The Loud Halo Read online

  ‘What happened to all your hay, Donald?’ they asked him innocently, and Donald, who was perfectly aware of their feeling, only laughed and, waving a facetious hand towards one of the outlying islands, replied, ‘It’s all in Sandy’s barn over there, I reckon.’

  The end of October drew near and then it was Halloween. Stags were roaring in the hills. The rams were already among the sheep. The Department of Agriculture bull had been caught and sent to his winter home. Through wind and rain I worked desperately at my potatoes so as to have them all lifted before November came. Admittedly, unlike my neighbours, it was not so much the disgrace of having croft work still unfinished on the first of November that spurred me on. It was the knowledge that, though a date well into the middle of November was always decreed by the local Grazings Officer as being that on which all cattle could be brought in from the moors and allowed to roam the crofts, as soon as a few of the more idle or less tolerant inhabitants had themselves fenced their haystacks and put away their spades for the winter, moor gates were liable to be left insecurely latched so as to swing open at the nosing of a curious cow, or after dark they would be deliberately opened so that one was apt to wake up to find cattle driving their horns deep into one’s carefully stacked hay or fighting one another over one’s precious potato patch. Resolutely ignoring my stiffening back I plunged the fork into the earth, lifting the roots and picking off the potatoes one by one, examining each for signs of blight before throwing it into the pail which in turn had to be carried to the shed where they were to be stored. The floor of the shed was already covered with dry peat dust and on top of this had gone a layer of heather and dry bracken. On to this cosy bed went the potatoes, to be covered, when the lifting was finished, with more heather and bracken and then with a layer of old sacks. I was assured my potatoes would now be safe from everything except pilfering mice.

  Mercifully, all my hay was in the barn and by tea-time on Halloween I had reached the final row of potatoes, digging in a deepening twilight that was aided by a mist of fine rain and enclosed in a silence that was pierced only by the occasional lament of a homeward-bound gull, the scrape of my fork into the stony ground and the thud of potatoes into the pail. The musty autumn smell of the moors was strong in my nostrils, reminding me of how the village children would even now be excitedly rummaging into musty sheds and spidery lofts for even mustier clothes in which to dress themselves for their evening ploys. Their simple Halloween ‘false-faces’, made from a sheet of cardboard bent round the face and tied with string at the back of the head, would in snatched and secret moments already have been chalked or painted with fearsome white fangs, staring multi-coloured eyes and then liberally trimmed with fleece from the spring shearings, before being hidden away to await the great night. I recollected that some parents had expressed doubt as to whether the children would have the courage to go out this year because of the reported presence of a ‘white beast’ or as some described it ‘a wee white man’ in the hazel copse which filled a cleft of the moor between my own croft and the skirts of the hills. In the autumn the copse was a favourite nutting place not only for the children when they came home from school but for any adults who had time to pick or teeth to crack the nuts, but this season, after the first pickers had returned visibly shaken to tell their stories, the copse had been completely neglected.

  ‘D’ye believe in the wee folk yourself. Miss Peckwitt?’ Old Anna had asked, and because I refused to be drawn she went on, ‘Are ye no’ afraid, livin’ all by yourself down there?’

  I had told her that I was not afraid but now, straightening my aching back for a moment and looking across to the copse looming spectrally through the drifting mist, I wondered if it was still the truth. No, I was not afraid, but there is no denying that in the twilight of a still evening the moors, wild and deserted yet full of whispers, can have a disquieting effect. They seemed to breathe their mystery down my neck as I picked up a full pail of potatoes and carried it up the croft to the shed, refusing to let myself hurry yet conscious that my torso seemed to be well ahead of my legs. I emptied the pail and resolutely went back to my lonely digging.

  ‘I see you’re busy.’ I jumped so much that I stuck a tine of the fork through the toe of my new gumboots and turning round saw the postman grinning at me from under his peaked cap. He was wearing uniform but there was a rifle under his arm and the mailbag was full of dead rabbits.

