I remember that day, a week before Kitta’s fourteenth birthday, like it’s happening now. There she is, standing outside number 8 Tiller Street with her long braid looped up and tucked beneath Grunnie Neish’s second-best hat. A flush is on her face, that sweet, lively face, and nervousness in the way she scuffs at the ground with the toes of her thick boots. A brand-new kist is by her feet, light as air to carry: Kitta hasn’t much but underclothes and her needles and balls of wool. Rowescroft House supplies uniforms for kitchen quines, and she’ll be given thread and needle and expected to make one of them fit her.

She has a little yellow daisy in her hat that someone has left on the lid of her kist. Brukie’s Sandy, I think, and I wish I’d thought to do the same, I wish I’d picked her a whole bunch of yellow daisies to carry as she leaves.

I’ll knit ye a scarlet gansey to wear at Hogmanay, quinie, she says lightly, flicking at my fringe with her long fingers. Just the thing for a ginger head.

I count up how many weeks and days to Hogmanay, when Kitta will come home.

Oh, now, don’t blub, Ginger Meggie, ye mustn’t blub, she says.

I look at her face, suddenly shiny, suddenly wet. Don’t ye blub yourself!

She turns away as I hug the scratchy woollen jacket that my sister will wear on Sundays to a church that is only a few miles the other side of the Gadle but might as well be on the moon, or even in Aberdeen.

~

With Da and the boys gone, and now Kitta too, it seemed to be change, change, everything changing. But in truth, life coasted on for some time, in the way it had always done.

Da’s goodbye to me was a short sermon on obedience and godliness. I’d heard him remark to Ma that I would be more useful now at home than at school and anyone in the parish with eyes could see that. She raised her brows but said nothing. From then on, I would push my palms together every night and pray to be given the two more years of school that the law allowed me.