The Scottish Scheme

17

The Scottish Scheme

November 5 Not. We’d now been in Scotland for almost a week. I had thought it was a reasonable hour to break one’s fast but when I went into the vast stone-flagged kitchen of Mac’s broken-down dump that up in Scotland might be considered a castle as claimed but elsewhere would have been classed as a broken-down stone dump, worse than the Château LeBec, there was no-one in it but Mac’s Mrs McBride, who as usual greeted me cheerily with: “Good morning, dearie! And what would you fancy for your breakfast?” (Rather luckily for us it had now dawned on her that porridge was not a popular item with those not born and bred in the heather, so to speak.)

    Well naturally what I would fancy was un grand bol de café au lait accompanied by a nice fresh croissant or two, but this was still Britain, after all, so I didn’t say so. “Just tea and toast and marmalade, thanks, Mrs McBride.”

    “If you say so, dearie. But I could do you a nice dish of eggs and bacon or maybe liver and bacon—Himself’s very fond of that!” she informed me on a hopeful note.

    For breakfast? Oh well, it takes all sorts. “Himself”, that was, Mac McDougall, probably had a metabolism that could cope with it. He was about six foot four, broad in proportion, and seemed to spend all his days striding over the heather attacking the native wildlife. Whilst capable managers ran the salmon farm and its smokery that brought in megabucks for him—quite.

    “No, thanks awfully, but I really couldn’t manage it.”

    So we sat down to tea, toast and marmalade (Mel) and tea (Mrs McB.), accompanied by a dissertation on such interesting points as (a) liver being full of iron, which girls of my age needed in their diet, and the nonsense these magazines (not in evidence) came out with, and as a corollary the advisability or otherwise of doing a few tomatoes with the liver, which personally she favoured but Mr McBride (not present) couldn’t stomach them, (b) the price of bacon in the local shop these days, and it was even worse over in (name of Scotch town) and thank goodness The McDougall raised his own pigs (read, employed a capable pigman to do so), but of course a flitch (once read in a book and helpfully explained by Alysse, not a word I’d ever envisaged actually hearing) only went so far, so they sometimes had to buy in, and (c) the virtues of our own Scottish marmalade—as on the jar’s label, yes—from (name of Scottish town, possibly the one on the label) and the interesting history of the original oranges, now this might surprise you Mel, dearie, which had come all the way from Spain! Er… yes. Wasn’t an Iberian provenance to be expected? “Oranges d’Espagne” was often scrawled on the price tickets sticking out of the boxes in the markets in France when they weren’t Israeli ones, so… I let it go. Plus (d) further intel on the trials and tribulations of one, Peggy McBride that was, who’d made the mistake of marrying one of they Macdonalds, one Willie of that ilk, against all advice.

    “Oh dear, he hasn’t lost another job, has he, Mrs McBride?”

    Rich snort. “Lost! No, he’s walked out on it, the miserable wee (Scottish epithet). And now he’s threatening to go on the oil rigs! Him? Never done an honest day’s work in his life!”

    Well it was more or less that: she sounded very Scotch, of course, but it’s beyond me to transcribe it, so I won’t try.

    I agreed that hard work on the oil rigs didn’t sound like him at all and we had another round of tea on the strength of it.

    I was then able to ask: “Where are they all, Mrs MacBride?”

    She looked very dry. “Gone off after deer. That idjit Donald McDougall came in first thing all excited to tell Himself that he’d sighted a six-pointer over to (Something) Crag, so off they all rushed to get their guns and out and away.” (She did always say “idjit” and at first I thought it was a Scottish word but after a while I realised it was only her version of “idiot” but by that time I had the spelling firmly fixed in my head, so I’m using it.)

    “Ugh!” I said in dismay. “Do you think they’ll really kill the poor thing?”

    Rich snort. “It’ll be a first if they do, dearie! I’ve been working here since I was a lassie of thirteen and my mother said if I hadn’t anything better to do than sit round mooning I could give her a hand in the house, and he’s never killed a deer yet! They’re far too fly for him, or that idjit Donald McDougall!” (Not a close relation, a member of the clan. Which Mrs McBride is, too: she was born a McDougall but allows that McBride is not so bad, as they go. Meaning men in general, I think, not just non-McDougall ones.)

