The Serial: A Rowan Tree In My Garden Day 5 By Margaret Gillies Brown

Eventually, around 10 o’clock, Mr Moyes appeared at the door of his adjacent house, in pyjamas

Mother found a house to let in the country remarkably quickly and one Sunday we all went to see it.

It was an old farmhouse called Pitermo with a big, half-wild garden, about eight miles from Dundee and half a mile or so from the small village of Lundie. (The village had two roads leading into it off the main drag, and both roads were about a mile and a half from the farmhouse).

The small village that we passed was almost lost in green fields. It could have been a million miles from any town. My father thought the farmhouse was a bit isolated but agreed to move there for our sakes. The rent was reasonable.

Mother was delighted. She had never liked living in a town. We moved in with all our worldly goods at the beginning of October. We children were excited about living on a farm – it would be a bit like Parkhill, we thought, our aunt and uncle’s farm in Aberdeenshire where we spent long summer holidays.

Unexpectedly, father enjoyed living at Pitermo better than he thought he would. Having been through the First World War from its beginning, he was not eligible to be called up for this one, but he wanted to do his bit. Home Guard The Local Defence Volunteers Force, which Churchill later renamed the Home Guard, was in its infancy all over the country. Lundie and district had set up one of its own. Father joined it. Several local farmers and other worthies were in the platoon.

Mr Moyes, the schoolmaster, a man about my father’s age, officiated along with Mr Bell, of Bell’s whisky fame, who lived in a beautiful mansion overlooking Lundie Loch.

Father loved the camaraderie of Lundie’s Home Guard. The camaraderie of soldiers, all together for one purpose, was the one thing he talked about when he was no longer a soldier.

Lundie’s troop often used to end up at Mr Bell’s lochside mansion after exercises and there partake of his generosity. Mother was not too happy at father coming home rather late at night with the smell of whisky on his breath.

She was always fearful that father would develop a fondness for drink. Having lost her first husband, in part, to alcohol, this was understandable.

Father was impressed by Mr Moyes, the schoolmaster. “I think the children should go to the village school,” said my father one day.

“Mr Moyes says he’s in need of pupils and it’s a quiet, pleasant little school with decent kids. Margaret, especially, hasn’t been at school much.” Mother somewhat reluctantly agreed.

“I’m supposed to be teaching the children myself,” she said. “What’s my MA degree and teacher training for if I don’t use it? But, if you insist, we’ll give it a try.”

Lundie School was about half a mile from Pitermo, and Jean and I would have to walk there. We had to be at school by nine o’clock. The school bell was supposed to ring at that hour, although it seldom did.

This didn’t stop me from being scared I would be late for school and get into trouble. I would run all the way there with Jean sauntering after me. However slowly she followed, she was seldom late. Not that it would have mattered if she had been. Mr Moyes was easygoing, to say the least. Pyjamas I remember one cold winter morning, in particular, when we were all playing outside in the playground, with school due to be in some time back. Eventually, around 10 o’clock, Mr Moyes appeared at the door of his adjacent house, in pyjamas.

“Just a moment, children, I’ve slept in – won’t be long.”

One could never have called him a punctual headmaster, which suited us children very well. It didn’t stop me, however, being frightened that I might be late, and after lunch, which mother insisted we came home to, I ran all the way back while Jean took her time as usual.

I don’t remember disliking Lundie school. It had a laid back feel about it compared to Seymour Lodge. There, I was forced to drink the warm school milk and got reprimanded from the headmistress for little things like forgetting to change into indoor shoes. Sometimes we were taken out on walks, in our full school uniform plus hats, in long crocodiles down boring town streets.

Not long after we first attended Lundie School, something momentous happened which both shook my parents and totally justified our move to the country.

One showery evening, a month or so after moving to Pitermo, mother had gone to the farmhouse door to get what she called a ‘breath of fresh air’. It was about 8pm and our bedtime.

Jean and I, in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns, attempting to put bed off for a little longer, followed mother to the door. The rain had just stopped, leaving a November dankness in the air. For a moment a full moon slid from behind a cloud and showed up the wet earth around us.

“How quiet it is, how peaceful,” mother said,” Listen, children – do you hear the silence?”

Just then a tawny owl wailed from the thick belt of trees we had named ‘The Jungle’ that bordered the path running down to the road.

We had already had imaginary adventures exploring its thick foliage and had played at ‘housies’ in its hidden places.

We weren’t frightened by the eerie sound of the tawny owl. We had heard it before. A cloud covered the moon again and it was very dark, no pinprick of light anywhere. Wail of a siren “Listen,” mother said again. Away in the distance, we heard it: the, by now, familiar beat beat of a German twin-engine bomber. Suddenly, as we stood there, long beams of white light fingered across the night sky, crossing and re-crossing and coming from the direction of the distant river, and then I heard another sound.

Far in the distance, the thin wail of a siren. Before I was able to mention it, we all heard a distinct dull thud, and then another and another. Father, who had come to join us at the door by this time, said:

“Under the kitchen table, girls, quickly, just in case the bomber comes this way.”

We had no safe cellar at Pitermo, as at Briarwood Terrace, and mother and father had reckoned, until we got some kind of shelter constructed, underneath the stout kitchen table, the very one we had our tonsils out on in Carnoustie, was the safest place to take cover. (More tomorrow.)