A Rope--In Case Read online

  ‘It’s the same with myself, just,’ Morag admitted. ‘Here’s me with hay in my tackety boots at this very minute to see will I keep my feet dry.’ Most of us stuffed hay into our wet boots when we took them off but we emptied it out before we wore them again.

  ‘It sounds a bit uncomfortable,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ she denied. ‘An’ it’s keepin’ my feets nice an’ warm.’

  Together we assessed the portent of the gentle blue of the sky and the few frayed clouds caught on the hill peaks. Down on the rocks slow breakers were still coming in rearing and breaking but out at sea only fitful white wave crests glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘If we would get a day or so of this we’d be able to have the lorry bring home our peats, likely,’ Morag suggested.

  ‘It’ll take more than a couple of days to dry out the moors enough for a lorry to get to my peats,’ I retorted. Due to my being a latecomer to peat cutting my peat hag was, naturally, the most inaccessible of all.

  ‘Ach, so long as there’s a good skin on the ground the lorry would get, I doubt,’ insisted Morag blandly.

  ‘I doubt you said that last year,’ I taxed her. ‘And remember how the lorry got bogged time after time and what hard work it was digging it out? Remember how the driver swore he’d never take any notice of you again?’ I continued relentlessly. Morag looked a little discomfited. ‘I’m not going to risk being made a fool of again this year,’ I added meaningly.

  ‘Oh, but, mo ghaoil, nobody made a fool of you,’ Morag hastened to reassure me. ‘It was just the way things turned out.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I agreed.

  The previous year several of us had clubbed together to hire a lorry to transport our stacks of peats home, the idea being that we all helped one another to load and unload, sharing equally the cost of the hire. On the face of it the scheme may have looked unfair to those who, like myself, had cut a relatively small number of peats whereas the larger families prided themselves on having a dozen stacks or more but as the larger the family the more helpers they provided the arrangement worked to everyone’s satisfaction.

  The lorry had arrived in charge of Willy Ruag (‘Red Willy’), it’s exuberant driver but even Willy scratched at his tawny head and muttered dubiously when he saw how far from the track some of the peat stacks were situated. However, in response to Morag’s assuring him airily that there was ‘skin enough on the moors to take a steam roller’, he yielded so far as to take the lorry alongside the stacks nearest the road.

  It had been a glorious day for work. The sun shone uninhibitedly but it was accompanied by a breeze that was enough to keep us cool and save us from the attentions of the vicious clegs (horseflies), yet not capricious enough to subject us to the torment of having our eyes continuously filled with peat dust. We all, including the ever-obliging Willy, set to work throwing the peats up into the lorry. There was no pattern to our throwing; everyone pitched peats with haphazard enthusiasm from all directions amid a constant flow of lighthearted banter with only an occasional shout of laughing recrimination to betray the fact that a peat had hit one of the loaders on the other side of the lorry. When the load had grown precariously high the driver called a halt and climbed up into the cab. We all stood back, rubbing peat dust from our reddening arms and faces. With a shudder the lorry started and simultaneously there came a snarling grumble from the rear wheels as they broke through the dried crust of the moor and spun themselves into the bogginess beneath. The distressed face of the driver peered out of the cab. The non-mechanically minded Bruachites, seemingly unaware of the likely consequence, exhorted him to carry on. Obediently Willy tried again but the wheels only spun themselves deeper into the soft ground. He called us to push and we all flung ourselves at the lorry with boisterous determination, even old Sarah lending her thin aged arms to the task. After half an hour of strenuous pushing and devising the anxiety I felt had begun to affect the Bruachites, though there were still eruptions of laughter above the murmured comments. When, inevitably, the order came to unload they greeted it without chagrin. For them the dilemma was an event; one that would have its place in the retailed anecdotes of the village and to which other more mundane happenings could be related in time. ‘I mind she calved the day before yon lorry that was loadin’ peats got stuck in the bog.…’

  When the unloading was almost finished and the remaining peats had been piled at the rear of the chassis Willy tried again to coax the lorry forward but by this time the ruts were deeper and squelchier. Erchy was dispatched to bring sacks from the village while the rest of us were commanded to go and gather stones from the bed of the burn and eventually with these aids and renewed efforts by the loaders the lorry was at last clear of the bog. Willy’s worried face peering from the cab broke into a relieved grin. We cheered as the lorry juddered forward. We ceased to cheer as Willy drove on and we realised he was not going to stop again until he had reached the firm ground of the track and that we should now have to carry all the peats over to the lorry before throwing them up. I was already wilting with dismay but the Bruachites, inured as they were to constant frustrations, accepted the extra work with patient good humour. So long as they worked in company their spirits were never dampened for long and soon the smiles were back and the joking had begun again.

