A Song of Sixpence (2 page)

Our evening communion was partly educational—it was he who had taught me my letters, and he would instruct me to read out, for our mutual benefit, recondite facts from his favourite compendium,
Pears' Cyclopaedia
—but in the main, and especially since my illness, he had sought merely to entertain me. With an amazing fertility of imagination, he invented and related a whole series of fascinating adventures in which a young protagonist of precisely my age, small and rather delicate, but intrepid almost beyond belief, performed feats of outstanding bravery in tropic jungles or on desert islands amongst primitive tribes and man-eating savages, meanwhile interpolating from time to time side remarks to my mother which related usually to the natural appendages and accoutrements of the dark-skinned female members of the tribe and which, while I did not in the least understand their significance, made her laugh.

Tonight, however, as my parents continued to be absorbed in talk, I perceived that the prospect of my being regaled with a cannibal feast had faded and, meeting Father's eye when he paused in what he was saying, I suddenly demanded, in the tones of one wronged and neglected:

‘What is in the bottle?'

He smiled with unusual benignancy.

‘It is yeast, Laurence. To be specific, Hagemann's Royal Dutch Yeast.'

‘Yeast?' I repeated, in bewilderment.

‘Just so.' He nodded graciously. ‘A living substance composed of innumerable living cells. Yes, a form of life itself, one might say, an organism that grows, buds, turns starch into sugar, sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas, and so leavens our staff of life. Prepared,' Father went on, in his best vein, ‘in mineral salt-sugar solution—as is my Royal Dutch Yeast—a modern technique far superior to the grain mash method, it offers a unique opportunity for introducing an entirely new process that will reorganize the Scottish baking industry.'

Father sounded as though he himself had discovered yeast and for long afterwards I believed he had. His exposition, obviously prepared, left me speechless. Mother, too, seemed to find it overpowering or at least quite enough, for me at present. She rose and, although the clock on the mantelpiece assured me it was well before my usual hour, suggested in a tone not to be disputed that I should go to bed.

This was ordinarily a lengthy process, prolonged by every pretext by which I sought to detain my mother, and complicated by all sorts of fetishes and rituals that I had built for my own protection and which, while unworthy of enumeration, may be imagined from my first action, which was to satisfy myself that a boa-constrictor was not concealed beneath my bed. Tonight, however, the advent of the yeast distracted me from all my ceremonies and shortened everything in a highly disagreeable manner.

Even when I was in bed and Mother had said good night, leaving my door ajar according to custom, this strange substance, mysterious invader of our home, kept fermenting in my mind. I could not get to sleep. As I lay with closed eyes I saw the yeast working in the flask, bubbling and frothing until it burst upwards in a swelling yellow cloud, overhanging our house, taking the form of the genie from the bottle in one of my father's stories. I stirred uneasily. Was this the beginning of a dream of some strange vision of the future?

Although they spoke in low voices, the resumed conversation of my parents came in snatches through the unshut door of my narrow bedroom. From time to time I heard impressive and disturbing phrases: ‘away from this confounded village' … ‘take up your music again'… ‘he would go to Rockcliff, like Terence' … And finally just before I fell asleep I heard Father declare, in his most serious and decided tone:

‘You wait. Gracie, we'll show your folks … and my lot too … that they can't go on treating us like this. One day they'll make it up to you. And soon.'

For weeks I had longed to go to school, an adventure skilfully built up for me in the most glowing terms by my father, and deferred only by my susceptibility to the commonest germs. But now that the day had arrived, my state of mind verged on panic. As Mother put the finishing touches to me, buttoning up my new blue serge trousers and pulling down my jersey, I begged her with tears in my eyes not to send me. She laughed and kissed me.

‘You'll be all right with Maggie. See, here's year new satchel. Strap it on your shoulders like a real boy.'

The satchel, although empty, did help to brace me. I had begun to feel stronger when a knock at the door made me jump.

Maggie was there, standing on the doorstep, with her usual expression, humble and lowering, her tangled locks falling over eyes which had that dull yet appealing look seen in young Highland cattle. She was the daughter of the village washerwoman, a known slattern whose husband had long since made his escape from her abusive tongue and who, while bewailing the lot of her deserted bairn, made a drudge of her. Dressed in an old cut-down tweed skirt my mother had given her, with a dam on the knee of one stocking, Maggie had few outward signs of grace. Self-acknowledged to be stupid, and with a heavy, depressed air that bespoke overwork and ill-usage at home, she was mercilessly teased with shouts of ‘Daft Maggie' by the boys of the village, who nevertheless were wary of her, for she had a strong arm and a sure aim with a round pebble, gathered from the shore and always handy in her pocket. But to me she was both confidante and mentor. I truly trusted her, as did my mother, who liked Maggie and was good to her in many ways. Despite the numerous duties imposed upon her—and after school hours one rarely saw her without a bundle of laundry or her armour of milk cans which, after her round, she must scald and scour at the farm before her final task of feeding the hens—she had been during the long summer holidays a kind of nursemaid to me, taking me for walks in the afternoon during my periods of convalescence. Our favourite pilgrimage took us along the shore, passing on the way an isolated, sadly broken-down little cottage with a rotted green trellis, misnamed Rosebank, where, to my everlasting disgrace, it appeared that I had been born. How so momentous an event could have occurred in so deplorable an edifice I could not comprehend, yet presumably it had, for as we passed Rosebank, Maggie would launch into a fearsome yet compelling description, derived doubtless from her mother, of my arrival in this world on a dark and dreary Sabbath night when it had rained torrents and the tide had risen so high that my father, desperately seeking Dr Duthie with his little black bag, had almost failed to reach the village.

‘And to beat all,' Maggie turned her commiserating gaze upon me, ‘ye came into the wurrld the wrong way round.'

‘The wrong way! But how, Maggie?'

‘Not head first. Feet first.'

‘Was that bad, Maggie?' I demanded, petrified.

She nodded in sombre affirmation.

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.'