For a large part of my life the rowan tree became synonymous with safety

The Serial: A Rowan Tree In My Garden Day2

Mother read to me in this cheerful room she had recently decorated with paper covered in pink rosebuds. Over the fireplace hung a picture of a girl around my own age wearing a frilly dress and holding a doll. I got to know it well. A fire was kept burning in the hearth and at night, when the hissing of the gas lantern ceased, I watched amazing shadows dance on the walls when flames burst through the damped down dross.

It was from this time that I noticed the word “delicate” used in connection with me and that I was pandered to more than ever.

My parents could so easily have lost me. This gave me a sort of unconscious power over them, giving me the freedom to live life as I wanted to and not do things that I didn’t like. Most of all, I didn’t like school.

Mother did think education was important. She herself had been born into a poor but proud farming family in East Aberdeenshire.

She was one of seven children and had struggled hard to get into Aberdeen University at a time when girls were not encouraged to get educated.

There, during the First World War, she got an M.A. degree.

Importance

Several years later she had an interesting job as factor for an estate in Aberdeenshire owned by the Earl of Southesk.

She was convinced she would not have had this job had she not been well educated, even though her people had been tenant farmers on this estate for more than 300 years and still were, and her first husband had been factor there before her.

Education was of paramount importance, in her opinion. It opened up new worlds and why not for girls?

However, the health and happiness of her precious daughters were of prime importance.

My sister and I were precious to my father also, although he was less ambitious for us. He was, once more, happy with his life.

Having spent four years of his youth fighting in a terrible war, a peaceful existence was all that he wanted now. Carnoustie, where we now lived, gave him that.

It was a pleasant seaside town whose population, in those days, doubled in the summer with people coming by train from other Scottish towns to the long golden beaches and the sea.

In summer the streets were festooned with hanging baskets of flowers and down by the sea there were chutes, swings and roundabouts.

On Sundays, a brass band played in a round band stand and in the large and airy pavilion entertainments were held for both children and adults.

Father’s new job suited him. He was good at it in his own mild way and above all, he was beside a good golf course.

The house that father had rented for us stood at the top of a brae that ran down to the main street. It was a detached house, large and rambling with a good-sized garden boasting a greenhouse complete with grape vine.

It was a wonderful place for us small girls to play in as it had lots of nooks and crannies and bushes to hide under. It also had an apple and a rowan tree.

The one thing I was a little apprehensive about was a wooden stile that went over our boundary wall and into a wild orchard.

Over-sensitive

In the middle of that orchard I could just see an old stone cottage. Cats prowled about the orchard and sometimes an old bent lady could be seen.

With my over-sensitive imagination I thought she was a witch.

My mother assured me she was not and anyway, even supposing she had been one, I was quite safe as there was a rowan tree in the garden that kept witches away.

For a large part of my life the rowan tree became synonymous with safety. Before we left Carnoustie the old lady broke her leg and was taken to hospital, where she died.

Mother told us, at a later date, that the rumour was that what had really killed her was being given a bath. The shock had been too much for her.

Unlike me, my sister sailed through the removal of her tonsils and recovered in no time at all but I remained poorly and it must have been much to my relief that there was no more talk of going back to that particular school I had attended.

“You have to go to school,” my mother told me, “but we’ll find another one.” I was hoping I wouldn’t ever have to go back at all.

Mother made up her mind it would need to be a private school but where?

One day I heard her discussing with a neighbour a private school in Arbroath, a town quite a bit further up the coast.

“She would have to get a bus back from Tutties Neuk though,” said the neighbour, “but other kids go and a teacher sees them across the road.”

I remember thinking what a funny name that was. Here, perhaps, began my fascination with words.

It was around this time that I composed a poem that so impressed my mother she told everyone I was going to be a poet.

Reciting poetry

I rather liked the idea. For a start, why would I need to go to school? I could read and write already and what more did you need to be a poet? My mother was always reciting poetry to us. She never thought we were too young for Byron, Wordsworth, Milton or Sir Walter Scott.

My father was told that night about the school in Arbroath. He didn’t think that going so far to school for so young a child was a good idea.

“She should go back to the one she was at,” he said. “She’ll get to like it in time. I had to go to school and I didn’t like it one bit but you get used to it after a while.”

But mother wouldn’t hear of it. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said to my father one evening.

“What’s that?” he said, emerging reluctantly from his daily paper.

“Live somewhere else. Now I’ve just heard of a good private girls’ school that sounds perfect for Margaret called Seymour Lodge but we’ll have to move to Dundee.”