The Hills is Lonely (19 page)

The geologists, still in a state of mental and physical overthrow and utterly bereft of speech, stared glumly white Ruari bent and began to fill the sack with shingle from the beach.

‘That's no good!' the leader found his voice. ‘For heaven's sake let's get home!' he snapped sullenly.

‘Ach, but it's no trouble at all,' Ruari declared, with an extravagant flourish of his hand, ‘and what harm I've done I must try to undo as best I can.'

‘You're a damn fool!' returned the irate one ungraciously, and snatching the sack from Ruari clambered gloomily aboard
Seagull
.

‘Well if I mustn't, I mustn't. I dare say you know best yourselves,' murmured Ruari with a puzzled nod.

As soon as the rest of the party were aboard we cast off and
Seagull
gambolled ponderously towards the Bruach shore. Talk was desultory, for Ruari was surprisingly abashed after his experience, while Lachy and I hovered between profound sympathy and irrepressible mirth.

It was an exceedingly melancholy party of ‘jolly gees' who were landed at Bruach and who climbed stiffly and slowly up the brae towards the special bus which awaited them. Ruari watched them go, a sly expression on his face. ‘Yon men are fools,' he observed as he baled out
Seagull
while I secured the tiller.

‘It's you who were the fool,' I told him. ‘You should have known that the stones wouldn't be ordinary stones.'

‘Me? A fool?' exclaimed Ruari indignantly. ‘Is it me that's the fool, when they've had to hire my boat to take them again tomorrow?'

‘You wretch!' I chuckled.

‘I'm thinkin',' said Ruari, cocking a speculative eye at the cloudless horizon, ‘that we're in for another fine day tomorrow. You'll be comin' with us again, Miss Peckwitt?'

‘No,' I said with a shudder. ‘I can't face that crowd again.'

Ruari turned to Lachy who had just come alongside in the dinghy to take us ashore.

‘What was you talkin' about to yon man?' he asked.

I had noticed that Lachy seemed to be having quite a voluble conversation with one of the geologists while he was taking them ashore.

‘Ach, he wasn't a geologist at all,' replied Lachy. ‘He called himself a cartyographer or somethin' like that.'

‘A what?' demanded Ruari.

A cartyographer,' repeated Lachy. ‘I had some fun with him I can tell you.'

‘How was that?' asked Ruari.

‘Well he was wantin' to know all the place names in Gaelic and in English,' said Lachy.

‘But I distinctly saw you pointing to Rhu Corran, and calling it Allt Rhunan,' I accused.

‘So I did,' agreed Lachy cheerfully. ‘And I told him Corry Dhy was Cnoc Dhanaid, and plenty others wrong besides. The old nosey parker he was.'

Ruari chuckled appreciatively.

‘But Lachy,' I expostulated feebly. ‘If he said he was a cartographer you should have told him correctly. It's very important.'

‘Ach,' said Lachy scornfully, ‘what does he want to know the right names for? He doesn't live about here at all. He's only after makin' a map.'

The acquisition of the Gaelic is, I believe, a necessity for those who wish to lead a full life in the Hebrides, and accordingly I purchased a Gaelic grammar and set myself the task of mastering the idiosyncrasies of that much-exalted tongue. Languages have never been my strong point but having the advantage of actually residing and conversing with natural Gaelic speakers, I estimated that by the end of three months I should have achieved a reasonable degree of fluency.

‘It's quite easy to learn,' encouraged one of the accepted scholars of the village when he heard of my intention. ‘The Gaelic is pronounced exactly as it is spelled so you will not find it half so difficult as other languages.'

I was enormously cheered by his words and was tempted to cut my estimate to six weeks, but the discovery that ‘Cnoc' was pronounced ‘Crock', ‘Dubh' as ‘Doo' and ‘Ceilidh' as ‘cayley' convinced me that his statement had been somewhat misleading. When I found that a simple phrase like ‘I have a cat' is in the Gaelic distorted to ‘A cat is at me' I felt that I must double my original estimate and, even so, doubted whether I should ever realise that to say ‘The dog is at me' indicated possession and not attack.

