‘What do you think about this dance?’ she asked, looking at me.
‘I’m not going,’ I told her.
‘You’re not?’ I shook my head. ‘You used to enjoy a dance,’ she reminded me.
‘Ach, she’s thinkin’ she’s too old for them now,’ Erchy informed her and the nurse, who was some years older than I, blushed. He was right, of course. I was getting too old for such capers and Bruach dancing was so rigorous that at the end of each dance the partners did not thank each other politely but thanked God audibly.
‘Oh, do come,’ pressed the nurse. But I would not be persuaded.
‘I never did like fancy dress dances anyway,’ I added by way of excuse.
‘What are you dressin’ up as yourself?’ Erchy asked her but she would not tell him. ‘There’s a good few goin’ all the same,’ he told her and nodded across at me. ‘Yon man that was over here buyin’ your dung was tellin’ me he’s thinkin’ he might go himself.’
‘What will he be after dressin’ himself up as?’ asked Morag.
‘Indeed I don’t know. Unless he’s plannin’ to go as a heap of manyer an’ that’s why he came to get the dung when he did.’
The nurse sniffed. ‘He wouldn’t need to dress up much if that’s what he’s going as,’ she said with elegant sarcasm. She put down her cup. ‘I must go anyway,’ she told us. ‘I have to see Alistair yet tonight.’
‘I’ll go with you, then,’ Erchy proposed. ‘I told the cailleach I’d go some time.’
Together they went out into the now wet and blustery evening and through the window we saw the headlights of the car probing their way along the narrow road. I had got out of the habit of drawing the curtains since in Bruach one did not want to shut out the night but rather to allow it to share one’s company. Morag sighed. ‘I’d best be away myself,’ she said but I pressed her to stay and brewed another pot of tea and while we sat at the table drinking it she told me of her childhood; of sitting round the peat fire which was in the centre of the room; of her mother and grandmother spinning and carding wool in the evenings; of herself knitting stockings for the family; of their unquestioning belief in curses and the powers of some people to lift them; of her own longing to go to school. ‘Aye, an’ I mind when I was at school first there was this new teacher came from the mainland an’ he got us children singing’,
“Jesus is my dearest friend,
I love him more than coal.” ’
‘Coal?’ I interrupted.
She nodded. ‘That’s what we used to sing right enough until one day he tells us to say the words just an’ not sing them an’ when he hears us say “coal”, says he, “It’s not coal, children, but gold”, though he didn’t think to tell us what gold was an’ none of us cared to ask him. So we sang about gold an’ I mind when we young ones got outside we were after askin’ each other what like of stuff it was. See,’ she explained, ‘we’d none of us heard of it or seen the like of it that we knew of. We knew coal was kind of precious since it was only the laird that could afford to buy it so we knew we’d have to be lovin’ Jesus plenty if we loved him more than coal but we didn’t know what use there would be for this stuff called gold. We children made it up between us that it must be some sort of stuff that warmed you better than coal.’ She looked at my astonished face. ‘There now,’ she said, ‘that’s how far back we were in those days.’
‘When did you first see a coal fire,’ I asked her.
‘Not till I was workin’ at the laird’s house an’ I was sixteen by then,’ she replied. ‘One of the things I had to do there was to get in the coal for the fires an’ I mind thinkin’ the first time I had to do with it that we children must have made Jesus awful sad to be singin’ to him that we only loved him more than these pails of dirty black stuff I was after carryin’.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘Aye, but those days are gone an’ now there’s not a one that cannot afford to buy coal to burn along with their peats, even if they don’t see much gold.’ The room was quiet except for the buffeting of the wind and the whine of a draught under the door.
‘Was there much entertainment in those days for the young people?’ I asked her.
‘Indeed more than there is now,’ she replied. ‘There was shinty for the men an’ then the laird would give a dance at the backend of the year for the estate workers an’ anyone that had a mind to come. These days you’ll not see a dance in Bruach from one year to the next.’
‘Did you do much dancing?’
‘When I was young I did,’ she admitted.
‘Did you ever fall in love?’ I pursued.
Her month was softened by a fugutive smile. ‘Not love the way you English would have it,’ she told me. ‘But I wasn’t passed by,’ she added proudly.
‘No one special?’ I persisted.
‘Ach, there was a young gamekeeper at the time helpin’ out the regular gamekeeper but he was such a dour one I didn’t know for sure was he wantin’ me or not.’
‘How was he dour?’
‘Ach, he was that feart of folks makin’ a game of him, though why they would I don’t know for he was a well set up young man. I mind him at the laird’s dance one time an’ I knew he was wantin’ to catch my eye but I was thinkin’ to myself that if he hadn’t the nerve to ask me to dance then he wasn’t the man for me anyway.’
