Women like that, p.1
Women Like That, page 1
Women Like That
Fiona Curnow
Published by Fiona Curnow, 2025.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
WOMEN LIKE THAT
First edition. December 1, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Fiona Curnow.
ISBN: 978-1919294711
Written by Fiona Curnow.
Also by Fiona Curnow
Before the Swallows Come Back
Women Like That
Watch for more at Fiona Curnow’s site.
Contents
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by this Author
Women Like That
by Fiona Curnow
For Shona
Also by this author
Before the Swallows Come Back
Writing as F J Curlew
Dan Knew
To Retribution
Don’t Get Involved
The Unravelling of Maria
Copyright © 2025 Fiona Curnow
All rights reserved
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission, please contact fjcurnow@gmail.com
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Women Like That is a work of fiction.
For Shona
Chapter 1
1914
It was a cruel and heartless place when the navvies had arrived. Mud and machinery. Rock-face and desolation. A brutal wind howled up the valley, over the loch, and into their very souls. Rain lashed alongside it. This was a place needing tamed before it could be inhabited, but there was no taming of the weather. Tame the land. That was their job. Work it. Master it. But that weather? Christ!
Houses weren’t yet built. Not that any house would be for them. No. They would be cast out like intruders, vagrants, people of no use. No worth. Apart from to build and slave and grind away at life as best they could. Shelter for them was minimal. Canvas haphazard as if thrown down by some greater power with no care. No design. But this was at least a job. Money to be made. Lives to be bettered. That was what they had been told, and when you have less than nothing the chance of something is a call to be answered. And they had. Hundreds of men and a handful of women with promises of dinner. A settling of hungry stomachs. Shelter.
Mhairi had cut off all of her hair—rough like a navvy’s—baulked as she had taken the clothes from Jamie, her dead brother, stuffed rags into the toes of his boots so that they would stay on her feet and joined the people of the road. Itinerant workers. People of no importance. People who had fled their homes to look for something, anything, to lighten their load. People like her.
It was easier than she had thought, this disguise, this slip into someone else. She had Jamie to thank for that. The big brother who had toughened her up, challenged her, and she would not be beaten. She worked hard and the strength came of its own accord. Muscles to rival most boys of her age.
Jamie had joked. ‘Ye’ll no be finding a man when it’s time, wi muscles like that!’
‘Oh, and who says I’ll be wanting a man?’ Mhairi had answered, proudly flexing her arm, poking at the muscle she had worked so hard to create. She looked across at him, a grin breaking up her face.
‘Aye, well, just saying,’ he said, with a playful slap to her head.
They raced up the hill, as they had done at the end of every day when they’d been offered casual work at one of the nearby farms. Their income was small, almost insignificant, but it helped to put food on the table. What they had been working on was what they were paid in: potatoes, turnips, cabbage, eggs, milk, oats. It was all welcome.
Dying bracken, brown and crispy, snapped at their legs. A wind was whipping up, shouting its presence through the trees—aspen and birch with tall, tall pine trees stretching above it all, keeping an eye out—an eerie sound, almost ghostlike. The aspen and birch swayed to its rhythm, casting off their remaining leaves. Hooded crows, rooks, and ravens cawed out their warning. Magpies mimicked the sounds, a flash of white and a swirl of the colours of petrol, barely seen in the decreasing light, but their presence was felt, nevertheless.
When Jamie and Mhairi rounded the brow of the hill everything looked wrong. There was no smoke from the fire twisting out of the chimney. Strangers stood on their land. Their mother, father and the two youngest were huddled together by the front door. A rag-taggle collection of bags at their feet.
‘You’re turning a family out into nothing! How can a man of the cloth do such a thing?’ their father shouted. His wife bowed her head in grief. The children clung onto their mother’s skirt, and she to them. They were too young to understand fully, but they could feel it. The fear. The desperation.
‘You’ve had more than enough warnings to pay your rent or leave. You haven't paid and now it’s time for you to go. Let’s not make this ugly for your children now.’
‘But...’ their father began. But what? There was nothing to be done and he knew it. Their lives had been hard, a challenge, poverty always biting at their bellies, at the clothes on their backs, but they had their home. A place that was full of hope and love, most of the time. No more.
And that was that. Everything had gone. Jamie and Mhairi were old enough to look after themselves now. To find a job of some sort or other. Their parents had agreed that they should leave, fend for themselves. The family would survive easier with just the youngsters. Fewer mouths to feed. More chance of finding some sort of lodgings. A room somewhere. The family were heading to Glasgow, big and dirty and strange, but maybe something for them.
