A Rope--In Case (3 page)

‘Oh,' said the driver, a little taken aback. ‘That might not be so good then.'

He suggested that we should go for a cup of tea while he made arrangements for the car and another driver. Half an hour later he was back and commanding us to get into the car.

‘Are you no stayin' for the dance, then?' Janet asked. He muttered petulantly.

The only vacant places were beside old Farquhar who was ensconced majestically in the middle of the back seat. We were about to climb in beside him when the driver stopped us.

‘No, you cannot go in there. You'll just have to squeeze up with the others,' he instructed us. ‘There's a ram I'm to pick up in a wee whiley an' he'll need to go in the back seat.' He requested the passengers to lift up their feet and dumped my roil of felt on the floor.

It took four men to get the struggling ram into the back of the car, where full mail bags were strategically placed so as to restrict its movement. Even so Farquhar had to crouch with the animal between his legs while he held on to its horns. The rest of us huddled together with our knees bumping our chins as the old car bounced from pothole to pothole and we tried not to take too much notice of the strugglings and gruntings that came from the seat behind us along with the overpowering smell of wet fleece.

The wind was rising rapidly to a gale; the sea came foaming in beneath a mist of spray. Every now and then the driver looked up at the hood which was lifting and banging ominously. ‘You'd best some of you hang on to that,' he advised and those who were nearest grabbed whatever handhold they could. We reached the head of the loch where the wind funnelled in from the sea and rushed screaming through the narrow strath between two ranges of hills. There was a shout of alarm as a sudden gust, stronger than any before it, thrust at the car, threatening to overturn it. We all ducked as the driver grappled with the wheel. The moment over, we sat up and saw in the same instant that there was no longer a hood on the car. Twisting round in our seats we could see the heavy canvas trailing like a broken kite behind. The driver stopped and all the passengers except Farquhar who was wrestling with an increasingly panic-stricken ram tumbled out to capture the hood. We fought the wind as we tried to pull it back over the car and secure it but the fasteners had gone and we had to stand holding it, awaiting instructions from the driver.

‘Wait now till I get a rope!' he shouted and rooted under his seat. He produced a length of rope and passed one end under the car to a helper on the other side who pulled it up. With the wind tearing at their clothes they scrambled together trying to tie it over the hood. ‘The driver swore. ‘The damty thing's not long enough.' Turning to us he asked: ‘Anybody got a piece of rope?'

‘I have,' I replied. ‘Hold on to this while I get it.' He weighed down on the section of hood I had been holding while I retrieved the piece of rope from the bottom of my shopping bag.

‘That'll do it,' he said, snatching it from me. He tied the two ropes together and we surveyed the repair briefly before climbing back into our seats.

‘I only brought that rope in case the old car needed a tow,' the driver said.

I murmured to Janet that there would be little hope of getting a tow on the deserted Bruach road. She looked slightly puzzled.

‘We're not likely to meet a car to give us a tow,' I pointed out.

‘Oh, no, mo ghaoil. He wouldn't be thinkin' of a motor to pull us.' She glanced round. ‘There are plenty of us here.' We reached Bruach without further mishap and juddered to a stop outside the Post Office. ‘What's wrong with the old car?' demanded the postman, coming out to collect the mailbags. ‘She looks as if she's got the toothache or somethin'.'

‘I doubt she would have lost her top if it hadn't been for Miss Peckwitt here havin' a wee bitty rope with her,' the driver told him.

I permitted myself a smug smile. ‘Oh, I always take a rope in case,' I said.

Even by Hebridean standards the weather during the month of May was atrocious. ‘Severe gale force nine' and ‘storm force ten' were predicted, realised and endured. Communal potato planting was accomplished on the few days when there was a brief respite from the stinging rain and hail, when we had to contend only with ‘gale force eight' winds that tore at the long winter mane of the young plough horse and threatened to wrest the hair from the head of any woman who did not attend constantly to the tightening of the knot of her headscarf. The men pulled on their caps back to front and jammed them well down over their foreheads as was their habit in wild weather. We all wore at least one pair of thick woolly socks inside our gumboots and we all had ropes tied round our waists to discourage our coats from flying above our heads as we bent to the task of planting. The women complained of the cold wind blowing up their skirts and were outspoken in envying the men their long woollen underpants. They congratulated me on my wisdom in wearing slacks and though I smiled in polite acknowledgment I knew perfectly well that they would sooner freeze to death than outrage the biblical traditionalism of their own attire.