‘Did he ask you?’
‘Aye, well, he works his way round to where I’m sittin’ an’ makin’ out I’m not seein’ him at all. Then when he’s right beside me he says quietly, “Are ye dancin’?” No more than that just but “Are ye dancin’?”. Says I without lookin’ at him, “Are ye askin’?” Says he, “I’m askin’.” Says I, “I’m dancin’,” and with that we started dancin’ together but he never spoke another word to me the rest of the night.’
‘Did you meet him again?’
‘Indeed I did so but seein’ he was that slow makin’ up his mind I thought I was best off without him though he was a fine young fellow. I couldn’t have had him anyway for my parents needed the money I was gettin’ workin’ for the laird an’ after about a year or two of courtin’ me with his eyes just as you might say he was away to the mainland for another job an’ I never heard of him again.’ She sighed. ‘Ach, I liked him well enough but he would never have done for my parents seein’ he wasn’t from these parts.’ She yawned. ‘It must be at the back of ten,’ she said and looked at the clock, which said it was twenty past six. My clock almost always said it was twenty past six. It was a seven-day clock which had been given to me by an English friend who when she had stayed with me had been distressed because I rarely used clock time. Now that I had a clock I was not much better since I wound it only on impulse; just as I would decide to wash curtains or bake an angel cake, I would decide to wind the clock and since the impulse came only about four times a year for three hundred and thirty-seven days out of three hundred and sixty-five my clock gave the time as twenty past six. Morag rose and pulling her buttonless jacket over her chest she tied it with a belt of rope and refusing the offer of a hurricane lantern dove out into the night leaving me to muse over the image of the diffident young gamekeeper and his approach to the equally diffident young Morag.
‘Are ye dancin’?’
‘Are ye askin’?’
‘I’m askin’.’
‘I’m dancin’.’
It was such an illustrative example of tight-lipped Highland reserve that I went over it again and again until it had settled in my mind like a formula.
Two weeks were to pass before there dawned a morning that gave promise of a calm dry day suitable for stack building and, as luck would have it, on that day I had arranged to catch the bus to the mainland. Two friends of mine, Sue and her husband Robert, were coming to pay me a visit and I had promised to go over to the mainland to meet them and their car and guide them along the road to Bruach. As I waited on the pier for their arrival I looked at the serene blue sky and the lazy sea and as I felt the genial smile of the sun I thought if only I ha
d been home in Bruach I could no doubt have persuaded Erchy to finish my winter stack for me. My visitors were delayed on their journey and it was nearly dusk when we reached Bruach and just as I had lit the lamp and was telling my guests to make themselves comfortable while I rushed round seeing to the outside chores Morag appeared in the doorway. I introduced her and suggested that she might like to stay for the strupak I would shortly be making but she resisted firmly. ‘I have fed your hens,’ she told me as she saw me start to prepare mash.
‘Oh, bless you Morag, you’re a treasure,’ I told her. She made a deprecating gesture, then still standing in the open doorway she turned and pointed out into the gathering dusk and to my delight but to the utter bewilderment of my two guests she declared dramatically. ‘’ Tis no myself would be botherin’ Miss Peckwitt but ’tis Erchy that’s wantin’ her to go to him just so he can show her the beautiful shaped cock he has waitin’ for her out there.’
The Croft in Between
My friends, Robert and Sue, were so impressed by the slow pace and the contentment of life in the Highlands they became enamoured with the idea of looking for a place of their own. Bruach, they decided, was too wild and barren for them to think of settling even had there been a croft available.
‘You ought to write a book and call it “How Bare was my Bruach”!’ suggested Sue.
After much map searching and much scanning of the newspapers which circulated in the crofting counties they came to the conclusion that their best course was to make a leisurely tour of the Highlands and keep an eye open for a place which offered what they were seeking, i.e. tranquillity without isolation; beauty without barrenness. They suggested I accompany them and since Morag was there when the idea was first mooted she volunteered immediately to look after my cow and hens. There was little to do on the croft now that my winter stack was complete. Bonny was still out on the hill and needed only to be milked and given a bundle of hay each day. The hens had to be fed and the eggs collected but until Bonny had to be brought in to the byre at night I was relatively free and the temptation to accept the invitation and see parts of Scotland I had never previously visited was strong indeed.
‘Of course she’ll come,’ Morag assured them with such emphasis that I think they expected me to begin packing right away.
