Fergus Lamont Read online

  No neighbours had called to say they were glad she was back, not even the Strathglasses or the Kerrs who lived on our landing. Everybody seemed sorry for me, instead of being pleased. My Aunt Bella had seized me by the jersey in the street and demanded that I go and stay with her. I had indignantly refused, though I liked my Uncle Tam and his pigeons. Aunt Bella was the one who, after my grandfather, hated my mother the most.

  ‘If you go away again,’ I said, ‘take me wi’ you.’

  She considered it for half a minute, a long time.

  ‘We’ll see, Fergie. Let’s try on the kilt, shall we?’

  ‘Oh, a’ right.’

  With a groan I took off my breeks. I placed them where they would be quickly available if I lost my nerve.

  Eagerly she wrapt the kilt round me.

  To my relief it was too long.

  ‘Kneel,’ she said.

  ‘Hae I to pray?’

  ‘I doubt if that would help much, Fergie. Soldiers kneel, you see, to find out what’s the right length. The edge should just touch the ground.’

  When I knelt the kilt lay in folds on the floor.

  ‘That’s easy mended.’ She tugged the waist up to my neck almost.

  ‘I can hardly breathe.’

  She buckled it there.

  ‘Your jersey will cover it. Look. What a pity you’ve not got a tweed jacket and a sporran and green stockings.’

  ‘I’m glad I havenae.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You look braw.’

  I thought I looked a terrible Jessie. They were sure to laugh at me. Except Smout, maybe. He would be too ashamed of the holes in his breeks. To hide them he stood against walls or lampposts or dustbins or even big dogs.

  Looking in the mirror, my mother put on her feathered hat, lilac in colour to match her costume. She dabbed scent behind her ears. I liked its smell, but I suspected it was one of the things about her that angered the women of our street. I wished she hadn’t put it on, but I would have died rather than beg her not to.

  She noticed my anxiety. ‘Well, if we’re going to be gathering dung we’ll need something nice to drown the smell.’

  Where had she been, I wondered, miserably, that she hadn’t learned there was nothing nasty about the smell of horses’ dung, even when it was fresh?

  TWO

  Because I was nervous and my pintle felt chilly and unhar-boured, I was no sooner out of the door than I needed to pee. I tried to find out if I could hang on till I reached my grandfather’s cottage where there was an inside toilet and it could be done in comfort and safety. I decided that if the circumstances had been ordinary I could have waited, but not if I was likely to be given frights and shocks, because of the kilt and because too of the animosity of neighbours towards my mother.

  ‘No sense in being uncomfortable,’ she said coolly. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

  My grandfather didn’t get home from his work till nearly six. It was just past four now.

  Because I was myself wearing a garment too bright and splendid for those dark brown walls and grey stone stairs it struck me more forcibly than ever how out of place my mother was. The idea of someone so beautiful and delicate having to use our lavatory seemed to me awful. Twelve people used it. Sometimes the seat was wet.

  There is a magic in courage. My mother went down those stairs as if they were of white marble, and stopped outside the lavatory door as if inside was a magnificent room with carpets and chandeliers.

  It was snibbed. I sniffed. There was the smell of tobacco smoke. Old Mr Strathglass was inside. He never hurried. I heard him farting.

  Shame made my need more urgent. I began to groan.

  ‘We’ll try the one below,’ said my mother.

  I was aghast. Did she not know that in our street, in our tenement, as in all the streets and tenements round about, no trespass was condemned more vociferously than using another landing’s lavatory? The one below ours too was Mrs Grier’s, the woman I feared most among all our neighbours.

  It was open and empty. It stank of piss. The cistern roared. The small window was broken. There was shitty paper on the floor.

  ‘Delightful,’ said my mother. ‘But in you go. Hold up your kilt.’

  She closed the door on me and stood guard outside.

  I was in such a panic-stricken hurry I wet the tail of the kilt. When I came out I had another need even more desperate: this was to get away before Mrs Grier or one of her spies discovered what I had done.

