The Hills is Lonely (7 page)

‘Yes indeed! I grew turnips here one year and they was just like my fist.' He clunched a gnarled hand expressively.

I nodded.

‘And I grew them again the next year and they was like …' He glanced impatiently about the shed but his eye lit on nothing suitable for demonstration and he continued: ‘They was the size of my two fists together.' He hurled his knife into the potatoes and clenched his two fists together.

I smiled encouragement

‘And the third year I grew them, and they was just like my head,' be went on.

A cursory glance at his head showed me that it was certainly not lacking in size.

‘Just like my head they was,' he repeated; ‘but when I cut them open what did I find?'

He leaned forward earnestly and I rewarded him with a doubtful shake of my head.

‘Well then, they was all rotten and maggoty inside,' he said disgustedly.

‘Even more like your head,' I murmured jocularly. He stared at me, a quizzical frown between his eyes.

‘Beg pardon?' he asked, grunting as be levered himself up from the potatoes to escort me to the house to drink tea.

‘I just said it was a pity about the turnips,' I dissembled.

His finger went again to his lips. ‘Yes,' he began, ‘ever since her operation.… I don't know …'

We were almost at the door of the cottage.

‘Come away in!' called the virago hospitably. She fixed me with a resolute smile, and I retaliated with equal determination.

I said goodbye to Old Mac and his niece after listening to the recital of a list of vegetables which included all I'd ever heard of and more besides, and which were bound to be failures on the Island because of the ravages of sun; rain; wind; mist; snow; hail; dogs; cows; sheep; horses; rabbits; deer; hens; blight; disease and tourists. From the way the old man referred to them I should have bracketed the last three together. It seemed that the growing of vegetables was an extremely hazardous business, and that Old Mac would be old indeed before he achieved his nest egg.

On my return home I wrote ordering a sack of carrots and one of turnips from a supplier on the mainland, and with these we managed tolerably well throughout the winter months. By the time spring came round I was heartily sick of both vegetables and an S O S was despatched to Mary, which resulted in the welcome arrival of a parcel containing peas, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, french beans and onions. (‘I get funny with the smell of them,' Morag observed, pointing to the onions.)

The preparation of the vegetables Morag accomplished quite successfully with the exception of the beans and radishes, which items must have been strangers to the laird's kitchen. The beans she painstakingly shelled, cooking only the sparse brown seeds and throwing the pods to the hens, exclaiming contemptuously as she put them before me in an egg-cup instead of the usual vegetable dish: ‘Sure they silly little peas is enough to crack the nails off a body.' The radishes were laboriously stripped of their colourful outer rind and served as a wan accompaniment to the lettuce. When I explained that they needed only washing, she commented: ‘My, my! And I believe they'd be fine and comical if you can do that with them just.'

Due no doubt to the invigorating air of Bruach my own appetite soon became prodigious. My taste in food had always been catholic and I was able to enjoy the novelty and simplicity of the traditional Island delicacies. Porridge, which in town I had eschewed as being too heating, now appeared regularly on the breakfast table—and as regularly disappeared! Dulse soup, carragheen pudding (both seaweeds), I found fairly agreeable and also such things as boiled cormorant (‘skart' as it was known locally) and many other kinds of sea fowl, though in some cases I must confess there was decided evidence of their marine habitat. Salt herring, which is the staple food of the crofters, sent me, after my first cautious mouthful, to the water bucket, where I drank more water in less time than I can remember ever having drunk before or since. The taste for salt herring, I venture to suggest, is rarely acquired. Indeed I maintain that to be able to enjoy salt herring one must first be able to speak the Gaelic, or, alternatively, to speak the Gaelic one must first have eaten plenty of salt herring. Which acts as the better throat abrasive I am not qualified to say, but before eating salt herring I think my voice would have been classified as ‘soprano'. After I had eaten it my voice sounded to my own ears more like ‘basso-profundo'.

