The Sea for Breakfast Read online

  ‘Have you used it before?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know how effective it is?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really, but Sandy Beag says it’s good right enough.’ She sniggered. ‘Me and my husband were watching Sandy Beag put some rat poison down a few weeks ago round his sheds. I don’t know if it was this stuff he was using then, but there he was carefully putting down pieces of baited bread and there at his heels was his dog following faithfully and eating every piece as it was laid down. Every now and then Sandy would catch him and swear at him and start laying the trail again, but he couldn’t stop the dog. At last he shut the animal in the house, but it wasn’t many minutes before it was out again and eating it. It was a good thing it wasn’t harmful to domestic animals or Sandy would have lost the dog right enough, and he was fond of it.’ She sniggered again. ‘Indeed, I think he just decided he must put up with the rats after all.’

  ‘He should try Erchy and Johnny’s remedy,’ I said, with a reminiscent smile. The story of how Erchy and Johnny had once been given the job of ridding an hotel outbuilding of rats had often been related in the village. The two rat catchers had stipulated that they be given a bottle of whisky apiece, their professed plan being to soak pieces of bread in the whisky and to wait until the rats got drunk on it. They would then pounce on the rats before they could dodge back to their holes and hit them on their heads. They swore that rats were attracted by whisky and that their method had proved effective several times previously. Armed with stout clubs the two of them reported for work one night and the hotel proprietor, sceptical but desperate, provided the whisky. But early the next morning, so the story goes, when he went to find out how the men had got on, he found Erchy and Johnny and several rats lying drunk on the floor—some of the rats being cradled in the crook of Erchy’s arm. At his shout of rage the rats had sprung up and bolted unerringly for their holes, but the two apostates had managed to struggle to their feet only to collapse again under the full blast of his wrathful sarcasm. The most curious outcome of the night’s affair was that, inexplicably, the rats thereafter deserted the outbuilding.

  ‘Seein’ the state those two were in was enough to drive any self respectin’ rat away,’ the hotel proprietor explained sardonically.

  ‘It was your damty bad whisky that got rid of them,’ retorted Erchy. ‘And your damty bad language,’ added Johnny morosely.

  That evening I discussed with Mary the possibility of swimming lessons for the children. She fell in with the idea at once, and I sent a message to the mothers saying that any of the children who could bring a bathing suit and towel could stay after school if they wished to be given lessons—provided the weather remained calm and sunny. After break two or three of the scholars came to assure me that it was surely going to ‘make a fine day’. They shook their cupped hands and opened them to show me horrid woodlice struggling on their backs. If the woodlice had rolled up into a ball it would have been a sure sign of rain.

  The sun continued to shine, the wind stayed muzzled by the heat, and when school was over for the day every child was waiting on the shore.

  ‘All right, go and get into your bathing suits,’ I told them as Mary appeared. The girls flocked into the porch and the boys dove behind the playground walls and all emerged wearing their bathing suits—their ordinary wool vests with a large safety-pin between the legs. With Mary and me in attendance, they splashed through the strokes in the shallow water, the more promising ones being taken out individually and tutored in deeper water. When it was decided that they had had enough for the time being, they asked for a demonstration of swimming and Mary, who is as adept as a seal in the water, performed for her entranced audience willingly. Then she and I went into the schoolhouse for a ‘strupak’. We were standing on the step taking our leave of the teacher when Seumas Beag, the father of the twins, came shuffling diffidently up to us.

  ‘What are you wanting, Seumas?’ the teacher teased him. ‘Have you come to learn how to swim?’

  ‘Not me indeed. I’ll never learn to swim,’ he replied.

  ‘Why not? You’re always out in boats. Wouldn’t you feel better if you could swim?’ I asked him.

  ‘I would not. I was talkin’ to a man who was drowned once and he warned me never to learn to swim. No, what I came for was the cailleach wanted me to tell you the twins is gettin’ their tongues awful cut on the knives at the canteen. She’s sayin’ they’re too sharp altogether.’

  ‘It’s their own fault entirely,’ retorted the teacher loftily. ‘They shouldn’t push them so far into their mouths.’

  ‘How do you manage to tell the twins apart?’ I asked Seumas. ‘I find it very difficult.’

