Ice Dancing Episode 20

Inside, the church was painted white with an upstairs gallery, which was where the local gentry always sat: Lord Darrach, who was very frail these days, and his wife Lidia, Lady Darrach, who bossed him about and had more of a plum in her mouth than he did.

Whenever they heard her speak, people in the village would remind each other that she was just a miner’s daughter who had made a good marriage. That wasn’t strictly true. Mine owner’s daughter would be more accurate. Lord Darrach was scrupulously polite and everyone liked him, even if they didn’t like his wife very much.

Such people seemed to exist at one remove from many of us. They often lived behind high hedges, in large crumbling houses, with little disposable income. They socialised in exalted circles and they sometimes kept what the old men of the village scathingly called “gentry horses” meaning horses that didn’t work for a living, but I suppose most horses are gentry horses these days.

Many of the big estates had hunting and shooting rights over the farms round about. Way back when the hunt still came through the village, the hunting fraternity used to say that it brought jobs to the countryside, but I couldn’t say I ever noticed it. People never found much work helping out with horses and hounds in this part of the world.

They worked on farms or as electricians and builders, gardeners and decorators. They cleaned holiday homes or cooked lunches for visitors in the pubs and restaurants or travelled to the nearby town, or even to Glasgow every day.

The hunt used to come in and clog up the village street with their horseboxes. They clip clopped about on their gentry horses looking very pleased with themselves. Sandy wouldn’t have them on our land, even back when it was legal, and I admired him for that. Not that he had any great love for foxes mind you. He’d lie in wait and take a pot shot at one now and again and his aim was usually good.

But he couldn’t bear the hunt at any price. He said he liked a clean shot better than watching one pack of animals tear another animal to pieces. There was a strong streak of good Scots radicalism in

Sandy, particularly for a farmer. I mean they’re not noted for it are they? In fact, in many ways, the farming community is as separate as the nabbery, which was that the village called the gentry.

Like all villages, I suppose, we have factions: the county set, the farmers, and the village proper, but even the villagers are divided into incomers and locals. And there’s a subset of English incomers who are occasionally the butt of supposedly harmless jibes which would, if they were directed at any other minority, be deemed inappropriate.

We come together for the various community events, large and small, and it’s a friendly place. But the fault lines, which run deep, sometimes appear on the surface and then people realise that the rural idyll is a myth.

I remember when the hunt came riding up our road one day and Sandy sent them packing.

“It’s tradition, Mr Breckenridge,” said Lady Darrach from her high horse, and he said, “Aye and so was slavery,” and they turned round and went away again.

Sandy was very quiet, but he was his own man and I loved him for that. He had always been a churchgoer, and when the new minister came, a young man who didn’t mind Sandy being bolshie with the nabbery, he was asked if he wanted to be an elder and he agreed.

Apart from attending meetings and helping to run the church, this also meant that on special occasions, like communion services, he got to sit with the other elders on posh carved chairs, and hand around triangles of sliced white loaf. Sandy was flattered to be asked. He said his prayers, he was a good man and a kind man. There was nothing at all about him to dislike.

Sandy was very quiet, but he was his own man and I loved him for that...he was a kind man. There was nothing to dislike

A creeping

The Sunday after the party, we went down to the village hall after church, as we so often did.

I stood there, clutching my mug of weak instant coffee, while Maisie Murtagh talked to me in an undertone. She had been speaking to me for some time and I hadn’t really been listening. I think she had been talking about her garden, and how she needed some help with the autumn pruning.

It was a shame, wasn’t it, she said, to see Louise’s lovely garden going to rack and ruin. I nodded vigorously. Did I think Joe might tidy it up a bit? I told her I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think there was a hope in hell of Joe doing any gardening but I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

It occurred to me that I might volunteer my services. I liked gardening and I had helped Louise. Maisie must have noticed my lack of attention and drifted off to speak to Betty McGowan. Sandy was standing among a huddle of elders. They were eating chocolate biscuits and talking about church matters.

The manse had recently been found to be riddled with dry rot and was becoming a worry to them. That word “riddled” was peculiarly apt where dry rot was concerned. We had had it up at the farm on more than one occasion and there was a sinister, alien quality to it. It could make its way through stone. Turn two-hundred-year-old oak beams to the consistency of cheddar cheese. At the manse, the bath had fallen through the ceiling.

Fortunately the minister hadn’t been in it at the time.

I saw cousin Mary heading in my direction and stared out of the window, hoping that she would be diverted by somebody else. Morris, as an elder, was in Sandy’s little group and Mary had accosted a number of other people with her complaint of the week.

I was pretty far down her list of desirable friends, but I was the only one in her line of vision, and she came swooping down on me.

This week’s grievance was the headteacher at the primary school who had invited a reasonably well-known children’s writer to talk to the kids and read them some of her stories. I had seen the usual photograph afterwards in the local paper.

Ice Dancing by Catherine Czerkawska, Dyrock Publishing, £9.99 and Kindle E-reader from £2.99. For more of her books, including The Posy Ring and A Proper Person To Be Detained, see saraband.net.