Free The Physic Garden by Catherine Czerkawska

seam, and that was useful. Susanna’s eyesight was not good, which was some excuse for her clumsiness. Jean was careless and a wee thing selfish. She liked animals and was always to be found playing with a mischief of kittens under the table, or coaxing the fox terrier that belonged to one of the professors into our garden with bits of cheese, for which it had a passion.
    ‘I wouldn’t care,’ said my mother, ‘but we can ill spare the cheese. She feeds it enough to make a good supper for herself and her sister. And she is normally so greedy, but that dog must take precedence!’
    It was true that what they lacked in concentration they made up in appetite. They would have eaten us out of house and home. My father always said as much, although he never begrudged them a mouthful of bread or a cup of milk. But when times were hard, as they were now that my father was gone, they had to make do with less, and ‘we’re starving’ was their constant complaint. But they were good humoured withall, and always laughing.
    I had, besides my sisters, Bessie, Jean and Susanna, three younger brothers, James, John and Robert. James was old enough to do his bit about the gardens. Nine years old and he could wield a spade with the best of them. He was wiry but very thin and the sight of his spindly shoulders bent over the spade would – so my mother sometimes said – make her heart ache for him. Mine too, although I wouldn’t admit as much. She would try to feed him up, putting extra bread on his plate, an extra spoonful of porridge in his bowl. But he was stronger than we realised. My father had been keen to see him schooled, as I myself had been taught to read and write, but James was a poor scholar at the best of times, and his learning had been limited to the occasional lesson from the old dominie who had once taught me, and who would try to wrestle words and numbers into his bullet head for a few pennies, when my father could spare them.
    Of the two youngest, John was but four years old when my father died, and Rab was a little lad of two, just toddling about, both of them too young to do much more than I had at the same age, although I found employment for Johnnie, who was something of a favourite with me, in scaring the birds, whenever I had planted seeds in the garden.
    Rab was the runt of the litter. He did nothing but cling to my mother’s skirts and hinder her from doing her work. He was a sickly soul, with a terrible cough, day and night, and with thesnotters always hanging into his mouth, green candles my mother called them, dripping down from his poor nose. She worried about him, but then we all did. When food was scarce, she would go without herself so that he could eat. He liked to nibble the bread and sip the broth off her dish, but his appetite was small, so it was no great hardship. And for all that he was sickly, he was mostly uncomplaining, except when the earache beset him. Those twin organs would become so inflamed that he had trouble hearing and he would keep us all awake at nights, sobbing, ‘Mammy, mammy, my ears are that sair!’ On the whole, though, Rab was a brave wee boy and Johnnie made much more of a fuss over the least little upset. When he was stung by nettles in the garden or when he accidentally dropped a rock on his toes while he was trying to help me, you could have heard his wails and cries all over the college.
    Most tragic of all, my mother was heavily pregnant with her eighth child when my father died. He never lived to see the baby, named Janet, and she did not survive him by many months, so my mother felt herself doubly cursed. For my part, I could not help the uneasy sense that the infant would have been just one more mouth for me to feed. I cannot say I was relieved at her death. I mind even yet her waxy face on the day she died, like a spent candle end, and my mother’s sobbing, low and persistent, for night after night, but all the same, I cannot deny that it was easier to provide