The Sea for Breakfast Page 3

  While I washed down the walls she told me of the prowess of Hamish and his sons. They had, it seemed, all possessed Herculean strength though, according to Morag, the sons had been no match for their father. She told me of the prodigious loads he could carry of how he alone could lift to shoulder height the three stones at the entrance to the village by which every man coming home from the sales was accustomed, in days gone by, to test his strength; of how he could lift a boat that taxed the strength of four lesser men. She related with pride the stories of his skill in breaking horses; of how he used to walk all the way from Glasgow once every five years and, when he reached home, to show he was not tired, he used to leap over the garden gate. (I was less impressed with this latter feat, for if I had left Glasgow two hundred miles behind me I have no doubt I too should have felt like leaping a gate.)

  ‘What are you goin’ to name your cottage now that you have it ready?’ she asked, draining her fourth cup of tea.

  ‘Oh, I shan’t bother to change it from “Tigh-na-Mushroomac”,’ I said. ‘I must get the correct Gaelic spelling.’

  ‘Here, but you mustn’t call it that. Not on letters, anyway,’ Morag said with a gasp.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t suit it just. And it’s no rightly a name at all. It’s just what it’s always been called since I can remember.’

  ‘But, Morag, what does it mean?’

  ‘Indeed I don’t know,’ she lied firmly. ‘Erchy’s mother says to tell you she has a wee poc of fish put by for you when you’re passin’ that way,’ she continued hastily and made for the door.

  It was of little use pressing Morag further, that I knew, and I walked with her as far as Erchy’s, pondering on the meaning of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ and why it should be considered an unsuitable name to be put on letters. I recalled the excessive amusement of the policeman when he had learned I was thinking of buying the house and wondered if it had been caused in some measure by the unsuitability of the name. I knew that in the Gaelic ‘Tigh’ means ‘house’, but never having seen the spelling of the name I could not identify the rest as being any Gaelic words I knew.

  ‘Erchy,’ I demanded, ‘what does “Tigh-na-Mushroomac” mean?’

  Erchy looked a long, long way out to sea, and his lips tightened to repress a smile. ‘Don’t you get feedin’ any of that fish to the pollis,’ he warned me, ‘and if you meet him with it, run for your life.’

  ‘How do you spell “Tigh-na-Mushroomac?”’ I persisted, after a hasty glance at the fish which I could now recognize as being nothing more illicit than mackerel.

  ‘Indeed, I don’t know,’ he replied with simulated apology.

  His evasion strengthened my determination to find out so I put the question to an old scholar who loved his language and who was patient with those who might wish to learn it.

  ‘Oh well, now, you mustn’t call the house that,’ he answered me smoothly. ‘No, no, that wouldn’t do at all. It’s not really a name but just a description the village has always had for it. Go and tell Morag she must tell you the story of it. She’s the best one to tell you, and you must tell her that from me.’

  I thanked him and went again to Morag. She was washing dishes and when I told her why I had come she began scrutinizing each dish lingeringly to avoid meeting my eye.

  ‘Well, mo ghaoil,’ she began, with an embarrassed chuckle. ‘It was Hamish’s lads when they was younger. They wouldn’t come out once they were in … y’understand?’ She managed to give me an insinuating glance, and then plunged on with her story. It appeared that one or two of Hamish’s less tractable sons had developed a dislike for work and so evaded it by disappearing into the ‘wee hoosie’ in the back garden where, immune to the threats and cajolery of their parents, they had stayed for long periods reading books or papers. Hamish had at last become so incensed that he had one day taken the saw and sawn the traditional round hole into a rough square one. The simplicity of his strategy was rivalled only by its effectiveness and, after enforced experience, I have no hesitation in recommending this form of torture to anyone who is barbaric enough to be interested in such practices. Inevitably, Hamish’s family had come to be known in Bruach and beyond as the ‘square bums’ and their house as ‘the house of square bums’.

  Once acquainted with the story I lost no time in choosing for my cottage a name that I could unashamedly put on my letters. For the seat in the ‘wee hoosie’ I had already substituted one of more conventional shape.

