The Sea for Breakfast (17 page)

My class struggled over their arithmetic, muttering, coughing, scratching their heads, jabbing pens into inkwells and doing all the other things that children do in a classroom. Fiona lifted her head and stared at me coolly. She disliked school and tended to be rebellious in class. Giggle and Sniggle, their hair-styles making them look as though they were going to take wing at any moment, chewed pens and whispered to each other. Both twins were backward, hence their presence in the junior class. A series of sniffs, resonant with satisfaction, claimed my attention and I traced them to a little boy with an exceedingly turned-up nose whom l knew only as ‘Beag a Mor' (Big and Small). Apparently he had been given the same name as an elder brother and when the brother had died the younger one, for some implausible reason, had inherited both adjectives. I went over and asked him quietly if he had a handkerchief. He delved into a pocket and after much rummaging produced a filthy tatter that led me to suspect that his nose might have turned up at the sight of it. Seeing my look of revulsion he explained engagingly that his handkerchief was not dirty. It was just that it had been tucked under a black jersey he had been wearing and when the jersey had got wet it had leaked.

As the children worked, there arose a strong tang of seaweed that competed with the smell of soapy washing to fill the classroom. Most of them were chewing and when they thought my attention was elsewhere they would furtively pull from under their desks sections of the peeled stalks of tangle-wrack, which they called ‘staff', and from which they took large bites.

From the other side of the curtain camp the sibilant voice of the head teacher who was putting her class through the agonies of mental arithmetic.

‘If one egg costs twopence halfpenny, how much does twelve eggs cost?' and without waiting for an answer she carried on conversationally, ‘Did your mother's hens lay yet, Jessac?'

‘No, they didn't yet.'

‘Fancy that! I got eight from my fifteen yesterday. Did yours lay, Johnny?' Johnny's reply was inaudible. ‘See and tell your mother to put in some spice with their food. The van sells it and it makes a great difference, I find. Now where were we?'

After a few more questions asked and answered her voice again penetrated my consciousness.

‘If ten pounds of sultanas … Annac, did I not hear your mother askin' at the van for sultanas last week?'

‘I believe she did.'

‘Well, mind and tell her when you get home that Ian the shop has some lovely ones, but she'll need to hurry because everybody was buying them to make dumplings when I was there.'

And again: ‘Pomegranates are threepence halfpenny.… Has anyone here seen a pomegranate?' No one had apparently because she went on to explain ingenuously: ‘It's a fruit like a cucumber. Anyone who's seen a cucumber has very nearly seen a pomegranate.'

When written arithmetic was substituted for mental she set them the old faithful one of the taps and the water cistern but adroitly she rendered it, ‘If your boat was leaking and the sea was comin' into it.…'

Thus companionably lessons progressed. Was it perhaps, I mused, partly because of homely observations such as these that Highland education is second to none? My musings were interrupted by a knock on the door of the classroom and the teacher, answering it, stayed talking to someone in the porch for a few minutes.

‘It's the shepherd,' she came through the curtain and whispered to me hoarsely. ‘He's after leavin' his job here and he's wantin' me to write him a reference.'

When morning break came the head took her pan of sheets and prevailed upon the canteen cook to give her a hand with the wringing and before the end of break they were billowing on the line across the school garden. At lunch time the children trooped into the tiny canteen shed at the back of the school where Giggle and Sniggle were deputed to act as waitresses. There were so many eager hands ready to grasp the plates as they appeared, however, that serving was accomplished with astonishing rapidity, as indeed was everything else. The meal began with Scotch broth and uproar.

‘Anyone want my vegetables?' shouted the teacher as she ladled up her soup and pushed the vegetables to the side of her plate. ‘Big and Small' came over and claimed the barley but he did not want the vegetables. She repeated the question, standing up and offering her plate like a market woman offers a bargain: there were no takers. The speed with which the children shovelled down all their food was phenomenal. With grubby fingers they crammed the utensils into their mouths and gulped, spilled, gurgled and sucked like starved puppies. I watched them, spellbound, reflecting upon all the sore stomachs in Bruach and remembering that a tin of bicarbonate of soda was as much of, a necessity on the table at mealtimes as sugar or salt and as familiar an ornament on a mantelpiece as a tea caddy.

‘It's no wonder the canteen's full of rats,' said the teacher through a mouthful of mince; ‘they spill that much of their food. I've had to get some rat poison and I'm goin' to put it down when school's over.' I offered to stay and help.

Giggle, leaning over me, whispered something that seemed to imply I was a ‘cursed tart' but which I knew was merely an offer of custard with my prunes. The meal was cleared away while the cheeks of the children were still bulging with their last mouthfuls and we stood up and thanked God for what we had received, though I considered a more appropriate grace would have been ‘Thank God we didn't choke'.

