Jinty's Farm Read online

  JINTY’S FARM

  Kate Blackadder

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 1

  ‘I’ve said it before – I think it’s a waste of time,’ said Douglas.

  And you’ll say it again, thought Isla, because I’m not going to stop.

  Her brother-in-law’s views on having primary school visits to the farm were repeated each time they happened. Isla couldn’t deny it was a time-consuming exercise. It wasn’t only the couple of hours of the actual tour. There was all the paperwork involved plus the endless hand washing the children were required to do. Isla’s own children had survived farm life happily and healthily without being quite so clean …

  ‘And I say it’s necessary,’ she replied. ‘Really, Doug, it’s shocking how some kids don’t know where milk comes from, or have never seen a lamb.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘See for yourself – if you take them round today I’ll get on with the VAT returns.’

  Douglas had the grace to smile back. ‘I wouldn’t have the patience. Well, mind they don’t go near my barley field. Here they are,’ he added, spotting a mini-bus through the window and making his escape through the back door.

  Isla ran upstairs to her younger daughter’s bedroom and knocked before pushing the door open.

  Mairi put her mobile down, looking guilty.

  ‘That’s the class,’ Isla said, ‘from Glenrothes, a P4. Want to give me a hand?’

  Mairi pulled a ‘must I?’ face.

  ‘If you’d been working, I’d leave you be,’ her mother said, eyebrows raised, ‘but you seem to have nothing better to do on study leave than chat to your friends.’

  ‘I don’t know enough about farming to talk to anybody about it.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Isla. ‘You’ll be surprised how much you know. More than these kids anyway.’

  ‘OK, but I’m not milking the cow, not for anybody.’ Mairi got to her feet.

  ‘I’ll handle that. You can show them the chicks.’ Isla headed for the landing.

  A voice from the next room called, ‘Mum.’

  ‘Calum, what is it, darling?’

  ‘I want to come too.’

  Isla popped her head round his door. ‘You’re staying in bed, remember?’ He’d been off nursery with a chesty cold and although the worst was over she thought she’d keep him at home today as well. That would give him the weekend to completely recover. Earlier he’d been engrossed in running a toy tractor over the pillow but now he was up and had dressed himself in a jumper and tracksuit bottoms, both on back to front.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m better now.’

  Sheena, Isla’s mother-in-law who lived with them, had gone down to the village. Isla didn’t want to leave Calum alone if he wasn’t safely tucked up in bed so she said, ‘All right. Ask Mairi to help with your socks and shoes.’

  Some fresh air this lovely May morning wouldn’t do him any harm. He’d been a premature baby, this little afterthought of theirs, and although he was now a robust five-year-old, due to begin school after the summer, she found it hard not to fuss over him.

  Downstairs, Isla thrust on her wellies and dashed outside where children were tumbling out of the mini-bus.

  ‘Good morning, lovely to see you,’ she said, making her voice as upbeat as possible.

  ‘Say “good morning Mrs Watson”,’ the teacher instructed and as the children intoned the greeting Isla took a deep breath. She’d forget for a couple of hours about the accounts that had to be completed today, about the as-ever dismal story they showed, and she’d concentrate on educating these kids about country life. It helped of course that she was a teacher herself, with a two-day-a-week job-share at the local primary school.

  She smiled at them. ‘Welcome to Jinty’s Farm.’

  One little girl kicked a stone across the yard. ‘That’s a stupid name.’

  ‘Its real name is Auchtermain,’ said Isla. ‘Jinty was the name of a lady who lived here a long time ago, my husband’s granny. Now, who would like to see some little chicks?’

  She led the way over to the hen run and as she glanced over her shoulder at the class she saw that Mairi and Calum had joined them.

  ‘Gather round, children,’ said the teacher. ‘Mrs Watson is going to show you a chicken.’

  ‘Actually my daughter Mairi is,’ said Isla, beckoning her forward.