    Then of course she had to ask me what I was planning to do today, so I admitted that old Jock McDougall (clan member) had offered to show me round the salmon farm and the smokery.

    Rich snort. “Him! He could show you how to poach a salmon, I make no doubt, and the trout too, not to mention the number of Himself’s birds he gets away with, the old (Scottish epithet) that he is! But he’s no more notion of how they farm the fish than how to fly to the moon!”

    “Oh,” I said, rather dashed. “But Mac said it would be okay for him to take me.”

    “I dare say,” she said drily. “Thinks the sun shines out of the old scoundrel’s behind, he does, just because he taught him to fish when he was a ween!” –That is a Scottish word: it means a child.

    “I see. So he didn’t learn from his father, Mrs McBride?”

    “From him? No, James McDougall was always far too busy making money, dearie. Well I don’t say the district couldn’t do with the jobs but all the man thought about was his profits. You see, it was his father that started the smokery, but in those days it was the wild salmon. But James McDougall, he said there was too many rules and regulations about that and it wasn’t going to get better with all the mad Greenies starting their nonsense. Not that we had any up here, but you never know, do you? So he went into it all, proper, with accountants and goodness knows what, and it was a real fight to get the permissions for it: he said the government was mad, did they not want Scotland to have viable industries? But he got it through in the end, tho we had to have I dunnamany fat politicians for the shooting and the trout fishing, eating us out of house and home, not to mention drink, and when he finally got the go-ahead there wasn’t a bottle of the liquor his grandfather had laid down left in the cellars!”

    Right. Got it.

    “So,” she concluded, “he had no time for little Dougie, as he was called then, nor for little Mary, neither.”

    “Mary?” I croaked: this was a new one on me.

    “Aye, that’s Himself’s sister, dearie. Went and married a man from Edinburgh. Aye well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it? But he’s a generous man, you can say that for him, and at least it meant that Mrs McDougall could get away from James at last. Mary’s older than Himself, you see, by seven years—she married at twenty, and you couldn’t blame her—and in all that time poor Mrs MacDougall had to beg the man for the housekeeping money every month of her life!”

    “I see,” I croaked. Gosh, if Grannie had been a man I could just see that happening in her house, actually. “So she went to live with Mary and her husband in Edinburgh?”

    “Aye, that’s it, dearie: happy as Larry. Trots down to the fashionable shops every day, doesn’t buy a thing, the habit’s so ingrained in her, you see, but she loves just looking.”

    I nodded feebly. It didn’t sound like much of a life but at least the poor woman wasn’t living with a miser any more! “Has she ever been back?”

    Mrs McBride looked very dry. “Aye, they all three came to James’s funeral, that was only half a dozen years later. And of course Himself said she must come back to live here if she liked, but she didn’t want to. Well you can understand it, the place had too many bad memories for her. And then she wasn’t from these parts. She was a Lacey, I dare say you’ve never heard of the family, no reason you should, but that’s the Duke of Munn’s family. The current Duke, he knows how to hold household, too, tho he’s not so mean as James McDougall. Shrewd as they come, tho: he’s got the National Trust looking after the old Keep of Munn—a big old stone tower, dearie—but they can’t have it outright, it has to stay in the family, well don’t ask me how, but he managed it. And he’s hung onto the lovely big house, too, but he’s let it to some English firm for a fancy hotel. Makes them pay through the nose for it. They say they spent a fortune doing it up and putting in extra bathrooms and so on, but then, the prices they charge their guests, they can afford it.” –Sniff.

    “I see,” I said weakly, not daring to stick my neck out and tell her that way back in Grandfather’s family history there had been several marriages between Claveringhams and Laceys, so in fact I must be related to this Mrs McDougall.

    “Aye well. It’s an English title, of course,” she ended on a sour note.

