A Rope--In Case

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• Lillian Beckwith
  
• Dedication
  
• Vocabulary
  
• A Rope—In Case
  
• A Change in the Weather
  
• Winter Fuel
  
• Venison Supper
  
• Romance
  
• A Vest for St. Peter
  
• ‘No Ortinary . . .'
  
• Winter Food
  
• Angus, the Fisherman
  
• The Wife of Little Ian
  
• Farewell to Farquhar
  
• Manure With Cream
  
• Poacher's Wedding
  
• A Day in the Hills
  
• The ‘Sheehan'
  

Lillian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.

Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir
About My Father's Business
, a child's eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book,
Secrets from a Crofter's Kitchen
(Arrow, 1976).

Since her death, Beckwith's novel
A Shine of Rainbows
has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature' awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children's Film Festivals.

For Ted

The March morning was full of mist; grey and inscrutable the swirling formations loped in from the sea to hover uncertainly over the village of Bruach so that the houses and crofts vanished and re-emerged in a constantly changing pattern; the land appeared to be adrift in a thick silence through which the distant throbbing of the burn and the nearer rasp of tide on shingle barely penetrated. ‘For every day of mist in March there'll be an inch of snow in May,' the old crofters predicted. This was our fourth day of mist in the first fourteen days of March so it looked as if we must expect an exceedingly cold May.

I had finished breakfast, milked my cow and fed the poultry and now I was preparing to catch the bus which would take me on the first stage of my visit to the mainland. The preparations entailed no searching of a wardrobe and debating which garments I should wear. A trip to the mainland meant an early morning start and an evening return and as the weather could change dramatically in that time it was necessary always to play safe and wear one's toughest shoes, well polished for the occasion, and one's most dependable waterproof which would have a sou-wester tucked into a pocket. I dropped my shoes into the shopping bag I was taking and pulled on a pair of thick socks and gumboots over my stockings. The path was wet and muddy so I would change into shoes when I reached the bus and leave the socks and gumboots under a seat ready for my return. Giving the fire a final damping down with wet peats and dross I reached up and took my waterproof from the hook beside the door and with it a length of rope which hung on an adjoining hook. It was instinct now to open the door cautiously so as not to disturb any wild life that might have ventured near in the early silence. I was so often rewarded for my caution; perhaps with the sight of a buzzard surveying the world from the top of the clothes line post; perhaps it would be a rabbit drinking from the hens' water bowl or a seal close inshore eyeing the cottages as if he would like to be invited in for breakfast. But then again it might only be a hooded crow loitering with such intent over my chicken run that I had to clap my hands to drive him away. This morning the mist hid any secret there might have been and I pulled the door shut behind me. It was unthinkable to lock a door in Bruach even when one was leaving the house for a whole day. Outside I paused, looking at the length of rope I still held in my hand. Foolish of me, I thought, it wasn't necessary to take a rope with me on what after all was to be in the nature of a day off from work. For a moment I hesitated wondering whether I should go back and replace the rope on its hook but with a shrug I dropped it into the bag along with my shoes. It seemed less trouble to take it.

When I had first come to the Hebrides Morag, my landlady had advised me always to ‘take a rope—in case', and when I moved into my own cottage a length of rope hung on the hook next to my outdoor clothes so that it was a habit to reach for a coat in one hand and the rope in the other. In fact it had become such an essential adjunct that I felt bereft if I was not carrying it somewhere about my person. Over and over again I had proved its usefulness. I might need it to catch a calf or a sheep; to carry a bundle of hay to the cow or a can of paraffin from the grocer; to tie a bundle of driftwood I had collected, or a sack of peat; to secure a boat; make a temporary repair to a sagging fence or a halter for a horse. In stormy weather there was nothing so good as a rope tied round the waist for preventing one's clothes from billowing up above one's head. Excepting when they were going on holiday or to church the Bruach crofters were rarely without a length of rope, either coiled around an arm or protruding from a pocket.

The bus driver blew a blast on his horn as I came out of the mist and I suspected that either I was late or he was in a bad temper.

‘I'm sorry,' I began, ‘Am I late?'