Previous to commencing the study of Gaelic I had noticed that the inhabitants always seemed to be slightly nonplussed by my formal English greeting of ‘Good morning!' or ‘Good evening!' Naturally I used ‘Good morning' as a salutation, not as an observation on weather conditions, and I was not to know then that in such matters the Gael believes in being specific. In my anxiety to say the right thing I asked Morag to tell me the Gaelic way of wishing people ‘Good day'. She, taking me literally, taught me to say ‘He Breeah', a phrase which, I later learned to my dismay, meant ‘It is a good day', in the sense that ‘the weather is fine', and it was singularly unfortunate that for practically the whole of that season there were no days when ‘He Breeah' could have been called a suitable greeting. Through rain and cold, through wind, hail and snow, ‘He Breeah!' I called gaily, and received in reply politely bewildered ‘He Breeahs' from dejected figures whose boots squelched wetly and from whose sou'westers the rain streamed steadily. ‘He Breeah!' I greeted the embittered roadman as he sheltered in his inadequate little hut from the merciless flurries of sleet which swept incessantly up the valley. ‘He Breeah!' I hailed startled milkmaids as, blue-fingered and red-nosed, they huddled miserably under the cows' bellies, seeking refuge from the torrential rain.

The villagers accepted my misuse of the phrase with amused tolerance and were unfailingly complaisant, as is their way, but my suspicions were at last aroused when one old soul, battling homeward against a fierce northwesterly gale, her sodden cape billowing wildly in spite of her effort to restrain it, returned my ‘He Breeah' promptly and then added conscientiously, ‘But there's a fearful lot of wet along with it now, isn't there?' That night I learned to say ‘He Fluke' (it is wet) and ‘He Fooar' (it is cold) and by so doing ensured the finest spell of warm dry weather that the Island had experienced for some years.

Though my Gaelic studies were not conspicuously successful they did at least help me to understand the propensity of my new friends for investing anything and everything with the masculine or feminine gender, for, like French, the language has no neuter. A shoe for instance is a ‘she', while a coat is a ‘he'. The professions are all masculine, though the noun ‘work' is feminine. (It is easy to understand the significance of this when one has lived in the Hebrides for a short time.) The circumstance that an object might be feminine in the English language yet masculine in the Gaelic added to the confusion, as did the complications of soft and hard consonants and shortened vowels; and when I heard of cows with calves at foot being referred to as ‘he' I began to doubt very much whether anyone among the Bruachites was capable of classifying sex with any certainty.

This use of either the masculine or the feminine gender persisted among the crofters even when speaking English, and I was frequently considerably agitated on hearing remarks which seemed to suggest all manner of nefarious or ludicrous practices.

‘When he's done barking, Ruari's going to hang him on the clothes line for an hour or so,' I overheard Bella telling Morag one day, and was greatly relieved to discover that ‘he' was nothing more animate than a fishing-net. For one like myself, possessing only a limited capacity for controlling my countenance, there were agonising moments such as the occasion when I met an old crofter and his wife stumping morosely along the road. The weather, which earlier had looked promising, had turned treacherously to rain and as we paused to commiserate with one another on this fact the woman bent down to tie her bootlace. Her husband studied her bent back, a lugubrious expression on his lined face. ‘Yes,' he grumbled disconsolately, ‘and I did think we'd have got to the peats today, but it's no use now she's gone and turned wet on me.' I need hardly point out that in this case the weather was the ‘she'.

Apart from the curious idiom I was often disconcerted by the precise old ladies who, having little knowledge of English except for the English of the Bible, attempted to converse with me in distressingly scriptural language, utterly oblivious of the fact that many Biblical words are not used in polite conversation these days.

To familiarise myself with the language and thus help along my Gaelic studies, I should have acquired the ceilidh habit. These ceilidhs, which were really nothing more than the impromptu dropping in of neighbours, were going on almost every night of the autumn, winter and spring, but whereas most writers on Highland subjects deem it their duty to depict the ceilidhs with a romantic pen—lamplight; peat fire flames playing on a cluster of honest friendly faces; rich Highland voices, joking, singing and story-telling; cups of tea and home-baked scones—I was never able to forget that the room was likely to be ill-ventilated; that the tight-packed bodies would be hot and unbathed; that the pipe-smoking old men would be spitting indiscriminately; that the boots of the company would be caked with dung and mud; that more than one of my neighbours might be belching with threatening violence, and the clothes of others reeking of stale peat smoke and sour milk. As a consequence I was inclined to view the ceilidhs with disfavour; so that I was not at all pleased when Morag relayed to me a most pressing invitation to attend such a gathering at the home of the village's pet widow. I was tempted to refuse point-blank but, recalling that the house in question was comparatively large and airy and that the widow herself was an exceptionally genial lady, I decided that I might do worse than accept.

