A Croft in the Hills (17 page)

Helen enjoyed the boys’ stay immensely. After supper, Henry would set her problems in arithmetic, or do a drawing for her, or make wonderful models out of plasticine.

The boys could certainly work. They spread cartfuls of lime and manure; they scythed rushes; they helped to dip the sheep. And they were ready to deal with any emergency. After the first ten
days or so of superb, unbelievable spring weather, we had two or three days of real storm. The water came swirling off the slope of the moor and began to seep into the glass-house, where the
chickens were. The boys set to with spades and deepened the trench round the glass-house before the chickens were engulfed. They enjoyed this battle with the elements. We could hardly dissuade
Henry, after that, from digging drains; so great was his enthusiasm that he drew up a plan for draining the whole moor. We had to explain that, much as we should have liked to embark on some such
scheme, we had to submit to the pressure of other work. When you’re running a small place on your own, you hardly ever manage to catch up with the bare essentials, let alone undertake the
more grandiose projects—it’s always a case of ‘next year’ for the big things. So Henry had to be dragged from his draining to spread muck on the potato ground.

I was kept hard at work, during those spring weeks, coping with the boys’ appetites. Well I remembered how we had been perpetually hungry in our first months in the hills. After a day or
two working in the keen air, there was a gleam in the boys’ eyes as they came into the kitchen at meal times. Henry would quite openly sniff the warm smell coming from the oven and rub his
hands with satisfaction as he sat down. John would just murmur, ‘That Irish stew’s good. Funny... I’d never look at it in the canteen, but here...’ I knew what that
‘here’ meant. The vitalising effect of satisfying work in the high air was working its spell. As I heaped John’s plate, I glanced at his face. The pale, rather haunted look of the
student had gone, I noticed, and there was a hint of the countryman’s weathered confidence about his features. Perhaps our scheme
was
having the two-way effect we had hoped for.

The boys were to have one day in the week completely free. On their first holiday they both went to Inverness. But after that they put sandwiches in their pockets and had a long day in the
hills. In their free time, after five o’clock, they never once opened a text-book; but they climbed the near hills, they went over the moor with the gun, they called on various families in
the district and were made welcome in Highland style.

John, as a veterinary student, was naturally interested chiefly in the animals. I think he was genuinely sorry that his spell with us would be over before lambing started. I’m sure he
would have settled quite happily, at any time, into a hill-man’s life. Henry, on the other hand, never quite accepted his sense of isolation. He was inclined to want to post letters, send
wires, or make telephone calls at all sorts of odd moments. He had the townsman’s attitude to living arrangements. Milk came out of a bottle, water out of a tap, and that was that. It never
occurred to him to wonder how it was that water did, in fact, come out of a tap, in this wilderness. The result was that he would let the water run while shaving, till the cistern was emptied and
the household threatened with drought until it had time to fill up again. Poor Henry! He couldn’t quite understand the maledictions that descended on his good-natured head! Perhaps only those
who’ve carried water in pails, dragged logs from the wood and sawn them, can fully appreciate the value of the simple necessities—water and fire.

Towards the end of the month, John had a shot at ploughing the field we were to bring into cultivation that year. The boys had scythed the rushes that were choking it, they’d removed
several large boulders, and now it was ready for ploughing. John did very well. We called the field ‘John’s field’ and we sowed it later with oats and grass seed. When John came
to see us, several years later, he cast a reminiscent eye over it. It had obviously been quite often in his thoughts. The day the boys were due to leave, John’s father and sister arrived to
fetch him. They had come north by car, for a long weekend, and were picking him up on their way home. We were all out finishing off a job in the yard when they arrived. It was a typical spring day
of sudden squalls and gleams of sunlight. Mr. S., getting no answer to his knock at the door, rounded the gable of the house, clutched his hat as a gust of wind nearly carried it off, caught sight
of us and roared, ‘You don’t really
live
here, do you?’

