go but to work and needed all the sleep they could get. From the side of her eyes she took a glance at her parents’ bed. She knew from the low and regular snore from her mother that she was asleep. And then she lifted David from the bed without wakening him and hugged him to her for a moment. She was wasting time! Picking up his clothes with her free hand she ran over to the fire with him. The boy wakened suddenly, his eyes wide open. He turned sharply in her arms and looked round him. Seemingly assured that he was in his own home he said:
‘I want back to my bed: it’s no’ time to get up yet.’
‘Wheesht, Dave. Do you mind what mither told you last night? You’re to steer the pot – Peter’s no’ weel. Come on now, son, and I’ll dress you.’
‘It’s no’ morning yet.’
‘Wheesht, now, or you’ll waken mither.’
The thought of wakening his mother was enough for the child. He allowed his sister to dress him with quick deft hands.
A gust of wind tore round the house and the rain spattered in the wide chimney. The child raised his eyes as the old white-washed guano bags rose and fell between the rafters in the draught, causing shadows to ripple across the billowing guano-sack ceiling.
‘There now, Davie son. Stand up here on the stool and steer the parritch like a wee man.’
She stood him on the bucket stool and put the wooden spurtle in his hand which was still the chubby dimpled hand of a child.
‘Steady yourself on the jamb o’ the fire, son, and watch and no’ coup yourself.’
But David’s wide eyes were already on the porridge that was beginning to bubble and splutter in the huge pot.
David was used to having his porridge at five – the hour was not an unearthly one for him. What was strange was being up before his father and his brothers, John and William. But now that he was up the sense and worth of his importance intrigued him. He didn’t want Peter to get better and so rob him of this new importance. He could stir the porridge all right – as good, if not better, than Peter. And surely he would win a word of commendation from his mother. Child he was indeed; but his child sense told him that his mother was not as she should be. For he was unable to get any response from his mother. She had neither the time nor the disposition to nurse him.
She had reared twelve children and buried three. She was already exhausted with the labour of child-bearing and the labour of nursing and mothering them. And only last year had she managed to free herself of the early morning rising and preparations for breakfast that had now fallen to Agnes.
The peats blazed and burned on the crude ribs of the fire and the porridge stottered and bubbled in the pot. David slowed in his stirring to watch the tiny craters erupt and the bubbles explode. He was fascinated. His world was a small, circumscribed, but active and populous one. From the moment he wakened till he went to sleep, usually exhausted, there was activity. The coming and going of his brothers and sisters; the endless coming and going of the hens, either to lay under the bed or to forage for crumbs and scraps; the wag at the wa’ clock with its swinging exposed pendulum and its weights and chains; the bucket stools constituting his toys when the most of his brothers and sisters were absent; the odds and ends of domestic lumber stacked about the four corners of the house.
But the gaunt and weary figure of his mother dominated his world. Her irascibility irritated and thwarted him. He carried his head on a tautened neck: tautened against the continual cuffs from his mother as he either got in her way or got into some mischief or other.
And his outside world? It lay in a little hollow in a dip towards the sea. From the doorway a rough pathway wound towards the cart-track to Achgammie farm, lying grey and dour among its bare stony fields. All around the house was rough pasturage and out-croppings of stone. There were no trees and the only cover the bare land provided was that of innumerable little whin-covered knolls. There was the garden: about a quarter of an acre of ground running from the back of the house. It also was bare and devoid either of flower or shrub.
The sea was at hand. But the heughs of the coast line were hard and cruel: the grey sea crashed and spumed on its crags. Even on the calm of a summer’s day the sough of it could be heard in the Suie; and after a storm the sea-foam would be flecked across the roof thatch.
The outside world was cold and menacing to David: he clung to the dim but more homely world of the cot-house. He was only beginning to recognise the bare outlines of his world: only beginning to cast child glances across its restricted boundaries: only beginning to glimpse its more distant horizons. He was beginning to realise that the water had to be carried in pails from Achgammie, three-quarters of a mile away. Only dimly beginning to realise that he had brothers who went out on the sea and sometimes brought back fish – and occasionally a crab for him to play with.
And yet already something of the slavery and cruel tyranny of the life around him had impressed itself upon him. He had already known the pain of hunger and cold and neglect. And his instinct for life had driven him to face and overcome his difficulties in his own child fashion. He supped the monotonous meals of porridge and brose with hungry avidity and would have supped more had there been more. Already he had begun to rely upon his own resources and avoid his mother.
But childlike, he was quickly able to forget pain and distress in the bliss of a happy moment. As he stirred the porridge by the warmth and comfort of the fire he forgot everything in the warmth of his own immediate happiness. Cold, wet, hunger; scoldings and cuffings were all forgotten: his parents, his brothers, his sisters were forgotten. The moment was timeless: without past or future – save perhaps, for the dim, unconscious anticipation of breakfast.
And then there came to Agnes’s olfactory sense the knowledge that the porridge, due to the lethargic and inadequate stirring of David, was burning. The realisation of such a major calamity and the dire consequence that would accrue from it, caused her to lose her control. She dropped the heavy boot she was greasing with pork fat.
‘Dave: the parritch’s burning!’
The shrill terror of her voice shattered David’s dreamworld. He started for an instant, lost his balance on the bucket stool and toppled into the fire. The high-pitched hysterical shriek of Agnes carried almost to Achgammie.
In a moment the house was in an uproar. Every one was out of their beds including Mrs. Ramsay and the child Peter. Agnes had rescued David even before her shriek died in her throat.
It was her father who took the child from her, called loudly for the castor oil and when it was brought to him applied it liberally to David’s abdomen, chest and left shoulder. Both his hands were blistered. John and William stood gaping at David: stood silent and almost imbecilic-looking in their coarse shirt-tails.
Across David’s crying and sobbing cut his mother’s scolding and bullying of Agnes, until she broke under the strain and commenced to cry. At this, her mother seized her thin arm, swung her round and rained blows on her head and back.
The wind, rising suddenly to an angry bluster, tore away from the thatch the cries of child-pain and fear and torment.
A light appeared in the kitchen at Achgammie: the dreaded signal that another day of toil had commenced.
CRAIGDAROCH
Ned MacWhirrie of Craigdaroch was a power among the farmers of Kirkmaiden. Ned would have been a power almost anywhere for he was cunning beyond the average and was utterly
