The Sea for Breakfast (20 page)

Our gossip had lasted rather longer than it should and I had to hurry if I was to deliver a note that Johnny had asked me to give to the joiner. The road from the harbour was steep and I wished I had the same incentive as the fishermen in whose wake I toiled: the public bar was at the top of the hill and the way they were drawn towards it was like the force of gravity in reverse. I found the joiner's shed but the door was tight shut and there was little to indicate that any sort of business was carried on there except for a notice-board which bore the esoteric announcement:

I knocked at the door of a neighbouring cottage, from the garden of which two ragged-looking geese eyed me apprehensively, and enquired after the joiner. He had gone, I was told, with his family on a Sunday School picnic.

I rushed back down the hill to find Morag.

‘Did you give the joiner Johnny's message?' she asked, as we hurried to the station.

‘No,' I told her. ‘He's gone off on a Sunday School picnic.'

‘What like of man is that then, goin' off on a Sunday School picnic on a Saturday,' she scoffed.

The guana spattered train with its assemblage of covetous gulls was already in the station and we dived hastily for the shelter of the corridor. We found an empty compartment and barely had we seated ourselves when the train gave a jolt and started to move resolutely away from the platform. I held my watch to my ear, thinking it must have stopped, but there was too much noise to hear anyway. Then the train stopped, vacillated for a while between jostlings and bumps and groaned slowly back into the station.

‘What is all this shunting for?' I enquired of a flaccid porter who appeared to be rooted to the platform outside our compartment. He blinked, looked pallidly about him and then with an obvious shock of recollection informed me solemnly:

‘ 'Tis all for the sake of the fish, madam. Just for the sake of the fish.'

‘I expect they've had to put us on to an extra fish van,' Morag interpolated. ‘I was talkin' to a woman in the tea-room and she told me there'd been heavy landings today.' She produced a bag of peppermints and sat back, sucking contentedly.

‘You mind,' she said reminiscently when the driver had let the engine have its head, ‘that woman I was talkin' to in the tea-room? Well, her man's a fisherman and he was in today with a good catch, but do you know what that man is gettin' for his tea tonight?'

‘Boiled fish,' I guessed.

‘No, but fish fingers—them artificial fish out of deep freezers. And he loves them, she says, and so does the rest of the fishermen.'

‘Good gracious!'

‘Aye,' agreed Morag indignantly. ‘Them things! For a man! And not a bit of taste to them at all, until they come back.'

I have an unfortunate habit of falling asleep on trains and so I was soon startled by Morag's shaking me and telling me to get ready to alight. We were breaking our journey so that I could visit a dentist and so that Morag could seek out a builder's yard where there might be second-hand sinks and basins for sale, for now that Hector was home she clung to the hope that he would put in piped water for her.

The delightful lady with whom we had arranged to spend the night heaped our beds with eiderdowns as though the temperature were several degrees below zero, although it was but mid-September, and heaped our plates with food as though we had been starved. ‘Oh my, I wish I had two stomachs,' sighed Morag greedily when she had eaten.

The dentist obligingly fitted me in without a previous appointment. He was a charming man and when his receptionist showed me into his homely surgery he was sitting on the floor playing happily with an adorable little puppy. He was wearing a starched white jacket, bedroom slippers and no socks. I sat in the chair and waited timidly while he gathered up the puppy and carried it over to its basket. He put it in, patted it and told it to stay there and then came and stood over me. Taking an instrument from an array on a nearby shelf he told me to open wide and began to probe. ‘Ah, yes … perfect, perfect … now puppy … naughty puppy! Stay there puppy … nice puppy.…' Even rolling my eyes to their extremities I could not see what the puppy was up to but my attention was caught by a shelf above that on which the instruments were arrayed. It looked to be a species of museum shelf and reposing on it was a collection of awe-inspiring relics of previous clients. The dentist continued with his inspection. ‘Good teeth you have … yes …' He jerked away suddenly. ‘Puppy! Naughty puppy!' He turned and shook the instrument at it admonishingly. ‘When he wants me to play with him he has a habit of nipping my ankles and his teeth are terribly sharp,' he vouchsafed by way of explanation. He bent over me again but, changing his mind, he picked up the puppy and stowed it again in its basket.

