Yoked with a Lamb Read online

  Molly Clavering

  Yoked with a Lamb

  Miss Flora Milligan, tripping westwards through the royal burgh of Haystoun with a bowl of her famous potted head, decently shrouded from vulgar gaze by a snowy napkin, in a neat basket, was the first person of any social standing to notice that the ‘To Sell or Let’ board had been taken down from the Soonhope entrance.

  The town of Haystoun is in a tizzy because Andrew and Lucy Lockhart and their children are boldly returning, several years after Andrew’s scandalous liaison with another woman. Most residents are firmly in Lucy’s corner, but as Lucy’s plans to host a family gathering in celebration of their return exacerbates existing tensions, Andrew’s cousin Kate Heron—drafted to help smooth the way—begins to wonder . . . The resulting difficulties draw in Kate’s brother Greystiel, elderly Jean Anstruther, who keeps the town under careful surveillance, Jean’s nephew Robin, the Lockharts’ formidable Aunt Charlotte, and an unforgettable array of supporting characters as the tale reaches its satisfying climax.

  Molly Clavering was for many years the neighbour and friend of bestselling author D.E. Stevenson, and they may well have influenced one another’s writing. First published in 1938 (under the pseudonym B. Mollett) and out of print for more than 80 years, Yoked with a Lamb is a witty and entertaining account of family conflict and reconciliation in a charming Scottish setting. This new edition features an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.

  FM66

  THIS BOOK

  is dedicated with love to the

  kindest and most charming of

  GRANDMOTHERS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Clavering

  Furrowed Middlebrow

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Of Yoked with a Lamb, the second of Molly Clavering’s novels to be published under the pseudonym of ‘B. Mollett’, the Dundee Courier and Advertiser (19 May 1938) commented, ‘The intimate social atmosphere of a homey community is made wonderfully real’. However, the Daily Mirror (7 April 1938) was rather more incisive, recognising that what fuelled life in that ‘homey community’ was gossip, so that ‘If an extra pigeon went stalking across the old paving stones . . . it was news in Haystoun. Tongues wagged – teacups clinked in delightful scandal-spreading.’ Yoked with a Lamb, describing the events surrounding an attempt to repair a marriage, broken when the husband had left his wife several years earlier for another woman, was a rather audacious choice of subject. Played out in a small Scottish Border community, it did indeed allow the author plenty of scope for the creation of gossip and gossipers, as well as demonstrating that there was more to marriage than mere fidelity.

  Yoked with a Lamb was, in fact, Molly Clavering’s fifth novel, the first three having been issued under her own name. The pseudonym ‘B. Mollett’ had most likely been a whim of her new publisher, indicating neither, it would seem, any desire for privacy or change of style or genre. Whether writing as ‘B. Mollett’ or as herself, Molly Clavering centred her fiction on life in the Scottish countryside, with occasional forays into Edinburgh, the novels reflecting the society of the day, with characters drawn from all strata, the plots driven, as we have noted, by small-town gossip, rendered on occasion very effectively in demotic Scots. Molly is peculiarly adept at describing, in all seasons, the scenery and atmosphere of the Borders. We have no doubt, for instance, that it is through her eyes that in Yoked with a Lamb Kate Heron sees ‘The Lammermuirs, her own hills, looking far away and hazy in the heat . . . a long dim blue rampart against the summer sky. The very names – Bleak Law, Lammer Law, Nine Stane Rig, Crib Cleuch – rang wild in her ears as a Border ballad.’

  Born in Glasgow on 23 October 1900, Molly Clavering was the eldest child of John Mollett Clavering (1858-1936) and his wife, Esther (1874-1943). Named ‘Mary’ for her paternal grandmother, she was always known by the diminutive, ‘Molly’. Her brother, Alan, was born in 1903 and her sister, Esther, in 1907. Although John Clavering, as his father before him, worked from an office in central Glasgow, brokering both iron and grain, by 1911 the family had moved to the Stirlingshire countryside eleven miles north of the city, to Alreoch House outside the village of Blanefield. In an autobiographical article Molly Clavering later commented, ‘I was brought up in the country, and until I went to school ran wild more or less’. She was taught by her father ‘to know the birds and flowers, the weather and the hills round our house’ and from this ability to observe were to spring the descriptions of the countryside that give readers of her novels such pleasure.

