Lightly Poached

Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

About Bello:
www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

About the author:
www.panmacmillan.com/author/lillianbeckwith

• Lillian Beckwith
  
• Dedication
  
• Vocabulary
  
• Lightly Poached
  
• Hic Jacet!
  
• In Search of Apples
  
• The Men who Played with the Fairies
  
• Family Silver
  
• Wild Wander
  
• Pears in Brine
  
• Not their Funeral
  
• Going to the Roup
  
• Pianissimo
  

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 Philip, Katy, Tina, Neil and Anita

The sun-stained showers had put a sheen on everything. On the summer grass; on the craggy hills; on the gulls' wings; on the sibilant water and on the rocks of the shore. Even the clouds looked as if they had been polished up with a soft duster.

Between the showers I had been engaged on the urgent task of cleaning my weed-smothered potato patch, using a hoe until my aching shoulders entreated rest when I would crouch down and pull out the weeds by hand until my knees reminded me it was time to stand up and use the hoe again. I loathed weeding potatoes. As each spring came round and I, helped by neighbouring crofters, set the seed on nests of manure along the new-dug furrows I vowed that this year I would really cherish my potatoes; that I would attend to the weeding as soon as the green rosettes appeared above the soil and would continue regularly doing a little every fine day so that, come summer, I should have a trim forest of healthy green shaws rising from the ridged black earth with a definable space, weed free and wide enough for a booted foot to tread, between each row. Thus, I promised myself, I would ensure that when the time came for harvesting I should, like my neighbours, fill pail after pail, sack after sack, with potatoes of a size that could reasonably be termed Vare', that is, fist-sized or larger. So far, however, even the most encouraging critics would never have described my potato crop as anything but ‘seed', which means of a size equivalent to a bantam's egg, or worse, as ‘chats', which were hardly bigger than marbles or, as Morag, my ex-landlady, described them, as ‘bein' no bigger than a hen would swallow in one gulp'. Too small for cooking in their jackets, they had to be peeled raw and anyone who has had to endure winter after winter of coping with such puny rants will know there is no more dispiriting an occupation. I usually ended up by boiling a panful every day, mashing them with a bottle and mixing them with oatmeal and then feeding them to my cow and hens while, swallowing my pride, I would buy a sack of potatoes from someone who had worked much more dedicatedly than I and who therefore had some to spare. Alas this year again despite all my resolutions and the tactful comments of well-meaning Bruachites I had failed to get to grips with the task of weeding in time and now in midsummer except for two short rows which I had cleaned the previous morning my potato patch resembled a jungle more than an orderly forest and with the plants scarcely a hand's height me leaves had already begun to pale as a result of their contest with lusty persicary, binding buttercups and tenacious dockens. I knew they must be rescued now or never, so, ignoring my body's unwillingness and the clouds of midges which assailed me every time the breeze died and a shower threatened to obscure the sun, I continued resolutely, hoping that I could clean enough rows to yield sufficient ware potatoes for my own use. Another hour's work, I told myself, and then I could finish for the day. As I made the resolution I sighed forgetfully which resulted in my having to spit out a queue of midges which had been hovering around my mouth waiting the opportunity to explore my larynx. Kneeling down I resumed pulling at the strangle of corn spurrey which, though relatively easy to uproot, leaves a sticky deposit on the hands which proves even more attractive to predatory insects than clean flesh. I wished often that potatoes were not so essential a part of my food supplies, but to face a Bruach winter without a good store of potatoes in the barn would have been foolhardy. The crofters would have considered it suicidal.

It had been some time now since the last shower; some time since I had had an excuse to nip back for a ‘fly cuppie' in the coolth and comfort of the cottage. Through my thin blouse the sun was toasting my back; the exposed parts of my body itched with midge bites; my open-toed sandals—open-toed due not to design but to wear—were full of earth and sharp grit. I was sticky, dirty, itchy and achy and I longed for a respite. Straightening up I rested on the hoe. The breeze had died away completely with the last shower, leaving shreds of mist in the corries of the hills. The sea was like a stretch of blue cambric variegated with darker patches which, suddenly erupting into arrow-shaped shock-waves of spray, told of shoals of mackerel pursuing their food around the bay.

‘So you're busy!' It was Morag's voice and I turned to greet her as she tacked across the croft towards me. Accompanying Morag was Flora, a remote kinswoman of hers who occasionally visited Bruach on holiday from the East Coast fishing port where she lived. Flora was famous in Bruach as being one of a band of ‘kipper lassies', the girls who travelled from port to port throughout the herring season and in all weathers sat out on the piers deftly gutting and cleaning mountains of herring newly unloaded from the fishing boats; bandying ribald pleasantries with the crews and, reputedly, screaming imprecations with complete impartiality at sluggard fish porters, scouting gulls or indeed anyone who threatened to impede their work. Flora took great pride in being a ‘kipper lassie' and always carried around with her a photograph cut from a newspaper which showed her along with half a dozen other lassies smilingly busy at their gutting and seemingly oblivious of the hail and sleet that flew around them. There was an inked ring round Flora on the photograph because the girls were so bundled up in clothes that identification might otherwise have been impossible. She was middle-aged, ‘all beam and bust' as Erchy described her, and her eyes and hair were appropriately kipper coloured. Her voice was as strident as a ship's siren; her laughter piercing and when irritated her vocabulary would, according to an admiring Hector, ‘take the feathers off a hoody-crow'. She was a good-natured, good-humoured soul and whilst she was in Bruach the summer ceilidhs were enlivened by lurid accounts of her adventures, quarrels, flirtations and spending sprees, accounts which I no doubt would have found more entertaining had I been able to decode more than one word in six of her broad East Coast speech and that one word usually ‘yon'. In her absence the Bruachites referred to her as to all ‘kipper lassies' as ‘Skin-a-herrin' Lizzie', though they would never have been either discourteous or rash enough to have used the nickname in her hearing. Only once did I hear it used in her presence and that was by Davy, a Glasgow-bred child without a vestige of Gaelic courtesy or reticence who with his mother was visiting a relative in the village. One Friday evening when there had been the usual batch of customers, adults and children, waiting at the weekly grocery van for their turn to be served Davy was there insolently superintending his doting mother's purchases to ensure she bought for him an ample supply of sweeties and biscuits. When Flora appeared he had left his mother abruptly, sidled round to the front of the van and begun chanting:

‘Skin-a-herrin',
Skin-a-herrin',
Skin-a-herrin',
Lizzie
.'

In the unthinkable event of a Bruach child behaving in such a fashion the nearest adult male would have grabbed him, boxed his ears and been thanked by the embarrassed parents for administering punishment so promptly. But Davy was a foreigner and though we were all made to feel exceedingly uncomfortable by the boy's rudeness only old Murdoch admonished him with a snapped ‘Whist, boy!' and the gesture of an upraised hand. Davy ignored the old man and continued his taunting. Flora darted a glance at the mother as if giving her a chance to take action before she herself did, but the mother had retreated into an air of intense preoccupation with the small print on a packet of cream crackers and would not look up. We saw Flora's bosom swell; we saw her eyes glint and we prepared to flinch at the linguistic dexterity we expected to hear. But our ears were assailed by no fish-pier malediction. Instead Flora merely raised her voice to its most penetrating pitch and screamed: ‘Aye, lad, I can skin a herrin' as quick and clean as your own mother skins the lodgers that stay in your house!'