  ‘I’m about finished,’ I told him, indicating the half dozen or so sticks of withered haulm still unlifted.

  ‘They’re no’ bad,’ he complimented me after he had rubbed one or two of the potatoes in his hands. ‘Are they nice and dry?’

  ‘No’ bad,’ I admitted. ‘They’re not waxy, anyway.’

  ‘My own are, but you should see the size of them,’ he told me. ‘I planted them in that boggy patch that’s never been ploughed before, and I used nothin’ but seaweed for them, My God! I’m tellin’ you, I can tuck just one of them under my arm and it’ll do a dinner for the four of us.’ He gathered up one or two potatoes that had missed the pail and put them in. ‘I’d best be gettin’ along, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘She’ll have it in for me if I’m not there on the dot.’ He swung his mailbag into a more comfortable position and started off. but changing his mind he came back to stand beside me again. ‘Did they tell you about yon white beast?’ he enquired anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, with a surreptitious glance towards the hazel copse.

  ‘Well, if you should see one be sure and chop it in two with your graipe,’ he instructed, and even while I gaped at him in astonishment he dove forward and picked up something from the soil. ‘That’s the beastie,’ he told me, triumphantly displaying on the palm of his hand a fat grub that might have been white beneath its film of earth. ‘Make sure you kill it properly now or it’ll play hell with your potatoes next year.’

  He loped off, whistling a Gaelic air to which the thudding of the mallbag against his bottom provided an erratic accompaniment. I threw the last potato into the pail, forked the dead haulm into heaps ready for burning and, heavy with weariness yet full of satisfaction, went back the cottage.

  The kitchen was warm and while I waited for the torch, soaked in methylated spirit, to heat the tube of the pressure lamp, I looked out across the darkening bay to where the pattern of lighthouses were already singing their charted beams over the furrowed water, the most powerful of them kindling a fleeting window-patterned reflection of itself on my kitchen wail. The lighthouses always served to emphasize the change in my life, for in town at this time in the evening it would have been the ordered queues of street lamps flicking on to contemplate the drab pavements with stark suspicious glare. I drew the peony-flowered curtains and pumped the lamp until it hissed into brightness.

  The kettle was steaming on the stove when there was a rattle at the door and Morag came in. I put aside the grocery list I had been studying with its quotations for bolls (140 lb.) of flour and oatmeal, for sugar by the hundredweight, pot barley, rice and coconut by the stone, for syrup in fourteen-pound tins.

  ‘Ach, now, seein’ you doin’ that reminds me Neilly was askin’ me to get some of that tobacco for him,’ said Morag, nodding towards the list. ‘I’ll not be sendin’ there for a whiley yet so perhaps you’ll order it along with your own,’ she suggested.

  I took up the list. ‘What kind does he like?’ I asked, having always been intrigued by the esoteric attraction of ‘Black Twist’, ‘Bogey Roll’, ‘Warhorse’ and ‘Warlock’. To my delight she plumped for ‘Bogey Roll’.

  ‘I wonder,’ I mused as I wrote it down, ‘just what “Bogey Roll” has that the others haven’t got?’

  ‘Indeed I don’t know,’ responded Morag, ‘but when he hasn’t any tobacco from the shop Neilly will smoke nettle leaves, or dockens, or I’ve even known him stuff his pipe with brown paper and smoke it, so I shouldn’t think it’s anythin’ particular.’

  She wriggled herself into her chair like a hen into a dust bath
before taking the cup of tea I was holding out to her.

  We sipped in silence for a while, half listening for the furtive whisperings or stealthy footsteps of children who, on their one night of jollity in the year, might be rigging a booby trap outside my door or climbing on to the roof to drop empty tins down the chimney.

  ‘Did you hear about the sod-hut tinkers?’ Morag burst out suddenly.

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’re goin’ to have a marryin’,’ she announced exultantly, ‘in the church with the minister.’

  I stared at her incredulously. During the spring and summer months Bruach, in common with most of the Hebrides, was beset by tinkers selling every kind of merchandise and of more recent years by the collectors of scrap-iron—still called ‘tinks’ —who poked uninvited around our crofts and sheds discovering our assets and then, with irritating insistence, making offers for everything we did not wish to dispose of. I have never forgotten one filthy old man who had stood glowering at me through a draggle of grey beard while a confederate of his was glibly proposing to ‘take out of my way’ an old trough with which I had not the slightest intention of parting. During a slight pause the old man had jerked suddenly into the conflict by asking, ‘Is they your own teeths?’ with such an air of covetousness that I expected him to immediately make me an offer for them.

  These ‘scrap tinks’ were considered by the crofters to be of a much lower class than the rest of the tinkers, largely, I think, because they indulged in no courteous Highland preamble before they got down to business, a neglect the Bruachites found distasteful. But they became, like the other ‘tinks’, an unavoidable adjunct to the Hebridean way of life, and in the early mornings throughout the spring and summer one could see their tents or their dejected old lorries parked in some green and pleasant spot just off the road while nearby a kettle hung over a crackling twig fire. On clear sunlit mornings when the air was splintered with birdsong and the faces of the breakfasting tinkers seemed to reflect the sunshine, the life appeared to be not without a certain glamour, but any hankering for it was dispelled on dreary mornings of storm when the camping place was sleeked by rain and dotted with dismal heaps of scrap unloaded from the lorries so as to make sleeping space for the family. There was no crackling fire then but only a pile of twigs which a drape of gloomy faced men took turns to fan with their hats into some semblance of flame.

  Bruach normally saw the last of its tinkers well before the end of September but this year a company of them had decided to stay for the winter and had built for themselves a substantial hut of sods, covered with tarpaulins which were weighted down with boulders from the bed of the burn. Although the encampment was a good two miles from the village the Bruachites at first seemed to find the presence of the tinkers a trifle disturbing, partly, I suspected, because they could never completely dissociate them from the stories of witchcraft and magic with which a Hebridean child is surrounded. It soon became obvious from the blue smoke that sprouted from a hole in the tarpaulin that the tinkers were burning peat, so peat stacks were examined frequently, though even had pilfering been observed it is unlikely that anything would have been done about it except to carry all the peats home to the safety of the shed at the side of the house. When two of the more incautious of the villagers reported that the tinkers had opened up a couple of hags close to their encampment the relief was general. No one really wanted to have any cause for complaint against the tinkers. Of course, they admitted, they had no right whatever to cut peats without permission from the village. ‘Ach, but what’s a few yards of peat in hundreds of acres of the stuff!’ they exclaimed in tones that would not have been half so tolerant had it been one of themselves who had so flouted tradition. It was exactly the same with the driftwood on the shore. In Bruach the men went regularly to the beaches, putting up above high-tide mark all manner of flotsam and jetsam ranging from small pieces of driftwood which would make good kindling to large hatch covers which might provide solid supports for a new byre or shed. All along the shore these dog-in-the-manger piles of wood were dotted, constantly being added to, rarely being depleted. Sometimes the larger pieces would have initials roughly scratched on them to proclaim the finder but this was unnecessary, for in the village it was an unwritten law that a man owned whatever he put above high-tide mark and it was considered to be the depth of treachery for another to lay a finger on it, even if it had been lying rotting there for much of the claimant’s lifetime. They were able apparently to memorise not only each heap they had garnered but each individual piece and I have witnessed an old man who had not moved from his fireside for several years describe after a few moments’ meditation a piece of wood of a particular shape and size and then give an importunate relative reluctant permission to abstract it from one of his caches on the shore. Yet now came the tinkers who with smiling indifference and without a sign of remonstrance from the owners indulged in day-long sorties, looting the stores of wood with a rapacity that, had they been ordinary villagers, would have resulted in months of bitterness and recrimination.

