The Quarry Wood

Nan Shepherd

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781847678010
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Classiques

When Martha accepts a place at university, her decision is met with a mixture of hostility and pride by her uncomprehending family. This is the story of a young woman's journey to maturity and independence, struggling to cope with the intellectual and emotional challenges that surround her, at a time when such space was rarely given freely to women.In The Quarry Wood, Nan Shepherd's subtle prose is matched by intense and memorable descriptions of the natural world, and a dry sense of humour. Ninety years after its first publication, it remains as fresh and original today.

ONE

Aunt Josephine Leggatt

Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her grand-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it was she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving − she reflected − that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.

Mrs. Ironside would have grumbled on for long enough and Aunt Josephine knew it.

‘Ye’ll just tak the craitur awa fae the school Emmeline,’ the old lady said. ‘Ye’ll never haud book-larnin’ in a wizened cask. Stap it in, it’ll aye rin oot the faister. The bairn’s fair wizened.’

‘Oh, I ken she’s nae bonny, Aunt Josephine—’

‘O ay, ye were aye the beauty yersel, Emmeline, I’se nae deny it. But ye’ve nane to blame but yersel that the bairn’s as she is. “There’s Emmeline, noo,” I says to Leebie, “throwin’ hersel awa on yon Geordie Ironside, and the bairn’s as ugly a little sinner as you’d clap e’en on in a month o’ Sabbaths.” “Dinna mention the wean,” says Leebie, “nor Emmeline neither. If she hadna the wit to pit a plooman by the door, nor the grace to mind on fat was due to her fowk and their position, she can just bide the consequences. Dinna speak o’ Emmeline to me,” says Leebie. “She’s never lookit richt upon her man if she’s gotten a surprise that the bairn’s nae a beauty.”’

‘Geordie’s nae that ill-looking, Aunt Josephine.’

‘Na, mebbe no. But look at his sister Sally − as grim’s an auld horse wi’ a pain in its belly. Matty’s an Ironside, ma dear, and ye’ve gotten fat ye hae gotten by mairryin’ aneath ye.’

Aunt Josephine said it calmly, without passion or malice, as one delivers an impersonal truth. She alone of the Leggatt family had recognised Emmeline since her marriage; but she would never have dreamed of denying that the marriage was a folly. She had even, in the early years, attempted on her sisters the thankless task of persuasion in Emmeline’s behalf. After all, she was the only bairn of their own brother − ‘blood’s thicker nor water,’ Aunt Josephine had the audacity to remind Aunt Jean, even after that lady had delivered her ultimatum with regard to Emmeline.

‘But it’s nae sae easy to get aff yer hands,’ said Jean.

That made the matter conclusive. To have Emmeline on their hands would have been an impossible disaster for the respectable Leggatts.

Emmeline tossed her head at their opinion. With base effrontery she married the man she loved, and after twelve pinched and muddled years, with her trim beauty slack, two dead bairns and a living one mostly nerves and temper, she stood in her disordered kitchen and fretted that she could not offer her aunt a decent cup of tea.

‘Beautiful, my dear, just beautiful,’ said Aunt Josephine, sipping the tea; and she returned to the question of Martha’s schooling. Emmeline, to be sure, had a dozen reasons against taking the child away. Reasoning to Miss Leggatt was so much moonshine. Fretful little girls are solid realities (if not so solid as their grand-aunts might wish): reasons, merely breath. It was not to be expected that a vapour would impede Aunt Josephine. She announced calmly and conclusively that she was taking the child back with her to Crannochie.

‘We’ll just cry on the craitur,’ she said, ‘and lat her know.’

The craitur all this while, serenely unaware of the conspiracy against her peace, was dwelling on a planet of her own. A field’s breadth from the cottage, where two dykes intersected, there was piled a great cairn of stones. They had lain there so long that no one troubled to remember their purpose or their origin. Gathered from the surrounding soil, they had resumed a sort of unity with it. The cairn had settled back into the landscape, like a dark outcrop of rock. There Martha played. The stones summed up existence.

Aunt Josephine walked at her easy pace across the field. Mrs. Ironside followed for a couple of steps; then stood where she was and bawled across Aunt Josephine’s head.

Aunt Josephine paid no attention: nor did Martha. The one plodded steadily on through the grass, the other made a planet with her dozen stones; both thirled to a purpose: while Mrs. Ironside behind them shrilled and gesticulated to no purpose whatsoever.

As her mother acknowledged, the child was no beauty: though impartial opinion, at sight of her, might well have decided that the mother was; intensifying the description by aid of the sturdiest little helot of the local speech − ‘a gey beauty’: inasmuch as the bairn’s frock was glazed with dirt and drawn up in a pucker where it had been torn; and of her two clumsy boots, one gaped and the other was fastened with half a bootlace and a knotted bit of string, and both were grey. Her hair was a good sensible drab, not too conspicuous when badly groomed; and she had a wicked habit of sucking one or another of its stribbly ends.

