The Hills is Lonely (6 page)

‘Don't forget the cockerel,' she reminded me as she disappeared with her milk pail.

I knew I should never forget the cockerel.

My stay in Bruach lengthened from weeks to months and looked as though it might continue indefinitely, for the attractions of the Hebrides are indisputable and compelling; there were times when I felt I could not wish to forsake them for whatever England might offer in recompense. I soon surprised myself by becoming interested in agriculture generally and surprised my neighbours by my zeal in learning to milk, to plant and hoe potatoes, to make hay and even to scythe and to cut and carry peats.

The transition from town to croft life was accomplished without too much difficulty, though it was certainly not without its humorous side. Despite Morag's expert instruction, my early efforts were amateurish in the extreme: my haycocks, however painstakingly built, were wont to collapse; my corn-stooks curtsied; potatoes habitually impaled themselves on the tines of my fork; my scything was erratic to the point of danger—(‘You'll be hoppin' around on one feet if you thrust yourself about like that,' Morag continually warned.) However, perseverance brought some measure of skill and in time my offers of voluntary labour came to be accepted by the villagers with something akin to eagerness instead of sly mirth.

My own unfamiliarity with country folk and their habits was, if anything, outrivalled by the Bruachites' ignorance of English people, for Bruach was extremely isolated and, apart from a meagre sprinkling of tourists who came and went during the summer months, it was only the indefatigable researchers into crofting conditions who ever succeeded in negotiating the steadily worsening roads and penetrating the quiet seclusion.

The general impression seemed to be that ‘the Englishman is a fool but his money is good,' and during the whole of my Hebridean sojourn I doubt if I gave the Islanders cause to alter that opinion. I must admit that at first it comes as a shock to the egotism to realise how far one is discounted merely because of being English, though one eventually grows accustomed to it: so that I was not more than ordinarily surprised when Morag, after telling me that a certain woman had been married twice, replied, in answer to my observation that I had heard the woman had been married three times: ‘Aye, my dear, so she has rightly, but the first one was an Englishman.'

The phenomenon of an Englishwoman actually resident among them—and an uninquisitive Englishwoman at that—was enough to arouse the curiosity of the crofters to fever pitch, and my movements were followed by the populace as eagerly as the movements of Royalty are followed by the Press. Trifling incidents which befell me during my walks were already known to Morag before I returned home, and inevitably her greeting would be some comment on the day's adventures, such as; ‘I'm hearing you met so-and-so by such and such a place today,' or: ‘They're after tellin' me that you near got caught by the tide and had to paddle.'

This constant prying on my activities was naturally a little irksome, but I assured myself that the interest was only temporary and soon I should be able to enjoy my leisure without feeling myself to be the cynosure of all eyes. As I have said, I knew practically nothing about country folk!

Some of the stories concerning my initiation into Island life are still told in Bruach today, and will, I am sure, continue to be told for years to come. The story for instance of how, after volunteering to collect a broody hen for my landlady, I struggled the whole length of the village, one hand clutching one leg of a vociferously outraged bird which flapped wildly above my head, the other hand shielding my eyes from I knew not what. Morag, striving to compose her features, met me outside the house.

‘What fool gave you that?' she asked.

I explained with some irritation that the lady of the house had been out and that the ancient grandfather and myself had chosen this hen because it happened to be the only one sitting down at the time.

‘Why, a broody hen should sit under your arm as quiet as a lamb,' she told me, ‘but that rascal you have there will no sit on an egg supposin' you set a haystack on top of her.'

My spirits sank on learning that my errand had been in vain. ‘What shall I do with her then?' I demanded, for the hen's struggling and clamouring showed no signs of decreasing.

‘Let go of her leg,' counselled Morag, adding optimistically, ‘she'll likely find her own way home.' I let go the leg and the hen, still squawking, flew heavily towards the sea.

‘That's no a broody hen at all,' said my landlady. ‘You can always tell a broody hen by her clockin'.'

