and tantrums at all. Nor, apparently, could she understand us, and the effect that her capers might have on us.

  A year or two ago she chose the very moment when Johnnie Greycairn’s horse was right alongside her to blow her flighty whistle. Greycairn is a sheep croft, away in the hills, higher even than the marginal land of Reachfar, and Johnnie had only one little hairy horse and a small cart, but, as I said, everybody came to the coal boat, so Johnnie and his horse were there, although everyone knew that, in the end, one of Sir Torquil’s big strong horses would have to haul the few hundredweights of coal up to Greycairn, while Johnnie’s horse Diamond would act as a trace over the worst parts of the road. Diamond, being a very wild, remote, sheep-croft person, had his poor head in enough of a muddle seeing all these people and horses round him while chains rattled and coal dust flew, so when the boat blew her shrill whistle right in his ears he reared high in the air, shook off his master and dashed down the pier, dived off the end into the deep water, cart and all. Fortunately my Uncle George and some of the fishermen from the Fisher Town who were there were strong swimmers, and there was a throwing off of boots and coats and a dozen men were in the water around the struggling Diamond. The fishermen were as terrified of Diamond as Diamond was of the coal boat’s whistle, and would not have gone near him even on land, and Diamond, lashing his well-shod hooves about in the water, was no swimming companion for anyone, but, directed by my father from the pier, the fishermen supported the cart and tried to shove it shoreward against the tide while my uncle, with the help of his big clasp-knife, got Diamond free of his yoke. Suddenly a mighty cheer went up as Diamond and my uncle began to swim away westwards, leaving the fishermen with the cart; all the boys began to run westwards along the beach abreast of the man and horse in the water, whooping like Indians, and Johnnie Greycairn was dancing up and down on the pier shaking his fists at the coal boat and shouting: “Poor Dye-mon! It’s west at Inverness he’ll be with the fright that’s in him before Geordie catches him!” But even as Johnnie shouted, George was leading Diamond, still shuddering with fright, up the sand, and calling: “Come, Johnnie! Leave your cart and take Diamond home”, which Johnnie did, but not before he had told the coal boat and her crew what he and Diamond, individually and collectively, thought of them.