Bruach Blend (11 page)

‘Hello, Gulliver!' I greeted him, and automatically hunched my shoulders ready for his landing, but to my consternation instead of coming to me he chose to land on the colonel's completely bald head. There was an enraged shout from the colonel and an equally enraged squawk from Gulliver as he was thrust roughly away. With screaming protestations he flew some distance away, only to return instantly to fly round and round as if preparing to repeat the manoeuvre.

‘I'm so sorry,' I faltered apologetically. ‘It's my pet gull. I should have warned you but I didn't think he would take any notice of you.' I tried hard to keep my countenance and my voice suitably serious, but the sight of the colonel, both hands clamped firmly over his bald head, dodging and feinting so as to be out of range of further assault, was too much for me. My voice broke into a choke of laughter which could not be disguised even by an assumed attack of coughing. I caught Dorothy's eye and the next moment we were both convulsed with a mirth that not even the truculent glare of her husband could wither.

‘Infernal gull!' he muttered testily, though I thought I perceived a slight softening of his expression.

‘I call him Gulliver,' I said.

‘Infernal Gulliver!' responded the colonel heatedly.

There was a definite feel of autumn in the air the following day and, after a ‘pride of the morning' mist had lifted, it revealed a serenely blue sky-chalked with wispy clouds under which the land lay clean and polished while the sea gurgled as it lapped up the sunshine. Not surprisingly, the colonel professed himself enthralled by the scene and after breakfast announced his intention of sitting outside to smoke a cigar and contemplate his surroundings.

‘Watch out for Gulliver, dear,' cautioned Dorothy. Her husband replied with a grim smile as he pulled a sturdy deerstalker hat firmly over his bald head. Dorothy and I washed up the dishes while we exchanged the sort of cosy news which people who have not met since childhood enjoy sharing. We saw the colonel carry a deck-chair over to a sequestered spot where he sat relaxing for a few minutes before taking out a cigar. There was, it seemed, an eddy of breeze outside which hampered the lighting of the cigar and he used several matches without apparent success. It then appeared that having exhausted his supply of matches he was rooting in his pocket for a second box, and while he was thus occupied Gulliver came into sight, flying investigatively over his chair. I can only surmise that the cigar in the colonel's mouth appeared to Gulliver like a stick or a clothes peg, for the next moment he touched down briefly on the deerstalker, swiftly plucked at the cigar and with a triumphant squawk flew away with it towards the far end of the croft. We saw the colonel shake his fist as he lunged after the gull. We saw Gulliver drop the cigar, but long before his pursuer could reach him he had retrieved it and flown with it out over the sea. In the kitchen we tried to stifle our laughter sufficiently to commiserate with the colonel when he came storming back to the cottage.

‘That infernal gull of yours!' he charged me. ‘He's stolen one of my best cigars. Just whipped it out of my mouth while I was sitting there, would you believe it?'

We assured him that we did believe it, having just witnessed the incident.

‘But, darling,' soothed his wife, though her voice was taut with laughter, ‘just think what a tale you'll have to tell at the club when you get back home. An encounter with a cigar-smoking seagull. You'll be able to dine on it for months.'

The colonel huffed a few acrid-sounding comments, but his glare was not half so irate as his voice and I got the distinct impression he was secretly amused by the incident. Sensing our inward laughter he soon retreated upstairs where, so Dorothy reported, he enjoyed a cigar in the safety of his bedroom.

During the next few days we came to suspect that Gulliver had either selected the colonel as a likely playmate or, for some obscure reason, had determined on a campaign of harassment, for whenever he ventured outdoors during daylight Gulliver would soon be hovering around, calling attention to his presence by picking up twigs and pebbles and dropping them recklessly close to wherever the colonel might be. If he was sitting in a deck-chair Gulliver would alight somewhere near by, make a rapid but stealthy approach, and begin an investigative pecking at his feet – a disagreeable experience for someone wearing no socks and flimsy sandals. So with many acerbic observations about women who treated birds as if they were brethren, the colonel, who normally liked to bare his head in the sunshine, took to wearing his deerstalker as a safety helmet to protect his head from Gulliver's several forms of bombardment; smoked his cigars indoors and when he ventured to take his siesta outdoors substituted more robust footwear for sandals. But Gulliver was not to be thwarted completely. Observing the colonel resting in his chair, he would take up his favourite perch on the chimney pot from whence he would indulge in a monotony of thin reedy shrieks which, according to the colonel, were as conducive to repose as would be the insistent ringing of a telephone bell.