  Settling In

  With my cottage brightly redecorated so that even the unhappy walls of ‘the room’, now my bedroom, were laughing with warmth and colour, I was ready to receive my furniture which, as the telegram had said, was due to arrive the following Tuesday. I very much wanted to pay a visit to the mainland to buy one or two last-minute necessities and as ‘Joanna’, the little second-hand car I had bought in England, was undergoing repairs, I planned to catch the bus on Monday morning, do my shopping, stay the night and get a lift back with the: furniture lorry the following day. Everything worked according to plan except for one tense half-hour when, with only a few minutes to spare before I was due to meet the lorry, I darted into a telephone kiosk on the station and was imprisoned as the result of a careless lorry driver backing his lorry against the kiosk door and going off for a cup of tea. It was an embarrassing and vexatious experience. People hurried by to the train, heedless of my gesticulations; they heard neither my calls nor my hammerings. When I did eventually manage to attract the attention of a couple of station loiterers they stared at me with mingled curiosity and trepidation before they would come near. When they realized what had happened they bolted off in search of the driver, believing no doubt that I was intending to catch the train which was due to leave in a few minutes’ time; fortunately another loiterer waited long enough to listen to my plea for someone to go down to the pier and hold up the furniture lorry.

  At the pier, where I arrived harassed and apologetic, the driver was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He had never been to the Island before, he told me, and he hadn’t any idea of the road anyhow and he might have been driving around all day looking for the place. The two itinerant labourers, who had already been recruited to help with the unloading, tore themselves away from a knot of arguing fishermen and installed themselves in the back of the lorry and we set off. Weightily the lorry rumbled along the rutty roads with every now and then explosive comments from the driver on their condition and their sinuousness. Shepherds called in their dogs to heel while they stood and watched us impassively. Women, carrying water or moving tethered cows, stopped their work to wave and smile. At one isolated cottage which had a long view of the road, an old woman came hurrying out holding aloft a large jug of milk and some cups. The driver pulled up and taking a slopping cup of milk which she urged upon him, handed it to me. I drank obediently, and allowed the driver to drink his too, stifling the knowledge that conditions in the interior of the woman’s home much belied its white-washed appearance and that of her batch of children several were patients in the mainland sanatorium. She would accept no payment. It gratified her to offer refreshment to passing strangers and our enjoyment of it was her reward. When we handed back the empty jug and the cups her maze of happy wrinkles deepened delightedly and her kind old face flushed with pleasure. She still stood there as we drove away, smiling, nodding her head and waving until we were out of sight.

  The road now wound picturesquely around the head of the loch so that we had the full-skirted hills jostling us on one side and water lapping at our wheels on the other. The driver said, not inaptly, that he felt as though he was between the Devil and the deep blue sea, though the day was grey and the loch not blue but darkly reflective. The hill peaks loomed sinister through swirling clouds of mist which polished their craggy faces. Scenically it was awe-inspiring. The driver said it gave him the willies. He would have liked to accelerate and get away from it but the road made that impossible.
He became noticeably less talkative.

  I was preoccupied with the problem of how to arrange my various possessions in the cottage and was already experiencing the thrill of once again handling some of the dear, familiar things which I knew were stored in the back of the lorry: the silver model of ‘The Olde Curiosity Shoppe’; the white Grecian urn that would be the perfect setting for the large sprays of rowanberries in their season; my set of Cézanne prints. The lorry came to an abrupt stop. I looked at the driver questioningly. He was staring aghast at the little wooden bridge spanning the burn which surged and rumbled over the green-grey rocks into the lock.

  ‘I’m not taking this lorry over that thing,’ he said flatly.

  I was appalled. I had to admit the fragile appearance of the bridge and recalled that when I had first travelled the Bruach road I had had serious doubts about its suitability for anything but the lightest of vehicular traffic. Since then I had seen loaded lorries, buses and even a steam roller negotiate it with absolute safety. There was a thumping from the back of the lorry and in a moment the two recruits appeared beside the cab. They looked at the bridge suspiciously and agreed with the driver that it didn’t look safe.

