A Guest Post by Lorna Campbell.

Imagine, if you will, rural Scotland and a pleasant country road leading to a town surrounded by woods and a river running through them on the south side. The sun is shining intermittently and a heat is building slowly, a rare enough occurrence in this land of rain and mists.
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I always knew that Donnie was eccentric, but I never realised how mad he was till that day when I met him in the chipper in Balnadunnie, liberally salting and vinegaring and saucing his fish and chips. Donnie never did anything by halves. I made the mistake of asking him how he had been lately and what he was up to these days, and, when he drew in a long, deep breath, I knew I was in for a stotter. Not that Donnie lied exactly; it was just that he had a way with words that made them skate precariously on the thin ice of truth.

Donnie fancied himself as an inventor, and, to be fair, he did sometimes build things that had potential – for the recycling skip, usually. “I’ve been busy wi my telescope,” he said, “and I built masel a pulse machine that sends signals oot intae space.” I grunted in response, devouring my pie supper. When I had masticated and swallowed, I said: “Is that right, ay? A radio, ye mean? Whit dae the signals say like?” I was humouring him, the mad professor. He smiled smugly (like you do when you’ve won a tenner on the Lottery, a step-up from the two quid you won the week before) and tapped his nose with his finger. “Ye ken whit’s happenin, don’t ye?” I thought of lots of things that were happening, so I shook my head: “Nothing specific springs tae mind.” He looked at me pityingly: “Yer no much of a political pundit, are ye, if ye dinnae even ken that the referendum’s this week?” That was a bit below the belt because he knew fine that we had been chappin doors together and had had a fair amount of well-wishing and a wee amount of abuse from the usual suspects, snarled exclamations of the expense when the country was on its knees… that sort of thing. You have to have a thick skin when you’re going round the doors.

“Weel, I’ve been askin for help wi that”, Donnie stated through a mouthful of chips and haddock batter, spraying my chest and pointing upwards towards the sky, which for the moment, was a watery blue hinting at rain, but at least it was dry for now and still warm. I stared at him. This was madder than anything he had ventured before. “Whit dae ye mean, the sky? Naw, gies a brek… ye dinnae mean…? “Ay.” A chunk of deep-fried pie almost choked me. “Pointy heids and green skin? Ye mean ye’ve been tryin tae communicate wi… ?” “Naw, ye bampot. Dae ye think I button up the back? I’m talkin aboot the Big Man.”

 

“D’ye mean God? Ye’ve been prayin tae God? Tae help us win the referendum? And whit did he say?” Donnie looked thoughtful – well, glaikit, really, which, for him, was the same thing – and shook his head. No, he explained, he had not been praying exactly, but sending pulses from his pulsometer into the night skies each night for a couple of months because God would be able to distinguish one set of pulses in Morse code from another whilst he might not be able to differentiate between one prayer and another. “Och, ye reckon?” I asked, turning away from him to screw up my chip paper and bin it, while trying to supress a snort of laughter at the same time. “God will hear yer ‘pulsometer’, but he cannae hear yer prayers. Whit kinda lugs has he got?”

Donnie tutted and threw his chip paper in beside mine. “Och, ye’ve aye been a septic, you, even when we were knee high tae a grasshopper.” “A sceptic, dae ye mean?” “Ay, that tae.” He exhaled loudly. “Look,” he said, “we must win it this time or we’re done for, so I’m trying everything. You got a better idea, bawheid?” He knew I was touchy about the shape of my head, and he would always mention its football dimensions when he was annoyed with me. He’d been doing it since we were in the playground. I had to give him that, though, because we would be well and truly stuffed if we lost again, but I felt the old need to retaliate: “Och, ye always were a neep, man.” It was the best riposte I could summon at the time. Scots have a reputation for being good at the flighting even when they’re not poets, and even when they’re not flighting.

It was a few days later when I fell in with Donnie again, having avoided him and his madcap notions by canvassing with Wee Jamesie and Big Lizzie McCandless who had postered every fence post and tree between Balnadunnie and Invercludge. In fact, the four of us were making our way to the hall for the count, to see that no shenanigans took place, when we spotted something rather peculiar in the distance, up the road a bit. A crocodile of small people led by two tall ones was making its way towards the town. The two adults, teachers presumably, and the crocodile of small children, girls and boys, all looked very similar with their reddish-auburn hair. They might have been a family group except that we counted about ten children and the adults were far too young to have had ten children all the same age and size, if that was even possible.

