The Scottish Heart

Chapter 1-4

“I"ve had breakfast, Ma.”

“Go on, yer just a wee slip of a thing. It"s good.”

Dorothy drank deeply from her teacup and soon the dumpling was gone. She ate with relish and Nathan loved it; just like the evening at the club when he took her to the food stall and they drank tea and ate hot rolls with sliced sausage. “Would you like to go for a walk?” Nathan said.

“Yes, I"d like that.”

“When will ye be back, Nathan?” Ma asked.

He looked at Dorothy. “What are you doing at six?”

“Going home. My mother left something prepared. She and my father are away visiting for the day.”

“Come back here, then,” Ma said. “It"s miserable eating yersel".”

“Thank you. That"s very kind.”

Nathan freshened up, choosing his best navy slacks and the new blue shirt that had been washed and ironed to perfection by Ma. He folded the cuffs back and thought about polishing his already well-polished old, comfortable loafers. Then worried that he"d stain the shirt with black shoe polish and decided there was just enough time to give the loafers a good dusting. He wanted to make this a happy afternoon.

Back in the kitchen, Ma looked him over. “Well, Ah"m gled to see yer dressed fit for Sunday at long last.”

Dorothy smiled approvingly and made eyes at him. She excused herself for a few minutes.

“That"s a nice young girl, Nathan.”

“Ah know.”

Dorothy came back to the kitchen. “Are we ready?”

Nathan took her east, figuring that as she lived in the west, it would be new to her. They crossed Provident Street, entering the park, and stood at the War Memorial. They walked round admiring the grey granite sparkling in the June sun, the bronze angel mounting the prow of an ancient ship fronting the monument and the bronze chains anchoring the war memorial to granite columns at each corner.

The frieze of Gothic letters on the four sides of the base recorded the fields of sacrifice: Palestine, Mesopotamia, Italy, Flanders, Gallipoli, France; and the Naval engagements at the Falklands, Jutland and Zebrugge. Further down the base of the memorial was another frieze: men crouching alongside lions; man and beast joined in suffering.

“The men from Westburn,” Dorothy said. “They fought everywhere.”

“Yes, they did,” Nathan, said. “My grandfather used to take me to the Armistice Day parade,” Nathan said. “He was in Flanders.”

“I see,” Dorothy said.

1958 and the Great War was etched in living memory. Beneath the stoic faces of Westburn, pain lurked and time had not healed the wounds of lost sons, dead lovers, and husbands.

“They call it the Well Park,” Nathan said moving away from the war memorial. “After my Grandfather died, I used to come here and sit. It"s peaceful on sunny days.”

They walked through the park, under the oaks and plane trees, past smooth lawns dappled by sunlight. They came to the Old Well dating from 1629, sealed. They admired the sandstone canopy crowning the well, resting on four short Corinthian columns that had been executed by the hand of an artisan.

“Oh I like it,” Dorothy said. “Just look at the doves carved on the corners. Why, they"re softened and rounded with age and weather. It"s simple and beautiful.”

Children were busy on the swings and the chute, their cries of pleasure muted by the warm sun. Old men in Sunday best sat on benches warming their bones, glancing at their newspapers.

“It"s lovely here,” Dorothy said. “It"s the first time I"ve been to the park.”

They looked across the river and to the mountains that Nathan loved when the shabbiness of Westburn got him down. “First time?”

“Yes. I was born here but I lived in Hong Kong for years. When my father returned to the shipyard, I was sent to board at a posh school. I"ve just finished.”

“You"re looking for a job?”

“Oh gosh, no.” She laughed her lovely, girlish laugh. “I"m going to University in October. St Andrew"s, to read History and English. I"ll be eighteen then.” She hesitated. “You see, I did quite well at school and I know I"m lanky, but I was good at games too.”

“You"re not lanky.”

She smiled, squinting into the sun brushing her hat against her leg. He wondered what the hell she saw in him: Nathan Forrest, a welder and part-time musician, trying to play Jazz in this backwater. He figured she should know something more about him.

“I"m twenty-five and I"ve worked in the yard since I was fourteen,” he said.

“All that time?”

“Well, I was in the Army. I went when I was eighteen. Conscription. I was called up.”

“What was it like?”

“Terrible. One thing I learnt about the Army is that I never want to be in it, ever again.”

They sat on an empty bench, the sun on their backs, the river and mountains to the front.

“Tell me about the Army.”

So he told her that he"d served in a Highland Regiment, the infantry. At first he was stationed in dreary Fort George up north. When they discovered he welded, he was on loan to the motor pool doing repairs. Later, Nathan sat in with some of the players in the Regimental band. A cornet player was ill and he performed a stint in the band.

”Did you wear a kilt?

”Yes.”

“Oh, Nathan. You in a kilt,” she said, smothering laughter with her hand.

“That"s how I felt about it. The hard bit was when the Battalion was sent to Korea and I reverted to rifleman.”

“Was that bad?”

Nathan was silent as he remembered one attack by waves of Chinese that almost over ran the position. They were beaten back with great difficulty. He shrugged non-committally.

“It was dirty: hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I never got used to the way the Chinese sounded attacks on bugles. I was glad to get home. They let me do a bit more welding in the motor pool, and I hung around the band before I was demobbed.”

“I see.”

Nathan learnt more about welding and was better at it when he got out of the Army. The personal breakthrough was the final stint in the Regimental band playing the cornet. His technique improved and finally, he got a firm hand on reading music.

“They tried to get me to sign on again. Promised me a permanent place in the band.”

They moved to the edge of the park and looked down at a derelict house dominating the northwest approach, its windows boarded, the stonework sooty and damp.

“That house must have been beautiful. Look at the chimneys: they"re so slender and elegant.”

Dorothy was right but Nathan lived so close to it that he often walked by without seeing.

“Yes. It was built in the 17th Century, the Baron Baillie"s House.”

“Why doesn"t the town restore it?”

“Anything old here, the politicians want to knock it down, not fix it up. They call it progress.”

Nathan pictured the new, already shabby estates ringing Westburn. He preferred the fading elegance of Galt Place to the drab uniformity of the politicians" concrete shoeboxes.

“Have a look sometime at the housing estates they"ve built. You"ll see what they mean by progress.”

The clock in the tower of the Clyde Kirk chimed quarter past two and they looked across to it.

”What an elegant steeple. You"re so lucky to live near it, Nathan.”

“The clock sometimes wakens me at night.”

For Nathan it was just another church with a steeple, a Protestant Church of less interest than the Catholic Church he"d rejected. But, when Dorothy mentioned it he looked at the building anew. It was a beautiful church; so much more than a temple of bourgeois spirituality marooned in his part of Westburn.

Nathan took pride in the the close feeling he had for Westburn. He showed Dorothy the Dutch Gabled House built in 1755, elegant still, in its cloak of shabby disrepair.

“What a shame. It"s so sad and neglected. It needs a lover to take care of it.”

“Lover to take care of it.”

The shock of Dorothy"s words left him feeling warm. But, he felt the stab of pain, remembering the wreckage of a youthful crush. When he was sixteen, Nathan met a girl at a dance and had gone out with her several times. He"d walked home with the girl, a freckled little pudding. At the entrance to her tenement, she turned on him.

“Ma mother says your nuthin" but a bastard an Ah"ve no" tae see ye again.”

Surely it would be different with Dorothy?

They admired the Lyle Fountain at the centre of the square, built in eighteen seventy nine. The fountain covered by a wrought iron dome had around its edges the shields commemorating the local gentry: Dunlops, Baines, Farrens, Wallace of Kelly, Scott and Morton, Crawfurd of Cartsburn. These families believed in "God Speed Westburn," but it would need a great impetus from their heirs and successors to shift the town out of its present lassitude.

“Sure, they made Westburn,” Nathan said, “But it was people like me that built the place and the ships and engines. You"d think the names of a few workmen might"ve appeared on the fountain.”

They turned from the fountain, and saw the ragged edges of the gable ends on the Municipal Buildings, proud old lime and mortar pointing sticking out between the bricks. Cowan"s Corner demolished in the Blitz and not yet fully repaired.

Heading east, they passed the Long Well dug in 1682 at the bottom of Duff Street; it had never been grand: by 1958 it was a melancholy place; a gloomy canyon of shabby tenements.

They walked on, passing several bombsites. Once, tenements stood there until flattened by German bombers in 1941. The patterned tiles covering the floor of tenement entrances remained visible through the tramped earth and weeds. Westburn had not yet fully recovered from the effects of the war.

Nathan stopped and looked around up to the park and back to the square, and swept the view with his hand. “I explored every nook and crannie here when I was a boy. It"s my place.”

Later, they strolled on the Old Quay licking ice cream cones. “Mmm,” she said, her pink tongue darting out for another taste. Dorothy pointed her cone at the Georgian Customs House. “The honey coloured stone, it"s beautiful.”

“Giffnock sand stone,” Nathan said. “The emigrants to North America and the West Indies used to leave from here.”

“In those awful wooden ships?”

“They must have. They say Captain Kidd was born in Westburn.”

“The pirate? Golly.”

Gosh and golly, schoolgirl slang. So there were people who spoke that way. But he liked it when she said it; he really liked this girl.

“Wait a minute” Dorothy said. “I remember something about the Customs House. My English teacher mentioned it. John Galt, the novelist worked there, a clerk.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Oh, he"s quite famous. He wrote Annals of the Parish. I didn"t like it. He travelled with Byron in the Mediterranean. Something about arranging trade agreements. Your address, Galt Place has to be named for him.”