    Ouch! We’d already had some of this in another connection. This would mean it was bestowed on some crawler from the English court after the Forty-Five, when the English had grabbed the land concerned after its misguided owner had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Scottish Cause.

    “I see. Um, so Mac would only have been thirteen when his mother left?”

    “That’s right, but he was away at his English school most of the year, you see, so it didn’t make that much difference to him.”

    I’d already registered that Mac didn’t have a Scottish accent, so I just nodded. There was certainly something to be said for the public school system when a boy had that sort of family.

    And this appearing to conclude the saga, we got up and companionably did the dishes together, Mrs McBride as usual protesting that I didn’t have to help and me as usual not taking any notice.

    After which old Jock McDougall turned up, beaming all over his red-cheeked Scottish face, to take me over to the salmon farm. And—after the obligatory screaming not to come into her clean kitchen in the boots, and the removal of said footwear—was allowed to sit down and wait while I followed orders and put on a warm jumper and my anorak in case it rained. A wise precaution because, tho Jock was motorised and we wouldn’t have to trudge over unexciting stretches of the Western Highlands of Scotland, heather or not, the thing was an ancient sort of jeep or, as the Bean had noted, jalopy, with no roof. And off we went, me, Jock and his elderly Border Collie dog, MacLad. –Jock’s idea of a joke: the dog’s father had been called Lad, and Mac or Mc means, apparently, “son of.” They had formed part of the welcoming committee on our arrival, so the Egg—he and Crumpy had stayed the night but then had to get off home to sustain the fiction of the Yorkshire trip—as I say the Egg had been able to explain that no-one else in the entire country had ever appeared to think it amusing but Jock still thought it was a terrific joke.

    One had read, incidentally, that the Scots were a “dour” race but so far all the ones I’d met had been very cheery. Well Mrs McB. could be scathing, but only where merited, most of the time she was a very cheerful person. And so was Jock. And even Mac, tho he didn’t talk much, could not have been described as dour. Cheery but uncommunicative, really.

    … “Aye, well: that’s it,” said Jock as we looked down from the top of a rise at a collection of giant hangars and a couple of large ponds.

    “Gosh, it’s huge!”

    “It is that, dearie.” He pointed out the various hangars in turn, explaining what went on in each. Well sort of, words such as “fingerlings” made no sense to me, but I nodded understandingly anyway. Golly, there was a laboratory as well?

    “Aye, they’re very scientific,” he explained. “It’s not hit and miss, this fish breeding.”

    Golly.

    And down we went…

November 9 Not. Well I can’t honestly say I grasped it all, but there were fish in all different stages of development, I got that much, and the eggs had to be harvested— Help, the poor mother fish! –No, but in the wild—

    Help! Not really? The poor things!

    Yes, of course, hadn’t I seen those David Attenborough episodes with the bears?

    Er… Helpfully various beaming, red-cheeked faces, male and female, good show, at least they weren’t discriminating against the distaff side at the fish farm, elaborated. Crumbs. When was this? –Well bother! To think that I could have been watching that sort of really interesting telly programme at Merrifield, instead of having to put up with the drivelling romantic rubbish starring bimbos chosen by all the bimbos in my Form, that or walk out of the so-called Seniors’ Common Room, otherwise Seniors’ Over-Scented Battleground, which Alysse and I usually had done in self-preservation.

    Well by this time a beaming and not positively ancient Andrew McLaren had taken possession of my elbow, what time Jock was somehow pushed into the jolly old background, as it were, and he suggested that I might like a wee sit-down and maybe a cup of tea? Which I would, actually, the place was enormous, I felt as if we’d been walking for miles. And it was quite tiring trying to concentrate on something that was a totally closed book to me, given that I’d never done any science at all and had, it now appeared, missed all those helpful David Attenborough programmes that would have enlightened my ignorance. Tho I had managed to see a couple, one had been about whales, not altogether relevant, as I had grasped the point that they were mammals, not fish, and had milk for their babies, and another one had been about Kew: the Bean had got hold of a copy of it so as we could have a good laugh at Mum’s expense, but actually it was very interesting, much more so than anything she’d ever been in, tho possibly that goes without saying.

