A Croft in the Hills (5 page)

Here, again, our neighbours came to the rescue. Willie Maclean, from over the burn, sent word that we could come at any time to fetch a load of turnips. He was getting on in years and would not
be putting down another crop. He had been ill the previous autumn and had only been able to gather in enough turnips to do his one remaining cow. The rest were lying in small covered heaps in the
field, and we were welcome to help ourselves to them. We gladly accepted the offer and went round with Charlie and the cart. On our departure we were told ‘that was an awful wee load’
and we were to ‘be sure and come back for another’. As we were about to set off with the second load, we were bidden to come again for some corn sheaves, for ‘the horse would be
the better of a feed of oats’. On our return next day Sadie, the young girl of the house, was there to help fill the cart with sweet-smelling sheaves and to give a hand to secure the load
with stack-rope. We threshed the sheaves in the old-fashioned way, by beating them with a stick, and it warmed our hearts that evening to see the cattle-beasts munching bundles of good oat-straw
and chopped turnip and to watch Charlie devouring half a pailful of corn.

We installed Daisy, the cow, in the home byre and cut rushes with a sickle to make her a clean bed. I washed her udder with soap and water and brushed the accumulation of caked mud off her
flanks. The College vet. took a sample of her milk for testing and it was declared free of T.B. bacilli. She was a nice quiet milker and we drank quantities of milk from that time on.

We now found ourselves struggling to overtake the rush of spring work. Loads of lime and fertiliser had arrived and were waiting to be spread, there was dung to be carted out to the potato
ground, there was still some ploughing to do. We decided we should need some help for a week or two so we asked our good friend the post if he knew of anyone who might be available. There were two
brothers, he said, young lads who were often available for odd work. It sounded hopeful.

Next morning Jim went off to see them and a few days later, on a Friday, they turned up for work. They went hard at it all day, carting out lime, while Jim was harrowing with the tractor. On the
Saturday they worked with us till evening and we began to feel we were really getting ahead. On Sunday we went for a walk down to Loch Ness-side, in celebration, and found the trees showing a flush
of green and the first primroses in flower.

We bought fifty day-old cockerels for fattening and ordered a hundred growing pullets to be delivered in June; these were to be our winter layers.

We now found that the routine work of milking, attending to the poultry and feeding the stirks took up a lot of time, but we managed to keep abreast of the field work and at last, towards the
third week in April, we were ready to make our first sowing of corn. The weather had been blustery and uncertain for several days but we felt we couldn’t delay any longer. We sowed in the
time-honoured way, from a canvas tray slung round the neck. It was satisfying to see Jim pacing up and down, his arms moving rhythmically, the yellow seed-corn falling in a fine arc on to the brown
earth. Helen and I were standing, hand-in-hand, at the edge of the field watching him when, over the hill to the east, a great black cloud came sailing. The wind rose suddenly and a moment later
snow began to fall. Helen and I had to run for shelter but Jim went calmly on with the sowing. We stood at the kitchen window watching him till he was almost lost to view among the whirling flakes.
It seemed to me that there was something symbolic about making one’s first sowing in a snow-storm. There must be a riddle in it somewhere, I thought, but I couldn’t find the answer.

The black cloud soon passed over and the sky to the west cleared to a limpid green. As I opened the door to Jim we heard the cuckoo call quite distinctly, three times, from the birches on the
edge of the woodland. We looked at each other and smiled, A moment later Billy came in, knocking the snow from his boots. ‘It’s the cuckoo-snow’, he said, in his most
matter-of-fact voice, and he began calmly washing his hands. We knew then what it was to be bred in these hills. It meant that you took in your stride whatever came, without panic or jubilation:
that you foresaw the worst and so were quietly thankful for the best. The cuckoo sang in the snow-storm; the seed was sown. We sat down hungrily to our hot supper.

That was indeed a topsy-turvy spring. No sooner was the sowing of the corn completed than the rain came down in torrents. We stood at the kitchen window in the grey evening light and watched it
carving wide runnels in the sloping fields. It looked as though every scrap of seed would be washed clean out of the ground.

The garden plot was now securely fenced and I limed it and put in two dozen cabbage plants. I surveyed the neat rows with some satisfaction, but I had forgotten about the agility of goats. One
evening, one of them sailed blithely over the fence and in ten minutes demolished every scrap of young cabbage plant!

We lost almost half the cockerels when a gale blew out the brooder lamp one night. The robber goat died, not from a surfeit of young cabbage, but as a result of the lean winter she had had. We
had hoped to use her as a supplementary milk supply, to tide us over the cow’s dry period, before calving. But she was a trial, anyway, and as full of tricks as a box of monkeys. It took two
to milk her, one to hold her steady and the other to coax the milk into the pail. Daisy the cow, on the other hand, was so quiet and placid that you could milk her in mid-field, without even
tethering her.

‘April is the cruellest month’, I would murmur sometimes, as I watched the sleet lashing the bare ground and saw the thin, dispirited cattle-beasts stand shivering in the lee of the
steading walls. But I knew it was only a question of biding our time, of getting used to disappointments and losses. I spent the worst days catching up on arrears of housework, while Jim made
fencing posts in the shelter of the barn. We were cheered, too, by visits from neighbours and Helen had many happy games with the children from Woodend and young Bertha, from over the burn. We had
first made the acquaintance of this lively, yellow-haired small girl when she had been sent over, one day at the end of winter, with a bottle of milk for Helen, from Willie Maclean’s newly
calved cow. She had been boarded out with the Macleans since an early age and was one of the many children they had brought up along with their own daughter.

