No Place Like Home

stapled the first two notices to tree trunks where the path leading off the track entered the wood, and were now walking down that path deeper into the trees.
‘It was a sort of crunching noise!’
Phoebe had bravely agreed, in the end, to accompany Bram and Max to put up the notices, but Bram was beginning to think that had been a mistake. When he’d slid open the glass doors onto the terrace, he’d had to fight a primitive instinct that had told him to shut them again, to keep doors and walls between his children and –
And what?
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said firmly. ‘Come on.’
They carried on through the trees, the path turning first one way and then another. In the stands of little birch trees, light dappled the mossy, hummocky ground, where brambles and other scrubby stuff grew, but as the path entered the beechwood, the huge canopies of the mature trees blocked the sun and they walked through a twilit world populated by giants, great grey giants with twisted trunks and roots that seemed to writhe their way out of the ground. Not much grew here. A russet carpet of previous years’ dead leaves stretched away to a high bank to their right. Bram knew, because he’d googled it, that this carpet of beech leaves and husks suppressed the growth of most other plants.
‘I guess you can appreciate why people in Medieval times thought woods were evil places,’ Max mused. ‘Dark and mysterious. Where robbers and outcasts hung out. Hence all the fairy tales warning children not to go into the woods because you never know what might happen, you might get stalked by wolves or kidnapped by a mad witch or–’
‘Yes, okay, thank you, Max.’
‘– a psychopath,’ Phoebe finished for him in a small voice, her hand finding its way into Bram’s as a sudden vortex of air whooshed through the branches over their heads.
Bram upped the pace. ‘Max, I was thinking maybe you could sound out Finn and Cara, find out if they maybe do have an inkling about who might be using an airgun around here.’
‘I already asked them, Dad. They don’t have a clue. We’ve put out word on the social media grapevine, but so far nada.’
‘Good thinking. Right. Let’s put the rest of these notices up.’
They stapled the last two notices to a tree at the edge of the wood where it abutted the paddock. Bram looked from the mountains and woods and fields to the house, the cedar shingles glowing in the sunlight. A few days ago this view would have made him smile, but now he felt his stomach lurch a little. They were pretty isolated out here.
Phoebe ran ahead of them towards the house. But of course the sliding doors on the terrace were locked, and she had to stand there waiting for Bram and Max to catch up.
‘Come on, Dad!’
For a moment, Bram couldn’t find the small key that opened the sliding doors, and Phoebe pressed close against his side. He could see her small chest rising and falling under her blue sweatshirt as her breathing quickened.
‘Here it is!’
Phoebe made sure he locked it again after them and even wanted to pull the curtains across the expanse of glass, but Bram was able to distract her with a text message from Kirsty, who was away for the day in Inverness meeting clients.
‘Mum says well done for being so brave and helping put up the notices. See?’
Phoebe leant into him as she looked at the message on his phone, her head against his arm.
‘You really did well, Phoebs. I’m proud of you. And now you’ve seen there’s nothing to be frightened of out there, haven’t you? Just a few noisy blackbirds and a deer or two!’
The deer had been pretty traumatic.
‘Uh-huh.’
Maybe a sing-song would help. Bram had put the guitars at the library end of the Room with a View, and he fetched them now, slinging the strap of his own guitar over his neck and handing the other to Max, who perched on one of the sofas and started tuning the strings, while Phoebe skipped off to get her recorder.
‘I’ve found a good song for our party piece,’ said Bram. ‘For the housewarming.’ He fetched his tablet and brought up the bothy ballad he’d found on the internet. Bothy ballads were traditional Scottish songs, it seemed, sung by farm labourers in their bothies, basic accommodation that used to be provided on farms in Victorian times. They’d while away the evening hours after a long day’s work by singing these ballads to each other, some tragic, some comical, some, it had to be said, offensively sexist and sometimes verging on the pornographic.
He’d found a nice one, though, about a ‘kitchie deem’ – a kitchen maid – in love with a ploughboy. He strummed his nails across the strings and began to sing.
‘Doon yonder den there’s a plooman lad,
Some simmer’s day he’ll be aa my ain.
And sing laddie-aye, and sing laddie-o,
The plooman laddies are aa the go.’
He paused. Was ‘aa’ a typo? No – he googled it, and found it meant ‘all’ in the Scots language.
‘Aa the go means “all the rage”,’ he clarified for Max. ‘What do you reckon?’
Max nodded. ‘It’s, uh, good to keep these traditional songs alive.’
‘There are four more verses.’
He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar words, but it really was a charming song, all about how the kitchie deem could have had the merchant or the miller, but no one else would do for her but her own humble ploughboy. Phoebe appeared for the last verse, piping away rhythmically but untunefully on her recorder. A musical interlude could generally be counted on to restore Phoebe’s spirits.
‘It’s quite funny, really,’ Bram said as he came to the end. ‘These ballads were written by the farm labourers, and they often put themselves in the starring roles. The guy who wrote this one was probably a ploughman.’
Max was screwing up his face a little, in the way he did