‘You take care o yer wee sister, Jamie,’ their mother called in the wind, a break in her voice, tears streaking her face. She glanced back at them every few steps until she tripped, almost fell.
Her husband caught her elbow, held her up. ‘That’ll do ye no good, now,’ he said. ‘You need all o yer strength for these two.’ He nodded down at the children still clinging to her skirt. ‘Come on now.’
She knew that he was right, but it broke her heart nonetheless to turn away and walk on, her family splintered, separated in a way she hadn’t anticipated. Yes, they were nearly grown up. They would have moved out with their own loved ones soon enough. Started their own homes, and with luck, their own families. That would have been normal. Expected. Joyous even. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Not in her wildest dreams had she anticipated this. Yet here it was, and she was powerless. A failure of a mother.
Her husband took her hand and squeezed it tight, before reaching for the hands of his children, a forced smile on his lips. ‘What an adventure this is going to be!’ he said.
Jamie and Mhairi turned back to take one last look at their little house. Peculiar how it had slipped from a place of warmth and comfort to nothing. The rough stone walls and thatched roof that had sheltered them, now forlorn. The patch of land that they had worked, grown vegetables on, limp and weary. A sadness had enveloped it all, as it had their lives.
They headed further into the countryside, quiet and lost in dark thoughts. Struggling to come to terms with this. Work and food were their priori ties. Focus on that. First, they had asked at their neighbours’, where they had put in a couple of hours most days for years now. ‘Sorry. We could give you an hour, but no more.’ It wouldn’t be enough, so they moved on, hoping for something better. They headed north towards unknown farmland. The harvesting had been done, bales of straw gathered and packed away for the coming winter.
‘There’ll be tatties needing picked, if we’re lucky,’ Jamie said, trying to keep things positive. But the adventure soon enough became a challenge. A chore. Their feet began to blister, but they couldn’t stop. Not yet. They needed shelter, at least, and work.
It hadn’t been long—more than one week, less than two—before Jamie got sick. An awful coughing and a fever and he just wasn’t her brother anymore, as he spat blood and whimpered. He was confused and weak and could barely speak for the coughing.
‘You—Need—To stay—Away—From me. Away!’
Mhairi didn’t want to. Of course she didn’t. She wanted to sit by him and comfort him and do what she could to help him. To ease his cough. To lessen his fever. She sat opposite him, her arms wrapped around her knees and watched. It was the most awful thing. To watch his life bleeding out of him like that.
And all of a sudden, he was dead. Gone. She couldn’t make any sense of it. Here and then not. Her brother and then a body, cold and lifeless. She stared blankly, her body frozen, her mind closed, her feelings deep in the darkest place of her soul, until day became night, and night became day once more. It was the shivering that forced her to move, warned her that she would join him soon enough if she didn’t take control of this.
She pulled herself up, searched the ground for some kind of a tool. Something to dig with. It would be a sin to leave his body uncovered, crows pecking at him, food for wild things, stares of disgust from passersby. No. She couldn’t do that to the remains of him.
She scratched at the ground, hammered it with a sharp rock, scratched some more, dug some more. A rhythm to it. Death’s toil. A slow and strong rhythm that made her hands bleed. That buried her thoughts. A peculiar strength took over her. It was like she was someone else, detached from him, his death. She buried him as best she could, whispered words of beauty; of what he had been to her. ‘I’ll always love you, Jamie,’ she said as she kissed the cruel soil, stood tall, turned away, and moved off.
It was a strange moving. Almost like floating; like being something else, someone else. She knew that this was her body, those were her feet that she was placing one in front of the other, that was her breath that twisted through the cold air in a plume of disappearing white. Yes, this was her, but it wasn’t. Not really. Not anymore. Half of her lay back there under the earth. This half felt empty and soulless. Push on. There was nothing else that she could do. Push on.
Chapter 2
1914
She traipsed through the countryside, keeping to the small road that they had been following. It was little more than a track carved out by horse and cart, by cattle—sheep mostly—and by itinerants like her. No-one paid her any mind as she passed through villages, past crofts, smallholdings. Perhaps a curse if she got too close; asked for some food. ‘A slice of bread? Could ye spare one? Just a crust.’ There were the kind folk who smiled and offered her enough to keep her going. The others that spat or cursed or even threatened her with violence or the police. A vagrant. A tramp. A nuisance. No worth.
