A Croft in the Hills (20 page)

Alec and Billy came to gather the flock and separate them into their categories—ewes with lambs at foot, and gimmers. Jim got a lift home on the evening before the sale. We shut the
gimmers into a field and put the sheep with lambs into the enclosed space round the house. All night we heard them moving restlessly around. At six o’clock we were out taking a last look over
them then we all went in to the market. Jim stood watching the sheep in their pens, but I couldn’t bring myself to see them sold; that was a hard day.

But things had to go on. On Jim’s next day at home a neighbour came, with his tractor, to open the potato drills. We planted the potatoes in the wake of the tractor and the drills were
closed the same evening. Later on, this same neighbour came to prepare the turnip ground and Billy sowed the seed with Charlie.

I had to resort to all sorts of devices to get certain jobs done. There was the wringing of hens’ necks, for instance. That was a thing I had never been able to do and Billy, curiously
enough, would rather not attempt it either. When I had half a dozen birds to sell to the butcher, I had to put the poor creatures in a pen and ask the post to do the necessary, when his own work
was done. He was always ready to help in any emergency and he took this quite as a matter of course.

Then there was the business of taking the cows to the bull. With our particular cows, who all had wills of their own, this had always meant that two people must accompany them—one to hold
them on the rope, the other to open and shut gates. I therefore went, as a necessary part of the bridal party, as far as the last gate, where I waited discreetly, before resuming my duties on the
return journey.

Billy spent much time, that June, cutting peats. It is hard work, skimming off the turf and cutting the blocks out of the bank. Two or three times a week I would go along in the afternoon to
help him, setting the chunks in small heaps to dry. Later on we made the small heaps into bigger ones. Sometimes Sadie would come over for an hour or two and the time would pass quickly, in
company. On a Saturday Helen and Bertha would join us; then the peats would fly, and the sweat would pour off Billy’s face, as he struggled with all the feminine competition. There’s
always an element of holiday in days at the peats; it’s hard work, but it’s different. You’re working away from your usual haunts and the air is sweet on the moor in June. On the
way home we would paddle in the burn and gather handfuls of bog-cotton and huge, yellow ‘butterballs’ to decorate the kitchen table.

Helen came home for the holidays with a first prize for classwork and a passionate resolve to become a teacher! Each fascinating thing she learnt had to be imparted urgently to anyone within
earshot. The walking to and from school had made her hardy and resilient. Some of the questions she began to ask showed that her mind was clear as a bell. A child brought up out of the reach of the
multifarious distractions of town life keeps a keen, uncluttered perception. She doesn’t have the adult world thrust at her in all its distorted forms, from the cinema screen, the
advertisement hoarding, or the chance overheard conversation of strangers. She grows into it naturally and accepts its responsibilities as she does her food. If she wants an egg for her breakfast,
she knows that the hens must be fed and cared for first. She realises that the enjoyment of a glass of milk involves fetching the cow from her grazing, seeing that she’s comfortable and
helping to scald the pail and basin. Even the boiling of a kettle means the gathering of good kindling sticks, and she soon learns which make the best burning. She sees life whole because she has
begun by discovering its roots.

That summer we got wind of a development which was to affect the lives of almost every one of us. A meeting was called in the village hall and an official of the Hydro-Electric Board announced
that the power line would be coming our way in the near future. He explained very patiently all the working of the scheme, the outlay involved, the cost of consumption and the help that could be
given in the purchase of equipment. The talk at neighbourly ceilidhs over the next months was alive with comment on the plan, and practically everyone was determined to scrape the bottom of the
barrel, so as to share in the benefits of electricity. For ourselves only a minimum of expense would be involved, as the house was already wired for light, and we should only need to have power
plugs installed.

One amusing story went the rounds. It concerned an old countryman in the south who went to stay a night with a daughter whose house had lately been equipped with electricity. ‘Well, Sandy,
how did you like the electric light?’ he was asked, on his return home. ‘Ach’, he said, ‘I canna’ be daein’ wi’ it. Kept me wakened a’ nicht.
It’s in a bottle and ye canna’ blaw it oot!’

Within a few days of the meeting, the surveyors were out on the moor and the Hydro Board’s small, white van was scurrying up and down the hill road, visiting every croft. The officials
were all most courteous and patient as they answered our eager questions and explained exactly where the poles were to be erected. The surveyors were scrupulously careful to avoid the arable
ground. All being well, they said, we should be connected up within the year.

Ours is a bleak, forgotten sweep of upland, barely snatched from wilderness, but in the short time we have been here, we have seen it take a leap of a hundred years. A good road now links us
with our market, we have a bus service and as many van deliveries of goods as we could wish for, and now—electricity. This is progress in the real sense. To equip people in their millions to
mind machines and then to cater for their leisure with the provision of such hectic delights as will allow them to bear their daily boredom without complaint is not necessarily progress. To provide
basic facilities for those still engaged with the earth is a thing worth doing.

CHAPTER XVI

A STORMY CHRISTMAS

T
WO
small families made arrangements to spend their fortnight’s summer holiday with us—one in the second half of July, the other in the
first half of August. Each party consisted of a small girl and boy and their parents. We were confident that they would fit into the scheme of things, for they would not have chosen a small,
unknown place in the Highlands for a holiday if they had been difficult to please.

