The Sea for Breakfast Page 2

  Erchy, with whom I consulted, startled me by admitting that he ‘quite liked a bit of work now and then just as a change when he could spare the time’, and by promptly agreeing to undertake the task. True to his word he was soon at work taking out the old frames and enlarging the window space. When he had got thus far there was a lull in his activities.

  ‘What’s happened to Erchy these days?’ I asked at a ceilidh one night. ‘He seems to have gone on strike. There’s been no work done on my cottage for days.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll not be workin’ at anythin’ for a week yet,’ explained Johnny. ‘He’s got his girl friend from Glasgow stayin’ in the village and they’re away every night to the heather.’

  ‘That’s not his girl friend,’ contradicted Morag indignantly.

  ‘Maybe not,’ conceded Johnny easily, ‘but he’ll make do with her while she’s here.’

  But the return of Erchy’s proxy girl friend to Glasgow did not, unfortunately, result in a resumption of activity by Erchy. A wedding was announced at which he was to act as best man. Erchy got drunk in anticipation, drunk for the solemnization and drunk again in recollection. A week later there was a dance and Erchy got drunk in preparation. He reckoned he’d never have the courage to ask a girl to dance with him if he was sober. A cattle sale followed closely on the heels of the dance and Erchy’s beasts made the highest prices; he stayed drunk for nearly a week! By this time winter was upon us and Noachian deluges, lashed by fierce gales, washed the exposed room inside and out. Hailstones pitted the wood-lined walls; spiders’ webs were torn from their anchorages; salt spray filmed the floors. It was on a particularly savage day, with a full-blooded gale inverting the waterfalls over the cliffs and sending them billowing skywards, that I went over to the cottage to reassure myself that it was still there. Hungry green breakers were hurling themselves at the shingle shore, flinging spume high over the roof of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’. The wind seemed to have chosen the poor little cottage as its mam target and I was buffeted towards it. Inside I found Erchy frenziedly prising out the small window from the back of the kitchen.

  ‘My, but it’s coarse, coarse weather,’ he announced,

  ‘Erchy!’ I yelled, ignoring the greeting in the belief that he was still suffering from the effects of his recent orgies. ‘I don’t want that window out, you idiot!’

  ‘I canna’ get it open,’ Erchy yelled back. ‘I’ve got to try will I get it out. It can go back when it’s needed.’

  ‘It’s needed now if ever it was,’ I retorted savagely.

  ‘My God, woman!’ Erchy shouted at me above the storm. ‘Do you not know that where the wind gets in it’s got to get out again? If you don’t let it out here you’ll lose your roof. Wind’s the same in a house as it is in a stomach; you’ve got to let it blow its way out once it’s in. You canna trap wind.’

  I watched him dubiously, slowly becoming aware that not only was the floor pulsing as though there were an engine beneath my feet, but that interspersed with the noise of the storm were strained creakings and groanings from the timbers of the ceiling.

  ‘This floor’s quaking,’ I said tensely.

  ‘You are yourself too, I dare say,’ retorted Erchy unrelentingly. ‘And if you had this amount of wind under your beams you’d be quaking a lot worse.’ I subsided into the most sheltered corner of the kitchen. ‘Hear that now?’ Erchy continued as an ominous thudding became audible from somewhere above. I listened; it sounded as though the ceiling joists were stamping against the walls in their impatience to be gone. ‘That should stop when I get this clear.’ He wrenched the window free and lowered it to the comparative shelter of the ground outside. ‘Now listen!’ he commanded, but though I listened obediently I was not much the wiser. The whole cottage seemed to be threatening to take wing at any moment. ‘Aye, you’d have lost your roof all right tonight, I doubt,’ said Erchy with great satisfaction.

  Through interminable weeks ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ waited, naked and exposed, for the new door and windows to arrive. Glass, I was told, was scarce and when at last it was obtainable the mid-winter gales followed, one after another, so that the carrier complained it was impossible for him to get across to the mainland. A brief respite from the gales brought the snow, which blocked the road. Blessedly came the thaw—which washed the road away. A day of calm dawned; there was no snow and the road had been repaired. With bated breath I telephoned the carrier.

