Chapter 18
Across town, Rhona was also waging an internal war with herself.
Why had she taken the toboggan? Why had it come to be at the ski centre in the first place? What was she going to do with it now it was taking up most of her bedside rug?
Silly, rash Rhona! Wasn’t this so like her, not thinking things through. That’s what her father would probably have said, and it’s definitely what her sister would say now, if she found out.
It had been easy enough to sneak it into the house earlier, given that Senga was in her favourite spot with her slippers up in front of the telly, with reruns of the Vicar of Dibley Christmas specials blaring and, at her side, her teapot and dish of sliced stollen from the post office shop (even the best of bakers enjoys a shop-bought sweetie every now and again).
‘That’s me home,’ Rhona had called out as always, and Senga had replied with her usual, ‘Right you are’, and she’d hurried the toboggan sideways into her bedroom directly opposite the living room and the back of Senga’s head, breathing a sharp sigh of relief when she could lean on the other side of her closed door.
During a hurried bath earlier, she’d worried what to do, and now that she was in her night clothes and slippers she still had no answers, only memories, more vivid than before, of that blessed Christmas drifted with snow and adventure and, in the end, heartache.
She’d told Senga she had a sore head and was going to bed early, wishing not for the first time she had a bolt on her bedroom door.
She’d risked reaching for the big manila envelope she kept under her bed with the treasures she’d squirrelled away in those sorrowful weeks after their dad died, when the sisters had sorted through his belongings and found some boxes, untouched by anyone since he himself brought them home from his old sawmill offices.
Alone in her room, she unpeeled the envelope carefully and drew out the pictures. All the time she could hear, across the hall, Senga’s cake-muffled chuckling in front of the TV.
‘Cairn Dhu Sawmill Shinty Team, 1978,’ the largest of the photographs read, beneath an image of rows of boots and shiny knees, crossed forearms and proud smiles.
The picture had been taken before all ‘the trouble’, as her dad described the strikes on the very few occasions had cause to mention them at home.
Most of the men had grown-out hairstyles, some down to their shoulders, many with moustaches, some droopy, some smart and short.
They all looked young and strong and stocky in the way few men were in those days.
You had to be strong and well fed to work at the sawmill.
It was heavy work and required carthorse strength.
Her eyes settled on the figure in the front row, seated next to her father.
The back rows stood, but Eric had been one of three foremen, all responsible for different parts of the operation.
Her father had needed lads who were good at rallying the men, keeping them in check, representing his interests, but without the boss obviously breathing down their necks.
Her dad preferred to stay in his little glass office up above the sawmill floor where he had his phone and his files and he commanded his timber-felling and sawing empire, feeding the boom in hire purchase furniture-buying.
Half the G Plan furniture of Scotland was made from wood that passed through his operation, and for a long time they grew rich off the fad for sleek Scandi décor and wood-panelled rooms. Her dad didn’t know much about the design side of timber production; he only acquired it, felled, seasoned, sliced and sold it.
They’d moved to a new house her father built on the outskirts of Cairn Dhu, calling it their ‘dream home’. It was the only home Rhona remembered living in. She’d known her and her sister were ‘very fortunate girls’; everyone told them so.
The first time she’d learned of industrial action was watching the news and seeing the miners coming out on strike all over the country.
Her mum and dad had exchanged glances watching the reports of the police with their shields up protecting the buses of men being brought from other parts of the country into picketed coalfields, but her parents never said anything.
There were no mines in the Cairngorms, but there was something buzzing amongst the region’s workers, she knew.
The first time ever she saw Eric had been at the works dance, six months before the trouble started, and she’d sat the whole thing out, watching from the sidelines with her sister, sipping Cokes and not knowing if they were even allowed to dance.
All the other men seemed so old and brutish, but now she had the photo of the men in her hands she knew it was her who had been young and sheltered.
They were just lads doing their best, trying to save up and make homes for themselves and their families.
An angry little streak made tears prickle behind her eyes as she ran her thumb over Eric’s image. She didn’t like to think badly of her father. Not when he’d given them all this.
Senga laughed again from the living room of the house where the girls had grown up so comfortably.
They’d had the best of everything and all the opportunities afforded young lassies growing up at that time.
They’d not even had to find work, the pair of them.
Though Rhona often regretted that fact. She’d grown older, and good for nothing, while Senga had established her beloved repair shop café, at long last finding something of her own to love and to cherish.
That’s why her sister protected her little fiefdom so fiercely; she had made a place of her own behind the counter, and Rhona had simply been carried along with her, like always.
