The Red Door by Iain Crichton Smith

who was lying on his bed. I went over to him, thinking he was ill. He had shot
himself by putting the rifle in his mouth and pulling the trigger. The green coverlet on the bed was completely red and blood was dripping on to the scrubbed wooden floor. I ran outside and was
violently sick. Looking back now I think it was the training that did it. I didn’t want to be sick on that clean floor.
    Of course, there was an inquiry but nothing came of it. No one wrote to his MP or to the press after all, not even the public schoolboys. There was even a certain sympathy for the corporal:
after all, he had his career to make and there were many worse than him. The two public schoolboys became officers: one in the Infantry and the other in education. I never saw them again. Perhaps
the corporal is a sergeant major now. Anyway, it was a long time ago but it was the first death I had ever seen.
    The sheriff leaned down and spoke briefly to the two youths after they had been found guilty. He adjusted his hearing aid slightly though he had nothing to listen for. He
said,
    ‘If I may express a personal opinion I should like to say that I think the jury were right in finding you guilty. There are too many of you people around these days, who think you can
break the law with impunity and who believe in a cult of violence. In sentencing you I should like to add something which I have often thought and I hope that people in high places will listen. In
my opinion, this country made a great mistake when it abolished National Service. If it were in existence at this date perhaps you would not be here now. You would have been disciplined and taught
to be clean and tidy. You would have had to cut your hair and to walk properly instead of slouching about insolently as you do. You would not have been allowed to be idle and drunk. I am glad to be
able to give you the maximum sentence I can. I see no reason to be lenient.’
    The two of them looked at him with insolence still. I was quite happy to see the sheriff giving them a stiff sentence. After all, the victim must be protected too: there is too much of this
molly-coddling. I hate court work: I would far rather be in my little office working on land settlements or discussing the finer points of wills.
    It was a fine summer’s day as I left the court. There was no shadow anywhere, all fresh and new, just as I like to see this town.

The Exiles
    She had left the Highlands many years before and was now living in a council flat (in a butterscotch-coloured block) in the Lowlands. Originally, when she had first moved, she
had come to a tenement in the noisy warm centre of the town, not much better than a slum in fact, but the tenement had been pulled down in a general drive to modernise the whole area. The council
scheme was itself supposed to be very modern with its nice bright colour, its little handkerchiefs of lawns, its wide windows. The block swarmed with children of all shapes and sizes, all ages and
colours of clothes. There were prams in practically all the hallways, and men in dungarees streamed home at five. Then they would all watch TV (she could see the blue light behind the curtains like
the sky of a strange planet), drink beer, or shake the flimsy walls with music from their radiograms. On Saturdays they would go to the football matches – the team was a Second Division one
– or they would mow the lawn in their shirtsleeves. The gardens were well kept on the whole, with roses growing here and there; in general, though, it was easier to lay down grass, and one
would see, lying on the grass, an occasional abandoned tricycle.
    The walls of the council houses were scribbled over by the children who ran in and out of the closes playing and shouting and quarrelling. Apart from the graffiti, the council houses would have
been all right, she thought, but the children wouldn’t leave anything alone, and they were never looked after by their mothers who stood talking endlessly at