From: Penny Plain

by O. Douglas (Anna Buchan 1877- 1948)

Anna Buchan was the sister of John Buchan. She was born in Perth and died in Peebles.

The novel is set in the Tweedside town of Priorsford (Peebles). The heroine is Jean Jardine – a young, intelligent, saintly woman. Mrs. M’Cosh is Jean’s retainer. Jean has a neighbour called Bella Bathgate who takes in a lodger – the Honourable Pamela Reston.  Pamela’s brother is Lord Bidborough. Jean Jardine inherits a large fortune, marries Lord Bidborough and lives happily ever after.

p13:

“It’s to be hoped,” said Jean to Mrs M’Cosh, “that the honourable lady will suit Bella Bathgate, for Bella, honest woman, won’t put herself about to suit anybody. But she’s been a good neighbour to us. I always feel so safe with her near; she’s equal to anything from a burst pipe to a broken arm…”

p34

Pamela Reston stood in Bella Bathgate’s parlour and surveyed it disconsolately. It was papered in a trying shade of terra-cotta and the walls were embellished by enlarged photographs of the Bathgate family – decent well-living people but plain-headed to a degree.    

P48

Later in the day, as Miss Bathgate sat for tea in Mrs.M’Cosh’s shining kitchen and drank a dish of tea, she gave her opinion of the lodger.

“Awfu’ English an’ wi’ a’ the queer daft ways o’ gentry. ‘Oh, Miss Bathgate’ a’ the time. They tell me Miss Reston’s considered a beauty in London. It’s no’ my idea o’ beauty – a terrible   lang neck an’ a a wee shilpit face, an’ sic a height! I’m fair feared for ma gasaliers. An’ forty if she’s a day. But verra pleasant, ye ken.  I aye think there maun be something wrang wi’ folk that’s as pleasant as a’ that – owre sweet to be wholesome, like a frostit tattie!… The maid’s ca’ed Miss Mawson. She speaks even on. The wumman’s a fair clatter-vengeance, an’ I dinna ken the one-hauf she says. I think the puir thing’s defeecient!”       

p81

Jean Jardine, in a letter to her brother David, says:

“…Bella is almost like a stage-caricature of a Scotswoman, so dour she is and uncompromising, and she positively glories in the drab ugliness of her rooms. Ugliness means to Bella respectability; any attempt at adornment is ‘daftlike’…”

p119

Pamela writes to her brother:

“She and Mawson have become fast friends. Mawson has asked Bella to call her Winifred, and she calls Miss Bathgate ‘Beller’.

Miss Bathgate spends any leisure moments she has in doing long strips of crochet, which eventually become a bedspread, and considers it a waste of time to read anything but the Bible, the Scotsman , and the Missionary Magazine (she is very keen on Foreign Missions)…”

p169

Miss Bella Bathgate was a staunch supporter of the Parish Kirk. She had no use for any other denomination, and no sympathy with any but the Presbyterian form of worship. Episcopalians she regarded as beneath contempt, and classed them in her own mind with “Papists” – people who were more mischievous and almost as ignorant as “the heathen” for whom she collected small sums quarterly, and for whom the minister prayed as “sitting in darkness.”  Miss Bathgate had developed a real, if somewhat contemptuous, affection for Mawson, her lodger’s maid, but she never ceased to pour scorn on her “English ways” and her English worship.

p174

“Marriage,” sighed Mawson, “is a great risk. It’s often as well to be single, but I sometimes think Providence must ha’ meant me to ‘ave an ‘usband – I’m such a clinging creature.”

Such sentiments were most distasteful to Miss Bathgate, that self-reliant spinster, and she said bitterly:

“Ma wumman, ye’re ill off for something to cling to! I never saw a man yet that I wud be pitten up wi’.”

“Ho! I shouldn’t say that, but I must say I couldn’t fancy a h’undertaker. Just imagine ‘im ‘andlin’ the dead and then ‘andlin’ me!”

“Eh, ye nasty cratur,” said Bella, much disgusted. “But I suppose ye’re meaning English undertakers – men that does nothing but work wi’ funerals – a fearsome ill job.  Here it’s the jiner that does a’ thing, so it’s faur mair homely.”

p175

“I aye wear black,” said Bella firmly as she carried the supper dishes to the scullery, “and then, as the auld wifie said, ‘Come daith, come sacrament, I’m ready!’”

p224

Bella Bathgate’s voice was heard talking to Mrs M’Cosh at the door: “I dinna believe in keeping Christmas; it’s a popish festival. New Year’s the time. Ye can eat yer currant-bun wi’ a relish then.”

p328

Bella comments on the fact that Pamela Reston, at the age of  forty is about to be married:

“an’ she’s no’ that auld. I saw a pictur in a paper the other day of a new-mairit couple, an’ baith o’ them had the auld-age pension.”

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