written in a period before conservation or industrial farming as we know it, The Weatherhouse pinpoints timeless philosophical debates about the naming of things and our relationship to the environment. Ellen says there is no need to learn the names of the birds: ‘Her lips parted and her eyes shone; and Mrs Falconer longed to tell her of the strange secret of life – how all things were one and there was no estrangement except for those who did not understand.’ The people of Fetter-Rothnie are linked into the bigger cycles of land and community, and what Garry comes to see as ‘this astonishing earth.’
Amy Liptrot
The Main Characters
THE YOUNG PROTAGONISTS
Captain Garry Forbes (30), (‘the Gargoyle’), son of the timid Benjamin Forbes who was half-brother to Barbara Paterson. Wounded in the trenches of the First World War.
Miss Lindsay Lorimer (19), daughter of Andrew Lorimer; sister of Frank, who served in the war with Garry Forbes.
Miss Louisa (Louie) Morgan (35), at Uplands, daughter of the previous minister at Fetter-Rothnie. Louie claims to be engaged to David Grey, Garry Forbes’s engineer friend, who died of T.B.
THE LADIES AT THE WEATHERHOUSE
Aunt Craigmyle (Lang Leeb) (90+), cousin to Andrew Lorimer, the solicitor father of Lindsay and Frank. Widowed at 54, Leeb retired to the Weatherhouse and left things to her three daughters, namely:
Miss Annie Dyce (Paradise) Craigmyle, raised by her father to look after the farm, she took charge of it when he died until crippled by rheumatism.
Mrs Ellen (Nell) Falconer (60), married at 27 to Charlie Falconer who died in poverty, leaving Ellen to return to her old home along with her daughter, Kate Falconer (30), cook at a nearby convalescent hospital.
Miss Theresa (Tris) Craigmyle, Leeb’s youngest daughter, housekeeper to her mother and sisters at the Weatherhouse.
FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Miss Barbara (Bawbie) Paterson (55), of Knapperley, maiden aunt to Garry Forbes.
Francie Ferguson, son to Jeames Ferguson who helped adapt the Weatherhouse; brother to ‘Feel Weelum’, finally husband (after 22 years engagement) to ‘Peter Sandy’s Bell’, already father to her children, Stella Dagmar and Sidney Archibald Eric.
Mrs Barbara Hunter, of Craggie, ex servant girl and friend to Bawbie Paterson at Knapperley; wife of crofter Jake Hunter; mother of Dave, who returns wounded from the war to re-educate himself as a graduate and a school teacher.
Jonathan Bannochie, cobbler to trade, originator of the phrase ‘Garry Forbes and his twa fools’, referring to Garry, Bawbie and Francie.
The name of Garry Forbes has passed into proverb in Fetter-Rothnie.
One sees him gaunt, competent, a trifle anxious, the big fleshy ears standing out from his head, the two furrows cutting deeply round from nostril to chin, his hands powerful but squat, gift of a plebeian grandfather, and often grimed with oil and grease—hardly a figure of romance. Of those who know him, to some he is a keen, long-headed manager, with a stiff record behind him in the training of ex-service men and the juvenile unemployed, tenacious, taciturn, reliable, with uncanny reserves of knowledge; to others, a rampageous Socialist blustering out disaster, a frequenter of meetings: they add a hint of property (some say expectations) in Scotland; to some he is merely another of those confounded Scotch engineers; but to none is he a legend. They are not to know that in Fetter-Rothnie, where the tall, narrow, ugly house of Knapperley is situate, his name has already become a symbol.
You would need Garry Forbes to you. It is the local way of telling your man he is a liar. And when they deride you, scoffing at your lack of common sense, Hine up on the head of the house like Garry Forbes and his twa fools, is the accepted phrase. As the ladies at the Weatherhouse said, A byword and a laughing stock to the place. And married into the family, too!
ONE
To the Lorimers of a younger generation, children of the three Lorimer brothers who had played in the walled manse garden with the three Craigmyle girls, the Weatherhouse was a place of pleasant dalliance. It meant day-long summer visits, toilsome uphill July walks that ended in the cool peace of the Weather house parlour, with home-brewed ginger beer for refreshment, girdle scones and strawberry jam and butter biscuits, and old Aunt Leeb seated in her corner with her spider-fine white lace cap, piercing eyes and curious staves of song; then the eager rush for the open, the bickering around the old sundial, the race for the moor; and a sense of endless daylight, of enormous space, of a world lifted up beyond the concerns of common time; and eggs for tea, in polished wooden egg-cups that were right end up either way; and queer fascinating things such as one saw in no other house—the kettle holder with the black cross-stitch kettle worked upon it, framed samplers on the walls, the goffering iron, the spinning wheel. And sometimes Paradise would show them how the goffering iron was worked.
Paradise, indeed, gave a flavouring to a Weatherhouse day that none of the other ladies could offer. Round her clung still the recollection of older, rarer visits, when they were smaller and she not yet a cripple; of the splendid abounding wonder that inhabits a farm. Not a Lorimer but associated the thought of Paradise with chickens newly broken from the shell, ducks worrying with their flat bills in the grass; with dark, half-known, sweet-smelling corners in the barn, and the yielding, sliding, scratching feel of hay; with the steep wooden stair to the stable-loft and the sound of the big, patient, clumsy horses moving and munching below, a rattle of harness, the sudden nosing of a dog; with the swish of milk in the pail and the sharp delightful terror as the great tufted tail swung and lashed; with the smell of oatcakes browning, the plod of the churn and its changing note of triumph, and the wide, shallow basins set with gleaming milk; with the whirr of the reaper, the half-comprehended excitement of harvest, the binding, the shining stooks; with the wild madness of the last uncut patch, the trapped and furtive things one watched in a delirium of joy and revulsion; and the comfort, afterwards, of gathering eggs, safe, smooth and warm against the palm.
Of that need for comfort Paradise herself had no comprehension. Rats, rabbits and weakly chicks were killed as a matter of course. There was no false sentiment about Miss Annie: nothing flimsy. She was hard-knit, like a homemade worsted stocking, substantial, honest and durable. ‘A cauff bed tied in the middle,’ her sister Theresa said rudely of her in her later years, when inactivity had turned her flabby; but at the farm one remembered her as being everywhere.
It was Andrew Lorimer, her cousin, who transformed her baptismal name of Annie Dyce to Paradise, and now his children and his brothers’ children scarcely knew her by another. Not that Miss Annie cared! ‘I’m as much of Paradise as you are like to see, my lad,’ she used to tell him.
The four ladies at the Weatherhouse, old Aunt Craigmyle and her daughters, could epitomise the countryside among them in their stories. Paradise knew how things were done; she told of ancient customs, of fairs and cattle markets and all the processes of a life whose principle is in the fields. The tales of Aunt Craigmyle herself had a fiercer quality; all the old balladry, the romance of wild and unscrupulous deeds, fell from her thin and
