The Sea for Breakfast Read online

  I yielded sufficiently to choose a lovely fair-isle jersey for Behag and to help him buy some sweets for Fiona and Morag. We were on our way back to the car when Hector muttered suddenly: ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. He was staring across the road at a policeman who was standing near the kerb. My knees started to feel a little weak. I recalled hearing of poaching penalties which included the confiscation of the offender’s car.

  ‘He’ll see me in a minute,’ muttered Hector. ‘Here, take tsese.’ He thrust the parcels at me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked agitatedly.

  ‘He’ll want to shake hands with me,’ Hector replied. ‘I used to know him well and I haven’t seen him for years,’ and then added by way of explanation, ‘I should have asked to wash my hands at that hotel, tsese bloody trout scales stick like glue. Are tsere any on my cuffs?’ He displayed his right hand liberally dotted with unmistakeable trout scales and then rubbed it vigorously on the seat of his trousers. We were approaching the policeman who, turning, caught sight of Hector. His face split into a grin as he came across the road to greet him. Hector’s hand rubbed even more vigorously behind him, ‘God!’ I heard him mutter desperately.

  The policeman put out his hand, grasped Hector’s and shook it firmly. As soon as it was released Hector plunged both hands deep into his jacket pockets and kept them there.

  ‘Tsat’s a nice fellow,’ he told me when everything had passed off serenely, ‘but all tse same, if I’d known he was in tsis part of tse world I wouldn’t have wanted him to see me.’ I made no comment. ‘I’d best go to tse service now,’ he said when we were putting the parcels in the car and after I had discovered that it was early-closing day so that my shopping would not get done.

  ‘You’ll get rid of those trout before you do anything else, Hector,’ I insisted firmly.

  ‘Oh yes, aye, aye.’ He heaved a big sigh. ‘I wonder what will I do with tsem?’

  ‘I was expecting you to to say you’d present them to the policeman,’ I said with bitter sarcasm.

  Hector looked at me with surprised approval. ‘I could do tsat too,’ he rejoined. ‘I’ll see will I get a wee bitty paper to wrap tsem in.’

  ‘Hector,’ I called despairingly, but he was hurrying away. I cringed behind me wheel of ‘Joanna’ and shut my eyes as he bowled confidently through the open door of the police station opposite. I opened them again when I heard him at the boot. He came round to the door of the car with a box tucked under his arm.

  ‘I won’t be more tsan a minute,’ he assured me happily. I could not bring myself to ask him what had happened, but before very long he was back at the car again, whistling discordantly. ‘I’m away to tse service now,’ he said.

  ‘What did you do with the trout?’ I managed to ask weakly.

  ‘Ach well, I went into tse pollis station and asked for him but tsey said he was takin’ his dinner, so I went round to see his wife, and told her I wanted a wee bitty paper or a box to put somesing tasty in for her man’s dinner. She gave me a box and so tsat’s got rid of tsat lot.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I’d best be away,’ he repeated, but he had reckoned without the grateful attention of the policeman who now came hurrying towards the car. Hector beamed complacently as once again his hand was grasped and shaken. But this time it was the policeman’s hands that were covered in fish scales.

  When Hector returned from the service he asked me if I would mind very much following the hearse back to the burial ground instead of returning straight to Bruach, as we had originally intended. Behag’s uncle, he explained, had been something of a reprobate and had cut himself off from the family. As a consequence Hector had been the only mourner and he thought Behag would not like it if he left the old man to go alone to his final resting place. Though I suspected in this arrangement a design to await the evening opening of the pubs before returning home I fell in with it because it meant that I should be able to see part of the Island I had never seen before. While Hector supervised the actual interment, I thought, I could wander over the moors looking for wild flowers of which there might be some species not found in Bruach.

  When we arrived at the burial ground we were met by a trio of indignant grave diggers who roused themselves from their perches on listing tombstones to inform us that they had not received a word about preparing a grave until an hour ago. They had the cows to milk and other chores to do tonight and they couldn’t get the grave finished until morning.

