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The Sea for
Breakfast, Chapter 1
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You can purchase
The Sea for Breakfast from Amazon.com
 A
Place of My Own
One hundred and ten; one hundred and eleven,
ouch! One hundred and twelve, damn! For the third torrid day in
succession I was exasperatedly discovering and extracting nails of every
tortured shape and unexpected size from the wooden walls of my cottage
kitchen. My tool, which I had previously understood to be a claw-headed
hammer, had been bestowed upon me by Ruari, the Imperiously obliging
brother of my former landlady. He however had referred to it more
colourfully as a ‘cloven-footed’ hammer. It was a typically Hebridean
tool with a thick, rough handle and a rusty head so loose on the shaft
that it was a toss-up each time whether the nail would be prised out of
the wall, or whether the ‘cloven-foot’ would remain poised vacillatingly
on the firmly embedded nail while I reeled back, brandishing the handle
and recovering myself just in time to receive a blow of acknowledgement
from the descending head. For the umpteenth lime I stopped to massage
tingling elbows with grazed fingers and swore as I Jammed the head
savagely back on to the shaft. For the umpteenth lime I wished, rather
half-heartedly, that the little village of Bruach were not set amidst
such glorious Isolation and, most whole-heartedly, that the terrain were
less abundantly provided with handy-sized stones. As it Was, even this
poor makeshift had necessitated some diligent seeking. Still, I
comforted myself as I doggedly counted my successes (simply so as to
prove just how many nails one may expect to find in an old croft
kitchen), the unpredictability of proceedings did serve to enliven a
task that otherwise might have been as soporific as counting sheep.
Just why any household
should have wanted or needed more than a hundred nails disfiguring their
kitchen I could not understand. The six-inch ones higher up on the walls
and the ones in the rafters would of course have been used for hanging
fishing nets. In addition to those serving as picture hooks and those
used for hanging coats and oilskins, some of the rest would doubtless
have been used for strings of salt fish or rabbit skins. A few dozen
nails, even fifty, I would have been prepared to accept as a normal
complement, but over a hundred!...
‘My kitchen walls,’ I
lamented to Morag after my first impact with them, ‘have more nails to
the square foot than a fakir’s bed.’
‘Aye, but those is
Hamish’s men’s nails,’ she replied reverently, and seeing that I looked
blank, continued: ‘Ach well, mo ghaoil, d’you see, Hamish and Mary that
lived there had seven sons and all of them men y’understand? Not like
the wee ticks of things we have nowadays, but big men they was and
strong, and every lime one of them got back from the hill or from the
sea they’d likely have a rabbit or a few fish and maybe a skart and
they’d be after pickin’ up a stone just and bangin’ a nail into the wall
so as to hang it away from the cats and the dogs.’
‘It still puzzles me why
there should have been such a glut of nails all ready to hand, here in
Bruach of all places,’ I said.
‘But isn’t the wood you
gather from the shore full of them just, lassie? Have you no seen that
for yourself? And Hamish’s men wouldn’t be the kind to be wastin’ them.’
Thus was the plethora of
nails explained. Now I should like to explain why I, during three
picnic-perfect days of early June when cuckoos were yodelling across the
sun-soaked moors and bluebells were pealing wildly into bloom, should be
gloomily and resentfully pulling all Hamish’s men’s nails out again.
When her nephew in
Glasgow had been involved in an accident which was supposed to have
affected his health generally, Morag, the crofter landlady from whom I
had rented half a house since my arrival in Bruach three years
previously, had decided that he and his wife, who was herself a
semi-invalid, should come to live with her on the croft where she could
keep a strict eye on the two of them. She also, she said, intended to
keep a strict eye on their precocious lithe daughter, a design which I
suspected privately, having met the child, would result in her having
one more subject for her tyranny, for Morag, like all Gaels, loved to
have a child about the house to indulge. Naturally the new arrangement
meant that Morag and I, to our mutual regret, must part company, and I
was faced with the alternative of returning South or looking for other
accommodation locally. After three years of crofting life and with ill
health only a memory, I found I did not relish the idea of returning to
the noisy clutter of life in England where nowadays it seems there is
too much prosperity for real happiness; too much hurry for humour. In
Bruach there was prosperity enough for most things and time mattered
lithe. My days were pleasant and full and the nights brought unbroken
sleep so that even dreams had the continuity of one long novel in
contrast to the disjointedness of a book of short stories. And
undoubtedly I had grown fond of Bruach and its inhabitants, for the
Gaels of the Hebrides are indeed a happy race. Even their language is
happy; listening to the Gaelic is like listening to a series of
chuckles; there is always a lilt even in harangue; often a smile in a
scold. I might be shocked at some of the events of the day, but at night
I could chuckle myself to sleep over them. I wanted to stay in Bruach,
so I looked for a place of my own.