As they came closer, we could see that they were all good-looking in a healthy sort of way, which made us suspect immediately that they were not Scots: to be both Scots and good-looking in a healthy kind of way is a kind of physical oxymoron. “Have you come to learn about the referendum?” Lizzie asked, but she was dubious: most of the children looked about 10 years of age. They looked at her with deadpan expressions, nodding jerkily. “Which school are you from?” Lizzie would have made a first-rate interrogator or a detective, but she was too wee, hence the Big Lizzie nomenclature. Wee Jamesie was wee Jamesie because he was wee. They were a matching pair of garden gnomes.

 

 

All the children turned as one and looked at the teachers, a young man and woman who could have been siblings, if not twins, and with the same reddish-auburn hair, the woman’s long and lustrous. “We are not from Scotland,” the man said, as if we needed convincing, “but we have come from far to study this referendum.” His accent was trans-Atlantic, with a hint of something else underlying it. Scandinavians, Jamesie decided, winking when Lizzie intercepted his gaze lingering on the young woman. “What is the name of the town just ahead?” the young woman asked in an accent identical to the young man’s. “Balnadunnie”, Lizzie said, and the young woman nodded in a manner reminiscent of the children’s jerky movements. “This is where the voting samples for this area are taken as representative of the whole of Scotland, postal and polling station. We’ve been the indicator of the Scottish voting patterns for many years.” Lizzie sounded proud and she was maintaining a pseudo ‘posh’ accent for the visitors’ benefit. She added, wistfully: “This referendum result is very important, of course. We lost last time, you see… ”

The group set off again, heading for Balnadunnie, and not even an exchanged whisper reached our ears. “No big talkers, those bairns”, said Jamesie, intending his remark to be sotto voce, but a megaphone would have had trouble outdoing him. He himself had been a wee tearaway at school and he could not conceive of any child that was as serious as those wee Scandis. “Ay,” Lizzie agreed, “I could clip cloots wi ma tung when I wis that age, me and Hetty, ma pal.” “Ay, I mind. I got detention because of you and Hetty: the teacher thought it wis me and Erchie Campbell bletherin.” He saw our looks and added hastily: “We had high voices then, as wee laddies.” They stared after the crocodile for a long time, following in its footsteps, a couple of hundred yards behind until it disappeared inside the hall. “Is it no a bit late for the wee ones tae be oot?” Lizzie asked no one in particular.

They encountered them again in the town hall where they were being treated as honoured guests for the count, everyone surprised that such young children would be so interested in the political goings-on of another country. If anything, Lizzie noticed and pointed it out to us, it was the children who were wide-eyed and attentive, the teachers looking sleepy-eyed and impatient, their roles reversed. They did not have long to wait, though, as the ballot boxes began to arrive, the contents shaken out and spread across the tables. Lizzie nudged Jamesie, I noticed, and nodded her head in the direction of the Scandinavian group. We could all feel the individual concentration of each child and of the teachers concentrated as one on the ballot papers. “I hope my pulses have worked and the Heavens will smile on us the night,” Donnie whispered to me, crossing his fingers to show solidarity with Lady Luck, too.

As soon as the count ended, the two teachers and their charges rose from their seats as one and headed for the door. Jamesie and Lizzie followed them, and Donnie and I followed Jamesie and Lizzie, worried that the children might get lost in the late gloaming. “We could try and arrange a lift for you all,” Jamesie suggested. The two teachers spoke as one: “We have transport. Just over the crest of the hill. We have had a productive and very tiring day, so we will make our way back now. You are very kind.” They both yawned extravagantly, and all the children looked at them askance. Lizzie smiled: “Which part of Scandinavia do you come from? Norway, maybe?” The group all stared at her, hard, as if she had said something unintelligible, and the young woman shrugged. “We must go now.”
Lizzie nodded. “I hope it won’t hae been wasted, your trip,” her ‘posh’ accent abandoned or, more likely, the effort was just too exhausting. “If we dinnae win, I mean.” She took a thought then: “Maybe you’re nae bothered who wins, though?”
The whole group exchanged glances. “We came to see you win,” said the young man, leading the crocodile that had already formed up towards the road and back the way they had come. “But you haven’t heard the result,” Lizzie said. The group looked back at her for a moment, and walked on. We four stood and watched once again until they disappeared from view. “It’ll kill me if we dinnae win this time,” Donnie sighed. We all gazed at the hill over which the crocodile had disappeared from sight, as a rosy dusk settled over the distance, illuminating the sky with what seemed almost to be leaping flames. “In the name o the wee man, they’ve left a campfire burnin and set fire tae the woods up there,” Jamesie shouted and started running up the road, with the rest of us in hot pursuit, knee joints and hips protesting vigorously.