  Luckily we met no one on the stairs, but when we went through the close to the backcourt there, near our coal cellar door, in the sunshine, among the washing, with their feet in dusty dandelions, were Mrs Grier herself and two of her most frightening cronies, Mrs Leitch and Mrs Lorimer.

  Rather than pass that fearsome trio I would gladly have given up the dung-gathering, but my mother took me by the shoulder and marched me right past them.

  These were women I had never got to know. I had not been inside their houses. Their children were all grown up. They couldn’t have been more than fifty, but to me and my friends they were sinisterly old.

  Mrs Leitch was hump-backed, with a twisted nose that made her speech snuffy. Her nickname was Mrs Sneuch-Sneuch.

  ‘Michty-me, Fergie,’ she cried, with a snuffly giggle, ‘is that the bumbee tartan?’

  I nodded politely. I was busy trying to open the coal cellar door.

  The second of Mrs Grier’s companions was fat Mrs Lorimer. By herself she was amiable and harmless enough, but when showing off to Mrs Grier she could be horrible. Once she had thrown a handful of clothes pegs at Mrs McGuire, and called her a Papish cunt, just for using Mrs Grier’s clothes pole.

  Now she waddled up to us and spat in my mother’s face.

  Later in my life I was to see men’s guts spilled about their feet and their heads blown off, but those sights did not dismay me, with a sense of unconquerable evil, as much as that big spittle sliding down my mother’s cheek.

  With a proud smile my mother wiped it off with her handkerchief, which she then flung to the ground. A sparrow, thinking it might be bread, hopped up to take a look at it.

  In my misery I wished I was a sparrow, with sparrows for my mother and father and grandfather and neighbours.

  At last I had the coal cellar door open. I dragged my barrow out. I was very proud of it, but that afternoon I didn’t care if its red and white paint got covered in coal dust. Into it I flung the rusty shovel I used for dung-gathering.

  What I was waiting for, in dread, then happened. Slow and splay-footed, Mrs Grier approached us. She was big-headed and thick-throated, with a hairy mole on her chin: my friends and I called it her devil’s spot. She had shaggy grey hair. She wore a red blouse with a hole at the left oxter: grey hairs could be seen.

  ‘Whaur are you gaun wi’ the barrow, Fergie son?’ she asked. The braw barrow your faither made wi’ his ain guid honest hands.’

  As always, I distrusted her kindness. She was the wolf dressed up as grandmama.

  ‘I’m going to gether dung,’ I replied, ‘for my grand-faither’s roses.’

  ‘Are they rid, your grandfaither’s roses?’

  ‘Some are rid. Some are white and yellow.’

  ‘I’m thinking nane are as rid as a face no’ a spittle’s cast awa’ should be wi burning shame.’

  At first I thought she meant my own face. Certainly it felt hot and red.

  ‘Bring us some dung, Fergie,’ said Mrs Lorimer, ‘and we’ll chuck it at this shameless whure, your mither.’

  ‘Whure’ was a word heard often enough in our district, applied to rainy weather, a marble that stopped short of the hole, a quoit that fell in the wrong place, a horse that hadn’t won. Sometimes, with ‘wee’ in front of it, it was used to denote exasperated affection. But mostly it was a term of abuse. I objected strongly to its being applied to my mother, by a stupid fattie like Mrs Lorimer.

  ‘It’s you that’s an auld whure,’ I yelled, ‘a fat auld whure.’
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  I rushed off with my barrow and almost crashed into a clothes pole.

  My mother overtook me in the close. She was panting. It was me she was angry at.

  ‘Don’t ever let me hear you say a word like that again. Do you hear?’

  ‘But she spat on you!’

  I was to be tormented in nightmares by that spit.

  ‘They’re dirt, not worth bothering about.’

  I didn’t understand. I was more than willing to hate them for what they had done to her, but I couldn’t see how they could be dirt if they lived in Lomond Street, in our building in fact. If they had lived, say, in Davidson’s Vennel, where the houses were slums, then of course they would be dirt. On Sundays Mrs Grier wore a hat, not such a fancy one as my mother’s, but fancy enough. The women of the Vennel wore shawls even on Sundays.

  ‘You shouldn’t be living in this horrible place,’ said my mother. ‘You should be living in a castle.’

