A Croft in the Hills (6 page)

Good food we had in abundance: not for us was the policy of selling every available egg to the van and buying doubtful commodities in their place. It was surely better, we felt, to have a huge,
golden-shelled egg on your breakfast plate and health in your eye, than cash accumulating in the tin box. Likewise with milk—though there, of course, there was no question of any being
sold—the best was for ourselves. The rich, yellow cream we would churn into butter, after setting aside the jugfuls for porridge and tea. Any surplus would be fed to the growing chickens.
Later on we hoped to rear a baconer for our own use and some table poultry.

When the garden really came into production we meant to have a good supply of all the hardy vegetables and fruit. An evening stroll with the gun would often yield a couple of young rabbits for
the pot. Very good they were in those days, and now, although the crops are certainly better off without them, we do miss the meals they gave us.

In fact, our aim was to be as far as possible self-sufficient in the way of food and to cut down other living costs to a minimum. The fuel problem, for instance, we hoped would take care of
itself, with the limitless supplies of peat and dead wood that were to hand. As for clothes, they had only to be serviceable, not decorative, so that hard-wearing stuff such as corduroy and denim
and leather, which would survive for years, was our chief rig. In Helen’s case, of course, we had to allow for growth, which was rapid. But, by buying things several sizes too big and taking
in ample reefs and tucks, even these were made to last. Corduroy slacks, which began voluminous and ankle-length, she could still wear several years later, almost skin-tight and reaching not much
below her knees, and still be in the fashion! Only on footwear were we all extremely hard, and gum-boots and leather shoes have had to be renewed at alarmingly frequent intervals.

The surplus eggs were already beginning to bring us in a useful supply of ready cash, and in an extremely handy way. Every Thursday we left a boxful at the gate for collection by the van from
the packing-station and the following Thursday we found an envelope containing the pounds, shillings and pence and a note explaining exactly how many eggs were first-grade, second-grade, cracked or
‘rejects’—so that we knew where we were and what we could count on in this department. The grocer’s van was calling regularly every week and the money from the previous
week’s eggs usually met his bill for bread, tea, sugar, butcher-meat and oddments.

In other ways, too, we meant to be self-sufficient. We had to rely on our own resources for mental stimulus. We had hundreds of books, accumulated over the years, and we had come to treat them
with a new respect during the evenings of our first winter in the hills. We had always read a lot and loved music. But to read a book in a half-circle of firelight, with the feet-deep snow outside
cutting off all possible interruption, to hear on the wireless a symphony of Sibelius above the shrieking of a north-east gale, is to experience these things in the raw. I shall always remember
rereading
Wuthering Heights
in these conditions and entering, as it were, barefoot, into Emily Brontë’s world.

The last thing we wanted to do was to run away from life. We were all too well aware of what went on in the wider world and we listened as avidly as the next household to B.B.C. news bulletins
and talks on current affairs. We could get a paper delivered to the door on the afternoon of its day of publication. But we did firmly and passionately believe that close contact with natural
things was the only means of getting the savour of balanced living. It was the deeper world we wanted to explore, not the wider.

On the croft we could work hard all day, feel the sun on our hands or the rain on our faces, come in to eat food fresh from the ground and still have time to stand on the doorstep in the evening
light, to watch the birds gliding in the shadowed air, engaged in their own lives, and to see the stars come out, and to wonder.

We were fully aware of the fact that man had prefabricated a ghastly doom for himself. Nuclear weapons could destroy cities, could wipe out the records of a whole civilisation, and that was bad
enough. But that they could also destroy the earth upon which, ultimately, all depended, that was the final horror, we felt. To devote all one’s energy to working for the banning of the use
of nuclear power as a weapon, was that the only reasonable thing to do with one’s life, we sometimes wondered. But negative purposes have never a deep appeal. Surely the only appropriate
gesture to make in the face of enormity is a positive one, however small. We could cultivate our portion of earth. It was little more than wilderness, lying exposed to every kind of blasting
weather, but it was earth, and earth responds. Learn to understand it a little, work along the rhythm of it and it will repay you in ways beyond your reckoning.

Soon we saw a thick green sheen come over the cornfields and the potatoes began to push through in crowded rows. The garden plot, which had been so well limed and manured, was producing lettuces
of real succulence and flavour.

