A Croft in the Hills (14 page)

Life on a large farm can be almost as much a matter of mechanics as life in a factory or office. On a croft there is the intimacy and warmth of immediate contact with the fundamentals, and there
is wholeness. What chance has the factory worker, who stands all day at his bench making an infinitesimal part of some giant machine, or the city typist who taps out another’s words in
triplicate, of acquiring wisdom or judgement, the capacity to see things in the round. Even the leisure of these unfortunate people is drained away in evenings spent gaping at the cinema or
television screen. The penny-in-the-slot machine churns out the daily requirements of living. It can be quite pleasant to jog along with the blinkers on: those who still like to see the beginnings
and the ends of things are considered uncomfortable finnicks.

To wrestle with things in the raw is a craving of every healthy human being. The height of happiness to a child is to scramble up a tree, to plowter through mud, to find shelter in a rock. The
more scratched and torn and filthy he gets in the process, the wider his grin of delight when he staggers home. Deprived of this natural outlet, a city boy will find satisfaction in breaking
windows, in slashing cinema seats or other boys’ noses. If the immediate matter of making his living were one where a man could use the whole of himself—his strength, his wits and his
imagination, the problem of how to fill his leisure would not arise, and he would be too preoccupied to spend more than the odd day thinking up ways to exterminate his fellows. His culture would
not be imported in canisters from the other side of the world; he would make it himself, from a brain and a heart kept bright and taut with satisfactory living. It may be fascinating to have a
picture of life among the peasants of Andalusia flashed to one’s fireside, but how much more fascinating it would be to feel a song of one’s own dancing on one’s own lips out of
the joy of one’s own doings.

A natural life has its own tensions, its own moments of fulfilment and disaster, out of which art can leap unfettered, as a man tries passionately to record his glimpse of the pattern. For those
who are not artists, there is the satisfaction of craft. I’ve seen it in the face of the man who selects a hazel branch from the thicket by the loch-side and slowly fashions it into a crook.
In his strong, stubby fingers, the living wood is shaped and smoothed into an object that’s not only vitally necessary to his daily work, but is beautiful into the bargain. He has made dozens
of these crooks, yet no two are alike, each has its own individual feel in the hand.

Of course we can’t put the clock back. We’ve got to go on from noon. At noon our inventions lie about us, glittering in the light like new-made toys. Where will we get the wisdom to
lay hands on the wonders and to discard the monstrosities among them?

CHAPTER XI

THE BIG GALE

A
BOUT
the middle of December occurred one of those minor miracles, which are apt to be left out of a normally well-reasoned forecast of events, and
which we have learnt to accept as tokens of beneficence. After a spell of snow, which had blocked the road and held up the grocer’s van again, we suddenly emerged one morning into a day of
blue and gold, with sunshine enough to set the midges dancing. We could hardly believe in it, yet we had to admit the evidence of our senses.

Our one thought was—the potatoes! As soon as the routine jobs were done, we made a final assault on the potato field. The frost had hardened the ground sufficiently to allow the digger to
get a bite, and yet had not been severe enough to damage the tubers. In two days stolen from spring, we got the remaining drills lifted, and so our epic struggle with the potato crop ended in
victory.

We needed every tattie we could lay hands on, for the pigs were consuming them in ever increasing quantities, and we sold none that year. Jim’s ambition was to invest in a couple of in-pig
gilts, in the spring, after all the porkers were sold. He had pig-fever badly. Small fortunes were being made in the pig-trade and we needed cash to build up the overall soundness of the place.
Though it was a fickle business, liable to ups and downs unheard-of in the steady sheep and beef-cattle trade, we hoped we could catch it at an opportune moment.

Meanwhile, we lost Billy but we knew this was bound to happen sooner or later. He went to take up what had always been his main interest—the tending of sheep. We missed seeing him about
the place. There was an elemental quality in him, a simplicity, a generosity, that was quite disarming.

