Flight
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Romance
Swearwords: None.
Description: A young couple elope on the eve of the Highland Clearances.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Tell me a story, Granny,” Effie pleaded with me.
It had been raining all day. We had not been able to take our usual walk to Princes Street and the Old Town so we were all a bit bored. We were sitting in the nursery of the brand new house in what was already being called the ‘New Town’ of Edinburgh. The persistent rain would probably finish the bunting that had been put up for the coronation of Queen Victoria: it had been looking the worse for wear when we were out yesterday.
I was in a deep armchair beside the fire with a shawl round my shoulders for I feel the cold in my bones nowadays.
I mind when I would go out to the peat stack with snow on the ground in nothing but my shift. Now I drift into wee reveries like this.
Leaning against my knee is twelve year old Euphemia but everyone except her mother calls her Effie. Her brother Philip is sprawled on the fireside rug with his book propped against the fender.
“Tell us about the olden days,” she persisted.
Philip at sixteen only deigns to be with us because we are waiting for nanny to bring in our supper. My son-in-law would like me to join them for dinner but I am too sleepy by eight o’clock to get any enjoyment from the meal. I am used to having my dinner in the middle of the day and I cannot adjust to the new-fangled notion of having my main meal at bed time.
“Do tell us, Gran,” Philip said, turning his head to look at me.
With that simple movement he suddenly looked so like my lovely Hamish at the same age that my heart lurched. My poor love is dead these five long years.
“Don’t sigh, Gran. Remember the wonderful stories Grandpa used to tell us about jacobites and redcoats?”
Effie looked a wee bit put out for she hardly remembered my husband: “I just ‘member that he smelled of soap and tobacco – and his beard was scratchy!”
“Well then, if you two are ganging up on me I had better just tell you a story.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl called Effie…”
“That’s me! That’s me, Philip. The story is about me!”
“This story is about another girl called Effie, although nowadays everyone just calls her ‘granny’.”
It seems like years since anyone called me by my given name.
“Is it a story about you, Gran?” Philip put a bookmark in place, then turned on his side and propped his head on his hand.
“Are you twelve in the story?” Effie desperately wanted to be the heroine of the romance.
“I was about the age Philip is now when the story starts.”
Effie was ready to interrupt again but I told her to let me tell it in my own way and she snuggled in quietly against my knee.
“I lived with my father, mother and little brother Callum in a wee stone cottage at the edge of a township in what is now Argyllshire. The roof was made of turf and we only had two rooms. The main room had a peat fire, a table, two benches and a box-bed where mum and dad slept. Callum and me slept in the other room with the cow.”
“That’s disgusting! You didn’t really sleep with a cow?”
“There’s nothing disgusting about it. The cow was warm and smelled of grass and milk. Of course, it took a while to get used to its tummy churning and rumbling all night long!
“This one night I am telling you about was very special. There would never be another night like it because in the morning men were coming to rip off the roof and knock down the walls of our home.”
“People can’t do that! They can’t just come along and throw you out, can they?”
“We were tenants of Her Ladyship and she wanted the land for sheep since they were more profitable than crofters. She had given us legal notice to quit but we stayed because we had nowhere else to go so we waited until the bailiffs came to evict us. The minister had pleaded with people on our behalf but he only managed to collect enough money from sympathisers to hire a ship to take us to Canada with some seed grain to give us a fresh start. The very next morning we were to walk to Inverary with all we could carry to board a schooner.”
“I would really like to travel to Canada,” Philip mused.
“Well, if you go you will be able to visit your cousins, for my brother Callum married and had children.”
“It’s like one of Mr Scott’s adventures. Isn't it? Why are you still in Scotland? Did you come back from Canada?”
“Hush up and I’ll tell you the whole story!
“There were thirty-six people due to leave in the morning: men, women and children. The bailiffs were a rough lot and they were camping in a ruined cottage just outside the township. We could see their fire and hear their talk and coarse laughter.
“The man in charge of the evictions was Seamus Martin, Her Ladyship’s factor.”