That summer, around the time the shinty team posed for the picture, when the sawmill team were regional champions and her dad was raking in record profits, Eric had helped organise the first letter of appeal, asking the boss for better pay for the men, pay that reflected the company’s position.
That letter was also in the manila envelope, along with her dad’s reply, saying that no pay deal was coming; the men were already richly recompensed with the same rate as all the other sawmill workers in Scotland, and if they didn’t like it, they knew what they could do about it.
There had been a second letter from Eric, this time with a set of demands and a threat of action.
Rhona didn’t know if there’d been a reply to that one, but she did remember the day her dad had stormed home in a foul mood and slammed the front door so hard all her mother’s delicate china in the display cabinets rattled.
From overheard snatches of conversation at home, and then in the papers the following week, she’d learned of the strike and every one of the lads coming out against the sawmill board.
The newspaper clipping, also in the envelope, carried a grainy shot of the placards outside the chained gates.
None of the men pictured was Eric but the report had named him and the other foremen as ringleaders in the strike.
All three of them had been laid off by August, and the gates were back open again, logging trucks streaming in and out all day long.
Eric hadn’t left town immediately but hung around the site, ‘stirring up agitation’ her dad had called it, until there’d been a fight one night.
No one knew who the men were, allegedly, but Eric had been left with a bloodied nose and the message to stay away from the yard.
The gossips had a field day with the news, and for a while Rhona was left with the impression that everything had gone back to normal.
Her father had increased the ordinary men’s wages without any ceremony on that same day as the brawl, and everyone seemed placated.
Only Rhona, it seemed, remained concerned for Eric.
When she’d dared to ask about the whereabouts of the jobless foremen, one Sunday dinner, she’d been shooshed by her mother and ignored by her father.
She’d looked out for him for weeks on the street, willing him to appear before her down the shops or in the hotel’s saloon bar room where the women were allowed on weekday nights, but there’d been no sign of him, until one day in early December.
Suddenly there he was, leaning on the lamppost down the side of the school house.
‘Psst!’ he’d called as she passed, and when she approached him, he’d said with those wolf teeth showing, ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
That’s when she’d forgotten everything she’d ever been told about the man’s sheep’s clothing.
He still hadn’t found work, he’d said. He was looking all over the region but his reputation went everywhere before him, spoiling his chances. He’d said he’d probably end up taking something down south and he’d joked about a cheap passage to Australia. ‘That’d be awfy south!’
She’d told him she was sorry about the whole thing and he’d said not to be daft, she’d had nothing to do with any of it.
They’d chatted out of sight of the town and arranged to do the same thing the very next week. It had been innocent and friendly enough, though she’d never dare mention it at home, or to anyone, just in case.
Then one day, after a few similar stolen conversations, he’d asked her if she fancied walking out with him for real.
‘Will it cause problems at home?’ he’d asked, looking for all the world like a man in a terrible bind and ready to walk away from this if it was going to bring trouble to her door again, and she’d lied and promised him it wouldn’t, that her dad couldn’t very well say anything about him now that the strikes were all over with.
From then on, she’d kept him a secret until it wasn’t possible any more and she’d tripped home at midday through heavy snow after spending the first and only night of her life away from home and in a man’s arms.
The row her revelation caused that day, she had blocked out.
And the sight of her father swinging for his ex-employee on the doorstep, because Eric had refused to let her face the music alone, stayed locked away even now, she couldn’t bear to examine it, but she did remember being dragged into the house and the door slamming upon Eric and, after a burst of anger and her dad’s disbelief that she’d ever ‘betray the family, and with him of all folk’, there’d been no more said about it.
Even Senga, who always had a lot to say, didn’t attempt to comfort her in her grief for fear of upsetting life in their dream home.
Rhona glanced at the toboggan now, so weakened and splintered with age, its red paint peeling.
Without another thought, she got to her feet and carried it right out the door and down the corridor, past her distracted, contented sister, and into the coal bunker at the end of the garden where the house lights barely reached.
She tiptoed even though she was in her soft slippers.
‘There,’ she said as she shut her secret away in the darkness. ‘I’ll return you before the sun comes up, and no one will ever know I stole you.’
She hid the envelope once more under her bed and put herself under her covers with no thought for supper, punishing herself like a bad child, and she lay under her covers in the dark, a storm churning inside of her, little knowing that Senga had pricked up her ears and turned her head at the sound of padding footsteps and the turning of the back door key.