A Croft in the Hills (15 page)

We walked home in a happy mood. Through the half-open door of the infants’ room we had glimpsed a row of small girls with fresh faces and old-fashioned ringlets. We thought of the fun
Helen would have, the new games, the small, whispered confidences. We called in at the Macleans on our way home; they were delighted to hear that Helen was to go to Glen Convinth, and made plans
for Bertha to meet her every morning at the burn and shepherd her to school. In the evening she was to wait for the bus which brought the scholars from the Junior Secondary school at Tomnacross to
within half a mile of the stile and Bertha would see her safely to the burn again. In her ever kindly way Mrs. Maclean made everything seem simple and serene, and we felt confident as we sipped our
tea at her fireside.

Two days later Bertha came over with a book from the school library for Helen. It was a kindly gesture on the Dominie’s part and it gave Helen a taste for reading which has developed at an
alarming rate over the years. We decided that she should start school as soon as the days began to stretch and the weather to soften a little.

January had been promising: we had had days when we’d been tempted to make a start at the ploughing. The bright air made it seem as though one small leap would land us in April—but
we should have known better. On the last day of the month we were wakened early by the sound of a fierce north wind roaring up under the slates. We felt the whole house shake and give, like a ship
in an Atlantic gale. We went down and peered out of the living-room window. Snow was being driven horizontally across the fields by a wind which must have been near to hurricane force.

Jim managed to open the back door and it took the two of us to shut it after him. He staggered out to see to the animals in the steading. I tried to light the fire in the kitchen stove, but I
found that the force of the wind was so great that there was no suction in the chimney and the smoke billowed back into the room. So I lit the living-room fire and boiled a kettle and made toast
there.

Jim came in, the breath completely knocked out of him on the short journey from the steading. One of the three giant rowans was up by the roots, he said, and the roof was off the henhouse, where
we kept a small overflow of poultry. Sheets of corrugated iron were scattered over the near field and the cows’ backs were powdered with fine snow, driven through minute cracks in the byre
wall. Otherwise everything was all right!

We carried the woebegone hens bodily down to the byre and gave them a feed of corn. In the comparative warmth and shelter they soon revived and strutted happily among the cows’ legs. Two
of their mates were frozen stiff on the perches in the roofless house and we had to put them in the larder.

The rest of the day we spent huddled at the living-room fire, listening to the roar of the wind and the groaning of the house-beams, between trips to the steading. The deep-litter hens were
completely unperturbed; they actually laid a record number of eggs that day. But Hope, the house-cow, didn’t care at all for her coating of snow. We hastily stuffed every crevice in the byre
wall with bits of sacking and wisps of straw. In the evening I stood, in complete outdoor rig, frying ham and eggs on a spirit-lamp in the ice-box of a kitchen, waiting for the crashing of the
stove pipe on the iron roof.

Next day we heard on the wireless of the damage that the storm had done. Square miles of timber had been uprooted, square miles of coast flooded and scores of people made homeless. We had come
off comparatively lightly in our little stone house on the bare hilltop.

By Monday evening everything was calm in the pale sunshine. We went the round of the sheep; they were all quite placidly grazing. We sawed some limbs off the fallen tree. Rowan logs burn well
wet or dry, and we had a particularly bright fire that evening, but it was sad to see the flames licking the bark of this friendly old giant. On our next trip to town we saw hundreds more like him
lying prone about the fields, their roots exposed, their huge crowns flattened against the earth. It was only then that we realised fully that it was indeed a hurricane we had survived. Being right
in the centre of it, with immediate, practical problems to solve, we had not been aware at the time of the ferocity of the force let loose about our heads.

The terror of this day soon faded from our minds and we began to plan the spring campaign. We should have to tackle it on our own this year, as there was no source of casual labour in the
district. Then it struck us—might there not be a student, somewhere in the city of Edinburgh, who would be glad to spend a few weeks working on a Highland croft, in the spring of the year,
for his keep and pocket money? We had heard of various schemes whereby young people were sent to help on the small crofts in the west. They undertook such jobs as draining, peat-cutting and
harvesting on a voluntary basis, in return for their keep. But they went, as a rule, to very small places which might fail utterly without help on account of the age or infirmity of their
occupiers. Our place was not quite in that category! Still, we thought, we might apply privately for a student.

One night, when the wind was roaring about the house again, and the logs were hissing on the hearth and spring work seemed a hundred years away, we sat with a writing-pad between us and drew up
a letter to the Secretary of the Students’ Representative Council in Edinburgh. Between the sheltered quadrangle of the University and our few acres crouched against the hills a great gulf
was certainly fixed. Would any student care to venture into these unknown wilds? we wondered.

We wrote a brief description of the place, the stock it carried and the work that was to be done. We offered to pay the rail fare and one pound a week pocket money to anyone who would live with
us, as one of the family, and work from eight in the morning till about four in the afternoon. After that, his time was to be his own. He could do some reading, go out with the gun, or follow his
fancy. If we had been students, we reflected, we should have jumped at the chance. We imagined there must still be a good few young men about the dusty classrooms who would be glad to give their
lungs an airing and pit their wits against a fresh set of problems. We made no bones about it—the work would be hard, the food plain, and of streamlined entertainment there would be
absolutely none.

With some misgiving we thought of a thin and pimply youth trying vainly to work out the intricacies of fitting Charlie to his harness, by a process of logical deduction, whereas the one thing
needful, as a rule, is a bent nail, a length of stack rope or a kind word in his ear. Worse still, we thought, would be the embryo mathematician who would work out on squared paper the exact number
of eggs we should be getting from each pullet if she were to justify her existence, bearing in mind the cost of feed, our own labour, overheads, etc. We might feel compelled to cull a quarter of
our flock and, heaven knew, they might well come up to scratch yet if given a few weeks’ grace! There are some things better left in the lap of the gods if each living hour is to keep its
shine. And that was exactly where we left the procuring of our student help. If he were not a misfit, much mutual good might come of his stay. The Easter vacation, from mid-March to mid-April,
should coincide, weather permitting, with our big rush of spring work. We posted our letter in hope and went on riding out the winter.

