The Weatherhouse Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Prologue

  The Drama

  1. Proposal for a Party

  2. The January Christmas Tree

  3. Knapperley

  4. Coming of Spring

  5. Problem set for Garry

  6. Tea at The Weatherhouse

  7. Why Classroom Doors should be Kept Locked

  8. Compeared before the Session

  9. The Andrew Lorimers go to the Country

  10. Andrew Lorimer does the Same

  11. Garry and his Two Fools on the Housetop

  12. Concert Pitch

  13. Proverbial

  14. April Sunrise

  15. Whom the Gods Destroy

  The Epilogue

  Glossary

  Introduction

  ‘She threw the curtain about her, drew on a pair of galoshes, and ran into the night.’

  When nineteen-year-old Lindsay Lorimer is drawn wildly out into the full moon, I knew that The Weatherhouse was not just a portrait of a community but a sensory thing that would speak to anyone who has known the Scottish land, or enjoyed Nan Shepherd’s beloved work of non-fiction The Living Mountain. ‘Running thus before the wind,’ Lindsay ‘had entered into peace that is beyond human understanding: she was at one with the motion of the universe.’ This is one of the glittering moments that scatter this complex exploratory novel. These epiphanies, often coming when a character is alone and outdoors, are key to Shepherd’s work and make it so exhilarating for me as a reader.

  In the fictional Fetter-Rothnie, a small rural community in northeast Scotland, a cast of mainly female characters live their lives in the wake of World War One. The Weatherhouse of the title, with a ‘quaint irregular hexagon’ room, a glass door to the garden and a sundial, is home to ancient matriarch Lang Leeb and her three daughters. It is a microcosm of the country at that time, pursuing a traditional way of life in a changed world. Then there is the wider community, from old tramp Johnnie Rogie to Stella, a young adoptee, and the novel’s other central character, Garry Forbes. When Garry returns to Fetter-Rothnie, scarred by a horrific trauma in the war, he is sceptical about the village: ‘the reconstruction of the universe,’ he thinks, ‘would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.’ But in the path of the novel the place affects him deeply and his attitude changes.

  The Weatherhouse was published in 1930 and was Shepherd’s second book. She lived in the same house on the outskirts of Aberdeen for eighty-seven years and died in February 1981, three months before I was born. I grew up further north, in the islands, in an agricultural community almost one hundred years later, but many of the concerns remain the same. She explores what I recognise as both the pleasure and toughness of rural life. I have been that young woman escaping into the light of the full moon and also, returning after having lived away, I have felt like Garry, frustrated and conspicuous. It took a slowing down and an opening up to see the light and worth in what was around me.

  Many of the characters are ‘looking for the heart of life.’ We are repeatedly taken into the minds of women seeking some kind of self-realisation. Mrs Ellen Falconer longs for purpose, endeavour and imagination: ‘It was life she wanted, strong current and fresh wind, no ignoble desire.’ She encourages her daughter’s connection to Garry to satisfy her own desires. Meanwhile, minister’s daughter Louie Morgan wants to be admired: praying earnestly outdoors, hoping to be seen. Later she connects herself to the dead army engineer David Grey, saying: ‘I wanted to be at the heart of life instead of on its margins.’ Others dispute her version of their engagement, triggering a debate on the nature of truth and reality that is one of the themes of the book.

  Compared to Garry’s experiences in the trenches, Louie’s fantasies seem inconsequential, but take up much more time and exploration. Shepherd shows how important minor scandal, reputation and gossip are in a small community. She uses the turning points and strivings that make a life, the friendships and misunderstandings, to prompt deeper meditations.

  Nan Shepherd makes ingenious use of free indirect speech to create a novel of great empathy. Uneducated widowed Ellen, a ‘nasty old woman,’ is explored with depth and sensitivity, while crude Stella, born into poverty, comes to represent the future, finding employment and confidence by the end of the book. Characters can say things without really speaking: ‘Garry is coming? I thought, I used to imagine – long ago – you were such friendly you two. I wondered sometimes – but then he went away.’