The stirks were coming on amazingly well on the natural grazing and were scarcely recognisable as the lean, shivering creatures we had bought only two or three months before. Our aim was to sell
them profitably in the autumn and buy in a couple of good calving heifers, from which we would build up a small herd of four or five breeding cows. There were two licensed Aberdeen-Angus bulls in
the district, for service. The sheep also we meant to sell at a profitable time and with the proceeds buy a score or so of well-bred, black-faced ewes or gimmers, to form the nucleus of a breeding
flock which we could increase to about a hundred.

We meant to keep a hundred and possibly, later on, two hundred pullets in deep litter and to rear a few pigs if feeding permitted. Our plan was to slough off all the rag-tail stock by the autumn
and start afresh then. And so it worked out.

The first item in the new stock we had to acquire almost at once—a hundred five-week-old pullets, which were to come into lay about the end of September. We put them into two rearing
houses in a field near the house and let them run on good clean grass. All went well until the weather broke but then the trouble started. Almost every morning we would bring in two or three sodden
chicks and dry them out in boxes by the stove. As they grew bigger they began to crush each other on cold nights and we would retrieve one or two small suffocated bodies from the pile in each
corner of the hen-house. We tried every device to keep them from crowding, but to no purpose. They were obstinate little devils and seemingly had entered into a vast, grisly suicide pact. By the
time they developed some sort of sense we had lost at least twenty of them, and even then our patience nearly gave out, as we dodged each other round the henhouses each evening at dusk, chasing the
elusive little rascals in to bed. The two or three ex-broody hens, who were complacently rearing ducklings in the next field, looked on at these manoeuvres with a faintly derisive twinkle in their
elderly eyes. Don’t you know there is no substitute for mother, even foster-mother, love, they seemed to say!

We had no hay crop to worry about that first summer, and once the turnips were hoed and the potatoes ridged we turned the attack once more to the ever-recurring problem of fencing. Our southern
flank was now very adequately protected by a first-class Forestry Commission fence. To the north and east we were moderately well defended but our western approaches were badly in need of
safeguard. We had a frontage here of three or four hundred yards along the roadside and the fence was practically non-existent. So, one Saturday, we loaded the trailer with posts and wire, packed a
picnic basket and set off for what we called ‘the west end’.

We had had a spell of very dry weather and the water was coming into the storage tank in the house in only the smallest of trickles so we had to use it very sparingly indeed. At the ‘west
end’ there is a burn which never dries up. It has its source in the hill and its water is clear amber and lies in pools, where the small trout flash. Remembering this burn, and the cool
delight of it, I packed a bundle of washing and a bar of soap among the fencing material and, while Jim dug holes for the strainers, I did the family wash in a pool of golden water. I hung it to
bleach on the dwarf alder bushes, while Helen splashed about and floated twig boats in the pool. We made a fire to boil our tea kettle and afterwards I helped to stretch wire for Jim. We bumped
home happily in the trailer, Helen and I each clutching a bundle of clean linen, Jim whistling softly with satisfaction at the thought of a job well begun.

We spent several more days working at that fence. Strangers passing along the road in cars, seeing our picnic fire and Helen gallivanting in her sun-suit, mistook us for holiday-makers and gave
us an encouraging wave. We waved back enthusiastically for we did almost feel we were on holiday. I say almost, because even the most fascinating of holidays had never given us quite as satisfying
a feel as most of our working days gave us. To know you were achieving something real, in the best company in the world, with the sun warm on your hands and all the wild things you
loved—bird, hill, flower, sky—surrounding you, was deeply pleasurable. Of course, we hammered our thumbs, we dropped staples at crucial moments in the rushes, we tore our legs on pieces
of barbed wire, but that was just the pepper and salt. When the last stob was in and the last wire tightened, we waded in the burn with Helen and sat on the bank watching a heron flap his lonely
way up to the lochan in the hill beyond Rhivoulich.