Morag was delighted, and about nine o'clock on a bright starlit November evening we sallied forth. All day there had been a sharp frost and now our footsteps rang with a clear, staccato echo instead of the customary sloshing plod. A silvery glow behind the hills heralded the rising of the maturing moon and suddenly and impressively it emerged above the dark peaks, spilling light and shadow with superb artistry into the tranquil valley. My companion and I walked briskly; not because we expected to be late for the ceilidh—that would have been well nigh impossible as the Bruachites kept astonishingly late hours—but because of the invigorating effect of the chill air. Morag, never at a loss for some topic of conversation, pointed out various dwellings and amused both herself and me by recounting stories of their occupants past and present. Just as we came abreast of a low, thatched house on the high road the door was flung open and a woman of demi-john proportions stood silhouetted in the lamplit space. Morag immediately called out a greeting which was shrilly returned by the fat woman, along with the additional information that she would be catching us up presently.

‘Yon's Anna Vic,' said my companion. ‘You'll know her likely?'

I certainly knew Anna Vic both by sight and reputation. Ruari had described her to me as being ‘so fat that if you saw her on the skyline you didna' know if it was herself or two cows standin' side by side', while Lachy asserted that ‘if you can see daylight between the ankles then it canna' be Anna Vic'.

‘She is indeed a very big woman,' I said.

‘Aye, and her heart's the biggest part of her,' replied Morag warmly. ‘My,' she continued with barely a pause for breath, ‘but she holds a lot of water that one.'

‘Who does?' I gasped.

‘Why, that fine rainwater tank beside the house there,' answered my landlady, inclining her head towards the house we had just passed. ‘I must be seein' about gettin' one of them for myself.'

Our ears were assailed by a piercing shout and, turning, we beheld the panting Anna Vic waddling after us like an excited duck.

‘How fast you walk,' she grumbled pleasantly as she toiled along beside us, but neither her corpulence nor our speed proved the slightest impediment to her conversational powers.

‘Why,' she panted after a little while, ‘it's warm enough walkin' but in the house I was feelin' the cold terrible. Indeed I was sittin' that close over the fire that when I came to put on my stockings my legs was tartan with the toasting I'd given them.'

We laughed, and so entertained did she keep us that it seemed no time at all before we were pushing open the door of the ceilidh house where we found several people already comfortable ranged in front of an enormous peat fire. On the inevitable wooden bench sat Alistair the shepherd, Angus, Murdoch, Adam the gamekeeper and one-armed Donald. Roddy and Callum, the hostess's bachelor brothers, sat determinedly in their favourite armchairs. A wooden chair was shared awkwardly by twin sisters whom I had already christened ‘Giggle' and ‘Sniggle'; Johnny the bus-driver was perched precariously on one end of the roughly hewn kerb, while Elspeth, the young schoolteacher, sat, with arms akimbo and knees locked virtuously together, on a corner of the table, her feet resting on a low stool. Greetings were exchanged and the men, after catching the intimidating eye of our hostess, executed a sort of ‘general post' as they outdid one another in their anxiety to make room for us. We settled ourselves on a horsehair sofa drawn close to the fire; the conversation was resumed and in no time at all Anna Vic and Morag were involved in an argument with Donald as to the price of whelks for the previous season. I listened impartially, being far more interested in the setting than in the dispute.

The room was cosily warm; the mellow lamplight, reflected by the varnished wood walls, whitened the hair and smoothed the wrinkles of the aged, while it burnished the hair and enhanced the already ravishing complexions of the young. On the gleaming hob two sooty kettles spouted steam and beside them a magnificent brown teapot squatted complacently. Against one wall stood a homely dresser bedecked with gay china, and flanked on either side by ‘Vesuvius in Eruption (daytime)' and ‘Vesuvius in Eruption (at night)'. On the opposite wall, nearly surrounded by its festoon of weights and chains, hung an old-fashioned clock, its pendulum lazily swinging the night away; its ticking rivalled only by the repetitive sniffs of the company, for sniffing is as sure an accompaniment to a ceilidh as is the popping of corks to a champagne party.