A Song of Sixpence Read online

  After this humiliating disclosure Maggie would revive me by taking me further along the estuary to the Erskine Rocks, where, enjoining me not to tell my mother, who would have been shocked to hear that her spoiled darling was upsetting his stomach with such ‘trash’, we gathered fresh mussels which she roasted, nut-sweet, on a driftwood fire. The novelty of this repast alone delighted me, since I was, if anything, over-nourished; but for Maggie, sadly ill-fed, it was welcome sustenance, and by way of dessert, taking off her battered boots and the long black stockings, one or other of which despite the darns usually sported a hole, she would wade into the grey waters of the firth and, feeling in the muddy sand with her toes, uncover little fluted white cockles which she devoured like oysters, raw and quivering.

  ‘But they’re living, Maggie,’ I protested, dismayed at the pain these innocent bivalves must suffer under her sharp teeth.

  ‘They don’t feel anything,’ she assured me calmly. ‘If you bite them quick. Now let’s play shop.’

  Maggie invented all sorts of games and was full of country skills. She could make a willow whistle, fashion intricately woven harvest plaits of a pattern that my fingers could never master, and magically unfold tight little paper boats that we sailed down the Gielston burn. She could also sing, and in a hoarse but tuneful voice would offer me current favourites like ‘ Goodbye, Dolly Gray’ and ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’.

  But the game Maggie liked best undoubtedly was ‘shop’ and she never tired of it. When we had collected and set out on the shore our varied symbols, chips of shells, seeds of wild fennel, burdock tips and sea pinks, white sand, bladders of seaweed, marbled pebbles, each representing a different commodity, Maggie would assume the airs and responsibilities of the proprietress while I became the customer. This gave to Maggie, so poor and neglected, a sense of security, even of wealth. Looking round her shop with the pride of possession, counting her store of good things—tea, sugar, coffee, flour, butter, ham and of course black-striped peppermint balls—she could forget those days when she must stave off hunger with salt cockles, a raw turnip lifted from one of Snoddie’s fields or even the skins from the dog-rose and hawthorn berries that we called ‘hips and haws’.

  We were happy together, and I felt her fondness for me until, glancing upwards suddenly during our game, I would find her eyes bent upon me with the wondering expression of one whose attention is drawn repeatedly to some incomprehensible singularity. I knew then what must come, for presently in a tone half puzzled, half commiserating she would soliloquize:

  ‘When I look at you, Laurie, I still can’t credit it. I mean, you’re not much, but you don’t seem any different from us. And your mother and father too, they’re so nice you would never dream they were that.’

  I hung my head. Maggie, in her blundering, good-natured way, had once again uncovered one of the hidden shames that seared my early years and which, without further pretence, must be confessed. I was, alas, a Roman Catholic. A boy bound hand and foot to the grinding chariot of the Pope, miserable acolyte of the Scarlet Woman, burner of candles and incense, potential kisser of the big toe of St Peter. Not only so, my parents and I were the sole adherents of that reviled religion, and worse, the only ones ever to have established themseles in the staunchly, exclusively true-blue Protestant village of Ardencaple. We were as conspicuously out of place in that tight little community as would have been a family of Zulus. Equally, we were outcasts.

  Whatever the public attitude towards my father, which he delighted to provoke rather than to appease, I suffered nothing beyond that certain pitying or even sympathetic curiosity bestowed upon an oddity. Nevertheless, on this Monday morning when I faced the prospect of school, this had its part in lowering my morale. And when, after final admonitions from Mother, Maggie grasped my hand firmly and we set off up the road to the village, my mind was in a dither. A horse was being shoed in the smithy amidst an enticing fume of burnt hoof, yet I scarcely noticed it. The windows of the village store, against which I liked to press my nose, investigating the rich display of boiled sweets, peppermint oddfellows, slim jim and apple tarts, were passed unseen. It was a dolorous way, made more harrowing by Maggie’s low-toned recital of the fearful punishments exacted by the schoolmaster Mr. Rankin, whom she designated by the name of Pin.

  ‘He’s a cripple,’ she kept deploring, with a shake of her head. ‘And a stickit minister. No more nor that! But he’s a terror with the tause.’