There were two empty
cottages not far from the village. ‘ugh-na-Craig’ (House on the Rock),
to the north, was situated close to the burial ground, the other, with
an unpronounceable name — the nearest I could get to it was
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ — to the south, adjoined the cleg-infested moor.
Faced with a choice between clegs and corpses I chose the clegs and was
immensely relieved I had done so when I later heard Erchy, the poacher,
telling someone: ‘Ach, the grave will no take long to dig. It’s no a
County Council burial ground so you’ll not have to go more than two
feet. It’s no trouble at all.’ The County apparently insisted on four
feet.
The cottage of
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ had been empty when I had first arrived in Bruach
but the fact that it might be for sale did not emerge until after I had
announced my intention of settling. The Bruachites are averse to putting
their property on the open market but like to be wooed into graciously
permitting you to buy provided you can convince them of your need and of
your bank balance. Calum, one of Hamish’s surviving sons and the owner
of the cottage, lived in Glasgow, so I lost no time in contacting him
and in visiting the local policeman in whose charge the key had been
left.
My first meeting with the
policeman, soon after my arrival in Bruach, had left a distinctly droll
impression on both our minds. I had been on my way back to Morag’s one
drearily wet evening when I had come upon his car parked plumb in the
centre of the road, without lights of any sort. A little farther along
the road a lorry too was stopped and beside it the policeman, watched
attentively by the lorry driver, was siphoning petrol out of the tank of
the
lorry into a can. When he
had transferred the petrol to the tank of his own car, the policeman
generously offered me a lift borne. Morag had been away in Glasgow at
the time and as the policeman had yet to finish the enquiries about
poaching he was engaged on making in the village, I invited him in for a
meal. Earlier in the day Erchy had handed me a parcel of fish which he
had said offhandedly were mackerel. I cooked one for the policeman.
Before the meal he had seemed much dispirited by the results of his
day’s work, but after the fish and several cups of tea his geniality was
restored. Indeed he became quite jovial. He complimented me on my
cooking and when he got up to go he impressed upon me that I must be
very sure to thank Erchy for him and tell him that he, the policeman,
had ‘never tasted mackerel like them’. I assured him I would do so.
‘He said what?’ demanded
Erchy when I had innocently kept my promise.
‘He asked me to tell you
he’d never tasted mackerel so good,’ I repeated.
‘Damty sure he hasn’t,’
muttered Erchy, turning a little pale. ‘Why the Hell did you want to let
him see them?’
‘But you told me they
were mackerel. Weren’t they?’
‘Mackerel indeed! D’you
mean to say you can’t tell the difference between what’s a trout and
what’s a mackerel? And do you not know trout’s illegal?’
At that stage of my
Initiation I was incapable of distinguishing a legal fish from an
illegal one, having hitherto relied on my fishmonger to identify my fish
for me. Full of contrition, I admitted my defections.
Erchy stared at me with
both pity and amazement. ‘Sometimes,’ he said crushingly, ‘I think
school teachers is the most ignorantest people out.’
Since that episode one of
the policeman’s eyes had always drooped into an indubitable wink
whenever we had met and now that I approached him with a request for the
key of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ he appeared to find it excessively funny.
‘You’re thinkin’ of buyin’
"Tigh-na-Mushroomac", are you? Well, right enough I did have the key
once but I’ve lost it now. Indeed, when the door was blown in by the
storm a year or two back the only way I could keep it shut again was to
ram a big stone behind it and tie a good piece of string to it. You’ll
see the string under the door. You’ll pull it towards you when you come
out and it rolls and jams the door. Keeps it closed better than the old
lock that was on it before, I’m tellin’ you.’ He was so taken with his
contrivance that it seemed a pity to draw his attention to the fact that
I must first get into the cottage. ‘Ach, you’ll give it a good shove
just. Mind now, it’ll need to be a right good one, for it’s a biggish
stone. You’d best get one of the lads to do it for you,’ he added on
second thoughts.