  I liked the idea of living in a castle, but I couldn’t agree that the close was a horrible place. It was washed twice a week. Mrs McNair who lived on the ground floor was very particular. She decorated the stone floor with pipeclayed squiggles. On rainy days I had played happily at marbles or ludo in this close. Mrs McNair didn’t allow football.

  Through the close lay the street. I could hear the cries of girls playing. Jessie McFadyen was sure to be among them. She was daft enough, and fond enough, to want to feel my kilt. I hoped Peggy Maitland, my cousin, was there too. She would restrain Jessie.

  ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ asked my mother. ‘Forward march.’

  Her voice was so hoarse it frightened me. So did her eyes. They were like blue glassies. They reminded me of my grandfather’s. His went like this when he was talking about boys that swore, men that got drunk, women that had babies but weren’t married (like Katie Murdoch up the close next to ours) and, especially, Roman Catholics.

  Spitting on my palms, as I had seen workmen do, I grabbed the shafts of my barrow and wheeled it through the close on to the street.

  The girls were playing peaver on beds chalked on the pavement right in front of the closemouth. Jessie McFadyen was among them.

  They let her play out of kindness. She spoiled every game she took part in. If it was peaver, she hopped on all the wrong squares; if it was skipping ropes she got them fankled round her neck. She was soft in the head. Everybody said it was a pity, for with her long fair hair and big blue eyes she was the prettiest girl in the street. Usually, though, as now, she had a snotter at her nose. She was in my class at school. When Miss Cochrane took us out into the playground to play games, like ring-a-roses, Jessie would take nobody’s hand but mine.

  First to notice me, she screamed and clapped her hands.

  The other girls, including Peggy, were pleased too. They gathered round me.

  ‘Oh, Fergie, you’re a real braw wee kiltie!’

  ‘Whaur’s your sporran but?’

  ‘And your Glengarry, wi’ a feather in it?’

  ‘Are you going to learn to play the bagpipes, Fergie?’

  But it was really my mother they were interested in. They kept glancing up at her: Peggy Maitland, especially.

  I knew Peggy well. My father paid her a sixpence a week to take me to school in the mornings, and after school to escort me to my Aunt Bella’s, where I stayed till my father came home from work. She was saving up to buy a new dress: she had showed it to me in a shop window in Main Street. She was thin, with pimples on her face.

  She bent down and hugged me.

  ‘I don’t look a Jessie, do I?’ I muttered in her ear.

  ‘You look like a wee gentleman, Fergie.’

  That was far from reassuring.

  ‘Will onybody laugh?’

  ‘Onybody that laughs will get a keeker from me.’

  Nor was I reassured by that threat of black eyes.

  Since it was summer and sunny and warm, the street was crowded. People liked to come out of their small dull houses. There were women with bare arms at every closemouth and at many window-sills. The usual group of men without jobs chatted at the corner outside Boag’s shop, perhaps joking about the notice ‘No Credit’ in the window. In the roadway some boys were playing football. Among them were Jock Dempster, Smout McTavish, and Rab McIntyre. The ball was a bundle of rags bound with twine. At one end the goalposts were mounds of dung, at the other caps and jackets.

  This scene of community at other times would have contented me. Now it filled me with foreboding.

  Rab was the first to notice me. ‘Oh Christ,’ he cried, clapping his hands across his eyes, ‘look at wee Fergie.’

  It seemed to me he had a cheek to be shocked: his breeks, his father’s old ones cut down, were wider than my kilt.

  The game stopped. Jock had his bare foot on the ball. He looked round to see what Rab was shouting about. Thirteen years of age, like Peggy he was a pupil of Kidd Street Advanced Division School, where he got the tawse every day, not just for being stupid at lessons but because he wasn’t ashamed of being stupid. Always in rags himself, he was inclined to look on neat clean clothes as affectation. Often, round corners, we rubbed dirt on our jerseys and rumpled them before asking him to let us join in.

  Except for Smout, the others yelled and danced in derision. They waited for Jock to express loud blasphemous disgust.

