Searching for Shona
Read Searching for Shona Online
Authors: Margaret J. Anderson
ISBN: 9781483505787
Table of Contents
Chapter 3 Canonbie Primary School
Chapter 12 Dr. Knight Gives Advice
Chapter 1
Holyrood Park
Marjorie Malcolm-Scott walked slowly up Willowbrae Road toward the narrow iron gate that opened into Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. It was mid-September 1939, and Britain was at war with Germany, but it wasn’t thoughts of the war that were uppermost in Marjorie’s mind. She was merely wondering what she could do to fill the day.
“You go off and play in the park for two hours,” Mrs. Kilpatrick, the housekeeper, had said.
Marjorie didn’t like being sent off like that, as if she were a small child who was always in the way. But that’s how Mrs. Kilpatrick treated her. Sending her out and saying that she wanted to get the housework done, though Marjorie didn’t see that there was much work to do. Most of the time there were only the two of them.
And what fun was there in going to the park all by herself? However, this was Saturday, so there would be other children there. Perhaps she would find someone to play with. Marjorie opened the gate and headed down toward a small pond where a group of children often gathered. Most of them were from St. Anne’s Orphanage and Marjorie sometimes found herself thinking that in spite of their shabby clothes and frequent noisy squabbles, they had a better time than she did.
Today they were playing on a pile of rocks beside the pond and Marjorie stood watching them, hoping they would ask her to join in. But they were much too busy to notice her—and she was too shy to ask if she could play—so she sat down on a bench near them and tried to work out what their game was all about.
There was one girl in particular whom Marjorie watched—a girl of about eleven or twelve, with short fair hair and a faded red coat. She heard the others call her Shona, and although she was by no means the biggest, she seemed to be the organizer of the game. She and three boys had occupied the “castle rock” and others were trying to take them captive and drag them off to a stronghold on the other side of the pond. A stray dog, excited by their voices, joined in the fight, and Shona yelled, “Wolves! They’ve trained wolves to attack us!”
The other children had already captured one of the boys and they now had Shona surrounded and began to pull her, shrieking and resisting, toward the pond. Marjorie watched anxiously, hoping they weren’t really going to throw her in. Then one of the boys left on the rock yelled, “It’s dinner time! Come on!” The children immediately forgot their game and went running off, right past the bench where Marjorie was sitting, never even glancing at her. Marjorie watched them disappear through the gate and then got up and walked slowly home.
She lived in a big stone house on Willowbrae Road with her Uncle Fergus, but he had been gone all summer. As she approached the house her feet began to drag. There would only be Mrs. Kilpatrick at home and she was never exactly welcoming. Marjorie pushed open the heavy front door, crossed the dimly lit hall, and went through to the kitchen.
“Is that you back already?” Mrs. Kilpatrick asked without looking up from the brass candlesticks she was polishing. “It seems like you only just went out.”
Marjorie didn’t bother to answer but picked up the
Daily Mail
. Slumping into an armchair, she opened the paper. It was dated Saturday, September 16, 1939. The war had started only two weeks ago and nothing had really happened yet, but the newspaper already made gloomy reading. Marjorie stared at a picture of some London children who were being evacuated to the country, and then threw the paper aside.
“Do you think Uncle Fergus will come home soon?” Marjorie asked Mrs. Kilpatrick.
“I shouldn’t think so,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said, giving a final rub to the candlestick. “Not with this war on. He’ll have other things to worry about.”
Marjorie sighed. Not that Uncle Fergus being there made so very much difference. He was always busy with his own concerns. But he
had
taken her to France two summers ago, and last year to London. This summer they had gone nowhere. It would be another week before school started and Marjorie found the holidays very long and boring.
The following Monday, Mrs. Kilpatrick again sent Marjorie out to play in the park. The city schools had started earlier in September than Marjorie’s private school, so she knew the park would be deserted except for young mothers pushing prams (and it was too early in the day for that) and staid old ladies and gentlemen walking their dogs or sitting on park benches, staring at the threatening headlines in their newspapers.
Marjorie had a piece of dry toast in her pocket and she planned to feed the ducks. When she had asked Mrs. Kilpatrick for bread, Mrs. Kilpatrick had told her firmly, “With a war on, there’s no bread to spare for ducks. We’ll be lucky if there’s food for ourselves before the war is over.” Marjorie was used to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s gloom and didn’t listen. Instead she took the toast she’d left uneaten at breakfast. Throwing it in the dustbin wouldn’t help the War Effort that Mrs. Kilpatrick talked about so endlessly. Besides, it wasn’t the ducks’ fault there was a war on!
She reached the pond and was trying to entice the ducks with the toast, when a voice behind her asked, “Can I feed them, too?”
Marjorie turned quickly and found that Shona, the girl from the orphanage, was standing beside her. She broke off a piece of toast and handed it to Shona, saying shyly. “I do like the ducks, don’t you?”
“Especially the ones with the shiny green heads and blue and white collars,” agreed Shona.
When the toast was finished, Shona looked curiously at Marjorie and asked, “Why aren’t you in school?”
“My school doesn’t start till next week.”
“Lucky you!”
