The Sea for Breakfast Read online

  ‘Why, Jinty, of course,’ I said. ‘You are Jinty’s man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is that so?’ He turned and spat reflectively. ‘Indeed I got a good son from her right enough.’ He waddled away contentedly, the youth dragging behind.

  Sheena dropped in to see how I was getting on.

  ‘I hear you had the rinks sweeping your chimbley,’ she said. ‘Did they make a good job of it?’

  ‘I’ve yet to see,’ I replied as I put a match to the paper and sticks. The stove had always been a depressingly sluggish burner. In the mornings when I got up I would light it and it would go out. I would light it again; it would show a little promise and then peter out. Oh, well, I would think to myself, third time lucky—and sometimes it was, but daily it had grown more temperamental so that lighting it had become more like the ritual of plucking petals from a daisy and saying ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. This time the paper caught quickly; the sticks were soon crackling and the flames curling round the peats and spearing up the chimney. It was wonderful.

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that fire burn so well as that before, even when Hamish and Mary had it,’ exclaimed Sheena. ‘My, but they must have given it a good cleanin’.’

  ‘I think they very nearly cauterized it,’ I murmured with a faint smile.

  Sheena had come to tell me that she was due to attend the local hospital the following morning for an ear examination and she wanted me to look out for a tinker called ‘Buggy Duck’ from whom she was; in the habit of buying most of Peter’s clothing. He was expected to be in the village the next day and I was to buy socks, shirts, overalls and handkerchiefs for Peter. There was no bargaining to be done, she assured me, Buggy Duck always named a fair price.

  Next morning when a huge, savage-looking man with great tussocky eyebrows and broken black teeth bared in a wide grin presented himself at my cottage I recognized him as ‘Buggy Duck’. His great arms, bare to the elbow, were shaggy as autumn grass; the skin of his face resembled crusty brown bread. When I had first encountered Buggy Duck a year or so previously his appearance had terrified me—until he spoke. Like so many vast men his voice came out of his body like the squeak from a stuffed toy and every bit of his energy seemed to be concentrated on producing even that ludicrous falsetto. Today he had a little girl trotting beside him—his daughter possibly, but after my recent blunder I decided it was better to refrain from enquiring into tinker relationships, for it seems that some of them cannot endure the stigma of marriage. I led them into the kitchen and while Buggy Duck untied the brightly coloured cloth of his bundle the little girl sat munching concurrently cake and apple and sweets which she had collected from child-loving Bruachites. I picked up a pair of men’s socks from the top of the pile and examined them. In a second Buggy Duck had whipped off his battered shoe and, balancing on one leg, was holding up his foot for my inspection.

  ‘Goot, goot socks, these, mam. The same as I have on myself. A fortnight now I’ve been wearin’ these and they chust dhrinks up the shweat.’ His squeak was emphatically Highland. My nose corroborated his statement; I put aside half a dozen pairs.

  ‘Those shirts,’ I mused. ‘I’m not at all sure of the size.…’ Mentally I was trying to compare the width of Peter’s shoulders to those of Buggy Duck. I gasped as, with a swift convulsive movement of his body, Buggy Duck divested himself of his thick pullover and stood before me in shirt-sleeves.

  ‘Same as I have on myself, mam. Try him across my shoulders for size,’ he invited.

  I measured hastily and put aside two shirts.

  ‘Vests or combinations, mam?’

  ‘No,’ I said emphatically, and hurriedly pulled two pairs of overalls from his bundle, adding them to the shirts and socks.

  ‘Handkerchiefs?’

  I breathed again. He displayed his stock of handkerchiefs—a frenzy of polka-dotted pinks, fungus greens and passionate purples. I chose some of the least offensive, and asked him the prices of everything.

  ‘That comes to an awful lot of money for those few things,’ I said when he told me.

  ‘Indeed, but the price of things these days makes one shiver,’ he agreed passionately. With a gusty sigh he collapsed into a chair, taking the tea I proffered and sucking it into his mouth noisily,

  I turned my attention to the child. She was wet-nosed, sticky-lipped and carelessly dressed, but her hair was the colour of sun on corn stubble and her eyes had been put in with an inky finger. Her name, Buggy Duck told me, was Euphemia, ‘Phimmy’ for short. Normally tinker children are too reticent to speak to anyone, but this child answered me pertly when I asked how old she was.