“But your name is Martin, isn’t it?” Philip interrupted.
It is and it took an age before Hamish was able to take me before the altar to make it so.
“Seamus had married the ladies’ maid in the big house but she died giving birth to their son. Before her death my father said that Seamus was easy-going and ready to help anyone but afterwards he became hard and unfeeling.
“Just before midnight on that fateful night, my mother crept into my room with a bundle containing all the food they could spare. I bundled it up with my one spare dress then we hugged and I slipped out into the night.
“The fire was still burning at the Bailiffs’ camp but there was no longer any sound. My room had been so dark that I was able to see clearly in the starlight outside. The shadows were inky black and it was out of one of these shadows that a hand reached out and clasped mine. I breathed a sigh of relief: Hamish had been able to get away. He was the factor’s son and we had been hand-fast for two years. We were running away together!
“I kilted my skirt and we set off up the glen hand in hand.”
“What’s kilting, Granny?”
“You take hold of the back of your skirt, pull it forward between your knees and tuck it into your waist at the front.”
Effie stood up and kilted her skirt showing an expanse of her lacy bloomers.
“Mother will have the vapours if she catches you like that, Effie.”
“Did you show your bloomers, Granny?”
I chuckled to myself because in those days I didn’t even have knickers.
“No dear, I just showed my bare legs all the way up to the knee. What do you think your mother would say to that, Philip?
“I had played around the glen all my life so I knew every stone and tuft of grass. I took the lead because Hamish did not know the way so well in the dark.
Our problem was that Seamus had a horse and he was sure to ride us down in the morning to bring me back and load me on the ship – in chains if he had to!
“About a mile above the village the glen narrowed at a vertical cliff of slate about fifty feet high with water cascading over the lichen-covered rocks. It looked impossible to climb but if you knew just where to place your feet and hands you could go up it like a ladder. I had been up there often enough but never in starlight and black shadow. For part of the way, I had to take hold of Hamish’s foot and place it on the next step, but we made it to the top!”
Out of the shelter of the glen, the wind knifed through our soaked clothing: I have never been so cold before or since!
“We were on open moorland but we made good time along the side of the burn until it disappeared into the peat bog from which it flowed. At that point Hamish took the lead and, just as day was dawning, we reached the loose scree that skirted the base of the mountain. A horse would have to take a long detour to bypass the cliff we had climbed and it would be unable to follow us across the scree. In fact the slide was so unstable that an incautious step would send you to the bottom with a ton or more of rock.
“We ran all the way, hand in hand like a couple of bairns. I might have thought of turning back but Hamish was so tall and handsome that I would have died rather than let him know that I was scared.
“Hamish had been there before and he was able to lead us safely across on a barely visible track made by wild sheep. Once on the flank of the mountain we felt safe since no one would believe that we could have passed two daunting obstacles so we reasoned that we would be looked for in another direction.”
“Where did you go from there? Was that the worst of the journey over?”
“The first thing we did was to sit in the shelter of a whin bush and unpack the supplies Hamish had brought. He had gone to the big house where the cook always gave him the best of the left-overs. She had been a friend of his mother’s and had a soft spot for him.
“We had planned everything very carefully. Hamish had tried to persuade his father to keep our family to be shepherds but Seamus would not even listen to the suggestion.”
My father and Seamus had been great friends as young men and they were courting at the same time. Now he had lost his wife and my dad and mum were still happy together.
“That was when we decided to go to Edinburgh to his aunt. She was a widow and had been trying to have Hamish live with her to train as a lawyer. Aunt Gwen was his mother’s sister and she had been companion to Her Ladyship. She was wooed and won by the family solicitor who carried her off to Edinburgh after the wedding. He was about twenty-five years older than Gwen and he died nearly five years after they were wed, leaving her a wealthy widow.
“She had often tried to get Seamus to send Hamish down to live with her. She promised to send him to the university so he could become a lawyer but Seamus was reluctant to let him go.”