  ‘Indeed, some times I’m not knowin’ that myself,’ he admitted sadly. ‘I was thinkin’ I’d get the subsidy man to clip their ears for me the next time he comes, same as he does with the calves.’ A smile fumbled longingly at his lips.

  ‘Why was Hamish not in school today, Seumas?’ the teacher taxed him.

  ‘Ach, he’s no well in himself,’ replied Seumas shiftily.

  ‘He was out on the hill last evening, I saw him myself. Was there anything wrong with him then?’ she asked dryly.

  ‘No, indeed. It was this mornin’ just, after he’d taken taken his breakfast, he felt bad with a pain in his stomach.’ Seumas started to shuffle hastily away.

  ‘He’d probably eaten too much breakfast,’ retorted the teacher.

  ‘No more than two raw eggs boiled hard did he have,’ contradicted Seumas indignantly as he hurried away.

  ‘He’s away to warn Hamish not to show himself,’ commented the teacher knowingly. ‘Indeed, the lice that man gives me is terrible.’

  I knew from the puzzled expression on Mary’s face that I should have to explain that the teacher was referring to Seumas’s plausibility and not his parasites.

  We decided that as the tide was low we would pick our way leisurely homeward along the beach and had not gone more than a few hundred yards when we came upon Sandy Beag himself with his gun and his dog, ensconced upon a rock looking out for likely ‘starts’. Sandy complimented Mary on her swimming, and then remarked that he thought we would soon have thunder.

  ‘I was wonderin’ if you’d teach my own dog here to swim,’ he went on hopefully. ‘Here’s me after shootin’ skarts day after day and the tide takin’ them away on me because my dog cannot swim.’

  ‘But all dogs can swim,’ responded Mary, valiantly suppressing a smile.

  ‘No this one, indeed,’ argued Sandy Beag. ‘I’ve thrown him in a couple of times and he’s near drowned for fear of movin’ his legs. I thought maybe if I took him out in my boat and threw him overboard and you’d be waitin’ just by to grab him and wriggle his legs for him to see will he swim. If he knew that he should wriggle he’d maybe be all right after that.’

  Mary laughingly refused to ‘wriggle’. ‘He’s a nice dog,’ she said, stroking the animal’s head.

  ‘Ach, he’s nice enough, but he’s no use to me at all. It’s chasin’ the hills myself I have to be while he just sits there watchin’ me and scratchin’ himself. Aye, but my wife is fond of him y’see so I canna’ get rid of him.’ Thus he excused his own attachment to the dog.

  Just at that moment Sandy jumped up, flung his cap in the air and flapped his sides with his arms. It is a contention of Bruach ‘skart’ shooters that if a ‘skart’ is swimming out of shooting range it will come close to investigate a cap thrown into the air, presumably believing it to be another ‘skart’. The lure does appear to be effective.

  ‘If I get this one I’ll bring it round to you,’ promised Sandy Beag.

  Some people say that ‘skarts’ are not worth eating; that they taste fishy. In Bruach we buried them for three days and then we skinned them. There was not the slightest trace of fishiness about them after this treatment and the amount of meat on their breast and legs has to be seen to be believed. One boarding-house proprietor I know used to serve them up as ‘sea turkey’ and was often con
gratulated on the dish. Mary and I made a couple of very sleek and expensive-looking feather toques from their skins, simply by stretching them over a piece of pit-prop and then having them cured and lined.

  After the heavy heat of the day I, at any rate, was tired and we sat long over tea watching a spider’s web outside the window gradually filling with midges so that it began to resemble a faint pencil sketch being drawn over heavily with charcoal. The web had been there for some time for was too perfect a thing to destroy. Each morning it had been cleaned of its catch and the spider grew perceptibly bigger and fatter. We wished him long life. I roused myself at last. It was the night for my fortnightly writing of Sarah’s letters and Mary intended to stroll along with me and then go on up to the post office with her letters. Usually Sarah came over to the cottage with her writing materials but the hot weather had been very trying for her feet and I had promised tonight that I would go to her. Veiled against the midges we set out, Mary threatening to collect me on the way back so as to meet the fabulous Flora, who, though I had often described her in my letters, Mary maintained was too incredible for her to accept. To the south the sky was strangely lit and screened by still, dark clouds with deckled silver edges. The thunder Sandy had predicted murmured faintly behind the hills and the sea, sullen and shadowed, seemed to be growing chill with apprehension. The crofters we saw at work were rubbing the midges off their faces and necks.