Practically every croft house has one or more of these foster-children and we have seen several grow from little thin-faced waifs into burly youngsters. Their up-bringing is supervised by
officials from the city of their birth (in most cases it is Glasgow), who pay them regular visits and provide them with clothing and pocket money. In most cases they are regarded as sons and
daughters of the house and they come back, once they are launched into the world, to spend their holidays, or bring their own families to visit in the only real home they have known. In the
Macleans’ house at this time there was Bertha, aged ten, Billy, twelve and Sadie, eighteen, and they were a happy, lively trio of whom we were to see a lot.

Willie Maclean himself (‘Beelack’, as the affectionate Gaelic diminutive of his name was pronounced) was a man of the old Highland type, well-read, with an inquiring mind and a
genuine courtesy of manner. In his younger days he had been a great piper. His brother was a well-known doctor in Glasgow. His kindly wife would always meet us on the doorstep with the greeting,
‘Come away in’ and we could be sure of good talk over a cup of tea at her fireside. As we left, her ‘haste ye back!’ would ring in our ears, as we made our way over the
little bridge and along the track through the heather to our home. At night we would see the yellow glow of the light in her kitchen window and in the morning we would watch the smoke rising in a
thin blue plume from her chimney and we found it immensely cheering to know we had these hill-folk for friends. They would anticipate our needs before we were fully aware of them ourselves. Many a
time Bertha has come flying across the moor with a drench for the cow, because we had mentioned that she was off her feed, or a broody hen to mother some chicks whose own parent had abandoned
them.

At last May brought more genial weather. The rush of work was over and we dispensed with the boys’ help. Jim borrowed a ridge-plough and ridged the potato field and we spent a couple of
days planting potatoes. It is back-breaking work, tramping up and down the drills, bent double, dropping the potatoes into place. But the weather was wonderful and we made a picnic of it. I spread
a rug on the grass verge at the top of the field, on which Helen sprawled with her dolls. Every now and again she would seize a small pail of potatoes and thrust a dozen or so tubers solemnly into
the ground, then scamper back to the rug and instruct each doll in turn in the art of potato-planting. At mid-day we stretched out on the rug beside her and ate sandwiches and drank flasks of tea.
Overhead, the sky was a pale, milky blue and the air rang with lark song. We were glad to be alive and to be doing exactly what we were doing.

With the potatoes safely in the ground there was a lull till turnip-sowing time. We spent most of this gathering fuel from the felled woodland. The Forestry fence was going up rapidly and we
wanted to lay in a stock of wood for winter before this useful source of supply was shut off. So, once again, we made a picnic of it and spent several whole days carting loads of wood to a dump on
our own ground.

For the turnip-sowing we sought the good offices of Charlie. This was the first field work we had done with him and he at once proved his worth. With the bite of good grass he was now getting he
had improved tremendously and was looking almost sleek. No one knew exactly how old he was, but one neighbour reported having seen him working on a croft some miles away nearly thirty years before.
But he was by now a firm family friend and we preferred to ignore all rumours about his probable age. He toiled up and down the turnip drills and, quite literally, never put a foot wrong. He was as
patient with us novices as an indulgent father, and we found an affection for him which was to grow steadily over the years.

On the first fine, windless day, we sowed the grass seed. It is so light and feathery that even a gentle breeze will scatter it in the wrong direction. We gave the fields a good rolling and felt
that at last we could relax a little. There was still much to do, but the pressure had eased.

On the last Saturday in June, when the sun was blazing from a deep blue sky, we packed a picnic and made for Loch Laide. It’s less than a mile from our home and it’s the perfect
place for relaxation; summer or winter, we never tire of walking by its shore. This June day we lay on our backs in the heather, watching a curlew glide round the shoulder of the hill, uttering its
long, drowsy call. Then we plunged into the smooth, dark water and Helen splashed in the shallows of the little beach. We made a fire of roots and twigs to boil our kettle; and we walked home
deeply refreshed and ready to tackle whatever might come next.

CHAPTER V

FIRST HARVEST

W
ITH
the crops safely in the ground and the cattle and sheep finding a succulent bite in the clean, natural grazing, we had time to take stock of our
position and to analyse rather more closely our aims, both long-term and immediate. Our farming, even bolstered as it was by Government subsidies, could never be more than subsistence farming: we
were fully aware of that. As a business proposition its appeal was absolutely nil, but, of course, we had never looked at it—in fact, we had never looked at anything— strictly in that
light. As a way of life it had endless fascination and reward—the smallest thing could give us a glow of satisfaction. To see the green flush of corn shoots, or of turnip seedlings in ground
that had yielded nothing for years, was an obvious thrill. But there were also the small delights of watching a drain flow freely after it had been cleared of silt, of driving the horse and cart
along a road made passable with new patchings of stone, of seeing the sheeps’ foraging among the new-sown grass thwarted by a stout fence, hung on the posts we had made in the dark, winter
days. Every way we looked there was a reward and a new challenge springing up behind it, something to give us a small, encouraging pat on the back and to spur us on before we had time to smirk.

Perhaps one of the greatest satisfactions of our life was the knowledge that we were in this thing together, as a family, as a unit. There was no seeing father off every morning, to struggle
with his own remote set of problems, while mother and child coped with theirs at home. There were no watertight compartments. When it was time to hoe the turnips we all set off to the field
together and worked side by side all day, Helen, too, wielding a diminutive hoe among the seedlings. At supper-time Jim stoked the fire and, when we’d eaten, we tackled the day’s
accumulation of dirty dishes together and it took only a few minutes to smooth the well-aired beds before we slipped between the sheets!