He held his son responsible for his mother’s death and behaved badly towards him. I think he only wanted to keep Hamish around so that he could keep his rage with the world well stoked.
“Hamish knew she would welcome us with open arms and shelter us until he could find work.”
I was a lot less certain about the welcome we would get but I would have followed Hamish to the ends of the earth and I have never regretted doing so.
“Why did Seamus not want you to be shepherds and why did Her Ladyship prefer sheep to people?” Philip wanted to know.
“I think it was because they were bringing in trained shepherds form the Lowlands to look after the flocks that they were bringing with them.
He was eaten up with jealousy of my dad because mum was still alive.
“Her Ladyship resisted evicting the crofters for a long time after it became commonplace all over the Highlands but in the end her hand was forced. She had a son who had been the laird since his father died when he was about fifteen. Now in his mid-twenties he lived in London where he had squandered his inheritance gambling at cards. Her Ladyship had to bring in sheep and borrow against the future profits to keep her son out of debtors’ prison.”
Much good it did either of them: he blew his brains out a year later when they had nothing left to sell.
“Did you have lots of adventures on your journey? Were there highwaymen and deep un-fordable rivers between you and Edinburgh?”
Nothing to speak of except bitter cold and gnawing hunger for a week tramping through wet heather. We avoided the clachans sleeping in old byres and under hay ricks.
“No highwaymen, but it was a great adventure crossing the Highlands in the company of a handsome young man! I had never been to Edinburgh and the one time Hamish had visited his aunt he was in a closed carriage that drove right up to her door so he was not exactly sure where she lived.”
“I hope he married you after all that time alone together,” Effie fretted.
Oh yes he certainly did even if it did take longer than we had planned.
“When we did find her tenement on the Royal Mile she treated us both like her children. I became her companion while Hamish went to university and became a solicitor and Writer to His Majesty’s Signet. So we lived happily ever after just like in the fairy stories.”
If you start a story ‘Once upon a time’ you just have to finish living happily ever after. Gwen was ready to leave me in the street to starve, believing me to be a money-grubbing commoner who would bring her beloved nephew to a life of misery. It was only because keeping me was the only way to make Hamish stay that she relented to the point where she gave me bed and board. In return I worked as skivvy, cook and butler. She never forgave me for having youth and beauty while all she had was money. She was always distantly courteous when Hamish was about but when he was out all she ever addressed to me were orders.
I had been lost in my thoughts for a while, I suppose, when Effie piped up. “Did the rest of your family get on the ship?”
“Yes they did. With the other folk from the township they crossed the Atlantic Ocean to a place called New Scotland, only the name is in Latin.”
“Nova Scotia,” Philip translated. “I would much rather have gone there than to Edinburgh! Someday when I travel the whole world, I will go there.”
“When you get to Nova Scotia you can visit your cousins.”
“Do we really have cousins there, Granny?”
“My brother Callum married and had a son and two daughters and they have married and had children. Callum is dead now but his elder daughter, Marie, writes to me from time to time. I will show you the letters sometime.”
The first winter in Nova Scotia killed my father and Callum only just survived a fever that brought about the deaths of eleven of the people from our township. It took six years for them to gain a secure foothold in their new home but they are modestly prosperous now, the Lord be praised.
At that moment Morag, the nanny, opened the door and pushed in the trolley loaded with supper dishes.
“Oh my, miss Effie. Whatever have you done to your pretty frock?”
“It’s kilted, Morag. Do you like it?”
“Your poor mother will have the vapours if she sees you like that!”
When did my daughter become such a prig?
We all laughed and Morag looked a bit sulky until I explained that Philip had said exactly the same thing!
“Did you and Grandpa live in this house, Granny?”
“No dear. We stayed with Aunt Gwen until she died and then took over the property. That’s where we lived when we were raising your mother and uncles.”
She had the grace to get in a maid when I became pregnant but I still had to do the cooking.
“We lived in that house until your Grandpa Hamish died.”