  There appeared to be at least a dozen of the ‘sod-hut tinks’ and from the sounds of laughter one could always hear in the vicinity of their abode they seemed to pack a great deal of jollity into their unfettered lives. The grocer reported that they were ideal customers in that they bought unstintingly, paid cash and carried their purchases away with effortless good humour. The barman was quoted as having said much the same thing.

  ‘Which of them is going to marry which?’ I enquired of Morag, being as much enchanted with the news as she was.

  ‘I believe it’s yon little one Erchy’s after sayin’ has the “come-to-bed eyes” ’ She gave a wry chuckle. ‘Aye, an’ I mind our own Hector tellin’ him, “Well, Erchy,” says he, “if it’s come-to-bed eyes she has then I’m thinkin’ it’s a been-to-bed walk her legs has.” ’

  ‘Oh, that one.’ I exclaimed, recalling a young girl with rather bandy legs, bounteous chestnut hair and shadowed lazy eyes, who had called at the cottage a couple of times and with liquid mendicant chant had tried to flatter, wheedle and coax me into buying bowls and ladles made from dried milk tins, roughly soldered.

  ‘Aye, that one,’ confirmed Morag.

  ‘And who is she marrying?’ I demanded.

  ‘And who but that one they call “Hairy Willie” ’ she declared with great satisfaction.

  ‘Hairy Willie!’ I ejaculated. ‘But he’s too old for her, and anyway he’s in Canada.’

  ‘He may be too old for her but he’s not in Canada,’ contradicted Morag with smug emphasis. ‘He’s back at the sod hut.’

  I was overcome with curiosity. The rumour a month or so earlier that Hairy Willie’s sister in Canada had sent him the money for a three-month trip by plane to visit her had caused a great sensation in the village. No one had at first believed the story but gradually signs of unusual excitement became apparent among the tinkers themselves. Several bachelors in the village reported having been asked for cast-off underwear to fit a ‘big, big man’. (Hairy Willie was a clothes-bursting six foot two.) Others were asked if they could spare a suitcase. Then when interest had been whipped up to its peak Hairy Willie himself did Erchy the great honour of appearing, at his door and asking ‘would he be havin’ a kind of tie or two he wasn’t wantin’ to go to Canada?’ Erchy had obligingly produced a couple of cherished ties and in return for the gift had asked Hairy Willie point blank if the story of his flying to Canada was really true. Hairy Willie had been delighted not only to show Erchy the letter from his sister (he himself could not read) but also the money order she had enclosed for his fare. (‘An’ the size of it near knocked me over!’ Erchy confided afterwards.)

  One day the following week a bevy of tinker children was seen climbing over and under, inside and outside Hairy Willie’s ramshackle old van, racing each other with pails of water from the burn, washing it and polishing it and making it fit for the journey down to Glasgow where he was to catch
the plane. The very next day Hairy Willie, dressed in a lovat-green tweed jacket which had come from the Laird via the gamekeeper, a pair of homespun trousers, furtively supplied by the shepherd’s tender-hearted wife; a pious black hat begged from the minister, and a pair of ex-R.A-F. flying boots from an entirely unaccountable source, had climbed into his van beside a battered portmanteau and amidst a chorus of good wishes, spurts of delighted dancing and waving of arms and hats started on his adventure. Since then the village had heard no news of him and it had been assumed by everyone that he was safely in Canada with his sister. Now, here was Morag saying that he was already back at the encampment.

  ‘Didn’t he like Canada?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed the man never got to Canada,’ she replied. ‘You mind he was drivin’ himself down?’ I nodded. ‘Well, they’re tellin’ me he collected that many drunken drivin’ summonses on his way to Glasgow that all the money for his fare had gone on fines before ever he got there.’ Morag was outraged by my laughter. ‘A waste of good money,’ she scolded, and then added thoughtfully, ‘not but what it was a waste, anyway. How did she know he was her real brother? You canna’ tell with tinks.’