The Loud Halo (10 page)

The schoolroom was very small and was tastefully decorated with jars of white, strongly scented flowers which I had never seen growing anywhere but in the most sheltered corner of the burial ground. The two bored voting officers sat cuddled together at the teacher's inadequate desk on which cups of tea, a plate of buttered scones and a dish of jam reposed hospitably between the box containing our voting slips and the official black ballot box. The polling arrangements would have made wonderful propaganda for an enemy. To mark our cards we were in turn directed to a cupboard which stood against the wall at right angles to the window. The cupboard was just large enough for a small person to get inside but if one closed the door it was too dark to see what one was doing. If one left the door open then everything one did was easily visible to the prospective or spent voters who loitered with carefully assumed indifference outside the window.

When I came outside again Big John, who stood six foot three and was of pugilistic build and yet the mildest of men, was leaning nonchalantly on the sill watching a confused Sarah peering in her short-sighted way at the voting slip which she held in her two hands. Sarah frowned; she pulled at her lips. John gave a commentary on her predicament and there was a stir of laughter. We all knew Sarah couldn't read anyway. At last she held her card up to the window and her mouth framed a question. Big John pointed. Sarah nodded and smiled with relief and bent over her card, the pencil grasped in her shaky fingers. John rapped peremptorily on the window and Sarah's perturbed head bobbed up. John gesticulated.

Again Sarah nodded and bent over her paper. John relapsed into nonchalance.

‘Silly old cailleach nearly voted for the wrong fellow,' he told us.

The following summer was drearily wet and was succeeded by an autumn that was distinguishable only by the shorter hours of daylight and by the waning appetites of the midges. For those of us who had not been hardy enough to ignore the constant rain (the less resilient under-sixties, it seemed) croft work dragged on interminably. Most of my potatoes were as yet undug. My peat shed was only a third full, the rest of the peats being still in their stacks on the moors waiting either for me to carry them home, creelful by slow and heavy creelful, which I had been endeavouring to do all summer, or for the track to dry out sufficiently for them to be loaded on to a lorry. I even had hay still out on the croft in sad, dark cocks which were so soaked with rain that they were able to resist the teasings of the strengthening winds.

‘I doubt a right gale will come before long an' put your hay away for you, but not where you're wantin' it,' predicted Yawn smugly as he passed the croft where I was working. I answered him with a feeble grin, recalling how savagely a gale the previous autumn had dealt with almost the whole of Donald Beag's carefully made stacks of hay. Into a night of mist and calm the gale had come suddenly, announcing its arrival by a staccato rattle of the new tiles of my cottage roof. By the time I had shut the bedroom window and buttressed the front door with a shaft of wood it was already thumping against the window, blasting noisily into the chimneys and hissing venom at the leafless elder bushes. For two hours it had blown turbulently and then, with only two or three faint whispers of apology for the commotion it had caused, it had gone, leaving the unsettled night to be soothed by the dolorous tick of the rain. Daylight had revealed that all that was left of Donald's hay harvest were the wisps and shreds that were caught in the wire netting of neighbouring hen-runs. The Bruachites secretly gloated. Donald was easily the hardest working man in the village and the fact that he made his croft pay caused some resentment. They had lost no time in seeking him out to witness his dismay whilst at the same time offering perfidious commiseration.

‘What happened to all your hay, Donald?' they asked him innocently, and Donald, who was perfectly aware of their feeling, only laughed and, waving a facetious hand towards one of the outlying islands, replied, ‘It's all in Sandy's barn over there, I reckon.'

The end of October drew near and then it was Halloween. Stags were roaring in the hills. The rams were already among the sheep. The Department of Agriculture bull had been caught and sent to his winter home. Through wind and rain I worked desperately at my potatoes so as to have them all lifted before November came. Admittedly, unlike my neighbours, it was not so much the disgrace of having croft work still unfinished on the first of November that spurred me on. It was the knowledge that, though a date well into the middle of November was always decreed by the local Grazings Officer as being that on which all cattle could be brought in from the moors and allowed to roam the crofts, as soon as a few of the more idle or less tolerant inhabitants had themselves fenced their haystacks and put away their spades for the winter, moor gates were liable to be left insecurely latched so as to swing open at the nosing of a curious cow, or after dark they would be deliberately opened so that one was apt to wake up to find cattle driving their horns deep into one's carefully stacked hay or fighting one another over one's precious potato patch. Resolutely ignoring my stiffening back I plunged the fork into the earth, lifting the roots and picking off the potatoes one by one, examining each for signs of blight before throwing it into the pail which in turn had to be carried to the shed where they were to be stored. The floor of the shed was already covered with dry peat dust and on top of this had gone a layer of heather and dry bracken. On to this cosy bed went the potatoes, to be covered, when the lifting was finished, with more heather and bracken and then with a layer of old sacks. I was assured my potatoes would now be safe from everything except pilfering mice.

Mercifully, all my hay was in the barn and by tea-time on Halloween I had reached the final row of potatoes, digging in a deepening twilight that was aided by a mist of fine rain and enclosed in a silence that was pierced only by the occasional lament of a homeward-bound gull, the scrape of my fork into the stony ground and the thud of potatoes into the pail. The musty autumn smell of the moors was strong in my nostrils, reminding me of how the village children would even now be excitedly rummaging into musty sheds and spidery lofts for even mustier clothes in which to dress themselves for their evening ploys. Their simple Halloween ‘false-faces', made from a sheet of cardboard bent round the face and tied with string at the back of the head, would in snatched and secret moments already have been chalked or painted with fearsome white fangs, staring multi-coloured eyes and then liberally trimmed with fleece from the spring shearings, before being hidden away to await the great night. I recollected that some parents had expressed doubt as to whether the children would have the courage to go out this year because of the reported presence of a ‘white beast' or as some described it ‘a wee white man' in the hazel copse which filled a cleft of the moor between my own croft and the skirts of the hills. In the autumn the copse was a favourite nutting place not only for the children when they came home from school but for any adults who had time to pick or teeth to crack the nuts, but this season, after the first pickers had returned visibly shaken to tell their stories, the copse had been completely neglected.

‘D'ye believe in the wee folk yourself. Miss Peckwitt?' Old Anna had asked, and because I refused to be drawn she went on, ‘Are ye no' afraid, livin' all by yourself down there?'

I had told her that I was not afraid but now, straightening my aching back for a moment and looking across to the copse looming spectrally through the drifting mist, I wondered if it was still the truth. No, I was not afraid, but there is no denying that in the twilight of a still evening the moors, wild and deserted yet full of whispers, can have a disquieting effect. They seemed to breathe their mystery down my neck as I picked up a full pail of potatoes and carried it up the croft to the shed, refusing to let myself hurry yet conscious that my torso seemed to be well ahead of my legs. I emptied the pail and resolutely went back to my lonely digging.

‘I see you're busy.' I jumped so much that I stuck a tine of the fork through the toe of my new gumboots and turning round saw the postman grinning at me from under his peaked cap. He was wearing uniform but there was a rifle under his arm and the mailbag was full of dead rabbits.

‘I'm about finished,' I told him, indicating the half dozen or so sticks of withered haulm still unlifted.

‘They're no' bad,' he complimented me after he had rubbed one or two of the potatoes in his hands. ‘Are they nice and dry?'

‘No' bad,' I admitted. ‘They're not waxy, anyway.'

‘My own are, but you should see the size of them,' he told me. ‘I planted them in that boggy patch that's never been ploughed before, and I used nothin' but seaweed for them, My God! I'm tellin' you, I can tuck just one of them under my arm and it'll do a dinner for the four of us.' He gathered up one or two potatoes that had missed the pail and put them in. ‘I'd best be gettin' along, I suppose.' He sighed. ‘She'll have it in for me if I'm not there on the dot.' He swung his mailbag into a more comfortable position and started off. but changing his mind he came back to stand beside me again. ‘Did they tell you about yon white beast?' he enquired anxiously.

‘Yes,' I admitted, with a surreptitious glance towards the hazel copse.

‘Well, if you should see one be sure and chop it in two with your graipe,' he instructed, and even while I gaped at him in astonishment he dove forward and picked up something from the soil. ‘That's the beastie,' he told me, triumphantly displaying on the palm of his hand a fat grub that might have been white beneath its film of earth. ‘Make sure you kill it properly now or it'll play hell with your potatoes next year.'

