to break up for a spell. The children would soon be needed for turnip thinning, weeding, the early potatoes and peat cutting. The children were eagerly looking forward to the break – even though most of them had bitter memories of the toil of the fields. But any toil was preferable (in anticipation) to the nagging and bullying of Johnny Gibb.
Inside the school-room it was intolerably hot and stuffy: the steady bright sunshine shafting in at the small window, mingling with the sharp exultant cries of the sea swallows, was an agony. In the foreground the figure of the hunchback spat and girned: an object of fear, hatred and terror.
It was after the lunch interval. The day outside had been warm and breathless and a heat haze hung out on the calm dull blue sea. The children who could not get home had run down to the beach and bathed, girls and boys together, and skelped up and down the shore till they were dry. All too soon the bell had rung, cutting peremptorily across their timeless sense: imposing a world of duty and obedience. Their fun had been healthy and vigorous. The sense of life had been heightened by the free intercourse of glistening and naked bodies. Had they attempted to cover their nakedness, a fatal sense of physical self-consciousness would have been introduced. They were not indifferent to the sight of their naked bodies. They experienced a keen un-selfconscious sense of invigorating stimulation.
In this the Galloway children were like uncorrupted children anywhere: like savages. There was no shame in the naked body: no shame in the performance of the natural functions. Shame came with puberty and morality. At the moment they were young, unsophisticated …
But the school bell had cut across their hour of exultant pleasure. Now they were back in the stuffy class-room listening with at least one ear to the shrill cry of the terns. The dominie was in a foul temper: the heat gave him a headache: the carefree laughter of the children jarred on his nerves. He had never known laughter even as a child. His infirmity had isolated him. More than anything his marriage had embittered him. He was impotent. And his wife’s frustration had hardened into a poisonous sadistic persecution. His whole life was a bitter misery: the more bitter and miserable since he did not know the root causes of it all.
His head throbbed violently. He had no patience to teach arithmetic or spelling. He set the pupils to hand-writing. While they were copying the sentence he had written on the blackboard he walked up and down the passage, his hands behind his back: in his hand he held a thin twelve inch ruler.
Jean Gibson was a poor calligraphist: she could not master the tortuous method of character formation which was in the copper-plate tradition. Nor could she hold her pen for long in the prescribed fashion. To-day her whole spirit rebelled at the task. Her whole body was aglow with intense physical excitement: she wanted to run and shout and liberate her spirit…
She bent closer to the copybook as the dominie slunk up the passage beside her. She almost trembled at the nearness of his presence. For a moment the dominie stood over her. The writing was as wretched as any in the school. And no wonder! How often had he told them how to hold their pens? And yet here was this girl holding her pen as in a death grip, the first joint of her forefinger flexed inwards with the strain.
The grip tightened as he stood over her and the hand began to shake. With a vicious stroke he brought the sharp edge of the ruler down on her hand. The thumb nail was split open down into the root.
Jean started up with a strangled cry but the dominie thrust her back down on the bench.
‘Maybe you’ll learn to hold your pen correctly – how often am I to tell you?’
GALLOWAY GLOAMING
Tom Gibson weeded and hoed in his garden till dusk began to settle on the land. Then he lit his pipe and leaned his arms on the garden wall close to a clump of gooseberry bushes. From the garden wall the land fell away towards the heughs of the coast and towards Craigdaroch Bay. He could smoke in peace for as yet the midges were not out in their plaguing myriads.
Tom Gibson, though he could rarely allow himself moments of inactivity, could, at the end of such a day of fruitful toil, lean on his garden dyke and meditate. His mind was extraordinarily calm. He had never known, and it seemed he would never know, excitement. Excitement was a sign of weakness: of instability. But there was no weakness or instability about him. He was rock-sure of himself: the earth was beneath his feet. He could afford to meditate in his garden – even if it was a kitchen garden. He would have been ill-at-ease in a garden where good soil and good labour was wasted on the cultivation of flowers.
He puffed slowly and deliberately at his pipe and gazed almost dreamingly over the dusk gathering fields towards the sea. He found the world good. But even as he gazed he was thinking how to-morrow he would vist the dominie at Dunmore. The dominie was a runt: a mere invoice of a man. His audacity in inflicting injury on his child was in the nature of an aberration: but an aberration that would not be allowed to go unchecked.
But there was no hatred in Tom Gibson’s heart: no petty desire to revenge himself on the dominie. He would merely teach him a much-needed lesson: administer effective censure. Not to do so would be to fail in his duty.
And yet in his meditation he found pleasure. There was much satisfaction in being strong and resolute and determined. The working of his iron will brought him a sweet feeling of power. Once doubt and indecision entered, this deep and elemental satisfaction fled.
He was in the magnificent prime of his life. He worked on the land as a Beethoven or a Michael Angelo worked at his art. He was a master-labourer, consummate in his skill, indefatigable in his strength. He could not envisage a day when his muscles would wither and his strength decline and the edge of his cunning dull.
The swallows had gone from the sky: a solitary bat squeaked above the steading of Craigdaroch: a large white moth fluttered among the rank grass and weeds close to the dyke-side. The cattle turned their way from the burn and began to work up through the field. In the stillness could be heard their rasping of the dew-wet grass; the restless movement of a sexually stimulated heifer; the heavy anticipatory breathing of the almost satiated bull as he nosed his way with uplifted muzzle through the herd. The bull, like Tom Gibson, was sure and deliberate: overpowering in its masculine domination.
The grieve of Craigdaroch was alive even in his brooding meditation to every subtle harmony of the night. But he had overstayed himself. He withdrew his pipe from his mouth, tapped the ash gently on his palm, and taking a deep breath of the night air (for a sigh would have been foreign to his nature) he moved towards the house that had already merged with the night: gathered in upon itself in sleep.
SPRINGTIME
The winters were hard. There were long periods of frost when the earth was iron-bound; there were snows that covered the hedges and lay in deep drifts in the hollows of the land; snows that covered the land for weeks till the coming of the thaw.
Springtime came, snell and bleak, towards the end of March. Spring came with the peesweeps and the whaups coming back from the shore to the tilled soil and the moorland. Springtime came with the immemorial sowing of seed, with harrowing and rolling, with draining and fencing, with the sough of spring rain always in the wind.
Springtime signified the opening of a new year of increased toil and activity for every one. But above all it meant one thing to the Rhinns of Galloway: springtime meant calving time.
From the beginning of March till the end of April there was hardly a night that the dairyman was not called out of his bed by the lowing of a cow in labour. There were nights when all the sleep he got was a few minutes snatched on a bunch of straw in a vacant stall. In a land where herds averaged one hundred and fifty milk