There was no doubt that initially Gulliver's attentions affected the colonel's enjoyment of his holiday but as time went on he seemed to find them less of an annoyance, confiding to Dorothy that he found the gull's behaviour intriguing. Even when after much complicated negotiation he had managed to procure a current newspaper from the mainland, only to have Gulliver snatch it from his lap still unfolded and unread and scatter the pages over the croft, he had been more astounded than aggravated by the gull's behaviour.

But Gulliver's most inglorious misdemeanour was perpetrated towards the end of my friend's stay. It was a still day when the mushroomy smell of autumn lingered over the sun tinted moors; robins chirruped their territorial claims; spring-hatched cockerels practised their crowing and drifts of foraging starlings sped like dark shadows over the short grass of the hay-cleaned crofts. The weather being so mild, we were to lunch outdoors in the ‘garden', which was the courtesy title for the small enclosure of land adjoining the cottage which I tried to protect from violation by my own and other people's cows and hens, and where I tried annually to grow the vegetables and flowers I missed so much, only, it seemed, then to have to sacrifice them just as regularly to the voracious appetite of the storms which wrenched them out of the ground long before the plants reached anything like maturity. But it was enclosed land and therefore to me it was a garden. We each took our tray and on each tray was a plate of bacon and eggs – smoked bacon, which I could not buy on the island and which had been specially ordered from the mainland, because I knew it was one of the colonel's favourite dishes. There was a wooden bench outside the cottage with room for two people to sit comfortably so I put down my tray on the grass.

‘Will you watch my tray while I go indoors to get a stool?' I asked Dorothy. ‘Don't for goodness' sake take your eyes off it in case Gulliver should be about.'

Ever gallant, the colonel put down his tray. ‘Let me get the stool,' he insisted, and turning to his wife requested that she should similarly watch his tray. The stool was upstairs and while he went to get it I went quickly to the kitchen meat safe and took out a whole raw mackerel with the idea that if Gulliver did come to pester us the fish was large enough to keep him occupied while we enjoyed our meal. The colonel, now carrying the stool, stood courteously aside as I emerged from the kitchen with the fish. He was behind me as we reached the open door. His gasp of horror coincided with my own as we stood shocked into speechlessness at the sight of Dorothy, both arms waving protectively over two of the trays – hers and my own – while she stared helplessly at Gulliver who was helping himself to the final slice of bacon from the colonel's plate.

‘Gulliver!' I bawled when I could find my voice.

‘I did shout at him,' Dorothy rushed to explain. ‘And I flipped my napkin at him but he wouldn't go away. It was impossible to protect all three trays at the same time.'

At that moment Gulliver caught sight of the mackerel I was holding in my hand and even in the split second it took for the bird to register the fact and form his intention I seemed to hear Ian Beag's voice, ‘Supposin' they're full of food an' there comes a chance of something they like better they'll bring up everythin' that's in their stomachs just to make room for it,' Gulliver proceeded to demonstrate most convincingly that he preferred fresh mackerel to smoked bacon. He made room for it!

‘Oh God!' murmured the colonel's wife, turning away from the resultant mess that had now been so neatly disgorged on to her husband's tray.

‘Oh, Gulliver!' I expostulated, as he hopped over and snatched the mackerel from my grasp.

‘Oh Glory be!' exclaimed the colonel, and to his eternal credit he put down the stool, sat on it and surrendered himself to great guffaws of body-shaking laughter.

It was not long after the colonel and Dorothy had returned home that Gulliver also made his farewell. By this time he was finding all the food he needed and as a consequence was spending more and more time beyond the area of the croft, and though he still returned regularly to be fed and also maintained his habit of subsequently squatting on the chimney pot I had accepted that the day of his desertion was not far off. When it came it was a day of hazy sunshine attended by a reticent breeze, and his going was in the nature of a valediction.

