Land Fit for Heroes

Sullatober Dalton

Description

This is a story of love; Peggy Kirkwood's enduring love for her fiance, killed as a pilot in the Great War; love for the people of her home community, especially the children she teaches. She is determined to honour the promise of 'A Land Fit for Heroes' the country made to the men who went off to war. Instead she has to fight prejudice against women having a career and the educatiioon of the children who would form the next generation of 'cannon fodder'. The story, with its dark moments and lighter patches, follows her struggles from the end of the Great War, through the mining strikes of 1925 and 1926,to the easing of things for the miner's families on their return to work.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 08 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783338788
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
A LAND FIT FOR HEROES
by
Sullatober Dalton



Publisher Information
Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Sullatober Dalton to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 Sullatober Dalton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
This book is dedicated to all the women who teach, especially those who taught me. I just hope they have forgiven me.
And my wife without whose patience and support there would be no books.



Chapter 1
It wasn’t the place I’d have chosen to talk about Miss Kirkwood, our old teacher. In fact she’d have been appalled at the idea of anyone discussing her in a pub full of the smell of cigarette stubs and stale beer - even one refurbished to allow 1978 ‘ladies’ to drink in it. However, it was where Tar McAdam came to rest. Other than here, the old road mender was walking the hills and glens around Cairndhu with his old collie dog, Blackie.
‘Peggy Kirkwood,’ he said as he sat down in the corner of the bar smiling as he remembered days before the Great War. He might not have been able to see much through the opaque whiteness of cataract that partially covered both eyes but the memory was bright and clear and he gripped my arm in emphasis as he started to speak. ‘Peggy Kirkwood was more than just a bonny lassie. When she tossed that thick dark hair of hers and flashed those big blue-grey eyes with their long lashes,’ he began... (Like every boy in her class, I’d have called those eyes steel grey or ice blue.)... I’m telling you, even the cheekiest laddie, some that would be ship’s captains and even commandos, would do whatever she wanted.’
I’d been asked to do her eulogy because I’d known her better than anyone else, they said - been teacher’s pet, they meant - and had had a chance to read her diary. But what can you learn of someone like Peggy Kirkwood from a diary in a few days?
In the years afterwards, as I read that diary in a late sunset with the sky slashed with grey and yellow and crimson, or when I saw a rainbow, or heard a child laugh, I wondered how I had missed the real Peggy. How none of us had guessed the story she’d kept hidden from us behind that pale severe face, I don’t know.
My mother sometimes joked that Peggy had been my father’s sweetheart and might have been my mother. My father only shook his head and grinned, but I’d always wondered why he didn’t laugh as he usually did when my mother teased him.
What was missing from the diary was the years before... but let me go back to Tar or I’ll get lost.
***
‘I ken what you’re thinking,’ Tar went on. ‘I ken the song you used to sing about her - There is a happy land, up at Cairndhu School,’ he mumbled. ‘Where Peggy Kirkwood stands, roarin’ like a bull. Long legs and skinny jaws, she can fairly use the tawse, (the tawse was a two foot long leather belt that Scottish teachers used to ‘warm’ the hands of children who were late, couldn’t remember what seven times eight was, talked in class, were cheeky, or when the teacher just needed to get anger or frustration out of their system). Aye, I ken it fine, but then you never saw her when Peggy was a lassie.’
Tar’s expression changed, his eyes grew moist and I wondered if he was going to shed tears but he pulled himself together.
***
Miss Kirkwood had taught us sums at school. If she had been short as well as thin, I would have said she was waspish, but she was tall and slim, even aristocratic. You saluted and said good morning in your best King’s English when she passed. One of the school gateposts was bent but, Tam Watson maintained, it stood up straight when she went through.
Her discipline was strict yet it was only as a last resort that she lifted the lid of the big desk that sat at the front of the class and brought out the tawse. This would bring indrawn breaths from the girls, even though they were safe. Her strap was used with stinging effect on the outstretched hands of any of the boy who didn’t heed her frigid look, or whose efforts were judged inferior. At sums, Tam Watson got the strap for four out of ten and I could have written a family saga about Tam’s struggles with the eight times table. Because I was expected to do better, I got strapped when I only got nine out of ten.
