by Jane Duncan
Oh yes. The coal boat was a great institution, and anything could happen when she came in. The first day of her visit was always the best, though. Once the coal started coming out, the men worked hard at the loading to keep the horses moving in a continuous stream on the little, narrow, slippery, stone pier, and everybody and everything—men, children, horses and carts—became grimed with coal-dust. On the second day there was no proud setting off with horses and carts groomed and shining to the last hair and brass trimming, the big horses stepping lively and tossing their heads in front of the empty carts whose weight they did not feel. No. On the second day the carts were loaded on the outward journey with bags of potatoes, bags of oats and barley or wood from Sir Torquil’s saw-mill, and every horse had a pull on his collar. Mind you, in spite of the hard work there was always a certain amount of fun.
Hughie Paterson, from the little croft of Seabrae, which lay above the big farm of Seamuir, had a big grey mare which he had bought, as Tom put it, ‘for half-nothing’ because she had been badly broken to harness and was not ‘guaranteed for work’. She was a handsome animal, as good in appearance as any at the coal boat, her name was Pearl and she was a character to be reckoned with. Pearl was in no way vicious—she never thought of rearing, kicking, bolting or biting or other horse protests at injustice. No. When it came into Pearl’s big head that she had had enough of work for the present she simply refused to move. This idea invariably came into her head when her cart had been filled with coal and she was politely requested by her soi-disant master, Hughie Seabrae, to move off with it. Pearl would give him a blank look of sheer insolence, blow through her nostrils, stare out over the Firth and not move an inch. Every man on the pier prided himself on his horsemanship, and certain ones, like Sir Torquil, my father and my uncle, were reputed to be able to ‘do anything with a horse’. They would all try all their tricks on Pearl. The hatful of oats would be held a foot from her nose, they would cajole and flatter her with all sorts of encouraging words and noises, and, as a final resort, they would threaten her with a whip (after one had been fetched from the back shed of the Plough, for no driver of working horses in our part of the country at that time would have been seen dead with a whip in his hand). Pearl would not move, or else, in the middle of some man’s speech to her, she would give him a scornful, disgusted look and march away with her load, leaving him looking a fool in mid-word, to be followed by his infuriated: ‘Ye bliddy, thrown, ould bitch!’ for she made it obvious to all that she had moved merely because she felt like it and not because of anything that had been said to her.
All the time that these efforts with Pearl were going on the children would be laying bets on who could get her to move, and the men would be arguing among themselves and at the threat of the whip Hughie Seabrae would start to dance up and down and shout: ‘Don’t be coorse on her! If you’ll be at her with the wheep it’s sit doon she’ll do!’ But one memorable day, Sir Torquil, exasperated, did tap Pearl on the rump with a piece of rope. Hughie Seabrae’s promise came true. Pearl sat down on her well-fed behind, with a hideous rending of wood as she broke both trams of her cart, and stared at Sir Torquil as if to say: ‘Now try and move me!’ Work had to stop altogether for half an hour until Pearl chose to rise and march off with great dignity, up the pier, with the pieces of broken trams hanging from her harness.
In a contrary sort of way all of us, who were so proud of our intelligent, hard-working, ‘guaranteed’ horses, had a special pride in Pearl. She was a symbol of the freedom of the individual to entertain his own views and indulge his own whims. She was not mischievous like our big Dick from Reachfar, who, if he thought he was being kept waiting in one place for too long or was bored in any way, would start stamping his big feet, tossing his head with a jingling of harness and nickering until he had infected every horse on the pier and had them all capering too. Pearl was not like that. Pearl lived unto herself and would pull a load to oblige when she felt like it, but when she did not feel like it no power in heaven or on earth would make her do it. Secretly everyone admired her for her stolid independence of spirit, although, at the coal boat, it could be the limit of exasperation both for the landsmen and the crew of the boat, for the coal boat was always in a hurry, and what with the time lost on the turn of the tides, there was no time to spare to indulge Pearl’s temperament.
I never could understand why the coal boat was always in such a hurry. My family was always scornful of people who were in a hurry, and I had been brought up to believe that there was something disgraceful in it. I knew that you had to ‘step smart’, of course, and not ‘waste time’ and not ‘dally’ and ‘look businesslike’, but all these things were quite different from being in a hurry.
“Get up in time in the morning,” my grandmother said, “and you won’t be running in a hurry all day.”
“Get off to church in time,” said my father, “and not be hurrying at the last minute like Teenie Ferguson.”
But the coal boat was always in a hurry, in her every puff and whistle and rattle of her chains, and I asked my father why this was.
“It’s because of the war,” he said. “Before the war, when you were too little to mind on her, she had more time. But with the war, she has a lot more places to go, so she is always in a hurry. Indeed, but for Sir Torquil, I doubt if we would be getting any coal at all these days.”