He loped off, whistling a Gaelic air to which the thudding of the mallbag against his bottom provided an erratic accompaniment. I threw the last potato into the pail, forked the dead haulm into heaps ready for burning and, heavy with weariness yet full of satisfaction, went back the cottage.

The kitchen was warm and while I waited for the torch, soaked in methylated spirit, to heat the tube of the pressure lamp, I looked out across the darkening bay to where the pattern of lighthouses were already singing their charted beams over the furrowed water, the most powerful of them kindling a fleeting window-patterned reflection of itself on my kitchen wail. The lighthouses always served to emphasize the change in my life, for in town at this time in the evening it would have been the ordered queues of street lamps flicking on to contemplate the drab pavements with stark suspicious glare. I drew the peony-flowered curtains and pumped the lamp until it hissed into brightness.

The kettle was steaming on the stove when there was a rattle at the door and Morag came in. I put aside the grocery list I had been studying with its quotations for bolls (140 lb.) of flour and oatmeal, for sugar by the hundredweight, pot barley, rice and coconut by the stone, for syrup in fourteen-pound tins.

‘Ach, now, seein' you doin' that reminds me Neilly was askin' me to get some of that tobacco for him,' said Morag, nodding towards the list. ‘I'll not be sendin' there for a whiley yet so perhaps you'll order it along with your own,' she suggested.

I took up the list. ‘What kind does he like?' I asked, having always been intrigued by the esoteric attraction of ‘Black Twist', ‘Bogey Roll', ‘Warhorse' and ‘Warlock'. To my delight she plumped for ‘Bogey Roll'.

‘I wonder,' I mused as I wrote it down, ‘just what “Bogey Roll” has that the others haven't got?'

‘Indeed I don't know,' responded Morag, ‘but when he hasn't any tobacco from the shop Neilly will smoke nettle leaves, or dockens, or I've even known him stuff his pipe with brown paper and smoke it, so I shouldn't think it's anythin' particular.'

She wriggled herself into her chair like a hen into a dust bath before taking the cup of tea I was holding out to her.

We sipped in silence for a while, half listening for the furtive whisperings or stealthy footsteps of children who, on their one night of jollity in the year, might be rigging a booby trap outside my door or climbing on to the roof to drop empty tins down the chimney.

‘Did you hear about the sod-hut tinkers?' Morag burst out suddenly.

‘No,' I admitted. ‘What about them?'

‘They're goin' to have a marryin',' she announced exultantly, ‘in the church with the minister.'

I stared at her incredulously. During the spring and summer months Bruach, in common with most of the Hebrides, was beset by tinkers selling every kind of merchandise and of more recent years by the collectors of scrap-iron—still called ‘tinks' —who poked uninvited around our crofts and sheds discovering our assets and then, with irritating insistence, making offers for everything we did not wish to dispose of. I have never forgotten one filthy old man who had stood glowering at me through a draggle of grey beard while a confederate of his was glibly proposing to ‘take out of my way' an old trough with which I had not the slightest intention of parting. During a slight pause the old man had jerked suddenly into the conflict by asking, ‘Is they your own teeths?' with such an air of covetousness that I expected him to immediately make me an offer for them.

These ‘scrap tinks' were considered by the crofters to be of a much lower class than the rest of the tinkers, largely, I think, because they indulged in no courteous Highland preamble before they got down to business, a neglect the Bruachites found distasteful. But they became, like the other ‘tinks', an unavoidable adjunct to the Hebridean way of life, and in the early mornings throughout the spring and summer one could see their tents or their dejected old lorries parked in some green and pleasant spot just off the road while nearby a kettle hung over a crackling twig fire. On clear sunlit mornings when the air was splintered with birdsong and the faces of the breakfasting tinkers seemed to reflect the sunshine, the life appeared to be not without a certain glamour, but any hankering for it was dispelled on dreary mornings of storm when the camping place was sleeked by rain and dotted with dismal heaps of scrap unloaded from the lorries so as to make sleeping space for the family. There was no crackling fire then but only a pile of twigs which a drape of gloomy faced men took turns to fan with their hats into some semblance of flame.