And I still miss him awful sore even after five years.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A young couple elope on the eve of the Highland Clearances.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Tell me a story, Granny,” Effie pleaded with me.
It had been raining all day. We had not been able to take our usual walk to Princes Street and the Old Town so we were all a bit bored. We were sitting in the nursery of the brand new house in what was already being called the ‘New Town’ of Edinburgh. The persistent rain would probably finish the bunting that had been put up for the coronation of Queen Victoria: it had been looking the worse for wear when we were out yesterday.
I was in a deep armchair beside the fire with a shawl round my shoulders for I feel the cold in my bones nowadays.
I mind when I would go out to the peat stack with snow on the ground in nothing but my shift. Now I drift into wee reveries like this.
Leaning against my knee is twelve year old Euphemia but everyone except her mother calls her Effie. Her brother Philip is sprawled on the fireside rug with his book propped against the fender.
“Tell us about the olden days,” she persisted.
Philip at sixteen only deigns to be with us because we are waiting for nanny to bring in our supper. My son-in-law would like me to join them for dinner but I am too sleepy by eight o’clock to get any enjoyment from the meal. I am used to having my dinner in the middle of the day and I cannot adjust to the new-fangled notion of having my main meal at bed time.
“Do tell us, Gran,” Philip said, turning his head to look at me.
With that simple movement he suddenly looked so like my lovely Hamish at the same age that my heart lurched. My poor love is dead these five long years.
“Don’t sigh, Gran. Remember the wonderful stories Grandpa used to tell us about jacobites and redcoats?”
Effie looked a wee bit put out for she hardly remembered my husband: “I just ‘member that he smelled of soap and tobacco – and his beard was scratchy!”
“Well then, if you two are ganging up on me I had better just tell you a story.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl called Effie…”
“That’s me! That’s me, Philip. The story is about me!”
“This story is about another girl called Effie, although nowadays everyone just calls her ‘granny’.”
It seems like years since anyone called me by my given name.
“Is it a story about you, Gran?” Philip put a bookmark in place, then turned on his side and propped his head on his hand.
“Are you twelve in the story?” Effie desperately wanted to be the heroine of the romance.
“I was about the age Philip is now when the story starts.”
Effie was ready to interrupt again but I told her to let me tell it in my own way and she snuggled in quietly against my knee.
“I lived with my father, mother and little brother Callum in a wee stone cottage at the edge of a township in what is now Argyllshire. The roof was made of turf and we only had two rooms. The main room had a peat fire, a table, two benches and a box-bed where mum and dad slept. Callum and me slept in the other room with the cow.”
“That’s disgusting! You didn’t really sleep with a cow?”
“There’s nothing disgusting about it. The cow was warm and smelled of grass and milk. Of course, it took a while to get used to its tummy churning and rumbling all night long!
“This one night I am telling you about was very special. There would never be another night like it because in the morning men were coming to rip off the roof and knock down the walls of our home.”
“People can’t do that! They can’t just come along and throw you out, can they?”
“We were tenants of Her Ladyship and she wanted the land for sheep since they were more profitable than crofters. She had given us legal notice to quit but we stayed because we had nowhere else to go so we waited until the bailiffs came to evict us. The minister had pleaded with people on our behalf but he only managed to collect enough money from sympathisers to hire a ship to take us to Canada with some seed grain to give us a fresh start. The very next morning we were to walk to Inverary with all we could carry to board a schooner.”
“I would really like to travel to Canada,” Philip mused.
“Well, if you go you will be able to visit your cousins, for my brother Callum married and had children.”
“It’s like one of Mr Scott’s adventures. Isn't it? Why are you still in Scotland? Did you come back from Canada?”
“Hush up and I’ll tell you the whole story!
“There were thirty-six people due to leave in the morning: men, women and children. The bailiffs were a rough lot and they were camping in a ruined cottage just outside the township. We could see their fire and hear their talk and coarse laughter.
“The man in charge of the evictions was Seamus Martin, Her Ladyship’s factor.”
