Authors: Victoria Hendry
I turned away. I was embarrassed. I walked the last stretch to Morningside Road without looking back. A man was
leaning
against a bin with a half-bottle of whisky balanced on it. ‘I am waiting for friend gull to have a word,’ he said, and pointed to the sky.
I nodded and walked faster. I didn’t know what I wanted. I liked being on my own with my child. I had work and I had friends. Sylvia had promised to come in her motor and take us to the Fairy Hill near Aberfoyle on Sunday. My life was laid out, under my control. The country was staggering to its feet after the war and one day I thought I could make peace with my
family. Douglas was still fighting to get land for returning
ex-soldiers
, but I saw his face in the newspaper without feeling pain now. He was shaking the country, trying to bend it to his will, without realising that it probably never would. It never did what was expected. It never had. He was the dancing bear of
nationalism
. Everyone would come out to see him and be entertained, but they would go home with no intention of setting him free.
Sylvia drove like the wind, as fast as ever, along the twisting roads from Stirling to Aberfoyle. Wee Dougie was in the back, singing, ‘We’re going to see the fairies, we’re going to see the fairies,’ until Sylvia told him it was a secret. She stopped the car on the ridge above the town. The Doune Hill lay like an emerald in the middle of a basin of hills. She picked Dougie up. ‘Perhaps we’ll see the fairy queen,’ she said, and she winked at me. ‘You’ll like this, Agnes. The story isn’t on the scale of the classics, of course, but an interesting study nonetheless.’
She unscrewed the lid of her thermos and poured us all a cup of milky tea. ‘They say the local minister, Robert Kirk, was trapped in the tree at the top of the hill by the Gentle Folk, after he failed to return from his daily constitutional. He had abandoned his ministerial studies to write about the fairies, so he was certainly less than conventional – another one
swimming
against the flow – but whether that contributed to his disappearance is anyone’s guess. Politics and folklore, a potent combination, as old as bread and wine.’
Dougie looked at her with wide eyes over the lip of his cup. ‘I don’t want to go now,’ he said.
‘But you can make a wish, darling,’ said Sylvia. ‘They like children.’
She moved the thermos from the roof of the car, and we drove down into the valley. We parked behind the main street of the village and walked towards the hill, which rose straight up from the valley floor. It was covered in trees. A path wound up through the birches. The grass looked softer and greener than in the fields, and patches of sunlight made pools of light on the ground. ‘Perfect picnic spots,’ said Sylvia, ‘just perfect.’
Dougie ran on ahead, jumping over the tree roots that criss-crossed the path, and disappeared up the ladder they made, as if the hill had interlaced its fingers to help his wee feet climb the slope. He ran out of sight. ‘Stop at the top,’ I shouted. ‘There isn’t a drop on the other side, is there?’ I asked Sylvia.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘He’s perfectly safe. Let’s enjoy the peace and quiet. I never get you to myself these days. The department is coming back to life. Lots of new faces as the men return, and more students than I can handle. They all seem to think they are classicists just because they sailed past Crete in a warship.’
Dougie was running round and round the tree at the top, not widdershins, thank goodness. It was covered in colourful scraps of cloth torn from people’s clothes. Silver sixpences had been pressed into the bark, and scraps of paper were tied on with ribbon or string. Each one was a wish. Some were prayers for the safe return of men abroad.
‘Do you think they came back?’ I asked Sylvia.
She picked up a tiny doll from the foot of the tree. ‘Well, I expect it gave them hope that they might. That is a kind of mercy,’ she said. She laid the doll back down and patted its hair into place. ‘Curious, isn’t it? All this mishmash feels sacred.’
Dougie was jumping up and down, trying to catch a silver ribbon that was twisting in the breeze. ‘I want it, Mum,’ he shouted.
‘You can’t peel a fairy hill,’ said Sylvia. ‘Just leave it or you might get into trouble with the pixies.’
‘What would the classicists think of your poor man’s superstition?’ I said. ‘I thought you were a university
rationalist
, heart and soul?
‘University of life, my dear, first and foremost. Don’t
disallow
any possibility until it has been fully examined.’
‘So what do you think happened to the good minister?’
‘No one knows. He was a most respected Gaelic scholar and the author of a remarkable book for its time,
The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies
. According to him, they were a notable community known to those with second sight. He interviewed enough people locally who believed in it. He had a most questioning mind, but how it sat with the Church, I am not so sure.’
