Miss Tait and Tommy and the Carol Singers

A Christmas story by George Mackay Brown

There was a very severe old lady called Miss Tait who lived alone with her cat Tompkins in a big house at the end of the village.

Miss Tait found her grandfather’s thick hickory stick in the attic, and blew the cobwebs off it. ‘This,’ said Miss Tait to Tompkins, is for the next young villain who comes round this house!’
And she made a fierce flourish with the stick until it whistled through the cold gray air of her kitchen.

All the village children avoided Miss Tait’s house. She was especially severe if they came round on Bonfire Night, or to collect for charity – though it was well known that Miss Tait was the richest person in the island, by far. The tin tea caddies on her mantelpiece, it was said, were stuffed with musty-smelling moth-eaten twenty-pound notes. They made a point of putting treacle on her door-knob at Halloween, and once they tied an empty tin to the tail of Tompkins the cat.

How enraged Miss Tait was! She phoned the island councillor, district councillor, J.P., and the police office in Kirkwall. But nobody could find out who the wicked young scoundrels were who had inflicted such mischief on Miss Tait and Tompkins.

Miss Tait found her grandfather’s thick hickory stick in the attic, and blew the cobwebs off it. ‘This,’ said Miss Tait to Tompkins, is for the next young villain who comes round this house!’

And she made a fierce flourish with the stick until it whistled through the cold gray air of her kitchen.

Tompkins took one alarmed leap from floor to dresser-top. The air was cold because it was mid-December and Miss Tait had lit no fire since the miners’ strike began.

The village children practised their carols, to sing here and there about the island two nights before Christmas.

All the children except Tommy practised their five or six chosen carols round the school piano, after four o’clock.

Tommy was not included because he had a voice like a crow; and, more than that, whenever the children did anything communally like a play or a bonfire, Tommy always ruined it with some piece of stupidity or clumsiness.

Two nights before Christmas, the choir, well muffled in bonnets and mittens and scarves, set out in lightly falling snow to sing their carols. How pure and sweet their voices sounded at the cross-roads, and outside the inn, and at the teacher’s house and the manse and the doctor’s house – Once in Royal David’s City, Away in a Manger, O Come All Ye Faithful.

As the choristers went through the falling snow to sing at their last station, the block of new council houses, one of them wondered where Tommy might be?

‘Oh,’ said Mary who had the sweetest voice in the choir, ‘I saw him down at the shore, with a sack, just at sunset.’

After they had sung Mary’s Boy outside the council houses – and got more 5p and 10p pieces, so that the collecting box rang like a bell – Willie (who was game for anything) said, ‘Let’s go and see what kind of a Christmas Miss Tait is having’…

That caused a fluttering among the girls! They had heard about Miss Tait’s stick and how she meant to thwack boys and girls who came about her doors.

‘It’ll be miserable in there!’ said Sandra. ‘No Christmas tree. No decorations. Not even a fire!’

But, greatly daring, softly through the snow they stepped to Miss Tait’s window and peeked through.

They nearly fell on top of each other in astonishment!

For who was sitting in Miss Tait’s armchair, eating an apple, but Tommy the outcast! And there was a fire of wood in the grate, burning bright! And there was a sack of wood – shore-gathered – on the floor.

And every now and then Tommy threw a piece of a fish-box on to the flames.

The bowl on the sideboard was heaped with apples, tangerines, grapes, oranges, bananas and nuts.

Miss Tait looked very happy, sitting in her rocker.

But suddenly she was aware of the faces at the window. She made towards the door. And the silent choristers, clustered outside the window, fled. The girls shrieked! Mary slipped in the snow, and cried in terror.

‘Come back!’ cried Miss Tait from the open door, and it was as if her voice glowed like a candle and trembled like a bell, through the falling snow, ‘I have a new pound coin for each of you.’

The choristers returned one by one, with smoking breaths. They stood outside Miss Tait’s open door. They sang, We Three Kings of Orient Are.

Then one by one they came in and stood by the fire. ‘Tommy brought me driftwood,’ said Miss Tait. ‘Now, who likes oranges?’

Tompkins purred merrily beside the blaze.

This story, and more festive tales can be found in George Mackay Brown – Christmas Stories, published by Galileo, and available in all good bookshops.

Text reproduced by permission of the Estate of George Mackay Brown.

Pin it!