Michael Bloor

The Visionary Librarian by Michael Bloor

(first published in The Copperfield Review, February 6th 2018)

January 1st, 1781. I do not fully know my reasons for setting down this record of past events. I have studied the works my great contemporary, David Hume, and I therefore no longer cleave to the kirk and to the faith of my fathers. Yet the purging of what others call my soul, penitence, and the striving for a moral life, they all remain a habit with me. Furthermore, I have a strong presentiment that I shall not live out this winter. These days of bitter chill may be my last opportunity to reveal my hidden crime and to state my case, not to the Maker in whom I no longer believe, but perhaps to my better self – the self who always seeks but never finds, who can carefully shape a principle but cannot always live by it. If others should find this manuscript after I am dust, may they read it and know that even a puir body can try to do his duty.

I have taught the school in the parish of Inverallan for thirty seven years and I trust I have discharged that duty honourably, though no Inverallan weaver’s or ploughman’s bairn has joined the ranks of David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and William Fergusson – the Philosopher-Kings of Edinburgh and all Europe. However, the Inverallan dominie has a further duty yet – a duty greater, I believe, than that of schooling the Inverallan bairns – I refer to my duty as Keeper of the Books. A hundred years since, the Inverallan laird bequeathed his library of two hundred volumes (together with a respectable sum for their upkeep) as a free library to all men and women who wished to borrow them. When the old minister, Mr MacKellar, informed me of my appointment and showed me the library that was to be in my charge, I could conceive of no duty under the sun that could be more pleasurable. I was not to ken then the rue that would come to me.

In the early years of my charge, Inverallan and the surrounding parishes were in a sorry state. The laird had declared for Prince Charles Stuart, and when the laird is for a cause then the tenants have little choice but to follow. Two score of men had marched off with the laird, my elder brother Alexander among them. Only three lads limped home. At first, we had good news of Alexander. It seemed that he had distinguished himself in the field at Preston Pans and, when the laird fell ill and was left behind in Edinburgh, Alexander took charge of the laird’s men on the march into England. On the retreat from Derby, Alexander was detailed to be part of the garrison the Prince left in Carlisle. After that we heard nothing. Cumberland’s army marched through our parish on their way to Culloden: they fired the laird’s castle and drove off all our cattle and our remaining horses.

It was in February 1752, a time of want and bitter cold, that I had more news. In the late evening there was a tapping at my window, but the pane was so frosted over that I could not see out. I took up my lantern and opened the door. A tall figure, muffled in a cloak stood before me. There was a bright moon, but his face was shadowed by his hat.

‘They tell me our parents are both dead.’ It was Alexander. I dropped the lantern; we embraced.

I fed him some porridge and spirits and studied him as he ate and drank. To my surprise, he seemed hardly changed, for all his seven-year absence. Only his rich, travel-stained clothes spoke of a difference. He told me bits and pieces of his story: it seemed that in the ’45 several men had died at his hands; more recently, he been in France in the service of the Stuarts, but Scots were no longer welcome there; he had used the last of his money to pay the ‘freetraders’ (as the smugglers are commonly called) to land him near Kirkcaldy; he had travelled to Inverallan only by night, there being a price on his head. But rather than talk over-much about himself, he had the charming ability to draw out the talk of others:

‘Well, Jamie lad, you’re quite the scholar now. I see on the table that “Lock’s Works” is your present study eh?’

‘Philosophy is only one of the subjects to be found in The Free Library, Sandy. There are books on geography, history, theology, and mathematics, translations of Ovid and Virgil, maps, collections of sermons…’

‘Yon is a strange conceit, is it not? to make a pile of your books, some of them doubtless worth a year of our faither’s labour. And then offer them up to any passin’ ploughboy that has a fancy for them?’

‘Each ploughboy, as you put it, must sign for each volume that he borrows. But Sandy, I don’t think you’ve grasped the wonder of the thing. They come here from their fermtouns and weavers’ cottages, limbs stiff after a hard day’s labour, walking miles through the sleet and the glaur. They carry back with them Shakespeare’s Sonnets to read by the ill light of their cruisie lamps. And that is their taste of Rhenish wine and honey cakes, their bed of goose down, their transport to Samarkand. With a book in his chapped hand, every ploughboy is an equal of the Duke of Argyll and the Marquis of Breadalbane. This free library is a growing light in a dark world, Sandy.’

