Lightly Poached Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/lillianbeckwith

  Contents

  Lillian Beckwith

  Dedication

  Vocabulary

  Lightly Poached

  Hic Jacet!

  In Search of Apples

  The Men who Played with the Fairies

  Family Silver

  Wild Wander

  Pears in Brine

  Not their Funeral

  Going to the Roup

  Pianissimo

  Lillian Beckwith

  Lightly Poached

  Lillian Beckwith

  Lillian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.

  Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father’s Business, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen (Arrow, 1976).

  Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children’s Film Festivals.

  Dedication

  For Philip, Katy, Tina, Neil and Anita

  Vocabulary

  Cailleach

  Mo ghaoil

  Ceilidh

  Strupach

  Oidhche mhath!

  Bodach

  Biolaire

  Thig a’s Tigh

  Thalia

  Seanachaidh

  Sao

  Potach

  Gogaid

  Orra Chomais

  Each Uisge

  Tha e breagh

  Crack

  Sooyan

  Old woman

  My dear

  An impromptu meeting

  for gossip and song

  A cup of tea and a bite

  to eat

  Good night

  Old man

  Watercress

  Come inside

  Go away!

  A teller of tales

  Here, take it

  Oatmeal mixed with water

  and pressed into a round cake

  A light-headed, foolish girl

  ‘An amulet to deprive

  a man of his v.r.l.ty

  particularly on his wedding

  night, by way of vengeance

  (A fine thing to cure

  blackguards!)’ Ad literam

  MacAlpine’s Gaelic dictionary

  Waterhorse

  It is fine (Good day!)

  A gossipy chat

  A young coalfish

  Approximate

  pronunciation

  Kyle-yak

  Mo gale

  Cayley

  Stroopak

  Oi she-va

  Bodak

  Byul-ar

  Hic-a-Stoya

  Halla

  Shenna-ka

  Sho

  Pot-ak

  Go-gad

  Orra-shoma

  Ek-ooska

  He Breeah

  Lightly Poached

  The sun-stained showers had put a sheen on everything. On the summer grass; on the craggy hills; on the gulls’ wings; on the sibilant water and on the rocks of the shore. Even the clouds looked as if they had been polished up with a soft duster.

  Between the showers I had been engaged on the urgent task of cleaning my weed-smothered potato patch, using a hoe until my aching shoulders entreated rest when I would crouch down and pull out the weeds by hand until my knees reminded me it was time to stand up and use the hoe again. I loathed weeding potatoes. As each spring came round and I, helped by neighbouring crofters, set the seed on nests of manure along the new-dug furrows I vowed that this year I would really cherish my potatoes; that I would attend to the weeding as soon as the green rosettes appeared above the soil and would continue regularly doing a little every fine day so that, come summer, I should have a trim forest of healthy green shaws rising from the ridged black earth with a definable space, weed free and wide enough for a booted foot to tread, between each row. Thus, I promised myself, I would ensure that when the time came for harvesting I should, like my neighbours, fill pail after pail, sack after sack, with potatoes of a size that could reasonably be termed Vare’, that is, fist-sized or larger. So far, however, even the most encouraging critics would never have described my potato crop as anything but ‘seed’, which means of a size equivalent to a bantam’s egg, or worse, as ‘chats’, which were hardly bigger than marbles or, as Morag, my ex-landlady, described them, as ‘bein’ no bigger than a hen would swallow in one gulp’. Too small for cooking in their jackets, they had to be peeled raw and anyone who has had to endure winter after winter of coping with such puny rants will know there is no more dispiriting an occupation. I usually ended up by boiling a panful every day, mashing them with a bottle and mixing them with oatmeal and then feeding them to my cow and hens while, swallowing my pride, I would buy a sack of potatoes from someone who had worked much more dedicatedly than I and who therefore had some to spare. Alas this year again despite all my resolutions and the tactful comments of well-meaning Bruachites I had failed to get to grips with the task of weeding in time and now in midsummer except for two short rows which I had cleaned the previous morning my potato patch resembled a jungle more than an orderly forest and with the plants scarcely a hand’s height me leaves had already begun to pale as a result of their contest with lusty persicary, binding buttercups and tenacious dockens. I knew they must be rescued now or never, so, ignoring my body’s unwillingness and the clouds of midges which assailed me every time the breeze died and a shower threatened to obscure the sun, I continued resolutely, hoping that I could clean enough rows to yield sufficient ware potatoes for my own use. Another hour’s work, I told myself, and then I could finish for the day. As I made the resolution I sighed forgetfully which resulted in my having to spit out a queue of midges which had been hovering around my mouth waiting the opportunity to explore my larynx. Kneeling down I resumed pulling at the strangle of corn spurrey which, though relatively easy to uproot, leaves a sticky deposit on the hands which proves even more attractive to predatory insects than clean flesh. I wished often that potatoes were not so essential a part of my food supplies, but to face a Bruach winter without a good store of potatoes in the barn would have been foolhardy. The crofters would have considered it suicidal.