  ‘Oh, indeed I’m sorry but the tide’s not just in the right state for loadin’ at the pier,’ he said with practised apology. ‘Not till next week it won’t be.’

  Next week brought a repetition of the previous delays but when the tide had crept round again to a suitable state and miraculously it coincided with a period of calm I again ’phoned the carrier.

  ‘Did you no hear, Miss Peckwitt?’ he answered plaintively. ‘My lorry broke on Monday and I’ve no managed to get it sorted yet. I canna’ say when I’ll be out now.’

  Every time I visited my refrigerated little cottage I became a little more despondent. Every night I prayed the Almighty for patience. But the day did come when the elements acted in unison and nothing ‘broke’ and the carrier’s lorry came romping along the track to the cottage to deliver two beautiful new windows and one front door. The front door was not new. There was a little note from the merchant explaining that he had not been able to procure a new door of the right size so he had taken the liberty of sending this one which had been removed from the local police station. He hoped I wouldn’t mind! The carrier had also brought cans of paint, rolls of paper and turps, so whilst Erchy set to work installing the windows, I began to paper ‘the room’. The original colour of the walls of ‘the room’ was really indescribable and the nearest I came to identifying it was in the recollection of a time when Morag, suspecting her calf was sick, was debating with me whether or not she should send for the vet.

  ‘What makes you think there’s something wrong with him?’ I had asked as we watched the beast skipping around on his tether. ‘He looks healthy enough to me.’

  ‘Aye,’ Morag had agreed reluctantly, ‘he looks all right in himself but see now,’ she had explained, indicating his smeared rump, ‘his dung is such an unhappy colour.’

  Once the windows had been put in I installed a camp bed and a couple of borrowed chairs and one or two other essentials and moved into the cottage. A few nights afterwards four of the girls from the village turned up to inspect progress. My spirits sank a little, for where the girls went soon the men would follow and then there would be a ceilidh and I would have to stop work and provide tea. I told them I was just planning to start papering upstairs. ‘We’ll give you a hand,’ they volunteered. My spirits sank lower. As I expected, it was not long before some of the lads were bursting in, completely sure of their welcome and, giving up any thought of doing more work, I prepared to settle down for an evening’s ceilidh, hoping the girls would forget their offer of help. The prospect of a wasted evening was not nearly so discomposing as the prospect of having to accept their help with the decorating.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dollac, the village beauty, inexorably. ‘We’re all goin’ to help Miss Peckwitt paint and paper upstairs so she can have it all ready for a good ceilidh. Get the paint, you Ally. Is the paper cut? Those that can’t do paintin’ or paperin’ can do some scrapin’.’ Feebly I tried to dissuade them. ‘Now just you get on with finishing the room,’ they told me. I submitted to the juggernaut of their enthusiasm and when I had put the last few touches to ‘the room’, I carried water from the well and coaxed the stove into heating it. I found biscuits and collected odd cups and mugs, since my own crockery had not yet arrived. As I worked there came from above bursts of song, the banging of doors, clanging of paint cans, uninhibited shrieks, yells of tension, thudding of feet and generally such a hullabaloo that I doubted if ever I should be able to clean up their mess in anything short of a decade.

  ‘Tea!’ I called up the stairs and there was such an immediate sca
tteration that I fully expected a brace of paint cans to come hurtling down the stairs too. My helpers had enjoyed themselves immensely; that at least was obvious. Each one of them had a swipe of paint across a cheek, a decoration which Dollac dismissed as being the result of a game of ‘paint-brush tag’—to see who would get the most paint on him. When they had finished their tea and biscuits they rampaged back upstairs to ‘finish things off’. I felt that the phrase would turn out to be most appropriate. I heated more water and washed the cups, envisaging myself having to take time off from cleaning up the farrago in order to go to the post office to ’phone for a large supply of paint remover and a repeat order for paint and wallpaper. It was the early hours of the morning before my helpers came trooping down the stairs again. They had cleaned the paint off their faces and I wondered vaguely how and where. They had finished both bedrooms, they said, and they were ‘beautiful just’, but they must have my promise not to go upstairs and look at them until after breakfast. They wouldn’t look so good until then, they explained, because there were still some wet patches; I must wait to inspect it until it was all properly dry. The promise was an easy one to make for I felt much too debilitated then to climb the stairs and face up to the chaos which I was certain would confront me. Yet, after breakfast, when I felt strong enough to bear the sight of it all, I went upstairs and found there was no chaos at all; I could not have hoped to have done the job nearly so well myself. The unused materials were stacked tidily in a corner, and paint splashes had been cleaned away. It was, as they had said, beautiful— beautiful just. But only Gaels, I believe, could have accomplished such a splendid job and yet have derived so much fun and frolic from doing it.