  By the age of seven Molly was sufficiently confident in her literary attainment to consider herself a ‘poetess’, a view with which her father enthusiastically concurred. Happily, her mother, while entirely supportive, balanced paternal adulation with a perhaps necessary element of gentle criticism. In these early years Molly was probably educated at home, reading ‘everything I could lay hands on (we were never restricted in our reading)’ and having little ‘time for orthodox lessons, though I liked history and Latin’. She was later sent away to boarding school, to Mortimer House in Clifton, Bristol, the choice perhaps dictated by the reputation of its founder and principal, Mrs Meyrick Heath, whom Molly later described as ‘a woman of wide culture and great character [who] influenced all the girls who went there’. However, despite a congenial environment, life at Mortimer House was so different from the freedom she enjoyed at home that Molly ‘found the society of girls and the regular hours very difficult at first’. Although she later admitted that she preferred devoting time and effort to her own writing rather than school-work, she did sufficiently well academically to be offered a place at Oxford. Her parents, however, ruled against this, perhaps for reasons of finance. It is noticeable that in her novels Molly makes little mention of the education of her heroines, although they do demonstrate a close and loving knowledge of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and, as shown in the choice of title for Yoked with a Lamb, Shakespeare.

  After leaving school Molly returned home to Arleoch House and, with no need to take paid employment, was able to concentrate on her writing, publishing her first novel in 1927. Always sociable, she took an active interest in local activities, particularly in the Girl Guides, with which her sister Esther, until her tragically early death in 1926, was also involved. During these years Molly not only acted as an officer for the Guides but was able to put her literary talents to fund-raising effect for them by writing scenarios for two ambitious Scottish history pageants. The first, in which she took the pivotal part of ‘Fate’, was staged in Stirlingshire in 1929, with a cast of 500. However, for the second in 1930 she moved south and wrote the ‘Border Historical Pageant’ in aid of the Roxburgh Girl Guides. Performed at Minto House, Roxburghshire, in the presence of royalty, this pageant featured a large choir and a cast of 700, with Molly in the leading part as ‘The Spirit of Borderland Legend’. For Molly was already devoted to the Border country, often visiting the area to stay with relations and attending, on occasion, a hunt ball.

  Molly Clavering published a further two novels as ‘B. Mollett’ before, on the outbreak of the Second World War, joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service, based for the duration at Greenock, then an important and frenetic naval station. Serving in the Signals Cypher Branch, she eventually achieved the rank of second officer. Although there
was no obvious family connection to the Navy, it is noticeable that even in her pre-war novels many of the most attractive male characters, such as ‘Robin Anstruther’ in Yoked with a Lamb, are associated with the Senior Service.

  After she was demobbed Molly moved to the Borders, setting up home in Moffat, the Dumfriesshire town in which her great-grandfather had been a doctor. She shared ‘Clover Cottage’ with a series of black standard poodles, one of them a present from D.E. Stevenson, another of the town’s novelists, whom she had known since the 1930s. The latter’s granddaughter, Penny Kent, remembers how ‘Molly used to breeze and bluster into North Park (my Grandmother’s house) a rush of fresh air, gaberdine flapping, grey hair flying with her large, bouncy black poodles, Ham and Pam (and later Bramble), shaking, dripping and muddy from some wild walk through Tank Wood or over Gallow Hill’. Her love of the area was made evident in her only non-fiction book, From the Border Hills (1953).