I’m afraid that is the reaction of quite a lot of chance visitors to our small domain. By the time they have found the place on the map (large-scale), been directed by several neighbours,
with varying degrees of explicitness, have drawn the car into the side of the narrow road, taken the path through the heather, climbed the stile and pushed open the garden gate (which is always so
well barricaded against marauding cattle, that it’s sometimes easier to climb the fence, anyway), there is generally an expression of blank dismay on their faces. We have come to know it
well, but we have our defences ready. A chair drawn up to a blazing fire, a cup of steaming tea and a plateful of well-buttered scones will usually work wonders in winter or spring. In summer or
autumn, a dish of fruit and cream and a stroll out on to the moor will generally do the trick.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic visitors we have ever had were two young Norwegians, man and wife. They stayed a week with us in very stormy weather, one October, and they loved every moment of
their stay. It was just like home, they said. The only thing that surprised them was that we allowed the sheep to roam the hills all winter. In Norway they have to be brought into shelter and
hand-fed for months. Some of the most ‘marginal’ of our land would be considered, they said, quite first-class in parts of Norway, where soil is so precious, and the fields have
actually to be built before anything can be grown. The deep-litter system of poultry-keeping intrigued them greatly.

The very day after the boys’ departure, the lambs began to arrive. There was half a gale blowing as we staggered round the moor, looking for the tiny white specks. Over the following days,
it rained, it snowed, it blew, and the lambs kept on appearing. We wished John were there to help. Mercifully, no mishap occurred, though it was the kind of pitiless, harsh weather that is very
hard on a new-born lamb.

Towards the end of April we decided to sell ‘Red Mary’, the cross-Highland cow. She had always been a bit of a terror. Having bigger and better horns than any of the other cows, she
had become a bully, and her athletic powers had increased over the years. She could jump, if not over the moon, at least over the highest fence we could manage to erect. Any fence she didn’t
feel like jumping she would persistently lean against at a weak spot until it gave way, when she would step elegantly over, inviting the other cows, with a toss of her head, to follow. We felt we
couldn’t put up with her tricks for another growing season. Already, the year before, Jim had had to take to sleeping with his bed jammed against the window, so that he could look out at
first light to see what marauders were in the crops. Many a morning he had gone out in pyjamas and gum-boots, to drive Red Mary out of the springing corn.

It was a bitter morning of snow, and blowing hard, when Jim went to take Red Mary to the fank to await the cattle float. I decided to keep Helen at home, for the moor road looked most
uninviting. Jim had been gone a full hour and I was plodding round the yard, seeing to the hens, wondering when the float would arrive, when I saw Alec and a Forestry man coming down the path from
the stile. ‘Have you a ladder?’ Alec asked. ‘Why, yes, I think so.’ One is never surprised at being asked for anything up here, but I did find the ladder puzzling, and
Alec’s manner was a little strange.

‘It’s Jim’, he went on, ‘He’s not bad, really, but... the heifer dragged him, he...’ My heart began to jump.

‘The heifer dragged him...’ That wretched Red Mary! He’d had her on the rope, she’d been determined to break free, Jim had been equally determined that she
wouldn’t. He’d held on firmly and she’d dragged him for yards along the road. I stopped trying to picture what might have happened and found a short ladder. I took a rug and
followed the men to where Jim was lying at the roadside. No bones were broken, but he was sick and his face was the most ghastly shade of green, with a mauve tinge round the mouth. Alec and the
Forestry man carried him to the house on the improvised stretcher. We pulled off his boots and lifted him into bed, then I smothered him with blankets and hot-water bottles. I persuaded him to
drink a cup of sweet, hot tea and we left him to lie quiet.

Alec promised to see to all the cows for me. Nellie, our easterly neighbour, came to offer to take charge of Helen if I wanted to go for the doctor, but Jim wouldn’t hear of this. Duncan
went the lambing round. As ever, we felt surrounded with goodwill. I got a fire going and slipped in to see Jim every half-hour. He was sleeping peacefully and I was thankful to see that his face
was its normal colour. By tea-time he was sitting up, eating a boiled egg. I could hardly persuade him to stay in bed until the following morning. ‘That darned heifer’, he muttered, at
regular intervals. She was, alas, still with us, for the snow had deterred the float from coming. As I looked out into the dusk, I could see her doing her best to resist Alec’s efforts to get
her into the byre for the night.