  It had been some time now since the last shower; some time since I had had an excuse to nip back for a ‘fly cuppie’ in the coolth and comfort of the cottage. Through my thin blouse the sun was toasting my back; the exposed parts of my body itched with midge bites; my open-toed sandals—open-toed due not to design but to wear—were full of earth and sharp grit. I was sticky, dirty, itchy and achy and I longed for a respite. Straightening up I rested on the hoe. The breeze had died away co
mpletely with the last shower, leaving shreds of mist in the corries of the hills. The sea was like a stretch of blue cambric variegated with darker patches which, suddenly erupting into arrow-shaped shock-waves of spray, told of shoals of mackerel pursuing their food around the bay.

  ‘So you’re busy!’ It was Morag’s voice and I turned to greet her as she tacked across the croft towards me. Accompanying Morag was Flora, a remote kinswoman of hers who occasionally visited Bruach on holiday from the East Coast fishing port where she lived. Flora was famous in Bruach as being one of a band of ‘kipper lassies’, the girls who travelled from port to port throughout the herring season and in all weathers sat out on the piers deftly gutting and cleaning mountains of herring newly unloaded from the fishing boats; bandying ribald pleasantries with the crews and, reputedly, screaming imprecations with complete impartiality at sluggard fish porters, scouting gulls or indeed anyone who threatened to impede their work. Flora took great pride in being a ‘kipper lassie’ and always carried around with her a photograph cut from a newspaper which showed her along with half a dozen other lassies smilingly busy at their gutting and seemingly oblivious of the hail and sleet that flew around them. There was an inked ring round Flora on the photograph because the girls were so bundled up in clothes that identification might otherwise have been impossible. She was middle-aged, ‘all beam and bust’ as Erchy described her, and her eyes and hair were appropriately kipper coloured. Her voice was as strident as a ship’s siren; her laughter piercing and when irritated her vocabulary would, according to an admiring Hector, ‘take the feathers off a hoody-crow’. She was a good-natured, good-humoured soul and whilst she was in Bruach the summer ceilidhs were enlivened by lurid accounts of her adventures, quarrels, flirtations and spending sprees, accounts which I no doubt would have found more entertaining had I been able to decode more than one word in six of her broad East Coast speech and that one word usually ‘yon’. In her absence the Bruachites referred to her as to all ‘kipper lassies’ as ‘Skin-a-herrin’ Lizzie’, though they would never have been either discourteous or rash enough to have used the nickname in her hearing. Only once did I hear it used in her presence and that was by Davy, a Glasgow-bred child without a vestige of Gaelic courtesy or reticence who with his mother was visiting a relative in the village. One Friday evening when there had been the usual batch of customers, adults and children, waiting at the weekly grocery van for their turn to be served Davy was there insolently superintending his doting mother’s purchases to ensure she bought for him an ample supply of sweeties and biscuits. When Flora appeared he had left his mother abruptly, sidled round to the front of the van and begun chanting:

  ‘Skin-a-herrin’,

  Skin-a-herrin’,

  Skin-a-herrin’,

  Lizzie.’

  In the unthinkable event of a Bruach child behaving in such a fashion the nearest adult male would have grabbed him, boxed his ears and been thanked by the embarrassed parents for administering punishment so promptly. But Davy was a foreigner and though we were all made to feel exceedingly uncomfortable by the boy’s rudeness only old Murdoch admonished him with a snapped ‘Whist, boy!’ and the gesture of an upraised hand. Davy ignored the old man and continued his taunting. Flora darted a glance at the mother as if giving her a chance to take action before she herself did, but the mother had retreated into an air of intense preoccupation with the small print on a packet of cream crackers and would not look up. We saw Flora’s bosom swell; we saw her eyes glint and we prepared to flinch at the linguistic dexterity we expected to hear. But our ears were assailed by no fish-pier malediction. Instead Flora merely raised her voice to its most penetrating pitch and screamed: ‘Aye, lad, I can skin a herrin’ as quick and clean as your own mother skins the lodgers that stay in your house!’

  The delighted smiles on the faces of the Bruachites were swiftly erased as Davy’s mother turned first on Flora and then on the rest of us a look of concentrated venom that changed even as we watched to confusion as she realised that, isolated as Bruach was, it was not too isolated for us to be unaware of the poor reputation of the boarding house she kept in the city and that lodgers who had once endured her hard beds, scanty food and high prices never stayed long. Calling her son with an asperity that startled him into obedience she hurried him away.

  ‘He’s a wee monster, that one,’ Anna Vic had said severely.

  ‘An’ his father before him,’ observed someone else.

  Old Murdoch took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘As the old cock crows, so the young one learns,’ he had declared fatalistically.

  ‘I’m thinkin’ it’s wastin’ your time you are, mo ghaoil, cleanin’ your potatoes when there’s showers about. You’re no’ givin’ the weeds a chance to die.’ Morag was standing by my potato patch assessing its chances of survival with much the same expression on her face as if she were standing by a deathbed. ‘You should get at them when the ground’s good and dry.’

  The thought that much of my day’s labour might have been in vain was a little deflating but I rallied when I remembered I had carried away most of the uprooted weeds to the dung heap behind the byre where they could revive or perish without harming my potatoes. Nevertheless it was with relief that I abandoned the hoe.

