It is hard to look at that girl as she was then, knowing what was to come. When I remember those times, those uncertain months before the war began, I always think of something Emily Dickinson wrote:

That love is all there is

Is all we know of love.

6

I sit one night with my hands around the tea-cosy Clementina Ratter has knitted for me. She is the best knitter I know, better even than Ma, and has learned some of the Shetland patterns that I could never have tried, not even before my finger was taken. The teapot is warm on my hands but canna bring comfort, no. Nothing can thaw the chill in my blood this night.

I listen for tyres braking on limestone, the scuffing of boots. Thud, thud, in my ears. Dull, like guns a long way distant. My own blood, is all. The drumming unease of waiting.

The gate scrapes. Magnus Tulloch half falls through the door. Rumpled up.

He fends me off with a blur of hands and lurches into the bedroom.

I follow. He is tearing at buttons, kicking off his boots, while I stand back, watching.

Finally I must ask. Did you do it? Magnus? Did you? Did they take you?

He falls onto the bed, still dressed, a hand across his face shutting me out. Silence.

~

They would not take him. The same war that was snatching men from all walks and dispatching them to faraway places did not want Magnus Tulloch. They turned him away, much to the satisfaction of Castlemaine Brewery, which had lost too many of its workers already. It was a terrible thing to think, and never could I say it out loud, to anyone, but I was glad of the ringing in Magnus Tulloch’s ears, the dizzy spells he took on sometimes—leftovers from an accident in a barrel factory the year we met.

My duty, it be every man’s duty, he had tried to explain to me. And when I refused to commiserate, something happened that never I thought would. His voice hardened. Aye, hardened against me. Ye understand, Meggie Tulloch, he said, ye canna tell me ye don’t. I canna stand by an’ do nothing—an’ ye know that, girl, ye know what it’s like when ye have ta run at somethin’ whether ye like it or not.

I would not meet his eyes, and I would not discuss it, so it was one more little crack that came between us. Something that I tried to knit over with tight stitches of purl but never, never could.

7

Hal and Jessie were too young to see in the New Year, too young to understand the passage of one year into the next, but Clementina was stubborn.

Northern bairns they are, Buchan an’ Shetland both, an’ what were good for us is good for them as well. An’ they need to know … Hogmanay is … They especially need to know now …