Winkles, which during the winter months Morag picked for the London market, I managed to swallow after they had been boiled, but the prospect of letting them wriggle down my throat raw as Morag and Ruari did was too revolting to contemplate. Crabs, very much alive and wriggling, were put into the hot embers of the peat fire for about twenty minutes and then taken out and pulled to pieces with the fingers—a poker being used for all necessary tool-work. I soon became very partial to crab suppers and with practice grew adept at wielding the poker.

‘Crowdie', a soft sour milk cheese, was very good when well made, though I could not fancy it served as a pudding with jam and cream: nor could I cultivate a taste for sugar instead of salt with my boiled eggs, which was the way the Bruachites relished them.

Sour milk was much drunk locally, but I had the townswoman's distaste for milk which is even slightly on the turn.

‘I canna' understand you,' said Ruari one day, after I had watched him tilt a jugful of thick sour curds to his lips and suck them greedily down his throat ‘You town-folk now, you'd never think to eat a plum or an apple before it was ripe? Then why would you be drinkin' milk before it's ripe?'

I admitted that I had never thought of it in that way.

‘Why, when I was for a time in England during the last war,' went on Ruari, ‘I never saw a drop of ripe milk but except it was fed to the pigs. Everyone wanted this unripe new stuff straight from the cow. Ach, there's no good in that, except for the tea, and no as much taste in it as in a drink of water.'

During the summer months, when milk was plentiful and rich, Morag made butter—and such butter! In town I would have complained that it was rancid, but though its ‘ripeness' stung my throat and I might have to swallow two or three times to every mouthful, I came to enjoy it as I had never enjoyed butter before. Morag's butter churn was a large sweetie jar with a hole in the lid. Through this hole went a rod about three feet long, at the bottom of which was a circle of wood with three or four holes in it. To make the butter Morag would sit on the edge of her chair, the jar, which would be about half full of cream, gripped firmly between her knees; then she would grasp the plunger and jerk it furiously up and down until the butter came. She reminded me of a jockey crouched grimly on the neck of his mount, his eyes fixed on the winning-post, while the illusion was intensified by the spatters of cream from the churn which spotted and streaked her face and hair, like the flecks of foam from a hard-ridden horse. The process sometimes lasted for hours and neighbours dropping in would obligingly take a turn at churning while Morag made tea. If she tired, my landlady would go to bed and resume her butter-making the next day or even the day after, and sometimes I would hear the ‘plop! plop!' of the churn as a background to my dreams. It was a slapdash way of butter-making—slap-dash in every sense of the word—but we nearly always got the butter, and it usually took longer to make than it did to eat!

Mushrooms in season grew abundantly on the moors and when the villagers heard of my fondness for them they persisted in bringing me all they could find. Day after day the mushrooms arrived, in milk-pails, in jamjars, in dirty handkerchiefs and even dirtier caps. I ate mushrooms fried for breakfast; I ate them in soups; I concocted mushroom savouries; I experimented with the idea of drying them, but still I could not use all the mushrooms they so generously bestowed upon me. I was touched by the thoughtfulness of my new friends until disillusionment came with the discovery of their ineradicable belief that all mushrooms were deadly poison!

There were of course the dumplings.

There appears to be a tradition that a Scotch dumpling shall weigh at least ten pounds when cooked, no matter what size the household may be. It is fruity and spicy and is a noble sight when it is lifted from the pan in which it has been bubbling away for several hours and turned out on to the largest meat dish. Morag always used one of her old woollen vests, well floured, for a dumpling cloth as this produced a pleasing lacy effect on the outside. Ten pounds of rich fruit dumpling is a formidable quantity for two women to eat their way through unaided and whenever I saw one in preparation I knew I could look forward to a prolonged bout of indigestion. No scrap of it was ever wasted. The first day we ate it in steaming wedges hot from the pan and it was wonderful; on the following days we sliced it cold with a sharp knife and ate it either as cake or heated in the frying-pan for pudding. It was still good. Towards the end, when the pattern of Morag's vest began to take on a decidedly angora-like quality, we hewed the last craggy pieces, soaked them in custard and made them into a trifle. And that was the dumpling finished. I would heave a sigh of mingled regret and relief and put away my magnesia tablets—until the next time.