    So Andrew, Jock and I, plus a whole crowd of eager, red-cheeked, white-coated persons adjourned to their cafeteria. It was a jolly nice one, sparkling clean, and obviously very new. Aye, The McDougall had put it in for them, they confirmed happily; the old place hadn’t been big enough to swing a cat, but that had been his father all over. Yes well, good for Mac!

    Naturally the tea was horrible, but given we were still in the British Isles, tho judging by some of the fascinating accents one would scarcely have thought so, this wasn’t surprising. The biscuits were good tho, especially the ones they assured me were real Scottish shortbread!

    Yum! Wonder if Marthe or Tante Louise could do those? Er… Or yours truly, thinking of the future, not too distant, one could but hope (eschewing the frightful and misapplied American neologism “hopefully”). No, I’d burn the dashed things. Oh well, make hay while the sun shines! I accepted another piece of Scottish shortbread from a beaming, not-so-red-cheeked and very good-looking Colin McAndrew. What was it you did, again, Colin? –Fish genetics.

    Gulp. I’d have said he was about twenty-three but to have got into that sort of field he’d probably have to have a doctorate. Okay, they bred them fresh-cheeked with a healthy, youthful look about them in the Highlands, apparently. They all had it, really, well not old Jock but he certainly looked healthy, as if striding over the heather for hours would be nothing to him.

    Jock then proposed getting over to the smokery and maybe they’d give me a wee taste of the fish! Which they all tended to pronounce as halfway between fish and “fush”, I had seen the latter in English books but had assumed it was merely the over-educated Anglophone slighting attitude to anyone not speaking R.P., only now I realised it possibly wasn’t sheer racism at all, but on the other hand possibly it was, so I wouldn’t use it. So I’m not.

    So off we set along a surprisingly well-paved stretch of road to the smokery. Which as we got there resolved itself into a whole complex of buildings, with neat signs pointing to various departments. Unless these signs were lying, it was hardly just a “smokery”. I looked around dazedly. “So—so they do freezing here as well, Jock?”

    “Aye, they do. The McDougall got a wee man over from Edinburgh to go into all that, and they decided that they couldn’t beat the big firms with the fresh fish, not if they wanted to send it down to London or the Continent, it’s the transport costs, you see. So the wee man, he said they’d do better to go for what he called a niche market, and supply the best hotels and restaurants direct, you see—well there’s enough of them in Scotland these days, but don’t ask me who eats there, lassie, at those prices! But The McDougall, he found some down in London, too, they don’t seem to care how much they pay, so it goes down by air. But these days there’s a big demand for the frozen fish as well, so they decided that’d be a better sideline. It takes the fish that aren’t good enough to go for the smoking, you see. Tho it's the smoked salmon that make the big money.”

    “I see. And—and what’s ‘Caviar Plant’, Jock?” I asked, pointing to one of the smartly lettered signs.

    “That’s for the fish eggs, dearie. They go into these wee jars, you see. Well a female salmon, she’ll produce thousands of eggs, and if those lads and lasses you’ve just met over to the farm were to let them all be fertilised, the whole of Scotland would be swimming in fish!” He laughed cheerfully. “So the wee man, he said: Why are these going to waste? In London they’d put three eggs on a wee cracker and charge you twenty pound for it, and that’s not even in the top-price places! So now they put them up in the wee jars, you see. It’s made a lot of jobs for the women. And the wee man, he said: If they can’t all work full-time because of their home duties, let them work part-time, why not? So they do, and it suits them fine.”

    “Yes, I can see it would.”

    “Aye. You might not think it to look at us, lassie, but we’re a prosperous community these days,” he said smugly.

    It certainly sounded like it. And we headed eagerly for the main door—No, MacLad! Stay!—and the delights of a series of giant processing plants.

