Chapter 9
It was this road Jenny Caldicott took when she came to remove her nephew, Tom Raven.
‘Deep freeze, dear boy,’ Edward Raven had said.
‘What luck – we can celebrate Christmas in January.’ The sheep, which they named Vera, after Vera Lynn, because Edward said she had shapely legs, hung in the outhouse next to their one-storey cottage.
Vera lasted them for weeks and the mutton broth was warm, with carrots and the last of the turnips.
But by April, oh, they were both sick of the sight and smell of lamb, though Tom would never have admitted it.
For the rest of his life, he could not touch lamb.
It reminded him too much of that last spring in Scotland.
His father was sometimes cross – about the wind whistling through the cottage, or the leaks, or the way the range smoked, but he was not a shouter like some of the men in Gatehouse Tom knew who yelled at their sons and hit them.
Tom’s father would go for walks up into the hills, and that meant he could not do his work, which was carpentry – everything from kitchen tables for farmhouses and dressers and shelves to more delicate items like bird cages and house signs, and a new lectern for the kirk in Wigtown.
Every year Tom would choose what he wanted and his father would make it for his birthday.
Sometimes it was a trolley. Sometimes a box with his name carved into the lid:
TOM * RAVEN
One year, a small raven, itself on a polished oak stand. Its thick beak and hooded eyes terrified Tom and he had to hide it, though he would never have told his father that either.
Tom had another secret which he also did not tell his father: he really wanted a Matchbox toy car.
One like Ian Forsyth’s. Ian’s Matchbox car was mulberry-maroon, a poor colour for a car in Tom’s opinion.
It should be red. Tom would have been happy with a Matchbox car, of course, but what he wanted more than anything was a crane, which he had seen an advert for in the Radio Times in the newsagent’s in Kirkcudbright.
Oh! It was a fine thing, the Matchbox Yellow No.
11 Jumbo Crane, with a hook on the end. The hook was made of metal, and it actually dangled on a string off the crane of its own free will.
The Matchbox factory was in London, Shacklewell Lane, London E8.
Tom memorized this in case he ever went to London.
‘Can we go to Shacklewell Lane, London E8, please,’ he’d practised saying to an imaginary cab driver.
He watched a lot of films, sneaking in at the back of the picture house in Kirkcudbright and he liked the kind of films where there was a car chase, and a taxi driver had to drive fast, and complained.
These always made Tom laugh. So he knew how to talk to a taxi driver, when the time came to go to the Matchbox factory in Shacklewell Lane, London E8.
Tom was eight, about to turn nine, in that everlasting winter, and because he was inside so much during that time he started to have questions: how they had ended up there, what had happened to them.
So in the late-winter evenings Tom would ask for stories about the time before he was born, his father’s early life, how he had met Tom’s mother.
And his father would tell him: tales of the time he had fallen out of his Hawker Fury when the door wasn’t properly fastened, or the pub that his commanding officer had found them all in when war was finally declared, opening the door and calling, ‘Back to base, you bleedin’ useless lot!
Fight’s on!’ Or, when Tom begged for a story about his mother: the iron bedstead and how it had been the bed of Tom’s mother, Irene, as a child in London, and how, after she died and they moved far away, Edward had dismantled it, strapped it to the top of the car and driven it to Scotland using most of his petrol ration, only to find one of the legs had rolled off somewhere in the Pennines, where it to this day presumably continues to bewilder the sheep and stray walkers, who wonder how one leg of an intricately carved iron bedstead came to be in one of the remotest places in the country.
Edward had the missing leg replaced by the ironmonger in Anwoth.
All these stories were grand, but they never really answered any of Tom’s questions.
The snow took forever to melt, and when it had finally gone the tumbling, chattering Skyeburn was full almost to bursting with the water it carried from the hills down to Fleet Bay, and in those March mornings the light came earlier, pearly and speckled with silver.
Yet there was a frost most nights, and Tom had given up hoping for spring until one white-cold morning before his ninth birthday, when he saw a hare outside, squatting on the road, giant, gimlet-eyed, calm, and knew winter must, thankfully, be over.
The hare stared at him without expression, utterly still, as though it had come with a message, then shivered and loped away, and Tom, not knowing why he did so, saluted it.