‘Pish, Jamie. Your ploughboy is a duke’s equal (mention not that damned Argyll to me) in the alehouse, wi’ a tankard in his hand and a maid on his knee. What need of books, when you’ve left the schoolroom?’

In my eagerness to convince Alexander, I fetched the Borrower’s Register to show him. As he turned the pages, he murmured: ‘Well, well, Andra Comrie borrows Abercrombie’s Sermons. I thought him dead on the field at Falkirk.’ He turned to me: ‘Jamie, I have need to borrow a pile of your books… Indefinitely.’ I stared. ‘There’s a bounty on my head. I know of a vessel at the Broomielaw in Glasgow that will carry me to a new life in the Carolinas. For a price. Your books are as good as ready currency.’

My elder brother faded before my eyes and a simulacrum took his place. The brawling spirited lad I had idolised and run after was vanished like snow off a dyke. Now before me was the callous gallant who had left his parents to fret and go to their graves thinking him dead on a battlefield, who had fawned and intrigued for place and favour in foreign courts, and who had only returned briefly to his native Scotland to profit from, and ruin, his brother’s position of trust. Worst yet, he would pillage the free library – the library that is, and should remain, a hope and consolation in a wretched world.

Every schoolroom is a stage for the dominie to strut and strike a pose. It was now my turn to dissemble and fall in with Alexander’s plans. We made up his bed, despite his faint protestations (‘I’m an old campaigner, Jamie – the heather has oft times been bed enough for me’) and fixed that he would stay hidden with me the next day, departing in the dusk with his booty of sixteen books (more than he needed for his fare, I’ll warrant).

That next day, I watched him take the less-frequented moorland road. I marvelled at how he hardly bent his back, shouldering the coarse linen sack of books. When he was past the castle ruins, I grabbed my hat and walked over to the manse, to beg the loan of the minister’s mare (I was still a communicant in those days and a member of the kirk session). I then took the military road to Stirling. I had slow progress over the half-frozen snow and dawn was breaking when I reached Stirling Brig. Mares’ tails of mist were twisting over the River Forth, which Alexander had to cross to gain the Glasgow road. I had the Brig sentry call up the Sheriff’s Officer, an old pupil of mine, to whom (in confidence) I told my tale.

After resting the horse, I turned for home and only heard the end of the story a week later. Samuel Haldane, the Sheriff’s Officer, came by to return the linen bag of books. I sat him down at the fireside and poured him a glass. He told me that Alexander, as he’d surmised, had been too canny to try to cross the brig: Haldane had put a concealed watch on the upstream ford and his men had taken Alexander there by surprise. However, as the party were marching back to Stirling, Alexander had slashed at one man with a concealed dirk, broken away and ran for the river. Whether the pursuers’ musketry had been successful, or the cold of the river had overcome Alexander, Haldane was unable to say, but Alexander’s body was seen to be borne away by the current, down to the sea.

Haldane could see that his news had pierced me. He rose and laid a hand on my shoulder: ‘Mr Robertson, your brother Alexander was well-kent in all this countryside from Stirling to Crieff, even before The Rebellion. He was too wild a man for these New Times.’

Though Haldane’s words were some comfort to me, mine is nevertheless the sin of Cain. But I did not commit fratricide merely to repossess a bag of books. Rather, I would claim that I sinned for a great principle, the principle of free knowledge. I have served that principle (not always constantly, but as best I can) for thirty seven years. And, if I could still pray, I would pray that the light of Inverallan library would shine out across all Scotland and the whole wide world.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

Fermain Bay by Michael Bloor

(first published in The Flash Fiction Press, January 5th, 2017)

(Ed note–We are ecstatic to welcome Mick Bloor back for another week; come back through this Saturday and we believe that you will like him as much!–LA)

A routine visit to the town library with my daughter. My pedagogic overtures rejected, I drift over to a display of new books. A shock: the photo on the dust-jacket of a book about the Channel Islands. It’s Fermain Bay, Guernsey. For years, I carried in my wallet just such a photo, taken from among the headland pines on a day of luminous light, looking down into the narrow sandy bay. On the dust-jacket, I can just make out tiny, scattered deck-chairs, once my summer-long responsibility.