    … Phew! Everyone had been only too eager to show me what they did, and what with the strict hygiene regulations—at a couple of points we had to get into white rubber boots, overalls and hairnets—and all the explanations and the huge sheds filled with workers and machinery, not to mention the ones full of smoke which we were allowed to peep into—! Gosh. Like enormous dark caves. And the way the filleters skinned those fish had to be seen to be believed! Yes, it was all done by hand, they advertised it as all organic artisan-handled best Scottish smoked salmon, you see, one Nicol McDougall (clan member) explained eagerly. True, the solid ladies and gents on the filleting line didn’t look to me as if they’d relish being called “artisans”, but never mind, it paid their bills and they all certainly seemed prosperous and happy in their work.

    The “Caviar Plant” was even more astonishing if anything, with the beautiful apricot-coloured little globules being salted and going into the lovely little jars and the pretty labels going on and everything. Even more women worked here, I could see what Jock had meant about part-time being so helpful to them, because they were all different ages and a couple were obviously preggers.

    Everyone was very welcoming, and eager to hear that I was enjoying my stay with The McDougall—the fact that this was supposed to be Top Secret kind of going by the board, but nobody asked me for my surname, thank goodness—and some of the older ladies were in fact rather embarrassingly eager to know what I thought of The McDougall, stressing the fact that he was “a fine figure of a man,” oops! One can hardly say baldly “He’s not my type”, after all.

    And eventually we emerged well into the afternoon with a bag full of goodies plus several immense wrapped-up fish that had to go under Jock’s arm, as they were too long for the bag.

    “Aye well, in the old days—aye, this is for you, you greedy (Scotch epithet),” he said, awarding MacLad a special piece of fish that one of the ladies had forced on him—“in the old days it’d be a handful of fishermen after the salmon with a rod, and some say it was no change for the better, but there! It’s filling the bellies of the weens, and you can’t say that’s a bad thing!” Jock concluded.

    “No of course it isn’t. It’s the same where Grannie lives,” I said thoughtfully. “A local industry sustains the local community, doesn’t it? If she didn’t provide lots of jobs at the Château LeBec vineyard—and the bottling plant as well, of course—then people would have to leave the village to look for work.”

    “That’s right, lassie, you hit the nail on the head there. So your grannie’s got a vineyard, eh?”

    “Yes—oh dear! I don’t think I was supposed to talk about it!” I realised in dismay.

    Jock grunted. “Well I won’t be spreading it around, lassie, and The McDougall isn’t one to talk, neither.”

    “No, that’s why we’re here, really,” I said in relief. “Well you see—” And I poured it all out to him, as we traversed wide stretches of the Western Highlands on the way back to the “castle”. It was a huge relief, actually.

    He patted my hand as we drew up in the courtyard. “Aye well, never you fret, Mel, dearie, they won’t hear it from me. And I’m sure the Ministry’ll be keeping your John safe, if they’ve done it before. –Aye, there’s some wicked men in this old world. I mind the Lockerbie disaster…”

    I listened in horror as he told me about it. December 1988, the week before Christmas. Scotland hadn’t forgotten it, he said grimly. Concluding: “There’ll be short shrift for any bloody terrorists here, lassie, you can count on it!”

    I believed him: I wouldn’t have thought his genial face could possibly look so grim.

November 11 Not. Continuing: What had we been doing, you’ve missed your lunch, dearie!—She didn’t seem to care about Jock.—And what do you imagine I’m going to do with two great fish the size of them?—as he unveiled two of his giant packages and they proved to be fresh salmon, ouch: which misguided employees had happily ripped off their employer there?

    “Cook them, Mrs McBride?” he suggested, extra meekly.

    “Get away with you!” –This, however, appeared to be merely a matter of form, as she didn’t object when instead he sat down at the kitchen table. True, he had prudently removed his boots before entering.

    “We’ll need something for dinner, Mrs McBride. Unless you were planning on fresh venison, of course,” I said politely.

    This struck a chord, and both she and Jock exploded in sniggers.

    “That’ll be the day!” he concluded, blowing his nose on a giant and none-too-clean handkerchief.

    “Aye, it’ll be a miracle!” she agreed. “Had you thought that these are too big to go in the fish kettle, you great (Scotch epithet)?”

