The Sea for Breakfast Page 13

  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.

  Back to School

  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.

  My class struggled over their arithmetic, muttering, coughing, scratching their heads, jabbing pens into inkwells and doing all the other things that children do in a classroom. Fiona lifted her head and stared at me coolly. She disliked school and tended to be rebellious in class. Giggle and Sniggle, their hair-styles making them look as though they were going to take wing at any moment, chewed pens and whispered to each other. Both twins were backward, hence their presence in the junior class. A series of sniffs, resonant with satisfaction, claimed my attention and I traced them to a little boy with an exceedingly turned-up nose whom l knew only as ‘Beag a Mor’ (Big and Small). Apparently he had been given the same name as an elder brother and when the brother had died the younger one,
for some implausible reason, had inherited both adjectives. I went over and asked him quietly if he had a handkerchief. He delved into a pocket and after much rummaging produced a filthy tatter that led me to suspect that his nose might have turned up at the sight of it. Seeing my look of revulsion he explained engagingly that his handkerchief was not dirty. It was just that it had been tucked under a black jersey he had been wearing and when the jersey had got wet it had leaked.

  As the children worked, there arose a strong tang of seaweed that competed with the smell of soapy washing to fill the classroom. Most of them were chewing and when they thought my attention was elsewhere they would furtively pull from under their desks sections of the peeled stalks of tangle-wrack, which they called ‘staff’, and from which they took large bites.

  From the other side of the curtain camp the sibilant voice of the head teacher who was putting her class through the agonies of mental arithmetic.

  ‘If one egg costs twopence halfpenny, how much does twelve eggs cost?’ and without waiting for an answer she carried on conversationally, ‘Did your mother’s hens lay yet, Jessac?’

  ‘No, they didn’t yet.’

  ‘Fancy that! I got eight from my fifteen yesterday. Did yours lay, Johnny?’ Johnny’s reply was inaudible. ‘See and tell your mother to put in some spice with their food. The van sells it and it makes a great difference, I find. Now where were we?’

  After a few more questions asked and answered her voice again penetrated my consciousness.

  ‘If ten pounds of sultanas … Annac, did I not hear your mother askin’ at the van for sultanas last week?’

  ‘I believe she did.’

  ‘Well, mind and tell her when you get home that Ian the shop has some lovely ones, but she’ll need to hurry because everybody was buying them to make dumplings when I was there.’

  And again: ‘Pomegranates are threepence halfpenny.… Has anyone here seen a pomegranate?’ No one had apparently because she went on to explain ingenuously: ‘It’s a fruit like a cucumber. Anyone who’s seen a cucumber has very nearly seen a pomegranate.’

  When written arithmetic was substituted for mental she set them the old faithful one of the taps and the water cistern but adroitly she rendered it, ‘If your boat was leaking and the sea was comin’ into it.…’

  Thus companionably lessons progressed. Was it perhaps, I mused, partly because of homely observations such as these that Highland education is second to none? My musings were interrupted by a knock on the door of the classroom and the teacher, answering it, stayed talking to someone in the porch for a few minutes.

  ‘It’s the shepherd,’ she came through the curtain and whispered to me hoarsely. ‘He’s after leavin’ his job here and he’s wantin’ me to write him a reference.’

  When morning break came the head took her pan of sheets and prevailed upon the canteen cook to give her a hand with the wringing and before the end of break they were billowing on the line across the school garden. At lunch time the children trooped into the tiny canteen shed at the back of the school where Giggle and Sniggle were deputed to act as waitresses. There were so many eager hands ready to grasp the plates as they appeared, however, that serving was accomplished with astonishing rapidity, as indeed was everything else. The meal began with Scotch broth and uproar.

  ‘Anyone want my vegetables?’ shouted the teacher as she ladled up her soup and pushed the vegetables to the side of her plate. ‘Big and Small’ came over and claimed the barley but he did not want the vegetables. She repeated the question, standing up and offering her plate like a market woman offers a bargain: there were no takers. The speed with which the children shovelled down all their food was phenomenal. With grubby fingers they crammed the utensils into their mouths and gulped, spilled, gurgled and sucked like starved puppies. I watched them, spellbound, reflecting upon all the sore stomachs in Bruach and remembering that a tin of bicarbonate of soda was as much of, a necessity on the table at mealtimes as sugar or salt and as familiar an ornament on a mantelpiece as a tea caddy.

  ‘It’s no wonder the canteen’s full of rats,’ said the teacher through a mouthful of mince; ‘they spill that much of their food. I’ve had to get some rat poison and I’m goin’ to put it down when school’s over.’ I offered to stay and help.