It was a grey day with
sneaky little flurries of wind which dashed us sporadically with chilly
drops of rain when Morag and I went to pay our first visit of
inspection. Morag had enlisted for me the help of Peter, the son of
Sheena, who worked the croft adjoining ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’. Peter was a
doughty, chrysanthemum-headed youth whose shape suggested that his
mother had placed a heavy weight on his head in childhood to make him
grow broad rather than long. When he smiled his wide gummy smile it
looked as though someone had cut his throat. When he laughed he looked
as though he was going to come to pieces. He now strode beside us along
the shingle track, his shoulder hunched as though in eager preparation
for the assault on the door.
‘My,’ confided Morag with
a little shudder, ‘1 don’t like the look of him at all. He looks that
wild.’ I glanced surreptitiously at Peter, who was wearing such a
ridiculously tight pair of trousers and such a constraining jersey that
It looked impossible for him to be anything but extremely well
disciplined. ‘And he’s that lonely,’ went on Morag steadily as she
assessed the baby hill and the bare half mile of road that separated
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ from the rest of the houses, ‘you’ll have none but
the sheeps for company.’
I told her, patiently,
for I had told her many times, that I did not mind the solitude.
‘But, mo ghaoil,’ she
argued, ‘you could die here and none of us the wiser till the butcher
smelled you out.’
Built of grey stone,
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ squatted in smug solitude at the extreme tip of
Bruach bay, its two lower windows like dark secrets half buried in the
three-foot thick walls. From the sloping felt roof two tiny dormer
windows peeped inquisitively at the sea which at high tide skirmished no
more than twenty yards away. In fact it would not have needed an unduly
exaggerated fishing rod to have enabled one to lean from one’s bedroom
window and draw upon the sea for breakfast each morning.
Behind the cottage was
the neglected croft which merged Into the wildness of the moors and they
in their turn stretched to prostrate themselves at the feet of the
lonely hills. It would have been cruel to have insisted to Morag that
its distance from the rest of the houses was, for me, one of
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’s’ chief attractions. The Gaels as a general rule
seem to have no desire for privacy, building their houses as close to
one another as croft boundaries will permit. ‘Alone-ness’ is a state
they cannot endure and ‘any company is better than no company’ is a
maxim that is accepted literally whether the company be that of an idiot
or a corpse. Not desiring it for themselves, they can neither understand
nor really believe in the desire of other people for privacy and so
genuinely anxious are they that you should not be lonely they
continually seek you out of your cherished solitude.
Outside the cottage Peter
turned on us his cut-throat grin and poised himself ready for action.
‘All right now, Peter,’
said Morag. ‘I’ll lift the sneck.’ Peter rammed his shoulder fiercely
into the door; there was a short, sharp protest from the rusty hinges as
they parted company with the wood; the door fell inwards, see-sawed
across the big stone so thoughtfully provided by the policeman, and
flung Peter into the farthest corner of the porch. Bewilderedly Peter
picked himself up, revealing that he now had two long, gaping splits in
the seat of his trousers.
‘Peter!’ upbraided Morag,
blushing for his predicament. ‘You’ve broken your trousers!’ Peter
looked somewhat puzzled and felt each of his limbs in turn but thus
reassured he became more concerned with locating a splinter which, he
said, had ‘come out and lost itself on him’. I diplomatically went
upstairs and minutes later heard his exclamations of relief and then his
dismissal by Morag. Through a bedroom window I caught sight of his
stocky figure fleeing homewards across the moors, presumably minus his
splinter and with his rear parts effectively camouflaged by Morag’s best
floral silk apron which she had fortunately been wearing beneath her
coat. My landlady joined me upstairs.
‘Didn’t I tell Sheena
this mornin’ just,’ said Morag complacently, ‘that Peter was gettin’ too
tight for his trousers?’
Inside,
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ was a replica of all the two-storeyed croft
cottages I had seen, there being a kitchen leading off one side of the
entrance porch and ‘the room’ off the other. In Bruach this second room
was never known as anything but ‘the room’, presumably because no one
was really sure of its intended purpose. Morag, In her original letter
to me had described hers as ‘the room that wasn’t a kitchen’. Usually
the anonymous room was necessary as a bedroom and indeed in many of the
single-storeyed croft houses these two rooms, with a recessed bed in the
kitchen, comprised the whole of the living accommod~1o1t Yet in such
limited space large families were reared and a galaxy of scholars
produced. It was no unusual sight to see a university student at his
books by the light of a candle in a corner of the small kitchen, while
all around him the neighbours jostled and gossiped, argued and sang.