The things you forget. The great Martello Tower, built to dominate the beach and deter Napoleon – forgotten. A mere stone obstacle to be skirted on journeys between my deck-chair store and Ginny’s beach café. An historic monument rubbed out and Ginny’s brown eyes and deft movements given Conservation Area status. The things you remember: our first kiss, when I couldn’t stop my knees trembling; how the smell of the pines gradually gave way to the smell of the sea on morning walks to work; the taste of fresh Guernsey milk. And there’s the bad stuff too: the café break-in when all the fags were stolen and the owner blamed me; my night at the police station – a brief episode, but a lasting after-taste of how it is to be the bewildered outsider, the stranger deemed suddenly to be the enemy. That summer was my passage into adulthood, backlit by the ‘vision splendid’ of childhood, but treading step-by-step into Man’s Estate.

Thirty-odd years have passed since that library visit, just as twenty-odd years had stretched between my Guernsey days and my discovery of the dust-jacket. A strange exercise, to sit and recall the time when the memory of Fermain Bay engulfed me like an incoming tide – the memory of a memory.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

And Now For the Good News….by Michael Bloor

(We conclude this week’s run of tales by Michael Bloor on what happens to be his birthday. Anyone who has been reading knows why we hope to publish more of his work in the future. Happy Birthday Mick!)

Davie Millar paused in the middle of the Faery Bridge, leant on the rail and stared down at the Blackwater. Like a few other things in the town, the Faery Bridge was misnamed. When it was built, it was first called the Ferro-Concrete Bridge, but ferro-concrete had been an unfamiliar concept in the town a hundred years ago.

It was the autumn, and the total official number of UK Covid deaths (including Davie’s granny) had exceeded the Hiroshima bomb fatalities. But that wasn’t why Davie was so woeful: he was sorrowing because he was on his way to meet Big Andy McBride, the town loan shark. Big Andy was barred by the betting companies (Davie could guess why), so it was natural for Big Andy to ask Davie to put a bet on for him. Fifty quid at 25 to 1. Davie, of course, hadn’t been in a position to refuse. Big Andy’s piggy-pink eyes had narrowed slightly as he handed over the fifty quid. ‘Dinna mess wi’ me now, Davie. The last guy that did that wis left tryin’ to pick-up his broken teeth wi’ a broken arm.’

‘Nae worries, Mr McBride.’

It was Davie that was worried. Last night, he’d had just enough cash to take Melanie to the Bond film, but when she’d wanted a (ridiculously big) bag of popcorn, he’d had to break into Big Andy’s winnings. And once that terrifying Rubicon had been crossed, it had seemed a minor matter to blow quite a lot more of Big Andy’s winnings on a couple of rounds of drinks at the King of Prussia and a taxi home. Considering the risk that the events of last night were now posing to Davie’s life and limb, Melanie had proved disappointingly lukewarm. He had to face up to the likelihood that, compared to Seb, the lead guitarist in the regular band at the Abercrombie Hotel, Davie was running a poor second in Melanie’s affections..

Watching a couple of ducks fossicking about in the Blackwater shallows, half a dozen lame excuses of the dog-ate-my-homework variety ran through Davie’s head. He sighed, turned away from the rail and headed across the bridge towards the old mill. His granny had worked at the mill til it closed, like some much else, in the 1980s. Now the building had been converted into bijou flats. The closure and conversion had happened before he was born and he suddenly realised that he had no idea what the mill had produced before it produced Edinburgh commuters. All he could recall being told was that it used to produce a lot of dust, which had eventually killed his grandad. The recollection didn’t improve his mood.

His pace slowed as he headed up the hill to the council houses. He was surprised to see an ambulance parked beside Big Andy’s BMW. He stopped fifty yards away and watched as two ambulance men manoeuvred a stretcher into the back of their vehicle. Davie turned to a nearby neighbour: ‘Is that Big Andy on the stretcher?’