We set off a few days later and in golden sunshine made for the remoter parts of the Highlands, spending the night wherever reasonably attractive lodging offered accommodation so late in the season when snow was already capping the sable hills and the yellow-reeded bogs and pools were stilled by frost. We had enjoyed Highland hospitality everywhere. The colder the night the warmer the fires they built for us; the more blankets they piled on our beds; the more hot water bottles they put in them; the more food they loaded on to our plates. ‘Marvellous people,’ Robert frequently observed.
‘They all look so happy and serene,’ said Sue. ‘I’ve always thought Highlanders were dour and uncommunicative but it simply isn’t true.’
It is really asking too much to make one’s first tour of the Highlands and house-hunt at the same time. One becomes so overwhelmed by the vastness of one’s surrounding; by the superabundance of hill peaks; the glory of lochs; the slightly intimidating desolation of the moors, that one is capable of doing little else but marvel at their wildness. So it was with Robert and Sue. Though they saw many deserted looking croft houses in situations which strongly appealed to them ferreting out information regarding their owners and the possibility of sale had proved, as I suspected it might, a frustrating task for a tourist. ‘I have never before experienced such courteous dissimulation,’ Robert complained. ‘They seem willing to give one almost anything but the information one wants. I believe sometimes I’m actually talking to the owners of the place I’m enquiring about without them ever betraying the fact,’ he ended with a chuckle.
‘I think you might find it more rewarding to put an advertisement in one of the Highland papers,’ I suggested meekly.
‘I think you’re possibly right,’ Robert conceded and thereafter we gave only desultory attention to house hunting and simply allowed ourselves to revel in the scenery. We had enjoyed splendid weather for our trip; indeed Robert and Sue had not seen a drop of rain since they had set foot in Scotland but the day before we were due to return to Bruach there was a perceptible difference in the day.
‘I shan’t mind going back to the office nearly so much if the weather turns nasty before we leave,’ Robert said.
‘The office!’ moaned Sue. ‘After this.’ We were having a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking a long narrow loch that was like a blue furrow between ridges of the hills and not even the croak of a hoody crow or the bleat of a sheep broke the all-enveloping silence. I understood the despair in her voice.
We returned to the car and it was as if we had absorbed some of the silence for none of us spoke until Robert brought the car to a stop outside a small hotel whose front lawn bordered the loch.
‘This looks okay,’ he said and went to enquire as to the possibility of our spending the night there. When he reappeared he was nodding affirmatively. As we took our overnight bags out of the car we felt the first sleety cold drops on our faces.
We were the only guests at the hotel and after eating a traditional and immensely satisfying high tea we were invited by the friendly old couple who apparently owned the hotel to forsake the indifferent comfort of the residents’ lounge for the snugness of their private living room, one end of which was conveniently bounded by the back entrance to the bar. Robert suggested drinks but the old man held up his hand and a moment or two later his wife appeared with a tray on which there were five glasses of whisky and a jug of peat tinted water. We raised our glasses to the old couple and wishing them ‘Slainte Mhath!’ began sipping what was to me the mellowest whisky I have ever tasted in my life. The old man questioned us about our travels and in turn Robert plied him with enquiries about crofts that might be for sale but, as always, it seemed that the crofts in the vicinity were claimed by the locals or by their relatives who even though they might live on the mainland still held on to the houses as holiday homes or as places they hoped to retire to.
‘Ach, but this is a gey lonely place,’ said the old woman. ‘I doubt you would want to live here.’
I looked at Sue. I had no doubt of her desire to live in the Highlands but I guessed she would soon be wanting more company and more amenities than a lonely croft could provide. But it was nice that she should have her dream.
The old man had a folded newspaper on his knee and I asked him if there was anything of interest in it. He offered it to me and pointing a finger to a headline said, ‘I was just readin’ to Peggy the piece about the twin brothers. Now that’s a strange thing, do you not think so?’ I began to read.
‘Read it aloud,’ pleaded Sue, so I read them the report of twin brothers, one of whom had been engaged to the daughter of the local gamekeeper, but a few weeks before the marriage was to take place he had been killed in an accident. Some time later the surviving twin had become engaged to the same girl but only forty-eight hours before the wedding day he too had met with a fatal accident. The gamekeeper’s daughter was quoted as saying she ‘had the feeling that her first fiancé had reached out beyond the grave and prevented the marriage’.
‘Aye, that would be the way of it just,’ said the old man. ‘There’s things happen in these parts that’s so strange when you come to tell of them folks don’t believe you.’ He sat back in his chair and puffed at his pipe. ‘And since no Highlander can bear to be thought a liar,’ he went on, ‘then they don’t trouble themselves to tell of these things.’ His bright blue eyes regarded us challengingly through a mist of tobacco smoke.
