THE CINDER PATH Read Free

order his men to level the dump. He decided on
    a path being made from the back of the byres where the
    ground ran level, to where, thirty yards distant, it
    sloped down towards the bum, beside which stood the tiny tworoomed dilapidated cottage.
    When the mound of cinders was levelled, the path to the burn was only three parts made, but each
    morning the maid of all work gradually lengthened it
    by adding to it the huge buckets of cinders taken from the house.
    Why, asked the farmhands of each other, did he
    want a path leading down there? The stone cottage
    would never be used again; and who wanted to go and look at the burn at that point where it was only a couple of
    yards wide?
    William MacFell didn't give his
    reasons for taking the path down to the burn, but it
    soon became evident that he had another use for it,
    and the first example he gave of this was when he took his eight-year-old son by the collar, threw him on to the
    cinders, and laid about his back with a birch stick.
    That was the beginning.
    Jimmy Benton was the next to experience what it
    was like to be thrown on the cinder path. He was seven
    years old at the time and scarecrowing on the farm.
    Jimmy had at an early age developed a taste
    for raw eggs; he had discovered they would keep him
    going and would take the gnawing hungry feeling from his stomach.
    The morning he stole two eggs from the hen cree
    William MacFell caught him, and, taking the
    eggs from him, he had without a word lifted him
    up bodily by the scruff of the neck and, ignoring the
    boy's flaying arms and legs . . . and howls, he
    had thrown him on to the path where the cinders had torn at the palms of his hands and his bare knees. He had
    thrown one egg after the other on to the back of the boy's head, then kicked him in the buttocks. The action
    had lifted the child from his hands and knees and sent him sprawling flat out.
    The boy's father had been for going and knocking hell
    out of William MacFell, but the mother reminded him
    that it was their livelihood, and after all the boy was only disscraped on his hands and knees.
    With the youngsters on the farm, the
    cinder path became a fear. The mothers in the
    cottages no longer threatened the children with the bogey man, but with the cinder path. One thing the farm workers did say in favour of their master, he had no
    favourites for the path for he treated his own son to an equal share of it.
    Such are the quirks of nature that instead of
    Edward MacFell hating his father, the boy admired
    him and if he had ever really loved anyone it was his
    male parent. His mother, to whom one would have expected him to turn, she being of a sympathetic and gentle
    nature, he almost ignored. Perhaps it was because
    subconsciously he sensed that she had no love for
    him, for in character and looks he was the facsimile of her husband.
    Edward MacFell was twenty-seven years old
    when his father had died. William had left no will for the simple reason that he had imagined wills
    precipitated death, and so according to law Edward was
    entitled to twothirds of the estate and his mother
    to onethird. That almost immediately the legal affairs were settled his mother should take her share and leave the farm to join a cousin in Scotland came as no surprise
    to him; rather it afforded him a great deal of relief.
    He was no
    longer responsible for her; now he could look round
    for a wife, a wife who was different but, like his mother, someone with a bit of class.
    He knew only too well in what esteem his
    father had been held in the surrounding countryside, and he set out to show them that he himself was different, that he was no ordinary tinpot little farmer, he was as good as they came in the country, and he was determined to make the farm an example for others because it contained some of the best pasture land in the county, besides fields that
    yielded reasonable grains. Even Hal Chapman,
    over in Brooklands, had had to admit there
    wasn't another place like it