The Hills is Lonely Page 5

  ‘Hello,’ I greeted it, and as it ‘baad’ and rubbed itself against me in an ecstasy of recognition I knew it to be a motherless lamb which Ruari had brought home from the hill for his wife to bottle feed. The lamb had, not unnaturally, become the pampered pet of the household, cropping the grass of the park and running in and out of the kitchen like a frisky child. When it had grown into a fat and sturdy ‘wether’ it had become rather a problem and had to be banned from the house. Unfortunately, this did not discourage its devotion and it rarely ventured far afield, except to follow Ruari or Bella whenever they went to the well.

  How the sheep had managed to stray so many miles from home I was at a loss to understand. Whether it really knew me or whether it would have thrown itself on the mercy of any passing human I could not be sure, but there was no escaping the fact that it was lost and that it was delighted to see me. I was certain Ruari would be missing the beast and wondering what had happened to it. Doubtless at this moment he would be out looking for it. With this in mind I unwound the scarf from my neck and tied it around the wether; then, feeling rather like the Good Shepherd and anticipating Ruari’s gratefulness for having restored the lost sheep to the fold, I led the animal homeward. It was eager enough to be led and trotted obediently beside me all the way until, as we neared Ruari’s house, I slipped my scarf from its neck and waited to see what would happen. Rushing forward delightedly, the wether bounded through the gate and, running up to the door of the house, commenced butting it with its horns, ‘baaing’ happily.

  The door opened quickly and Ruari, obviously interrupted in the ritual of shaving, appeared on the threshold. I was just congratulating myself on my good deed when I was shocked to hear Ruari utter a curse which made me flinch and to see him put his boot against the thick fleece of the former pet and push it roughly away. He then embarked on an ear-stinging recital of the poor beast’s pedigree, during which he got right down to fundamentals. Turning, he saw me.

  ‘Look!’ he commanded exasperatedly. ‘Fourteen miles and more I trudged yesterday with that beast. Fourteen miles I took him to try would I lose him, and here he is back at my own doorstep within twenty-four hours!’ A resentful oath bubbled again in his throat. ‘Would you believe it. Miss Peckwitt, that a beast would know its way home from fourteen miles away?’

  I replied feebly that I should have great difficulty in believing it, and Ruari, still muttering, drove the unhappy animal towards the byre.

  With ears still singing I slunk away home where Morag awaited me. Almost the first words she said were: ‘You’d best give me your scarf and let me wash it. It’ll be smellin’ awful strong of sheep likely?’

  Before I had been long in the village I discovered that one of the essential differences between the English and the Hebrideans is that, in general, the former ‘live to eat’ and the latter ‘eat to live’. There is a vast difference. The crofters ate sporadically, alternately gorging and fasting, while their eating habits made those of savages seem relatively elegant. As a consequence one saw otherwise healthy people looking as wishy-washy as a bowl of gruel; swallowing spoonful after spoonful of baking-soda or patent stomach powder, and if they were ‘educated’ punctuating their conversation with so many ‘excuse-me’s’ that listening to them was like listening to the playing of a badly cracked gramophone record. In all my years in Bruach I never once met a crofter who regularly enjoyed his food. ‘Sore stomachs’ were such a frequent complaint that the job of the doctor must have been as monotonous as working at a factory bench, so busy was be kept cutting out identical pieces from an interminable procession of stomachs.

  The fare was plain and shockingly lacking in variety. Except for the ubiquitous turnip, vegetables were practically unknown, the average crofter having as little inclination for the eating of vegetables as he has for the growing of them. So much is he in the thrall of his own fatalism that he will stand beside a plot of good cabbages and placidly assert that ‘cabbages will not grow hereabouts’. So hypnotic are his mellow pathetic tones that the inexperienced are inclined to accept the truth of this astonishing statement despite the evidence of their own eyes.