Fish, naturally, were there for the catching, but though when in England I had glibly prophesied to Mary that I should soon be doing my own fishing, I had never really expected the opportunity to arise. Fishing as a sport did not attract me in any way; I had not even held a fishing-rod in my hand. But ‘Needs must when the Devil drives', and to my dismay there came a day when the butcher's meat ‘went bad on him' and Morag, having developed a stomach ache, suggested that I should borrow a rod from Ruari and try my luck at catching a fish or two for the evening meal. She seemed to be so sure I could manage the task that, after a moment's hesitation, I decided that fishing might be as pleasant and profitable a way as any of spending an afternoon.

I went to see deaf Ruari, who by this time had become a very good friend of mine—if friendship can be said to exist between two individuals who resemble one another about as closely as a blast furnace resembles a candle. Ruari's powerful voice may at times have been an asset, but a few minutes conversation with him left me feeling bruised all over. It was said of Ruari, and I could well believe it, that his call for his stick and his dog was enough to put to flight the sheep on the far side of the hill. It was said that the cattle on the neighbouring island ceased their grazing and stared apprehensively about them when Ruari called home his own beasts. His dog, having had orders bawled at him since he was a puppy, would obey no command given in an ordinary voice, though he obviously possessed acute hearing. Ruari's voice was unique in my experience, and his habit of ‘whispering' confidential asides was a source of embarrassment to everyone within earshot. On Sundays he was repeatedly adjured by both his wife and his sister to ‘keep his mouth quiet' lest he should desecrate the Sabbath, and I had no doubt whatever that if Morag could have had her way her brother would have been banished to the creel along with the cockerel. But Ruari was a big man, and a determined one. His blue eyes topped by belligerent tufts of white eyebrows could be very fierce on occasion and when roused from his normal stolid good humour his red face beneath its feathering of white down would deepen to the colour of an overripe plum. He certainly would never be dominated by any woman.

This particular afternoon I found Ruari sitting on a kitchen chair in front of his house, his head supported by the ample stomach of the grocer-cum-barber, a cherubic octogenarian, who stood with wide-straddled legs in front of the chair and wielded a pair of scissors menacingly over Ruari's thin white hair. Against the Wall of the house squatted a queue of patient but critical ‘customers' of all ages and sizes, all alike in their indolence and shock-headedness.

I was greeted courteously and at considerable length, and when the subject of the weather had been completely exhausted and a polite interval had passed I collared Ruari's ear and made my request known. The waiting group concealed their smiles with difficulty. Women have for so long been nonentities in the islands that the idea of any woman, particularly a townswoman, going fishing appeared to them highly ludicrous. Ruari's voluble acquiescence was only slightly muffled by the barber's paunch, which shuddered visibly so that he stepped back a pace with the hurt look of a man who has received a low punch.

Ruari's wife Bella, having heard my voice, appeared in the doorway of the house and beckoned. Bella was pleasant and rubicund and had the shy, foolish look of the woman of seventy who had remained a virgin until she was sixty-five, for she and Ruari had married late in life. She accompanied me to the calf shed where Ruari's rods were kept, so that I might choose one for myself. The door of the shed stood wide open and inside a tousle-headed young boy sat on a log of wood, reading a comic which he held awkwardly in one hand. The other hand grasped a battered pail. I recognised the boy, chiefly by his insignificant nose, to be one of the clan of ‘the other half of the boat.'

‘Johnny here is waitin' on the calf to watter,' explained Bella with a bashful smile and in answer to my look of enquiry continued, ‘He's awful sick with the red watter.' I was not at all sure which of the two occupants of the calf shed had the ‘red watter' until Bella went on to tell me that red water fever was a very common ailment of young calves and that the only remedy was to ‘make him drink his own watter'. This they intended to do and young Johnny was now engaged in earning a sixpence by waiting, pail in hand, for the calf to perform. The boy's hopes of his sixpence were apparently fast receding when we arrived on the scene, for so engrossed had he become in his comic that the calf had already foiled him twice. At our entrance, however, the beast woke from its torpor and almost before Bella had finished explaining it rose to its feet; there was a shout, and Johnny leaped forward and at last the precious medicine was safely in the pail.