Early in the morning while feeding the hens I noticed an unusually large flock of young gulls close-circling the croft. All the gulls were identical in colouring and therefore in age to Gulliver and as the morning progressed the gathering of gulls increased until the air was clamorous with their squeaked invitations. Gulliver, having swallowed his morning fish, had taken up his chimney-pot perch from where he observed the other gulls with almost a detached air; sometimes answering them, though for a while it seemed that he was not disposed to join them. But watching him I could detect his yearning to belong; his growing intent; the urge for flight throbbing so compulsively through his restless wings that he had constantly to fold and refold them to his body. Then suddenly as I watched it seemed as if he could resist no longer and with rapturous squeals he flew up to mingle with the gyrating throng of his companions. My eyes followed him without difficulty at first, for even among so great a number of gulls he was easily identifiable by his superior size, but then, as if the flock were exultant at having enlisted their last reluctant member, their flight mounted higher and higher until they became a confusion against the clouds and I could no longer be sure which was Gulliver. I felt strangely bereft. I had been expecting him to leave. Indeed I would not have wished it otherwise, yet now at the moment of departure a swift surge of sadness sent me running inside for another mackerel which I held aloft while I called his name repeatedly in the hope he would return. But no matter how much I called and coaxed no gull came near. No gull detached itself from the throng or even swooped low to investigate and I wondered if, in the moment of decision to join his kind, the memory of the human who had nurtured him had been erased from his brain. Tired at last of holding up the fish I let my arm droop to my side and stood disconsolately watching the haphazard crowd of gulls achieving a rough formation as they flew round and round the croft in a semblance of a game of ‘follow my leader'. I wondered if the leader was Gulliver. Once, twice and then a third time they circled before heading in the direction of the hills. I continued to watch them until the whole flock were merely scattered flecks in the sky which soon merged and then vanished altogether in the misty clouds that shrouded the sun. It was Gulliver's final leave-taking and to my knowledge I never saw him again.

Erchy assured me that gulls do not journey more than a few miles from their birthplaces until they are fully mature and I was rather inclined to accept his assurance, since shortly after Gulliver's departure there came a report that late campers at a site only about four miles away were having trouble with a gull which haunted their camp and had not only stolen their breakfast bacon on more than one occasion but had tried to snatch a pipe out of a man's mouth.

‘Indeed, I do believe it must be that gull you reared yourself, surely,' said Morag. ‘The one that military man that was stayin' with you used to say was his inferno.'

1. See Beautiful just!
   

   Back to Text
   

‘Directly the dew is off the grass I believe it will make a good day for the corn-gathering,' Morag announced. It was indeed a good day for almost any outside work, the scarves of morning mist having been dissipated by fine spun autumn sunlight tempered by a soft breeze which would, in Morag's words, ‘Drink the sweat from us as we worked.' I wrapped a clean tea towel round a fruit cake which I had baked the previous day and handed it to Morag, assuring her that as soon as I returned from milking I would be ready to begin work.

In England one thinks of corn as being wheat or maize; the basic ingredients of our daily bread and, watching even a mechanized corn harvest and smelling the clean zesty smell of the golden grain, one's imagination is ready to leap forward, evoking the nutty aroma of fresh wholewheat flour as it pours from the mill; the warm hunger-making smell of good fresh bread. In Bruach where soil and climate made the growing of wheat and maize impractical the term ‘corn' referred to the sturdier oats and since the ultimate fate of the sheaves of oats was to be beaten against or with a stone so as to dislodge the grain for feeding to the poultry, the rest, the empty ears and the straw, being fed to the cattle, the crop evoked no such satisfying images.

Of course this had not always been so. Many Bruachites remembered the days when the corn crop had been threshed and winnowed on the croft and Morag herself had more than once referred to the nightly ritual of toasting the fresh grain over the open fire before feeding it into the quernstones; turning the quernstones with a stick inserted into a socket in the upper stone and grinding the corn ready for the next morning's porridge. Some of the old women remembering only too well the labour involved spoke of those times with a tinge of bitterness, but Morag seemed only to reflect sadly that porridge neither smelled nor tasted like real porridge any more.