  ‘What’ll we do with him for tse night tsen?’ asked Hector

  ‘We could put him in the church,’ suggested one of the trio. The grave diggers and the driver of the hearse carried the coffin into the church. Hector watched them impassively.

  ‘You know,’ he said when we were seated again in ‘Joanna’ and heading for Bruach, ‘I tsink tsat’s likely tse first time tse old man has ever been in church in his life.’

  I dropped Hector at Morag’s cottage and because I was still feeling aggrieved over the business of the trout I made an excuse not to go in for a ‘strupak’. I supposed both Morag and Behag knew that it was a box of poached trout Hector had loaded into my car that morning but as no Bruachite really believes poaching in moderation to be a crime they would have assumed that I also knew and approved.

  I had barely finished feeding my poultry and having my own tea when Hector sparked in through the gate in a new electric blue and viridian pullover. He came with a saucer of fresh-made butter from Morag and really sincere offers to help me with one or two jobs which he knew perfectly well I had already done for myself. He sat on the bench watching me as I cleared the table and washed the dishes, too ashamed and embarrassed to keep up a conversation but humming every now and then to show me how much at ease he felt. I had some letters to write and I wished he would go but I could not bring myself to say ‘I mustn’t keep you back’, which is the accepted Gaelic way of telling anyone ‘For goodness’s sake, go!’ My expression must have been a little forbidding because he tried several times to draw a smile from me by telling me feeble jokes. At last he could bear it no longer.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t made you cross with tse fish,’ he said miserably.

  ‘Oh, I suppose it’s all right,’ I conceded stiffly.

  He got up and lumbered towards me, his arms outstretched. I remembered the cats, and capitulated.

  Beachcombing

  One of the chief delights of living in Bruach was that there was always an excuse to go rambling along the seashore in search of drift wood for kindling. To negotiate much of the tide line one needed to be fairly agile. It was a matter of leaping from one slippery rock to another whilst wearing equally slippery gumboots; of wallowing ankle-deep in sodden tangle; of wading through shell-strewn pools and sometimes climbing up steep barnacle-encrusted rocks to skirt the incoming tide. To me it was all sheer glory. With the sharp clean smell of the sea filling my nostrils, the roaring of the breakers in my ears and the astringent caress of fine spray on my cheeks I was content to wander for hours. The dominant motive was always to gather driftwood, but it was difficult to resist the fascination of collecting a few limpets or winkles to smash and feed to the waving tendrils of the anemones in the colourful pools, or turning over a stone to watch the green crabs scuttling to fresh hiding places. There was always plenty of driftwood and one began by collecting every piece and making little piles along the shore to be collected on the return journey, but always, a little farther along, there were choicer pieces of driftwood than those one had already gathered and so one continued acquisitively until there were far too many piles to be carried home and one had to select the most desirable pieces and leave the rest, hoping it would be there another day.

  Apart from driftwood, the assortment of objects washed ashore was limitless. Tins of American shaving cream (which Morag reckoned was splendid for washing Hector’s sweaty socks); plastic cups; letters in bottles (very unromantic ones); oars; brooms; deck shoes; cans of paint. It was doubtless due to the finding of half-ful
l tins of paint that the walls of my cottage had been such a peculiar colour. Once I found an undamaged vacuum flask which I use to this day. Once a necklace, and once, very fortuitously, a full tin of dripping. My bread-board is the door of a ship’s locker; my door-stopper is the vertebra of a whale which visiting small dogs frequently linger to gnaw and visiting large dogs determinedly try to appropriate. My most treasured find to date is merely a piece of driftwood, part of the branch of a tree, but beautifully sculptured by nature into a classic representation of a female figure.