‘Now stay there, puppy,' he bade it firmly. ‘My wife usually looks after it but she's gone off to hospital to visit her mother,' he said companionably. ‘And my secretary's away home now.' The puppy sat in his basket looking appealingly vague. The dentist resumed his inspection. ‘Aye, yes, now there's a wee holey there … no more I think. Ouch!' He jerked away again.

‘Puppy!' He sounded really cross and looked about him helplessly for a moment as though wondering whether to put down the instruments and chastise the offender. His eye suddenly lighted on the museum shelf. Surreptitiously he flicked off one of the relics, which rattled across the surgery with the puppy gambolling happily after it. The dentist breathed a sigh of relief and concentrated his attention on stopping my tooth. As a retriever the puppy was not a conspicuous success and there were only one or two relics remaining on the shelf when I took my leave.

In Edinburgh we spent our days and nights being entertained by past residents of Bruach, by relatives of present residents of Bruach and by Morag's own innumerable friends and relations, so much so that I saw hardly anything of the city and Morag did not find time to renew her acquaintance with the penguins. On our return journey we touched Inverness briefly on a hot, busy day with the buses grinding heavily along and ice cream trodden over the pavements. Inverness suffers too much from the cult of the laird to be popular with Islanders and when they go away they prefer the indiscriminate affability of Edinburgh and Glasgow. At Morag's suggestion we carried on to Dingwall, which is a delightfully scatterbrained little town wavering between East-coast industry and West-coast indolence. Coming out of the station we were confronted with what looked like the preparations for a Guy Fawkes bonfire but which we found was the Seaforth memorial to the battle of Cambrai. But Dingwall is really dominated by the church tower with its four clocks of which, during the time we were there, no two were in agreement and not one was correct. Our landlady was no generous Highlander; she did not smother us with eiderdowns nor overtax our stomachs, but she was the only landlady I have ever come across who had the courage to put a supply of the day's newspapers in the lavatory in addition to an ample supply of toilet paper. I like Dingwall for its individuality and for its decorous bustle but mostly it will linger in my memory as the place where at night the men stand so still on the street corners that even the dogs get confused.

The train journey from Dingwall to the West is beautiful indeed and the halts frequent enough to allow it to be fully assimilated. I slept most of the way and roused myself for lunch to find that our compartment was now shared by a corpulent old Highlander and a heavily built, masculine-looking woman. The man was dressed in black suit, black hat, black shiny boots and with a snowy Wool-worth's handkerchief in his breast pocket. I know it was a Woolworth's handkerchief because I had just bought a dozen for Erchy. When he was not conversing with Morag in the Gaelic he sat self-consciously in his corner staring at the pictures of Morecambe and Bognor Regis which decorated the compartment. He looked as though he had left his croft and his bible only for a few hours and was already wearying to return to them. I discovered he had been travelling the world for the past eighteen months visiting his scattered children and was only now on his way home. The woman was wearing an amorphous raincoat and a deerstalker and she was so engrossed in a novelette with a lurid love scene backing that she appeared to be oblivious of our presence and even of the attractions of Morecambe and Bognor Regis.

We were back to contentious seagulls; back to ‘Tea-rooms' (instead of restaurants) with their stale cakes that looked as though they had been kept on a shelf for six months and taken down and dusted only occasionally. The drizzly rain was full of salt; boats bumped against the slip; ropes were flung; the men's oilskins flapped and crackled. We squelched over seaweed to the ferry. I saw Morag aboard and then asked the ferryman if he could wait while I nipped into the shop on the pier. I had bought a large vacuum jar and I thought it would be a good idea to get it filled with ice cream for the children of Bruach who rarely got the chance to taste it. The youth in the shop considered the capacity of the jar and finally decided that two family bricks would compress suitably. The boy took the bricks and the jar to the back of the shop. He was gone for rather a long time and I could see the ferrymen were becoming restless.

‘Please hurry,' I called; ‘the ferry is waiting.'

