The Serial: A Rowan Tree In My Garden Day 29

It was a boring time anyway just after the war. Food and clothes were still rationed and there didn’t seem to be much fun around.

Mother cried out, her grey, amber-flecked eyes glowing: “Darlings! How wonderful to see you both. How worried I have been about you, especially as I wasn’t able to get in touch. Father has been telling me how brilliantly you both have managed, although I knew you would.”

That evening, by the light of the Tilley lamp which shone on Mother’s black hair, a soft bun of which caressed the nape of her neck, we talked over all that had happened to us. After the ordeal, we were a family again.

“Margaret will have to do something,” my father said one day, about nine months after we had moved to our new home. “She can’t hang around here all day doing nothing very much.

“It’s not good for her and joining a boating club, a naturalist club and attending evening classes in European history isn’t going to get her to university any time soon, not with the small amount of studying she does at home.”

Ambition

He knew the university was my mother’s ambition for both her daughters and up until now he had taken very little say in our education. Father turned to me.

“How about enrolling you for a class in shorthand and typing? You are interested in writing aren’t you? It could be helpful to have these skills.”

For some reason, this suggestion was anathema to my mother and before I could reply she said: “I don’t think so, dear. She needs something a bit more adventurous than that.” As it didn’t appeal to me either, I said nothing.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Father. “How about journalism? I’ve got a new golfing companion at Scotscraig. He’s the editor of the Sunday Post. I could ask him if he has any vacancies for a trainee.”

“I’d like that,” I said before Mother could get a word in edgeways. “Well, okay,” my mother said hesitantly and so it was agreed.

Mother had found a house for us to rent in a village called Wormit, just across the Tay rail bridge from Dundee. According to her, the location was suitable. The house was a three-bedroomed villa that had been built in the early 1920s. Unfortunately, it was furnished which meant we would, once again, have to put most of our furniture in store but it would have to do, Mother said, until we found a suitable unfurnished house.

It stood at the top of a hill overlooking Wormit station and the river. It had come on the market for rent after its owner, a spinster, had been found attempting to cross the rail bridge with no clothes on. She was now in a nursing home and unlikely to emerge from there.

Father liked the house because it was of a reasonable size and had most mod-cons of the age.

Best of all, it was near a good golf course and now, with the war over, he could once more indulge seriously in the sport he loved. Mother was also quite happy with it as it was surrounded by mansions built by the jute barons of an earlier age. It also made it easy for her to get to her teaching job and for Jean to get to Dundee High School.

The house itself was in a bit of a time warp. A 1920s aura hung about it, with the top half of the front door being of stained glass, through which the sun filtered in rainbow light. Apart from that, the drawing room is what I remember best.

Polished

We seldom used it in the winter time as it was spacious and the coal fire, the only form of heating in most homes in those days, took a long time to warm it up. It was a pleasant room with a large bay window that let in plenty of light in spite of facing north. The wallpaper was flowery and the somewhat faded carpet was also patterned and surrounded by polished wooden flooring.

The easy chairs were deep and scattered with antimacassars. The pictures were framed Victorian prints but what I remember best of all is the clothcovered table on which stood an old gramophone, complete with horn and records of songs from the First World War or earlier.

Round the bay window ran a padded window seat. Once the school term began I got into the habit of going to this window around four in the afternoon, to watch the train that carried Jean and Mother homeward puffing its way across the Tay Bridge and stopping at the station.

Gypsy, Jean’s spaniel, that we had brought with us from Westburn, always came with me, jumping up on to the window seat to watch. She knew this train as well as I did and even if I forgot this ritual sometimes, she never did, judging the time exactly.

After the initial excitement of moving and settling in, I was finding Wormit boring. There didn’t seem to be any young people of my age about. The only thing at all joinable was the boating club which had only a few members, most of whom were courting couples.

It was a boring time anyway just after the war. Food and clothes were still rationed and there didn’t seem to be much fun around.

I missed the croft but we weren’t entirely without livestock. Mother had managed to rent a small bit of ground in a wood about half a mile from our house, to which she took a hen house and a dozen hens. All the other hens at Westburn had been sold.

Blessing

Jenny the goat had died, sadly, of old age. I found her dead one day in her stall during that long hard winter.

Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise as she was beginning to have difficulty walking.

A worse tragedy happened shortly afterwards. I went out one morning to feed my rabbits as usual and they were all gone, with the cage doors left wide open.

“It must have been a fox,” my father said. “It couldn’t possibly have been,” I argued. “How could it have got all the doors open?”

“The hutch doors weren’t all that secure, were they, Margaret?”

I had to admit to the inadequacies of my joinery skills. However, I insisted on getting the police to investigate, thinking someone must have stolen them. They eventually came and, after some searching, found a fox’s footprints near to the hutches in some small patches of snow.

Now, in Wormit, apart from during the holidays, Mother, Father and Jean were away all day. I was left to do the housework and to take Gypsy for a walk to the wood where I fed the hens and collected the eggs. This, as it turned out, led to making me a little less lonely as there I met up with Mrs Jackson.

This lady would sometimes bring her daughters, one four-year-old and twins of three, to see the hens. (More tomorrow.)

By Margaret Gillies Brown