‘Little’ Billy, from over the burn, who was gleefully approaching the end of his schooldays, began to spend every minute he could spare from home chores giving us a hand. He would
work away all Saturday afternoon at whatever job Jim was busy at. After supper, he would play reel tunes on his mouth organ, while Helen cavorted about the kitchen. Those were happy evenings.

We passed the shortest day, confident in the knowledge that we were adequately prepared for winter. The whole of the year’s effort is really directed towards this end. If the work has gone
well, it results in a real snugness, with everything battened down and stores of food, fodder and fuel lying to hand, so that winter can be not only endured but positively enjoyed. If things have
gone badly—a crop has failed or not been properly secured—then winter is a time of nagging anxiety, and sometimes the margin between the two states can be very narrow indeed.

By living thus, near to the bones of things, the simplest bounty can be a delight. It never fails to astonish me that the hens can lay eggs by the huge, golden dozen, while the snow is lying
feet deep round their house and the wind is driving it through the minute crevices below the roof. True, we have worked all season to achieve this end: we’ve hatched eggs, or bought chicks at
the appropriate time, we’ve spent hours liming and turning the litter of peat-moss, chaff and straw that warms the hens’ feet, we’ve grown corn and potatoes to feed them,
we’ve given them a light to simulate spring. Yet still it remains a marvel that the eggs are produced so ungrudgingly in the dark, bitter days. Similarly with the cow, the wonder is that the
pail still brims with milk, though clover is only a memory wafted from an armful of hay.

The least co-operative of the animals were the pigs. Their job was to put on weight, and that is a thing no beast can be expected to do in a hurry, on a hill-top farm, in winter. However, we
eventually shipped them, one by one, to market and though they didn’t do as spectacularly well as their predecessors, they fetched quite satisfactory prices.

Christmas, as always, we made into a small oasis of light and relaxation. It’s surprising that, in a part of the world as near the midnight sun as northern Scotland, there is no midwinter
celebration like that held in Sweden, called the ’Festival of Light’, when the youngest girl in the family, wearing a crown of candles, carries a light into every room in the house,
shedding a beam into the darkest corners. Light is precious; it’s fitting that there should be ceremonial in honour of the basic things. In the Catholic west, they still set a candle in the
window on Christmas Eve to show the Child the way, but in the Calvinist north and east, Christmas passes almost unsaluted. However, I think our recognition of the Festival touched off a spring in
the young people of the district. We returned home from a shopping expedition late one evening, hurried in at the front door and hastily changed into gum-boots and old coats before struggling out
with torches to do the feeding round. I opened the back door and into my arms fell a mysterious object, dark, prickly and aromatic. A beam from the kitchen light struck it and I saw that it was
shining with frost crystals. It was a Christmas tree, decked by nature! Tied to its trunk with a wisp of straw was a scrap of paper scrawled over with five words: ‘Here is a tree.
Billy’. It was the sheer unexpectedness of the gift that made the moment! We felt a glow in us, in spite of the numbness of our fingers, as we tossed hay and corn to the stalled beasts that
evening.

Helen helped to decorate the tree that year. We dug up the tin of rowan-berries we had buried in the ground in autumn, and found they were as fresh and shining as the day they were picked. We
collected fir branches and trails of ivy from the wood; and we had roast duck and apple sauce for our Christmas dinner. Then we gathered all the children about us and played games of magic by the
fire.

Winter doesn’t seem long when you have Christmas to prepare for and enjoy and New Year following close on its heels, with ceilidhs that go on till well into January. By the twelfth of the
new month—date of the ‘old’ New Year, which is still kept in mind by the older generation here—there is ‘an hour on the day’, they say. It’s a precious
hour, for it means that you can do just that little extra bit of work outside before coming in for the night. You can repair a fence, or make a gate, or go after a strayed ewe, and indulge in a
grin of satisfaction as you knock the snow from your boots and move the kettle on to the hot part of the stove.