CHAPTER XII

SHINING MORNING FACE

T
HE
larks were rising and falling in a blue, windless sky on the day Helen and I set off for Glen Convinth school. Lessons began at ten, so we left the
house just after nine. Helen had her small, brown satchel on her back—it contained only a biscuit and an apple, but it looked quite impressive.

Bertha met us at the burn and we walked gaily. As we approached the school, three small girls came running to meet us. I recognised the bright faces and ringlets I had glimpsed through the open
door a few weeks before. They were sisters, Bertha said. That was clear, for they were as like one another as three chickens. They immediately took charge of Helen, in a charming, motherly way, and
she had vanished into the schoolroom before I’d even had time to say good-bye to her.

It had been arranged that I was to wait in the house where Mrs. Maclean’s daughter lived, a stone’s throw from the school, until the eleven o’clock play, when Helen and Bertha
would come down to see me and report progress, before I set off for home. I was given tea and entertained with kindly talk. But still I couldn’t help remembering my own unhappy beginnings in
the schoolroom, and wondering how Helen was reacting to her strange surroundings. I needn’t have worried. At eleven o’clock, the two youngsters came rushing up the garden path and into
the little parlour. Their eyes were bright and Bertha was as excited as an elder sister, as she proudly announced that Helen had got all her sums right!

Helen herself was quite overwhelmed by the attention of the motherly small girls and the thrill of all the new ploys she had embarked on.

At dusk we watched for the two small figures coming down the grassy slope. It had been a long day for a five-year-old, but when Helen came into the lamplight in the kitchen her cheeks were
glowing and her eyes round as she recounted, in a few breathless snatches, the doings of the day.

Her schooldays had got off to a good start. She began to make progress at once, for her innate wish to learn was recognised and fostered. Her teacher, who had reared and taught four fine
children of her own, knew instinctively the approach to make to a young, fresh mind.

The little classroom had none of the streamlined equipment deemed essential to the schooling of the modern infant. There were no glittering devices to allure young minds and make it seem that
learning is some kind of glorified game. But there was something no large, impersonal classroom could achieve—the comfort of a relaxed atmosphere. The teacher didn’t have to spend
precious energy acting as a policewoman all the time. With only a handful of children confronting her, she found it comparatively easy to keep order, and she could give of her best to the actual
job of teaching. Each child was known as an individual. His background was understood and thus his shortcomings could be accounted for and efforts to overcome them directed along the lines most
likely to lead to success.

There was a homely feeling of security about the classroom itself. On bleak winter days the children found it a real refuge. Wet coats and boots were put to dry by the glowing stove, which was
opened up for a few minutes to allow small, numb fingers to be rubbed in the warmth before lessons began. There were nice, friendly little customs; a new child had an older one to
‘mother‘ her, to see that she put her things to dry, to accompany her on trips outside, to see that she washed her hands before dinner and that she made a good meal.

During the half-hour that Helen had to spend waiting for the bus, in the afternoon, while Bertha was still at her lessons in the ‘big room’, her teacher took her into the house and
gave her tea and cake. On arrival at Mrs. Maclean’s, she was again fortified with a hot drink and biscuits in winter, or lemonade in summer, so that the journey didn’t seem wearisome or
long. In fact, it was one gay adventure. Sometimes, after a day of torrential rain, the burn, which had been quite easily crossed in the morning, would be impassable by evening. Then Bertha would
accompany Helen along to the road, over the bridge there and in through the gate at the ‘west end’. We would hear the laughter rising above the roaring of the burn and we would see the
torches weaving patterns in the dusk and we would go to meet the pair of them. Our own torch would reveal a couple of gleaming, laughing faces and we’d never catch a whimper of distress.
Bertha would turn about for home and I would shepherd Helen into the kitchen, strip off her wet things and make her sit at the fire in her dressing-gown till she’d swallowed a cup of hot,
sweet tea.

On spring evenings they’d dally all the way home, swinging their skipping ropes and stopping to examine the progress of the clutch of meadow-pipit’s eggs in the tiny, neat nest in
the bank by the well, or to watch the peewit fledgelings scurrying through the rushes, in their anxious mother’s wake.

The following year, when Bertha had gone on to the Junior Secondary school, we would take it in turns to walk Helen to school in the mornings. For the return journey she still had Bertha’s
company from the school bus. We used to beguile the journey with the telling of a serial story, each of us, including Helen, taking it in turn to add our chapter. Jim usually managed to leave the
protagonists in some fantastic predicament, from which I had to extricate them before Helen took over.

In these small country schools the children receive a thorough grounding in the basic disciplines, at a time when their minds can grasp first principles with amazing ease. This is important in
an age when glamour seems to be invading even the infant classroom, and to ‘have fun’ seems to be the end of existence for too many youngsters. The healthy young imagination
doesn’t need much titillating, but the growing mind does need discipline. There are regular periods for drawing and singing, needlework and knitting for the girls, and handwork for the boys,
but the main emphasis is on plain learning. In a very short time Helen was coming home, bristling with information in the fields of grammar, history and geography. ‘Surely’, we said,
‘you’re not doing that!’ as we racked our brains to answer some question regarding the use of personal pronouns, or the place of embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers.
‘No’, was the reply, ‘but class four is.’ We heard later from Bertha that Helen, when she had finished the task set her by the teacher, would sit wide-eyed and wide-eared,
‘listening-in’ to the lessons being given, in the same room, to another class.