“But your name is Martin, isn’t it?” Philip interrupted.
It is and it took an age before Hamish was able to take me before the altar to make it so.
“Seamus had married the ladies’ maid in the big house but she died giving birth to their son. Before her death my father said that Seamus was easy-going and ready to help anyone but afterwards he became hard and unfeeling.
“Just before midnight on that fateful night, my mother crept into my room with a bundle containing all the food they could spare. I bundled it up with my one spare dress then we hugged and I slipped out into the night.
“The fire was still burning at the Bailiffs’ camp but there was no longer any sound. My room had been so dark that I was able to see clearly in the starlight outside. The shadows were inky black and it was out of one of these shadows that a hand reached out and clasped mine. I breathed a sigh of relief: Hamish had been able to get away. He was the factor’s son and we had been hand-fast for two years. We were running away together!
“I kilted my skirt and we set off up the glen hand in hand.”
“What’s kilting, Granny?”
“You take hold of the back of your skirt, pull it forward between your knees and tuck it into your waist at the front.”
Effie stood up and kilted her skirt showing an expanse of her lacy bloomers.
“Mother will have the vapours if she catches you like that, Effie.”
“Did you show your bloomers, Granny?”
I chuckled to myself because in those days I didn’t even have knickers.
“No dear, I just showed my bare legs all the way up to the knee. What do you think your mother would say to that, Philip?
“I had played around the glen all my life so I knew every stone and tuft of grass. I took the lead because Hamish did not know the way so well in the dark.
Our problem was that Seamus had a horse and he was sure to ride us down in the morning to bring me back and load me on the ship – in chains if he had to!
“About a mile above the village the glen narrowed at a vertical cliff of slate about fifty feet high with water cascading over the lichen-covered rocks. It looked impossible to climb but if you knew just where to place your feet and hands you could go up it like a ladder. I had been up there often enough but never in starlight and black shadow. For part of the way, I had to take hold of Hamish’s foot and place it on the next step, but we made it to the top!”
Out of the shelter of the glen, the wind knifed through our soaked clothing: I have never been so cold before or since!
“We were on open moorland but we made good time along the side of the burn until it disappeared into the peat bog from which it flowed. At that point Hamish took the lead and, just as day was dawning, we reached the loose scree that skirted the base of the mountain. A horse would have to take a long detour to bypass the cliff we had climbed and it would be unable to follow us across the scree. In fact the slide was so unstable that an incautious step would send you to the bottom with a ton or more of rock.
“We ran all the way, hand in hand like a couple of bairns. I might have thought of turning back but Hamish was so tall and handsome that I would have died rather than let him know that I was scared.
“Hamish had been there before and he was able to lead us safely across on a barely visible track made by wild sheep. Once on the flank of the mountain we felt safe since no one would believe that we could have passed two daunting obstacles so we reasoned that we would be looked for in another direction.”
“Where did you go from there? Was that the worst of the journey over?”
“The first thing we did was to sit in the shelter of a whin bush and unpack the supplies Hamish had brought. He had gone to the big house where the cook always gave him the best of the left-overs. She had been a friend of his mother’s and had a soft spot for him.
“We had planned everything very carefully. Hamish had tried to persuade his father to keep our family to be shepherds but Seamus would not even listen to the suggestion.”
My father and Seamus had been great friends as young men and they were courting at the same time. Now he had lost his wife and my dad and mum were still happy together.
“That was when we decided to go to Edinburgh to his aunt. She was a widow and had been trying to have Hamish live with her to train as a lawyer. Aunt Gwen was his mother’s sister and she had been companion to Her Ladyship. She was wooed and won by the family solicitor who carried her off to Edinburgh after the wedding. He was about twenty-five years older than Gwen and he died nearly five years after they were wed, leaving her a wealthy widow.
“She had often tried to get Seamus to send Hamish down to live with her. She promised to send him to the university so he could become a lawyer but Seamus was reluctant to let him go.”