  Giggle, leaning over me, whispered something that seemed to imply I was a ‘cursed tart’ but which I knew was merely an offer of custard with my prunes. The meal was cleared away while the cheeks of the children were still bulging with their last mouthfuls and we stood up and thanked God for what we had received, though I considered a more appropriate grace would have been ‘Thank God we didn’t choke’.

  Outside the sun was brilliant, raining silver darts on the blue water and gilding the steep cliffs of the cove that sheltered the school. I sat on the steps watching the children, and the teacher brought out a basket of darning and joined me. There were few games the children could play in Bruach. It was nearly always too windy to skip; it was too steep for ball games; too rough for playing hop-scotch. The younger ones strolled now in groups along the shore, poking into rock pools or playing a clumsy game of ‘tag’ over the boulders. One child walked alone playing with a chopped-off hen’s leg of which he pulled the exposed sinews so that the toes opened and closed with horrid agility. Some of the older boys had found a washed-up pit-prop and began a game of ‘tossing the caber’ while others played at ‘finger-stones’, a most peculiar game resembling rubbing one’s tummy with one hand and patting one’s head with the other. The first and second fingers of the left hand are slid to and fro over a boulder whilst the boulder is hit rhythmically with a stone held in the right hand. It is a savage method of I.Q. assessment, the less alert boys frequently hitting their fingers; it was considered a great joke locally to get the village idiot playing ‘fingerstones’.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to go back to teaching?’ asked the head suddenly.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Fancy! I wouldn’t be without it. There’s always somebody to talk to when you’re teaching. Don’t you ever get lonely?’

  ‘How many of the children can swim?’ I asked, deflecting her attention from myself.

  ‘Why none of them, I don’t believe.’

  ‘It seems a pity, with the sea so close,’ I said.

  ‘More than a pity,’ she agreed. ‘Indeed the risks they take climbing about the rocks sometimes, I’d be a lot happier if they could swim.’

  I said nothing but I thought I would talk over the matter with Mary, who was not only a splendid swimmer but was also a part-time swimming instructor.

  When lessons began again the sun had moved round full on the schoolhouse windows. The fire had been left to go out but the classroom became increasingly torrid. The discarded chunks of staff under the desks became decidedly odiferous and the classroom began to give off the musty, sour smell of sweating children mingled with that of sunlight on dust-impregnated wood and cloth. The children were taking it in turns to read aloud from a book of fairy stories I had taken because there were none in the school library. I had to remind myself constantly that they were naturally Gaelic speakers with English only as an acquired language. Giggle’s turn came at the end of the story and she faltered along, stabbing at the odd words she knew with expressionless indifference and shaping her mouth experimentally over the syllables of the rest. ‘And … the … prin … cess … max … married … the … d … duck.…’ There was a burst of tittering from the class which I quelled with a look. I told her to read it through again but she still persisted on pronouncing ‘duke’ as ‘duck’. Suppressed titters came again, this time not only from my own pupils but from the other side of the curtain where the class, with india rubbers audibly in evidence, were engaged in drawing a map of North Africa.

  ‘Flora,’ I reasoned with her, ‘a princess wouldn’t marry a duck, would she?’ Flora stared at me with unblinking stupidity. I insisted she try again, telling her to use her common sense. It was of no avail. She
was still determined to marry the princess to a duck.

  Impatiently I turned to Sniggle, whose eyes were bright with contempt for her sister. ‘Murdina,’ I said, ‘can you tell your sister what a princess would be likely to marry?’

  Murdina’s hand shot up eagerly. ‘Yes, Miss. Please, Miss, it would have to be a drake.’ The whole room dissolved into laughter and the teacher bustled from the other side of the curtain to add her ridicule before she called us firmly to attention for evening prayers.

  I stayed behind when the children had gone, so that I could lend a hand with the rat poison and the teacher took the opportunity to show me the reference she had written out for the shepherd.

  ‘Is he as good as this?’ I asked doubtfully. It was an encomium. I doubt if there has ever been a better shepherd.

  ‘You’ll know him, of course?’ she asked. ‘He lives outside the village but he goes to my own church regularly.’

  ‘I know that Netta had a baby by him a little while ago,’ I admitted.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed. But he’s done the right thing by her. He’s made sure the baby was registered under his own name.’

  ‘But if he admits he’s the father and wants the baby in his own name, why on earth didn’t he marry the girl?’

  The teacher looked at me in shocked surprise. ‘Oh, Miss Peckwitt,’ she hissed reproachfully, ‘he’s a good-living man and he’s hoping to be a missionary some day. He could never marry a girl like that.’

  We adjourned to the canteen and spread slices of bread with rat poison.

  ‘They’re supposed to become thirsty with this stuff and leave the premises in search of water and when they drink they die, isn’t that the way it works?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but I think we’ll make sure they can get at water here,’ she said as she thoughtfully placed saucers of water in the cupboards.