‘Aye, Covid. Serve the bugger right: never wears a bloody mask in the Co-op.’

As the ambulance lights dwindled in the distance, Davie turned back towards the Blackwater. By the time he’d returned to the Faery Bridge, he’d realised that the remainder of Big Andy’s winnings would be more than enough to buy that elderly Alfa Romeo saloon on the forecourt at Macrae’s Car Sales (the unique noise from the Alfa Romeo engine block was one of the sweetest sounds on Earth). Apparently, when Seb The Guitarist needed a car, he had to borrow his mummy’s Ford Fiesta.

And he could maybe make a few quid delivering for the Chinese take-away. The two ducks were now battling gamely upstream.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Unsung Freedom Fighter by Michael Bloor

It was a shock when old Andy Baranov died. Sudden deaths are always a shock: it was a car crash – brake failure on the steep, winding descent of the Braeport, near his house in Dunblane. As well as a good neighbour, he was my favourite opponent at the chess club. Although over-the-board chatter is frowned upon, the club is a friendly place and we had become firm friends, continuing to play at each other’s houses during the summer months, when the chess club was closed. Naturally, I went to his funeral at the crematorium.

Gordon, the chess club president, was also at the crematorium; we sat together. Gordon was surprised that the service wasn’t at the Orthodox Church. I explained that, although Andy was the grandson of Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, the family weren’t members of the Orthodox Church. They had fled the revolution because they were social democrats, opponents of both the bolsheviks and the church-and-state czarist regime…

Gordon muttered, ‘OK, gimme the history lesson later.’

The service was pretty grim. Afterwards, Gordon and I felt obliged to accept the family’s invitation to the Drummond Arms for afternoon tea. I have a weak bladder (age-related) and was fiddling with my half-empty tea cup, wondering when I could decently leave, when Andy’s daughter, Sophie, came up to have a word. Gordon and I were giving her our condolences, but she cut us short. Addressing me, she said, ‘It’s Frank, isn’t it? I was hoping to catch you here, I have to travel back to London tonight. Dad wanted you to have this…’

She fished a book out of her capacious shoulder bag, handed it over, and moved on. The book was Harry Golombek’s account of the World Chess Championship, between V. Smyslov and M. M. Botvinnik held in Moscow in 1957*. Gordon and I stared at the book, rather underwhelmed. A hardback, with its original, but torn, paper cover. I turned a page or two: Andy hadn’t written anything on the inside of the front cover. The book recorded all those 1957 world championship games in the old descriptive notation. A simpler algebraic notation had been universally adopted in 1981: for example, a pawn move to the fourth square on the king file changed from ‘P-K4’ to the simpler ‘e4.’ Only a few old-timers like me were still familiar with the old notation. So the book had little intrinsic interest or value. Gordon shrugged and muttered, ‘Well, at least it’s a memento of Andy.’ I nodded, slipped the book in my jacket pocket and asked Gordon if he thought we might leave.

When I got home, I changed out of my suit because I was planning to go down to the allotments and and sow some peas. As I was hanging up my suit in the wardrobe, the jacket slipped off the hanger and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, Andy’s book (already forgotten) fell out of the pocket and landed, spread open, on the bedroom floor. I picked it up and noticed what I perhaps should have noticed before, namely that a folded piece of paper had been sellotaped to the inside of the spilled paper cover. I separated the folded paper from the cover and spread it out. It read as follows:

Dear Frank,

I write this in haste. If you receive this book from my daughter, it will be because I have died suddenly, possibly violently.

I know you are a supporter of Russian freedom (even though you are a misguided follower of Kropotkin, rather than Kerensky). I have left a memory stick, hidden in an old spectacle case, at the back of the chess club cupboard at the kirk hall. Please take the memory stick and catch the 10.10 to Glasgow from Dunblane on May 1st. Board the second carriage at the door nearest the engine and take the second seat on the left. Push the memory stick into the seat upholstery. Leave the train at Stirling. A friend will recover the stick and pass it on to those who can make most use of it. Please do this in the cause of Russian freedom and as a token of our long friendship.

With every good wish,

Andrei Baranov

Shit!

