Michael Bloor

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).