A Schoolmistress at War Read online

  For Colin and Alistair

  With a big much love

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also in the Flowers of Scotland series by Eileen Ramsay

  Welcome to the world of Eileen Ramsay!

  Meet Eileen Ramsay

  Simple Scottish Stovies

  Wartime Tales from Memory Lane

  Memory Lane Club

  Copyright

  1

  KIRSTY COULD BARELY CONTAIN HERSELF. Father was the dearest man in the world, and the cleverest, but if he didn’t tell her what the Board had said in that letter, she would, she would . . .

  ‘Jessie, my dear, if I might have a generous bowl of your excellent soup?’

  ‘Father,’ groaned Kirsty. He was deliberately being provoking, trying to sound like something out of a novel by Dickens. John Robertson, headmaster of the small country school, always read all official letters quietly before drawing his chair into the table and smiling at his wife and daughter, but this letter, Kirsty knew, just had to refer to her and therefore should be treated differently – and immediately.

  ‘John,’ said Mother reprovingly but, as always, she smiled when she looked at her husband.

  ‘Oh, are you two ladies interested in hearing what was in my communication from the Board?’ He unfolded his large linen napkin and solemnly spread it across the knees of his second-best suit before taking pity on their curiosity. ‘Why, naturally they said that Miss Christine Robertson could be employed as a pupil teacher.’

  Kirsty jumped up and threw her arms around her father and then danced across and hugged her mother, almost covering the pair of them with hot soup. She was going to be a pupil teacher. That frightening body called the Board had allowed it, and now she could help him officially. Oh, was it not about time?

  ‘Immediately?’ she said. ‘Do I start tomorrow, and may I put my hair up? It would be better, wouldn’t it, Mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her parents spoke together and they all laughed.

  ‘Your father first,’ said Jessie Robertson.

  ‘Miss Christine Robertson is to start at the beginning of the next session, and at the truly magnificent sum of five pounds per annum.’ He smiled to soften his daughter’s disappointment. ‘It’s only another three weeks, Kirsty. You can wait three weeks.’

  Three weeks! It was an age, and she was bored to tears with being a pupil: she was cleverer by far than any of these farm children. Conveniently Miss Cameron forgot that she alone of the children never missed school through working on the surrounding farms. But besides, only today there had been seventy-one pupils in a one-room school and she had already waited five months for permission to become part of his staff; his only staff, if you didn’t count Jessie, who, being a married woman, was graciously permitted to teach sewing to the girls. The embroidery taught at the little country school was of the highest standard – but of what use to farm children, Kirsty could not imagine. Still, the two hours weekly, from three to four on Mondays and Thursdays, were much enjoyed by the girls and the small payment did help to eke out John’s meagre salary.

  ‘They call what they pay your mother an emolument, Kirsty,’ John had said when he and his daughter had discussed her proposition that, now she had reached the age of fourteen, she might be hired as a pupil teacher until she was old enough to sit the scholarship examinations for the university. ‘Is that not,’ he went on, ‘a splendid word to wrap up a few shillings in? Why, I do believe it’s bigger than the sum itself.’

  ‘And naturally you must put your hair up, Kirsty,’ said Jessie now as she watched her daughter prance around the room, ‘and I shall make you a new dress, and with a longer skirt as befits a working woman.’

  ‘With an apron, Jessie. Kirsty is only fourteen years old. We do not want her aged before her time.’

  Mother and daughter smiled at one another but said nothing. There would be an apron all right, but it would still be a dress that told the world that Christine Robertson was embarking on a career.

  After tea John went back into the school to correct exercises and, after helping her mother clear up, Kirsty wandered outside into the garden. It was a riot of spring flowers and already neat rows of vegetables were thrusting themselves importantly from the ground. She walked among them, bending every now and again to remove a weed that had had the audacity to show its sinful head. When schoolwork permitted, John Robertson could be found in his garden. He said that he enjoyed the hard physical labour after the mental torture of trying to fill young – mostly unwilling – minds with the three Rs.

  ‘Kirsty.’

  She looked up from her weeds with a smile that transformed her face, had she but known it, from little girl to blossoming woman.

  ‘Jamie, oh, Jamie, where have you been? You’ve not been at school for weeks.’

  Jamie Cameron was thirteen years old, almost a year younger than Kirsty, and from their first day together at the small country school he had been her rival and her dearest friend. She looked at him now, too pale, much too thin. His long, badly cut hair lifted from his forehead in the gentle evening air as they talked, and Kirsty saw the bruise his hair had tried to hide and felt the pain of the blow that had caused it.

  ‘I think that could poetically be described as a noble brow,’ John Robertson had said once when talking to a school inspector who had laughed at his plans for the ragged urchin before them. ‘This laddie might well have more brains than either of us. With a modicum of care and affection and an education, I vow the lad could go anywhere.’

  Where was he going? Kirsty thought now as she looked at her friend.

  ‘Ach, spring’s too busy a time on a fairm, Kirsty,’ Jamie excused his truancy. ‘I dinna ken when I’ll get back, but I brocht the Dominie’s book. Could he let me have another by the same fella? Grand stories.’