  ‘Did anybody feed your hens for you yet?’ Morag asked me just before it was the turn of my peats to be loaded.

  ‘Goodness, no,’ I admitted ruefully, not having noticed until she spoke how near to the hill peaks the sun had travelled. Spring days in the Hebrides are long and night began nominally when the sun disappeared behind the first of the peaks. The poultry too seemed to accept this as a sign of the end of their day and if I did not attend to them in time they would go sulkily to roost without their evening feed. Experience had taught me that sulkiness and hunger had a disastrous effect on egg-laying.

  ‘You’d best go back with Willy on this load and then see an’ catch him again on the way back,’ Morag advised.

  I climbed into the cab beside Willy Ruag, asking him to drop me off at my croft and to look out for me on his way back. Willy nodded acceptance of the arrangement. As I had expected my hens were grouped querulously around the door of the cottage and when they caught sight of my approach they ran towards me, their feet stamping noisily on the dry ground. They crowded about me, pecking at my feet and impeding my progress until there came several indignant screeches accompanied by much wing flapping as I inadvertantly trod on some of them. They were accustomed to having a good bowl of mash at night for which they were in the habit of queueing at least an hour before it was ready. Tonight, however, there was no time for mash-making so I filled their bowl with corn—a repeat of their morning feed—and hoped they would be deluded. Keeping an ear alert for the sound of the returning lorry I brewed myself a quick cup of coffee and hastily munched a slice of home-made bread spread thickly with home-made butter and crowdie. Between sips and bites I raced to collect the day’s eggs from the nest-boxes; took in the sun-warmed washing, which had already been out for two nights, and then gratefully flopped down on the wooden bench outside, reflecting as I watched the sunset burning the sky behind the dark positive peaks of the hills how lucky I was to be living in such surroundings.

  Half an hour later I was no longer reflective. There bad been plenty of time for the lorry to be unloaded but there was still no sign of its return. Had Willy stopped for a prolonged strupak? Surely not, I argued. After a long day and with everyone waiting for him to resume loading he would undoubtedly be in a hurry to get finished. I waited for another quarter of an hour and then thinking that in some inexplicable way I had missed seeing or hearing the lorry I got up, stretched my reluctant limbs and started to walk.

  It was a rough plod of nearly two miles to the peat moors but it was a plod made so frequently either to work at peats or to milk, feed or inspect cattle that with time it had become for me no more demanding than a short walk to the shops would have been when I lived i
n town. Small children walked twice the distance to school and back each day and were not considered hard done by. Old men, who spurned the idea of a ‘wee hoosie’, did not consider there was privacy enough for them to relieve their bowels unless there was a good two miles of moor between themselves and their homes. (They suffered a good deal from constipation during spells of very bad weather.) The women thought nothing of making the trudge two or three times a day between household chores. As an instance of this I recall during my early days in Bruach calling at the house of one of my neighbours who had very kindly offered to allow me to cut peats from one of her own hags until I should find someone to ‘skin’ my own. She had promised to come with me to show me which particular hag this was, since the moors were scarred all over with hags and, to the uninitiated, one was no different from another. When I arrived at her house, carrying my peat iron and all ready for work, I found her entertaining a party of friends from a neighbouring village. I made my apologies and was about to withdraw when my neighbour put down her cup of tea, threw a cardigan over her shoulders and announced that she was ready to accompany me.

  ‘But you mustn’t leave your friends and come all that way with me,’ I protested. ‘It will do some other time.’