  In many ways my landlady, having been employed in the laird’s kitchen ‘till lately’ (twenty-five years since!), was far superior to her neighbours both in the preparation and serving of meals, a circumstance for which I was ineffably grateful. She had even progressed far enough to boil mint along with new potatoes, which she did, she said, ‘because new potatoes is poisonous and the mint sucks the poison to itself’. However, the laird’s menus struck me as having boasted scarcely more variety than those of his tenants, and I had some difficulty in persuading Morag that there were puddings other than rice and custard, and that there were more palatable ways of cooking young chicken than boiling it in a pot along with chunks of ancient turnip. She was always very anxious to please and accept my suggestions without rancour, though she was inclined to dismiss the idea of serving a separately cooked vegetable each day of the week as eccentricity or, as she put it, ‘city swank’.

  Quite soon after I had arrived in Bruach Morag’s own small stock of turnips had become exhausted and as we were then without vegetables she suggested that I should pay a visit to ‘Old Mac’, who, at the age of eighty-four, had decided that it was time he started to save up in readiness for his old age. With this object in view he was reputed to have begun experimenting with the novel idea of growing vegetables for sale to hotels on the mainland.

  I set out for old Mac’s one chilly January morning. The moors were grizzled with hoar frost and the heather roots crisp under foot. A biting easterly wind frisked and rippled through the shaggy coats of the Highland cattle which grazed desultorily, one eye on the sparse grass, the other on the fence which barred them from the clustering buildings below, whence they were expecting their owners to appear bringing them filling bundles of hay. As I passed they lifted their heads hopefully and then, disappointed, returned to the task of filling their enormous bellies.

  Dropping down the hillside I came upon Old Mac’s croft, which was rush-grown and mossy, and decidedly unpromising-looking even to my inexperienced eye. The house itself huddled low into the hillside and from the single podgy chimney which pierced its grey thatched roof sprouted a wavering plume of peat smoke. I knocked on the door, over which drooped a dark moustache of battered ivy, and the old man’s niece, a virago of about forty who also sported a dark moustache, appeared in answer to my summons. I acquainted her with my mission and, all smiles, she led me towards a small thatched shed where her uncle, white-bearded and as podgy as the chimney pot, sat—‘marrying his potatoes’, the niece explained. I thought I must have heard incorrectly but there the old man was, a heap of potatoes on either side of him. With serious concentration he took a potato from each heap, cut them into the required shapes with a meticulousness which would have been obscene in anyone less primitive, and then tied them together tightly with string. He hoped, he told me, to produce by this method a new variety which he intended to call ‘Mac’s Victory’.

  Like Ruari, old Mac was rather deaf but, unlike Ruari, his speaking voice was inclined to be low and confidential. When the necessary civilities were over and the virago had departed to put on the kettle I repeated my errand. Mac shook his head.

  ‘Turnips?’ he said; ‘it’s no good tryin’ for to grow turnips here.’

  ‘Too sour?’ I asked politely.

  Mac glanced quickly towards the door from which came the sound of his niece’s receding footsteps. He put a warning finger to his lips.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed fervently. ‘She’s been like that ever since her operation. I don’t know what’s come over her.’

  I had an uneasy feeling that the footsteps had paused.

  ‘I mean the soil,’ I put in hurriedly.

  ‘Oh aye,’ agreed Mac. ‘Can’t grow turnips.’ He sighed deeply. ‘The doctor said it might be her glands. I don’t know … ever since her operation …’

  ‘Did you ever try to
grow turnips?’ I persisted desperately in unnecessarily loud tones. To my relief the footsteps recommenced and then died away.

  ‘Yes indeed! I grew turnips here one year and they was just like my fist.’ He clunched a gnarled hand expressively.

  I nodded.

  ‘And I grew them again the next year and they was like …’ He glanced impatiently about the shed but his eye lit on nothing suitable for demonstration and he continued: ‘They was the size of my two fists together.’ He hurled his knife into the potatoes and clenched his two fists together.

  I smiled encouragement

  ‘And the third year I grew them, and they was just like my head,’ be went on.

  A cursory glance at his head showed me that it was certainly not lacking in size.

  ‘Just like my head they was,’ he repeated; ‘but when I cut them open what did I find?’

  He leaned forward earnestly and I rewarded him with a doubtful shake of my head.