  ‘Five.’ She stared around the room, missing nothing it seemed. ‘You have six elephants, so you have,’ she accused as her eye lighted on the parade of ebony elephants strung out along the mantelpiece.

  ‘So I have.’

  ‘You have seventeen books on that shelf, so you have.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I think you must like elephants and books, so you must.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you are a very clever little girl, Phimmy, to he able to count up to seventeeen when you’re only five years old.’

  ‘So I am,’ she agreed complacently.

  Buggy Duck reached for my cup and tilted it critically. ‘Oh, to be sure, mam, there’s happiness in store for you.’ The purchase of socks, shirts, overalls and handkerchiefs, I felt, ought certainly to have ensured an auspicious future.

  ‘Go on,’ I encouraged.

  ‘You’re goin’ to come into some money,’ he predicted with shrill earnestness.

  ‘I’ll need to if I’m going to buy from you,’ I countered.

  He snorted: a magnificent sound which embodied all the resonance his voice lacked. He stood up and began tying his bundle.

  ‘Well, mam, my thanks to you and good luck till next year.’ (Just like a tinker to wish good luck by instalments.)

  I walked down the path beside them. Phimmy rushed ahead through the gate. The child interested me and I wanted to impress upon Buggy Duck that she was an exceedingly bright child, and to plead that her education should not be the haphazard thing it is with most tinker children.

  ‘Phimmy,’ I began seriously, ‘is an exceptionally intelligent little girl.’

  ‘Oh, so she should be, mam,’ he agreed eagerly; ‘it was a doctor himself who fathered her.’

  Phimmy ran back to us. ‘There’s a bag with his pipes coming up the road,’ she burst out excitedly. .

  I was on the point of correcting her when I saw the shape of the piper and decided it was not really necessary.

  ‘He’s getting the wind up now,’ she announced. ‘He’s going to play.’

  The piper turned in at the gate. I like the bagpies moderately, though I think the fitting of suppressors should be made compulsory. At a reasonable distance they provide the ideal music for the country of hill and glen, surging and wailing as it does. The trouble is that their devotees seem to think that six feet from one’s ears is a reasonable distance and more than once I have had to suffer the torment of being entertained by a piper blowing at full blast within the confined space of a bus.

  Phimmy danced and jigged. Buggy Duck tapped his foot and nodded his head. I fixed a perfidious smile on my face and endured. My spirits rose as a black cloud, no bigger than a child could hold in its fist, brought a swift sharp shower, but we only shuffled back to the shelter of the cottage and the piper did not cease for the space of a breath. Indoors the noise was shattering and I recalled Jinty’s man’s advice regarding the chimney. It was getting a blast now all right.

  At last the performance droned away to silence and Buggy Duck and Phimmy departed; the piper waited expectantly until I pressed a coin into his hand when a smile that was as thick and dirty as a swipe of tar parted his lips. ‘My thanks, mam,’ he muttered sepulchrally.

  With the onset of autumn the tinkers gradually deserted us, leaving behind them the traces of their fire
s by the roadside and discarded shoes, garments and broken utensils littering the heather.

  ‘I believe we’re seem’ tse last of tsem for tsis year,’ said Hector, as we watched a number of them climbing wearily on to their lorry one rainy day.

  ‘Good riddance too,’ said Erchy feelingly. ‘You remember that last lot was here a week ago? Got their lorry stuck in the ditch they did and they sent word for some of us to go and try would we get it out. A few of us went right enough, me and Hector was two of them, and by God! we’d no sooner got their lorry back on to the road than they was pulling out their bundles and trying to sell us shirts and socks and things, right, left and centre. Out there, mind you, beside the road! Indeed I believe they put their lorry in the ditch on purpose just to get us there.’

  I was startled the next morning when I drew back my curtains to see a perambulator at the bottom of my garden. I stared at it, unable to believe my eyes. I was sure there had never been a perambulator in Bruach. No baby would have survived being pushed over roads like ours. I went to investigate, circling it as a suspicious animal circles bait. It was certainly a perambulator—not a new one but in quite good condition. I simply could not account for its presence there and the only thing to do was to wait and see what happened. Nothing did happen, so I went to see Morag.

  ‘Morag,’ I said, feeling very, very foolish indeed. ‘There’s a perambulator at the bottom of my garden.’