The war was a very peculiar thing. People talked about it a great deal, and always in phrases like: ‘because of the war’ and ‘to, with, by and from the war’ and in a sighing way of ‘before the war’ and in a sad way of ‘at or in the war’. The war did hundreds of dreadful things, far worse things than making the coal boat be in a hurry, so I asked Tom about it, and he told me what it was and where it was, but he could not tell me how or why it was. Nobody could. It was a thing even more mysterious than the tide that swung the big ships round in the Firth on their buoys, for Dominie Stevenson could make you understand the pull of the moon on the sea, and, although it was miraculous, you had to believe it. But even the moon, which controlled the tides, and the sun, which could ripen the corn, could do nothing about the war, apparently. In the end I asked my mother if God made the war, and she said a very queer thing. She said: “No. I think the war is one of the few things that people have made for themselves and it is nothing for them to be proud of.”
At the end of a week or ten days, long after the coal boat had sailed away and we children were back at school, the last load of coal would have been carted away from the dump at the pier and my father and my uncle would sigh with relief at supper-time in the evening.
“Lord, but it’s me that hates the coal!” George would say. “And the stour and the dirt and a-all. Got your horses cleaned up yet, Duncan?”
“Och, aye,” my father would reply. “But it makes the devil of a mess of the carts and harness. Still, it’s by for another year.”
“I feel as clarty as Jock Skinner,” George would say, scratching at himself, and we would all laugh.
It was not possible, we all knew, for my big, fresh-skinned uncle or any of my family or any of the men who worked on the land of Poyntdale or anywhere to be ‘as clarty as Jock Skinner’. Jock Skinner was a native of the Fisher Town, but he did not go to sea like the others. Jock Skinner was what was called a ‘dealer’, which was reckoned to be an even more rascally occupation than that of ‘unctioneer’. He lived at a seaside croft at the east end of the Fisher Town, with his clarty, shrill-voiced wife and a gang of unruly children who were always having to be ‘whipped in’ to school by the whipper-in, whose official title was ‘School Board Officer’. All around the untidy house and its overgrown garden there were heaps of old iron, and torn sacks hung over every sagging fence, while hens were scratching and pigs were grunting round the door, to which, periodically, Bella Skinner would come with a basin and hurl out a dollop of potato peelings, fish guts or other refuse, regardless of the youngest child who would be crawling there among the pigs.
Jock had a
flat cart and two shabby little horses, which were yoked to the cart turn about, and when not yoked fed themselves as best they could, mostly by breaking through into the pastures of Captain Robertson of Seamuir. With his cart and his horse, with his poaching lurcher dog running under the axle of the cart, Jock roamed the country, ‘dealing’. When the fishermen made a good catch Jock would be at the pier with his cart, buy a load of fish and drive madly off with them ‘west the country’, where he sold them at excessive prices, and on his return trip the next day he would call at all the farms and crofts and exchange cups and saucers and bowls for rabbit-skins and rags, in the intervals concealing in his cart the rabbits which his dog killed and carried to him. Back in Achcraggan, he would exchange the cost of the haulage of some beer from Dingwall for drink at the Plough, and the haulage of some grocery commodity for tobacco at Miss Tulloch’s, and then he and Bella would be seen sitting at the gable of their house, smoking their clay pipes and drinking whisky and beer out of cracked teacups with no handles.
Jock Skinner, people would tell you, ‘had done very well out of the war’, particularly with the fruits of his poaching and thieving, for the big ships that came into the Firth had a constant demand for fresh food of almost any kind, and how, as Tom said, ‘would the decent hard-working sailors be knowing that Jock Skinner was thieving the most that he was selling to them’? Reachfar was too far from the beaten track to suffer a great deal from Jock’s depredations, but my father and my uncle, whose charges of Poyntdale and Dinchory both had fields bounded by the County Road, lost turnips by the cartload, and on one occasion two of the Poyntdale calves disappeared without trace. There was a big to-do about this, and the people of Achcraggan said it would be nearly justifiable to ‘send west for the policeman’, but this disgrace was avoided by my father borrowing Sir Torquil’s riding crop in the evening, going to Jock’s croft and ‘putting the fear of God in him’. I never had explained to me, precisely, the connection between Sir Torquil’s riding crop and the fear of God that came into Jock, but certainly neither livestock nor turnips disappeared after that from Poyntdale or Dinchory.
One of Jock Skinner’s more honest bits of ‘dealing’, however, was his coal-merchant’s business which he operated from the dump on the pier. Among the farm people like ourselves it was considered a disgrace to buy coal from Jock Skinner—we bought our coal ‘direct’, which meant that we made payment for it to Sir Torquil, who ‘backed’ the entire boatload. Let it not be thought, though, that we burned only coal. Far from it. The coal, at Reachfar, the whole two tons of it which we bought per year, was a treasured luxury, and every black stone of it was put on the fire, with pride, by hand. Our main fuel was wood from the moor, and the coal was used only to put heart into the fire for a specially skilled piece of baking or on a particularly cold winter night, and to burn too much, so that we ‘ran out’ before the boat came again, and had to have recourse to Jock Skinner, coal merchant, would have been, in our eyes, a deep disgrace. Decent people, people ‘of any standing’, did not buy coal from Jock Skinner. The church, the Manse, the doctor’s house, the school, the schoolhouse, the smithy, the few merchants and the people of the village, the farms and the ‘Big Hoose’ of Poyntdale, all had their coal direct from the boat, delivered by the massed farm carts of the district, and then Jock Skinner ‘made a deal’ with Sir Torquil for what was left in the dump and ‘took a gamble’ on someone running short—owing to sickness in the house perhaps—so that he could charge them a shocking price, while the fisher folk kept his business alive by buying from him a little at a time, as they could afford it, through the winter.