  Sarah had paper and envelopes already waiting for me and she appeared to be unusually flushed and excited.

  ‘I want you to write to the Queen for me,’ she blurted out as soon as I sat down at the table.

  ‘The Queen,’ I echoed, startled. ‘What do you want to write to the Queen about, Sarah?’

  ‘I want to write and ask her what she uses for her husband’s corns,’ she elucidated.

  ‘But has the Duke of Edinburgh got corns?’ I asked, vainly trying to recall some news item that might throw light on her resolve.

  By way of explanation Sarah produced a recent photograph of the Duke of Edinburgh in polo kit. ‘He must have corns,’ she replied, pointing at his footwear. ‘Wearin’ they big boots would put corns on anybody’s feets. You do as I say and write and ask her, mo ghaoil. She won’t mind tellin’ an old lady like myself who works hard and has such terrible feets, and she’s bound to get the very best for him, you know.’

  I have regretted ever since that I dissuaded Sarah from sending off that letter.

  Mary called my name through the open door and came in to be staggered briefly by the impact of Flora, but there came a long drawn-out roll of thunder and big splodgy rain drops hit the stone steps so we cut short our visit and ran through the early dusk, now mercifully midge free, to the cottage. Mary sat by the window a little awestruck by the sheer quantity of water that was sheeting down on to the sea and cascading from the shed roof to flay the full water-butts. I lit the lamp and started to mark the history books I had brought home from school. The class had been doing the battle of Mons Graupius and, perhaps because Elspeth would be returning to her duties in a day or two, I had taken special pains to ensure that they had a good grasp of the subject. They had written on the battle for homework and the first few books seemed to indicate that my toil had not been fruitless. I marked away happily. And then I opened Giggle’s exercise book. My head flopped forward on to my hands as I stared in dismay at the solitary line of writing across the otherwise empty page: ‘Mons Graupius was a big, fat man.’ I read it again and again, puzzled by a vague consonance, and I groaned histrionically.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Mary, looking round. ‘Goodness!’ she went on, half rising from her seat, ‘there’s someone coming here, Becky. In this weather!’

  ‘Anyone you know?’ I asked indifferently.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, but I can’t tell, he’s all done up in oilskins. It’s a man though. A big, fat man.’

  ‘That,’ I said heavily as I got up to go to the door, ‘will certainly be Mons Graupius.’

  The ‘Tour’

  ‘Now that I have Hector and Behag at home will we go for our little tour?’ asked Morag, to whom any sort of outing, even a day’s shopping, was a ‘tour’.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I agreed, ‘but while we’re about it let’s be ambitious. Let’s go as far as Inverness and see some shops.’

  Morag and I had often talked of going away together for a few days’ holiday but always before she had pleaded that her animals and poultry prevented her from leaving the croft for more than a day. I was prepared for excuses now.

  ‘Aye,’ she agreed surprisingly; ‘and we might even get farther. I’d like to go to Edinburgh and see them little penny-goin’-ins I seen when I was there a few years back.’

  ‘You mean those slot machines you put a coin in and get chocolate or something in return?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, mo ghaoil. I mean them black and white birds they feed fish to at the zoo.’

  Our tour was soon arranged. To save us the usual early morning bus ride and to make our journey scenically more interesting, Hector volunteered to take us to the mainland in his boat. He reckoned he could count on getting together a party of tourists who could be persuaded into thinking that the trip was exactly what they wanted and thus make it a financial success.

  The day arranged for our tour broke unpromisingly grey and damp with frayed clouds working their way sluggishly over the hill tops and a rumpled line of sea stretching across the mouth of the bay. Only one or two tourists were waiting at the shore when Morag and I arrived there.

  ‘What sort of a trip are we going to have?’ I asked Erchy, who was acting as temporary crew for Hector.