  The children turned to stare at Mairi, and at Calum who followed her, looking, his mother thought fondly, rather like a chick himself with his fair hair unbrushed.

  They went into the hen run, closing the wire gate behind them. When they emerged from the hen house each of them was holding a yellow chick.

  Back with the class Mairi crouched down so that she was at the children’s height. ‘Who would like to stroke it?’ she asked and was almost knocked over in the surge forward. ‘One at a time now. Remember it’s still a baby,’ she instructed them.

  She’s a born teacher, Isla mused. But Mairi declared she had no idea what she wanted to do when she left school, whereas her older sister, Rosalyn, always knew she wanted to work with animals and was now a veterinary nurse.

  Calum clutched his chick almost too firmly. ‘One at a time now,’ he echoed his big sister.

  Isla and the teacher exchanged amused glances.

  A boy put up his hand. ‘I hope the foxes don’t get the wee chicks, miss.’

  ‘We’ve never had trouble with … ’ Isla began.

  ‘They eat them with knives and forks,’ the boy went on. ‘It’s cruel, isn’t it, miss?’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ said Calum scornfully. ‘Foxes just gobble them up.’

  ‘It was in a book,’ protested the boy.

  ‘We’ve been reading Fantastic Mr Fox,’ the teacher said to Isla. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t the best choice just before coming here.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Isla said to the children. ‘Our chicks are quite safe. You can see we have a fence all round their house.’

  The boy went over and fiddled with the catch on the gate. ‘A fox could open it easy as anything.’

  As the teacher dived towards him Isla was relieved to see Bill coming round the corner, his black and white collie at his heels. Unlike his brother Douglas he thought the visits were a great idea but he rarely had time to be involved.

  ‘This is Floss, the sheepdog,’ Isla said, ‘and this is my husband, Mr Watson, the farmer. He’s come to say hello and to see if you have any questions to ask him.’

  Bill grinned at the children. ‘I’ve got a question for you first.’

  Isla handed the squeezy mop to her mother-in-law. ‘Do you want to do the floor? I’ll do the surfaces.’

  It was late in the afternoon and Isla and Sheena were cleaning the kitchen of one of their two holiday cottages prior to guests arriving tomorrow.

  ‘Thank you, dear. How did the school visit go today?’

  Isla laughed as she told the story of Calum’s graphic description of foxes’ table manners. ‘And then Bill came along and asked if any of them wanted to be a farmer when they grew up.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘No! Well, only Calum! But I think they enjoyed it. Some of them asked if they could come again.’

  Sheena leaned on the mop handle. ‘It’s a lot of work for you, what with everything else you do.’

  ‘Only three visits a term,’ said Isla.

  ‘I can finish up in here,’ said Sheena. ‘Didn’t you say you had paperwork to get off today?’

  ‘It’s almost finished. And two pairs of hands are better than one.’

  Isla wouldn’t have said so for the world but Sheena’s cleaning skills weren’t what they used to be. Last week Isla had had surreptitiously to re-wipe the kitchen surfaces in the cottages after Sheena had been round them – a less than pristine appearance could lead to bad reviews on the internet.

  Isla suspected that Sheena’s eyesight was deteriorating but she’d been adamant it was fine when Isla asked when she’d last had a check up.

  ‘The cattleman’s wife wouldn’t recognise this cottage if she was to come back and see it,’ Sheena said, moving the mop slowly across the floor. ‘She brought up eight children here, would you believe.’

  ‘Talking about back in the day.’ Isla turned to look at her mother-in-law. ‘I was having a quick tidy-up in the office and I came across old Jinty’s diary, the farm diary. Did you know that the farm has been in the family for a hundred years this year? How about having a party to celebrate, maybe in the autumn?’

  ‘It’s a shame the diary lapsed – neither of my lads kept it up,’ said Sheena. ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea about the party, dear. But what will those sons of mine think of it? Pour cold water, I expect.’