  He handed her a thick leather-bound volume and she looked at the title as she took it, one of her father’s most precious possessions. How he must value Jamie to allow the treasured volume from his sight.

  ‘Hard Times.’ Clever as she was, she hadn’t yet read it, hadn’t wanted to. Dickens was too . . . too gloomy. A sombre choice for a farm lad.

  ‘I’ll ask Father for another book for you, Jamie. Are you sure you want another Dickens? Maybe something from Sir Walter Scott?’

  He smiled. ‘Will he let me hae the lend of another book, Kirsty? I’ll no’ be back till winter, if at all.’

  Kirsty decided not to remind him that he had missed most of the winter months too, and surely there was nothing to do on a farm in the cold dark days? ‘I’m sure he will,’ was all she said. ‘Come on in. Father’s in the schoolroom – he’d love to see you.’

  ‘I cannae bide,’ said the boy cautiously, but already moving with her towards the school. ‘M’fait
her’ll miss me. I should be in ma bed. We’re up at three these mornings.’

  ‘Heavens, what on earth do you do at that time of the morning? Surely cows and things are still asleep?’

  John Robertson rose from the desk where he had been labouring over the exercises, and his smile showed his pleasure at the sight of his young visitor. ‘Jamie. You’ve come for another book.’ He ignored the boy’s truancy. ‘I suppose we won’t see you in school until the winter now?’

  ‘I’ll be fourteen by November, Dominie. I’ve maybe had my last lesson.’

  ‘Would it help if I spoke to your father, Jamie? Maybe he needs reminding that there’s a fine mind in that haystack of a head of yours and that, unlike turnips, it needs nurturing?’

  The fear on the boy’s face was answer enough.

  ‘It doesn’t take a fine mind to plant tatties, Mr Robertson,’ said he, trying hard to remember the standard English words that warred with his Angus dialect.

  ‘Your father’s employer is a good man, lad, with his own son off to a fine school. Perhaps . . .?’

  ‘Father.’ Kirsty, tired of being completely ignored, interrupted. ‘Jamie likes Dickens, but I thought something not quite so intense.’

  ‘My daughter prefers mainly happy endings to her stories, Jamie.’ John looked at the title page of the book the boy had returned. ‘I think something stirring, perhaps Sir Walter . . . a medieval adventure, or no, wait . . .’

  From the shelf behind his table he lifted down a slim volume. ‘Poetry, lad. All the greats are here, and if you learn them off as you read them, you will always have beauty in your head.’

  Jamie took the book reverently and opened the pages at random. ‘There’s beautiful words of my own in my head, Dominie, not near so great as these, but I like fine to hear them now and then.’

  His thin cheeks coloured at his own audacity and with a stifled ‘Thank you’ he went from the room, taking the little book with him.

  Kirsty and her father looked after him.

  ‘It’s an unjust world, Kirsty,’ sighed John. ‘That laddie has more ability than you and me put together, but he’ll die at the handle of a plough with his beautiful words still in his head, not out there for the world to console itself with.’

  Kirsty bridled a little at her father’s seeming criticism. She was cleverer than Jamie Cameron. She always beat him in tests – well, almost always.

  ‘You could talk to Balcundrum, Father. Did you see the bruise on Jamie’s head?’

  ‘It’s the bruises I can’t see that bother me, lass. Damn it, to have a son like that and . . .’ He pulled himself together. ‘Come, Kirsty, your mother will be looking for you. Were you not to attempt some stitches before bed? And something tells me that there is a bolt of cloth put by just in case Miss Christine was acceptable to the Board. I know you ladies and your wiles: a tuck here, a tuck there, and what starts out as a simple frock becomes a fine gown. Off you go. I must try to make some sense of the Supplementary Class essays before I come through for supper.’

  Kirsty moved to the door that connected schoolroom and living room. Her brown curls bounced on her shoulders and a devil lurked in her brown eyes as she turned to smile at her father.

  ‘Jamie will not be the first unlettered farm lad to write poetry, Father. Was not Robert Burns a farmer?’

  ‘Ach, come back a minute, Kirsty, if you can tear yourself away from your sewing,’ said John wryly. Kirsty was more his daughter than Jessie’s; she would never happily spend time sewing. He waited until his daughter had seated herself at a desk, looking, had she but known it, more child than teacher.

  ‘My intellect tells me that Scotland’s national bard was a fine poet, but my upbringing drummed into me that Lallans is the language of the peasant classes. Can you try to understand, lass, that it is therefore to be avoided by those who are themselves scarcely a step from the peasantry.’ He stood up and walked around the small room as if to better emphasize what he had to say. ‘What fine people your grandparents were, Kirsty. Did I not go to the university on the shoulders of their sacrifices? Then there was your Uncle Chay, my brother, who happily, proudly even, worked day in, day out for his bright laddie. They wanted me to better myself, to be able to mix in any society.’