A few days after this episode, I was passing a neighbour's garden when I happened to notice a sulky, bedraggled-looking hen which was being cold-shouldered by its companions. It looked distressingly familiar. I was sure in this case that Morag's optimism had not been justified and that it was up to me to do something about it, so sidling over the wall, in a manner that was fast becoming second nature, I cautiously approached the bird.

‘Chuck, chuck,' I called seductively.

The hen appeared to have recognised me and, with a frenzied squawk which immediately stirred the rest of the hens into a screaming cacophony of terror, she took wing, scattering stray feathers as she flew, and disappeared behind a distant byre. I never saw her again. I doubt if her owner did either.

They tell too the story of the pet sheep.

It happened that I had taken a picnic lunch and had spent a long day exploring the moors. Evening was coming on by the time I started on the homeward road and I had not gone far when I heard a forlorn ‘baa' and looking round saw a lone sheep hurrying towards me.

‘Hello,' I greeted it, and as it ‘baad' and rubbed itself against me in an ecstasy of recognition I knew it to be a motherless lamb which Ruari had brought home from the hill for his wife to bottle feed. The lamb had, not unnaturally, become the pampered pet of the household, cropping the grass of the park and running in and out of the kitchen like a frisky child. When it had grown into a fat and sturdy ‘wether' it had become rather a problem and had to be banned from the house. Unfortunately, this did not discourage its devotion and it rarely ventured far afield, except to follow Ruari or Bella whenever they went to the well.

How the sheep had managed to stray so many miles from home I was at a loss to understand. Whether it really knew me or whether it would have thrown itself on the mercy of any passing human I could not be sure, but there was no escaping the fact that it was lost and that it was delighted to see me. I was certain Ruari would be missing the beast and wondering what had happened to it. Doubtless at this moment he would be out looking for it. With this in mind I unwound the scarf from my neck and tied it around the wether; then, feeling rather like the Good Shepherd and anticipating Ruari's gratefulness for having restored the lost sheep to the fold, I led the animal homeward. It was eager enough to be led and trotted obediently beside me all the way until, as we neared Ruari's house, I slipped my scarf from its neck and waited to see what would happen. Rushing forward delightedly, the wether bounded through the gate and, running up to the door of the house, commenced butting it with its horns, ‘baaing' happily.

The door opened quickly and Ruari, obviously interrupted in the ritual of shaving, appeared on the threshold. I was just congratulating myself on my good deed when I was shocked to hear Ruari utter a curse which made me flinch and to see him put his boot against the thick fleece of the former pet and push it roughly away. He then embarked on an ear-stinging recital of the poor beast's pedigree, during which he got right down to fundamentals. Turning, he saw me.

‘Look!' he commanded exasperatedly. ‘Fourteen miles and more I trudged yesterday with that beast. Fourteen miles I took him to try would I lose him, and here he is back at my own doorstep within twenty-four hours!' A resentful oath bubbled again in his throat. ‘Would you believe it. Miss Peckwitt, that a beast would know its way home from fourteen miles away?'

I replied feebly that I should have great difficulty in believing it, and Ruari, still muttering, drove the unhappy animal towards the byre.

With ears still singing I slunk away home where Morag awaited me. Almost the first words she said were: ‘You'd best give me your scarf and let me wash it. It'll be smellin' awful strong of sheep likely?'

Before I had been long in the village I discovered that one of the essential differences between the English and the Hebrideans is that, in general, the former ‘live to eat' and the latter ‘eat to live'. There is a vast difference. The crofters ate sporadically, alternately gorging and fasting, while their eating habits made those of savages seem relatively elegant. As a consequence one saw otherwise healthy people looking as wishy-washy as a bowl of gruel; swallowing spoonful after spoonful of baking-soda or patent stomach powder, and if they were ‘educated' punctuating their conversation with so many ‘excuse-me's' that listening to them was like listening to the playing of a badly cracked gramophone record. In all my years in Bruach I never once met a crofter who regularly enjoyed his food. ‘Sore stomachs' were such a frequent complaint that the job of the doctor must have been as monotonous as working at a factory bench, so busy was be kept cutting out identical pieces from an interminable procession of stomachs.