Sometimes her thoughts drifted back—not that long ago, but a lifetime in her head—to when she had been loved and cared for. Her family holding her, keeping her safe. They may have had little compared to others, but that love, that belonging, was beyond compare and she had never wished for more. But it didn't do to dwell on that. It hurt so much. A stabbing to her heart that she could ill afford. No. Her brother had said there was a future up here for them and why not then for her?
It wasn't as if she was the only one. The world had been cruel to many a poor family. Folk turned out, like hers. Rents too high. Others left destitute from the famine. Many had crossed over from Ireland to find some hope here in Scotland. Anything. When she saw them, she hid herself in the bushes, always wary, and listened for clues, for direction. Things overheard could calm an angry stomach, save a life.
She heard talk of a farmer looking for help for a while. Potatoes to pick, cows to milk. It didn't matter what the work was. There would be a roof, of sorts—straw in a barn—a bit of food, even a few pennies at the end of it all.
There were almost as many children as adults travelling and working, travelling and working. Folk of her age and younger taking on the guise of a grown-up. And when the howking was done, the work finished, they moved on; some in groups, friendships that had formed, families; some solitary strangers, like her. She hung back a little, just enough to see, to size them up, to catch talk of where they were headed to.
‘Aye. Good money and months, years of work, they say.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Aye. So yon man was saying.’
She wasn’t sure of where they were headed, these men, of what this promise might be, but there was a positivity to their talk and that pulled her on. She had nowhere to go anyway, and a rumble in her belly that needed quieting, filling. Again. A hard frost bit at the land now, at her flesh. Her skin prickled with it. Breath caught, stuttered, like it was a struggle to do even that. To breathe. Her clothes, already thin and worn, wouldn’t last through the coming winter, and neither would she. This—whatever this was—had to work.
She followed, keeping her distance, but close enough to know where those men were. Keeping them in her sight. They walked quickly, as if they had a real purpose now, but she was strong and, by the grace of God, healthy, and she kept up. When they settled for the night, so did she. But that was a worry. They might move off early and leave her far behind. Her sleep was light and fitful. Always anxious. Always wary.
That place. Kinlochleven. By God! A wild place the likes of which she had never dreamed of, let alone seen. Mountains high and stark. Unforgiving. Their peaks streaked with snow. The memories of trees, bare and lifeless. A bleak valley that seemed to have no purpose other than to make the winds howl and shriek their way along it. Loch Leven stretched through it, deep and dark and foreboding. Water that could snatch the life out of you and made no pretence about it.
At the building site itself there was mud and rock everywhere. Little to bring a break to your soul, a breath to your lungs. It looked and sounded like hell. She had bound her chest tight, deepened her voice, tried to keep a scowl on her face, in an attempt to appear masculine. She attached herself to a group of men and boys. Mixed herself up with them. There was a confidence to them. A knowing. That was what she needed. They were all checked in. It was easy enough. Anyone could work there. It seemed that she had become a navvy. One of the boys.
The constant hammer of metal on rock filled the air. Explosions as dynamite blew more and more of the mountain away. Sometimes navvies with it. A man at work. An accident. A body. She found it hard to get her head around that. These men though? They just carried on. Hard drinking. Hard gambling. Hard grafting.
Do your graft, earn your wages and that was that. The work was hard though, and you weren’t allowed to stop. Not even to catch your breath. Foremen shouting at you. ‘Get a move on! No slacking.’
Chapter 3
1914
It wasn’t just that the work was hard. It was dangerous too. That first accident she had witnessed made her stop and stare. Blood and flesh. Splintered bone. It was grotesque.
‘Move along now. There's work to be done!’
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
The foreman stared hard. Like he was seeing through her. Sizing her up. Imagining what lay beneath those clothes. It was like he knew. She pulled at her cap, picked up her hammer and swung. But his eyes were still on her. That night she couldn't sleep. The canvas hut was full of men. Many sharing bunks. Snores and a filthy stench of stale alcohol and manliness filled all the empty spaces. For the first time she felt like her difference stood out for all to see. Now she was vulnerable. Exposed. Frightened.
The clattering of the night shift drowned out most of the snoring. The rhythm of it thumped through her body. There could be no sleep. Not now. He knew. She was sure of it. The foreman knew. She was at risk now. Fearful. He could use her. She had never witnessed such things, but she had heard. Young women like her for the taking. No. She couldn’t allow that to happen. It was done. Her time here was done. She should never have come anyway. As if she could pretend like that; as if she could become one of them.