  ‘It’ll be choppy enough out there when we get,’ he replied, ‘but we’ll no be sayin’ anythin’ about that until we get the tourists aboard. It’s calm enough here on the shore.’

  Familiarity with the sea since I had come to the Hebrides had completely overcome my former terror: the prospect of a choppy passage I now found exhilarating. Erchy rowed us out in the dinghy to the Wayfarer where Hector had mugs of tea waiting for us in the tiny fo’c’sle.

  ‘Best fill up tse kettle again and we’ll give tse rest tea when tsey come aboard,’ said Hector. Erchy filled up the kettle from a rusty water-can and put it back on the Primus stove.

  ‘How many people are you expecting to come today?’ I asked.

  ‘About twenty altogeszer, I believe,’ Hector replied.

  ‘As many as that? I thought you weren’t allowed to carry more man twelve fare-paying passengers without a Board of Trade licence?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to drown more tsan twelve fare-paying passengers,’ Hector corrected me gravely. I chuckled, but his expression remained perfectly serious. It appears to be a curious legal anomaly that in this country any greenhorn can take up to twelve fare-paying passengers in any boat, be it held together by nothing more than paint and prayer, and so long as he does not drown more than the twelve he is not committing an offence in law; it is a very serious matter if he drowns thirteen. That, at any rate, is how the Hebridean boatmen interpret the law.

  Hector finished his tea and popped his head up out of me fo’c’sle. ‘Tsere’s quite a few folks waiting on tse shore now,’ he announced. He collected the cups and washed them in the kettle. ‘Tsat’ll put a bit of strength in tseirs for tsem,’ he remarked happily.

  Erchy hauled the dinghy alongside and jumped down into it. ‘There’s more man twenty there now,’ he remarked as he pulled at the oars. ‘I wonder will they all want to come?’

  ‘If tsere’s more tsan we can take tsen see and pick tse young ones, tsey’s easier to get aboard if she turns bad on us,’ called Hector.

  The dinghy’s stem crashed into the bow of Wayfarer.

  ‘She’s tsere when she bumps,’ commented Hector sarcastically.

  ‘Erchy’s sometimes no very good at manuring the boat alongside,’ Morag murmured to me.

  Half a dozen people came aboard, four sparsely haired though youn
gish men and two girls. One of the girls was a curvaceous blonde whom Hector’s eyes appropriated as soon as he saw her.

  ‘Here, Hector,’ called Erchy, ‘d’ you know who’s on the shore wantin’ with us?’

  ‘No, who?’ demanded Hector.

  ‘The pilgrims – Miss Flutter and Stutter. Will I get them?’

  ‘God!’ said Hector expressively. ‘Are tsey goin’ away?’

  They’re goin’ some place,’ said Erchy, and added warningly: ‘Pilgrims is as bad as ministers for making the weather blow up,’

  ‘Aye,’ Hector agreed, massaging his unshaven jaw perplexedly. He brightened. ‘See if you can get tsem by tsemselves and tell tsem it’s goin’ to be awful wild,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve done that already,’ said Erchy. ‘They just told me it’s a good forecast.’

  Hector groaned. ‘Maybe it was a good forecast for tse Bay of Biscay tsey heard,’ he said. ‘Ach, well, if you canna’ leave tsem behind you’ll just have to bring tsem, tsat’s all.’

  Miss Flutter and Miss Stutter came out with the next boatload. Miss Flutter greeted us effusively. She simply must, she insisted, sit outside in the breeze to stop her from feeling sick; she had brought her knitting for the same purpose.

  ‘I find I simply must keep my mind occupied,’ she said, pulling a half-knitted sleeve out of her bag and commencing work on it immediately. Miss Stutter managed a taut smile and twined her gloved fingers together ceaselessly.

  By the time we had taken aboard the third boatload the sea outside had infected the bay with its restlessness and Wayfarer was beginning to rock tentatively at her moorings.

  ‘I’m sure to be sick,’ asserted a great cart-horse of a girl who sported a frugal pony-tail, and in preparation she draped herself into a suitable position. More boatloads of tourists were harvested from the shore, always with young women predominant, and not until we had more than thirty people squatting along either deck and littering the forepeak did Hector call at halt.