Montrose against the sky). But description is spare and rarely present merely for its own sake; the colour and shadow at the opening of ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’, for example, foreshadow the story’s dramatic concerns. Jacob’s fiction has a range of effects; it is sometimes poignant, sometimes lyrical, often humorous. There is gusto in the creation of the marvellous Auntie Thompson, and a gentler touch in the handling of young Anderson and his kindly friend the horseman. Joy is granted to unlikely people, like the cantankerous old man who longs to see and hear the ‘Fifty-eight wild swans’. Yet Jacob’s portrayal of humanity is rarely mawkish, because of the narrative economy of her work, a tendency to avoid direct narrative comment or judgement, and her abrupt, sometimes ambiguous endings.
The short story has a long and robust history in Scotland, and one that looks increasingly interesting, as new writers emerge, and older ones are rediscovered. Now that Jacob’s short fiction is again in print, we can begin to appreciate her distinctive contribution to the form and to Scottish tradition.
I WOULD like to thank Malcolm Hutton for his kind help and co-operation in publishing these stories. I must acknowledge, too, the invaluable work of the late Ronald Garden, who first brought the Lum Hat stories to light. Thank you also to Katy Gordon, Faith Hobbis and Margery Palmer McCulloch, and to librarians at Montrose Public Library, especially John Doherty and Fiona Sharlaw, and Kirsten Tomlinson at Montrose Museum, who were all very helpful.
THE SIDE street of the Angus town was as grey a thing as could be seen even on this grey dripping day. The houses, thick-walled, small-windowed, sturdily uniform and old-fashioned, contemplated the soaking cobble-stones and the ‘causeys’ which ran like rivers on either side; the complacent eyes of their dark panes, made yet darker by the potted geraniums whose smouldering red gave no liveliness to a reeking world, stared out, endlessly aloof, upon the discomfort of the occasional passer-by. Under their breath they seemed to be chorusing unanimously the words of St. Paul and saying, ‘None of these things move me.’ The dried haddocks, which usually hung on their wooden ‘hakes’ nailed to the walls, had been brought in, as had the small children whose natural playground was the pavement; chalk-marks made by schoolboys in their various evening games had been obliterated from the flags. Newbiggin Street was a featureless place given over to the sulky elements.
All night it had rained steadily, for with evening the fitful drizzle of the day before had settled down to business. The woman who stood framed in the only open doorway of the street looked up and down, frowning. She was a thickset, bony woman, one of those who, unremarkable in feature, are yet remarkable in presence, and though in daily life she made no bid for attractiveness, it was because she did not happen to know where, or in what, attraction lay. Her eyes were steady, and full, at times, of a purposeful though not alluring light. Her hair was dark and thick, her skin sallow, and her head well carried. She was dressed tidily, in stout, ill-fitting clothes, in strong contrast to which she wore a cheap, new hat with a crude blue flower; this was a recognition of the occasion, for she had walked yesterday from her home, five miles away, with her bundle in her hand, to see an aunt whose voice could now be heard in conversation behind her. She was not paying the smallest attention to the old woman’s talk; her return journey was before her and the prospect did not please her.
A lad came up the street with his hands in his pockets and his head ducked into his collar under the downpour.
‘Bad weather,’ she observed, as he passed the doorstep.
‘Bad weather!’ he exclaimed, with a half-contemptuous laugh; ‘wumman, hae ye seen the river?’
Her face changed. She stood hesitating, staring; then, without a word to the unseen aunt within, she gathered up her bundle and stepped out.
Soon she was in the movement of the main street which declined in a steep hill to the lower levels; there were many others making in the same direction and as she went along she could hear, above the noise of wheels and footsteps, a steady roaring. Not a breath of wind was stirring to make the sound fluctuate, and the even relentlessness of it awed her a little. She crossed the way that lay at right angles to the bottom of the street and stood looking down over the iron-railed wall which held up the road at the riverside. The grey, moving mass that slipped by was almost up to the railings.
Beyond her and all along the row of houses, the people were gathered to watch the rising water. The doors of the one-storied dwellings were choked with furniture that was being lugged out and carried away. Chairs, tubs, tables, birds in cages appeared and disappeared up the hill; women screamed angrily to venturesome children whose curiosity had lured them from the maternal skirts, frightened infants cried, men pushed about laden with cooking-pots and bedding; boys shouted to each other, running about in the crowd, the thud of their bare feet lost in the changeless, covetous voice that rose from between the banks. A blind man was being led towards the rise of the hill; he too was playing his part, for he carried a ‘wag-at-the-wa’ ’clock with a gaudily-painted face clasped in his arms. She paused a few minutes to look up and down the torrent and then struck away from the crowd, seeking through the outlying streets for her straightest line home.
Janet Robb’s life had been much concerned with the elements. The house for which she was making at her steady, uncompromising tramp was a waterside cottage just above the spot where the river wound into a lake-like estuary on its way to the North Sea. Here she was born, here she had lived out her thirty-four years, for her father had been ferryman until the building of a new bridge a short distance up-stream had shovelled his trade into the limbo of outworn necessities. She had kept house in it almost ever since she could remember; for her mother, who had been an invalid, died when her girl was thirteen, and the ferryman, in spite of the prophecies of his neighbours, did not marry again. Women had no attraction for him, and the need of a housekeeper, which, more than any other cause, drives middle-aged working men into matrimony, did not exist while he had a daughter like Janet, so well able and so well accustomed to grapple with domestic needs. She was a hardy woman now, close-fisted and shrewd. She had been an invaluable help, both in the house and out of it; the two had worked the ferry between them, for the river was not wide and the traffic was small. Carts and horses had to go round to a point about a mile westward, and only foot-passengers on their way to the town troubled that part of the shore; when her father was out, she could leave her house-work to put them across to the farther bank without much interruption to it.
The ferryman was not an inspiring acquaintance. Though he belonged, in company with publicans, barbers, and blacksmiths, to a trade eminently social in its opportunities, he cared nothing for that part of it. He could put over a boatful of people without addressing a word to any of them and with scarcely an answer to any man enterprising enough to attack his silence. He was not popular, and, as those who give nothing of their mind to the world must perforce submit to have the gaps they create filled up according to the taste of their neighbours, a whole crop of tales sprang up at the water-side like so much duckweed. He was a secret drinker; he was worth ten thousand pounds; he kept a woman in the town whom he ill-treated – had she not been seen with her head bandaged, crying ill names after him on the public road? – he starved his daughter; she starved him – all these whisperings surrounded his unconscious head. He was a spare man, smaller in build than Janet, lined and clean-shaven. Besides his recognised business he had a cart and an old horse by means of which he did a little carrying, going townwards three times a week, whilst she took charge of the boat; and though nobody outside the cottage knew anything about it, he received substantial help from a son who had left home early and was making a good income in Canada. While the neighbours went wide of the mark in most of the rumours they set afloat about him, one of these had a fragile foundation of truth. Davie Robb kept no woman and cared as little for drink
