A Song of Sixpence Read Free

Maggie would launch into a fearsome yet compelling description, derived doubtless from her mother, of my arrival in this world on a dark and dreary Sabbath night when it had rained torrents and the tide had risen so high that my father, desperately seeking Dr Duthie with his little black bag, had almost failed to reach the village.
    â€˜And to beat all,’ Maggie turned her commiserating gaze upon me, ‘ye came into the wurrld the wrong way round.’
    â€˜The wrong way! But how, Maggie?’
    â€˜Not head first. Feet first.’
    â€˜Was that bad, Maggie?’ I demanded, petrified.
    She nodded in sombre affirmation.
    After this humiliating disclosure Maggie would revive me by taking me further along the estuary to the Erskine Rocks, where, enjoining me not to tell my mother, who would have been shocked to hear that her spoiled darling was upsetting his stomach with such ‘trash’, we gathered fresh mussels which she roasted, nut-sweet, on a driftwood fire. The novelty of this repast alone delighted me, since I was, if anything, over-nourished; but for Maggie, sadly ill-fed, it was welcome sustenance, and by way of dessert, taking off her battered boots and the long black stockings, one or other of which despite the darns usually sported a hole, she would wade into the grey waters of the firth and, feeling in the muddy sand with her toes, uncover little fluted white cockles which she devoured like oysters, raw and quivering.
    â€˜But they’re living, Maggie,’ I protested, dismayed at the pain these innocent bivalves must suffer under her sharp teeth.
    â€˜They don’t feel anything,’ she assured me calmly. ‘If you bite them quick. Now let’s play shop.’
    Maggie invented all sorts of games and was full of country skills. She could make a willow whistle, fashion intricately woven harvest plaits of a pattern that my fingers could never master, and magically unfold tight little paper boats that we sailed down the Gielston burn. She could also sing, and in a hoarse but tuneful voice would offer me current favourites like ‘ Goodbye, Dolly Gray’ and ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’.
    But the game Maggie liked best undoubtedly was ‘shop’ and she never tired of it. When we had collected and set out on the shore our varied symbols, chips of shells, seeds of wild fennel, burdock tips and sea pinks, white sand, bladders of seaweed, marbled pebbles, each representing a different commodity, Maggie would assume the airs and responsibilities of the proprietress while I became the customer. This gave to Maggie, so poor and neglected, a sense of security, even of wealth. Looking round her shop with the pride of possession, counting her store of good things—tea, sugar, coffee, flour, butter, ham and of course black-striped peppermint balls—she could forget those days when she must stave off hunger with salt cockles, a raw turnip lifted from one of Snoddie’s fields or even the skins from the dog-rose and hawthorn berries that we called ‘hips and haws’.
    We were happy together, and I felt her fondness for me until, glancing upwards suddenly during our game, I would find her eyes bent upon me with the wondering expression of one whose attention is drawn repeatedly to some incomprehensible singularity. I knew then what must come, for presently in a tone half puzzled, half commiserating she would soliloquize:
    â€˜When I look at you, Laurie, I still can’t credit it. I mean, you’re not much, but you don’t seem any different from us. And your mother and father too, they’re so nice you would never dream they were that. ’
    I hung my head. Maggie, in her blundering, good-natured way, had once again uncovered one of the hidden shames that seared my early years and which, without further pretence, must be confessed. I was, alas, a Roman Catholic. A boy bound hand and foot to the grinding chariot of the Pope,