‘Whatever do you do with your evenings up there?’ friends have asked us on several occasions, with an almost perceptible shudder in their voices. We sometimes wonder what we did with
our evenings when we lived a town life; we just can’t remember. Here, every one of them is memorable. To begin with, it is a joy to have achieved evening. We’ve been, say, sawing logs
all afternoon, till the light has faded from mauve to green behind the hills. We’ve crunched our way about the yard feeding the animals, and we’ve come in with the pail of milk, the
basket of eggs, the sack of fuel. We’re pleasantly tired, and glad of shelter, and we’ve had a good hot meal, and tucked Helen into bed. Now there are books to hand, there may be some
music we want to hear on the wireless, or a play. There is the diary to write, and a letter or two, and there are things to mend, events to be discussed, plans to be made.

Sometimes the door will open and in will come a neighbour without knocking. The absence of a knock is a sign that we’re accepted as friends, and it always delights us. The evenings are
never long enough: our pet vice is to sit gazing into the fire hours after we should be in bed. Are we hopelessly unambitious, antisocial even? Is there something lacking in us that we are content
with the company of one another, a few neighbours, the beasts which depend on us and the slowly swinging stars? I don’t know. But I do know that it is very satisfactory to be content to find
the family unit, the neighbourly unit, the man-and-beast unit fitting securely into the pattern of hill and field and sky. Dr. Johnson himself, who surely ranks among the sophisticates, once said:
‘To be happy at home
is
the ultimate result of all ambition.’

With the turning of the year, we began to prepare for the big event in Helen’s life—school. She was five years old and could already read and write and do simple sums. She had a
naturally inquiring mind and was as eager to learn as a collie pup to chase sheep. The Abriachan school was quite accessible, only about a mile down the road from our gate. But at that time it had
only six pupils, all but one of whom were boys. There was not much prospect of happy companionship for her there. To send her to the girls’ school in Inverness as a weekly boarder was
financially impossible. Besides, we both have strong feelings about boarding schools; they seem to create their own rather artificial, even unhealthy, climate. Youngsters reared in them often find
difficulty later on in adjusting themselves to the extremes of temperature in the world outside. We would rather that ours grew hardy and resistant from the start, with a background of family and
farm life to keep her on an even keel.

The children from the Maclean household had all been to Glen Convinth school, which was about two miles away, on the Beauly road. One day, towards the end of January, we decided to walk over to
see the headmaster of this school. Helen came with us, and we took exactly the road she would have to take—the path through the heather and across the burn to the Macleans’ house, the
short cut up the grassy slope and over the stile to the road, along the rise to the eleven-hundred-feet level and down the steep plunge to the wooded strath at the foot of Glen Convinth.

It was a brilliant day. The smoke from the few croft houses was rising straight into the still air. The Strathfarrar hills lay in a soft, blue haze. We reached the little grey-stone school, with
its two high-windowed schoolrooms, and the Dominie’s house adjoining. We noticed his neat garden, the apple-trees and the row of beehives. It was a pleasant place. I remembered the forbidding
corridors and bare, windswept playgrounds of town schools and was glad Helen was to be spared those. Here there were two classrooms with a small lobby between. The huge branches of an oak were
tapping the window panes. There was a grass patch edged with flowers for the children to run on. Behind the school building was a small, modern cook-house, where the midday meal was prepared.

We stood together, in the lobby, listening to the murmur of voices from the two rooms. Then we tapped on the door of the infants’ room and a small lady, with a mother’s face, came
out to greet us. We told her we should like Helen to come to her school. She smiled, and went to fetch her husband from the senior room. He was tall, and looked a scholar. He wore a suit of rough
Harris tweed, and when he opened his mouth out came the music of the western speech. We could feel at once the kindliness and warmth and humour of the isle-folk, and we knew Helen could not be in
better hands than these. Having heard so much from town friends about the difficulty of getting a child into a school, we asked him somewhat diffidently if it would be all right to send Helen to
him. Perhaps we were breaking some regulation, should she have gone to Abriachan school, which was nearer? He simply asked Helen her name, shook her hand and said: ‘You come to school
tomorrow, Helen.’ And that was that.