“Why aren’t
you
in school?” Marjorie asked.
”I didn’t want to go,” Shona answered.
“But won’t you get in trouble?”
“Not if I don’t get caught,” Shona said with a shrug. “I’ll go back with the others when they get our of school.”
“Don’t you go to school in the orphanage, then?” asked Marjorie.
“Of course not,” answered Shona. “We go to Preston Street Primary like everyone else who lives around here.”
“What about the other children from the orphanage who are in your class? Don’t they tell on you when you don’t go to school?”
“There’s only Tommy Walker and he wouldn’t tell. He wouldn’t dare!”
Having watched Shona scuffle and play with the boys in the park last Saturday, Marjorie thought this was probably true. A silence fell between them, and then Shona asked, “Do you want to climb Arthur’s Seat? That’s what I was going to do.”
Arthur’s Seat was a high hill in the middle of the park, and although Marjorie spent a lot of time in the park, she had never climbed all the way to the top. Now that Shona suggested it, it sounded like a good idea.
It took them a long time to walk up the lower slopes. As they talked together, Marjorie discovered that Shona had seen her watching their game and had wondered why she didn’t join in. “I thought maybe you didn’t want to get dirty,” Shona said. Marjorie was suddenly conscious of her smartly tailored green coat and pale blue dress and white socks. Her long blond hair was neatly braided and tied with blue ribbons to match her dress. Shona’s skirt hung unevenly below her shabby red coat and her socks had worked their way down inside her battered shoes.
There was no breath left for talk as they scrambled up the last rocky heights and reached the stone marker on the very top. They looked down on Edinburgh and all the countryside around it spread out below them.
“Look!” said Marjorie. “You can see the Forth Bridge and the Braid Hills and the Castle. I can see my house!”
“Where?” Shona asked.
“Behind the wall that borders the park down there. That’s my street, and you can see the back of our house. The tall one.”
“That’s a posh house,” Shona said impressed. “Your mum and dad must be very rich.”
“They were drowned six years ago when I was five,” Marjorie answered abruptly. “I live with my Uncle Fergus and his housekeeper, Mrs. Kilpatrick.”
“You mean you’re an orphan, too?” Shona asked, her eyes widening. “Some people have all the luck!”
“What’s so lucky about being an orphan?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean having a posh house and nice clothes even if you are an orphan. You know who your parents were and you’ve got someone to look after you.”
“But you’ve got lots of friends,” protested Marjorie. “You always have someone to play with.”
Shona shook her head and then sat down, her back against the stone base of the marker and said, “There aren’t many of us older kids living in the orphanage. Most of them are younger, and it’s always the wee ones who get adopted and move away. Nobody’s going to come along and adopt me now. But worst of all is not knowing who I am and why I was left there. What were my mum and dad like? Who were they?”
“Don’t you know anything about them?” Marjorie asked.
“Just the little Matron told me. My mum came from a place called Canonbie, and I have a picture of her house. Someday, I’ll go there and find out about myself. But come on! I’ll be late if we don’t go back down.”
Shona jumped up, as if she hadn’t a worry in the world, and they ran down the hill together. They parted on the road at the bottom, Marjorie heading toward Willowbrae Road with its tall houses surrounded by trees and prim gardens, and Shona toward the old part of town with its cobbled streets and crowded buildings and St. Anne’s Orphanage.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” Marjorie asked, as they parted.
“I’ll try,” Shona answered.
They met three more time that week. Marjorie was greatly impressed by Shona’s daring, and she knew that Shona envied her her nice clothes and the fact that she had money to spend. On Tuesday they ventured out of the park and bought sweets in the little corner shop right next to Preston Street Primary School. The shopkeeper winked at Shona and asked, “Playing truant?” Shona just grinned at him, while Marjorie blushed scarlet. Then they bought buns at the baker’s and went back to the park where they shared them with the ducks.
On Wednesday, Marjorie was disappointed at not finding Shona, but the next morning Shona was waiting beside the iron gate near Willowbrae Road.
“Let’s go back to your house to play,” she suggested.
Marjorie hesitated. She knew that Mrs. Kilpatrick would think that Shona, with her shabby red coat and down-at-heel shoes wasn’t a suitable friend, but she could hardly tell Shona that.
“Maybe we could go later when Mrs. Kilpatrick goes shopping,” Marjorie suggested.
“Are you scared of her?”
“She doesn’t like me around when she’s doing her work,” Marjorie explained lamely.
“We won’t get in the way,” Shona said, boldly marching off down Willowbrae Road with Marjorie trailing behind.
When they entered the big front hall, Shona was obviously taken aback by the ornately carved Victorian furniture, the Oriental rug, and the dark paintings in gilt frames.
“It’s as fancy as Holyrood Palace,” she said in an awed whisper.
“Come on and I’ll show you my room.” Marjorie was hoping they could avoid Mrs. Kilpatrick.
As Shona followed Marjorie up the thickly carpeted stairs, she paused to look at the portraits that hung on the walls of the upper landing. Marjorie hovered anxiously beside her, listening to the distant sound of Mrs. Kilpatrick’s wireless down in the kitchen and the banging of pots and pans. If only she’d go out shopping.