  ‘Indeed, I must so,’ she insisted. ‘It’s no distance at all,’ and turning to her guests she blandly instructed them to carry on with their strupak while she ‘sorted Miss Peckwitt’. ‘I’ll be back with you in a wee minute just,’ she promised them.

  ‘Aye, aye’, her friends responded with equal blandness though they must have known that the ‘wee minute just’ would very likely be the best part of two hours.

  I walked on, my eyes on the ground, mapping out my path to avoid the hazards of tussocks, boulders, rabbit-holes and boggy patches. A snipe rose suddenly from almost beneath my feet, startling me into a brief nerve-jangling sweatiness. I paused to take a breath and watch but the bird was out of sight before I could trace the erratic line of its flight. There came a trilling, bubbling sound as two cuckoos chased each other along a line of ancient fence posts that had at one time marked some now forgotten boundary. The cuckoos seemed in no way perturbed by my presence. Resuming my journey I began to work out times and reckoned that even if Willy had started to load immediately on his return it was going to be close to midnight before all my peats would be unloaded back at the cottage. It had been a long and tiring day but the prospect of a substantial part of my winter fuel being soon accessible within the walls of my croft spurred me on. I panted to myself the fragments of a Scottish dance tune and tried to walk in time to it. The breeze was cool now and had brought up goose-pimples on my scratched arms. The pads of my fingers felt hot and raw. Examining them I promised myself a lazy evening when I would contrive to spare enough water for bathing, shampooing and a manicure.

  Looking up for a moment I espied Morag coming towards me. She was carrying two milk pails and she was carrying them as if they were both full.

  ‘You’ve milked your cow!’ I accused her.

  We had all taken our milk pails with us so that we could go straight to the cows as soon as the peat loading was finished.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Morag. ‘An’ yours too to save you goin’ back for it.’

  ‘But where’s the lorry?’ I demanded.

  ‘Ach, he’s away with it, mo ghaoil. Did he no tell you?’

  ‘Away home?’ I was aghast. ‘But what about my peats? He was supposed to be coming back to load them.’

  ‘He sent over a message sayin’ he’d come back in a day or two for yours when the moors was a bitty drier,’ Morag explained kindly. ‘He said he’d never get near them now.’

  ‘But he didn’t send a message to me,’ I retorted angrily.

  ‘Ach, he was sayin’ you looked so tired I daresay he hadn’t the hears to tell you,’ she said.

  I had been tired but now I was cross in addition and this plod to the moors only to learn that I was not to get my peats loaded after all did nothing to lessen either my tiredness or my temper.

  ‘He could have told me,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘But surely the man gave you a wee hint that he wasn’t comin’ back? Are you quite sure he said nothin’ to you?’

  I recollected my drive back with Willy. He had been intent on avoiding the worst of the boulders and potholes in the track and I had been glad of the respite from work so conversation had been monosyllabic until his attention had been caught by a couple of dinghies bobbing on the rippling water not far out from the shore.

  ‘It looks as if the mackerel’s in,’ he had observed with sudden animation.

  ‘Mm, I suppose so,’ I was too tired to display more than a degree of interest.

  ‘It looks as though they’re after fillin’ the boat,’ said Willy enviously.

  The Bruach crofters were fishermen as opposed to anglers. They liked to catch a lot of fish at one time—‘to fill the boat’ as they termed it and the conventional greeting to a man returning from an hour or two’s fishing was ‘An’ is your fingers sore, then?’, the implication being that he had caught so many fish the task of taking them off the hooks had made his fingers sore.

  During the winter months the crofters were content enough with their salt herring though occasionally they admitted that their ‘teeths’ were ‘waterin’ for the taste of a fresh soo-yan’. In winter, however, fish were scarce in Bruach waters and even on the few calm days when no storms or aftermath of storms prevented the launching of the boats the men were loath to go to all the trouble of untying their dinghies; emptying them of the heavy stones which had ballasted them against the gales, and then dragging them down the rough shore when as like as not they would return after a couple of hours of chilly searching with no fish or perhaps with one or two very small ones to recompense them for their trouble; with the prospect of having to haul the dinghy above the highest high-tide line, replace the stones and re-tie the innumerable ropes that secured it. Thus it was that when spring brought the discernible presence of ‘smollak’ to be followed by ‘soo-yan’, ‘lythe’ and, later, shoals of mackerel, excitement rippled over the whole village. Boats were ‘sorted’; zealously hoarded lumps of lead or rusty iron were ferreted out to be used as sinkers, and ancient fishing lines and corks were retrieved from the bilges.

