The Sea for Breakfast (3 page)

‘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 how 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 feilen 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 drought 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'll not want for water when she comes.'

‘You're not telling me that my rainwater tank is on its way at last, are you?' I 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 drink 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 dis-infectant 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 horses; 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 he 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'.