I was shivering, and not just because I was in my socks and underpants. ‘… a supporter of Russian freedom… a misguided follower of Kropotkin’?? As an undergraduate botany student sixty years ago, I’d read Kropotkin’s book, ‘Mutual Aid,’ a Pelican paperback, a scholarly corrective to the popular view of Darwinist evolutionary theory: Kroptokin had pointed out that evolution was not just a competitive struggle of all against all, there were plenty of examples of the importance for survival of co-operation both within and between species. I’d enthused about the book to Andy one night in the pub, after the club had closed. And I’d then been surprised when Andy told me that Kropotkin had been an anarchist revolutionary who’d escaped from the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul in Czarist St Petersburg, and had written ‘Mutual Aid’ in exile in a London suburb.

I didn’t think that having read Kroptkin’s book made me an anarchist. Similarly, I wasn’t a fan of President Putin (who is?), but to describe me as a devotee of Russian freedom was quite a stretch.

Why me, Andy? Why the hell pick on me?? OK, Andy and I were the only key-holders to the chess club cupboard. But as a 75 year-old retired botany lecturer, I was hardly a match for the Russian security services.

I struggled to think clearly. I poured out and drank the last of the bottle of Highland Park, left over from my birthday. Then I realised I was still in my underpants and put some more clothes on. May 1st was tomorrow. Logically, the first thing to do was to find the memory stick. When I stepped out the front door, I couldn’t help looking cautiously up and down the street. As I walked off to the kirk hall, a builder’s van suddenly pulled away from no.22. I spun around like a whirling dervish, but it simply drove past me, down to the Perth road. Truth to tell, I then went back home to change clothes, as I’d wet myself.

Pulling on another pair of jeans, I wondered if I shouldn’t try and pass this whole thing over to Andy’s daughter, Sophie. But she would be already on the train back to London, I didn’t have any contact details for her, and I knew from chats with Andy that his only child didn’t share his interest in family history and politics. The obvious people to deal with this were the British security services (not that popular opinion viewed them as a match for the Russian security services), but I imagined I could only contact them via the local police. And I knew I’d have a better case once I’d found the memory stick. I set out again for the kirk hall.

I got there just after five o’clock. The door was locked. I pressed the bell – no response. I pressed the bell again, for several seconds. A large, elderly lady appeared and wanted to know my business. I explained I needed to retrieve something from the chess club cupboard. As I said it, I could see that I ought to have dreamed up a story which implied an urgent and important errand. Did I mean the cupboard in the large meeting room? Yes, I did. The Kirk Presbytery were currently meeting in there to discuss the accounts: I would need to come back later. This was said in a tone that brooked no dissent. I went round the corner for a pint in The King of Prussia.

Fortified by the pint, another whisky, and a plausible cover story, I returned to the kirk hall half an hour later. I rang the bell and I rang it again. Then I realised there were no lights on. Damn it, of course, they’d all gone home. Befuddled, I stood for a minute outside the kirk hall.

A helmeted and black-leathered motor-cyclist rode slowly down the street, stopped and parked the bike twenty yards away, and started fiddling with some straps. I panicked and walked quickly away. I thought about heading for the police station, despite lacking the memory stick. But home was nearer. And in my panicky, befuddled state, home seemed safer.

Jeez, what a pig’s breakfast I was making of everything. I set the alarm, though I was sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. But of course, as an exhausted 75 year-old, I slept like a baby til I woke up bursting for a pee, had a pee, and then slept like a baby again.

I was at the kirk hall at eight o’clock the next morning – I thought there might be a cleaner there. But the door wasn’t unlocked til just after nine, by the beadle. I explained I needed something from the chess club cupboard. He followed me to the meeting room, but seemed satisfied once I produced my key to the cupboard. There was a lot of stuff in there – chess sets, chess boards, chess clocks, score sheets, old minute books, old photos – but I found the spectacle case eventually. I put everything back, locked up, shouted my thanks to the beadle, and headed for the station.

Dunblane is a terminus for Glasgow commuter services. So the 10.10 train was empty when it drew up at the platform. I was the first person into the second carriage and bagged the second seat on the left. Four other people entered the carriage and I found myself scrutinising them as they entered and walked past me. I discounted a mother with a toddler, and an elderly lady with a walking stick, but I fancied that a powerfully built middle-aged man with a shaved head gave me an apprising look as he walked past. I was uncomfortable that he was sitting behind me, where I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t dare quit the designated seat.