Their coming involved a good deal of turn-about in the house. We made three rooms ready for their use and fitted up the living-room and the spare room off it as our camping quarters. They used
the front door, and thus their part of the house was quite self-contained and they could come and go as they liked without disturbing us at our labours in the kitchen.

Ten days before their arrival, Hope obligingly calved, so that we were able to greet them with brimming jugs of cream and mounds of fresh butter. The hens were laying well and the garden was
stocked with greenstuff. The foundations of good, simple meals were to hand, but I had forgotten that people living near to shops are accustomed to variety in their diet. I had to rush up and down
to the gate to catch every available van in an effort to avoid monotony.

Each family had a car and they were co-operative and always willing to fetch fish and extra meat when they went off for the day. The children asked nothing better than to be left to play about
with Helen in the sand-pit, climb the rowans, explore the burn, bring in Hope for the milking, help Billy cart peats home from the moor. They had all the natural child’s zest for imaginative
play and Billy excelled himself as host. He let them lead Charlie and ride on his back, and in the evenings they all sat in the straw in the empty byre and had shots on Billy’s latest
acquisition—his accordion. That was a month of hard work, but it was rewarding—our visitors became friends, with whom it was a pleasure to keep in touch.

While the house was full I had to put all thought of doing any writing aside, but as soon as we settled back into our routine I got busy again. I had had several articles about Highland and
crofting life published in Scottish monthly papers, and had entered a story, of the woman’s magazine type, for a competition advertised in a daily newspaper. This had been solely in the
somewhat forlorn hope of making a little needed money. The prize was, I think, a hundred pounds. I hadn’t really expected my story to win anything, and it didn’t: it came back. But,
instead of the usual rejection slip there was a polite letter expressing regret that my effort had not won a prize, admiration for the writing and confidence that, if I could ‘get on to the
right lines’, I should be able to make a success of magazine story-writing. I was doubtful about this as I was mainly interested in writing about things I understood and loved. I was not at
all sure that I understood or loved ‘love’ in the sense accepted by the women’s magazines!

I went on writing about the hills and the men and women who grow among them—the tough, obstinate, shrewd, kindly folk, who grumble one minute and chuckle the next. They haven’t a
shred of glamour to them, but they are real, and there are not many of them left. Already the members of the younger generation who still work in the hills are acquiring the mass-produced responses
of the day; the impact of the wireless and the daily paper is slowly steamrollering them into the accepted mould. I wanted to record those whose individualities have not yet vanished, but of course
it was not the way to make money.

One afternoon I was sitting at the window, writing about the reaction of an elderly crofter’s widow to the coming of the electricity. I looked up, as a movement by the stile caught my eye.
A tall man, wearing kilt and bonnet, was coming towards the house. In his wake was another man and behind him two women. I watched the little company approaching and saw the expressions of slight
bewilderment, which no stranger manages to hide, on nearing us. Then the dogs set up a furious barking and I hurried out to greet the arrivals.

The kilted man introduced himself as the writer of the letter encouraging me to do stories for his paper. No one less like one’s conception of an editor of ‘pulp’ could be
imagined. He and all his party at once took a delighted interest in our place. They took photographs of Charlie, they inspected a new-born calf, they watched for Helen coming home across the
moor.

They had come north, they explained, for a long weekend and thought they would like to look me up on their way home. We talked a little about writing matters and had a cup of tea, then I saw
them off in their stream-lined car. I did write several ‘love’ stories after that, and an odd one or two were published, but I think this kindly editor knew as well as I did that I was
not likely really to get ‘on to the right lines’.

That September we had a displenish sale in our midst. It was a fine autumn day; the sunlight lay in long, pale beams across the flowering heather. It was a day for looking forward, for sniffing
the earth-scent and planning next year’s work. But about the croft there was only the drab confusion of buying and selling and ‘flitting’. Crockery, books, pictures, all the odds
and ends that had gone to make a home, stood in forlorn heaps, on top of dressers and tables. I bought a couple of peat-knives for a shilling, but I can’t say I felt particularly proud of my
bargain. It was as though a whole way of life were being put under the hammer and ‘going ... going... gone!’

The place was bought by an active couple who turned it into a poultry farm. Practically every place in Abriachan was by that time occupied by an in-comer. In addition to the
‘tomato-man’, the ‘strawberry-man’ and the ‘mink-man’, there was now the ‘poultryman’, and the gamekeeper’s croft had been taken by a lady who
kept Dexter cows and guinea-fowl and hens which laid golden-brown eggs. She was bred to country ways and it was always a delight to drop into her house for a chat and the loan of a book or a paper.
Her never-failing welcome did much to help me over my spells of loneliness, when I wore the green willow for Jim.

Jim came home in time for the corn harvest at the beginning of October, and we had to rush it in between spells of storm. The potato crop was only a small one and we lifted it with the graip,
taking it in turn to dig and pick. Then we went hard at the lifting of the turnips as we had to secure them before the arrival of the sheep we were to winter, for Jim had decided he would have to
work away from home for another spell, in order to strengthen our financial position.