  ‘We can’t afford it.’ Isla could hear Douglas’s voice in her head as she spoke but she had already thought of how to answer him. As she did the farm accounts she knew better than any of them the perilous state of their finances but such an occasion was still worth marking surely? It needn’t be expensive. We’d do the catering ourselves, she would tell him – and of course we’ll make cocktails with our very own gin!

  Distilling their own gin on a commercial basis was something both brothers had dismissed immediately when Douglas’s wife Kerry had first mooted the idea a year a
go. She’d visited a small gin distillery in Edinburgh with friends and had come home full of enthusiasm.

  They could use local plants to flavour it, she said, juniper of course which all gins must have plus rosehips and rowanberries, to make it unique. She would research it all and talk to the bank about a loan to start it up. The old byre could be converted for use, and she would get mates’ rates from tradesmen so that the conversion would not be too costly.

  She could be very persuasive – and of course she was used to dealing tactfully with difficult customers in her job as an architect … She won Bill and Douglas round by pointing out that all farms have to diversify these days, that artisan gin was extremely popular and that there were no other makers in their area. She clinched the matter by suggesting they name the brand ‘Jinty’s Gin’.

  Isla pulled out the chairs so that Sheena could mop under the table. ‘Hopefully the gin sales will pick up soon. I know it takes time to get the word out but it’s going slower than Kerry imagined.’

  When sales did improve then they would be able to employ someone else. At the moment they had Erin, a school friend of Rosalyn’s, who worked part-time, Isla herself, with Kerry on hand most weekends, something that gave her husband another thing to grumble about since they didn’t see very much of each other during the week. As they couldn’t afford to engage a PR company Kerry had hoped to garner publicity herself but her day job had been hectic the last few months and that had to take priority.

  ‘You girls have done a wonderful job,’ said Sheena. ‘I met someone in the village this morning who told me she’d just bought a bottle of “Jinty” as a birthday present. Nice to have something locally made, she said.’

  Isla was heartened even by this small success. ‘I’ll have a quiet word with Rosalyn and Mairi – get them to work on their dad and their Uncle Douglas. The girls would love to have a big party here. They could invite all their friends – maybe we could have a barn dance?’ Her mind raced ahead. It would be good to have something to look forward to.

  Sheena went back to the house to start the evening meal and Isla popped into the old byre – now transformed into the centre of operations for Jinty’s Gin – to check with Erin that everything was as it should be.

  The first thing she saw was a large picture of Jinty herself – a blown-up black and white photograph hanging on the wall. So that’s why Kerry had asked her if there was a photo she could have. It was Kerry’s plan to use Jinty, as it were, in promoting the gin, to build a story around the brand, as the marketing jargon went. It wasn’t an area Isla knew anything about and she could only hope Kerry was on the right track.

  There hadn’t been many photos of Jinty in the family album. She’d taken on the farm single-handedly during the Second World War, at the age of nineteen, after her brother had been killed and her father became ill. No doubt she’d had better things to do than pose for photographs.

  This one was the best of them – Jinty in baggy dungarees that had probably belonged to one of her men folk, and a tweed hat, standing beside a sheep pen. On the original photo she’d written on the back. Market, Cupar, 6 August, 1941.

  Erin came to stand beside Isla as she scrutinised the photo. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this,’ the girl said, ‘but she looks to me as if she’d disapprove of having a drink.’

  ‘She’s not smiling, I agree,’ said Isla. ‘Probably trying to prove to the men that she was to be taken seriously as a farmer! But I think there’s a twinkle in her eye.’

  And Isla wondered if she knew the reason for that. This afternoon, as she’d told Sheena, she’d picked up the farm diary, and she’d read a few of the entries for August 1941. Reading between the lines, Jinty had an admirer.