He held his son responsible for his mother’s death and behaved badly towards him. I think he only wanted to keep Hamish around so that he could keep his rage with the world well stoked.
“Hamish knew she would welcome us with open arms and shelter us until he could find work.”
I was a lot less certain about the welcome we would get but I would have followed Hamish to the ends of the earth and I have never regretted doing so.
“Why did Seamus not want you to be shepherds and why did Her Ladyship prefer sheep to people?” Philip wanted to know.
“I think it was because they were bringing in trained shepherds form the Lowlands to look after the flocks that they were bringing with them.
He was eaten up with jealousy of my dad because mum was still alive.
“Her Ladyship resisted evicting the crofters for a long time after it became commonplace all over the Highlands but in the end her hand was forced. She had a son who had been the laird since his father died when he was about fifteen. Now in his mid-twenties he lived in London where he had squandered his inheritance gambling at cards. Her Ladyship had to bring in sheep and borrow against the future profits to keep her son out of debtors’ prison.”
Much good it did either of them: he blew his brains out a year later when they had nothing left to sell.
“Did you have lots of adventures on your journey? Were there highwaymen and deep un-fordable rivers between you and Edinburgh?”
Nothing to speak of except bitter cold and gnawing hunger for a week tramping through wet heather. We avoided the clachans sleeping in old byres and under hay ricks.
“No highwaymen, but it was a great adventure crossing the Highlands in the company of a handsome young man! I had never been to Edinburgh and the one time Hamish had visited his aunt he was in a closed carriage that drove right up to her door so he was not exactly sure where she lived.”
“I hope he married you after all that time alone together,” Effie fretted.
Oh yes he certainly did even if it did take longer than we had planned.
“When we did find her tenement on the Royal Mile she treated us both like her children. I became her companion while Hamish went to university and became a solicitor and Writer to His Majesty’s Signet. So we lived happily ever after just like in the fairy stories.”
If you start a story ‘Once upon a time’ you just have to finish living happily ever after. Gwen was ready to leave me in the street to starve, believing me to be a money-grubbing commoner who would bring her beloved nephew to a life of misery. It was only because keeping me was the only way to make Hamish stay that she relented to the point where she gave me bed and board. In return I worked as skivvy, cook and butler. She never forgave me for having youth and beauty while all she had was money. She was always distantly courteous when Hamish was about but when he was out all she ever addressed to me were orders.
I had been lost in my thoughts for a while, I suppose, when Effie piped up. “Did the rest of your family get on the ship?”
“Yes they did. With the other folk from the township they crossed the Atlantic Ocean to a place called New Scotland, only the name is in Latin.”
“Nova Scotia,” Philip translated. “I would much rather have gone there than to Edinburgh! Someday when I travel the whole world, I will go there.”
“When you get to Nova Scotia you can visit your cousins.”
“Do we really have cousins there, Granny?”
“My brother Callum married and had a son and two daughters and they have married and had children. Callum is dead now but his elder daughter, Marie, writes to me from time to time. I will show you the letters sometime.”
The first winter in Nova Scotia killed my father and Callum only just survived a fever that brought about the deaths of eleven of the people from our township. It took six years for them to gain a secure foothold in their new home but they are modestly prosperous now, the Lord be praised.
At that moment Morag, the nanny, opened the door and pushed in the trolley loaded with supper dishes.
“Oh my, miss Effie. Whatever have you done to your pretty frock?”
“It’s kilted, Morag. Do you like it?”
“Your poor mother will have the vapours if she sees you like that!”
When did my daughter become such a prig?
We all laughed and Morag looked a bit sulky until I explained that Philip had said exactly the same thing!
“Did you and Grandpa live in this house, Granny?”
“No dear. We stayed with Aunt Gwen until she died and then took over the property. That’s where we lived when we were raising your mother and uncles.”
She had the grace to get in a maid when I became pregnant but I still had to do the cooking.
“We lived in that house until your Grandpa Hamish died.”
And I still miss him awful sore even after five years.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.