Neither was It unusual in due course to see that student’s name high in
the list of honours graduates.
‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’
provided ample accommodation for a spinster. It had two rooms upstairs
and, though these were of attic proportions with the windows at floor
level so that one had to sit down on the floor to look out through them,
they were habitable. The cottage needed a certain amount of repair;
first on the list was a new front door. But its walls and its roof were
sound. I liked what I saw.
It seemed to me that
everyone in the village took a hand in the ensuing transaction, and when
it came to bargaining they ranged themselves with complete affability
either on the side of Calum or myself or, with true Gaelic adroitness on
the side of both parties. With so many cooks the broth should have been
irrevocably spoiled but eventually everything was settled to everyone’s
complete satisfaction and I became the delighted owner of a cottage and
croft.
As I could afford only
the minimum number of alterations to begin with, I decided that priority
must be given to getting larger windows put in the kitchen and ‘the
room’. I wanted snugness but not permanent twilight in my new home.
‘But, mo ghaoil, think
how they’ll show up the dust,’ warned Sheena, who had lived all her life
in a dark, thatched cottage and whose only use for a duster was to wipe
over a chair whenever a visitor accepted the hospitality of her kitchen;
a necessary precaution, considering a hen had most likely been the
former occupant.
Erchy, with whom I
consulted, startled me by admitting that he ‘quite liked a bit of work
now and then just as a change when he could spare the time’, and by
promptly agreeing to undertake the task. True to his word he was soon at
work taking out the old frames and enlarging the window space. When he
had got thus far there was a lull in his activities.
‘What’s happened to Erchy
these days?’ I asked at a ceilidh one night. ‘He seems to have gone on
strike. There’s been no work done on my collage for days.’
‘Oh, he’ll not be workin’
at anythin’ for a week yet,’ explained Johnny. ‘He’s got his girl friend
from Glasgow stayin’ in the village and they’re away every night to the
heather.’
‘That’s not his girl
friend,’ contradicted Morag indignantly.
‘Maybe not,’ conceded
Johnny easily, ‘but he’ll make do with her while she’s here.’
But the return of Erchy’s
proxy girl Mend to Glasgow did not, unfortunately, result in a
resumption of activity by Erchy. A wedding was announced at which he was
to act as best man. Erchy got drunk in anticipation, drunk for the
solemnization and drunk again in recollection. A week later there was a
dance and Erchy got drunk in preparation. He reckoned he’d never have
the courage to ask a girl to dance with him if he was sober. A cattle
sale followed closely on the heels of the dance and Erchy’s beasts made
the highest prices; he stayed drunk for nearly a week! By this lime
winter was upon us and Noachian deluges, lashed by fierce gales, washed
the exposed room inside and out. Hailstones pitted the wood-lined walls;
spiders’ webs were torn from their anchorages; salt spray filmed the
floors. It was on a particularly savage day, with a full-blooded gale
inverting the waterfalls over the cliffs and sending them billowing
skywards, that I went over to the cottage to reassure myself that it was
still there. Hungry green breakers were hurling themselves at the
shingle shore, flinging spume high over the roof of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’.
The wind seemed to have chosen the poor little collage as its main
target and I was buffeted towards it. Inside I found Erchy frenziedly
prising out the small window from the back of the kitchen.
‘My, but it’s coarse,
coarse weather,’ he announced.
‘Erchy!’ I yelled,
ignoring the greeting in the belief that he was still suffering from the
effects of his recent orgies. ‘I don’t want that window out, you idiot!’
‘I canna’ get it open,’
Erchy yelled back. ‘I’ve got to try will I get it out. It can go back
when it’s needed.’
‘It’s needed now if ever
it was,’ I retorted savagely.
‘My God, woman!’ Erchy
shouted at me above the storm. ‘Do you not know that where the wind gets
in It’s got to get out again? If you don’t let It out here you’ll lose
your roof. Wind’s the same in a house as it is in a stomach; you’ve got
to let it blow its way out once it’s in. You canna trap wind.’
I watched him dubiously,
slowly becoming aware that not only was the floor pulsing as though
there were an engine beneath my feet, but that interspersed with the
noise of the storm were strained creakings and groanings from the
timbers of the ceiling.
‘This floor’s quaking,’ I
said tensely.