April had been, as it most often is, a cruel month, though March had been so lovely. But we managed to get the corn and the grass-seed sown. Come what may, seed-time and harvest are always
somehow or other achieved. I think it will always remain a bit of a miracle to us that this is so, perhaps because we were not actually born to face the odds of hill-top farming. To the native
hill-man it is just in the nature of things that there should be endless difficulties to overcome. If everything went smoothly, he would be inclined to suspect a catch. To us, the wonder is that
the stacks still rise against the skyline each autumn, though it may be November before the last ones appear, that the beasts thrive, the little chimneys have each their plume of smoke and the men
and women smile a welcome, inevitably, in the doorways.

Towards the beginning of May, when the weather was beginning to relent, we heard disquieting news from over the burn. Willie Maclean was home from hospital and his wife was hoping he would soon
be able to get a breath of the soft air. What he needed was to sit on the seat at the gable of the little house and feel the sun warm on his face and hands, she said. But Willie couldn’t pick
up strength to walk that far; he could only sit in his room and talk in quiet snatches and make plans for his wife and his household. He had got very thin and weak. The doctor could do nothing for
him, and one Sunday night he slipped away.

The minister held a service in the house on the Tuesday evening; on the Wednesday was the funeral. Jim was asked to help at the graveside. We were deeply touched by this gesture and we were
proud to think we had been his friends. The children and young people of his and of his daughter’s house spent the day of the funeral with Helen and me. From the window we heard the cadences
of the Gaelic hymns rising and falling in the still air. We watched the long procession of men following Willie to his rest. It is sad when a man like Willie goes, for there are none to take his
place. Willie could work his fields, talk of history and poetry in the Gaelic and the English idioms, slate a roof, play the pipes, and keep a secure home for his family. He was a man deeply
rooted, complete in himself. Men don’t seem to grow to that wholeness now.

When the last of the potatoes were in and the garden planted, and while we were waiting for a little rain to moisten the ground before sowing the turnip seed, I started the spring cleaning. It
was the first really big one I had tackled, for hitherto the house had nearly always been in some state of upheaval and thorough cleaning had been done piecemeal, as each room came into use. Now,
however, we were more or less settled, our living had fallen into a pattern. Most modern housewives would shudder at the amount of sheer brute force needed for a croft cleaning—there are no
shortcuts.

Jim gave me a hand to carry the upholstered chairs and the carpets out on to the grass, where I beat them till the dust flew away in clouds. I washed the blankets and draped them on the bushes
in the sun. Curtains and paintwork keep very clean in the hills, for there is no grime to encrust them. Only the living-room and the kitchen really needed much in the way of hard scrubbing.
Oil-lamps certainly make ceilings black. Kitchens which are used for every conceivable purpose—and may have to be converted at a moment’s notice into hospitals for sick lambs and
chickens, or (on occasions, when the outside boiler breaks down) into cookhouses for pigs—can do with any amount of cleaning. But I really enjoyed this hard work. After the long, dark winter,
when damp seeps into the corners, it’s good to be able to set doors and windows wide and to feel the warm, scented air flowing through the house.

The Highland crofter-wife takes a great pride in freshening her house every May-time. The fabric of her dwelling may not be all that could be desired. In many cases the rooms are unlined, just
‘plastered on the hard’, but she makes tremendous efforts to keep the place neat and cosy, against appalling odds. She has no water laid on, her fire is an open range, her light an
oil-lamp or a candle. Yet every spring she repapers one or more rooms, she distempers her kitchen ceiling, she paints her doors and window-frames. As long as she keeps a gay flag flying there will
still be life in the hills. She is well aware of all the devices of the day for making the housewife’s lot an easier one. Has not her daughter, who’s married to a townsman, a
pressure-cooker and a washing-machine? She doesn’t hanker miserably for these things, any more than her daughter might hanker for a trip to the moon. But the wise crofter is the one who, on
getting a good price for his stirks at the autumn sales, brings home a boiling-ring run on bottled gas, or a pressurised oil-heater for the bedroom. These things do help.