The Hills is Lonely (4 page)

We strolled towards the elusive entrance gate, which turned out to be nothing more than a gap in the dry-stone wall across which was placed an old iron bedstead. Though the wind had dropped away to nothing and Morag murmured something about the tide being halfway out, the swell still slapped and sucked around the bottom of the three stone steps which led from the garden to the shore. Much as I disliked the idea of scaling walls, I decided that climbing would be less destructive to morale than being confined to the house except at negotiable states of the tide.

‘It seems to be a choice of two evils,' I remarked sadly to Morag.

‘Ach, by the time you've been here a month, you'll be leapin' over yon dyke like a goat,' she predicted cheerfully. Reflecting upon my performance of the night before, I had a vague suspicion that my landlady was being ironical.

For some minutes I had been watching a boat which was now pulling in to the shore a little to our right. Besides the man at the oars it contained five or six women of varying ages, each of whom nursed at least one large milk-pail. As the boat grounded, the women stepped into the water, grasped the gunwales and hauled the boat up the beach as though it were a light toy. In answer to my look of enquiry, Morag explained that some of the cattle were grazed on a small tidal island and, despite the tides being roughly half an hour later each day, the crofters preferred to wait and go by boat to milk rather than walk the two or three miles round the shore. The arrangement struck me as being haphazard, but I had not then discovered that in the Hebrides the cattle are wonderfully accommodating; that time is practically non-existent and that the clocks are as much out of touch with reality as are their owners.

The women milkers, frankly curious, stood holding their heavy pails. As much for their sakes as my own I decided to return to the house and there asked Morag to direct me to the post office.

‘Well, you'll need to walk slowly, or she'll no be back from the milkin',' she instructed me.

‘What time does she open then?' I asked, for it was nearly eleven o'clock.

‘I believe it's nine o'clock rightly.' she answered, ‘but the cows have to be milked and she canna' be in two places at once, can she now?'

I admitted the logic of her statement and, unwilling to incur the displeasure of the postmistress, I walked very slowly in the direction indicated to me, deriving a furtive and infantile pleasure from plodding through the deepest puddles and squelching through the thickest mud.

The crofters' houses, some low and thatched, some two-storied and slated, were scattered along both sides of the road. Through their open doors were wafted the sounds of clinking dishes, thudding feet and Gaelic voices engaged in fierce altercation; sounds which ceased with suspicious suddenness as I approached. Once or twice I turned quickly, hoping to see some hidden watcher betrayed by the twitch of a curtain, until I realised that there were no curtains to twitch. Inquisitive dogs appeared in every doorway; collies and cairns; some venturing so far as to smell at my heels, others content to hail me from the sanctuary of their own doorsteps. Here and there a tethered cow grazed, placidly indifferent to its restricting chain. Sheep nibbled contentedly in the circle allowed them by their short ropes. In front of one house a horse moved gingerly, revealing the fine-meshed chain stretching from its hind leg to a stake some distance away. A turkey gobbled forlornly and stood stork-like on one leg, its other leg being secured by a length of parcel string to a nearby bush. The crofters appeared to have brought the science of tethering down to a fine art, and every kind of animal seemed to accept a length of rope and a stake as a matter of course,

Surrounding each of the houses was a small plot of land bounded by a drystone wall, which in England we should call a garden, but which Morag had grandly referred to as ‘the park'. This ‘park' was distinct from the rest of the croft, which was itself also bounded by the inevitable drystone walls. In every case the entrance gate was achieved by knocking down a few of the stones and placing across the gap an old iron bedstead. Some of the bedsteads were ancient and rusted; others, obviously newly discarded, still sported their ornamental brass knobs and rings. They were of every conceivable pattern, so that I was able to amuse myself by trying to guess which design I should come upon next. That night, when I wrote to Mary telling her of my journey and my reception and impressions so far, I added:
Just imagine, every house I've seen has an old bedstead for an entrance gate and I've already counted at least twenty-two!