  ‘Is there now?’ she asked with indulgent surprise.

  ‘Who put it there?’ I demanded.

  ‘Was it not yourself put it there?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I repudiated indignantly. ‘How could I?’

  ‘Indeed I don’t know then. You’d best ask Erchy.’

  I found Erchy mucking out his cow byre.

  ‘Erchy,’ I said, ‘there’s a perambulator at the bottom of my garden. Can you tell me why?’

  ‘Nothin’ to do with me,’ he disclaimed with virtuous alacrity.

  ‘Has anyone put it there for a joke?’ I persisted.

  ‘There’s never been a perambulator in the village that I’ve ever seen so how could they?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ I said.

  Erchy thought for a moment. ‘It must have been them times left it,’ he suggested.

  We could think of no reason why the tinkers should bestow a permabulator on a middle-aged spinster.

  ‘Oh, I mind now,’ Erchy recalled. ‘That last lot that was here when it was rainin’—they had a perambulator on the lorry and then they bought them old tanks from Murdoch. I dare say they hadn’t room for everything so they’d just throw off the perambulator and your garden was as handy a place to leave it as anywhere. It’s a wonder, though,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that they didn’t try to sell it to you.’

  We decided that is what must have happened and no other explanation ever came to light.

  ‘My, but you’re lucky,’ observed Erchy when someone referred to the subject a few days later.

  ‘Lucky?’ I echoed. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re lucky they only left you the perambulator. They might have left the baby in it too. You can never trust them tinks.’

  Happy Band of Pilgrims?

  Bruach suffered from the misfortune of having no public hall and, though the education authorities were not averse to its use, some local demigod was always sure to raise objections if the school were suggested for any social function.

  ‘We canna’ even have that W.R.I. here,’ Morag told me and Behag indignantly, ‘just because some folks thinks, it’s too sexular.’

  As a consequence the only communal relaxations for the crofters within the village were the church services or Sundays; the biannual communions; an election meeting once in five years and an even less frequent lecture by the poultry adviser, more familiarly known as the ‘henwife’. During the winter months our evenings were sometimes enlivened by the visits of young lay preachers, locally termed ‘pilgrims’, who, with varying degrees of fanaticism, would exhort us poor sinners —who listened with varying degrees of perplexity—to forsake our evil ways and return to the paths of righteousness. Some of the pilgrims stayed for as long as a week amongst us and every night we would endure the hard benches of the church while they, with white strained faces, tear-filled eyes and voices that not only grated with emotion but also implied chronic deafness of the congregation if not of the Almighty, besought for us forgiveness and salvation. Mouthing the name of the Diety with expletive violence they would adjure us to give up our pipe-smoking, our church socials and our concubines. (Curiously enough I never heard alcoholism specifically mentioned as a sin but I suppose even the most zealous of pilgrims must recognize the hopelessness of some tasks.)

  ‘What’s a concubine?’ Erchy asked, after one such meeting.

  ‘It’s a woman a man takes to live with him but who isn’t his wife,’ I explained.

  ‘A mistress, like?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Indeed we don’t do that sort of thing hereabouts,’ refuted Erchy. ‘Why would we take them to live with us when they have homes of their own already?’

  But, at a ceilidh a few weeks later at Morag’s house, Erchy referred again to the subject of concubinage.

  ‘I didn’t think when those pilgrims was here that I knew of anybody hereabouts that was livin’ with a woman who wasn’t his wife, but I remembered afterwards about Dodo.’

  ‘He’s no from Bruach,’ someone contradicted.

  ‘No, I know fine he’s not, but he was livin’ with a woman, right enough. And what’s more he’s had three children by her.’

  ‘That fellow!’ ejaculated Morag with righteous scorn.

  Dodo was a shiftless, happy-go-lucky, slow-witted character who lived in a nearby village. His house was patchily cement-washed and his croft work was never quite finished because he was for ever neglecting it to start on some new job which in its turn was dropped before completion because some other project had taken his fancy.

  ‘Well,’ went on Erchy, ‘when the pilgrims left here they went on to Dodo’s place and they must have got a good hold of Dodo for I’m hearin’ now that he and that woman slipped off quietly to Glasgow and he’s married her.’

  ‘Married her? After all these years?’ we all echoed incredulously.