  The following night the volunteers turned up again but now there remained only the kitchen to be decorated and as I insisted that all the nails should come out first and as no more tools were procurable the evening’s work degenerated into a cosy ceilidh. And that is why on this hot June day I came to be pulling out my one hundred and twenty-third nail when I heard the voice of Sheena, Peter’s mother, hailing me from the door.

  ‘My, but you’re a hardy!’

  I gathered up my harvest of nails from a chair and pushed on the kettle. In Bruach no work was ever considered too pressing to neglect hospitality and the arrival of the most casual visitor automatically ensured the popping on of the kettle.

  ‘I’ve taken a hundred and twenty-three nails out of this kitchen so far,’ I told Sheena, ‘and I believe there are still one or two left.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ she replied. ‘But Hamish was always such a handy man. Mary had never but to ask for a nail and he’d have it in for her. Aye, a right handy man he was.’

  ‘I’m not nearly so handy at pulling them out,’ I said ruefully.

  ‘No, but why go to the trouble mo ghaoil? You’ll surely want to hang things yourself and you’ll be glad of a nail here and there.’

  ‘Not a hundred and twenty-three times,’ I said.

  ‘No, maybe,’ she admitted. ‘But there’s pictures.’ (I should mention that the kitchen was about twelve feet by ten feet and no more than seven feet high.) ‘And will you no need a nail for your girdle?’ In Bruach a girdle is something a woman bakes on – not something she steps into. ‘And then you never know but what you might want to dry a rabbit skin or two, and a few fish maybe.’ I hoped I never should. ‘You’ll need some for towels some place and a corkscrew …’ she was enumerating enthusiastically now; ‘and a holder for your kettle and a couple of calendars and a wee bunch of feathers for the hearth. You have no man,’ she giggled, ‘so you’ll no be needin’ nails for him. Men needs an awful lot of nails in a house,’ she told me. ‘You must see and keep some mo ghaoil surely.’

  I surveyed my rusty harvest. I’d be dammed if any of them were going back in again, I decided, and between sips of tea Sheena sighed for my improvidence.

  ‘My, but your new windows are beautiful just,’ she enthused, slewing round her chair so that she could stare out at the sea. The windows had made an enormous difference to the cottage, giving a wide view of the bay which today was full of sunshine and silver-flecked water. On the shore, sandpipers scurried busily in the shingle and serenaded the quiescent ripples while thrift danced to the music of the sea. Above the outer islands comically shaped clouds, like assorted carnival hats, were strewn haphazardly across the sky. The black hills lay in a drugged haze, Garbh Bienn looking like an old man who has fallen peacefully asleep in his chair; the wisp of white cloud across its middle like the newspaper feilen from his face.

  ‘You know,’ said Sheena, whose appreciation of nature was purely gastronomical, ‘this weather ought to bring the mackerel in.’

  She finished her tea and as she got up to go she remembered she had a telegram for me in her pocket. ‘I was passin’ the post office and Nelly Elly said would I bring it. It’s only to tell you your furniture’s comin’ next Tuesday.’