  ‘The bus goes over it regularly,’ I said brightly. ‘And coal lorries with a couple of tons of coal.’

  The driver shook his head.

  I visualized myself and my furniture being abandoned beside the loch miles from Bruach. I wondered what on earth I should do.

  ‘Well,’ volunteered one of the men, ‘you canna’ turn round and go back, there’s nowhere to turn.’

  Thank God for that, I thought.

  The driver looked momentarily panic-stricken. The two men walked along to the bridge and tried jumping up and down on it, cautiously at first and then with growing confidence. The driver decided to go and inspect it for himself and soon all three of them were trotting up and down the bridge with serious concentration.

  ‘It takes a lot of heavy traffic,’ I called out.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Aye!’ I confirmed.

  The driver came back. ‘I can try it,’ he said timorously.

  ‘Wait now,’ commanded one of the men, pointing to one of the smaller struts of the bridge. ‘This piece is broken.’ He pulled a piece of parcel string out of his pocket and painstakingly tied the two halves of the strut together. When that was accomplished he waved the waiting lorry forward.

  ‘We’ll walk across,’ they offered magnanimously, ‘that’ll lighten the load.’

  ‘Aye?’ agreed the driver dubiously.

  Their apprehension had its effect on me and I too climbed down from the lorry.

  ‘Every little helps,’ I comforted treacherously.

  With stiff-faced pessimism the driver inched the quaking lorry across the bridge, his relief on reaching the other side showing itself in a little burst of speed that sent an exultant spatter of gravel and dust up from its tyres. He waited for us to get back in, but first I ran back to the bridge. I had a camera with me and under the pretext of taking a photograph of the burn I focused it on the string-tied strut. I still have that photograph. It shows plainly the two halves of the strut bound firmly together—the string is tied in a lover’s knot!

  There was a covey of Bruachites at the cottage to unload the van and after a couple of hours of heavings, pushings, questionings and teasings the furniture was installed and we were waving good-bye to the driver and his men who, much impressed by the repeated assurances of the villagers as to the enormous loads carried over the little wooden bridge and fortified by a tip and a couple of drams of whisky apiece, seemed not at all dismayed by the prospect of the return journey.

  It was some days later that Morag, who had devoted much of her time to helping me straighten things out, sat with me in the kitchen drinking tea. ‘Everywhere looks beautiful just,’ she murmured happily, ‘and so tastily furnished,’ she added, looking as though she might at any moment take a bite out of the settee. I was really quite taken with the way things were looking myself. ‘Now that you’re near settled and you’ve got your gramophone, you’ll have to give a party,’ she said.

  ‘I’d already thought of that,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to ask the grocer if he can get me some drinks. I used up the last of mine on the removal men.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll not get whisky from him, mo ghaoil,’ she informed me flatly. ‘He hasn’t got an explosives licence.’