A small sign, ‘Post Office', led me to a corrugated-iron shed. I knocked on the door; there was no response, and despite repeated knockings the place remained still and silent. I looked again at the notice. Yes, it definitely said ‘Post Office'. I continued knocking, but still nothing happened. A little way along the road some small boys were playing a scuffling game of football and, thinking that they might know the whereabouts of the postmistress, I went towards them. I was not really surprised to find that their football was a much battered brass bed-knob. They ceased their game as I approached, but my question stunned them into an embarrassed silence. I repeated it.

‘She'll be at her house likely.' One boy vouchsafed the information shyly.

‘Is the post office closed then?' I asked, gesturing towards the iron hut.

‘That's not the post office just now.' The boy's voice strengthened as he gained courage. ‘That's just the post office when there's tourists about in the summer. In the winter the stamps would all stick up with the damp in there, but she'll give them to you from her house.' He indicated a small cottage at the end of a cart track through one of the crofts, but a glance at my watch told me that the postmistress must remain undisturbed until after lunch. I quickly retraced my steps homewards.

In the cooking of my lunch Morag had excelled herself and once again the tablecloth was snowy white. The helping of meat was liberal enough for three appetites, but unfortunately it was served on an afternoon-tea plate, and even without the addition of vegetables the gravy was threatening to spill over the edge, I suggested a larger plate, hastily reassuring Morag, as I saw her woebegone expression, that it was not the inadequacy of the dinner that was disturbing me. Eagerly she hurried from the room, soon returning with an ordinary-sized plate which she was surreptitiously polishing on a corner of her apron. It was a pretty plate and I exclaimed delightedly at its attractive border of what I then took to be tiny yellow crocuses; their subsequent appearance and disappearance, however, was so perplexing that I reluctantly came to recognise them to be splashes of egg yolk, and was inordinately thankful that the green leaves at least showed signs of permanency. I complimented Morag on her cooking; the less said about her dishwashing the better.

I was awakened from my after-dinner doze by the noise of the front door opening and the rumble of a motor. Through the window I could see a lorry, loaded high with coal, jolting slowly down the road past Ruari's house and towards the sea. I went into the hall where Morag was hurriedly tying a scarf over her head.

‘It's yon man with the year's coal,' she grumbled in answer to my question; ‘and here it is a Saturday too, the rascal! Another two hours and the tide will be takin' it away on me.'

I offered to help but, though it was plain from her manner that she would welcome assistance, Morag refused my offer after a disparaging glance at my neat suit. I changed into an old skirt and jacket and hurried outside. The tide was out now and the entrance gate was high and dry; beside it on the shingle a huge mound of coal had been dumped. Morag was already engaged in bitter recriminations with the lorry driver, whom I recognised as my taxi-driver of the previous evening. They broke off as I approached and the man greeted me with polite warmth.

‘It's goin' to rain,' he told me cheerfully, with a knowing glance at the sky.

‘Do you think so?' I asked.

‘Certain to,' replied the driver emphatically. ‘Now, Miss Peckwitt, I'll tell you a good weather sign: if ever you should see trees up in the sky you may be sure it's goin' to rain before very long.'

I thought that if ever I saw trees up in the sky I should expect to see pigs flying in and out of them; but I nodded and stared intelligently at a cloud-patched ceiling of grey, deeming it better to accept his prediction without comment.

‘I canna' give you tea, if I'm to get this in before the watter's up,' snapped Morag to the driver.

The latter jumped hastily into the cab of the lorry. ‘I couldn't stay for tea supposin' it was waitin' on me,' he retorted. ‘I have two tons for the manse tonight yet.'

‘Two tons for the manse?' shrilled Morag. ‘They'll never take it from you tonight.'

‘Then they'll do without it for longer than they care to,' said the driver with a sardonic chuckle. He let in the clutch and the lorry jolted away along the foreshore.

‘So the taxi-driver is the lorry-driver too,' I observed to Morag as we set to work with shovels and pails.

‘He's not just the taxi-driver and the lorry-driver,' replied Morag caustically, ‘but he's the coal merchant, the carrier, the undertaker and the garage'; she counted off his trades on her fingers, ‘and I don't know what else besides.'