‘You are yourself too, I
dare say,’ retorted Erchy unrelentingly. ‘And if you had this amount of
wind under your beams you’d be quaking a lot worse.’ I subsided into the
most sheltered corner of the kitchen. ‘Hear that now?’ Erchy continued
as an ominous thudding became audible from somewhere above. I listened;
it sounded as though the ceiling joists were stamping against the walls
in their impatience to be gone. ‘That should stop when I get this
clear.’ He wrenched the window free and lowered it to the comparative
shelter of the ground outside. ‘Now listen!’ he commanded, but though I
listened obediently I was not much the wiser. The whole cottage seemed
to be threatening to take wing at any moment. ‘Aye, you’d have lost your
roof all right tonight, I doubt,’ said Erchy with great satisfaction.
Through interminable
weeks ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ waited, naked and exposed, for the new door
and windows to arrive. Glass, I was told, was scarce and when at last it
was obtainable the mid-winter gales followed, one after another, so that
the carrier complained it was impossible for him to get across to the
mainland. A brief respite from the gales brought the snow, which blocked
the road. Blessedly came the thaw — which washed the road away. A day of
calm dawned; there was no snow and the road had been repaired. With
bated breath I telephoned the carrier.
‘Oh, indeed I’m sorry but
the tide’s not just in the right state for loadin’ at the pier,’ he said
with practised apology. ‘Not till next week it won’t be.’
Next week brought a
repetition of the previous delays but when the tide had crept round
again to a suitable state and miraculously it coincided with a period of
calm I again phoned the carrier.
‘Did you no hear, Miss
Peckwitt?’ he answered plaintively. ‘My lorry broke on Monday and I’ve
no managed to get it sorted yet. I canna’ say when I’ll be out now.’
Every time I visited my
refrigerated little cottage I became a little more despondent. Every
night I prayed the Almighty for patience. But the day did come when the
elements acted in unison and nothing ‘broke’ and the carrier’s lorry
came romping along the track to the collage to deliver two beautiful new
windows and one front door. The front door was not new. There was a
little note from the merchant explaining that he had not been able to
procure a new door of the right size so he had taken the liberty of
sending this one which had been removed from the local police station.
He hoped I wouldn’t mind! The carrier had also brought cans of paint,
rolls of paper and turps, so whilst Erchy set to work installing the
windows, I began to paper ‘the room’. The original colour of the walls
of ‘the room’ was really indescribable and the nearest I came to
identifying it was in the recollection of a time when Morag, suspecting
her calf was sick, was debating with me whether or not she should send
for the vet.
‘What makes you think
there’s something wrong with him?’ I had asked as we watched the beast
skipping around on his tether. ‘He looks healthy enough to me.’
‘Aye,’ Morag had agreed
reluctantly, ‘he looks all right in himself but see now,’ she had
explained, indicating his smeared rump, ‘his dung is such an unhappy
colour.’
Once the windows had been
put in I installed a camp bed and a couple of borrowed chairs and one or
two other essentials and moved into the cottage. A few nights afterwards
four of the girls from the village turned up to inspect progress. My
spirits sank a lithe, for where the girls went soon the men would follow
and then there would be a ceilidh and I would have to stop work and
provide tea. I told them I was just planning to start papering upstairs.
‘We’ll give you a hand,’ they volunteered. My spirits sank lower. As I
expected, it was not long before some of the lads were bursting in,
completely sure of their welcome and, giving up any thought of doing
more work, I prepared to settle down for an evening’s cellidh, hoping
the girls would forget theft offer of help. The prospect of a wasted
evening was not nearly so discomposing as the prospect of having to
accept their help with the decorating.
‘Come on,’ said Dollac,
the village beauty, inexorably. ‘We’re all goin’ to help Miss Peckwitt
paint and paper upstairs so she can have it all ready for a good ceilidh.
Get the paint, you Ally. Is the paper cut? Those that can’t do paintin’
or paperin’ can do some scrapin’.’ Feebly I tried to dissuade them. ‘Now
just you get on with finishing the room,’ they told me. I submitted to
the juggernaut of their enthusiasm and when I had put the last few
touches to ‘the room’, I carried water from the well and coaxed the
stove into heating It. I found biscuits and collected odd cups and mugs,
since my own crockery had not yet arrived. As I worked there came from
above bursts of song, the banging of doors, clanging of paint cans,
uninhibited shrieks, yells of tension, thudding of feet and generally
such a hullabaloo that I doubted if ever I should be able to clean up
their mess in anything short of a decade.
‘Tea!’ I called up the
stairs and there was such an immediate scatteration that I fully
expected a brace of paint cans to come hurtling down the stairs too. My
helpers had enjoyed themselves immensely; that at least was obvious.