By the third week in September the corn was ripe. This is a reasonably early date for these heights—the previous autumn we had seen stooks still lying out in November. And the crop was
really one to be proud of. We had had a very heavy thunderstorm in August which had laid part of the oats in one field, where the yield was particularly heavy. But, on the whole, it was a good,
standing crop. On the twenty-fourth of the month Jim began cutting ‘roads’ for the binder, that is, cutting a border around the edge of each field with a scythe to allow the binder to
work freely without damaging any of the corn. I followed in his wake, tying the swathes into bundles with a stalk and setting them up in stooks.

We hadn’t been long on the job when we saw Willie Maclean making his way slowly across the burn and up through the heather to join us. He was leaning heavily on his stick and he looked
tired and a little shaky, but his face lit with pleasure as he picked up a sheaf and shook it by his ear. ‘It rattles!’ He beamed at us through his glasses, ‘It’s fine when
you hear it rattle!’ He looked over the small golden field appraisingly. ‘It’s a grand crop you have there’, he said, and we felt a small glow of pride. To hear a neighbour
praise a crop or a beast always brings a small thrill of pleasure to their owner. Hill people are not given to expressing enthusiasms, but when they do, in their own quiet, well-worn phrases, you
know you can believe what they say.

In a couple of days the corn was cut and then began the laborious process of stooking. Everyone was busy at the same time, with their own crop, so that it was impossible to exchange help. But
the weather remained magnificent until the last afternoon. It was a Saturday and we began to panic just a little as we saw the sky clouding and felt the first small drops of rain. We had to get the
field in stook before dark so we worked on steadily, stopping only for a snatched cup of tea and then, at about half-past four, we saw a pair of legs swinging over the fence at the top of the
field. Their owner gave no sign that he’d seen us working away at the bottom, but simply began stooking his way in our direction. Only when we were within earshot did he greet us with
‘Aye, aye, you’ll be wanting to get done before the rain’. It was our friend Bill (pronounced Beel) the post. He’d finished his letter-round, his own well-nursed crop was
already in the stook and he’d arrived exactly at the right time to give us the lift we needed.

For several weeks the crop stayed out in the stook. Then one afternoon, Alec, an easterly neighbour, and his two boys arrived, unannounced, in the field. He stood looking round the crop.
‘It would be as well in the rick, I think’, he said, as he pulled a handful of grain from the nearest stook and straightaway he and the boys began stacking the sheaves into a small
circle. A short while later Willie Maclean appeared, with Billy and Bertha in his wake, and the nine of us worked with gusto.

It was a perfect October evening. The sky was glowing red and the air was pungent, with a hint of frost. When the enormous yellow moon came looming over the arc of the hill, I went up to the
house with Helen and Bertha and we stoked the fire, to set the kettle boiling, and made toast and a panful of fried eggs.

On the next two evenings this band of neighbours worked with us, till all three cornfields were decked with small, sturdy ricks. ‘It’ll be safe enough now, whatever’, they
said, as they bade us good night. They had quietly watched our progress through the year and had taken, I think, a modest, communal pride in our first harvest. They just wanted to be sure we should
secure it, knowing as they did from their long experience what tricks the weather was capable of. We marvelled at their undemonstrative good-neighbourliness, and we blessed them for it.

Later on we had a couple of days’ hired help to make the big stacks, from which the corn would be threshed. The last few ricks had small caps of snow on them before they were at last
brought in. When the stacks were completed, on the last day of October, we knew what had gone into the fashioning of them—the work, the anxiety, sunshine, storm, good fellowship—the
whole of our new life was symbolised in those five rugged cones, standing stark against the crackling stars.

Yes, it was the last day of October when we put aside our pitchforks, and we’d hardly had time to eat supper and warm our stiff, calloused fingers at the fire, when there was a loud knock
at the door and into the kitchen marched the oddest-looking collection of creatures we’d ever seen. Their faces were completely masked in old bits of black stocking, or white calico. On their
heads they wore scooped-out turnips, battered hats or turbanned scarves. The remaining parts of their persons were swathed in garments that defy description; one wore a horse-hair tail. We’d
almost forgotten—it was Hallowe’en, and these were the guisers. After various attempts to guess their identity had failed, we offered them apples and sweets, which they had the utmost
difficulty in eating, as their mouths and even their hands were muffled in disguise. However, an ill-suppressed giggle finally revealed the identity of one or two of them and they were persuaded to
sing a song for a sixpence before they disappeared into the night.