  ‘Aye, that’s what I’m hearin’ and I believe it’s the truth.’

  There was a moment of silence as everyone digested the news and then Morag said, philosophically: ‘Well, if he has, it’s the first time I’ve ever known that man finish a job once he’d begun it.’

  Because of the attention of the pilgrims it must not be supposed that the inhabitants of Bruach were any more godly or ungodly than any other community either in the Islands or elsewhere. It was certainly not to Bruach that a certain missionary was referring when he complained from the pulpit: ‘The birds and the beasts and the roots of the the earth have their season, but the women of this place are always in season.’ The village had never aspired to a church social—there was nowhere to hold such a function; the practice of concubinage was, as Erchy had pointed out, rare enough to be discounted entirely; admittedly the pipe-smokers unregenerately smoked their pipes with as much pleasure when the pilgrims had departed as they had before they arrived. Nevertheless every pilgrim visiting Bruach could be sure of a full and ostensibly receptive congregation, for the innate courtesy of the Bruachites compelled them to attend the meetings. The pilgrims they reasoned, like the henwife, had taken the trouble to come to the village in order to help them. They might be no more interested in the destiny of their souls than they were in the destiny of their poultry but they flocked to the services with dispassionate regularity and listened with evident piety. After the service the women would murmur sanctimoniously to one another, ‘My, but wasn’t he a good preacher,’ or, ‘What a splendid sermon that was,’ for they are easily carried away by the tritest of dramatic performances; but once away from the church one could discern that little glint of hop
e behind the eyes that one of them would venture some comically outrageous aside and so allow them to untense themselves with a little burst of laughter. After long residence among them I do not believe that Gaels are essentially religious. They have been constrained by Calvinism, but their readiness to shed the constraint when circumstances appear to offer an excuse is, for me, sufficient proof that they have not absorbed it. They can be insufferably pious; they can also be sickeningly blasphemous. I recall once pausing on the threshold of a house I was about to enter while a devout old man read with slow reverence the nightly passage from the Bible to his wife. The lamplit ritual of the scene was most impressive until the old man, coming to the end of the reading, shut the Bible with a snap and, slinging it across the table towards his wife, commanded her to ‘Put that bloody thing away now.’ I remember too an irrepressible old bachelor living alone, who would no more have considered taking a bite of food without first asking the blessing on it man of paying his rates without first receiving the final demand note; after a stormy night which had stripped part of his roof so that the ensuing rain squalls sent dismal trickles down into his kitchen, he was sitting before a bowl of breakfast porridge, asking for the customary blessing. As he came to the end of his prayer a steady jet of water descended from the roof directly into his bowl. Unhurriedly he said the ‘Amen’ and then without noticeable pause or alteration of tone he went on, ‘But beggin’ your pardon, Lord, I’d thank you not to go pissin’ in my porridge.’

  So, with negligible effect on the community, the various religious representatives, all indifferently referred to as ‘pilgrims’, came and went. Once Bruach had been startled to find a black-robed priest in its midst; a kindly, jovial man who was every day to be seen striding the rough moors or climbing the hills, his black robes fluttering around him. ‘Puttin’ all the hens off their layin’, that’s all he does,’ Morag grumbled to me.

  Since I had come to live in Bruach a second church had been built so that it was no longer necessary for the two sects to hold joint services*. The new church was about half a mile farther along the road than the old one and was similarly constructed of plain corrugated iron. It was to this new church that Morag, Behag, Kate and myself set out one Wednesday in October to hear the last of a series of services conducted by two earnest young men who were making an evangelistic tour of the Hebrides which, they hoped, would arrest if not recall the great number of people who had back-slidden since their previous visit. The opening of their campaign in Bruach had been accompanied by the onslaught of a fierce gale which had raged almost without respite throughout the first four or five days, buffeting the walk of the church and driving rain and leaden hail against the root with machine-gun force. During the last day or two, however, the storm had moderated, first into busy squalls with flurries of hailstones that stung one’s cheeks like hot sparks, then into frisky breezes that brought tinsel-like rain, and finally this evening into a dramatic calm that was intensified by the steady sibilance of the sea outside the bay. Above the décor of hill peaks the stars flicked on haphazardly and the immature moon peeped out from a stage-wing of cloud, like a too-impetuous performer.