The wind, like a heavy hand in the small of our backs, pushed us along as we hurried to and fro with our pails of potatoes and fertiliser. It filled our mouths, whipping away the instructions we shouted to one another so that we had to resort to mime. It made futile the directions Erchy, the ploughman, shouted to his horse so that he had to resort to vituperation. Man and animal grew increasingly exasperated at the lack of co-ordination in their efforts. Dung flew about us as the men carried it forkful by forkful from the scattered heaps to the furrows while one or two of the older, hardier women, unable to endure seeing good dung wasted, scraped it up in their bare hands and placed it, almost lovingly, in the rows. Those of us who, like myself, were responsible for seeing that each potato was given a generous helping of ‘guano' (in Bruach all artificial manures were referred to as ‘guano') were ourselves liberally coated with the dusty grey chemical. It smarted on our wind-burned lips and cheeks and made our eyes run with tears.

‘Oh, my, but it's coarse, coarse, coarse,' we complained to one another as we mustered in the croft house for a welcome mid-morning strupak.

‘Indeed but I'm after havin' a job to keep the plough in the ground with the strength of it,' grumbled Erchy. He gave three loud belches in quick succession. ‘Every time I open my mouth to shout at the horse the wind rushes in and fills my stomach,' he excused himself. He pushed back his cap, exposing the broad weal that marked the boundary between his wind-crimsoned face and the sheltered area above.

I became aware that Hamish, the owner of the croft we were planting, was beckoning me towards the door.

‘I'm thinkin' of changin' Sarah to plantin' potatoes,' he confided. ‘She's no good with the guano.'

I looked at him questioningly. Sarah admitted to being seventy-nine years of age and to me she had appeared to be working as well as anyone else at spreading the guano.

‘Ach, her back's too stiff and she canna bend it right,' Hamish said.

‘Surely she'll have to bend even lower if she has to plant the potatoes?' I pointed out

‘No, that's not the way of it at all,' he argued. ‘She can drop the potatoes in the furrows easy enough and they'll land somewhere abouts even if it's no the right place. It's kind of different with the guano. When she drops a handful of it in this wind then it's away before it gets to the furrow. The potatoes will be missin' it, likely.'

‘Is it the potatoes is missin' it?' expostulated Angus, who had been listening to our conversation. ‘Man, I'm thinkin' it's not just your potatoes but your whole damty croft that's missin' it.'

At last everyone's potatoes were planted and we were able to return to our neglected chores while the rain renewed its onslaught. In Bruach, rain after ploughing was always welcome. It smoothed the ridged furrows and washed the earth into the gaps left by the often inexpert ploughing. We could sit back and think with deep satisfaction of the rich solution of dung and guano in which our potatoes would already be steeping.

As May drew to a close the weather grew even less spring like. Hailstones frequently racketed against the windows and the iron roofs of our cottages and barns, and the snow which, during a warm spell in April, had disappeared from all but the peaks of the hills now spread downwards again to clothe them with white capuchons. Some of us began to wonder if the warm spell had been the only good weather we should get that year but then, on the evening of the last day of the month, the baleful clouds which had shrouded us for so long parted their skirts to reveal the promising afterglow of a sunset that tinged the snow with apricot and edged the western horizon with gold. The wind gave way to noisy gusts, fierce but sporadic, the stillness between them softened by a perceptible warmth. Even before I retired for the night the sky was clear except for a few clouds thin as foam that drifted serenely. Moon shadows spread from the rowan tree and the old bam and only the noise of the swell banging pettishly against the rocks of the shore reminded me of the savagery there had been.

On the first morning of June I washed up my breakfast dishes and sang as I worked to the accompaniment of varying creaks from the corrugated iron roof of the lean-to kitchen as it shrugged and settled itself in response to a calm, rejoicing sun. It was always good to hear those creaks; to know that once again there was real warmth in the air and that, for a few hours at least, plans could be made to carry out work that could only be done satisfactorily in calm, dry weather.

I was putting out the sodden doormats to dry on the stone dyke when Morag arrived. She was wearing a thick navy sweater that proclaimed her to be a member of a well known steamship company; over her skirt she wore a clean sack apron and on her head was tied a square of white cloth liberally stained with brown. It looked suspiciously like the cloth she used for boiling the large fruit dumplings she made when she was expecting a visit from the missionary or someone equally impressive.