  ‘Well then, they was all rotten and maggoty inside,’ he said disgustedly.

  ‘Even more like your head,’ I murmured jocularly. He stared at me, a quizzical frown between his eyes.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ he asked, grunting as be levered himself up from the potatoes to escort me to the house to drink tea.

  ‘I just said it was a pity about the turnips,’ I dissembled.

  His finger went again to his lips. ‘Yes,’ he began, ‘ever since her operation.… I don’t know …’

  We were almost at the door of the cottage.

  ‘Come away in!’ called the virago hospitably. She fixed me with a resolute smile, and I retaliated with equal determination.

  I said goodbye to Old Mac and his niece after listening to the recital of a list of vegetables which included all I’d ever heard of and more besides, and which were bound to be failures on the Island because of the ravages of sun; rain; wind; mist; snow; hail; dogs; cows; sheep; horses; rabbits; deer; hens; blight; disease and tourists. From the way the old man referred to them I should have bracketed the last three together. It seemed that the growing of vegetables was an extremely hazardous business, and that Old Mac would be old indeed before he achieved his nest egg.

  On my return home I wrote ordering a sack of carrots and one of turnips from a supplier on the mainland, and with these we managed tolerably well throughout the winter months. By the time spring came round I was heartily sick of both vegetables and an S O S was despatched to Mary, which resulted in the welcome arrival of a parcel containing peas, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, french beans and onions. (‘I get funny with the smell of them,’ Morag observed, pointing to the onions.)

  The preparation of the vegetables Morag accomplished quite successfully with the exception of the beans and radishes, which items must have been strangers to the laird’s kitchen. The beans she painstakingly shelled, cooking only the sparse brown seeds and throwing the pods to the hens, exclaiming contemptuously as she put them before me in an egg-cup instead of the usual vegetable dish: ‘Sure they silly little peas is enough to crack the nails off a body.’ The radishes were laboriously stripped of their colourful outer rind and served as a wan accompaniment to the lettuce. When I explained that they needed only washing, she commented: ‘My, my! And I believe they’d be fine and comical if you can do that with them just.’

  Due no doubt to the invigorating air of Bruach my own appetite soon became prodigious. My taste in food had always been catholic and I was able to enjoy the novelty and simplicity of the traditional Island delicacies. Porridge, which in town I had eschewed as being too heating, now appeared regularly on the breakfast table—and as regularly disappeared! Dulse soup, carragheen pudding (both seaweeds), I found fairly agreeable and also such things as boiled cormorant (‘skart’ as it was known locally) and many other kinds of sea fowl, though in some cases I must confess there was decided evidence of their marine habitat. Salt herring, which is the staple food of the crofters, sent me, after my first cautious mouthful, to the water bucket, where I drank more water in less time than I can remember ever having drunk before or since. The taste for salt herring, I venture to suggest, is rarely acquired. Indeed I maintain that to be able to enjoy salt herring one must first be able to speak the Gaelic, or, alternatively, to speak the Gaelic one must first have eaten plenty of salt herring. Which acts as the better throat abrasive I am not qualified to say, but before eating salt herring I think my voice would have been classified as ‘soprano’. After I had eaten it my voice sounded to my own ears more like ‘basso-profundo’.

  Winkles, which during the winter months Morag picked for the London market, I managed to swallow after they had been boiled, but the prospect of letting them wriggle down my throat raw as Morag and Ruari did was too revolting to contemplate. Crabs, very much alive and wriggling, were put into the hot embers of the peat fire for about twenty minutes and then taken out and pulled to pieces with the fingers—a poker being used for all necessary tool-work. I soon became very partial to crab suppers and with practice grew adept at wielding the poker.

  ‘Crowdie’, a soft sour milk cheese, was very good when well made, though I could not fancy it served as a pudding with jam and cream: nor could I cultivate a taste for sugar instead of salt with my boiled eggs, which was the way the Bruachites relished them.

  Sour milk was much drunk locally, but I had the townswoman’s distaste for milk which is even slightly on the turn.