‘She’s just a skin,’ said Miss Leggatt, pausing at the foot of the cairn, while Mrs. Ironside’s voice came spattering past her in little bursts:

‘Tak yer hair ooten yer mou’, Matty … and say how-do-you-do … to yer aunt. Mumblin’ yer hair … like that … I never saw the like.’

‘She’s hungry, that’s fat she is, the littlin,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Ye’re fair hungerin’ her, Emmeline.’ And she put out her hands and drew Martha towards her by the shoulders. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said. It was a finished action and a finished phrase. Miss Leggatt’s simplest word had a way of suggesting completion, as though it conveyed her own abounding certainty in the rightness of everything.

Emmeline told her daughter what was in store for her.

‘Wunna that be fine?’ said Aunt Josephine.

Martha firmly held by the shoulders in Aunt Josephine’s grasp, answered by the action and not by word. Words came slowly to her need; and her present need was the most unmanageable she had ever experienced; for school to Martha was escape into a magic world where people knew things. Already she dreamed passionately of knowing all there was to know in the universe: not that she expressed it so, even to herself. She had no idea of the spaciousness of her own desires; but she knew very fervently that she was in love with school. Her reaction to the news she had just heard, therefore, was in the nature of protest − swift and thorough. She simply kicked out with all her strength of limb.

‘I wunna be ta’en awa fae the school,’ she screamed. ‘I wunna. I wunna.’

‘Did ever ye see the likes o’ that?’ panted her mother. ‘Be quaet, will ye, Matty? I’m black affronted at ye. Kickin’ yer aunt like that. Gin I cud get ye still a meenute, my lady, I’d gar yer lugs hotter for ye.’

Martha kicked and screamed the more.

Aunt Josephine let them bicker. Troubling not even to bend and brush the dust of Martha’s footmarks from her skirt, she walked back calmly to the cottage.

Aunt Josephine Leggatt was a fine figure of a woman. She carried her four-and-sixty years with a straight back and a steady foot. She would tramp you her ten miles still, at her own pace and on her own occasions. Miss Leggatt made haste for no man, no, nor woman neither: though she had been known to lift her skirts and run to pick a sprawling child from the road or shoo the chickens off her seedlings.

‘We’ll need to put a fencie up,’ she said.

It was just a saying of Aunt Josephine’s, that − a remark current for any season. She said it as one says, ‘It’s a bonny day,’ or, ‘I dinna ken fat’s ta’en the weather the year.’

‘Josephine’ll mebbe hae her fencie ready for her funeral,’ said Sandy Corbett, Aunt Jean’s gristly husband.

The fence was not neglected from carelessness, or procrastination, or a distaste for work. Still less, of course, from indifference. Miss Leggatt had a tender concern for her seedlings, and would interrupt even a game of cards at the advent of a scraping hen. But deep within herself she felt obscurely the contrast between the lifeless propriety of a fence and the lively interest of shooing a hen; and Aunt Josephine at every turn chose instinctively the way of life. The flame of life burned visibly in her with an even glow. A miracle to turn aside and see − the bush burning and not consumed. One could read it in her eye, a serene unclouded eye, that never blazed and was never dimmed. An eye, moreover, that never saw too much.

But pleasant as one found her eye, it was the nose that was the feature of Aunt Josephine Leggatt’s countenance. It was as straight as her back. A fine sharp sculptured nose that together with her lofty brow gave her profile a magnificence she had height enough to carry. A good chin too: though Jean, as Josephine herself was the first to acknowledge, had the chin of the family. Jean’s chin spoke.

To look in Aunt Josephine’s face, one felt that life was a simple matter, irrationally happy. Temper could not dwell with her. On this June day, hot and airless, with the spattered dents of early morning thunder-drops still uneffaced in the dust, not even Emmeline could withstand her serenity.

‘She’s ta’en a grip o’ ill-natur,’ Emmeline grumbled, shaking the child. ‘She’s aye girnin’, an’ whan she’s nae she’s up in a flist that wad fleg ye. An ill-conditioned monkey.’

‘Leave the bairn’s temper alane,’ said Miss Leggatt. ‘The inside’ll clear o’ itsel, but the ootside wunna. A sup water and some soap wad set ye better’n a grumble.’

Martha was accordingly washed, and another frock put on her. She possessed no second pair of boots, and therefore the existing pair remained as they were. A bundle that went under Aunt Josephine’s arm, and a hat pulled over Martha’s tangled wisps of hair, completed these preparations for the child’s first sojourn from home: a sojourn upon which she started in wrath.