  During these post-war years Molly Clavering continued her work with the Girl Guides, serving for nine years as County Commissioner, was president of the local Scottish Country Dance Association, and active in the Women’s Rural Institute. She was a member of Moffat town council, 1951-60, and for three years from 1957 was the town’s first and only woman magistrate. She continued writing, publishing seven further novels, as well as a steady stream of the stories she referred to as her ‘bread and butter’, issued, under a variety of pseudonyms, by that very popular women’s magazine, the People’s Friend.

  Molly Clavering’s long and fruitful life finally ended on 12 February 1995. Describing in her the very characteristics to be found in the novels, Wendy Simpson, another of D.E. Stevenson’s granddaughters, remembered Molly as ‘A convivial and warm human being who enjoyed the company of friends, especially young people, with her entertaining wit and a sense of fun allied to a robustness to stand up for what she believed in.’.

  Elizabeth Crawford

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  Miss Flora Milligan, tripping westwards through the royal burgh of Haystoun with a bowl of her famous potted head, decently shrouded from vulgar gaze by a snowy napkin, in a neat basket, was the first person of any social standing to notice that the ‘To Sell or Let’ board had been taken down from the Soonhope entrance. This discovery, deliciously exciting though it was, put her in a quandary. Her immediate impulse, born of inclination and duty alike, was to turn back and carry the news red-hot to her mother. As everyone knows, news, like a boiled egg, is only worth having when it is absolutely fresh. On the other hand, it was Miss Milligan’s proud boast that every dish of potted head made by her for the Parish Church Fancye Fayre was always sold before the sale was even opened; and if she went home now, she would not have time to deliver the very last consignment, and would thus break her proud record, for this was the day of the Fayre. Apart altogether from that, there was a danger that Mrs. Anstruther, who would be sure to hear that all Miss Milligan’s other clients had already received their orders, might feel slighted if hers did not arrive this morning, and refuse to take it at all, out of pure malice. Miss Milligan shuddered at the thought. She had no wish to be left with even one shape of potted head on her hands.

  Excellent though it was, the concocting of this dainty in bulk left its maker with strangely little appetite for it. Miss Milligan saw quite clearly that she must go on her way, and trust that Mamma would not hear the news from another source in the meantime. The chance that she might meet someone who could give her a few additional facts to add to the bare statement of the notice-board’s disappearance lent lightness to her feet, and she proceeded at a brisk pact towards Mrs. Anstruther’s red-roofed villa beyond the railway station, at the very west end of the town.

  Miss Milligan had the reputation of being the most kindly and amiable woman in Haystoun, though in fact she was more cowed by her mother than anything else, but she felt a trifle displeased with Providence as she pushed open the green gate of The Anchorage. She had not met a soul of whom she could ask information about Soonhope without loss of dignity, and while she agreed in theory that virtue was its own reward, in practice she preferred something a little more substantial. So, although she saw Mrs. Anstruther waving a hand from behind the zareba of ferns which filled her drawing-room window, she pretended a wilful blindness, and marched up to the front door, where she rang the bell with greater vigour than usual.

  “Well, Flora. You look very flustered, and surely you’re getting short-sighted?” was a greeting not calculated to soothe her as she entered the drawing-room. “What’s that rubbish in your basket, eh?”

  “The potted head you ordered, Mrs. Anstruther,” said Miss Milligan with restraint. Really, Mrs. Anstruther, sitting there in her arm-chair by the window, where she could peer through her ferns at everything that passed, was becoming daily more difficult to bear with. So knotted with rheumatism that she could barely move, dependent on the kindness of such of her friends as owned cars for her rare outings—for that nephew of hers up at Pennymuir did little enough for her—alone save for the elderly grenadier of a maid who looked after her with grim devotion, she should have aroused only gentle feelings of pity and sympathy in others. Yet how often, thought Miss Milligan, unpacking her basket with hands quivering with annoyance and flurry, was one conscious not of pity but of exasperation. It was all wrong.

  “Stop fumbling with that paper,” said Mrs. Anstruther suddenly. “There’s no hurry to unpack the stuff. How many years, Flora Milligan, have you been making potted head for the Fancye Fayre? (It used to be a plain church sale in the days when I had a stall, but I suppose Haystoun is too grand for that nowadays!) How many years have I been buying it?”