His actual birthday was a week later. During preparation of a slightly meagre birthday lunch of baked beans and potato cakes, when, in response to a question about how his mother died, his father had embarked on yet another yarn about something funny that had happened in the officers’ mess, Tom found himself standing up, walking the seven steps to the front door and flinging it open.
‘Sorry, Dad,’ he said, his legs shaking as he stood on the threshold, letting in the cool fresh sweet air.
He looked down the gravel path, out towards the hills and the sea.
‘Spring is here. It’s almost like I heard it knocking at the window.
’ He knew it sounded fanciful. But his father always understood.
‘Finally boring you, am I, old boy?’ his father said, standing up stiffly with a smile. He flipped the potato cakes over on the griddle and eyed the kettle. ‘We’ll have lunch soon. Lay the table, would you, Tom my boy? I say! We can play a game later – what do you think?’
Tom was still staring out of the door but he turned back. ‘I’d rather go out after, Dad, if that’s all right. Muck about a bit.’
‘’Course. Set the table first, old thing.’
In the corner was the table, under the window for light, an old oak settle just big enough for two.
Against the back wall was the armchair, where Tom’s father sat in the evenings and whittled – pegs and chess pieces and wooden dowels and chequers and all sorts; some things to sell, some to keep.
The range was at the back, along with the door and the sink; and then came the second room (third if you counted the lavatory in the outhouse with the wood store), a tiny bedroom.
Tom wished his father would sleep on the cot, so he was nearer the warmth of the range, but his father refused.
When Edward Raven went into the bedroom to fetch the water jug, Tom opened the door again, very quietly, and darted outside. There was still plenty of snow on Cairnharrow. He plucked four or five tiny late daffodils from a clump near the door, and glanced up.
Something, someone, a black dot, was on the horizon to the south, on the Corse of Slakes. He stood for a second watching it.
It was moving very slowly. It was a person.
Hurriedly, Tom went back inside and shut the door, dropping the lemon-curd-yellow flowers into a tiny cut-glass vase that glinted in the spring sun.
His father emerged not with the jug but with a bottle of sloe gin and two tiny crystal glasses.
He poured a thimbleful of deep ruby-purple liquid into each and raised the first, clinking his glass to his son’s.
‘Happy birthday, Tom darling,’ said his father. ‘Well! Nine years old. Nine. We got there.’ He raised his glass, looking up, and downed the liquid with a gulp; Tom followed suit, feeling extremely grown up.
They did not celebrate birthdays much, partly because they did not have the means to do so, but also partly because Tom’s birth must have happened with the help of Tom’s mother, and she was never mentioned.
As Tom was blinking hard, the sloe gin having burned his throat, Edward put a small package down on the table. ‘Here you go,’ he said.
Something clattered on the glass: a small twig, caught for a moment in the window frame, then pulled away, as if on a string. Tom stared down at the parcel, wrapped in newspaper, feeling his ears, his mouth, start to tingle.
It was a car. He knew from its curved top and edges it must be a Matchbox car, red and sleek and so beautifully designed, and he would race it around under the range and the cot and the length of the cottage.
It might even be a Jumbo Crane. Murdo and Ian at the Anwoth school would stare in silent awe, then clap him on the back and beg to be his friends.
He would no longer be a silent weakling in the same knitted cast-offs from Mrs Fairly, the farmer’s wife down near Cardoness, day in, day out.
He would be: Tom Raven – Matchbox No. 11 Jumbo Crane owner.
Gingerly, Tom pinched the soft wrapping, feeling something poking up through the layers. He did not think it was the metal beam of the crane with the hook at the end. Oh well. Perhaps he hadn’t got the crane this time.
‘Hurry up, then,’ said his father, blinking rapidly. ‘Open it, old boy!’
Tom pulled at the string and yanked open the parcel, feeling for the cool metal. But it was not cool metal; it was wood. A small square piece of wood.
‘What’s this?’ said Tom.
It was a carved wooden house. With windows, and a door, and the detailing – from the shape of the tiles to the curved chimney pots to the open casements to the cat sitting in one of the windowsills – was exquisite. It was the size of his palm.