  As the lorry jolted homewards I had watched the two dinghies, trying to identify the shapes of the busy occupants and wondering if I should be lucky enough to find a fry of mackerel hanging on the doorhandle of my cottage next morning.

  ‘Indeed, I could be doin’ with a mackerel for my supper,’ said Willy Ruag yearningly.

  ‘You eat them, then?’ I asked. An unquestioning submission to rubric made the majority of Bruachites averse to eating mackerel. They enjoyed catching it in quantity but mostly it was salted down for use as bait in lobster creels.

  ‘Aye, so long as they’re straight from the sea,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m hoping there’ll be one for my breakfast tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘For your breakfast?’ His tone was scathing. ‘Ach, what good will a mackerel be by breakfast time? You need to eat it within a couple of hours of it leavin’ the sea, or it’s no good at all.’

  ‘If they’re in by midnight it’ll only be about eight hours to my breakfast time,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Ach, keep a mackerel more than four hours an’ it’s done for,’ he retorted. I thought of town fish slabs where twelve-and twenty-four hour mackerel lay like stiff, faded replicas of the sinuous, irridescent fish we knew.

  ‘Just imagine,’ I said, and enthusiasm crept into my voice despite an immediate lack of appetite. ‘A couple of fillets, dipped in oatmeal and salt and cooked through in the pan in their own oil.’

  ‘They fairly makes my teeths water,’ said Willy.

  As I retraced our conversation enlightenment dawned and I knew that I should have accepted this last remark as Willy’s oblique but courteous Highland way of telling me that he was going fishing and that I and my peats could wait
until he was prepared to resume loading.

  ‘That’ll be my fine fellow now,’ said Morag, drawing my attention to a third dinghy which was being rowed out from the shore. The laggard afterglow of the sunset picked out a fiery red head.

  ‘Blast him!’ I said.

  Gaels invariably find a display of irritation amusing and there was a glint in Morag’s eyes as she said: ‘Ach, I doubt he’ll give you a good fry of fish to make up for it.’ I took my full pail from her and realising that at least I did not have to trek out to the moors again was full of gratitude.

  The placatory string of fish was delivered to me next morning via Erchy. Willy and his lorry did not appear in the village again for some weeks. By then the Highland cattle, many of which seemed to have something of the Spanish bull in their make-up, had played toreadors with my peat stacks, scattering the peats over the moor which, after the rains of July, had resumed its normal sogginess. I rebuilt the stacks and the cattle returned to the assault. Almost every other day it rained. In desperation I rang up the coal merchant and pleaded with him to send me a couple of tons of coal.

  Winter Fuel

  The first two weeks of June went by giving us fourteen days of uninterrupted sunshine. The skin of the moor tautened to a ringing hardness that resounded to the drumbeat of our footsteps. The stunted sedges were toasted brown and crisp so that they flaked beneath our feet as we trod. The April-burned heather was scratchy in its brittleness and all except the deepest bogs were at the stage of shedding a curling layer of peat. And still the sun shone. Young lambs bleated on the hills and wild-eyed calves, confined from birth to gloomy byres, were now coaxed out and tethered on the crofts where, for the first few days, they loudly protested their bewilderment at the new vista of space and light. Constantly on the verge of panic they cavorted within the restraining radius of the rope at any sudden movement such as the flight of a bird or the too close presence of a stalking cat. The hill ponies made for the higher ridges of the moor where, illogical as it may seem, greener and moister grazing could be found. There, as if striving consciously for effect, they strung themselves out in a graceful frieze against the skyline. Around the shore parties of eider ducks gossiped their exclamatory, inquisitive way; schools of porpoises tumbled about the glittering sea. Over it all the skylarks poured their jubilance, interspersed with the repetitive ‘plunk’ of diving gannets, the sound of which reached the shore exactly like the sound of heavy planks of wood being dropped one upon another.