‘I’m glad I never had second sight,’ I said. ‘I might never have married Jeff.’
‘I thought you loved him?’ She looked at me over her glasses.
‘I did. For a while.’
‘And then the SNP reared its ugly head.’
‘No. It wasn’t that.’
‘The war, then? That made it difficult for everyone,
especially
the objectors. If only Jeff hadn’t stuck his head above the parapet, stayed safe behind a desk. I never really understood. It wasn’t the time for flag-waving and posturing.’
‘I think he was fair taken with independence, with Douglas, with his dream, but nationalism isn’t glorious. It is a club that pens its members and leaves others to the wolves.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, holding me close. ‘No one could have known it would end so badly. The smallpox was an
unforeseen
misfortune.’
She smoothed my hair as she had for the doll. ‘It must be very difficult for you on your own, but at least you have me and your wee Dougie. Our Douglas is still banging about the country. He never gives up: hydroelectric power, mines, the question of ownership, crofts for servicemen, dead herring. A genuine political animal and… talking of animals…’ She looked round. ‘Where is that boy of yours?’
The glade was empty. The ribbons fluttered in the breeze and the sun glinted on the silver in the bark of the tree, like teeth.
‘Dougie? Dougie?’ I called, but there was no answer. I ran towards the path and called again, scrambling down as fast as I could. I only caught sight of him at the second turn. He was holding some grass out to a squirrel.
‘You aren’t to wander,’ I said. The beastie ran off and
chattered
at us from halfway up a tree.
‘This is a braw place, Mum. That squirrel’s my friend.’
I sat down beside him and held him close. I could feel his skinny arms and bony chest through my dress. We leant together. I think I was smiling with my eyes closed, and that is when Sylvia took our photo: Dougie, smiling up at her, and stretching out his hand to her Box Brownie. ‘To happy reunions,’ she said.
We walked back down the hill, retracing our footsteps, the pebbles on the path sliding under our feet. The Reverend Kirk’s old church stood on the other side of a marshy field, and we wandered over to the ruin and brushed the moss from his gravestone. They say he doesn’t lie here under this
impressive
memorial to his scholarly work. Never found, as I told you,’ said Sylvia. ‘Spooky,’ and she stretched the word out and waggled her fingers at Dougie, who screamed and ran off. ‘Grave robbers were a huge problem, of course. I believe there was a good stock in trade of bodies for curious academics in Edinburgh. The university has a lot to answer for, in its way,’ she said. ‘Intellectual curiosity running amok.’
Two huge lead weights in the shape of coffins lay by the derelict church door. ‘Even those couldn’t stop the thefts,’ she said, waving a hand at them. I thought of them pressing down on the graves, sealing the dead in the ground.
‘I don’t like it here, Mum,’ said Dougie, coming back and taking my hand. ‘I’m hungry.’
We walked back to the village over an arched stone bridge and had a plate of mince and tatties in a wee café on the high
street. China models of fairies crowded the windowsills,
looking
out towards the hill.
‘Sitting here, it is almost as if the war never happened,’ said Sylvia, but I remembered the wishes at the top of the sacred place, the wind carrying the longing on its breath. The fear, the loss and the hope still lived there.
The rest of 1946 passed slowly. There were still shortages, but gradually all the men who had survived began to return to their families, and things improved. The prisoners of war were last. Germany was divided and it seemed like the ogre was dead; hung, drawn and quartered; Hitler stuck in his craw like a bitter pill.
Dougie helped in the greenhouses, or thought he did, and Jim read him long stories by the fire on the dark winter
evenings
. I had my own cottage on the end of a white-painted row. Sylvia’s Christmas card came early, as it did every year, and behind the picture of a happy Santa she wrote, ‘Expect a visitor. That old rascal Schramml stole my picture of you from my desk to send to a mutual friend of yours. All very
mysterious
. He swears he will return it, but, if not, at least I have the comfort of knowing you have your own copy. It was a very happy day at Aberfoyle. I wonder if the fairies will grant our wishes. I can’t say they are very efficient, but then maybe time isn’t as pressing, if you are eternal.’
I looked towards the door, as if I would hear footsteps in that instant, but there was only the sound of the wind. Hannes arrived a fortnight later at the nursery. Mrs Ogilvie had him seated by the fire when I got to the farmhouse, and just as he stood up to greet me, she remembered something that needed urgent attention next door in the kitchen.
