The Sea for Breakfast 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

  A Place of My Own

  Settling In

  Just Hector

  Beachcombing

  Work on the Croft

  The Tinkers

  Happy Band of Pilgrims?

  Back to School

  The ‘Tour’

  The ‘Herring Fish’

  Bread and Uisge-Beatha

  The Christmas Party

  Vocabulary

  Lillian Beckwith

  The Sea for Breakfast

  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

  To

  ‘Bonny’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Bella’

  & ‘Blanche’,

  my four wild Highlanders

  A Place of My Own

  One hundred and ten; one hundred and eleven, ouch! One hundred and twelve, damn! For the third torrid day in succession I was exasperatedly discovering and extracting nails of every tortured shape and unexpected size from the wooden walls of my cottage kitchen. My tool, which I had previously understood to be a claw-headed hammer, had been bestowed upon me by Ruari, the imperiously obliging brother of my former landlady. He however had referred to it more colourfully as a ‘cloven-footed’ hammer. It was a typically Hebridean tool with a thick, rough handle and a rusty head so loose on the shaft that it was a toss-up each time whether the nail would be prised out of the wall, or whether the ‘cloven-foot’ would remain poised vacillatingly on the firmly embedded nail while I reeled back, brandishing the handle and recovering myself just in time to receive a blow of acknowledgement from the descending head. For the umpteenth time I stopped to massage tingling elbows with grazed fingers and swore as I jammed the head savagely back on to the shaft. For the umpteenth time I wished, rather half-heartedly, that the little village of Bruach were not set amidst such glorious isolation and, most whole-heartedly, that the terrain were less abundantly provided with handy-sized stones. As it was, even this poor makeshift had necessitated some diligent seeking. Still, I comforted myself as I doggedly counted my successes (simply so as to prove just how many nails one may expect to find in an old croft kitchen), the unpredictability of proceedings did serve to enliven a task that otherwise might have been as soporific as counting sheep.

  Just why any household should have wanted or needed more than a hundred nails disfiguring their kitchen I could not understand. The six-inch ones higher up on the walls and the ones in the rafters would of course have been used for hanging fishing nets. In addition to those serving as picture hooks and those used for hanging coats and oilskins, some of the rest would doubtless have been used for strings of salt fish or rabbit skins. A few dozen nails, even fifty, I would have been prepared to accept as a normal complement, but over a hundred! …

  ‘My kitchen walls,’ I lamented to Morag after my first impact with them, ‘have more nails to the square foot than a fakir’s bed.’

  ‘Aye, but that is Hamish’s men’s nails,’ she replied reverently, and seeing that I looked blank, continued: ‘Ach well, mo ghaoil, d’you see, Hamish and Mary that lived there had seven sons and all of them men y’understand? Nor like the wee ticks of things we have nowadays, but big men they was and strong, and every time one of them got back from the hill or from the sea they’d likely have a rabbit or a few fish and maybe a skart and they’d be after pickin’ up a stone just and bangin’ a nail into the wall so as to hang it away from the cats and the dogs.’

  ‘It still puzzles me why there should have been such a glut of nails all ready to hand, here in Bruach of all places,’ I said.

  ‘But isn’t the wood you gather from the shore full of them just, lassie? Have you no seen that for yourself? And Hamish’s men wouldn’t be the kind to be wastin’ them.’

  Thus was the plethora of nails explained. Now I should like to explain why I, during three picnic-perfect days of early June when cuckoos were yodelling across the sun-soaked moors and bluebells were pealing wildly into bloom, should be gloomily and resentfully pulling all Hamish’s men’s nails out again.

  When her nephew in Glasgow had been involved in an accident which was supposed to have affected his health generally, Morag, the crofter landlady from whom I had rented half a house since my arrival in Bruach three years previously, had decided that he and his wife, who was herself a semi-invalid, should come to live with her on the croft where she could keep a strict eye on the two of them. She also, she said, intended to keep a strict eye on their precocious little daughter, a design which I suspected privately, having met the child, would result in her having one more subject for her tyranny, for Morag, like all Gaels, loved to have a child about the house to indulge. Naturally the new arrangement meant that Morag and I, to our mutual regret, must part company, and I was faced with the alternative of returning South or looking for other accommodation locally. After three years of crofting life and with ill health only a memory, I found I did not relish the idea of returning to the noisy clutter of life in England where nowadays it seems there is too much prosperity for real happiness; too much hurry for humour. In Bruach there was prosperity enough for most things and time mattered little. My days were pleasant and full and the nights brought unbroken sleep so that even dreams had the continuity of one long novel in contrast to the disjointedness of a book of short stories. And undoubtedly I had grown fond of Bruach and its inhabitants, for the Gaels of the Hebrides are indeed a happy race. Even their language is happy; listening to the Gaelic is like listening to a series of chuckles; there is always a lilt even in harangue; often a smile in a scold. I might be shocked at some of the events of the day, but at night I could chuckle myself to sleep over them. I wanted to stay in Bruach, so I looked for a place of my own.