TWO

Crannochie

Aunt Josephine made no overtures. She trudged leisurely on through the soft dust, her skirt trailing a little and worrying the powder of dust into fantastic patterns. If she spoke it was to herself as much as to Martha − a trickle of commentary on the drought and the heat, sublime useless ends of talk that required no answer. Martha heard them all. They settled slowly over her, and she neither acknowledged them nor shook them off. She ploughed her way stubbornly along a cart-rut, where the dust was thickest and softest and rose in fascinating puffs and clouds at the shuffle of her heavy boots. She bent her head forward and watched it smoke and seethe; and ignored everything else in the world but that and her own indignation.

But in the wood there were powers in wait for her: the troubled hush of a thousand fir-trees; a light so changed, so subdued from its own lively ardour to the dark solemnity of that which it had entered, that the child’s spirit, brooding and responsive, went out from her and was liberated. In that hour was born her perception of the world’s beauty. The quiet generosity of the visible and tangible world sank into her mind, and with every step through the wood she felt it more closely concentrated and expressed in the gracious figure of old Miss Leggatt. She therefore drew closer to her aunt, looking sidelong now and then into her face.

Beyond the wood they were again on dusty road, and curious little tufts of wind came fichering with the dust; and suddenly a steady blast was up and about, roaring out of the south-east, and the long blue west closed in on them, nearer and denser and darker, inky, then ashen, discoloured with yellow like a bruise.

‘It’s comin’ on rainin’,’ said Martha; and as the first deliberate drops thumped down, she came close up to Aunt Josephine and clutched her skirt.

‘We’re nearly hame, ma dear, we’re nearly hame,’ said Aunt Josephine; and she took the child’s hand firmly in hers and held back her eager pace. Thunder growled far up by the Hill o’ Fare, then rumbled fiercely down-country like a loosened rock; and in a moment a frantic rain belaboured the earth. Martha tugged and ran, but Aunt Josephine had her fast and held her to the same sober step.

‘It’s a sair brae this,’ she said. ‘We’ll be weet whatever, an’ we needna lose breath an’ bravery baith. We’re in nae hurry − tak yer time, tak yer time.’

They took their time. The rain was pouring from Martha’s shapeless hat, her sodden frock clung to her limbs, her boots were in pulp. But Aunt Josephine had her stripped and rolled in a shawl, the fire blazing and the Kettle on, before she troubled to remove her own dripping garments or noticed the puddles that spread and gathered on the kitchen floor.

Martha was already munching cake and Aunt Josephine was on her knees drying up the waters, when the sound of a voice made the child glance up to see a face thrust in and peering. A singular distorted monkey face, incredibly lined.

‘It’s Mary Annie,’ said Miss Josephine. ‘Come awa ben.’

A shrivelled little old woman came in.

She came apologetic. She had brought Miss Josephine a birthday cake and discovered too late that she had mistaken the day; and on the very birthday she had made her own uses of the cake. She had set it on the table when she had visitors to tea, for ornament merely. Now, in face of the wrong date, her conscience troubled her; and what if Jeannie should know? Jeannie was her daughter and terrible in rectitude; and Jeannie had been from home when Mrs. Mortimer had held her tea-party.

‘Ye wunna tell Jeannie, Miss Josephine. Ye ken Jeannie, she’s that gweed − ower gweed for the likes o’ me.’

‘Hoots,’ said Aunt Josephine, ‘fat wad I dae tellin’ Jeannie? Jeannie kens ower muckle as it is. There’s nae harm dane to the cake, I’m sure, by bein’ lookit at.’

Her heartiness restored Mary Annie’s sense of pleasure; but she went away with no lightening of the anxiety that sat on her countenance.

Aunt Josephine had a curious belief that it was good for people to be happy in their own way: and a curious disbelief in the goodness of Jeannie.

‘She’s a − ay is she −’ she said, and said no more.

‘An’ noo,’ she added, looking at Martha, ‘we’ll just cut the new cake, for that ye’re eatin’s ower hard to be gweed. It’s as hard’s Hen’erson, an’ he was that hard he reeshled whan he ran.’

She plunged a knife through the gleaming top of the cake, and served Martha with a goodly slice and some of the broken sugar.

‘Yes, ma dear, he reeshled whan he ran. Did ye ken that? An’ the birdies’ll be nane the waur o’ a nimsch of cake.’

She moved about the room all the while she spoke, crumbling the old cake out at the window, sweeping the crumbs of the new together with her hand and tasting them, and breaking an end of the sugar to put in her mouth − with such a quiet serenity, so settled and debonair a mien, that the last puffs of Martha’s perturbation melted away on the air.

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