  Kirsty looked up at him, her eyes shining. ‘Grampa told me that the day you became a teacher was the greatest day of their lives.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ John’s thoughts went to his mother who, worn out by toil and too many pregnancies, had not lived to see her only grandchild, or to see her son become master of a one-room school. He could never say such things to a young girl, of course.

  ‘For your grandma it was enough that I was educated, but it was she who encouraged me to adopt the language of my books as a natural one. “I dinnae want ye ever to be ashamed o’ yer faither nor me, John,” she used to say, “but God’s seen fit tae gie ye a brain and yer faither an’ me wants fer you to use it. An’ Chay tae. Is he no’ longing fer the day he can say, ma brither’s a dominie?” ’

  ‘And now you are the Dominie, the teacher.’

  ‘Yes, and can you understand that every class contains my parents and my brother, who never had my advantages? Their sacrifices will be repaid. Every child who passes through my hands will receive the best that I can give them, especially you, my wee Kirsty.’ He looked at the young girl, at her shining, loving eyes, at her tumbled brown curls, and with a little trepidation he noted the determined little chin. Kirsty would fight for what she wanted: he hoped the battle would not be too onerous. When she was a little older he intended her to go on to Edinburgh University. Now she was saying that she was perfectly content to become a pupil teacher and to qualify here in his classroom, but he feared that she was thinking only of him. There were sometimes over seventy children on the register, but with illness, which was common, and the need of many families for their able-bodied children to work, there were often fewer than twenty pupils in the classroom. It was difficult, therefore, to persuade the Board that a second teacher was necessary, though it was due to John Robertson’s care and ability that many of the children were allowed to come to school at all.

  ‘Schooling’s no’ for the likes of us,’ was the attitude of many itinerant farmworkers, but when they stayed in this little corner of Angus near the town of Arbroath they heard of the skill and ability of the local Dominie, and they registered at least their younger children. Such had been the experience of Jamie Cameron. He had been sent to the school when he was too young to be of any help at home, and when his mother was told that the lad was bright she had taken the news back in awe to her husband, who had been singularly unimpressed. Jamie had been in attendance regularly until he was seven. After that he had helped out with chores or minding his even younger brothers and sisters in order to free his mother to do a man’s work.

  But young Kirsty Robertson was not thinking of her schoolfellow’s problems as she returned with a toss of her brown curls to the little living room where her mother was already unrolling a bolt of blue cloth. In her exchange with her father, Kirsty had temporarily forgotten Jamie, and for now she was interested only in her mother’s plans for the new dress.

  ‘See, Kirsty, I will make a pale blue collar and blue cuffs which we can interchange with white ones for variety and to save the material. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Then we will have a white apron to please Father, and a pale blue one, and perhaps for Sundays and special days I might find some lace. We’ll see.’

  ‘And no more pigtails. I am Miss Robertson from now on. Oh, Mother, show me how to put up my hair. There’s too much, surely, to sit securely on my head.’

  ‘You must anchor it with pins,’ said Jessie, gathering her daughter’s curls and holding them on top of her little head. ‘Your hair, like your pupils, will require discipline.’

  ‘You sound just like a schoolmarm,’ said Kirsty, throwing her arms exuberantly around her mother and hugging her. ‘Just think,’ she continued as she dropped into an
armchair and began to pick at a loose thread on one of the beautifully embroidered covers, ‘the Board is going to let me help Father. He’ll have to let me help with marking now, Mother, and I can prepare lessons for the little ones and hear them read while Father does mathematics and science with the older ones, and then at night, when he’s finished his logbooks, he’ll have time to read or to sing or to work in his garden if it pleases him.’

  ‘Don’t unpick that butterfly unless you are prepared to replace it with another one,’ said Jessie mildly. ‘Here, find me a blue thread and I shall mend it.’

  ‘No, I can manage a repair. I’ll stitch this loose end in while you cut the pattern for my dress.’

  They worked together companionably until John returned from the school.

  ‘And where is the fine seam you were to try tonight, Miss Pupil Teacher?’ he asked as he bent over his daughter to kiss her good night.

  ‘There, Father.’ Kirsty pointed to the delicate butterfly that hovered over an exotic bloom on the chair arm. ‘I worked on that.’ True enough; but it was rather a stretching of the complete truth.

  She ignored her mother’s reproving look and blew her a kiss. ‘Don’t strain your eyes with sewing, Mother. The new pupil teacher promises to help you with the easy bits: the bits that don’t show.’

  Upstairs in her little room under the eaves, she stood for a while holding up her hair and admiring the picture she presented in the mirror. ‘Good day, Miss Robertson,’ she bowed to her reflection. ‘We, the Board, have been told that never in the history of Angus education has there been such a pupil teacher as yourself. We have decided, therefore, to go against every tenet we have been taught to hold dear, and to offer you, a woman – and here she stopped to contemplate the enormity of what she was saying – the Rectorship of the Arbroath Academy.’

  The very idea of a woman head teacher was so overwhelming that Kirsty found herself unable to continue with her posturing and went to the window. Down there in the valley was the magnificent Georgian mansion of Balcundrum Farm, and just behind it but still visible from her window was the tiny tied cottage where Jamie and his family lived.