    “Wrap them in some of that foil stuff,” he replied airily. “Seen that on the television.”

    “Out here?” I croaked involuntarily. Mac certainly didn’t possess a television set; he only had an old radio which looked as if it would have been right at home in Blandings Castle, one could imagine Lord Emsworth sitting down to listen to it.

    No, it had been with his sister Jeanie, who lived in Perth.

    Mrs McBride was busily whipping a loaf of crusty bread and a dish of butter out of the pantry, but at this she paused. “Wrap good fish in that stuff? I’ll do no such thing!”

    “They might fit in the fish kettle if you cut their heads off, Mrs McBride,” I offered.

    “I dare say, but you’ll not find me presenting The McDougall with a headless salmon to his dinner, and him with guests in the house, too!”

    Oops. Well that was my best shot.

    After some muttering and a close examination of the fish, which had already been cleaned, she decided that several sheets of greaseproof paper would be the go, well buttered, and the big roasting pan. Then she attacked the bread, Jock meanwhile eying the giant knife askance and prudently keeping mum.

    Surprisingly enough he was permitted to share the belated lunch, which turned out to consist not only of generous slices of smoked salmon off one of the ones we’d been given, but also of a couple of the little pots of salmon “caviar”: she simply emptied them into a small bowl, help!

    “It’ll not keep now,” she said comfortably as I goggled at it, “so eat up, lassie. –Stir your stumps, Jock McDougall, and fetch us a lemon from that bowl!”

    Meekly he got up and retrieved a lemon from a bowl on the big old dresser. And with that the lunch was ready, so we had it. Yum! Well frankly it was hard to believe I was still in the British Isles, and as it turned out a large part of the explanation for it was that both the bread and the butter were freshly made by Mrs McB. herself. Gosh. Well granted the meat pies and stews she tended to give us when the males were home for lunch were good, but this was something really special!

    “Aye well, it’s not so bad,” she conceded when I congratulated her, “but a person gets sick of smoked salmon and the wee fish eggs after a while.”

    Er… Mm. Maybe. Just wait till I tell John, he’ll— Oh.

    Oh bother!

    It was quite late in the evening, in fact it was definite Scottish Gloaming out there when the intrepid hunters returned. Bone-weary, dishevelled, muddy and as to the older gents, very cross. And venison-less: quite.

    Bean Minor and Trelawney, however were in good spirits, considering.

    “We saw him, Mel: he was a magnificent sight!” beamed the minor legume.

    “Yes, a big stag!” beamed Trelawney. “We had a really good view of him, right across the valley, didn’t we, Bean Minor?”

    “Yes. He was up-wind of us, of course: they mustn’t get your scent because they’ll be off like the wind. But it was too far for The McDougall to get a clean shot,” my deluded younger sibling explained.

    Good.

    “Oh—was it? Mm.”

    “So we went on down the slope, you see, and headed up the other side, it was jolly hard going, actually. And…” Etcetera and so forth. In other words, deer One, humans Nil, hurray!

    “You might at least show some sympathy, Mel,” the Bean noted sourly.

    “I’m very sympathetic, Bean,” I replied sweetly.

    He gave me a hard look, said: “I’m going up to change,” and retired, scowling.

    I eyed the two lads with distaste. How had they possibly managed to get five times muddier and damper than their elders? “You two can go and get out of those muddy things, too: what were you doing: wading through streams and falling over in the mud? –Don’t answer that. Go on, go upstairs, there’s delicious baked salmon for dinner. –But have a shower first!” I shouted as they disappeared, followed by a thunderous nose of boots on the stairs.

    “Come on, before they grab all the hot water,” said the McDougall on a sour note to his old chum, and they disappeared, too. Accompanied by the now distinctly dour-looking Donald McDougall, maybe he felt he deserved a hot shower, too.

    And I retired to report to Mrs McBride, grinning.

    Crumbs, when Mac came back downstairs he was wearing a kilt! The Bean was down before him and hissed gleefully in my ear: “You owe me 10 P!”

