A Croft in the Hills (10 page)

Peat-cutting apart, July is a less strenuous month than some and so it is the most suitable time to hold agricultural shows. The second Friday in July is the day of the traditional Wool Fair in
Inverness. It is still called the Wool Fair, although no wool is sold at it now. Wool has its own Marketing Board these days and one has to abide by the rules and regulations in the selling of
one’s crop. But Wool Fair day still retains its atmosphere of holiday. It has become a horse show and sale and everyone who can possibly spare a day goes to the market place to see the
sights, to meet friends and have a dram.

We had heard that it was still sometimes possible to pick up a Shetland pony for a fiver and we went in hopes of getting one for Helen. But evidently something had happened to either the supply
or the demand or both, for the Shelties all reached nearer the twenty-pound mark that year. However, it was a delight to see the magnificent beasts that were put through the ring. A superb
Clydesdale was withdrawn at close on a hundred pounds. One admired the spirit of his owner. He certainly looked worth an untold amount, with his arched neck, his burnished coat and his huge,
powerful limbs. All working animals have a dignity about them that no beast kept for pleasure or sport ever achieves. They may have lost their wild, native pride, but at least they never fawn or
whimper. They demand respect and they get it from the men who work with them and know their value.

The next day we had a visit from a dealer, who practically insisted on buying Charlie from us. We had the greatest difficulty in making him accept our firm refusal. Charlie was one of us, we
said, even supposing he never did another day’s work, as long as there was a bite for us there would be a bite for Charlie. Eventually we pacified the dealer with a cup of tea and saw him off
the premises. He gave us a half-pitying look as he climbed into his magnificent car. From the corner of my eye, I could see Charlie kicking up his heels with joyful derision, in the lush pasture
down by the burn, and I could have sworn he knew exactly what had been going on. From that day on, our attachment grew stronger than ever to our wise, old, tawny-coated Charles.

Finlay came one evening, with his cousin Tom and a lad from a neighbouring farm, to clip the sheep. Jim and Billy had made a fank of wooden palings, and we had the sheep safely penned before our
helpers arrived. We went indoors, with satisfied grins on our faces, to snatch a quick cup of tea before the operation began. But we’d evidently underestimated the strength of mother-love.
The ewes, separated from their lambs, which were bellowing pathetically round the outside of the fank, made one wild stampede, completely ignoring the admonitory snaps of young Bess, whom we had
left on guard, and broke through the rails. Within seconds the whole flock was scattered and all our gathering was to do over again. Luckily, the squad arrived soon after this disaster. They had
two experienced dogs with them and between us we soon had the situation under control. It’s a fascinating thing to watch a good dog and a good sheep-man penning the last few obstinate members
of a flock. Not a hint of force is used, but the eyes of man and dog never leave the bewildered beasts. From the side of his mouth the man now and then utters a brief command. With stick
outstretched he points; then, with a sort of uncanny mesmerism, man and dog impose their united will on the sheep. They lurch into the fold, the gate clicks to. We relax and breathe more
freely.

All evening the men worked away at the sheep with concentrated energy. There was only the sound of the clicking shears and of an occasional scuffle with an unruly beast. Now and then, Tom would
crack a quiet joke and Billy would curse the midges. Helen and I went out to help carry the fleeces into the barn, then I put her to bed—and still the clipping went on. At last, at ten
o’clock, it was done: the last sheep staggered to her feet and went lolloping off to join her offspring. A freshly shorn sheep is perhaps the most pitiful-looking object in the world. Bereft
of its fine, shaggy coat, her outline is anything but imposing. Where, one wonders, is the fine, arrogant beast which stamped defiance when a dog came too near her lamb, only a month or two ago?
Surely this ungainly body, swaying off on its spindly, bandy shanks, can’t be hers? But it is; her lamb finds her as alluring as ever and is soon trotting happily at her side.

The men were glad of their ham and eggs that night and we all relaxed, bare brown elbows on the table, till the last tints of the sunset had faded from the sky.

Later, we packed the fleeces into the huge bags supplied by the wool-broker in Leith and carted them to the road-end, to await collection by the float. The first harvest of the year was
secured.

