O Caledonia

It was a rigorous life, but for Janet it was softened by the landscape, by reading, and by animals whom she found it possible to love without qualification. People seemed to her flawed and cruel. She saw Vera’s small unkindnesses to Lila, Lila’s lack of feeling for anyone save her balding cat, the boys’ savagery. Everywhere there was hideous cruelty to animals. Once as she rode past the sawmill she saw a deer hanging in an open-sided lean-to. They had chopped off its head and its legs to the knee. Then there was the frightening and constant seethe and surge of eruptive anger in Nanny, in Mr. McConochie, who grew more and more like horrible murderous Mr. Punch or like the passage he himself had read them, describing John Knox in infirmity and old age, leaning weakly on the edge of the pulpit, but by mid-sermon “like to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it,” his eyes fixed and sparkling with menace, his complexion choleric. She recognised in herself a distaste for people, which was both physical and intellectual; and yet she nurtured a shameful, secret desire for popularity, or at least for acceptance, neither of which came her way.

The boys regarded her as an unwelcome intruder into their masculine world and a potential spy. Girls were sissy. She tried to prove her worth: she climbed the great chestnut tree which hung above the woodshed. The next task was to wriggle on your stomach to the end of a branch and then swing from it and leap across the void onto the steep corrugated iron roof, skid to its edge, and land on your feet on the ground. Janet stood helplessly high among the yellow leaves clutching the trunk, feeling her feet slithering on the damp bark, watching the conkers tumble past her to the ground. Dizzy and dappled lay the sunlit grass below. She could not move. She looked at the sky. The sun was watching her, the clouds hung motionless. The boys were watching her too, silent but mirthful. Soon the familiar chant began: “Sissy, sissy. Cowardy cowardy custard, dipped in the mustard. Sissy, sissy, girly, girly, girly.” “I can see your knickers. We can see your knickers.” In desperation she let go with one hand and tried to jam her kilt between her legs. She slipped and hurtled head first to the ground, a sharp scent of earth and leaves, an agonising jolt, a flash of lightning, darkness. The darkness did not last long; she opened her eyes; the boys had melted away and Vera was standing above her, her face contorted with fury. “What in the world are you doing, Janet? Have you no sense at all? If you can’t get up a tree without falling out just don’t climb trees.” Janet got cautiously to her feet; her head ached and she felt sick. “Are you all right now?” added Vera as a sort of bitter afterthought. Janet nodded dumbly. “Good. Well, off you go and play with the others. And take more care in future.”

Janet stumbled over the gaping shards of fallen chestnuts and made her way painfully down the path through the beech trees to her pony Rosie’s field. Rosie was grazing but when she saw Janet she lifted her head and whickered and trotted to the gate. Janet sat on the gate and buried her face in Rosie’s mane and breathed in her warm tarry smell; Rosie nuzzled her jersey, champing over her last few blades of grass, leaving a trail of green slobber across the Fair Isle pattern. Janet hugged her tightly. Here was comfort, here was communion. A great peace descended on her, bestowed by the still autumn air, the sweet perfume of the pines, dark on the hillside before her, the great love she felt flow from her into Rosie, flow back from Rosie to her. Calm and tranced she walked up through the beeches again and saw two red squirrels leaping along their sinuous branches; they leapt and curvetted, stopped dead, flourished their tails and were off again, swift and smooth, fleeing like light up the trunks, so bright and merry and joyous that she wanted to shriek with delight. Thus armoured, it mattered nothing to her that the boys were sulking because Hector had forbidden them to swing from the chestnut tree. “The boys must not bounce on the corrugated-iron roof,” he had pronounced, giving every vowel its maximum resonance and rolling the r

’s into a thunderous finale.

Chapter Five

Winter descended on the glen; in mid-October came the first thin fall of snow, gone an hour later in the wet wind. The deer ventured down from the hills at dusk, tawny owls shrieked as they hunted through the darkness and shooting stars fled across the night sky. Leafless, the beeches and ashes shivered; the grass was parched with cold; pine and monkey-puzzle stood black and dominant. Only the red earth of the hill tracks retained its colour; the puddles looked like pools of blood.