  I waited too, but at the same time I dourly wheeled my barrow over to the goalposts of dung and shovelled them in. Smout, the goalie, was too fascinated by my kilt to try and stop me. The holes in his breeks hadn’t been mended. He had learned though how to stand, in a twisted cross-legged way, so that his bare behind wouldn’t be seen.

  My mother watched from the pavement. Peggy Maitland stood close beside her. She would have put her arm through my mother’s if my mother had let her. With part of my mind I heard from down the street a woman’s voice shrieking at Peggy. It was her mother ordering her to come away from mine.

  Jock picked up the ball. With it under his oxter, like an ambassador’s hat, he came running up to me. As he passed he gave Rab a kick in the backside to stop him chanting ‘Kiltie Cauldbum’. When he reached me he did a very strange thing: he faced my mother and bowed. Then, blushing, he helped me shovel the dung into my barrow.

  My mother came over. She smiled at Jock.

  ‘You’re Jock Dempster, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  He nodded eagerly. I had never seen him so eager.

  ‘Well, Jock, thank you for being kind to Fergus.’

  He was so shy and yet so pleased that he picked up a dollop of dung as if it was a rose. I thought he was going to offer it to her.

  When we moved on, he gazed after us heedless of the gibes cast at him from every closemouth and window-sill. He had done what among a graceless people always provokes angry derision: dressed in rags, he had dared to be chivalrous.

  ‘The young are more generous,’ said my mother. ‘There’s still hope for Scotland.’

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. Besides, I was trying hard not to hear the terrible things that women were shouting at her.

  In time to come Jock was to wear a kilt himself and be killed in it. So were Rab and Smout. Their names are on the Gantock War Memorial.

  THREE

  At last we came into less familiar streets. Here there was laughter at the expense of my kilt, but it was reasonably good-natured and could be endured. We had, however, still another ordeal to undergo. We had to pass the Catholic chapel.

  From the outside it looked almost like a Protestant church. It partly hid itself behind some yew trees. It seemed to know it wasn’t wanted. The Catholics had to wait a long time before anybody would sell them land to build it on. My grandfather was one of those who tried to prevent them.

  As we passed it I did not this time spit—I had acquired a horror of spitting—but I did mutter aloud the rhyme which was my own secret way of nullifying the Papish magic:

  Hail Mary, fu‘o’ grace,

  Stole a pe
nny frae the brace,

  Put a ha’penny in its place,

  Hail Mary, fu’ o’ grace.

  Rather proud of this incantation, for it had always worked in the past, in that no priest black as a crow had ever kidnapped me, I glanced up to see if my mother was impressed. To my astonishment, I caught her in the act of crossing herself. I was so shocked I stumbled and spilled some dung.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Whit did you dae that for?’

  ‘Do what?’

  I did it myself, very quickly. I almost expected the dung to turn into roses.

  ‘That,’ I muttered.

  ‘Maybe I thought it would help.’

  At last I thought I understood. The mystery was solved. She had become a Catholic. That would explain why my grandfather didn’t want to see her again, and why Mrs Lorimer spat in her face. Mr Lorimer was an Orangeman. He marched in parades wearing a yellow sash.

  I felt hopeful. It seemed to me it couldn’t be very hard to change back.

  ‘Are you a Pape?’ I asked.

  ‘What a nasty word. If you mean Catholic, say Catholic.’

  ‘Are you a Catholic then?’

  ‘What difference would it make?’

  It was hard to be patient with such wilful stupidity. Surely she knew my grandfather didn’t like Catholics. In case she had forgotten I explained how when I visited him I had to make sure there were no Catholics, such as Pat McGuire, with me.

  She murmured something. It sounded like ‘nonsense’. But surely it couldn’t have been. Everybody knew that if they were given a chance the Catholics would overrun the whole country, and then, as my grandfather had told me often, no man’s soul would be free.

  ‘Your grandfather has no right to set you against Catholics or anybody else.’

  She seemed to have forgotten that my grandfather was an important man. As well as running the Sunday school and the Band of Hope, he was an elder of the Auld Kirk, and a town councillor. He knew the Provost, and the Chief Constable, and even the Sheriff.