The Sea for Breakfast (2 page)

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, ‘I 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 oft 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 accommodation. 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 cottage 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 friend 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 time 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 cottage as its mam 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 cottage 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 little, 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 ceilidh, hoping the girls would forget their 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.