Still the grass was not ready for cutting. I made up my mind, while there was time to spare, to tackle the re-decoration of the house, so I started with the bedrooms. They had been distempered,
walls and ceilings, one in blue and one in pink, but the distemper was flaking. All I had to do, I thought, as I donned an old overall and tied my head up in a scarf, was to scrape this distemper
off and apply a coat of cream wall-paint in its place. I took a scraper and began on the ceiling of the blue room. I soon found that the removal of the blue distemper revealed a layer of off-white
beneath, and of some indeterminate shade of green beneath that. But, having made a start, I had to go on and I scraped till my arm and shoulder were almost burnt up with aching and my neck had
developed a permanent crick. Helen, determined to take part in whatever was going on, scraped away laboriously at small sections of wall and practically removed the plaster right down to the hard
stone!

I could only spend a limited amount of time at the work, for the cow and the hens and the garden, which were my particular provinces, had to be attended to and large meals cooked thrice daily.
Gradually something began to emerge from the welter upstairs. A pleasant smell of fresh paint was wafted about the house and at last I was able to show some result for my labours. It was amazing,
the impression of light and space and airiness the light cream paint-work gave to the bedrooms. When the floor-boards were restained and the grates painted black, we felt we had at any rate two
really presentable rooms. That meant that the rest of the house had to be tackled, for the shabbiness of it was all the more apparent. I developed quite a passion for decorating and it was very
satisfactory to see the transformation that could be achieved. I did the landing and staircase walls and worked my way down to the living-rooms. There I had to do some preliminary plastering-up and
I felt quite a professional as I daubed away with plaster and trowel. We left the kitchen to the last, chose a fine day, carted everything movable out on to the grass and went at it together, for
the kitchen can never be out of action for long. The effect of the light paint there was quite dazzling, for hitherto the wood-work had been a most depressing drab brown. Finally, I painted the
front door and the window-frames a rich blue, which gave a welcoming gleam to the house.

While these absorbing operations had been going on in the house, the grass had been quietly and steadily ripening. One warm, still morning, Jim hitched the mower to the tractor and, with Billy
perched precariously on the swaying seat, guiding the blades, moved slowly along the edge of the field. I couldn’t be expected to concentrate on cooking stew and apple-pie that day, even in
my dazzling kitchen. Every few minutes I would be poking my head outside to get a sniff of the new-cut grass. Helen was trotting round in the wake of the mower, gathering flowers and shouting
encouragement to the men. There was a feeling of excitement about. Miraculously, for that first hay harvest of ours, the weather held. One calm, blue day followed another and there was just enough
stir in the air to dry the crop satisfactorily. We borrowed Bill-the-post’s horse-rake and Charlie plodded up and down gathering the grass into windrows. We turned it and made it into small
ricks and hardly a drop of rain came to interrupt the work. Grass, cut at the right moment, quickly made and dried by sun and wind, has a high protein content, whereas the stuff that’s been
sodden and turned over and over again, and only dried at last into a stiff, dark tangle, has little feeding value and will only serve to fill a void in a beast’s belly. In subsequent years
we’ve wrestled with hay till, near the point of exhaustion, we’ve sworn we’d never bother to cut the crop again. We’ve hung it on the fences, like washing, to dry,
we’ve seen the ricks collapse into a black, treacly mess, we’ve had every kind of hay disaster, but that first crop was really a pleasure to handle.

Jim decided not to make the precious hay into stacks, but to store it under cover along at the far steading. There was no proper loft, but he made ceilings in byre, stable and barn by stretching
wire-netting from wall to wall below the rafters. Then he stuffed the hay into the spaces between ceiling and roof. Billy looked doubtfully on this operation. It was certainly an innovation, but it
worked. The hay kept perfectly through the winter, except in one portion where the snow blew through an ill-fitting skylight, and the insulation kept the building warm. For feeding purposes it
couldn’t have been handier. All one had to do was to take a fork and tumble the hay down on to the hungry beasts below.