  ‘I canna’ understand you,’ said Ruari one day, after I had watched him tilt a jugful of thick sour curds to his lips and suck them greedily down his throat ‘You town-folk now, you’d never think to eat a plum or an apple before it was ripe? Then why would you be drinkin’ milk before it’s ripe?’

  I admitted that I had never thought of it in that way.

  ‘Why, when I was for a time in England during the last war,’ went on Ruari, ‘I never saw a drop of ripe milk but except it was fed to the pigs. Everyone wanted this unripe new stuff straight from the cow. Ach, there’s no good in that, except for the tea, and no as much taste in it as in a drink of water.’

  During the summer months, when milk was plentiful and rich, Morag made butter—and such butter! In town I would have complained that it was rancid, but though its ‘ripeness’ stung my throat and I might have to swallow two or three times to every mouthful, I came to enjoy it as I had never enjoyed butter before. Morag’s butter churn was a large sweetie jar with a hole in the lid. Through this hole went a rod about three feet long, at the bottom of which was a circle of wood with three or four holes in it. To make the butter Morag would sit on the edge of her chair, the jar, which would be about half full of cream, gripped firmly between her knees; then she would grasp the plunger and jerk it furiously up and down until the butter came. She reminded me of a jockey crouched grimly on the neck of his mount, his eyes fixed on the winning-post, while the illusion was intensified by the spatters of cream from the churn which spotted and streaked her face and hair, like the flecks of foam from a hard-ridden horse. The process sometimes lasted for hours and neighbours dropping in would obligingly take a turn at churning while Morag made tea. If she tired, my landlady would go to bed and resume her butter-making the next day or even the day after, and sometimes I would hear the ‘plop! plop!’ of the churn as a background to my dreams. It was a slapdash way of butter-making—slap-dash in every sense of the word—but we nearly always got the butter, and it usually took longer to make than it did to eat!

  Mushrooms in season grew abundantly on the moors and when the villagers heard of my fondness for them they persisted in bringing me all they could find. Day after day the mushrooms arrived, in milk-pails, in jamjars, in dirty handkerchiefs and even dirtier caps. I ate mushrooms fried for breakfast; I ate them in soups; I concocted mushroom savouries; I experimented with the idea of drying them, but still I could not use all the mushrooms they so generously bestowed upon me. I was touched by the thoughtfulness of my new friends until disillusionment came with the discovery of their ineradicable belief that
all mushrooms were deadly poison!

  There were of course the dumplings.

  There appears to be a tradition that a Scotch dumpling shall weigh at least ten pounds when cooked, no matter what size the household may be. It is fruity and spicy and is a noble sight when it is lifted from the pan in which it has been bubbling away for several hours and turned out on to the largest meat dish. Morag always used one of her old woollen vests, well floured, for a dumpling cloth as this produced a pleasing lacy effect on the outside. Ten pounds of rich fruit dumpling is a formidable quantity for two women to eat their way through unaided and whenever I saw one in preparation I knew I could look forward to a prolonged bout of indigestion. No scrap of it was ever wasted. The first day we ate it in steaming wedges hot from the pan and it was wonderful; on the following days we sliced it cold with a sharp knife and ate it either as cake or heated in the frying-pan for pudding. It was still good. Towards the end, when the pattern of Morag’s vest began to take on a decidedly angora-like quality, we hewed the last craggy pieces, soaked them in custard and made them into a trifle. And that was the dumpling finished. I would heave a sigh of mingled regret and relief and put away my magnesia tablets—until the next time.

  Fish, naturally, were there for the catching, but though when in England I had glibly prophesied to Mary that I should soon be doing my own fishing, I had never really expected the opportunity to arise. Fishing as a sport did not attract me in any way; I had not even held a fishing-rod in my hand. But ‘Needs must when the Devil drives’, and to my dismay there came a day when the butcher’s meat ‘went bad on him’ and Morag, having developed a stomach ache, suggested that I should borrow a rod from Ruari and try my luck at catching a fish or two for the evening meal. She seemed to be so sure I could manage the task that, after a moment’s hesitation, I decided that fishing might be as pleasant and profitable a way as any of spending an afternoon.