Sacred Country Read Free Page A

peculiar everything was becoming. She was going through a phase of needing to touch surfaces all the time. Her favourite surface was the wheel of the sewing machine and her long, white thumb would go round and round it, like something trapped. When I told her about people becoming two of themselves, she put her hand fiercely over my mouth. ‘Ssh!’ she said. ‘ Don’t . I’m superstitious.’
    So it was my teacher, Miss McRae at the village school, who discovered my faulty vision. She told my mother: ‘Mary cannot see the blackboard, Mrs Ward.’ Which was true. The blackboard was like a waterfall to me.
    I went with my mother on a bus from Swaithey to Leiston to see an oculist. The bus had to make an extra stop to let some ducks cross the road. I ran to the driver’s window so that I could see the ducks, but all I could see were five blobs creeping along like caterpillars.
    A week later I got my glasses. Timmy laughed at me with them on, so I hit his ear. I hoped I’d hit him so hard his vision would go faulty too. ‘How are they, then?’ asked my father crossly, holding Timmy.
    ‘They are a miracle,’ I said.
    Miss McRae looked like a person made of bark.
    Her back was as straight and as thin as a comb. Her nose was fierce. Her long hands were hard and freckled.
    Every child in that school was afraid of Miss McRae when they first saw her. They thought, if they went near her, they’d be scratched. But when she spoke, her Scottish voice brought a feeling of peace into the room and everyone was quiet. She began every day with a story of something she’d done when she was a girl, as if she knew she looked to us like a person who had never been a child. The first words I heard her say were: ‘When I was a lass, I lived in a lighthouse.’ And after that I liked Miss McRae and began to tell her some of the things I refused to tell my father.
    That summer, sometime after the Beautiful Baby Contest, Miss McRae said to us: ‘Now, class, on Monday, I want you each to bring something to school. I want you to bring in something that is important or precious to you, or just something pretty that you like. And then I want you to tell me and the other children why you like it or why it is precious to you. It can be anything you like. No one need be afraid of looking silly. All you have to remember is to be able to say why you’ve chosen it.’
    On the way home from school, I began to think about what I would take as my precious thing. When I’d been born, my mother had given me a silver chain with a silver and glass locket on it. Inside the locket was a piece of Grandmother Livia’s hair and my mother had said recently that I should treasure this locket for always and that, if I ever wore it, I should touch it every ten minutes to make certain it was still round my neck. I used to look at it sometimes. It made me wonder what Grandma Livia had been wearing round her neck when she got into the glider. I thought it was the kind of thing Miss McRae would like and I could hear her say approvingly: ‘What a pretty wee thing, Mary.’ But it wasn’t really precious to me. And if a thing isn’t precious to you then it isn’t and that’s it; it won’t become precious suddenly between Friday and Monday.
    When I got home from school, I looked around my room. I thought I might find something precious I’d forgotten about. But there was hardly anything in my room: just my bed, which had come out of a cottage hospital sale, and a table with a lamp on it and a huge old wardrobe, in which I kept my sweet tin and my spelling book and my boots. The tin had a picture of a Swisschalet on it. It contained at that time two ounces of sherbert lemons and three Macintoshes toffees. I got it out and put a sherbert lemon into my mouth. I thought the little burst of sherbert might wake me up to the preciousness of something, but it didn’t and then I had this thought: no one has ever told me where Grandma Livia was going in that glider. Was