  There were two empty cottages not far from the village. ‘Tigh-na-Craig’ (House on the Rock), to the north, was situated close to the burial ground, the other, with an unpronounceable name—the nearest I could get to it was ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’—to the south, adjoined the cleg-infested moor. Faced with a choice between clegs and corpses I chose the clegs and was immensely relieved I had done so when I later heard Erchy, the poacher, telling someone: ‘Ach, the grave will no take long to dig. It’s no a County Cou
ncil burial ground so you’ll not have to go more than two feet. It’s no trouble at all.’ The County apparently insisted on four feet.

  The cottage of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ had been empty when I had first arrived in Bruach but the fact that it might be for sale did not emerge until after I had announced my intention of settling. The Bruachites are averse to putting their property on the open market but like to be wooed into graciously permitting you to buy provided you can convince them of your need and of your bank balance. Calum, one of Hamish’s surviving sons and the owner of the cottage, lived in Glasgow, so I lost no time in contacting him and in visiting the local policeman in whose charge the key had been left.

  My first meeting with the policeman, soon after my arrival in Bruach, had left a distinctly droll impression on both our minds. I had been on my way back to Morag’s one drearily wet evening when I had come upon his car parked plumb in the centre of the road, without lights of any sort. A little farther along the road a lorry too was stopped and beside it the policeman, watched attentively by the lorry driver, was siphoning petrol out of the tank of the lorry into a can. When he had transferred the petrol to the tank of his own car, the policeman generously offered me a lift home. Morag had been away in Glasgow at the time and as the policeman had yet to finish the enquiries about poaching he was engaged on making in the village, I invited him in for a meal. Earlier in the day Erchy had handed me a parcel of fish which he had said offhandedly were mackerel. I cooked one for the policeman. Before the meal he had seemed much dispirited by the results of his day’s work, but after the fish and several cups of tea his geniality was restored. Indeed he became quite jovial. He complimented me on my cooking and when he got up to go he impressed upon me that I must be very sure to thank Erchy for him and tell him that he, the policeman, had ‘never tasted mackerel like them’. I assured him I would do so.

  ‘He said what?’ demanded Erchy when I had innocently kept my promise.

  ‘He asked me to tell you he’d never tasted mackerel so good,’ I repeated.

  ‘Damty sure he hasn’t,’ muttered Erchy, turning a little pale. ‘Why the Hell did you want to let him see them?’

  ‘But you told me they were mackerel. Weren’t they?’

  ‘Mackerel indeed! D’ you mean to say you can’t tell the difference between what’s a trout and what’s a mackerel? And do you not know trout’s illegal?’

  At that stage of my initiation I was incapable of distinguishing a legal fish from an illegal one, having hitherto relied on my fishmonger to identify my fish for me. Full of contrition, I admitted my defections.

  Erchy stared at me with both pity and amazement. ‘Sometimes,’ he said crushingly, ‘I think school teachers is the most ignorantest people out.’

  Since that episode one of the policeman’s eyes had always drooped into an indubitable wink whenever we had met and now that I approached him with a request for the key of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ he appeared to find it excessively funny.

  ‘You’re thinkin’ of buyin’ “Tigh-na-Mushroomac”, are you? Well, right enough I did have the key once but I’ve lost it now. Indeed, when the door was blown in by the storm a year or two back the only way I could keep it shut again was to ram a big stone behind it and tie a good piece of string to it. You’ll see the string under the door. You’ll pull it towards you when you come out and it rolls and jams the door. Keeps it closed better than the old lock that was on it before, I’m tellin’ you.’ He was so taken with his contrivance that it seemed a pity to draw his attention to the fact that I must first get into the cottage. ‘Ach, you’ll give it a good shove just. Mind now, it’ll need to be a right good one, for it’s a biggish stone. You’d best get one of the lads to do it for you,’ he added on second thoughts.

  It was a grey day with sneaky little flurries of wind which dashed us sporadically with chilly drops of rain when Morag and I went to pay our first visit of inspection. Morag had enlisted for me the help of Peter, the son of Sheena, who worked the croft adjoining ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’. Peter was a doughty, chrysanthemum-headed youth whose shape suggested that his mother had placed a heavy weight on his head in childhood to make him grow broad rather than long. When he smiled his wide gummy smile it looked as though someone had cut his throat. When he laughed he looked as though he was going to come to pieces. He now strode beside us along the shingle track, his shoulder hunched as though in eager preparation for the assault on the door.