  Although we went slowly, only too soon did we reach the school.

  This was a smallish old red-brick building with an open yard of beaten, stony earth in front, and here, but for Maggie, I should certainly have run away. In this playground a mimic battle was being waged. Boys darted about, struggled, shouted, kicked and fought; girls, flailing with ropes, skipped and shrieked; caps were torn from heads and sent skimming through the air, tackety boots slid and scraped, sparking living fire from the stones, the din was ear-splitting. And suddenly noticing me, the biggest of the ‘bad’ boys let out a wild and ribald yell: ‘Look wha’s here. The wee Pope!’

  This sudden elevation to the throne of the Vatican, far from sustaining me, produced in my innards a further apprehensive sinking. In a moment I should be surrounded by a crowd seeking to exact more from me than my apostolic blessing. But from this and other dangers, pressing through with her sharp elbows combatively extended, Maggie protected me until suddenly a clanging quelled the tumult, and the schoolmaster appeared, bell in hand, on the steps of the entrance.

  Undoubtedly this was Pin, his right leg deformed and sadly shorter than the other, supported by a twelve-inch peg fixed to a queer little boot by an iron stirrup, the lower end capped with rubber. Surprisingly, he did not strike me as alarming. He was, in fact, though given to sudden explosions and choleric rappings of his desk with his knuckles, a mild, prosy, defeated little man of about fifty with steel-rimmed spectacles and a short pointed beard, seen always in a shiny black bobtailed suit, a celluloid dickey and a tucked-in black tie, who in his youth had studied for the ministry but, by reason of his deformity and a tendency to stammer, had failed repeatedly in trial sermons and become in the end a melancholy example of that supreme Scottish failure, the ‘stickit minister’ turned dominie.

  However, it was not to him that I was delivered. Pushing away from the main turbulent stream, Maggie finally entrusted me to the assistant mistress in the lowest class, where with some twenty others, many younger that myself, I was given a slate and seated on one of the front benches. Already I felt better, since I had recognized our teacher—a warm-looking girl with soft brown eyes and an encouraging smile—as one of the two daughters of Mr Archibald Grant, who kept the store. Her younger sister Polly never failed to give me a butterscotch drop when I went to the store on errands for my mother.

  ‘Now, children, I’m glad to see you back after the holidays and to welcome the new pupils,’ Miss Grant began, and I thrilled, fancying that her smile dwelt on me. ‘As Lady Meikle will be making her usual opening-day visit to the school this morning, I expect you all to be on your best behaviour. Now answer your names as I make out the register.’

  When she called out ‘ Laurence Carroll’ I imitated the others with a ‘Present, miss’, which, however, was so uncertain as to suggest that I doubted my own identity. Nevertheless it was accepted, and after we had all given our names and Miss Grant had entered them in the big book on her desk she set us to work. The class was at different stages. Soon one section was droning out the two-times table, another copying sums from the blackboard on their slates, while a third struggled with block letters of the alphabet. To me all this appeared such manifest child’s play that my earlier apprehension began to fade and to be replaced by a tingling consciousness of my own worth. What infants, not to know a B from a D! And who, amongst these older boys, had dipped, like me, into the mysteries of Pears’ Cyclopaedia with the picture of the tramp on the frontis-piece announcing that for five years he had used no other soap? Surrounded by such
evidence of juvenile ignorance, I felt the power of my superior knowledge, the distinction of my new clothes; I wanted to display my talents to shine.

  The screech of the slate pencils had not long begun before the door was flung open and the command given.

  ‘Rise, children.’