The only interruption to our days of haymaking that summer came not from the weather but from the four porkers on the heath. They were by this time massive creatures, with strong wills of their
own and highly developed bumps of curiosity. They would stand on their hind legs, snouts resting on the rail of their enclosure, scanning the alluring horizon. The combined pressure was usually too
much for the fence, sturdy as it was. There would be a crack and a clatter, and a tally-ho from Helen, ‘the pigs are out!’ We would drop whatever implement we were holding and rush to
head the four great hulks off from the cornfield. Sometimes they would be too quick for us and would go crashing into the corn, making four separate runways through the beautiful up-standing
stalks. Now and again they would pause and turn to leer at us out of their mischievous, unblinking eyes. I believe they thoroughly enjoyed those chases and indulged in them for sheer devilment. We
found them exasperating and exhausting, so much so that we decided the only thing to do was to pack the porkers off to market. They strongly resisted our combined efforts to load them on the float.
The driver lost his temper, the lovely summer morning air was defiled with raucous shouts and we made several picturesque additions to our growing vocabulary of the vernacular! But at last we waved
them off and at the end of the day they covered themselves with glory by fetching quite spectacular prices at the market. Jim was so elated that he bought six more youngsters at once. We worked
late that night, preparing a clean place for them on the heather.

We also sold the goats and have not since then had any more truck with the capricious tribe, for we found them more bother than they were worth. Tethered, they are a constant worry. They have to
be continually moved to fresh ground and one is tormented by the thought that that muffled groan one caught, when upstairs making the beds, was one of them strangling herself. One rushes down and
out, only to find it is a ewe which has temporarily mislaid her lamb. On free range goats are horribly destructive. In theory of course they rid the place of thistles and other noxious weeds, but
in practice, when they’re not in the garden selecting the most succulent of the greens, they’re having a nibble at the bark of a beloved tree. Trees are so scarce and so precious here
and we only have the one thin line of rowans to remind us that trees really do exist. The goats gnawed the bark off several, thus slowly killing them. I found the goats far more difficult to milk
than any newly calved heifer. It always took two of us to do the job—one to hold and the other to extract the milk, and at the end of this tedious business there would only be a couple of
pints, at most, at the bottom of the pail. We had heard the story of the wonderful nanny, who lived on practically nothing, came into the scullery of her own accord, morning and evening, to yield
ungrudgingly her quota of creamy fluid and was so devoted to the family that she couldn’t bear to be left alone and even had to be taken out in the car for a Sunday run! No doubt this story
was true, but the goat concerned must have been an exceptional lady. The idea of a goat is fascinating in the extreme, but the reality may be quite otherwise.

I think Helen was sorry to see ours go, but Jim and I couldn’t bring ourselves to shed a tear. Helen was rapidly developing a personality. Rising five, she had become, as we imagined she
would, remarkably independent and adaptable. Birth and death she accepted as she did sun, snow and the sprouting of the seed in her garden plot. Death, I think, sometimes caught her on the raw,
particularly when it came unexpectedly, say, to an adored yellow ball of a chicken, but then another birth would come along and the shadow would be gone. She loved to bring Hope in for the milking
and it was amusing to watch the tiny figure in blue dungarees, brandishing a hazel-wand and making the appropriate noises, while the great, brown hulk of the cow came swaying up the field and
lurched into the open byre. She showed great concern for all the animals’ welfare and would spend hours trying to restore a strayed lamb to its mother. She could hear and see with astonishing
acuteness; it was a quiet world she lived in and any sound which came to disturb the quietness had to be interpreted at once. Bess had only to set up a barking, from her vantage point at the end of
the steading, and Helen would come rushing in with the news. ‘It’s Feely (Finlay), Mummy, I see him coming along the heather with Tom. P’raps they want to borrow the mower.’
It was more than likely that that was indeed the explanation for the hubbub. Once, it happened that I was the first to glimpse a loaded lorry coming down the hill road to the back of us.
‘There’s a load of straw for someone’, I said, gazing at the vehicle, which looked like a child’s toy, crawling down the slope. ‘Not straw, Mummy, it’s hay
that’s in it’, Helen said, in a matter-of-fact tone. I looked again but, for the life of me, I couldn’t have distinguished the greenish-yellow of hay from the golden-yellow of
straw at that distance. To Helen, it came quite naturally.