‘No, I don't think so.' His voice was affable. ‘It's just that I want to see to a couple of my snares on the way so I thought I'd just hurry folks up a bit so I could get started.

Such unscheduled changes caused no complaint in Bruach and the driver was equally willing to similarly oblige his passengers.

I sat down beside Janet. ‘You have a good poc,' she commented, noticing my capacious shopping bag. Janet always managed to make her observations with a sort of disparaging admiration so that I felt I had to excuse the size of my bag by telling her I was expecting to bring home a fair number of purchases.

‘You're not wantin' to catch the train, then?' she asked.

‘No,' I told her.

‘I'm thinkin' it's just as well,' she comforted. ‘For the dear knows how long it will take him to see to his snares.'

‘Ach, that man an' his snares,' interposed Erchy, who was sitting behind us. ‘He forgets he's here for drivin' the bus when he's after the rabbits.'

It took the driver no more than a quarter of an hour to attend to his snares and when he returned he dumped three dead rabbits on top of the pile of mailbags. In three of the private mail-boxes where he stopped to collect letters he left a rabbit in exchange.

‘What's the time?' he asked, resuming his seat after the last mail-box had been emptied. No-one replied. My watch had not functioned for months and yet I had hardly been inconvenienced by the lack of it. Time was so rarely referred to in Bruach. The bus driver repeated the question in Gaelic, shouting at old Farquhar who was very deaf. Ponderously the old man took out his cherished watch and showed him. ‘We'd best get a move on,' the driver warned. The mist still enveloped us but on the Bruach road one could be fairly certain of meeting no other traffic so early in the morning. He put his foot well down on the accelerator.

‘Oh, how I hate the mist!' said Janet feelingly. There were murmurs of almost passionate assent from the rest of the passengers. Bruachites, especially the women, did indeed dislike the mist. It seemed to emphasize the loneliness and isolation of their lives, cutting them off from the reassuring view of other cottages where they knew company was their's for the seeking.

The road twisted and climbed around the steep shores of the loch. As we climbed higher the mist thinned so that soon we were looking down on curling banks of it as one looks down on to cloud from an aeroplane.

‘There's a wind on the wireless,' the driver called over his shoulder and at once everyone became more cheerful. Wind would soon drive the mist away.

The mainland village was squalid and colourless. This may have been because it was within a day's journey of a large town, or perhaps because it was too long since its inhabitants had forsaken the crofting life in favour of commerce. Whatever the reason I found it a cold and cheerless place to spend a day. It was only when there was a compelling need for some tool or material, the lack of which was holding up a long extended task, that it became in any way endurable for me.

‘Have you much shoppin' to do?' enquired Janet when we had disembarked from the island ferry.

‘Yes, quite a bit, I want some felt and roofing nails for the poultry shed. And some vegetables if I can get them,' I scanned my list. ‘Oh, and Sarah's asked me to try to get her a “man-chine for the calf's nose”,' I added with a smile. Janet smiled too. To Sarah most things contrived by man were ‘man-chines'. Cars and lorries were acceptably enough ‘man-chines' but it was more difficult to interpret her description of a broom as a ‘man-chine for cleaning floors' and a pillar-box as a ‘man-chine for posting letters'. The ‘man-chine' she had asked me to get for her now was merely a U-shaped flap of wood which fitted into the calf's nostrils and prevented it from sucking the cow while still allowing it to graze adequately.

‘You'd think Yawn could make her one,' said Janet.

‘Yawn says he's made her dozens and that she's lost the lot. He thinks if she has to pay for one out of her own money she'll take better care of it.'

‘I doubt she will,' said Janet.

There were no more than a half dozen shops in the village, one of which was a tearoom. There was also a small hotel. We visited first a poky general store where they sold meat and bacon, bread and groceries and shoes and drapery all from one littered counter. The varied smells that assailed us were dominated by the odour of old cabbages and softening onions in rolled-down sacks on the floor. Janet was trying on a pair of shoes when old Farquhar came in and announced that he wanted ‘two bread loafs an' a pound of wee beefies.' Dourly the assistant handed him two large loaves and then proceeded to weigh out a pound of mince.