  Shepherd’s sympathy extends to embrace those in the grip of madness, as when Garry thinks, ‘That’s what they said about me: beside himself, cracked. I was in a fever, you see. But I’m convinced I saw clearer than in my right mind.’ All the people in the novel are being exactly themselves and their motivations are presented with truth and kindness. With the Epilogue comes Ellen’s work with the Working Girls’ Guild, giving a sense of new possibilities and complications in the lives of women.

  The novel’s generous, calm attention to the inner lives of sidelined, unremembered women means it remains relevant for the twenty-first century. Shepherd herself lived happily without a man for many years and here we are shown women, often unmarried or widowed, as complex and passionate as they approach their later years. Perhaps my favourite moment in the book is when Garry returns from war and witnesses, before she has seen him, his aunt Barbara, ‘a hard-knit woman of fifty-five,’ alone in the kitchen, dancing.

  Besides speaking generally for its time and country, The Weatherhouse is also of a very specific place – the outskirts of the Grampians – with a culture and language of its own. Characters go ‘stravagin’ and have ‘collieshangie’. The words are specific to this area but have a control and understatement familiar to me from the isles.

  Continually colliding with this controlled society is a wider desire for joy and understanding in Lindsay, Garry and others. There are several passages of quivering beauty and connection, where time and the individual cease to matter. ‘He [Garry] saw everything he looked at not as substance, but as energy. All was life. Life pulsed in the clods of earth that the ploughshare were breaking, in the shares, the men. Substance, no matter what its form, was rare and fine.’

  In these pantheistic sequences of unbridled energy, where the earthly and spiritual realms are linked through nature, The Weatherhouse seems pressingly modern, a response that will be familiar to readers of The Living Mountain. It is no surprise that there is currently such renewed interest in Shepherd’s work. She has even become the latest woman to grace a Scottish bank note, appearing on the new Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note, depicted in front of her beloved Cairngorm hills.

  Although written in a period before conservation or industrial farming as we know it, The Weatherhouse pinpoints timeless philosophical debates about the naming of things and our relationship to the environment. Ellen says there is no need to learn the names of the birds: ‘Her lips parted and her eyes shone; and Mrs Falconer longed to tell her of the strange secret of life – how all things were one and there was no estrangement except for those who did not understand.’ The people of Fetter-Rothnie are linked into the bigger cycles of land and community, and what Garry comes to see as ‘this astonishing earth.’

  Amy Liptrot

  The Main Characters

  THE YOUNG PROTAGONISTS

  Captain Garry Forbes (30), (‘the Gargoyle’), son of the timid Benjamin Forbes who was half-brother to Barbara Paterson. Wounded in the trenches of the First World War.

  Miss Lindsay Lorimer (19), daughter of Andrew Lorimer; sister of Frank, who served in the war with Garry Forbes.

  Miss Louisa (Louie) Morgan (35), at Uplands, daughter of the previous minister at Fetter-Rothnie. Lo
uie claims to be engaged to David Grey, Garry Forbes’s engineer friend, who died of T.B.

  THE LADIES AT THE WEATHERHOUSE

  Aunt Craigmyle (Lang Leeb) (90+), cousin to Andrew Lorimer, the solicitor father of Lindsay and Frank. Widowed at 54, Leeb retired to the Weatherhouse and left things to her three daughters, namely:

  Miss Annie Dyce (Paradise) Craigmyle, raised by her father to look after the farm, she took charge of it when he died until crippled by rheumatism.

  Mrs Ellen (Nell) Falconer (60), married at 27 to Charlie Falconer who died in poverty, leaving Ellen to return to her old home along with her daughter, Kate Falconer (30), cook at a nearby convalescent hospital.

  Miss Theresa (Tris) Craigmyle, Leeb’s youngest daughter, housekeeper to her mother and sisters at the Weatherhouse.

  FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

  Miss Barbara (Bawbie) Paterson (55), of Knapperley, maiden aunt to Garry Forbes.

  Francie Ferguson, son to Jeames Ferguson who helped adapt the Weatherhouse; brother to ‘Feel Weelum’, finally husband (after 22 years engagement) to ‘Peter Sandy’s Bell’, already father to her children, Stella Dagmar and Sidney Archibald Eric.