  After she’d got the phone call from an angry client, Kerry made some calculations in her head. If she was at the building site to meet him by four-thirty and was there for, say, an hour then she might possibly be home by six-thirty. She sent Douglas a quick text to tell him. Not that he would be reading it any time soon– after having several phones go to their doom falling out of his pocket around the farm he tended to leave it now on the kitchen table.

  Of course it would have to be a problem with a job on the south side of Edinburgh – that meant coming back through the city to get home. As she negotiated her way down Newington Road, Kerry pondered on what the client had said – which wasn’t much and was barely polite. ‘Get down here, Mrs Watson, soon as you can, and bring your plans with you. Looks like you’ve made alterations without telling me.’ Then he’d hung up.

  ‘Mrs Watson.’ That was a bad sign. They’d been on friendly first-name terms up until now. Kerry couldn’t imagine what the problem was. She hadn’t altered anything. She would never do that without the client’s consent. He’d be paying the contractor’s bill, and her own.

  He was waiting for her on the site of the half-completed block of flats and beckoned her to look at the work inside. He’d calmed down a little since his earlier outburst, at least as far as she was concerned.

  ‘Out of order there, Kerry, apologies. I know you wouldn’t pull a fast one. That contractor – what I think’s happened is, he’s got rid of the top-notch workers and hired a bunch of cheap cowboys. They’ve all sloped off early, and look at this – shoddy’s not the word.’

  As they went through the building Kerry could only agree with him about the workmanship and as she had engaged the contractor it was up to her to sort it out with him, and it couldn’t wait until Monday.

  She went back to her car, took a deep breath and called him, then listened to his excuses at the other end of the line … hard times … keeping to the budget … blah blah blah.

  She cut him short. ‘Sort it out by this time next week or I’ll be recommending we find someone else to finish the job.’

  His expostulations made her hold the phone away from her ear until he’d finished. She said goodbye politely through gritted teeth and hung up. His threat to go over her head to her boss was one she had to take seriously so that was another phone call to make, to get in first.

  Six o’ clock. The queues for the bridge across the Forth to get to Fife would be horrendous.

  Douglas deserved a phone call himself this time, not a text. She rang the landline.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Douglas.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Kerry said. She crossed her fingers. ‘Should make it by seven-thirty. You want to go up to eat with the family?’

  ‘No, I’ll wait for you here. Something in the freezer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kerry said. ‘Some of your mum’s lamb casserole. I’ll text you when I’m almost home and you could pop it in the microwave.’ She resisted the temptation to say ‘sorry’ again. Was it wrong of her to accept the regular foil cartons that Sheena gave her? Surely Douglas and herself at the ages of forty and thirty-four respectively, shouldn’t be relying so much on his mother? But Sheena had laughed when Kerry had said words to that effect to her. She did most of the cooking for the rest of the family so it was no trouble at all, she said, to do two extra portions.

  ‘Ok,’ Douglas said. ‘And I’ll pop in a couple of baking tatties, shall I?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ Kerry heaved a sigh of relief that he’d understood.

  ‘Drive safely, love.’

  Kerry turned the key in the ignition. ‘Will do.’

  Not for the first time she pondered on how much easier life would be if she lived in town, in the flat she owned close to the centre of Edinburgh and now rented out, rather than having the fifty-mile journey back to the farm every day.

  She’d never imagined herself living in the country but Douglas moving in with her had never been an option of course.

  They were an unlikely pair, she and the rather reserved, down-to-earth farmer – she knew that some of her friends thought so even if they never said.

  She was a happily single career woman and Douglas, according to his mother, was a set-in-his-ways bachelor, when Kerry was called in to draw up plans for an extension to the farmhouse six years ago.

  And they rest as they say is history, she thought, as she joined the end of the anticipated queue for the Queensferry Crossing. Douglas fell for her like the proverbial ton of bricks but was hesitant to do anything about it. It took some tactful manoeuvring on the part of her now sister-in-law Isla to push them together and, to her surprise, Kerry found herself falling right back.