Each one of them had a swipe of paint across a cheek, a decoration which
Dollac dismissed as being the result of a game of ‘paint-brush tag’ — to
see who would get the most paint on him. When they had finished their
tea and biscuits they rampaged back upstairs to ‘finish things off’. I
felt that the phrase would turn out to be most appropriate. I heated
more water and washed the cups, envisaging myself having to take time
off from cleaning up the farrago in order to go to the post office to
phone for a large supply of paint remover and a repeat order for paint
and wallpaper. It was the early hours of the morning before my helpers
came trooping down the stairs again. They had cleaned the paint off
their faces and I wondered vaguely bow and where. They had finished both
bedrooms, they said and they were ‘beautiful just’, but they must have
my promise not to go upstairs and look at them until after breakfast.
They wouldn’t look so good until then, they explained, because there
were still some wet patches; I must wait to inspect it until it was all
properly dry. The promise was an easy one to make for I felt much too
debilitated then to climb the stairs and face up to the chaos which I
was certain would confront me. Yet, after breakfast, when I felt strong
enough to bear the sight of it all, I went upstairs and found there was
no chaos at all; I could not have hoped to have done the job nearly so
well myself. The unused materials were stacked tidily in a corner, and
paint splashes had been cleaned away. It was, as they had said,
beautiful — beautiful just. But only Gaels, I believe, could have
accomplished such a splendid job and yet have derived so much fun and
frolic from doing it.
The following night the
volunteers turned up again but now there remained only the kitchen to be
decorated and as I insisted that all the nails should come out first and
as no more tools were procurable the evening’s work degenerated into a
cosy ceilidh. And that is why on this hot June day I came to be pulling
out my one hundred and twenty-third nail when I heard the voice of
Sheena, Peter’s mother, hailing me from the door.
‘My, but you’re a hardy!’
I gathered up my harvest
of nails from a chair and pushed on the kettle. In Bruach no work was
ever considered too pressing to neglect hospitality and the arrival of
the most casual visitor automatically ensured the popping on of the
kettle.
‘I’ve taken a hundred and
twenty-three nails out of this kitchen so far,’ I told Sheena, ‘and I
believe there are still one or two left.’
‘Oh
aye,’ she replied. ‘But Hamish was always
such a handy man. Mary had never but to ask for a nail and he’d have it
in for her. Aye, a right handy man he was.’
‘I’m not nearly so handy
at pulling them out,’ I said ruefully.
‘No, but why go to the
trouble mo ghaoil? You’ll surely want to hang things yourself and you’ll
be glad of a nail here and there.’
‘Not a hundred and
twenty-three times,’ I said.
‘No, maybe,’ she
admitted. ‘But there’s pictures.’ (I should mention that the kitchen was
about twelve feet by ten feet and no more than seven feet high.) ‘And
will you no need a nail for your girdle?’ In Bruach a girdle is
something a woman bakes on — not something she steps into. ‘And then you
never know but what you might want to dry a rabbit skin or two, and a
few fish maybe.’ I hoped I never should. ‘You’ll need some for towels
some place and a corkscrew...’ she was enumerating enthusiastically now;
‘and a holder for your kettle and a couple of calendars and a wee bunch
of feathers for the hearth. You have no man,’ she giggled, ‘so you’ll no
be needin’ nails for him. Men needs an awful lot of nails in a house,’
she told me. ‘You must see and keep some mo ghaoil surely.’
I surveyed my rusty
harvest. I’d be dammed if any of them were going back in again, I
decided, and between sips of tea Sheena sighed for my improvidence.
‘My, but your new windows
are beautiful just,’ she enthused, slewing round her chair so that she
could stare out at the sea. The windows had made an enormous difference
to the cottage, giving a wide view of the bay which today was full of
sunshine and silver-flecked water. On the shore, sandpipers scurried
busily in the shingle and serenaded the quiescent ripples while thrift
danced to the music of the sea. Above the outer islands comically shaped
clouds, like assorted carnival hats, were strewn haphazardly across the
sky. The black hills lay in a drugged haze, Garbh Bienn looking like an
old man who has fallen peacefully asleep in his chair; the wisp of white
cloud across its middle like the newspaper fallen from his face.
‘You know,’ said Sheena,
whose appreciation of nature was purely gastronomical, ‘this weather
ought to bring the mackerel in.’
