O Caledonia

Now they started to go to a little school. They walked there each morning with Nanny, over a track which crossed the fields, into the grounds of a huge house. Here, in what had once been a summer house, a tiny Hansel and Gretel cottage, ten small children learnt reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic. Janet loved it all, apart from arithmetic. At eleven o’clock they each had a short, squat bottle of milk, its cardboard lid’s inner concentric circle pierced precisely by a straw, and a dark crimson apple, polished to gleaming ruby on cardigan sleeves. Wide lawns surrounded the little house and nearby stood a ruinous hayloft with a stone staircase to a black gap high on its outer wall. It was clear that a banished witch might live up there, using the platform at the top of the stairs as a useful take-off point. Janet imagined her triangular black form sweeping across the windy sky, blotting out the sun, descending to the house in which by rights she should dwell. But inside the school such fears evaporated. Reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic were soon supplemented by Nature and stories from Scottish history, and the French verbs etre

and

avoir

, in the present tense only. At midday Miss Mackie, rosy and rounded as a robin, would cry, “Let’s flit,” and they would push the tables and chairs to the side of the room and hurtle into singing and dancing games. Sometimes these were of a cautionary nature; there was one about brushing the Germs away, requiring vigorous elbow work, stooping, twisting, and shaking of imaginary brooms. All the children assumed that Germs was short for Germans and performed with patriotic fervour.

In spring a dazzle of crocuses, gold and white and deepest purple, gleamed in the grass. Janet stood staring at them, breathing the sudden soft air, spellbound. Her favourite boy, James, told her that he, too, liked purple best and asked her to marry him when they were grown up. Janet consented. Another boy, Bobby, also asked her to marry him; again she consented. She had no intention of marrying either, as she still wished to be a princess, but she liked the idea of their hopeless dedication and she devised quests in which they might prove their devotion. At first these were modest: James was to find a ladybird, or Bobby was to bring a pink shell from the beach; but even in the brilliant light of those May mornings the black gap of the witch’s loft stared fearfully down and soon she knew that the boys must go together up the staircase and find out whether or not the hag was there. The children were forbidden to go anywhere near the barn and so some strategy was needed.

At noon, when they were putting on their coats to go home for lunch, Janet offered to take the apple cores from the waste-bin to the pig Beatrice who lived in a pen behind the school. The children often visited Beatrice; she was a friendly black pig, a white stripe encompassed her stout middle and her eye was bright and roguish. She would come hustling out of her shed with gleeful snorts, stand motionless with a meaningful twinkle, then pick up her bucket on one deft twist of her wrinkled snout and hurl it over her shoulders to clatter down upright on her other side, and repeat the performance. Today Miss Mackie was pleased to let Janet feed her, and to let Bobby and James go with her. Janet had not told the boys about her plan; she did not want them to know about her fear of the witch in case they said they didn’t believe in witches. So when they reached Beatrice’s pen, she grabbed the bucket and flung the cores straight in. Beatrice, about to perform her trick, stared in disappointment; the twinkle faded from her eye; grumpily she rootled after the cores and subsided back into her house.