He appeared hastily, rather red in the fece, and handed me the jar.

‘I had no idea it was going to take so long,' I said testily as I handed him the money.

‘Ach, but d'you see, I had to melt them first to get them to go in,' he consoled me fatuously.

I hurried down to the ferry.

‘Miss Peckwitt! Miss Peckwitt! Mattami' I stopped. A cadaverous oilskinned figure was lumbering towards me,

‘Miss Peckwitt, am I spekink to?' He was very, very Highland.

‘Yes,' I admitted. ‘Do you want something?'

‘Would you be goin' back to Bruach now, marram?'

I admitted I would.

‘In that case would you be takink a wee message to Willy John MacRae? The phone iss not workink.'

I said I would.

‘You will tell him then that there iss a corp to come over for him tomorrow on the boat.'

‘A what did you say?'

‘A corp, mattam, to come over.…'

The ferrymen were revving the engine impatiently.

‘Yes,' I cut in, ‘I know, but what is it you said was to come over in the boat?'

‘A corp, mattam.'

‘A corp?'

‘Indeed yes.' He could not conceal that he thought me very unintelligent. ‘Willy John's uncle has died in Glasgow and his corp is to come over tomorrow,' he explained patiently.

‘Oh!' I exclaimed. ‘You mean a corpse!'

He looked at me pityingly.

‘Mattam,' he rebuked me gently. ‘I was spekink in the sinkular.'

‘The trouble with this place,' complained the local vet exasperatedly, ‘is that every single soul in it is a fierce individualist. Other townships manage to work together for their own good, but Bruach, never!'

The veterinary surgeons of the Hebrides are splendid men doing gruelling work over a vast area for long hours, often with little consideration or co-operation, yet they are unfailingly helpful, good-humoured and appear to be completely tireless. Our Island vet was no exception, but his exasperation was occasioned by the fact that he had spent a long day under appalling weather conditions chasing over mile upon mile of moor and bog trying to get within ‘slabbing' distance of cattle that were as wild as the hills that bred them. He had out-manoeuvred aggressive mothers with calves at foot; stalked refractory two-year-olds that had never before submitted to human touch; thrown himself upon young calves that fled on nimble legs from anything that had not horns and shaggy hair. In all this he had been hampered by a pack of vociferous Bruachites who, unable to agree as to the best way to catch a beast, had each gone about it in his own way; and by a pack of equally vociferous dogs which, frantic with excitement, had streaked in and out among the distraught beasts taking surreptitious nips at their heels.

‘It's one thing to hold a beast when it's half-mad, but it's another when there's a dog chewing at his tail,' was another complaint the vet made; a complaint well justified by the number of rolls of coarse hair . from the tips of tails that were later to be seen strewing the moors.

For such a round-up of cattle other villagers, as the vet pointed out, had combined to fence off cattle ‘parks'. Bruach had never aspired to anywhere other than the school playground but, to everyone's indignation, the present teacher had protested against its use for penning cattle, maintaining that the uproar distracted the pupils and that the language they could not help overhearing, particularly when one of the more recalcitrant beasts managed repeatedly to evade its captors, was altogether unsuitable.

Another way in which Bruach lagged behind other townships was in its reluctance to run a joint sheep stock. This arrangement whereby each crofter has an equal share in a common stock on the hill, one member of the community being employed as shepherd, appeared to work harmoniously in other places. Bruach preferred to carry on as their fathers and grandfathers before them, each man having a few sheep on the hill and shepherding them whenever he felt the need or the urge to do so. It was a method which meant the flock was being constantly separated and harried from place to place, for however unco-operative their owners may have been the Bruach sheep still retained the instinct to flock together. Half-hearted proposals to merge stocks had been put forward from time to time but they were always resisted for a variety of reasons. They had felt their resistance to be amply justified when they heard of a stranger who, having taken over a croft in a neighbouring village and with it the share of the sheep stock, had ingenuously declared his annual profit from the stock on his income tax returns, much to the interest of the Inland Revenue Authorities and much to the consternation of the rest of the holders.