  Mrs Barbara Hunter, of Craggie, ex servant girl and friend to Bawbie Paterson at Knapperley; wife of crofter Jake Hunter; mother of Dave, who returns wounded from the war to re-educate himself as a graduate and a school teacher.

  Jonathan Bannochie, cobbler to trade, originator of the phrase ‘Garry Forbes and his twa fools’, referring to Garry, Bawbie and Francie.

  The Prologue

  The name of Garry Forbes has passed into proverb in Fetter-Rothnie.

  One sees him gaunt, competent, a trifle anxious, the big fleshy ears standing out from his head, the two furrows cutting deeply round from nostril to chin, his hands powerful but squat, gift of a plebeian grandfather, and often grimed with oil and grease—hardly a figure of romance. Of those who know him, to some he is a keen, long-headed manager, with a stiff record behind him in the training of ex-service men and the juvenile unemployed, tenacious, taciturn, reliable, with uncanny reserves of knowledge; to others, a rampageous Socialist blustering out disaster, a frequenter of meetings: they add a hint of property (some say expectations) in Scotland; to some he is merely another of those confounded Scotch engineers; but to none is he a legend. They are not to know that in Fetter-Rothnie, where the tall, narrow, ugly house of Knapperley is situate, his name has already become a symbol.

  You would need Garry Forbes to you. It is the local way of telling your man he is a liar. And when they deride you, scoffing at your lack of common sense, Hine up on the head of the house like Garry Forbes and his twa fools, is the accepted phrase. As the ladies at the Weatherhouse said, A byword and a laughing stock to the place. And married into the family, too!

  ONE

  To the Lorimers of a younger generation, children of the three Lorimer brothers who had played in the walled manse garden with the three Craigmyle girls, the Weatherhouse was a place of pleasant dalliance. It meant day-long summer visits, toilsome uphill July walks that ended in the cool peace of the Weather house parlour, with home-brewed ginger beer for refreshment, girdle scones and strawberry jam and butter biscuits, and old Aunt Leeb seated in her corner with her spider-fine white lace cap, piercing eyes and curious staves of song; then the eager rush for the open, the bickering around the old sundial, the race for the moor; and a sense of endless daylight, of enormous space, of a world lifted up beyond the concerns of common time; and eggs for tea, in polished wooden egg-cups that were right end up either way; and queer fascinating things such as one saw in no other house—the kettle holder with the black cross-stitch kettle worked upon it, framed samplers on the walls, the goffering iron, the spinning wheel. And sometimes Paradise would show them how the goffering iron was worked.

  Paradise, indeed, gave a flavouring to a Weatherhouse day that none of the other ladies could offer. Round her clung still the recollection of older, rarer visits, when they were smaller and she not yet a cripple; of the splendid abounding wonder that inhabits a farm. Not a Lorimer but associated the thought of Paradise with chickens newly broken from the shell, ducks worrying with their flat bills in the grass; with dark, half-known, sweet-smelling corners in the barn, and the yielding, sliding, scratching feel of hay; with the steep wooden stair to the stable-loft and the sound of the big, patient, clumsy horses moving and munching below, a rattle of harness, the sudden nosing of a dog; with the swish of milk in the pail and the sharp delightful terror as the great tufted tail swung and lashed; with the smell of oatcakes browning, the plod of the churn and its changing note of triumph, and the wide, shallow basins set with gleaming milk; with the whirr of the reaper, the half-comprehended excitement of harvest, the binding, the shining stooks; with the wild madness of the last uncut patch, the trapped and furtive things one watched in a delirium of joy and revulsion; and the comfort, afterwards, of gathering eggs, safe, smooth and warm against the palm.

  Of that need for comfort Paradise herself had no comprehension. Rats, rabbits and weakly chicks were killed as a matter of course. There was no false sentiment about Miss Annie: nothing flimsy. She was hard-knit, like a homemade worsted stocking, substantial, honest and durable. ‘A cauff bed tied in the middle,’ her sister Theresa said rudely of her in her later years, when inactivity had turned her flabby; but at the farm one remembered her as being everywhere.

  It was Andrew Lorimer, her cousin, who transformed her baptismal name of Annie Dyce to Paradise, and now his children and his brothers’ children scarcely knew her by another. Not that Miss Annie cared! ‘I’m as much of Paradise as you are like to see, my lad,’ she used to tell him.