* * * * *
In 1918, as I made my way towards Achcraggan and the Miss Boyds with my basket—no, I have not forgotten the Miss Boyds—our district, like most other places, was fast in the grip of a great change, of which I, like most other people, was unaware. Until the war Achcraggan had been a healthy little fishing town of about thirty family boats that brought their catches in to the pier and disposed of them in a dozen ingenious ways. Doctor Mackay, with his trap, setting out on his round, would take a man and a creel of fish out to the limit of his visiting, and the man would sell out his creel on the way back. The mail cart would take away several boxes, all the way to Dingwall. Sir Torquil’s coachman, down with the trap for the Big House letters, would pick up the huge supply of haddock or herring for the use of the Big House and, in addition, pick up a man and a creel to drop him in Poyntdale ‘farm street’ which was a hamlet in itself. And, of course, the brown-faced, sloe-eyed, barefoot Bella Beagle, in her blue-and-white striped petticoat and grey drugget apron, would set off, heavy creel on back, aslant and southwesterly over the face of the hill, on my school route, and take in every croft and shepherd’s house on her eighteen-mile round, including Greycairn and Reachfar. Bella Beagle, whose name was really Bella Gunn, but who was known by the name of her family’s boat The Beagle, just as my grandfather was called ‘Reachfar’ and I was called ‘Janet Reachfar’ by the name of our croft, was one of my earliest friends. It was she who taught me to scale, gut and bone a herring with more than the usual proficiency of an amateur, although I never could match the speed and skill of her flying fingers.
Bella was never allowed into the house of Reachfar until she and I had cleaned the fish and handed them over to my grandmother in the white enamel basin, and Bella’s creel was never allowed into the house at all. When the scaling, gutting and boning were over, and we had given the refuse to the pigs, and we had washed our hands in the outside wash-house with the carbolic soap, we were allowed to come in, and Bella was paid for her fish and given a large bowl of broth from the pot and a large oatcake and butter. Fish, although a help on the menu, were ‘dirty, stinking brutes’.
Then, when Bella had finished her soup and had called down a blessing on the house for it, we went outside and I helped her to hoist the heavy creel on her back and then walked along the yard and round to open the north gate for her. Bella, who a short time ago had been up to the elbows in fish refuse, would pick her way daintily through the hen droppings of the yard, step carefully round the stable drain and turn away her head from the midden behind the steading. Farm animals, although necessary, were ‘dirty, stinking brutes’.
I have never, later in my life, been so aware of the gulf fixed between two races of people as I was of the gulf between the land and sea people of Achcraggan. They had nothing in common except the church, and even there, there was a deep-rooted difference. The land people tended to be tall and fair of skin, the sea people short and sallow; the land people were soft and slow of speech, the sea people shrill-voiced and rapid; to the land people fish were repellently dirty and stinking, to the sea people dirt and stink were the main characteristics of farm animals. The two races had nothing in common except their belief in God, and yet here came the deepest difference of all. The sea people claimed that they were God’s chosen because His only Son had made His friends among the fisher folk of Galilee. The land people claimed that they were the Lord’s chosen because He had put His first created man on earth to live in Eden, a garden. There was nothing to be done about it. The grown men fought over the issue at the Plough; the grown women fought over it in the village shops, and the children fought over it in the school playground. Grown-ups and children could be controlled only by the greater powers vested in the persons of the Reverend Roderick Mackenzie, the minister, and of Dominie Stevenson, the schoolmaster. Civil war simmered always just below the surface of Achcraggan life.
But by 1918 this was dying away, just as the family fishing boats were dying out one by one, swamped by the competition of the bigger boats from the bigger ports; just as the smaller, poorer crofts were becoming merged in the bigger farms as the older people died off. And the process was being accelerated by the war, which had drawn off so many of the younger men, landsmen and fishers alike, leaving on the land only the experts like Mr Macintosh, my father and my uncle and the older men like Sir Torquil, my grandfather and Tom.
And so, looking ‘far’ at the warships in the Firth and at the cloud shadows drifting over the hills to the north and thinking of the joys of the visit of the coal boat, I made my way, ‘stepping lively’ and without once putting the basket down or bumping it in any way, to the gate in the red freestone wall that ringed the ‘Miss Boyds’, to find that the gate was standing wide open, a most unusual sight. But, queerer and queerer, drawn up at the kitchen end of the house was none other than Jock Skinner’s shabby little cart and tatty little horse, the whole weighed down with numerous torn, dirty sacks of coal.