She finished her tea and
as she got up to go she remembered she had a telegram for me in her
pocket. ‘I was passin’ the post office and Nelly-Elly said would I bring
it. It’s only to tell you your furniture’s comin’ next Tuesday.’
Sheena had only been gone
a few minutes when Morag arrived and we were soon joined by Erchy who
had been painting his dinghy down on the shore. The kettle had to go on
again. I begrudged no one tea and I had grown tolerant of time-wasting,
but I was plagued by the fact that water for every purpose had to be
carried from a well over a hundred yards away down on the shore, which
meant that I had to struggle uphill with the full pails. It was
aggravating to have to squelch about the croft in gumboots even during a
prolonged thought and to realize that though there was an excess of
water everywhere it was too undisciplined to be of use to me. I was
ironically reminded of my own mother’s injunction, ‘Don’t leave the
kettle boiling, wasting gas’; here I had to remind myself, ‘Don’t leave
the kettle boiling, wasting water’. With so much cleaning to do the
carrying of water was proving a strength-sapping business and I was very
anxious to get the guttering of the cottage replaced so that I could
have rainwater for household purposes. The guttering, along with a
rainwater tank, had been on order for many weeks and Morag brought news
of it now.
‘She’s on her way,’ Morag
announced triumphantly. You II not want for water when she comes.’
‘You’re not telling me
that my rainwater tank is on its way at last, are you?’ 1 asked
hopefully.
‘Yes? indeed. I saw the
carrier yesterday just and he told me to tell you that if the Lord
spares him he’ll be out with her tomorrow for certain.’
‘That will be a
blessing,’ I said. However, as I pointed out, the new tank would not
overcome the drinking water problem because I had discovered that when
there was a combination of high tide and a strong wind the sea came into
my well so that the water was decidedly brackish sometimes.
‘So it will be, mo ghaoil,’
Morag agreed. ‘But you know the old doctor who was here always used to
tell us that if everybody took a good drink of plain sea-water once a
week there’d not be so many sore stomachs goin’ around.’
‘That may be true, but I
don’t like salty tea,’ I demurred. ‘I rather wish I could get hold of
one of those water diviners to come and find me a nice convenient well
here on the croft.’
‘Them fellows,’ said
Morag contemptuously; ‘they had one hereabouts a long time back to try
would he find a corpse in the hills and a few folks was sayin’ we ought
to let him try would he find more wells for us here in Bruach.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, they let him try all
right, and he said there was water here and there was water there, and
my fine fellow took ten shillings from each of us for sayin’ so, but
when folks started digging they found it was drier underneath than it
was up at the top. They’d lost their money and they’d found no water.’
‘They didn’t go deep
enough,’ put in Erchy, with a wink at me.
‘Indeed they did. He said
there was water on our own Ruari’s croft at twenty feet and Ruari dug
down until we could see only the cap of him just, sticking out of the
top of the hole he’d made and
still there was no water. Ach, I’m no believin’ in
them fellows at all. Maybe they can find corpses but I doubt they canna’
find water.’ It struck me then as strange that the Bruachites, who
genuinely believe in and often claim to be gifted with the second sight,
should yet be so sceptical of water divining. I recollected that I had
never heard of a Hebridean water diviner.
‘What you’ll have to do,
my dear,’ went on Morag, ‘is to think the wild water.’
‘The wild water?’ I
echoed.
‘Aye, what you catch from
your roof.’
‘For drinking?’ I
grimaced, thinking of all the dear little birds I heard scratching and
sliding on my roof every morning; of the starlings fumigating themselves
around the chimney and the gulls daily parading the length of the
ridging. Morag laughed.
‘You’ll soon get used to
that, lassie,’ she predicted firmly. And she was right.
She watched me take out
the last half-score or so of nails, giving a grunt of ‘there now!’ at
each success.
‘Anybody would think it
was you doin’ the work,’ Erchy told her.
‘If you was half as good
as the men who put in the nails you’d be after takin’ them out for Miss
Peckwitt instead of sittin’ watchin’ her,’ she rebuked him.
Erchy drained his cup.
When Morag was on the defensive her tongue could become caustic and he
was ready to flee from it.
‘D’you know you’re wearin’
odd shoes,’ he taunted her. ‘Ach, Erchy, but you know me. I just puts my
feets into the first things that I pull from under the bed.’
‘That could be damty
awkward sometimes, I doubt,’ he said as he disappeared homeward.
Morag watched me fill a
pail with hot water and pour in Some disinfectant.