As we neared the brow of the hill, we could feel an intense heat. “It’s like Spain, Lizzie, when I got sun-burnt,” puffed Jamesie, “except in Scotland!” He looked at me and Donnie: “I couldnae haud my drink for three days.” I glanced at him. He had a red glow to his face. So had Lizzie and Donnie. I put a hand to my own face and felt the warmth. The heat was tremendous, but there was no campfire in sight, just a very large, rounded and flattened piece of ground surrounded by smoking trees. “Oh the wee ones!” Lizzie wailed, as a silver flash of lightning lit up the sky. “Where are they?” She stumbled forward. “Whit wis that roarin noise?” For once, Jamesie held his tongue. He looked a bit sick. “Ay, I heard it tae. Did you lads?” We nodded, not entirely sure that we had. We ran back to the town as fast as our various arthritic ailments allowed, geriatric Olympians, and alerted the fire service and police. They found no trace of the Scandi group either, and were just as puzzled as we had been by the burned ground.

The police did put out an alert to the ports, especially the ones connecting Scotland and the Scandinavian countries, but no one had seen them. Later, after a couple of days had passed, the local police informed us that no registered group from any of the Scandinavian countries had travelled to Scotland for the referendum count. Lizzie offered an alternative explanation: “They could hae been Russians,” she said. “Ay, that’s it, they were Russians, maybe.”

Donnie had been very quiet. “Dae ye think my pulsator worked?” he asked me about three o’clock in the morning, in his house to which we had all repaired to await the result. “Eh? Whit are ye on aboot, man?” He lapsed into silence and sipped the tea he had made to tide us over until the whisky could be opened later that morning and drunk in celebration or commiseration. The count would be over in an hour. “I mean, maybe the Big Man intercepted the pulses? I did send oot a couple of wee prayers, tae, jist in case, and I kept my fingers crossed, tae. I wis hedging my bets.” Jamesie and Lizzie shook their heads, well used to their eccentric friend’s strange ideas, which often verged on the unhinged. I gulped down my tea, ready to return to the hall and find out the worst or the best. “It’s you that needs help, man, nae the result.” Then a thought struck me: “Did youse nae think those bairns and their teachers looked awfie alike? Like clones?” Lizzie nodded: “Ay, I noticed that tae, but Scandi folk dae look alike. Remember that Borgen? And Wallander?”
Donnie snapped: “Och, awa ye go, Lizzie, he wis that Northern Irish actor!” “No, the Swedish series,” Lizzie was annoyed. Jamesie said, trying to placate his enraged spouse: “Ay, remember that visit to York, Lizzie, the Viking place? They all looked like twa peas in a pod except there wis a lot of them. Or they could hae been Russian, like the dolls that fit intae ane anither and get wee-er and wee-er. I suppose Scots look alike, tae.” We all exchanged glances of horror, and I caught Donnie looking at my head. We set off for the hall, still mulling over our strange encounter with the Scandi/Russian bairns and their teachers. After a quarter of an hour, the result was in, and the faces in the hall said it all. “They look dumfoonnert,” I whispered to Donnie. “Surely it couldna hae been that bad?” Lizzie and Jamesie looked stricken with misery and doubt. We had yet to discover just how bad it was, it seemed. When the result was finally read out, we all collapsed on to the nearest chairs and sat like giant ragdolls, staring at each other in shock. The officials, the party agents, the vote counters all seemed to be made of stone. Then, a murmur started and rose to a chant: “We’ve done it! We’ve done it!” Donnie looked at me: “Telt ye,” he crowed. “The Big Man heard by pulses! Or my prayers. Or maybe he clocked my crossed fingers!” I could hardly see him through my tears and I just kept nodding my head. “Ay, he heard ye, Donnie. Somebody did.. Now it begins… the Treaty next.”

© Lorna Campbell, 2022