The fare was plain and shockingly lacking in variety. Except for the ubiquitous turnip, vegetables were practically unknown, the average crofter having as little inclination for the eating of vegetables as he has for the growing of them. So much is he in the thrall of his own fatalism that he will stand beside a plot of good cabbages and placidly assert that ‘cabbages will not grow hereabouts'. So hypnotic are his mellow pathetic tones that the inexperienced are inclined to accept the truth of this astonishing statement despite the evidence of their own eyes.

In many ways my landlady, having been employed in the laird's kitchen ‘till lately' (twenty-five years since!), was far superior to her neighbours both in the preparation and serving of meals, a circumstance for which I was ineffably grateful. She had even progressed far enough to boil mint along with new potatoes, which she did, she said, ‘because new potatoes is poisonous and the mint sucks the poison to itself'. However, the laird's menus struck me as having boasted scarcely more variety than those of his tenants, and I had some difficulty in persuading Morag that there were puddings other than rice and custard, and that there were more palatable ways of cooking young chicken than boiling it in a pot along with chunks of ancient turnip. She was always very anxious to please and accept my suggestions without rancour, though she was inclined to dismiss the idea of serving a separately cooked vegetable each day of the week as eccentricity or, as she put it, ‘city swank'.

Quite soon after I had arrived in Bruach Morag's own small stock of turnips had become exhausted and as we were then without vegetables she suggested that I should pay a visit to ‘Old Mac', who, at the age of eighty-four, had decided that it was time he started to save up in readiness for his old age. With this object in view he was reputed to have begun experimenting with the novel idea of growing vegetables for sale to hotels on the mainland.

I set out for old Mac's one chilly January morning. The moors were grizzled with hoar frost and the heather roots crisp under foot. A biting easterly wind frisked and rippled through the shaggy coats of the Highland cattle which grazed desultorily, one eye on the sparse grass, the other on the fence which barred them from the clustering buildings below, whence they were expecting their owners to appear bringing them filling bundles of hay. As I passed they lifted their heads hopefully and then, disappointed, returned to the task of filling their enormous bellies.

Dropping down the hillside I came upon Old Mac's croft, which was rush-grown and mossy, and decidedly unpromising-looking even to my inexperienced eye. The house itself huddled low into the hillside and from the single podgy chimney which pierced its grey thatched roof sprouted a wavering plume of peat smoke. I knocked on the door, over which drooped a dark moustache of battered ivy, and the old man's niece, a virago of about forty who also sported a dark moustache, appeared in answer to my summons. I acquainted her with my mission and, all smiles, she led me towards a small thatched shed where her uncle, white-bearded and as podgy as the chimney pot, sat—‘marrying his potatoes', the niece explained. I thought I must have heard incorrectly but there the old man was, a heap of potatoes on either side of him. With serious concentration he took a potato from each heap, cut them into the required shapes with a meticulousness which would have been obscene in anyone less primitive, and then tied them together tightly with string. He hoped, he told me, to produce by this method a new variety which he intended to call ‘Mac's Victory'.

Like Ruari, old Mac was rather deaf but, unlike Ruari, his speaking voice was inclined to be low and confidential. When the necessary civilities were over and the virago had departed to put on the kettle I repeated my errand. Mac shook his head.

‘Turnips?' he said; ‘it's no good tryin' for to grow turnips here.'

‘Too sour?' I asked politely.

Mac glanced quickly towards the door from which came the sound of his niece's receding footsteps. He put a warning finger to his lips.

‘Yes,' he agreed fervently. ‘She's been like that ever since her operation. I don't know what's come over her.'

I had an uneasy feeling that the footsteps had paused.

‘I mean the soil,' I put in hurriedly.

‘Oh aye,' agreed Mac. ‘Can't grow turnips.' He sighed deeply. ‘The doctor said it might be her glands. I don't know … ever since her operation …'

‘Did you ever try to grow turnips?' I persisted desperately in unnecessarily loud tones. To my relief the footsteps recommenced and then died away.