‘Well that story of the twins certainly sounds a fascinating coincidence,’ said Sue, who shared my appetite for ‘coincidences’.
‘Aye, indeed but there’s plenty says these things are true enough,’ maintained the old man.
‘What things?’ asked Robert,
lifting his empty glass and also his eyebrows to indicate that it was his turn to stand a round. The old woman took our glasses and while we waited for her to refill them only the snarl of the flames round the logs on the fire and the sad keening of the wind as if over the passing of autumn broke the silence. The old woman placed our full glasses in front of us and sat down again.
‘It’s true that the spirit can reach out beyond the grave,’ explained the old man in answer to Robert’s question. He took a good sip of his whisky and looked across at his wife. She glanced up from her knitting and I had the distinct impression she had given him a nod of permission. ‘There was the like of such a thing not so far from here,’ he continued. ‘It was a good few years back now but just the same I remember it well enough.’ Sue and I exchanged delighted smiles. We guessed there was a story coming and neither of us could have chosen a better way to spend the evening than by listening to a tale beside a log fire in a lamplit room.
‘There was these three crofts, see, at the head of the loch,’ went on the old man. ‘An’ they were owned by three brothers. It was one big croft just when the father was alive but in dyin’ he split it among his three sons so it wouldn’t seem as if he was favouring the one more than the other. But ach, it made the crofts that small and awkward to work that two of the brothers agreed they would work theirs together as well as they could which was not all that easy seeing the third brother had the croft that lay in between their own crofts. I hardly like to say it but the third brother was always the jealous one; right from a youngster he was spiteful an’ thrawn as they say; what we would call in the Gaelic a “Greannach”.’ He looked at me. ‘Yon will have come across that word, I doubt?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Aye well, the Greannach was that blinded by spite against the other two he would as often spoil himself in trying to prevent them making the best use of their crofts.’ He looked at the bottom of his empty glass and gestured to us to finish ours. Sue and I refused firmly but the old woman filled the glasses for the two men. ‘Ach, it was a foolish thing the father did, that, splitting up the croft though no doubt he was tellin’ himself it was for the best.’ He kicked back a log that had rolled out of the fire. ‘An, the time goes on,’ he resumed, ‘an’ the Greannach got himself a wife an’ then they had a daughter. Then another brother married an’ had a son. The other brother didn’t marry at all so when he died he left his croft to the son of his brother so that after a time the son came to own two of the three crofts. What then could be better than that he should marry his cousin, the daughter of the Greannach, so the three crofts would be one again? The young man set about courting his cousin but though she herself was pleased enough to have him her father refused to let her. She was old enough by then to choose for herself but the Greannach was so determined the young man shouldn’t have his croft that he threatened if his daughter married her cousin she should never inherit it. Ach, it was a pity an’ more than a pity right enough for I believe the young man would have made his cousin a good husband an’ the three crofts together would have given them as good a livin’ as they needed for these parts. But seein’ her father was so set against it the girl wouldn’t go against him. No son or daughter of the croft would want it to go to a stranger an’ seein’ there was no other relations nearer than Australia strangers is what they would have been, so the girl maybe acted wise enough. Even on his deathbed the Greannach was after makin’ his daughter swear she wouldn’t marry her cousin an’ what she said to quiet him no one but herself would know but after he died she got the croft. A couple of years went by an’ the young man thought maybe it was time he tried his luck with his cousin again. She didn’t take much persuadin’ seein’ she’d not been over fond of her father with his mean ways an’ his sharp temper an’ since she was thirty past an’ a wee bitty deaf an’ a wee bitty short-sighted she knew well enough she’d not be likely to get another chance if she waited. So they arranged the weddin’ an’ the young man was well pleased at the thought of the three crofts bein’ one again an’ he planned how he’d work it the next season without being girned at for lettin’ his cow put a foot over the boundary or maybe takin’ a sweep of grass that wasn’t his. The weddin’ was planned for November for then all the harvest would be in but that summer an’ autumn were so wet the work was held up again an’ again an’ they had to delay the weddin’ until the New Year. Ach, it was terrible weather that year; great pourings of rain that turned the crofts into bogs that the cattle churned up with their hooves; the drains overflowin’ so there was that much mud goin’ into the wells you couldn’t take a drink of water without lettin’ it settle in the pail for an hour or two after you’d taken it from the well. An’ the burns were that swollen they flowed white like snow down the mountainside.’ He paused and stared meditatively into the fire; his wife reached for a pair of spectacles and started to count the stitches on her needles; Robert lit another cigar and Sue and I sat quite still waiting for the old man to continue his story.
Beautiful Just! Page 13