As the train drew out of the station, I laid my raincoat beside me and, under the cover of the coat, pushed the memory stick into the gap in the upholstery. The ticket-collector arrived; he didn’t even look at me or my raincoat, just at my ticket. Then I got a shock: I’d completely forgotten the train stopped at Bridge of Allan before it got to Stirling. Several girl students came into the carriage and one of them came and sat opposite me. I felt sick, my mouth was dry and I couldn’t swallow.

She ignored me and sat swiping her phone.

The train pulled into Stirling station, where there were a score or more passengers waiting to board. I got up, picked up my raincoat, and noted that the memory stick was invisible, nestled in the gap in the upholstery. The shaved-headed guy also got off the train. I didn’t linger at the station for a return train to Dunblane, I headed straight for the taxi rank – an extravagance, but I would’ve given half my pension pot for a quick getaway. To my shame, halfway home, I had to ask the taxi driver to stop so that I could pee into a hedge.

A year’s gone by. I haven’t been on a bloody train since.

*H. Golombek, ‘World Chess Championship 1957,’ London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Second Letter by Michael Bloor

Charlie Robertson had spent his entire working life on the Kilblane estate. When he’d retired as head gamekeeper back in 2015, Sir Ewan had presented him with a silver watch and made a rambling but heart-felt speech about Andy’s knowledge of, and love for, the wild places. So it had been a shock after Sir Ewan died, when Charlie got a letter from the new estate factor, telling him that he’d have to quit his cottage. The estate was putting the cottage up for sale: someone from Edinburgh or London would likely buy it as a holiday home.

Charlie mentioned it to Willie Forbes, the postie, when Charlie asked Willie into the cottage to stand on a chair and change a light bulb for him. And then Willie mentioned it to the minister in the village. The minister was a nervous young man who’d previously served in the Castlemilk housing scheme in Glasgow: he explained to Willie that, once Charlie had actually been evicted, he’d then qualify for a council flat. The minister and Willie both knew what Charlie’s life would be like in a council flat in the town; Willie reckoned he’d be ‘like an auld lion in a circus.’ They agreed it was a bad business: Charlie would be much better off staying with a member of his family, but he’d never married and had no close relatives.

And that was how matters stood, on a warm spring day, when Charlie took a stroll up the glen, to see the primroses in full yellow bloom beside the burn as it tumbles and splatters over the boulders. Buoyed in spirit, on his return to the cottage he decided to open yet another official-looking letter that Willie had delivered two days previously. It was from a London solicitor and its contents took Charlie back fifty-odd years…

#

As the estate’s under-keeper back then, young Charlie had been despatched to look for the ponies that would be needed for the next day’s shoot. The head keeper had predicted (wrongly) that they would’ve taken shelter in Glen Ducheron (aka Gleann an Dubh Choirein, the Glen of the Black Corries). Charlie had wasted the whole afternoon walking the length of the glen without seeing so much as a hoof print. It was dusk as he returned to the mouth of the glen, and the track back to the shooting lodge. That was when he heard frantic shouting, but could see no-one. Then he spotted an arm waving above the dead bracken on the bankside of the Ducheron Burn. It was a woman, unable to stand: she had smashed her left knee when she’d slipped on a rock, trying to cross the burn. She was wet through and shivering.

Charlie took off his coat, wrapped it round her, and told her he’d hurry off to the lodge where there was a phone. She begged him not to leave her. Was it the hours of loneliness she’d already endured, the throbbing pain, or the sinister bellowing of the rutting stags that had drummed through the glen all afternoon? Maybe all three: at any rate, she was insistent and Charlie complied.

A few yards away downstream was a mature spruce plantation; Charlie quickly gathered two branches for a leg splint and a stouter branch for a crutch. In the early evening dark, huddled together for support, they set out on the two-mile walk to the lodge. The path, at first, was uphill, but at least it wasn’t uneven or stepped. Charlie’s auntie was the local midwife and so he knew about the soothing importance of distracting questions and chatter. He learned that her name was Millie and that she was a postgraduate archaeology student.

