O Caledonia

I leant my back unto an aikI thought it was a trusty tree,But first it bowed and then it brake…

Ye’ll set upon his white hausbaneAnd I’ll peck out his bonny blue e’enI hacked him in pieces sma’It was mirk mirk night

There was nae starlightWe waded through red blood to the kneeFor all the blood that’s shed on earth

Runs through the springs of that country.Last night I dreamed a dreary dreamBeyond the Isle of SkyeI saw a dead man win a fight

And I think that man was I…

The sound of the wind, the dawn wind, and the sound of the sea, eternally mournful, cruel, tender, were in those pages, were in Janet’s head and heart and blood.

On summer afternoons, when Hector and Vera thought that she was on the cricket pitch, a place she feared, she slipped away through the rhododendron jungle to the mossy silent path which led to the old hen house. The hens had all escaped long ago. Rab the hero dog had slaughtered most of them. He was condemned to wear a bloody corpse slung around his neck — primitive aversion therapy. Now and then a solitary Rhode Island or a snowy Leghorn would emerge from the bushes, peer about, squawk in horror, and retreat. No one cared. The flock of hens had been another of Vera’s attempts to introduce some element of gentle domesticity to the unyielding landscape of the glen, and like her orchard it had not prospered. However, the dank shadows of the hen house, its rotten lichened timbers and shafts of sunlight, received Janet’s taciturn presence and gave her sanctuary. Here she spent the long afternoons reading, and copying her favourite poems into an exercise book. Sometimes she would go farther up the path and come to the wide grassy clearing where the two gaunt old swings, tall and angular as guillotines or gallows, dominated the slope; there, with minimal effort, it was possible to soar to great heights, the steep bank falling away beneath, the black pine branches against the blue sky rushing outstretched to embrace her. The scent of the pines, the throb of wood pigeons, the shearing glissade of the circular saw at the distant wood mill and the perfect arc of the swing, as it rose and sank and rose again, lulled her into a trance of happiness. One day, as she swung, she watched a pheasant lead her brood of chicks through the long fine grass. Suddenly the mother bird sank low to the ground, the little ones ran straggling and cheeping towards her, and a great shadow fell across them, across Janet too, as she whirled around and around, unwinding from the twisted chains of the swing. A huge eagle was passing slowly above her, impervious and purposeful, its wings scarcely beating. It drifted on up the glen until in the distance it spanned the rift between the hills, a creature greater than its landscape.

Not all afternoons passed so happily, however. Janet was expected to benefit from the masculine activities available, to puff and pant her way down the drive on early morning runs, to play cricket in the summer and rugby in the winter. She loathed games and was notably bad at them, cringing as the cricket ball hurtled towards her skull, dropping the bat and jumping out of the way. Nor could she catch balls, nor could she throw them. It was even worse in winter on the rugby pitch, in the scrum where boys would seize her plaits and wrench them; she would overbalance and fall flat on her face in the squelching mud while their great boots trampled over her. Mercifully, fog descended on the glen in late afternoon and she could ebb backwards into it, unnoticed, unmissed, until the straining, baying packs of players were scarcely visible. Then she ran for the shelter of the trees and fled up the hill to Auchnasaugh, sliding in through the back doors and vanishing into its dark passages until it was safe to be seen, when the lights glowed warm in the old ballroom and eighty boys were clamorous over tea, and beyond the tall uncurtained windows trees and hills withdrew into lonely self-absorption in the wet dusk.