‘I thought you wanted to leave Scotland,’ I said to him, ‘but after all the trouble I went to, you keep coming back.’
‘I have a good reason to come back, Agnes,’ he said, taking my hand, and kissing me on both cheeks.
‘I fear you are mistaken,’ I said, sounding more like Sylvia than myself.
‘There is no mistake.’ He pulled a picture of Dougie from his pocket, but there was something wrong. It was an old photo of a boy among vines and there was a white church with a red-tiled roof in the background. ‘This is a picture of me as a boy, Agnes.’ He handed me Sylvia’s photo of me and Dougie at the Doune Hill. ‘And this is a picture of my son. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I wasn’t sure,’ I said.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘You can’t pretend the war didn’t happen. They play Tommies and Jerries at playtime in the school. I thought it would be simpler if he grew up thinking he had a Scottish father. I don’t want to lose his love. It is all I have.’
‘I am his father,’ said Hannes, holding out his arms. ‘You can both have me.’
‘How could you live here? How could he love you?
‘He could get to know me. I could love him, as you do.’
‘It’s too difficult.’
‘When did you ever let that stop you, Agnes Thorne?’
‘Don’t laugh, it cost me enough. I am twenty-two now.’ I sat down to put some distance between us.
‘And it is nearly 1947. Time is moving on. We can make something new for ourselves.’
‘What’s new?’ said Dougie, coming into the room with a biscuit from Mrs Ogilvie.
I looked at Hannes, who had fallen silent and was staring at the wee figure in the doorway.
‘Come here and shake hands, Dougie,’ I said, but he climbed on my knee and hid his face. ‘Do you remember I told you a long time ago that I had a friend who once helped me very much, and that he was an Austrian called Hannes?
Dougie nodded.
‘This is Hannes.’
Dougie picked a raisin out of the biscuit and ate it. ‘Is he a Jerry?’ he asked.
‘Just listen. And do you remember I told you how I helped him to escape on Uncle Duncan’s boat. In those days, we were fighting the Germans and Austrians, but I didn’t want him to get hurt because he had helped me?’
Dougie nodded again with big eyes.
‘Well, the story I told you was not complete. There was silence in it.’
‘What do you mean, Mum?’
‘The silence is the thing I didn’t tell you. The thing I couldn’t tell anyone, and I had to keep quiet about it for a long time.’
‘About what?’
‘About you.’ He looked at me with his father’s eyes.
‘I need to tell you something very important. Do you remember when I told you how angry your uncle Duncan was when he heard Hannes talking in German in his sleep?’ I paused, and took his hand.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well, he wasn’t talking in his sleep. He was talking to me.’
‘I don’t understand, Mum.’
‘We spent the night together. Dougie, he is your father.’
‘Yuk,’ he shouted, jumping off my knee. ‘I don’t like kissing stories.’ Then he shouted, ‘And I don’t want a German dad. I’m Dougie McCaffrey.’
Hannes got to his feet to leave. ‘He needs time,’ he said.
I reached out for his arm as he passed.
‘Just wait.’ I walked over to my wee boy and crouched down. ‘We don’t pick our parents, Dougie,’ I said. ‘They are who they are. And we don’t pick when or where we’re born. It just happens. Do you think you could get to know Hannes because he’s special to me?’
Dougie took my face in both his hands, then looked at Hannes, who smiled at him with so much love that, for the
first time, I had hope. Mrs MacDougall might have said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ or, ‘There are many mansions in my Father’s kingdom,’ or just, ‘It’s past laughing once the heid’s aff,’ but then she was probably cleaning the stair, or
having
another word with Professor Schramml.
I put a log on the fire. When I looked up, Hannes had seated himself at the piano and raised the lid. It had been closed for a long time. The first notes of some Mozart sounded,
perhaps
it was Wiegenlied, which Jeff used to play. Perhaps it was something else. Dougie was leaning on the edge of the piano. When he lifted his hand to move closer to Hannes, his wee fingers left prints in the dust. Hannes looked round over his shoulder, grinned at me and said in Mrs MacDougall’s voice, ‘Agnes, would you look at this dust? Standards are slipping.’
We both laughed. I knew then that the future lay
somewhere
in that laughter, not in the past, and if we could find the seed and nurture it, then all might be well. I could teach my son a new song.