I began to feel slightly embarrassed. ‘He must be quite wealthy in that case,' I said.

‘Wealthy?' she returned, ‘Why, if I had as many half pence as he has pounds I'd be comfortable for the rest of my life.'

I recalled the man's disinclination to accept my shilling tip and was glad that my exertions over the coal could account for the flush which spread over my neck and face.

‘And swank!' continued Morag, rubbing salt into the wound. ‘Why, he's that much swank on him as would suit a duke.'

Abruptly I changed the subject.

‘How much coal is there here?' I asked, eyeing the prodigious heap.

‘Two tons,' she lamented, ‘and in less than two hours the tide will be away with it.'

It seemed an impossible feat for the two of us to transfer the coal from the shore to the coal-shed in under two hours. Morag must have read my thoughts.

‘Ruari's away with his cow to the bull or he'd give us a hand,' she explained as we shovelled.

In all my life I have never performed such hard physical labour as I did during those two hours. The coal had to be carried pailful by pailful up the three stone steps and about ten yards beyond to a shed beside the henhouse. The day was dank and chill; our clothes were speckled with mist, but so fierce was our labour that we needed to work without waterproofs or even jackets. Morag wielded a workmanlike shovel, but I had to be content with a small fire-shovel that was of more ornament than use. After my sixteenth pailful my back ached, my arms felt as though they were being torn from their sockets and my ‘funny bones' as though they had been beaten repeatedly with hammers; yet we had made little or no impression on that glistening black mound. Frenziedly we filled and carried, constantly glancing behind us at the line of water creeping inexorably nearer. All the time we worked my landlady discoursed on such subjects as the wisdom of teaching young girls mathematics; juvenile delinquency (a police friend in Glasgow had told her that ‘galvanised delinquency had reached terrible propulsions these days'); and, inevitably, politics. I soon learned that Morag was an enthusiastic Tory: and by the time the last pail of coal had been tipped into the shed she was convinced that I was equally enthusiastic. The truth being that I had no breath to express any opinion save a grunt.

By the light of a hurricane lantern firmly planted on the top of the wall and with the sea washing around our ankles, we scooped up the last pailfuls from among the shingle. When daylight came we found that we had scooped up a fair amount of shingle too, but by lamplight wet, black pebbles look remarkably like wet, black coal.

‘My, but I'll be fallin' asleep in church tomorrow I'm that tired,' said Morag as we plodded wearily up to the house.

‘So you go to church?' I asked.

‘Why, yes indeed,' she replied in shocked tones. ‘I go whenever the missionary's there to take the service.'

(Missionary?—I recalled the words of my doctor, ‘people tell me they're only half civilised up there'—but missionaries?)

‘I thought you said in your letter that you had a minister,' I said.

‘Surely, there's a minister for marryin' and buryin' and such, but he's too busy to be takin' services here, there and everywhere. He has missionaries to do that for him.'

‘The missionary's not a minister then?'

‘No, no, indeed!' She turned a pair of soulful blue eyes on me. ‘Sure the missionary's wages aren't as big as the minister's, for he doesna' feel the call of God till he retires from work and finds his pension won't keep him,' she explained with startling irreverence. ‘But the minister now, he's a true man of God. He starts earnin' when he's quite a young man.'

After her piety of the night before, her guileless sarcasm shocked me.

The next morning, my landlady, sober of mien and attire, placed my breakfast before me. The weather, in direct contrast to the coal merchant's prediction, showed a distinct improvement, but the atmosphere was heavily Sabbatarian. When I offered to take the food to the hens Morag merely nodded and thanked me meekly. Outside I was relieved to find that the hens still had their weekday appetite and scrambled eagerly for their food.

‘Will you give a bitty to the cockerel under the creel yonder?' requested my landlady in a sepulchral call.

I went to the henhouse where she pointed and there discovered an upturned peat creel from which a cockerel's head was thrust disconsolately forward. Having dropped plenty of food through a gap in the wicker-work I returned to the house.