The Sea for Breakfast (16 page)

On the day and at the, time stated I set out for ‘Pilgrim Cottage' expecting to meet up with others along the road. Sarah called to me from the door of her own cottage.

‘Aren't you coming to the party?' I asked, seeing that she was still wearing gumboots and old clothes.

‘Indeed no, my dear. The cow's just near calvin' and I canna' leave him now,'

‘I can see to him myself,' interpolated her brother, who was carrying a pail of water into the house. ‘You can go to the party, right enough.'

‘Ach well, d'you see, I canna' find one of my stockings,' Sarah went on glibly. ‘I had it for church last Sunday, and I dare say I threw it under the bed the same as I always do, but where it is now nobody can say.'

I could offer no help as Sarah wore only thick black woollen stockings. Not long after I had said good-bye to her with the promise that I would convey her apologies to the pilgrims, the bus pulled up alongside me.

‘Are you comin' to the fillums?' Johnny, the driver, asked.

‘No, I'm going to the party,' I replied. ‘Aren't you coming?'

‘Well we were thinkin' of it right enough.' He turned for confirmation to the dozen or so passengers he was carrying. ‘But you see it's
Whisky Galore
they're showin' and we might never get a chance to see it if we don't go tonight.'

‘I'll have to go to the party,' I said. ‘I did promise faithfully I'd go.'

‘Didn't we all,' said Johnny lightly and everyone laughed as the bus started off again.

The Bruach road was busy. Hector, whom I had heard swear to cut his throat and wish to die if he didn't attend the party, was now coming towards me, pushing a bicycle. I asked him whether he was coming.

‘Ach no, my cycle's broke and I'm away to Padruig's to see has he got a tsing will mend it.'

It looked as though attendance at the party was going to be sparse indeed. Morag had butter to churm and the cream would not keep until morning and Fiona had been sick all day, so neither she nor Behag could, come.

When I reached the cottage I was greeted by the flustered and delighted pilgrims. Miss Flutter was dabbing continually at her brimming eyes; Miss Stutter was wearing exotic finger-stalls on two fingers of her left hand. Inside, I was confronted by a large table bearing innumerable plates each piled high with sandwiches of a variety of pallid-looking fillings. Miss Flutter began to introduce me to each plateful; egg and cheese; cheese and egg; cheese; egg; meat paste; fish. When she was unsure of a filling she lifted the lid of a sandwich and peered.

We sat down to await the rest of the guests, I with steadily increasing dismay. When the kettles on the side of the stove had been sighing for nearly two hours and the tops of the sandwiches were beginning to curl querulously, Miss Stutter decided that she had better make the tea.

‘I've made it nice and strong, so that we can add plenty of water to it when they come,' she said with tenacious optimism as she poured me a cap that was the colour of faded sun-tan. Miss Flutter, by now completely dry-eyed, invited me to try a sandwich. I chose a salmon filling; she looked puzzled.

‘We haven't any salmon,' she said.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,' I apologized. ‘I heard you say fish and as it looked pink I took it to be salmon.'

‘Oh, no, this is cod,' she corrected me with an earnest smile and handed me the plate. ‘It's a recipe we invented ourselves to use up some that was left over.' She took a closer look at the plate. ‘But they've turned pink!' She stared accusingly at Miss Stutter, who looked guilty down at her two finger-stalls and then surreptitiously put her hand behind her back. I changed my mind and had cheese.

When ten o'clock came round and still no one but myself had arrived for the party, the despondent pilgrims packed away the sandwiches into tins. I hoped that this might mean I could escape but they felt that as I had taken the trouble to come I must be entertained, and so I sat submissively while Miss Flutter rendered
The Lady of Shallott, The Forsaken Merman
and
Abou Ben Adhem
, and Miss Stutter chafed her violin with its bow and elicited from it jig-like noises that were no more musical than a two-stroke engine.

The following day the Bruachites were abject in their excuses and apologies to the pilgrims and made such asseverations of their disappointment at missing the party that the pilgrims were ready to believe the fiasco had been largely due to their own mismanagement.

‘You know,' said Erchy, when he strolled into my kitchen some days later; ‘Hamish had to take a gas cylinder to those pilgrims yesterday and he says they're still eatin' their way through piles of stale sandwiches. They asked him to stay for tea, but he knew fine what he was in for, so he said he had to go to the hill. They've asked quite a few in to tea since the party, but everybody's too wise to go,'

‘It really was too bad,' I told him. ‘They did ask everyone first and nearly everyone said they would go.'