They paused for a breather. ‘And what were ye doin’, out on the estate in the middle o’ November?’

‘Well, there was once a Roman camp down at Callander…’

‘Ah, ye were lookin’ for the Roman ford?’

Surprised out of her pain and exhaustion, she looked up at him. ‘Yes, that’s right! How..?’

‘Well, yer no’ the first tae come lookin’. Robbie, the head gamekeeper, told me that a couple o’ Edinburgh professors were here afore the war, lookin’. The Romans made a cuttin’ in that steep bank beside the burn and lined the cuttin’ wi’ stanes. There’s a lot o’ history in these glens, if ye ken where tae look.’

The moon was now up and he saw her smile and give a vigorous triple nod. They set off again.

When they reached the lodge, the housekeeper phoned for an ambulance, put them in front of the kitchen range and fed them warm milk and oatcakes with loganberry jam. Away from the moonlight, Charlie could see that Millie’s eyes were brown.

A few days later, he received a letter from Millie (sent care of Mrs Laing, the housekeeper), with her repeated thanks and apologies, plus two pounds to pay for dry-cleaning Charlie’s coat. He kept her letter and wrote a letter in return, but got no further reply.

#

And, as Willie the postie told his audience in the public bar of The Drummond Arms Hotel, that was that.

[dramatic pause]

Until Charlie got the letter from the solicitor telling him that the Archaeology Professor had died and left Charlie her wee house in London, which the solicitor had valued at in excess of nine hundred thousand pounds.

So, that was why Charlie was buying his cottage off the estate. Willie had got a lot of quiet enjoyment out of telling the story to the new factor’s wife, when he’d delivered a parcel to the factor’s house that morning.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

The Forensic Psychiatrist’s Tale by Michael Bloor

Bob Duncan, like a lot of ex-policemen, is of a philosophical turn-of-mind. He reckons that the Inverallan Allotments are a bit like the army in the days of the old National Service, where all sorts of people had to learn to mix in together. Misunderstandings might occur across the class barriers, disputes might flare up from time to time, but we all learn to jog along together in the common struggle against Mother Nature and the bloody weather. He was enlarging on this to Willie Brown and myself as we all took shelter from a sudden, vicious shower in the old allotment summerhouse.

Willie laughed: ‘All sorts, Bob? Well, I havena’ seen that Beyoncé on a plot yet. Nor the Duke o’ Buccleuch… Unless he’s that new fella in the blue floppy hat that’s got old Ellen’s plot, over beside the railway.’

‘Talk of the Devil,’ I nodded towards a man in a blue floppy hat hurrying through the downpour to the summerhouse.

He shook himself and gasped out a greeting as he came in the door. I shifted an old seed catalogue off the bench to make way for him. He introduced himself as Andrew MacSorley – a large man with a florid complexion. To be sociable, I asked him how long he’d been on the waiting list before he’d got a plot.

‘Two and a half years. I’m pleased with the plot, though. Especially the fruit bushes.’ He spoke with the long drawn-out vowels of the Scottish boarding schools. ‘And I was lucky, because I got the plot in October, just a month before I retired.’ This struck a chord and we all then spent a few minutes in a collective hymn of praise to Retirement. Then Willie asked him what he’s done before he’d retired. He replied that he’d been a forensic psychiatrist.

There was a moment of stunned silence and then I, rather lamely, said: ‘Wow. Interesting job!’

He stretched out his legs from the bench: ‘Terrible job. Before you ask me why, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what was the final straw…

‘You’ll maybe know that an important part of a forensic psychiatrist’s job is that of assessing for the courts whether or not arrested persons are fit to plead. Well, this case I’m going to tell you about wasn’t all that untypical, but it was just one case too many as far as I was concerned.

‘He was a lad in his late teens. He’d gone into the toilets in the square in Crieff, the ones where you pay the attendant 30p. When he went into the Gents, the attendant noticed that he had a chisel sticking out of his back pocket. Well, there’d been a rash of graffiti and minor vandalism in the toilets, and the attendant got suspicious when this lad was a while in the cubicle and not coming out. There were a couple of cops on foot patrol in the square, so she called ‘em over to investigate.

