Nothing on earth would have ever made her leave the children and she would guard them with her life

On her first visit Jane had not been a particularly prepossessing figure. Straight from the children’s home, she wore knee-length white socks which would have reached to her knees had they not been at different, wrinkly levels. Her unbecoming skirt hung at different levels too, drooping at the back and shorter at the front due to her being a little plump about the waist. After some time with us she slimmed down, got herself some clothes of her own choosing and became a presentable young teenager.

Jane was a quick learner and, in some ways, seemed to be fearless. On the few times she elected to go to town she walked to catch the main road bus half a mile away. She always took a lethal-looking hat pin with her.

“Pity the poor man that tampers with her,” I thought to myself. Not that anything ever did happen on these quiet country roads that our own children were often on also.

“Let them walk or get on their bikes,” Ronald would say to me when our lot wanted to go up to the village. “It’s not good to pamper kids over much. They’ve got to learn that the world doesn’t owe them a living. Besides, you haven’t time to run them here, there and everywhere at their demand.”

Independent

Ronald’s word was law and we all accepted without demur. I realised, in later years, how often he had been right.

In some ways, in the most important way, Jane came to me like an angel from heaven. She was totally responsible with the children and kind to them. I found quite soon I could leave her in charge. Nothing on earth would have ever made her leave them and she would guard them with her life.

They weren’t the easiest children to deal with, either, all of an independent character and all determined in their own ways but she had a nice, cajoling way of dealing with them and got through to most of them.

The older boys rather resented her to begin with. Richard saw her as not much bigger than himself and who was she to tell them what to do. But she managed to make a pact with him.

And so he would help her. Michael was the difficult one. He teased her unmercifully as he did his younger brother and Mahri-Louise. He was the one that was likely to get in the most mischief also. Who was it broke the branch of the plum tree? The barn window? Who was it that scattered stones on the grass that broke the mower? It wasn’t always Michael but because it usually was, he always got the blame.

Jane never got cross at him. Rather, next time she paid a visit to the milk bar, she would buy a poke of sweets just for him. Oddly, at the age of 14 Michael’s attitude to life completely changed and he became one of the easier boys to manage but by that time Jane was gone.

Michael wasn’t the only one to tease Jane. She was easily teased and a pleasure to tease as she made a great good-humoured fuss about it. One or two of the farm workers loved to tease her. One day she came bounding into the house in high indignation.

“Look, look what I’ve found,” she said holding up a poster of a bare-naked lady.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

Laughter

“It was pinned above my guinea pig cage.” (I’d given her a guinea pig for her birthday after she’d told me how she would have liked a pet of her own as a child but had never got one and how she would like one of her own right now.)

“I bet that was Jamieson,” she said, tears of annoyance in her eyes, which soon turned into laughter. From time to time she loved to have a laugh with the men on the farm. Once, at pea harvesting time, when there was a lot of bustle round at the pea viner, she came running back to the house. “Mrs Gillies, Mrs Gillies.” “Whatever’s wrong?”

“It was Joe.”

“What did he do?”

“He gave me a sweet and it was only a bit of chalk.” “So.”

“I ate it and didn’t realise until they told me!” Jane’s housework wasn’t of the best but then I wasn’t the best of teachers on that subject. Not like my mother-in-law who had treated maids quite differently. I was told she certainly wouldn’t have given them birthday gifts and let them off with things the way I did.

She was hard on them, taught them properly, was impervious to tears but they used to come back years later and say what a good boss she was. I suppose I wasn’t cut out to be a boss, really, and knew it.

Jane stayed with us for three never-to-be-forgotten years but she began to get restless and wanted pastures new. She left and went down to England where she stayed for several years, having several jobs, before becoming nanny to the wee boy of a famous actor. After he went to school she came back to Scotland, married and had two children of her own. I still see her from time to time. She hasn’t changed.

Ronald’s father, old Lindsay, died a month after young Lindsay was born. Secretly we knew he was pleased at Lindsay’s birth, plenty of Gillieses to carry on the name. But it wasn’t everyone’s reaction.

“Not another one,” other relations had said. “In this over-crowded world what are they all going to do when they grow up? The farm won’t keep all of them.”

After having spent three years in the wide open spaces of Canada, this thought didn’t worry me over much. There, children had been welcome and wanted. And they got free fares on the bus, I remembered. Every encouragement was given for you to have more.

Sad day

Also, in these days, when I had little time for reading and a women’s magazine was about all I could get through, I read a serialised story which influenced me a lot. It was a true story and the author was going for a dozen children and had reached the halfway mark.

She hadn’t much money or anything, took in lodgers and managed. It was a happy story, could it be mine? What if I was criticised, I didn’t need to listen. What was the saying: “They say, what do they say? Let them say.”

It was a sad day for all of us, old Lindsay’s passing, but as far as he was concerned it was a blessing in disguise. He was over 80 years old and had not kept good health for some time and had agreed to go in to a nursing home a couple of days before he took the massive heart attack that killed him.

How he would have hated being totally dependent on the nurses.

More tomorrow.