  The four ladies at the Weatherhouse, old Aunt Craigmyle and her daughters, could epitomise the countryside among them in their stories. Paradise knew how things were done; she told of ancient customs, of fairs and cattle markets and all the processes of a life whose principle is in the fields. The tales of Aunt Craigmyle herself had a fiercer quality; all the old balladry, the romance of wild and unscrupulous deeds, fell from her thin and shapely lips. And if she did not tell a tale, she sang. She was always singing. Ballads were the natural food of her mind. John, the second of the three Lorimer brothers, said of her, when the old lady attained her ninetieth birthday, ‘She’ll live to be a hundred yet, and attribute it to singing nothing but ballads all her life.’

  Cousin Theresa cared more for what the folk of her own day did—matter of little moment to the children. But she had, too, the grisly tales: of the body-snatchers at Drum and the rescue by the grimy blacksmith on his skelping mare; of Malcolm Gillespie, best-hated of excisemen, and the ill end he came by on the gallows, and of the whisky driven glumly past him in a hearse. To Cousin Ellen the children paid less heed; though they laughed (as she laughed herself) at her funny headlong habit of suggesting conclusions to every half-told tale she heard. Cousins Annie or Theresa would say, ‘Oh, yes, of course Nell must know all about it!’ and she would laugh with them and answer, ‘Yes, there I am again.’ But sometimes she would bite her lip and look annoyed. It was she too, who said, out on the moor, ‘Look, you can see Ben A’an today—that faint blue line,’ or talked queer talk about the Druid stones. But these were horizons too distant for childish minds. It was pleasanter to hear again the familiar story of how the Weatherhouse came to be built.

  Mrs Craigmyle at fifty four, widowed but unperturbed, announced to her unmarried daughters that she was done with the farm: Annie could keep it if she liked—which Annie did. Theresa and her mother would live free. Theresa was not ill-pleased, when it became apparent that she was to be mistress of the new home. Theresa could never understand her mother’s idle humour. The grace of irresponsibility was beyond her. But Mrs Craigmyle, whose straight high shoulders and legs of swinging length had earned her the family by-name of Lang Leeb, had been a wild limb, with her mind more on balladry than on butter; and her father, the Reverend Andrew, was thankful when he got her safely married into the d
ouce Craigmyle clan. She had made James Craigmyle an excellent wife; but at fifty four was quite content to let the excellence follow the wifehood.

  ‘We’ll go to town, I suppose,’ said Theresa, who liked company.

  ‘Fient a town. We’ll go to Andra Findlater’s place.’

  Annie and Theresa stared.

  Andra Findlater was a distant cousin of their mother, dead long since. A stonemason to trade, he had lived in a two-roomed cottage on the edge of their own farmlands. When his daughters were seven and eight years old, Mrs Findlater decided that she wanted the ben-end kept clear of their muck; and Andra had knocked a hole in the back wall and built them a room for themselves: a delicious room, low-roofed and with a window set slanting.

  ‘But if I could big a bit mair—’ Andra kept thinking. Another but-and-ben stood back from theirs, its own length away and just out of line with the new room—now what could a man do with that were he to join them up? Be it understood that Andra Findlater had no prospect of being able to join them up; but the problem of how to make the houses one absorbed him to his dying day. It helped, indeed, to bring about his death; for Andra would lean against a spruce tree for hours of an evening, smoking his pipe and considering the lie of the buildings. He leaned one raw March night till he caught cold; and died of pneumonia.

  Lang Leeb, as mistress of the big square farmhouse, had always time for a newse with her poor relations. She relished Andra. Many an evening she dandered across the fields, in her black silk apron and with her shank in her hands, to listen to his brooding projects. She loved the site of the red-tiled cottages, set high, almost on the crest of the long ridge; she loved the slanting window of the built-out room. A month after her husband’s death she dandered down the field one day and asked the occupant of the cottage to let her see the little room again. ‘It’s a gey soster,’ said she. ‘The cat’s just kittled in’t.’ Lang Leeb went home and told her daughters she was henceforth to live at Andra Findlater’s place; and her daughters stared.