    Scrooge. Okay, The McDougall did not have pea-stick legs.

    Jock had stayed on, well given the size of those fish there’d be plenty to go round. “You’ll be wanting a wee dram, no doubt, McDougall,” he said on a suspiciously airy note.

    Mac gave him a hard look. “And?”

    “Aye well, no doubt there’s more down cellar, but Mrs McBride was saying that while you were out the wee minister from (name of Scotch town) came to call and she told him it was no use him waiting but he sat there and finished the bottle of (unpronounceable Gaelic name).”

    “What?”

    “So she said, aye.”

    “Um, yes,” I agreed: “she did, Mac. We were over at the fish farm, otherwise we’d have stopped him, wouldn’t we, Jock?”

    “Why the Devil didn’t she stop him?” he demanded, his already reddish cheeks taking on a distinctly darker hue.

    Jock sniffed slightly. “Out in the kitchen making scones for him, you know what the women are when it comes to a minister.”

    “That means a vicar, Mel,” put in Henry kindly, examining the sideboard, which sure enough was denuded of anything that looked like a bottle of the hard stuff.

    “Oh, I see! Like the curé! I was thinking it was a politician. –Gosh, really? Grannie loathes the curé. So are Scottish women more religious, Mac?”

    “More superstitious, I’d say,” he replied on a sour note. “Go on, then, Jock,” he added, producing a huge bunch of keys from, gulp, his sporran, so they really were like purses, and sitting down heavily.

    Donald McDougall now also sat down—help, he’d been patiently waiting for his master to sit first!

    “I’ll fetch it, but I wouldn’t waste it on those lads,” Jock remarked, disappearing.

    “Actually Tommy’s got a splendid palate, Mac,” I said helpfully. “He remembers every wine he’s ever tasted.”

    “I dare say, but whisky’s not wine, Mel.”

    Er… This was incontrovertible, but…

    Donald was agreeing fervently with this statement, so I subsided.

    After a while Mac returned to the last subject but fourteen. “So your Grannie’s opposed to organised religion, then, Mel?”

    “Pretty much, I think. I’ve never heard her say anything good about any priests.”

    “Is there anything good to say?” he returned heavily.

    Oh dear, the minister drinking up his whisky was clearly going to be a life-long grudge!

    And we all proceeded to sit in silence, gloomy on the part of some and merely waiting-for-dinner on the part of another, until Jock returned with a bottle. Or three—were those wine bottles?

    “I thought this might go with the fish, MacDougall,” he said in explanation.

    Mac gave them a cursory glance. “Should think so, yes. Wouldn’t do with white fish, of course.”

    I tottered to my feet. What… My God! Bean Minor would explode with excitement!

    “What have you got down in that cellar, Mac?” I croaked.

    “Hey?”

    “This is a vintage Saint-Émilion. A very good Bordeaux.”

    “Uh—thought it was claret, old thing.”

    “Y— Um yes, the English do call Bordeaux claret.”

    “Well there you are,” he said mildly.

    Good grief! All we’d seen him drink so far was unpronounceable Gaelic whisky and he had a cellar full of decent wine? I tottered back to my seat…

    … “Well?” I said as Bean Minor tasted it.

    “Well it’s not a Premier grand cru, but it’s an excellent vintage, nonetheless.”

    Well yes it would be, unless he’d parked it next to a boiler down there.

    “Who’s your shipper, old man?” asked the Bean keenly.

    “Haven’t really got one. Just tell the chap who sells the stuff to send me over a few cases of decent claret every year. –Wine shop in Edinburgh,” he clarified.

    Good Lord. We F.-B. siblings exchanged glances. He was dashed lucky the man wasn’t completely ripping him off!

    “Personally,” Bean Minor added—I quailed—“I wouldn’t recommend it with fish, but this salmon’s robust enough.”

    “Aye, they were well-grown fish,” agreed Jock calmly.

    Something like that. Honestly, I was almost too flabbergasted, take it for all in all, to do justice to the meal!