  Though there was still a certain amount of renovation needed inside the cottage I had to abandon work on it temporarily so that I could start cutting a supply of peats for the winter. Peat was still the main fuel used in Bruach though all but a few diehards were beginning to use coal in addition to the peats which their deep old-fashioned grates consumed ravenously. Coal supplies, however, were erratic and depended very much upon the caprice and commitments of the undertaker who ran the business of coal merchant as a sideline and who seemed to think it would be as indelicate to offer a ton of coal before it was needed as it would be to offer a coffin. Any order for less than a ton per household he would decline arrogantly, even when rationing elsewhere was at its strictest, and not until he had collected firm orders for the minimum number of tons needed to coax a coal boat from the safety of a Glasgow wharf would he dispatch the order. Weeks later, when a sufficiently derelict puffer, looking as though the only reason it had managed to make the trip was because it was trying to run away from itself, came chugging and wallowing its laden way to the Island pier, the undertaker would hastily enlist volunteers and croft work would be neglected while the men went off to unload. The coal was tipped in half-ton scoopfuls straight from the boat into lorries which then took it to the consumers, the different tons being separated by odd bits of cardboard or sacking which would of course be blown away or shaken down among the coal before the lorry had gone more than a mile or two. The unloading of a ‘puffer’ was always a merry affair with Gaelic oaths and jests flying about as thickly as the coal dust itself. It was a regular practice of the men to try to fling one another’s caps into the lorry just at the moment the coal was being tipped in and there was much mirth both at the dispatching and receiving ends when this was successfully accomplished. But the trophies one might discover in one’s coal were not confined to caps: as the same pier was used for unloading coal as for unloading fish, it was not at all unusual to find fish hooks, fish heads, bits of seaweed and crab claws on one’s shovel; though the fact that after some stoking one’s kitchen became redolent of a guano factory was more often the result of the loaded lorries having to pass through a passageway locally termed ‘bomb alley’, where hundreds of gorged seagulls wheeled in ecstasy and extruded indiscriminately. When unloading was completed the volunteers, black all over, would return home to clean themselves up and to have their clothes well sprinkled with the louse powder they used for the cattle. The Bruachites maintained that coal was full of fleas and houses close to the pier were said to become infested whenever a coal boat was unloading.

  Thus was one’s supply of fuel obtained and the disadvantage was that if one had ordered a couple of tons or so and it turned out to be of poor quality then one was stuck with it. I discovered this for myself the very first time I took a delivery of coal—two tons of it—at the cottage. My suspicions were aroused at first sight. Good coal usually looks bright and brittle; this stuff slid off the lorry in flat shaley-looking slabs that made almost a metallic noise. When I put some on the fire it lay there sluggishly, defying heat or flame to ignite it; the chimney blew down smoke, no doubt in protest at the filthy stuff going up it. It was easily the least combustile fuel I had ever seen. Somewhat exasperated I got on the ’phone to the undertaker. He was not at home, I was told, but a voice I had never heard before and most emphatically never wish to hear again asked me in rich Highland accents if it could be of any help.

  ‘I wanted to know if there was a chance of getting hold of some coal,’ I said.

  ‘More coal? Surely, Miss Peckwitt, you took two tons of coal last week ju
st. What have you done with that?’

  ‘I’m building a castle with it,’ I retorted acridly. ‘I want to talk about coal, not this rubbish.’

  ‘Indeed, and isn’t it terrible stuff? My own mother was saying herself just last night that she might as well carry dung from the byre and try will it burn.’

  ‘Well, that’s an idea anyway,’ I conceded. ‘I suppose if this was India we might be able to do that.’

  ‘Do what? Use cow dung? For fuel, you say?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Indeed then, they must have very inflammable cows out there. I don’t think it would work here at all. Supposing you tried mixing a little peat with the coal.’

  ‘I have tried,’ I said. ‘It helps, certainly, but even so there’s very little heat from it.’

  ‘Ach, but you English,’ the voice chided patiently, ‘you’re always complaining of feeling the cold.’

  ‘It’s no good sending me stones to keep me warm,’ I retorted.

  ‘No, indeed.’ From the mouthpiece came the faintest of sighs. ‘Well then, Miss Peckwitt,’ the voice suggested blandly, ‘will I come out myself tonight and have a damn good try?’

  The months of April and May are regarded as being the best time for peat cutting so that the peats will have a chance to become thoroughly dry before the wet spell which can be relied upon to reach the Hebrides by the end of June or early July. This year a faltering spring had delayed all the croft work and the hiccoughing cuckoos were already warning us that ‘June was nearly away with the calender’ before a spell of fine weather was confidently predicted and Morag and I were able to set out together for the area of moor reserved for the village peat cutting. We followed first the track through the glen which, after years of agitation, the County Council had been persuaded to widen so that vans and lorries could reach some of the more isolated crofts where hitherto supplies had had to be carried by the women. Work on the project was slow and to all appearances involved the men in nothing more strenuous than chipping caves in rocky outcrops so as to provide shelter for them when at their card games.