  “I—I don’t quite know,” Miss Milligan was confused by this unexpected question. “It must be quite a long time now.”

  “What an object in life! The making of potted head which nobody really wants to buy!” Mrs. Anstruther uttered a sudden scoffing hoot of laughter. “And yet I suppose you consider that you lead a useful life, eh, Flora?”

  Really, Mrs. Anstruther was worse than usual to-day. Poor Miss Milligan, drawing herself up, answered with tremulous dignity. “I have always tried to lead a useful life in my own small way.”

  “Small way. Yes, our ways are certainly pretty small. I wonder if they count for anything in the scheme of the universe? There, Flora!”—as a small sniffing sound came from her visitor. “I am only being cantankerous, as usual, and speaking my mind for once. Always a mistake. It is, fortunately, too expensive a luxury to indulge in often. You must allow me a little license, my dear. Remember that if you are the best-natured woman in the burgh—though that isn’t saying much in a place so overflowing with scandal—I am well known to be the worst. Now I’ll try to make amends. You’ll have a glass of elderberry wine with me, and I’ll give you a piece of news to take home to your mother.”

  Miss Milligan, inwardly telling herself that it was only for Mamma’s sake, blew her nose and listened.

  “Of course you saw on your way here that Soonhope is no longer to let.” This was a statement rather than a question, but Mrs. Anstruther did not hurry. Indeed, she paused for so long that her listener almost danced with impatience. Finally, when Miss Milligan had decided that flesh and blood could not bear the suspense another moment, she said with careful casualness: “The Lockharts are coming back, and about time too.”

  “The Lockharts?” gasped Miss Milligan, her faint resentment forgotten. This was news with a vengeance. Virtue had received a reward so much greater than she looked lor that she felt humbly grateful. “But—surely you can’t mean the Lockharts?”

  “I do mean the Lockharts. After all, Andrew Lockhart owns Soonhope, and has neglected his duties far too long as it is.”

  “But—the scandal!” whispered Miss Milligan, her thin face flushing a delicate shade of mauve. “What will people say?”

  “If people have any sense they’ll say nothing,” Mrs. Anstruther answered grimly, and touched the handbell at her
side to summon the grenadier, who presently marched in carrying a tray with elderberry wine in tiny thistle glasses, and a plate of crisp, wafer-thin home-made wheaten biscuits.

  Not until the two ladies had tasted this refreshment did Miss Milligan pluck up courage to ask: “Is Mrs. Lockhart coming too? And the children?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Anstruther, most regrettably smacking her lips over her elderberry wine, “if you mean, is Andrew Lockhart bringing the woman he ran away with, to Soonhope, I must disappoint you. Lucy Lockhart and the children—the girl is grown-up now, by the way—are coming back also. When I said the Lockharts, of course I meant the whole family.”

  In moments of stress Miss Milligan’s nose quivered like a rabbit’s, and it now became violently agitated. “Since you have brought up that—that very painful subject, Mrs. Anstruther, I must say I think it shows a want of proper feeling on Andrew Lockhart’s part to come back to the place which he left in such disgraceful circumstances,” she said.

  “For goodness’ sake, Flora, if you want to talk about things, why can’t you call them by their names? Everyone in Haystoun—everyone in the county knows that Andrew ran off with Colonel Fardell’s wife, but it’s an old story now. I think it shows a good deal of courage to come back, knowing how much unkind gossip there will be,” said Mrs. Anstruther. “I had a feeling that he’d have to come back sooner or later to his own place, and the best thing we can do is to forget what is past, and try to help the Lockharts to forget it too.”

  “We look at it from such different points of view,” said Miss Milligan gently, for to the purveyor of news like this much could be forgiven. Not Mrs. Anstruther’s next remark, though. When that lady rejoined, “Yes, thank God!” with fervour, her guest rose to go, feeling that even the most Christian forbearance could not be expected to remain proof against this sort of thing.