  As we clattered to our feet Pin appeared and deferentially ushered into the classroom a stiff, self-important, overdressed little woman with a bust so swelling and aggressive as to give her, in conjunction with the tuft of feathers on her hat, a marked resemblance to a pouter pigeon. I gazed at her in awe. Lady Meikle was the widow of a Winton corset manufacturer who, behind the blameless but intriguing slogan: ‘Ladies, we use only the finest natural whalebone’, plastered on the hoardings of every railway station—an advertisement that to me ranked in interest equally with ‘The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen, they come as a boon and a blessing to men’—had advanced to considerable wealth, then, after a long term as provost of Levenford, to a knighthood, a distinction that had induced him to purchase and retire to a large property in the vicinity of Ardencaple. Here he had leisure to indulge his hobby of cultivating orchids and tropical plants while his spouse lost no time in assuming the duties and asserting the prerogatives of the lady of the manor, although with her down-to-earth ways and lapses into broad Scots idiom she was not, and freely admitted this, to the manner born. Yet Lady Whalebone, as my father named her, was a decent woman, generous to Ardencaple—she had given the new village hall—and charitable to the entire county. She had moreover a characteristic grim sense of humour and a strong dash of sentiment, since besides giving her lamented husband a magnificent tombstone, replete with many awesome urns, she faithfully maintained and had indeed made famous the orchid collection he had instituted before his decease. Strange though it may appear, while I had never exchanged a word with so exalted a personage, I had good reason to be familiar with her estate in all its extent, with its woods and river, the avenue a mile long winding through the park between giant rhododendrons to the big house with its enormous adjacent conservatory.

  ‘Be seated, bairns.’ She swept forward. ‘This room is unco’ stuffy. Open a window.’

  Miss Grant hurriedly complied while her ladyship, keeping a formidable eye upon us, conferred with Pin, who, bending forward, his deformed limb drawn back, half concealed behind the sound leg—a posture I soon saw to be habitual—made submissive murmurs of acquiescence. Then she addressed us, in the broadest Doric, beginning thus:

  ‘Bairns, ye’re a’ young and fushionless, but I hope and pray that so far ye have come to nae harm or tummelt into evil ways. Now ye a’ ken the interest I take in the village and in a’ of you, for what ye are, or may be, so see ye pay heed to what I’m about to say.’

  She continued in this fashion at considerable length, exhorting us to work diligently, to improve ourselves and to maintain always the highest standards of good behaviour and moral conduct, implying that it would go hard with us here and in the hereafter if we did not. Her address completed, she pursed her lips and favoured us with a dignified yet half-humorous smile in which might have been detected a trace of slyness.

  ‘As yet ye ken nothing. Virgin soil, that’s what ye are, virgin soil. But I am going to test your nat’ral intelligence to see if ye have any gumption or for that matter anything in your heads at a’. Miss Grant, a pencil.’

  The pencil, yellow in colour, was immediately presented, and poising it before us for a moment, she threw it, with a dramatic gesture, to the floor. We held our breaths.

  ‘Now,’ she resumed impressively. ‘Ye have no hands. None of ye have hands. But I wish that pencil picked up.’

  Whatever prompted this extravagant experiment—perhaps she had been visiting one of her many charities, a home for paralytics in Ardfillan—the result was silence, dead silence. The class was stumped. Suddenly inspiration struck me. As in a daze, I got up, weak from my own boldness, tottered into the public gaze and, prostrating myself before the yellow pencil, snatched at it with my teeth. But the pencil was round and smooth. It escaped my feeble incisors, shot far ahead on the dusty and uneven floor. I followed, crawling face down, like a tracking Indian. Again I tried and again failed. The pursuit continued. Every eye remained riveted upon me. Now the pencil had discovered a crevice between the floor-boards. I nudged it forward with my chin, coaxed it to a favourable position, only to see it roll gently into a deeper crack beside the black-board where a dust of chalk had already fallen. But my blood was up. Sticking out my tongue, I licked my quarry from its hold, then before it started to roll bit hard and true. The class gave a long sigh of applause as, whitened by chalk dust, my nose skinned and raw, I staggered to my feet, with the pencil impaled, clenched between my jaws.

  ‘Well done!’ cried Lady Whalebone, clapping her hands enthusiastically, then placing one upon my head. ‘Ye’re a verra clever wee laddie.’

  I reddened all over, bursting with pride. To be commended thus by the lady of the manor before my teacher, before the schoolmaster and, best of all, my classmates! And on my first day at school. A very clever boy. What joy to tell my mother.

  Meanwhile, as Miss Grant dusted me off, her ladyship, with the air of a phrenologist, still maintained a benevolent hand upon my cranium.

  ‘How old are ye?’

  ‘Six years, ma’am.’

  ‘Ye’re unco’ small for six.’