‘There's a right change in the weather,' she greeted me. ‘An' amn't I glad to see the back of all that rain.'

I agreed heartily and indicated the row of footwear along the wall of the cottage, tilted towards the sun.

‘I haven't a dry pair of boots or shoes to my name,' I complained. Soggy gumboots are not only cold and miserable for the feet, they are exceedingly difficult to pull on, and throughout my stay in the Hebrides my conception of Heaven was a never-ending supply of dry socks and dry gumboots.

‘It's the same with myself, just,' Morag admitted. ‘Here's me with hay in my tackety boots at this very minute to see will I keep my feet dry.' Most of us stuffed hay into our wet boots when we took them off but we emptied it out before we wore them again.

‘It sounds a bit uncomfortable,' I said.

‘Not at all,' she denied. ‘An' it's keepin' my feets nice an' warm.'

Together we assessed the portent of the gentle blue of the sky and the few frayed clouds caught on the hill peaks. Down on the rocks slow breakers were still coming in rearing and breaking but out at sea only fitful white wave crests glinted in the sunlight.

‘If we would get a day or so of this we'd be able to have the lorry bring home our peats, likely,' Morag suggested.

‘It'll take more than a couple of days to dry out the moors enough for a lorry to get to my peats,' I retorted. Due to my being a latecomer to peat cutting my peat hag was, naturally, the most inaccessible of all.

‘Ach, so long as there's a good skin on the ground the lorry would get, I doubt,' insisted Morag blandly.

‘I doubt you said that last year,' I taxed her. ‘And remember how the lorry got bogged time after time and what hard work it was digging it out? Remember how the driver swore he'd never take any notice of you again?' I continued relentlessly. Morag looked a little discomfited. ‘I'm not going to risk being made a fool of again this year,' I added meaningly.

‘Oh, but, mo ghaoil, nobody made a fool of you,' Morag hastened to reassure me. ‘It was just the way things turned out.'

‘Oh, of course,' I agreed.

The previous year several of us had clubbed together to hire a lorry to transport our stacks of peats home, the idea being that we all helped one another to load and unload, sharing equally the cost of the hire. On the face of it the scheme may have looked unfair to those who, like myself, had cut a relatively small number of peats whereas the larger families prided themselves on having a dozen stacks or more but as the larger the family the more helpers they provided the arrangement worked to everyone's satisfaction.

The lorry had arrived in charge of Willy Ruag (‘Red Willy'), it's exuberant driver but even Willy scratched at his tawny head and muttered dubiously when he saw how far from the track some of the peat stacks were situated. However, in response to Morag's assuring him airily that there was ‘skin enough on the moors to take a steam roller', he yielded so far as to take the lorry alongside the stacks nearest the road.

It had been a glorious day for work. The sun shone uninhibitedly but it was accompanied by a breeze that was enough to keep us cool and save us from the attentions of the vicious clegs (horseflies), yet not capricious enough to subject us to the torment of having our eyes continuously filled with peat dust. We all, including the ever-obliging Willy, set to work throwing the peats up into the lorry. There was no pattern to our throwing; everyone pitched peats with haphazard enthusiasm from all directions amid a constant flow of lighthearted banter with only an occasional shout of laughing recrimination to betray the fact that a peat had hit one of the loaders on the other side of the lorry. When the load had grown precariously high the driver called a halt and climbed up into the cab. We all stood back, rubbing peat dust from our reddening arms and faces. With a shudder the lorry started and simultaneously there came a snarling grumble from the rear wheels as they broke through the dried crust of the moor and spun themselves into the bogginess beneath. The distressed face of the driver peered out of the cab. The non-mechanically minded Bruachites, seemingly unaware of the likely consequence, exhorted him to carry on. Obediently Willy tried again but the wheels only spun themselves deeper into the soft ground. He called us to push and we all flung ourselves at the lorry with boisterous determination, even old Sarah lending her thin aged arms to the task. After half an hour of strenuous pushing and devising the anxiety I felt had begun to affect the Bruachites, though there were still eruptions of laughter above the murmured comments. When, inevitably, the order came to unload they greeted it without chagrin. For them the dilemma was an event; one that would have its place in the retailed anecdotes of the village and to which other more mundane happenings could be related in time. ‘I mind she calved the day before yon lorry that was loadin' peats got stuck in the bog.…'