‘What else can you say when people asks you straight out like that?' he demanded. ‘You can't just tell them you won't go.'

‘Why not?'

‘They'll want to know then why you won't go, and if you give them a reason like as not it will turn out to be a lie. It's easier to tell them yes.' He sat down by the window and lit a cigarette.

‘How did you like
Whisky Galore
?' I asked him.

‘It was grand,' he replied. ‘My but they got drunk there, I'm telling you.'

‘Drunker than people get here?' I asked doubtfully.

He pondered my question for a moment. ‘Well,' he conceded, ‘it looked to me as if they was pretty drunk, but what I couldn't understand is, they was in their ordinary working clothes. Ach, I don't think they can have been drank at all or they would have had on their best clothes. I think they was only acting.'

Erchy had dropped in on me on his way back from gathering hazels for a lobster creel he was making for me. I had bought a small, light dinghy, one that I could launch and pull up the beach unaided, and Erchy, knowing my fondness for lobsters, had suggested that I put out a creel and try catching them for myself. It was now my ambition to sit down to a meal of fish I had caught; bread and butter I had made; vegetables and fruit I had grown; so the prospect of a lobster creel pleased me as much as the prospect of a bottle of French perfume would have a few years before.

‘What are you makin' now?' Erchy asked, as he watched me break my eggs—from my own hens—into a bowl.

‘Lemon curd,' I replied.

‘Now that's stuff I like,' he enthused. ‘There's only one thing. I like better and that's blackcurrant jam.'

‘I like blackcurrant jam too,' I admitted sorrowfully. The garden of the cottage had been a tatter of blackcurrant bushes when I took over and I had cut them all down to ground level. Since then they had yielded seven blackcurrants.

‘I'll get you plenty blackcurrants if you'll make them into jam,' Erchy offered.

‘I'll make them into jam quickly enough,' I agreed. ‘But where are you going to get blackcurrants?'

‘Never you mind,' said Erchy. ‘You provide the sugar and I'll provide the blackcurrants and we'll split fifty-fifty.'

Though Erchy's mother was an excellent baker of girdle scones and bannocks she had never tried her hand at making jam and was completely confident that she could never achieve a ‘jell'. Indeed, few of the crofters made any attempt at jam-making despite the abundance of blackberries and brambles in their season. Those with families had no storage space; and the women complained that if they did make half a dozen jars of jam then each member of the family would take a jar and a spoon and eat the whole lot at one sitting. So I agreed to Erchy's proposal.

The following Thursday evening I went along to ‘Pilgrim Cottage' for the weekly meeting. It seemed as though the villagers, ashamed of their absence from the pilgrim's party, were trying to make up for it by their attendance tonight. The women and children crowded the little cottage and we had to have the door open so that the menfolk standing outside could join in. Erchy, Johnny, Hector, Alistair, Angus, all were there. Miss Flutter was ecstatic; she lost her place when reading several times, and put her hat on back to front for the prayers. The hymns were sung so lustily that Miss Stutter's violin could be heard only for a bar or two when it managed to get away ahead of the rest of the starters. When the meeting closed the two radiant pilgrims waved blessings and good-byes from the doorstep until we were out of hearing. My own feelings of vexation at the behaviour of the Bruachites towards the pilgrims the previous week melted. It seemed that they felt genuine compunction for their neglect, and when, the following morning, Erchy brought the promised blackcurrants—two milk pails full—I mentioned to him how much pleasure it had given the pilgrims to see such a good turn-out. He agreed with me abruptly and left.

There were about ten pounds of blackcurrants and I had eight full jars on the table ready for labelling and another panful of jam boiling on the stove when Miss Flutter called.

‘Oh, you're making jam,' she observed. ‘Blackcurrant too,' she sniffed appreciatively. ‘You know, we thought we'd make blackcurrant jam today too. We had such a lovely lot of blackcurrants on our bushes only yesterday afternoon, but we decided to leave them until today.' She sighed. ‘Now we're wishing we'd picked them because when we went out to get them this morning there wasn't one to be seen. Could the birds have stripped them so quickly, do you think?'

I was quite certain they couldn't have. I was ready for Erchy when he called to collect his jam later that evening.

‘Erchy, where did you get those blackcurrants?'

‘From the pilgrims' cottage. Where else?'

‘When?'

