Ann and Her Mother

by O. Douglas

CHAPTER VI

November is a poor time to go to a new place, and Kirkcaple certainly looked a most unattractive part of the world when we arrived on a cold, wet afternoon. 'The queer-like smell' from the linoleum factories, the sea drearily grey and strange to my inland eyes, the drive through narrow streets and up the steep Path, past great factories and mean houses, until we reached the road, knee-deep in mud, where the Manse stood, combined to depress me to the earth. It might have been infinitely worse. I saw that in the light of the next morning. There was a field before the Manse, and though there was a factory and a rope-work and a bleach-field and a coal-pit all in close proximity to it, there was also the Den, where hyacinths grew in spring, and where you could dig fern roots for your garden. The Manse itself stood in a large garden, and in time we forgot to notice the factories. The people were very unlike the courteous Inchkeld people—miners and factory workers, who gave one as they passed a Jack's-as-good-as-his-master sort of nod. We grew to understand them and to value their staunch friendship, but at first they were as fremt as the landscape.

"When the cab lurched through the ruts to the Manse gate and I got out and saw my new home I quailed. From the front it was a gloomy-looking house—one window on each side of the front door, and three windows above, and the kitchen premises on one side. There was a wide gravelled space in front, with a small shrubbery to shelter us from the road. It was a sombre and threatening place to enter on a dark night, and when alone I always made a mad rush from the gate to the front door. One night when I reached my haven I found a tall man standing against it. I had hardly strength to gasp, 'Who are you?' and the man replied, 'Weelum Dodds. I cam' to see the minister aboot gettin' the bairn bapteezed, but the lassie wadna open the door.' I had told the servants, who were young girls, to keep the chain on the door at night, and the poor patient soul had just propped himself up against the door and awaited developments.... The back of the house, looking to the garden, was delightful. You don't remember the garden?"

"Don't I?" said Ann. "I was only about nine when we left Kirkcaple, but I remember every detail of it. Just outside the nursery window there was a bush of flowering currant. Do you remember that? And jasmine, and all sorts of creepers grew up the house. There was a big square lawn before the window, rather sloping, with two long flowerbeds at the top and herbaceous borders round the high walls. Our own especial gardens were at the top of the kitchen garden. Mark had a Rose of Sharon tree in his garden about which he boasted; it seemed to set him a little apart. I had a white lilac tree in mine; Robbie, severely practical, grew nothing but vegetables, while Jim, when asked what his contained, said simply and truthfully, 'Wurrums.' Rosamond was a tiny baby when we left Kirkcaple, and the little lad knew only Glasgow. It was surely a very large garden, Mother? The gooseberry bushes alone seemed to me to extend for miles, and in a far-away corner there was the pigsty. Why was it called 'the pigsty'? In our day there was never anything in it but two much-loved Russian rabbits with pink eyes, Fluffy and Pluffy. I have a small red text-book in which, on a certain date, is printed in large round hand:

'This day Fluffy died.
" " Pluffy " '

A ferret got in and sucked their blood. What a day of horror that was! The roof of the pigsty sloped up to the top of the wall, and we liked to sit on the wall and say rude things to the children on the road, they retorting with stones and clods of earth. We were all bonnie fighters. You had no notion, you and Father, when we came down to tea with well-brushed hair and flannel-polished faces, of the grim battles we had just emerged from. The enemy was even then at the gate. We, with ears to hear, knew what sundry dull thuds against the front door meant. Marget, wrathful but loyal, wiped away the dirt and said nothing to you—lots to us, though! ... But I'm getting years ahead. You were just arriving with baby Mark to an empty, echoing Manse, through ways heavy with November mud. Sorry I interrupted."

"As to that," said her mother, "I was really just talking to myself. It is good of you to listen to my maunderings about the past."

"Not at all," Ann said solemnly; and then, "You daft wee mother, now that courtesies have been exchanged will you go on with that Life of yours? It will take us years at this rate. What happened when you tottered into the Manse? Did you regret the little sunny, bow-windowed Manse in Inchkeld?"

"Regret! I ached for it. I couldn't picture us being happy in this muddy mining place; I couldn't see this bare barracks ever getting homelike. But it was a roomy house. The dining-room was to the right of the front door, the study to the left, and the nursery was on the ground floor, too. They were all big square rooms: the dining-room was cosy in the evening but rather dark in the day time; the study was a very cheerful room, with books all round the walls, and a bright red carpet, and green leather furniture."

"And a little square clock," Ann added, "with an honest sort of face, and a picture of John Knox, long white beard and all, above the mantelpiece, and the carpet had a design on it of large squares; I know, for I used to play a game on it, jumping from one to another. Some deceased elder had left to the Manse and to each succeeding minister a tall glass-doored bookcase containing, among other books, a set of Shakespeare's plays illustrated. It was funny to see how the artist had made even Falstaff and Ariel quite early Victorian—and as for merry Beatrice I think she wore a bustle! Not that it worried us; we were delighted with his efforts ... and in that glass-doored bookcase there stayed also a very little book dressed in fairy green, with gilt lettering on its cover. I have tried for years to find another copy, but I have nothing to go on except that it was a very tiny book and that it contained fairy tales, translations from the German I think, for it talked in one of a king lying under the green lindens! I thought linden the most lovely word I had ever heard! it seemed to set all the horns of Elfland blowing for me. One of the stories must have been Lohengrin, there was a swan in it and 'a frail scallop.' How I wept when it appeared for the second time and took the knight away for ever! I loved Germany then because it was the home of green lindens and swans with scallops, and houses with pointed roofs and wide chimneys where storks nested. Even in the war I couldn't hate it as much as I ought to have done, because of that little green book.... But we're straying again, at least I am.... You got to like the house, didn't you?"