  Many of my neighbours were dedicated beachcombers, sometimes spending stormy nights in convenient caves so as to be the first to pounce on any trophy the sea might bestow – no doubt kept warm by the unflagging hope that it might be a cask of whisky. I can recall someone finding a sack of flour which he claimed as quite fit for use because the flour on the outside formed into a paste which had kept the inside dry. Another found a box of candles which were certainly useful. From washed-up crates I have been given onions that were so impregnated with salt they needed none in the cooking, and grapefruit that were uneatable for the same reason. Such things as bales of rubber were at one time considered lucrative finds because in addition to the pound or two reward from the Receiver of Wrecks quite high freight charges could be claimed for rowing them to a convenient spot for collection. So long as these charges were paid undemurringly the Bruachites continued to increase them until they reaped the reward of their own avarice, the authorities deciding that the recovery of the rubber was no longer economical. So the bales were left to rot on the shore along with the pit props, trawl bobbins, net floats, old coconut husks and fish baskets, which ate the inevitable adornments of the tangle-woven shingle.

  In the autumn, after the hay and corn had been stacked for the winter and all the peats had been carried home from the moor, the Bruachites would go winkle picking for the Billingsgate market. Often when beachcombing I met groups of them working their way along the shore, filling pails with the shiny blue-black shells; carrying the full pails to tip into the waiting sacks, and carrying the full sacks up the brae to the lorry. There was supposed to be good money in winkle picking and as my budget was a tight one I thought I would like to try my hand at it. Wearing about three pullovers and with scarves round my middle, round my neck and over my head, and oilskins topping everything, I took my pail and followed the outgoing tide. Crouching low, my back towards the sea, I turned over rocks, seeing the sparks fly and smelling the sulphurous smell as they crashed against one another and exposed the writhing cat-fish, the spotted gunnels, the myriads of sandlice and the pathetically few winkles beneath them. Working my way up again, with the incoming tide chasing me inexorably, I discovered colonies of winkles, but before I could get more than a couple of handfuls of them into my pail the tide was swirling around my boots and over the winkles so that I could no longer see them to pick. A good picker can pick a bag or more in a single tide, that is two hours before and two hours after low tide. After a few days’ practise I found I could manage about a pailful and there are five pailfuls to the sack. To get even that sad quantity I had to concentrate so much that when I shut my eyes at night I saw only troves of black glistening winkles and in my dreams reached out to gather them. I did, much to the astonishment of the other pickers, achieve a full sack eventually, but only by waiting another ten days or so for the next daylight low tide. In due course I received a cheque from a Billingsgate firm but the amount, after payment of the crippling freight charged by the railway was no reward for my worn nails and sore chapped hands and the ache in my back caused by wrestling with stubborn boulders. Yet the Bruachites looked forward eagerly to the beginning of the winkling season and I came to understand their eagerness. The work could be squeezed in between the other chores and the money earned was always welcome. For some of the younger folk who could not go to the mainland for employment because of having to look after the old folks it was often their only chance to make some pocket money. They winkled, as they did so many things, in happy, chattering groups, never wandering out of earshot of one another; but though the sea stays comparatively warm until after the New Year, to crouch down for four long hours on an exposed shore, drenched with spray and with a bitterly cold wind hurling its icy daggers between your shoulder blades is a desperate way of earning money. Particularly when you have not even the comfort of a hot bath to look forward to, but only a couple of kettles of hot water—if you first go to the well and fill a pail.

  The most inveterate beachcomber and by far the speediest winkle picker in the village was ‘Euan, the son of Euan, the son of Euan’, the Gaelic pronunciation of whose name approximated to a long drawn-out yawn. He was a bright-eyed old man, always picturesquely dressed in an old peaked cap and a seaman’s jersey—relics of his days on a yacht as a steward—and his legs bound round from the top of his tackety boots to above the knee with thick rope so that they resembled the legs of the Michelin Tyre man. He flatly refused to have anything to do with gumboots, saying that they ‘cooked his feets’, and stoutly maintaining that his strong hill-boots and rope puttees were more effective in keeping out the wet because it did not get a chance to leak over the top. Yawn had made some of the most envied finds on the shore. It was rumoured that he really had found a large cask of whisky and that he had secreted it somewhere in the hills.