  ‘My,’ confided Morag with a little shudder, ‘I don’t like the look of him at all. He looks that wild.’ I glanced surreptitiously at Peter, who was wearing such a ridiculously tight pair of trousers and such a constraining jersey that it looked impossible for him to be anything but extremely well disciplined. ‘And he’s that lonely,’ went on Morag steadily as she assessed the baby hill and the bare half mile of road that separated ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ from the rest of the houses, ‘you’ll have none but the sheeps for company.’

  I told her, patiently, for I had told her many times, that I did not mind the solitude.

  ‘But, mo ghaoil,’ she argued, ‘you could die here and none of us the wiser till the butcher smelled you out.’

  Built of grey stone, ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ squatted in smug solitude at the extreme tip of Bruach bay, its two lower windows like dark secrets half buried in the three-foot thick walls. From the sloping felt roof two tiny dormer windows peeped inquisitively at the sea which at high tide skirmished no more than twenty yards away. In fact it would not have needed an unduly exaggerated fishing rod to have enabled one to lean from one’s bedroom window and draw upon the sea for breakfast each morning.

  Behind the cottage was the neglected croft which merged into the wildness of the moors and they in their turn stretched to prostrate themselves at the feet of the lonely hills. It would have been cruel to have insisted to Morag that its distance from the rest of the houses was, for me, one of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’s’ chief attractions. The Gaels as a general rule seem to have no desire for privacy, building their houses as close to one another as croft boundaries will permit. ‘Alone-ness’ is a state they cannot endure and ‘any company is better than no company’ is a maxim that is accepted literally whether the company be that of an idiot or a corpse. Not desiring it for themselves, they can neither understand nor really believe in the desire of other people for privacy and so genuinely anxious are they that you should not be lonely they continually seek you out of your cherished solitude.

  Outside the cottage Peter turned on us his cut-throat grin and poised himself ready for action.

  ‘All right now, Peter,’ said Morag. ‘I’ll lift the sneck.’ Peter rammed his shoulder fiercely into the door; there was a short, sharp protest from the rusty hinges as they parted company with the wood; the door fell inwards, see-sawed across the big stone so thoughtfully provided by the policeman, and flung Peter into the farthest corner of the porch. Bewilderedly Peter picked himself up, revealing that he now had two long, gaping splits in the seat of his trousers.

  ‘Peter!’ upbraided Morag, blushing for his predicament. ‘You’ve broken your trousers!’ Peter looked somewhat puzzled and felt each of his limbs in turn but thus reassured he became more concerned with locating a splinter which, he said, had ‘come out and lost itself on him’. I diplomatically went upstairs and minutes later heard his exclamations of relief and then his dismissal by Morag. Through a bedroom window I caught sight of his stocky figure fleeing homewards across the moors, presumably minus his splinter and with his rear parts effectively camouflaged by Morag’s best floral silk apron which she had fortunately been wearing beneath her coat. My landlady joined me upstairs.

  ‘Didn’t I tell Sheena this mornin’ just,’ said Morag complacently, ‘that Peter was gettin’ too tight for his trousers?’

  Inside, ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ was a replica of all the two-storeyed croft cottages I had seen, there being a kitchen leading oft one side of the entrance porch and ‘the room’ off the other. In Bruach this
second room was never known as anything but ‘the room’, presumably because no one was really sure of its intended purpose. Morag, in her original letter to me had described hers as ‘the room that wasn’t a kitchen’. Usually the anonymous room was necessary as a bedroom and indeed in many of the single-storeyed croft houses these two rooms, with a recessed bed in the kitchen, comprised the whole of the living accommodation. Yet in such limited space large families were reared and a galaxy of scholars produced. It was no unusual sight to see a university student at his books by the light of a candle in a corner of the small kitchen, while all around him the neighbours jostled and gossiped, argued and sang. Neither was it unusual in due course to see that student’s name high in the list of honours graduates.

  ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ provided ample accommodation for a spinster. It had two rooms upstairs and, though these were of attic proportions with the windows at floor level so that one had to sit down on the floor to look out through them, they were habitable. The cottage needed a certain amount of repair; first on the list was a new front door. But its walls and its roof were sound. I liked what I saw.

  It seemed to me that everyone in the village took a hand in the ensuing transaction, and when it came to bargaining they ranged themselves with complete affability either on the side of Calum or myself, or, with true Gaelic adroitness on the side of both parties. With so many cooks the broth should have been irrevocably spoiled but eventually everything was settled to everyone’s complete satisfaction and I became the delighted owner of a cottage and croft.

  As I could afford only the minimum number of alterations to begin with, I decided that priority must be given to getting larger windows put in the kitchen and ‘the room’. I wanted snugness but not permanent twilight in my new home.

  ‘But, mo ghaoil, think how they’ll show up the dust,’ warned Sheena, who had lived all her life in a dark, thatched cottage and whose only use for a duster was to wipe over a chair whenever a visitor accepted the hospitality of her kitchen; a necessary precaution, considering a hen had most likely been the former occupant.