November 14 Not. Well I can’t say that day was typical, tho Mrs McBride’s food continued splendid, all freshly made, much of it sourced locally, tho I wouldn’t like to say where the lemons had originated—possibly Spain, like the famous Scottish marmalade’s oranges? I mean, once I’d seen how huge the so-called “smokery” was (I concluded that they’d started calling it that back when it just was, and had gone on doing so) and had been shown round the fish farm, there wasn’t much else to do. But Jock, MacLad and I got out to explore the countryside—more Scottish hills, an awful lot of rocks, a lot of cloud and mist, a considerable amount of mud, and possibly those pinkish streaks over there on the far hill were heather, mm.

    MacLad, incidentally, had been appointed as my guardian after Jock had got the full story of why I was here. He was allowed to come into my room to guard me at night, Jock explaining that Border Collies were very loyal and protective, they’d been bred to protect the sheep from the wolves, you see, and the lambs from the eagles, gulp. No, no wolves nowadays. And the eagles were protected, they were coming back! Help. Were they? That was good, Jock (feebly).

    Well MacLad had merely struck me as very friendly and a bit soft, but he was a great barker and could give with some splendidly loud and deep woofs when encountering unexpected sights such as a bird which was perhaps a grouse, Jock certainly got rather excited about it, or a strange man heading up the drive who turned out to be the harmless Mr McBride, or the wee minister—he was little, too. This time he turned tail and shot back to his car, hah, hah! Of course a working dog unquote (I’d never seen him do anything approaching work) was strictly not allowed on beds. No.

    But the thing was, he was a very big dog and terrifically heavy. And didn’t seem to understand “Get off the bed, MacLad!” I tried “Get down!” but he merely lay down with a big huffing noise and put his nose on his paws, so possibly that was what Jock used the command for. Oh well. At least he was lovely and warm, I didn’t need an electric blanket or the extra quilt that Mrs McBride had thoughtfully provided.

    True, there was the small point that he was very hairy. Jock had called him a long-haired Border Collie, so presumably that was what it meant, tho the hair wasn’t terrifically long, except rather gorgeous on his tail. But a lot of it seemed to come off as fluff. All over the bedding, oops. So I had to spend time every morning carefully getting it off and, since I didn’t dare to put it in the waste-paper basket, wrapping it in a tissue and disposing of it down the loo. And making jolly sure it flushed away. But I did feel very, very safe with him in the room and he was a really lovely dog with a very sweet nature. …I wonder if John likes Border Collies?

    Not thinking of that at all.

    Well as I was saying there was very little to do really, tho the lads were ecstatically happy rushing off with Mac and Henry to do masculine things. One day they returned proudly with two rabbits that the chaps had shot but as this was after a disappearance of from seven in the morning till six in the evening Mrs McBride was bally well spot-on in remarking that two bunnies weren’t worth it. Added to which, they could go in a pie or a stew, but it’d never go round, it’d have to be eked out, especially if that Donald McDougall was staying for tea (she often called it that but she meant dinner): he ate like a horse.

    Well to be fair so did my siblings and their chum, so I pointed this out, but she only chuckled comfortably and said that all lads were like that at their ages.

    As I say there wasn’t much to do but it was lovely going out with Jock and not doing it! Apart from the day when the deluded man decided to try to Teach Mel to Fish. Unfortunately as he started, flinging the thing over his head and explaining that one had to stroke the stream, I collapsed in a terrific fit of the giggles. He tried a few more times but I couldn’t stop. Added to which none of the whatchacallems, casts?—none of them resulted in a fish. So that was that.

    So by the time Egg rang to say that he and his dad and Oncle Albert had worked out a plan that’d get all three of us safely away—well okay, Mel, Trelawney too, if he liked, his dashed parents didn’t seem to be coming to the party, did they—and he’d see me soon, I was quite ready to move on. Kind tho everybody had been to us, and safe tho I’d felt the entire time, one couldn’t have called it exciting and apart from the salmon farm and production plant not even interesting, frankly. So I don’t think I’ll be tempted to spend another holiday in Scotland.

Next chapter:

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