***
‘Aye, Peggy Kirkwood,’ went on Tar. ‘You’ll be thinking of her as a real tartar, but when she was a lassie, she was full of mischief.
‘If there was any knockin’ on doors and runnin’ away, she would be in it. She played at rounders with the boys and could clout the ball as far as any of them.
‘As she got a bit older, she changed into a right bonnie lassie, she cut her pigtails and her hair would bounce as she walked. Her eyes were always grey afterwards but, in those days, they could sparkle full of life. He father was an accountant at the big mine and she wasn’t exposed to the poverty and hardship the ordinary miner’s family had to endure but even the worst off felt better for a smile from Peggy and it was only a matter of time before she had a lad. She played tennis at the doctor’s and there was always one or two laddies hanging round. Plenty tried to get her to walk out with them, especially that Francis Flint, the mine owner’s son, but she managed to steer clear and still keep half the village lads on a string for a while.
‘A new bank manager came. He had a two sons, Stuart was the eldest, with red hair and freckles, a wee bit taller than Peggy and a year or so older than her. Galahad, the younger laddie, worshipped the ground Peggy walked on and followed her round like a puppy dog.
‘Well, as they say in the women’s magazines, Pegs and Stuart seemed made for each other, and it wasn’t long before they were going about together whenever they could and provided they could dodge Galahad.
‘She was a clever lassie and the school master talked her dad into lettin’ her go to college to be a teacher. The head master had a hard time in that furrow, I can tell you, but, in the end, she got a bursary and her dad could do nothing but agree and get a housekeeper.
‘Stuart, by this time, had got himself job as an apprentice to an accountant and was doin’ well.
‘Well, Pegs was about eighteen at the time and with her going to college, her dad wasn’t too keen on her getting close to a lad, not even one with a promising job, and always insisted Pegs was home at nine, even on the light summer nights.
‘The village expected they’d get married, but Pegs said she had been given the chance of an education and it was a responsibility, even if she had to wait to get married.
‘Then came the war in 1914 and that changed a lot of things. Lads volunteered for King and Country and left their mothers and wives and lassies in tears, but terrible proud o’ them just the same.
‘Stuart had to be one of the first, of course. He got a commission, and man, but he looked smart in his uniform with his Sam Brown belt across his chest and his boots shining. You could see Pegs was proud to be walking around with him, but she refused point blank to get wed.
‘Pegs was in Glasgow studying when Stuart went off to France. There were ugly rumours about that, because, after the lads were away, one or two lassies went off for a while and came back with a ring and a bairn but no signs of a husband. What Pegs came back with was credits for her studies.
‘Stuart kept writing as often as he could. If I mind right, he talked about making the world a better place for bairns to grow up in. He talked about how the war was destroying good farms, and about the refugees. He wrote about how the war was dragging on and how it needed to be finished off to save the young lads. Half his unit was killed in one operation. He was lucky and managed to survive.
‘When Pegs read all this and saw some of the chaps coming back from the front she was terrible keen to join the Ambulance Corps but her dad and the minister managed to talk her into finishing her studies for a teacher.
‘Pegs asked what good was it to go studying Mathematics when there were men dying in the Somme but they managed to get her to understand that, when the war was finished, the country would need teachers to build the next generation.
‘Maybe you think it’s odd that a freckle faced laddie and laughin’ lassie would be concerned about dying men and refugees but the lads in the trenches were seeing men blown to bits and the lassies saw folk at home getting nothing but a telegramme from the War Office to let them ken.
‘Well, in late 1916, Stuart came back on leave, wounded. Nothing too serious, but he was thin and had a kind of glazed look for a while. After he’d got some decent meals and time with Pegs, he started to revive and by the time he went back, he was playing tennis again and you could hear Pegs and him laughin’ as you went past the Doctor’s.’
Tar paused and took his first sip of his beer.
‘I don’t suppose it was more than two months before he was on leave again. He said he’d got tired of sitting in the mud in the trenches and hearing the aeroplanes up in the sky. He said he’d joined the Royal Flying Corps and was training to be a pi