  Sheena had only been gone a few minutes when Morag arrived and we were soon joined by Erchy who had been painting his dinghy down on the shore. The kettle had to go on again. I begrudged no one tea and I had grown tolerant of time-wasting, but I was plagued by the fact that water for every purpose had to be carried from a well over a hundred yards away down on the shore, which meant that I had to struggle uphill with the full pails. It was aggravating to have to squelch about the croft in gumboots even during a prolonged drought and to realize that though there was an excess of water everywhere it was too undisciplined to be of use to me. I was ironically reminded of my own mother’s injunction, ‘Don’t leave the kettle boiling, wasting gas’; here I had to remind myself, ‘Don’t leave the kettle boiling, wasting water’. With so much cleaning to do the carrying of water was proving a strength-sapping business and I was very anxious to get the guttering of the cottage replaced so that I could have rainwater for household purposes. The guttering, along with a rainwater tank, had been on order for many weeks and Morag brought news of it now.

  ‘She’s on her way,’ Morag announced triumphantly. ‘You’ll not want for water when she comes.’

  ‘You’re not telling me that my rainwater tank is on its way at last, are you?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Yes, indeed. I saw the carrier yesterday just and he told me to tell you that if the Lord spares him he’ll be out with her tomorrow for certain.’

  ‘That will be a blessing,’ I said. However, as I pointed out, the new tank would not overcome the drinking water problem because I had discovered that when there was a combination of high tide and a strong wind the sea came into my well so that the water was decidedly brackish sometimes.

  ‘So it will be, mo ghaoil,’ Morag agreed, ‘But you know the old doctor who was here always used to tell us that if everybody took a good drink of plain sea-water once a week there’d not be so many sore stomachs goin’ around.’

  ‘That may be true, but I don’t like salty tea,’ I demurred’. ‘I rather wish I could get hold of one of those water diviners to come and find me a nice convenient well here on the croft.’

  ‘Them fellows,’ said Morag contemptuously; ‘they had one hereabouts a long time back to try would he find a corpse in the hills and a few folks was sayin’ we ought to let him try would he find more wells for us here in Bruach.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, they let him try all right, and he said there was water here and there was water there, and my fine fellow took ten shillings from each of us for sayin’ so, but when folks started digging they found it was drier underneath than it was up at the top. They’d lost their money and they’d found no water.’

  ‘They didn’t go deep enough,’ put in Erchy, with a wink at me.

  ‘Indeed they did. He said there was water on our own Ruari’s croft at twenty feet and Ruari dug down until we could see only the cap of him just, sticking out of the top of the hole he’d made and still there was no water. Ach, I’m no believin’ in them fellows at all. Maybe they can find corpses but I doubt they canna’ find w
ater.’ It struck me then as strange that the Bruachites, who genuinely believe in and often claim to be gifted with the second sight, should yet be so sceptical of water divining. I recollected that I had never heard of a Hebridean water diviner.

  ‘What you’ll have to do, my dear,’ went on Morag, ‘is to drink the wild water.’

  ‘The wild water?’ I echoed.

  ‘Aye, what you catch from your roof.’

  ‘For drinking?’ I grimaced, thinking of all the dear little birds I heard scratching and sliding on my roof every morning; of the starlings fumigating themselves around the chimney and the gulls daily parading the length of the ridging. Morag laughed.

  ‘You’ll soon get used to that, lassie,’ she predicted firmly. And she was right.

  She watched me take out the last half-score or so of nails, giving a grunt of ‘there now!’ at each success.

  ‘Anybody would think it was you doin’ the work,’ Erchy told her.

  ‘If you was half as good as the men who put in the nails you’d be after takin’ them out for Miss Peckwitt instead of sittin’ watchin’ her,’ she rebuked him.

  Erchy drained his cup. When Morag was on the defensive her tongue could become caustic and he was ready to flee from it.

  ‘D’you know you’re wearin’ odd shoes,’ he taunted her.

  ‘Ach, Erchy, but you know me. I just puts my feets into the first; things that I pull from under the bed.’

  ‘That could be damty awkward sometimes, I doubt,’ he said as he disappeared homeward.

  Morag watched me fill a pail with hot water and pour in some disinfectant.

  ‘My,’ she commented with an appreciative sniff, ‘I do like this dis-infectant you use. It has such a lovely flavour.’