  ‘Me an’ Flora,’ continued Morag, ‘was thinkin’ we’d go down to the shore an’ see maybe will we get a wee bitty dulse. The tide’s right for it now.’

  We looked down at the sea-deserted, weed-covered rocks, assimilating the prospects of dulse picking.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s pretty low tides this week,’ I agreed, confident now of my knowledge of the sea and its movements.

  Flora gave me a kipper-coloured glance. ‘D’ ye like yon?’ she asked with a vigorous nod towards the sea.

  ‘Dulse, do you mean?’ I was constantly being nonplussed by Flora’s haphazard ‘yons’.

  ‘Aye, yon.’

  ‘No,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve never managed to acquire a taste for it.’

  To me dulse tasted like strips of rubber steeped in water that had been used for washing fishy plates.

  ‘Och, yon’s good, yon,’ she commented ecstatically.

  ‘Erchy brought us a skart just the other day and Flora has a fancy for a wee bitty dulse boiled along with it,’ explained Morag.

  ‘He gave me a skart, too,’ I told her. ‘He must have been feeling generous.’

  ‘Generous?’ echoed Morag. ‘Did you not notice he’s lost his teeths an’ canna eat them himself?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I admitted, remembering Erchy’s gummy embarrassment when he had come to bestow his gift and his subsequent hasty departure in spite of the tea I offered.

  ‘It will be six months he’ll need to wait till the dentist comes again unless he goes up to Inverness himself to get a new set,’ Morag announced. ‘An’ six months is a long time to be without your teeths once you’re used to havin’ them,’ she added.

  ‘He told me he’d lost them overboard when they were fishing,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed it was the truth he was tellin’ you,’ agreed Morag with the flicker of a smile.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t wish Erchy discomfort but they say it’s an ill wind,’ I said lightly. ‘And it seems a long time since I last tasted skart.’

  ‘An’ had he yours skinned for you?’ asked Morag.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I replied. ‘I doubt if I could have done that for myself.’ A skart or shag is prepared for cooking not by plucking but by skinning it like a rabbit and then the thick red meat can be cut from its breast like steak. There was normally so much meat on one that, casseroled, a bird would provide me with four good meals and there would still be stock for soup. ‘It was last Tuesday he gave me mine and I’m just about at the end of it now,’ I told her.

  ‘Aye, I believe it was Tuesday we got ours,’ agreed Morag. ‘I mind him sayin’ he got three that day.’

  ‘And you haven’t cooked it yet?’ I asked. It was now the following Monday and as Bruach boasted no such co
nveniences as refrigerators I doubted whether in such sultry weather a shot bird could be kept so long.

  ‘But we’ve had it buried,’ she retorted in a voice edged with compassion for my ignorance. ‘Put in a poc an’ buried in the ground a skart will keep for weeks. Surely you knew that, mo ghaoil?’

  ‘Oh, I knew about burying them but never more than for two or three days. I wouldn’t have expected it to keep as long as this,’ I replied.

  ‘It keeps,’ asserted Morag. ‘An’ likely it will be tender enough when we come to eat it. Did you no find yours a bitty tough on the teeths, eatin’ it so soon?’

  I was about to deny that I had found it tough when Flora gave me a searching look. ‘Ah, but yon’s gey teeth, yon,’ she asserted positively. ‘Yon would crack bones like a dog, yon.’ She was looking at me as if she expected me to confirm her assertion.

  I smiled. ‘I haven’t been hungry enough to try,’ I told her. ‘Yet,’ I added.

  ‘We’d best away for our dulse, then,’ Morag said.

  ‘Oh, stay for a cup of tea,’ I urged, starting to gather up my treasury of weeds. ‘I’m so dry I could drink a potful.’

  ‘I’m as dry as a crow myself,’ confessed Morag. She treated the shore to a Canute-like glance. ‘The tide will keep a whiley yet, I’m thinkin’.’

  ‘The kettles’s been at the side of the fire all afternoon so it won’t take long to boil,’ I told her.

  ‘Ach, then I’ll away to the house an’ fuse the tea while you finish your clearin’. Flora will give you a hand.’

  Flora gave me a hand, accompanying her labours with such loquacious unintelligibility that I had to judge from her expression or intonation where to smile or to nod or exclaim. It appeared to suffice. As we turned to go back to the cottage she paused and with both arms full of weeds contrived to jerk an elbow towards the still unweeded part of my potato plot.

  ‘Yon’s filthy, yon,’ she commented with powerful disgust. I nodded rueful agreement. It deserved no more generous a criticism.

  It was good to see Morag pouring out the tea as we entered the kitchen and while I rinsed the dirt off my hands with a dipper of cold water and emptied the earth and grit out of my shoes, Morag, who was as much at home in my kitchen as her own, unwrapped the tea-towel from the girdle scones I had baked that morning, spread them with butter and jam and placed one on top of each steaming cup. In Bruach where all water had to be carried one never used more crockery than was absolutely essential. A cup required no saucer; a scone could be balanced on a cup until it was taken in the fingers. It might mean slops on the table or crumbs on the floor but rough wood is soon mopped clean and hens are good gleaners.