A History Maker Read Online Free PDF Page A

period?”
    â€œA period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”
    Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.
    â€œThere were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.
    â€œThe foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children’s Crusade? Peasants’ Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”
    There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read Ten Days That Shook the World , Wat?”
    Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.
    â€œNever,” said Wat thankfully.
    â€œWell, that’s the book for you.”
    So Wat ordered Ten Days That Shook the World , Reed’s account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.
    â€œCome outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”
    Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”
    â€œI pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,
    â€œBut a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”
    He strode out.

    On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-poolwhere infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

    Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There’s a lot of goodness out there.”
    â€œBut ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.
    â€œNo yet.”
    â€œMaybe you’ll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”
    â€œPessimist. I’m no like you. I’ll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”
    Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder