Tales from the Tent (8 page)

‘Wull, come in here,’ she called out, ‘Harry’s back with us.’

The shepherd rushed into the small bedroom, followed by his son.

‘Oh, my maun, you didn’t half put the frighteners on us right enough, how are you feeling?’

Harry lifted his frame from the bed, only to fall back flat, unable to say anything.

He lay stretched and sore and listened as his neighbours went on and on. It was a relief to hear them, but before he slipped back into a comfortable sleep he asked in a whisper, ‘how did
you know where I was?’

‘How indeed! Your lassies, of course, did they not bark us out of our beds! But we don’t know where they are. The lad here has searched high and low and can’t find them
anywhere. Ah well, no doubt they’ll soon come at your whistle. Eh, Harry?’

As word spread that me and Geordie were paired, the lassies giggled and gossiped as to when we might be wed or what colour our weans’ hair would be, seeing as mine was
jet black and his a honey blonde. Soon Daddy was picking up wee bits of this information and, unbeknown to myself, he was not at all pleased—in fact, my father was downright angry.

I was growing up and Daddy was losing his wee lassie. His attitude puzzled me though, because already my four older sisters were wed and had his blessing because of it.

It was a Friday morning I will never forget. Daddy called me into the trailer and asked me to sit down. ‘Jessie,’ he said, in the quietest voice, ‘in every family, especially
one like ours with lots of lassies, there has to be the one who stays single.’

‘Why, Daddy?’ I asked, puzzled and bewildered by such a comment.

‘That’s the one who’ll look after Mam and me when we’re too old to see to ourselves. Can you understand me, lassie?’

I bowed my head. ‘Yes, Daddy, I’m the one who will never know a man’s love or the joy of my own bairns. Oh yes, I understand you perfectly well.’

‘Promise me, lassie.’

‘I promise.’

I knew very well that this is an unbreakable rule amongst travelling people. It was and is still to this day an unwritten law that elderly parents have to see respect and care from their family
until the last breath. No matter what old age brings, whether the losing of the mind or bodily functions, family devotion must go all the way to the grave. Aye, and beyond, in many cases. Still, I
always thought my strong parents would see to themselves. It never entered my head they would need tending to. I don’t know if it was the thought that the two dearest people in the world to
me would one day be incapacitated, or because I was the one chosen never to know a man’s love or not, but my heart was pushing waves of tears into my throat. I needed solitude!

I had no wish to share my agony with Daddy or anyone else, so I ran and ran until I had left the campsite far behind me. For a while I wished that I were one of Harry’s dogs. At least then
there would be meaning and purpose to my life. All of a sudden a realisation spread through my young growing body; I wanted to be wee Jessie again. Never ever feeling the need to be grown-up, not
ever. How long I lay in my nest of summer clover and wild daisies I do not know, but a spiral of troubled thoughts threw me into an afternoon of deep sleep. It was Geordie’s voice that
wakened me.

‘Jess, my bonny lassie, what brings you up here to lie amongst the bluebottles and corn lice?’

I hadn’t realised, but within my heaven of clover a herd of Friesian cows was munching away, happily depositing the contents of their bowels in circles of pancakes all around me. A light
wind was blowing the tiny black lice from off a nearby cornfield and this heaven of mine was becoming less like a sanctuary and more like a farmyard on a hot sticky July day.

George lay down beside me and without a single warning kissed me hard on the lips. I was startled and perhaps embarrassed. I did not kiss him back, but rather pushed him away. He then became
quite forceful. Those gentle hands that had previously helped me when my foot was pained became powered by something I had never encountered before. This once-tender boy who embraced me gently in
dreams was foaming at the mouth and tearing madly at my clothes. Was he in for a shock! I jumped up, drew back my foot as far as possible and gave him the biggest kick between his legs. The scream
he let forth sent cows, bluebottles and corn lice into the next glen.

‘You ever try that again, and mark my words, laddie, I’ll take those swelt walnuts between your legs and stuff them into the biggest toad I can find. Then with the greatest pleasure
I’ll ram yon stuffed puddock as far up your arse as it’ll go, alright, bastard?’ I gripped his tartan shirt collar and warned him in no uncertain terms to watch his sleep, because
a regiment of rats and vampire bats were marching from hell’s depths to eat that offending weapon from between his legs. Yes, Geordie lad, with hands clasping a painful swelt area of bruised
manhood, would think twice before applying that kind of courtship to a lassie again. Served him right.

My days of courtship were well and truly over. If that was what men had to offer, then my parents would have no problems. Their old days would be taken care of by yours truly, and from then on
I’d be a maiden aunt. The term ‘auld spinster’ didn’t seem so bad, considering. I had hardly started with men and already I was finished. End of story.

From then on I reverted back to being a fifteen-year-old tomboy. Climbing the rear end out of my jeans. Shortest haircut and unwashed face looked good on me, and apart from the cursed once a
monthers, I was as happy as a pig in smelly stuff.

