Silver Unicorns and Golden Birds: Scottish Traveller Tales for Children by Duncan Williamson

Author:Duncan Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Floris Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Death in a Nut

Jack lived with his mother in a little cottage by the shoreside, and his mother kept some ducks and some hens. His father had died long before he was born. They had a small kind o’ croft. Jack cut a little hay for his mother’s goats. When there was no hay to collect, and when he wasn’t gardening he spent most of his time along the shoreside as a beachcomber collecting everything that came in by the tide, whatever it would be – any old drums, any old cans, pieces of driftwood, something that was flung off a boat. Jack collected all these things and brought them in, put them beside his mother’s cottage. He said, “Some day they might come in useful.” But the thing that Jack collected most for his mother was firewood.

And Jack was very happy. He was just a young man, his early teens, and he dearly loved his mother. He used to some days take duck eggs to the village (his mother was famed for her duck eggs) and hen eggs to the village forbyes; these helped them survive. And his mother would take in a little sewing for the local people in the village. Jack and his mother lived quite happy. Till one particular day, it was the wintertime, the month o’ January.

Jack used to get up early in the morning and make a cup o’ tea; he always gave his mother a cup o’ tea in bed, every morning. And one particular morning he rose early because he wanted to catch the incoming tide to see what it would bring in for him. He brought a cup o’ tea into his mother in her own little bed in a little room. It was only a two-room little cottage they had.

“Mother, I’ve brought you a cup o’ tea.”

“Son, I don’t want any tea.”

“Mother, why? What’s wrong, are you not feeling—”

She says, “Son, I’m not feeling very well this morning. I don’t think I could even drink a cup o’ tea if you give it to me.”

“Oh, Mother,” he says, “try and take a wee sip,” and he leaned over the bed, held the cup to his mother’s mouth and tried to get her to drink.

She took two-three sips. “That’s enough, laddie, I don’t feel very well.”

“What’s wrong with you, Mother? Are you in pain or something?”

“Well, so and not so, Jack. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says. “I’m an ill woman, Jack, and you’re a young man and I can’t go on for ever.”

“But, Mother,” he says, “you can’t die and leave me myself! What am I going to do? I’ve no friends, nobody in this world but you, Mother! You can’t die and leave me.”

“Well, Jack, I think I’m not long for this world. In fact, I think he’ll be coming for me some o’ these days… soon.”

“Who, Mother, are you talking about ‘coming for me’?”

“Jack, you know who he is,” she says. “Between me and you,

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