‘Apparently, he took a bit of coaxing to get out of the cubicle and when he came out he still had the chisel. Now, there was no damage to the cubicle, but when the cops asked him what he was doing with the chisel, he said it was to protect himself from man-eating spiders. If he’d said he was an apprentice cabinet-maker – no problem. But to ward off man-eating spiders?? So…

‘They booked him – possession of an offensive weapon. When I saw him he’d already been in the jail for a fortnight, on remand. Was he in a good state of health? Emphatically, he was not. In his terms, he was caught in a giant spider’s web.’*

He paused. ‘Ah, the rain’s almost off, I see. Nice to meet you lads!’

Bob and Willie and I watched him go. Thoughts of jogging along with his fellow-allotmenteers seemingly suspended, Bob turned to me: ‘So whit wiz the polis supposed tae dae? Help the lad fight off they man-eating spiders?? Forbye, that’s nae the reason he’s nae longer working. Ma niece cleans his flat: he wis suspended cos he turned up fo’ work pished…’

*I heard the radical psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, tell the story about the man-eating spiders at a meeting in Cambridge in 1968. It’s stayed with me me ever since.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

Allegra by Michael Bloor

(Our longtime friend in writing and fine gentleman, Michael Bloor, pictured, is our guest writer for July. This week we present five by Mick. Please see his bio at the bottom of this page–Leila)

Allegra

When John started his apprenticeship at Sowter & Son, Allegra was already working in Old Man Sowter’s office as typist/receptionist/assistant book-keeper. John would see her every morning as she made her way through the workshop to the rear office: Allegra kept office hours, whereas John had to clock-on an hour earlier, at eight o’clock. Back then, in the 1960s, any woman walking through an engineering workshop could expect a cacophony of whistles and cat-calls from the machinists and the fitters. John was struck by the anomaly that Allegra’s progress through the workshop was accompanied by no more noise than the usual screeches, bangs and clatterings of a metal-working shop. In fact, Old Man Sowter had previously told Big Arthur, the foreman, that any man found to be disrespectful of his niece, Allegra, would be on a warning of future dismissal. Newcomer John, however, assumed that the muteness of his fellow workers was a tribute to Allegra’s ethereal beauty. For himself, at any rate, an awed silence seemed the only immediately appropriate response.

John subsequently gathered that, although she was The Old Man’s niece, her surname wasn’t Sowter: she was ‘Allegra Heron.’ Such an appropriate name. John was a hill-walker: every Sunday morning that the weather allowed, he’d catch The Ramblers’ Special from the town’s railway station into the Derbyshire Dales. He loved the swift-running, pebbly rivers and brooks of the dales. Often, he’d stop for minutes at a time to watch the progress of a heron through the waters. The heron seemed an exotic bird to be dwelling in the quiet, domesticated English countryside: head held high and rigid, a long-legged, purposeful, solitary walk, somehow both remote and yet vividly aware of her surroundings. By his machine, John would feign activity while secretly watching Allegra Heron’s similarly exotic progress across the dingy shop-floor in her swinging, open, Afghan coat, her pale suede boots, short, flared, red skirt and skinny top.

As the apprentice, John was the workshop dogsbody and so would be dispatched to the office on errands for the foreman. Naïve, but not wholly inexperienced thanks to past youth club discos, John was able to make use of these occasional office visits to strike up an acquaintanceship with ethereal Allegra. After a few weeks, John felt they’d bonded over a common preference for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ over ‘Yesterday.’ So he suggested a Saturday date at the Rams Head pub, where Long John Baldry and The Steampacket would be playing in the big upstairs room.

She agreed! He was to pick her up from the house at seven o’clock.

Apprentice wages were only eleven quid a week, but he felt well turned-out in his black cord jacket and Ben Sherman shirt. He arrived ten minutes late and a bit out of breath, her parents’ house being out in the suburbs and some distance from the bus stop. She answered the door, already booted and coated, with a warm smile. She stepped onto the gravel drive and stopped:

‘Where the Hell’s your bloody car?’

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).