Daddy, obviously annoyed with his part in my giving up ever man-hunting again felt obliged to make amends by unsuccessfully trying to buy Mac’s journal. But nothing doing, my fellow
storyteller would take his tales to the grave. And if rumour is half right, then my friend lost his life one fateful night after a wild night drinking in the Macduff Hotel. It seems he fell into
the harbour and was drowned. It’s said he went over with a battered brown suitcase clasped in his hand. Did it contain those magical tales from the tents, or did they give heart to some
lonely man’s fire?

Mac parted with a few more stories before he ended his visit. Later, as we wander through this book, reader, I’ll pop them in.

Soon we had said our goodbye to the ‘berries’ and headed along the way to where Daddy was spray-painting over by Kirriemuir. This is a part of Scotland that shall live forever in my
mind as the place of couthie folk. Farm people, workers of the soil and, much to my delight, traditional music lovers and storytellers.

Like us who also were agricultural workers, they had little time for idle hands. Everybody I met had a job of sorts. Woman baked and cooked from nature’s larder, made their own cheese and
butter and ate only the food that swam, flew and browsed within the Angus Glens. And the men, well, they worked the land from sun-up to sundown. I heard many a traveller wife say to her children
‘to mind and eat yer grub an be big and strong like the ploughmen’—or, in cant, ‘like the plughs.’

8

THE GHOSTS OF KIRRIEMUIR

W
hy, I hear you ask, has she given a wee town that sits snuggled at the feet of the Angus Glens a whole section of the book? After all, we only
stayed a week. Well, it could be because the famed author of ‘Peter Pan’ was born there, but it isn’t. Or the fact that a great royal castle by the name of Glamis has its seat a
few miles down the way, and it being the birthplace of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the late mother of the present queen, but that’s not the reason either. If, however, I swear to you that
our entire campsite became a place of an immense haunting, would you believe me? Of course you wouldn’t.

Give me a hearing, that’s all I ask, then see what you think.

We found a wood a few miles outside the town in an area back-dropped by vast heather moorlands. Up a rough track on the way to our campsite we passed a mausoleum, the burial site of landed
gentry.

Before I frighten the life out of you with the haunting of our campsite, I would be pleased to ease you gently in with this tale. Not all ghosts are terror-filled.

‘It’ll snow before nightfall, Peter, the blackbirds have eaten every scrap of crumbs I put out this morning and the goats have been butting the barn door to get
inside!’

It wasn’t usual for the old man to agree with his neighbour’s wife, Mrs Beckett, but he’d felt the coming snow as far back as yesterday’s dawn. The groaning pain in his
joints told him it was time for it.

Mrs Beckett came as she did every year, basket filled with homemade mince pies, a little mulled wine, a slice of thick Christmas cake and one of her finest pork pies. In the Angus glens the
womenfolk were famed for their ‘porkies’.

She was a good woman who meant well, but her visit brought it all back, and he didn’t need to be reminded.

On the eve of Christmas she came, her basket filled with festive fare. Helen and the dear lady would sit till after ten in the morning, chatting about this and that.

He remembered it so well, like it was yesterday, could see their smiling faces in his mind, the way his pretty wife covered her mouth when her friend mentioned so-and-so was having an affair
with a certain person. ‘You’re an awfy lass, Mrs Beckett, you mustn’t listen tae rumours,’ she would say, before adding, ‘who did ye say it was?’

Peter seldom listened to the women folk’s banter, but although he didn’t admit it, he enjoyed the whispering tones of their endless chit-chat.

But since
that
day, the silence was all he heard, and it was deafening.

‘Mr Beckett sends his regards tae ye, he asks if you might like to spend Christmas wi’ us. The goose, well, goodness me, it’s far too big, I telt him the smaller one would do
just fine. “Husband,” I said, “that bird will feed our pigs for a month, it’s a monster.”’ Peter lifted his stiffened body from the rocking chair, slowly
straightened his back and thanked the dear woman for her neighbourly kindness. ‘I will, as always, find your gifts maist tasty, Mrs Beckett, but am thinking it would be wise if ye were to
leave now, as the sky grows thicker by the minute, and the three miles home will hinder ye greatly if it snows. Thank your man for his kind offer, but I’ll stay here at hame, if it’s
a’ the same with ye baith.’

‘Och aye, of course I feel it, the biting wind already chills my face, but you know we would like nothing better, especially at this time!’ Mrs Beckett wished she hadn’t
mentioned that! She saw old Peter flinch as if her words had opened a deep wound, spreading a look of pain across his old, craggy face.

She quickly sat the basket down and muttered she’d come back for it another time. ‘I’m right sorry, Peter, this tongue o’ mine, it must be the years pilin’ on,
I’m a mite forgetful. The man an’ I wish ye a guid Christmas. We’ll visit in the New Year, share a dram, weather permitting that is. Cheerio now!’

She had said enough. Angered at herself for her looseness of tongue, she bade him goodbye, pulled a thick woollen shawl from her shoulders, covered her head and was soon gone down the way she
had come an hour before.

Peter shuffled inside, closed the heavy oak door, put a few more logs on the fire and sank down in his worn armchair.