‘When we was at the meeting last night. Why else do you think we went there? All us boys had to go, some to do the pickin' and some to do the singin'. When they sang very loud it was to warn us that one of the pilgrims was near the door and we'd need to dodge back to the service. Ach, what are you worryin' about? They would have been wasted if we hadn't got them.'

‘They were going to make jam themselves today,' I told him. ‘Miss Flutter was here this afternoon and told me that when they came to pick the blackcurrants they'd all gone.'

‘She only wants things after she can't have them,' Erchy retorted.

‘I feel terrible about it,' I said miserably.

‘Ach, just you give her a pot of jam and shut her up,' he soothed. ‘Aye, and give her one from me too. That'll be more jam than ever she would have got from her blackcurrants.'

Miss Flutter and Miss Stutter were very very grateful for the two jars of jam. They no doubt used it to help down the last of the sandwiches.

The great tit in the rowan tree behind the house had been calling ‘tea-cher, tea-cher' since early morning. I little thought at the time that he was being prophetic but, later in the afternoon when I was gathering an armful of washing from the line, I turned to see the head teacher of the school striding towards me. When I had first come to Bruach with its scattered houses and discovered its preponderance of spinsters, bachelors and old-age pensioners, I had been a little surprised to find that there was a village school.

‘But are there any children to attend it?' I had asked artlessly.

‘Surely, we can make children here the same as they do everywhere else, you know,' Erchy had retorted with ruthless indelicacy.

The heavy figure of the head teacher leaned over me as she spoke with pious sibilance. It seemed that Elspeth, the junior teacher, had been taken ill suddenly and would not be able to carry out her duties for a few days. The head herself was suffering from a severe cold and was finding the strain of double duty a little too much. Would I, she pleaded, step into the breach temporarily? I liked the idea, particularly as Mary, my friend from England, was due to arrive the following day to stay with me and I knew she would be delighted to have Bonny and the chickens to minister to for a little while.

The Bruach school consisted of one classroom divided by a green baize curtain with about ten double desks on either side. When I entered the first morning the head teacher was already there. She introduced me briefly to the work in hand and gave me instructions, and while we awaited the arrival of the children we conversed together with the taut heartiness of two women who have little in common.

‘I hope you don't object to my washing,' she hissed, indicating a pan of sheets that was bubbling away on the side of the fire; ‘but with not being so well lately I've got behind myself with everything.'

At ten o'clock the children filed in, their eyes fixed on me with passionate interest. Johnny, who had given me my first lesson in fishing from the rocks, was there among the bigger boys, and the twins, whom I had long ago christened ‘Giggle and Sniggle', each a complete replica of the other, were huddled into a desk together, bringing with them a lingering atmosphere of the ceilidhs. When the children were settled the head read the morning prayer and the whole school recited the Lord's Prayer in measured tones, their rich Highland voices lingering on the r's and softening the consonants. I noticed they rendered the third line of the prayer as ‘Thou will be done on earth' and thought irreverently that from what I had seen of the behaviour of some of the little scamps out of school hours the substitution of the personal pronoun for the possessive was not inapt.

I took out the register.

Once in Bruach I had been approached by a stranger and asked if I could direct him to the house of a Mr. McAnon. Out of a total population of a little over two hundred, it had been necessary to explain to him, there were fifteen Mr. McAnons. It was Mr. Lachlan McAnon he wanted. The information made identification only a little easier, there being five Lachlan McAnons. I probed for other details. Was the Mr. McAnon married? Yes, in his letter he had referred to a wife. The number of possibilities was cut to three. Was he dark or red-haired? He didn't know, but if it would be of any help he could show me a sample of handwriting. I doubted it; I had been struck by the fact that all Bruachites seemed to have similar handwriting. Some might be more literate than the rest but they all wrote with the same painstaking legibility and added identical flourishes. A graphologist would probably have judged them to be of uniform character. However, by a process of elimination we did at last manage to select a suitable Mr. McAnon for him to call upon and it transpired that it was the right one. The calling of the register was much like my experience with the stranger, the majority of the children bearing the same clan surname and, because the custom of naming children after relatives was followed slavishly, there being much duplication of Christian names. In my small class I found I had two Alistairs; two Angus's; three Floras; and two Morags. Two of the Floras were sisters, the elder being named for her mother and known as ‘FloraVor' (Big Flora) and the younger being named for her grandmother and known as ‘FloraVic' (Little Flora). It was fortunate that I knew them all by sight.