  ‘Yes, m’am.’ I yearned to tell her of the illnesses, almost fatal, that had dwarfed me, probably for life, but before I could proceed she went on, encouragingly, a real patroness.

  ‘Ye must sup your porridge, with plenty of milk. Not skim, mind ye. And never turn up your nose at the staff of life. Ye ken what I mean by the staff of life?’

  ‘Oh, yes, m’am.’ Hot with triumph, conscious of my superior knowledge, recollecting my father’s use of the same phrase in connection with the bottle, I gazed at her brightly, answered confidently, loud and clear: ‘ Hagemann’s Royal Dutch Yeast!’

  A timid titter, swelling uncontrollably to a shout of laughter, rose from the class. Utterly dismayed, I saw my patroness’s face alter, approbation supplanted by a heavy frown. Her grip on my skull tightened.

  ‘Are ye darin’ to make fun of me, boy?’

  ‘Oh no, m’am, no!’

  She studied me narrowly for a long moment while my insides seemed to liquefy. Then, repudiating me, she removed her hand with, at the same time, a forward thrust that impelled me forcibly towards my seat.

  ‘Go! I see I was mistaken. Ye are nothing but a doited clown.’

  Humbled, disgraced for life, in fact once again an outcast, I sat for the rest of the morning with bowed head.

  On the way home, seeking the hand of my true protector, blinking water from my eyes, I mourned:

  ‘It’s no use, Maggie. I’m no good at anything, just a doited clown.’

  ‘Ay,’ Maggie answered with despondent satire, apparently having had a bad morning in her own class. ‘We’re a braw pair.’

  Chapter Three

  Despite Mother’s misgivings, and the public humiliation it had caused me, the business of the Royal Dutch Yeast had made a most auspicious start. Undoubtedly the opportunity was there, and my father, naturally clever, with a sharp and far-seeing business eye, was the very man to seize it. His intimate knowledge of the baking trade, the connections he had established throughout the West of Scotland during his five years as a salesman for Murchison’s, his attractive personality and easy manner, which he could attune exactly to the status of each customer and which made him generally popular, above all the aplomb with which he would fling off his jacket, tie on a white apron and actually demonstrate the new process in the bake-house, all marked him for success.

  Evidence of this was manifest after the first few months, in a family expedition to Winton when Father, having shown us with pride his new little office in the Caledonia Building, took us to a matinee of Aladdin at the Theatre Royal and afterwards to the famous Thistle Restaurant
. Always an open-handed man, he was more than usually generous that Christmas. In addition to a new winter outfit which did not greatly interest me, I received a sledge of that superb variety, equipped with a steering-bar, known as a Flexible Flyer, while for Mother there arrived one December day from Winton in a big two-horse van something she must have longed for ever since her marriage, a gift whose unexpectedness, since Father characteristically had not breathed a word of its coming, doubled and redoubled Mother’s joy. An upright piano. Not one of these yellowish cottage affairs with plush insets, such as we marched to in school, that twanged like an old banjo, but a brand-new, solid, ebony-black instrument, bearing the magic name Bluthner, with twin gilt candlesticks and shining ivory keys that on the merest touch emitted deep and vibrant chords.

  Mother, still quite dazed, sat down on the revolving stool that had come with the piano and, while I stood at her shoulder, after running her hands up and down the keyboard with a discerning mobility that amazed me, remarking at the same time, ‘Oh dear, Laurie, my fingers are all thumbs,’ she paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, then began to play. So vivid is my recollection of this scene I remember even the piece she played. It was Chaminade’s ‘Danse d’Echarpes’. To say that I was stunned and spellbound is no exaggeration, not only by the delicious sounds that fell upon my eardrums, but because of the miracle that Mother, whom I had never before heard strike a note and who from loyalty to Father—unable until then to afford a piano—had never introduced the subject in my presence, should after these silent years suddenly produce this unsuspected and accomplished talent and enchant me with a sparkling stream of music. The two porters, having each received a shilling and already with their caps on, in the lobby, had been arrested on their way out. Now, with me, as Mother ended, they applauded spontaneously. She laughed joyfully but shook her head.

  ‘Oh, no, Laurie, I’m so terribly rusty. But it will soon come back to me.’