‘My,’ she commented with
an appreciative sniff, ‘I do like this disinfectant you use. It has such
a lovely flavour.’
While I washed down the
walls she told me of the prowess of Hamish and his sons. They had, it
seemed, all possessed Herculean strength though, according to Morag, the
sons had been no match for their father. She told me of the prodigious
loads he could carry; of how he alone could lift to shoulder height the
three stones at the entrance to the village by which every man coming
home from the sales was accustomed, in days gone by, to test his
strength; of how he could lift a boat that taxed the strength of four
lesser men. She related with pride the stories of his skill in breaking
hones; of how he used to walk all the way from Glasgow once every five
years and, when he reached home, to show he was not tired, he used to
leap over the garden gate. (I was less impressed with this latter feat,
for if I had left Glasgow two hundred miles behind me I have no doubt I
too should have felt like leaping a gate.)
‘What are you goin’ to
name your cottage now that you have it ready?’ she asked, draining her
fourth cup of tea.
‘Oh, I shan’t bother to
change it from "Tigh-na-Mushroomac",’ I said. ‘I must get the correct
Gaelic spelling.’
‘Here, but you mustn’t
call it that. Not on letters, anyway,’ Morag said with a gasp.
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘What
does it mean?’
‘It doesn’t suit it just.
And it’s no rightly a name at all. It’s just what it’s always been
called since I can remember.’
‘But, Morag, what does It
mean?’
‘Indeed I don’t know,’
she lied firmly. ‘Erchy’s mother says to tell you she has a wee poc of
fish put by for you when you’re passin’ that way,’ she continued hastily
and made for the door.
It was of little use
pressing Morag further, that I knew, and I walked with her as far as
Erchy’s, pondering on the meaning of ‘Tigh-na-Mushroomac’ and why it
should be considered an unsuitable name to be put on letters. I recalled
the excessive amusement of the policeman when be had learned I was
thinking of buying the house and wondered if it had been caused in some
measure by the unsuitability of the name. I knew that in the Gaelic
‘Tigh’ means ‘house’, but never having seen the spelling of the name I
could not identify the rest as being any Gaelic words I knew.
‘Erchy,’ I demanded,
‘what does "Tigh-na-Mushroomac" mean?’
Erchy looked a
long, long way out to sea, and his lips tightened to repress a smile.
‘Don’t you get feedin’ any of that fish to the pollis,’ he warned me,
‘and if you meet him with it, run for your life.’
‘How do you spell "Tigh-na-Mushroomac?"
I persisted, after a hasty glance at the fish which I could now
recognize as being nothing more illicit than mackerel.
‘Indeed, I don’t know,’
he replied with simulated apology.
His evasion strengthened
my determination to find out so I put the question to an old scholar who
loved his language and who was patient with those who might wish to
learn it.
‘Oh well, now, you
mustn’t call the house that,’ he answered me smoothly. ‘No, no, that
wouldn’t do at all. It’s not really a name but just a description the
village has always had for it. Go and tell Morag she must tell you the
story of it. She’s the best one to tell you, and you must tell her that
from me.’
I thanked him and went
again to Morag. She was washing dishes and when I told her why I had
come she began scrutinizing each dish lingeringly to avoid meeting my
eye.
‘Well, mo ghaoil,’ she
began, with an embarrassed chuckle. ‘It was Hamish’s lads when they was
younger. They wouldn’t come out once they were in... y’understand?’ She
managed to give me an insinuating glance, and then plunged on with her
story. It appeared that one or two of Hamish’s less tractable sons had
developed a dislike for work and so evaded it by disappearing into the
‘wee hoosie’ in the back garden where, immune to the threats and
cajolery of their parents, they had stayed for long periods reading
books or papers. Hamish had at last become so incensed that he had one
day taken the saw and sawn the traditional round hole into a rough
square one. The simplicity of his strategy was rivalled only by its
effectiveness and, after enforced experience, I have no hesitation in
recommending this form of torture to anyone who is barbaric enough to be
interested in such practices. Inevitably, Hamish’s family had come to be
known in Bruach and beyond as the ‘square bums’ and their house as ‘the
house of square bums’.
Once acquainted with the
story I lost no time in choosing for my cottage a name that I could
unashamedly put on my letters. For the seat in the ‘wee hoosie’ I had
already substituted one of more conventional shape.
You can purchase The Sea for Breakfast
from Amazon.co.uk
You can purchase
The Sea for Breakfast from Amazon.com |