  ‘He’s never without a dram in the house,’ Postie assured everyone. earnestly. ‘And his pension doesn’t give that to him.’ As everyone was sure that Postie was bound to know exactly what Yawn’s pension gave him they accepted the story of the secret cask and whenever Bruachites did not know what to do with themselves, as on Sunday afternoons, they were inclined to form into little bands of searchers for Yawn’s treasure. As they always came back sober they obviously never found it.

  Yawn lived with his two sisters on the croft next but one to my own. Brother and sisters were all over seventy and of the three only Yawn himself could read or write or tell the time. His two sisters were utterly unlike. Sarah, the younger one (seventy-four), was a delightfully bobbish little lady doing all the housework and most of the croft work with never a word of complaint except that she was tormented by her corns. The elder sister, Flora, had once been a lady’s maid and could not bear to forget it. She sat stiffly all day long in a chair, commenting disparagingly on everything Sarah did and doing absolutely nothing else. She could neither read nor write. She did not knit, sew or dam. She would not move from her chair to cook or even to lift a boiling kettle from the fire. What little food she ate she took on a plate on her lap. She was not ill, nor paralysed in any way, but she had sat so still for so long that the chair seemed to have merged itself into her body and her body into the musty black skirts that clung to the floor as raggedly as old wainscoting so that one would not have been at all surprised to see mice darting in and out of them. On her head she wore the most impressive tea cosy of hair it is possible to imagine. It completely overbalanced her face and marvelling at the edifice I sometimes wondered if the weight of it was responsible for the apparent fixation of her body and mind. It was said in Bruach, and I can well believe it, that she had not touched her hair with comb or brush, soap or water, for over forty years; that if it was investigated thoroughly the remains of at least half a dozen hair nets and several hundred hairpins would be discovered, all completely enjungled. Some recalled with awe that before her hair grew quite so matted she had been seen to reach for the toasting fork that used to hang beside the fire and scratch her head with it, but now either her head had ceased to itch or she had mislaid the toasting fork.

  Flora spoke in a fiat voice, her remarks being addressed invariably to the fire.

  ‘You have cut your hay.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You have stocked it.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Your wife and your daughter helped you.’

  ‘Not my daughter.’

  ‘Your daughter was away on the bus.’

  ‘No, she was out fishing.’


  ‘She caught fish.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You will bring me a fish for my dinner tomorrow.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Sarah, you will cook the fish the way I like it.’

  ‘Aye, sister.’

  And so it would go on. She never asked a question and never answered one. She was waited on hand and foot and there appeared to be not a thing organically wrong with her. She was the most uncannily idle and least endearing personality I have met in my life.

  Because of Flora, I think, the household was not much visited by the Bruachites, and so until after I had gone to live in my cottage I had not come much into contact with either Sarah or her brother. One dark autumn morning however, when the mists were soaking into the hill tops and the hooded crows were croaking their ‘grace before meat’, I looked out of my window to see a big strong calf grazing on my croft and trailing behind him what looked like a tangled clothes line. I went out to investigate and the calf, seeing me, started to run away, dragging the clothes line after him. I was horrified to hear a groan. I started forward again cautiously, but again the calf bounded away from me. Sarah’s voice from the bundle of clothes came tremulous but clear.

  ‘If I keeps hold of the chain perhaps you could cut the wee bitty rope with a knife.’

  I rushed back into the house and got the sharpest knife I could find and as Sarah hauled on the chain I managed to grasp the beast’s head rope and slash it quickly. The calf bounded away and I ran to Sarah.

  ‘He pulled up his stake.’ she explained. ‘And then he got it round my foot and came galloping away down here dragging me after him.’ She was half lying on the wet ground, her face chalk white. ‘I think the beast has broken my leg for me,’ she murmured lucidly and then fainted clean away.