A September Day
It was a day in autumn when I came home from school in Stornoway, a town which was seven miles from the village. The sky was a perfect blue, and the corn was yellow and as yet uncut. I left the bus at the bottom of the road and walked the rest of the way home. I was eleven years old, and I wore short trousers and a woollen jersey both of which my mother had made for me. Even as I write, the movement of the fresh air on my legs returns to me, and the red radiance of the heather all about me. Every day I went to Stornoway on the bus and every day I came back. I began to think of myself as more sophisticated than the villagers. Didn’t I know all about Pythagoras’s Theorem and was I not immersed in the history of other nations as well as my own?
As I walked along the road I looked down at the thatched house where old Meg stayed. Sometimes one would see her coming from the shop with her red bloomers down about her big red fat legs. She went home to a house full of cats, hungry, ragged, vicious. Today there was no smoke from her chimney: perhaps she was lying in her bed. Her breath was much shorter than it used to be.
Outside his house old Malcolm was sharpening his scythe. I shouted, ‘Hullo’ to him and the scythe momentarily glittered in the sun as he turned towards me. His wife like a small figure on a Dutch clock came out and threw a basinful of water on the grass. ‘Hullo,’ I shouted as I felt myself coming home. Old Malcolm shouted in Gaelic that it was a fine day, and then spat on his hands.
The village returned to me again, every house, every wall, every ditch. It was so very different from Stornoway whose houses were crowded together, whose sea was thickly populated with fishing boats. I knew practically every stone in the village. At the same time I knew so much that didn’t belong to the village at all.
Head bent over his scythe, Malcolm sharpened the blade, and I made my way home to the little house in which we lived. Very distantly I heard a cock crow in the middle of the afternoon, a traditional sign of bad luck. After it had crowed a dog barked and then another dog and then another one. Ahead of me stretched the sea, a big blue plate that swelled to the horizon on which a lone ship was moving.
‘Huh, so you’re home,’ said my mother, ‘you took your time.’
As my mother hardly ever went to town I came home to her as if from another land. She made me work at my books but the work I was doing was beyond her. Nevertheless she knew with a deep instinctive knowledge that learning was the road to the sort of reasonable life that she had never had.
‘You’re just in time to go out to the shop for me,’ she said. ‘You can have your tea when you come back. Get me some sugar and tea.’
I put my bag down on the oil-skinned table and took the money she gave me. I didn’t particularly like to go to the shop, but at the same time I didn’t strenuously object. As I was walking along the road I met Daial who had come home from the village school. Now that I had gone to the town school I was warier with him than I had been in the past. He asked me if I wanted a game of football and I said that I had to go on a message for my mother. He snorted and went back into his house.
When I had passed him, I met old deaf Mrs Macleod. She shouted at me as if against a gale, in Gaelic, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re the clever one, aren’t you? Ask your mother if she wants to buy any milk. Anything going on in the town?’
I said I didn’t know of anything. She came up and said, ‘Your mother made that jersey, didn’t she? I wonder what kind of wool it is. Your mother is a very good knitter.’
I squirmed under her hands. ‘I’ll have to get the pattern from her sometime,’ she shouted into my ear. I almost felt my knees reddening with embarrassment.
When I left her I ran and ran, as if I wished to escape somewhere. Why were people always poking and probing? And yet I had been flattered when she said that I was the clever one.
I arrived at the shop and waited my turn. The shop sold everything from sugar to paraffin to methylated spirits for our Tilleys. Seonaid was talking to the woman who owned the shop and saying, ‘Did you hear if war is declared yet? I’ll take two loaves.’
‘No,’ said the other one.
I was gazing at the conversation sweets in the jars, and wished that I had money to buy some, but we were too poor.
‘Nugget, did you say?’ said the woman who owned the shop.
‘Black,’ said Seonaid. ‘They won’t wear brown shoes. Everything black or navy blue.’
‘That’s right,’ said the shop owner. ‘No, I never heard anything about the war.’
‘That man Chamberlain always carries an umbrella,’ said Seonaid. ‘You’d think it was raining all the time.’
She turned to me and said, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re getting taller every time I see you. And are you doing well at the school?’
I murmured something under my breath but she soon forgot about me. I went to the door of the shop and I saw Peggy, a girl of my own age who was wearing a yellow dress. She also went to the village school.
‘Hullo,’ I said to her.
‘Hullo,’ she said, looking at me with a slant laughing eye.
She was wearing sandals and her legs were brown. It was a long time since