Outside the sun was brilliant, raining silver darts on the blue water and gilding the steep cliffs of the cove that sheltered the school. I sat on the steps watching the children, and the teacher brought out a basket of darning and joined me. There were few games the children could play in Bruach. It was nearly always too windy to skip; it was too steep for ball games; too rough for playing hop-scotch. The younger ones strolled now in groups along the shore, poking into rock pools or playing a clumsy game of ‘tag' over the boulders. One child walked alone playing with a chopped-off hen's leg of which he pulled the exposed sinews so that the toes opened and closed with horrid agility. Some of the older boys had found a washed-up pit-prop and began a game of ‘tossing the caber' while others played at ‘finger-stones', a most peculiar game resembling rubbing one's tummy with one hand and patting one's head with the other. The first and second fingers of the left hand are slid to and fro over a boulder whilst the boulder is hit rhythmically with a stone held in the right hand. It is a savage method of I.Q. assessment, the less alert boys frequently hitting their fingers; it was considered a great joke locally to get the village idiot playing ‘fingerstones'.

‘You wouldn't like to go back to teaching?' asked the head suddenly.

‘No, not at all.'

‘Fancy! I wouldn't be without it. There's always somebody to talk to when you're teaching. Don't you ever get lonely?'

‘How many of the children can swim?' I asked, deflecting her attention from myself.

‘Why none of them, I don't believe.'

‘It seems a pity, with the sea so close,' I said.

‘More than a pity,' she agreed. ‘Indeed the risks they take climbing about the rocks sometimes, I'd be a lot happier if they could swim.'

I said nothing but I thought I would talk over the matter with Mary, who was not only a splendid swimmer but was also a part-time swimming instructor.

When lessons began again the sun had moved round full on the schoolhouse windows. The fire had been left to go out but the classroom became increasingly torrid. The discarded chunks of staff under the desks became decidedly odiferous and the classroom began to give off the musty, sour smell of sweating children mingled with that of sunlight on dust-impregnated wood and cloth. The children were taking it in turns to read aloud from a book of fairy stories I had taken because there were none in the school library. I had to remind myself constantly that they were naturally Gaelic speakers with English only as an acquired language. Giggle's turn came at the end of the story and she faltered along, stabbing at the odd words she knew with expressionless indifference and shaping her mouth experimentally over the syllables of the rest. ‘And … the … prin … cess … max … married … the … d … duck.…' There was a burst of tittering from the class which I quelled with a look. I told her to read it through again but she still persisted on pronouncing ‘duke' as ‘duck'. Suppressed titters came again, this time not only from my own pupils but from the other side of the curtain where the class, with india rubbers audibly in evidence, were engaged in drawing a map of North Africa.

‘Flora,' I reasoned with her, ‘a princess wouldn't marry a duck, would she?' Flora stared at me with unblinking stupidity. I insisted she try again, telling her to use her common sense. It was of no avail. She was still determined to marry the princess to a duck.

Impatiently I turned to Sniggle, whose eyes were bright with contempt for her sister. ‘Murdina,' I said, ‘can you tell your sister what a princess would be likely to marry?'

Murdina's hand shot up eagerly. ‘Yes, Miss. Please, Miss, it would have to be a drake.' The whole room dissolved into laughter and the teacher bustled from the other side of the curtain to add her ridicule before she called us firmly to attention for evening prayers.

I stayed behind when the children had gone, so that I could lend a hand with the rat poison and the teacher took the opportunity to show me the reference she had written out for the shepherd.

‘Is he as good as this?' I asked doubtfully. It was an encomium. I doubt if there has ever been a better shepherd.

‘You'll know him, of course?' she asked. ‘He lives outside the village but he goes to my own church regularly.'

‘I know that Netta had a baby by him a little while ago,' I admitted.

‘Oh yes, indeed. But he's done the right thing by her. He's made sure the baby was registered under his own name.'

‘But if he admits he's the father and wants the baby in his own name, why on earth didn't he marry the girl?'

The teacher looked at me in shocked surprise. ‘Oh, Miss Peckwitt,' she hissed reproachfully, ‘he's a good-living man and he's hoping to be a missionary some day. He could never marry a girl like that.'

We adjourned to the canteen and spread slices of bread with rat poison.

‘They're supposed to become thirsty with this stuff and leave the premises in search of water and when they drink they die, isn't that the way it works?' I asked.

‘Yes, but I think we'll make sure they can get at water here,' she said as she thoughtfully placed saucers of water in the cupboards.

‘Have you used it before?' I asked her. ‘Do you know how effective it is?'

‘Well, I don't really, but Sandy Beag says it's good right enough.' She sniggered. ‘Me and my husband were watching Sandy Beag put some rat poison down a few weeks ago round his sheds. I don't know if it was this stuff he was using then, but there he was carefully putting down pieces of baited bread and there at his heels was his dog following faithfully and eating every piece as it was laid down. Every now and then Sandy would catch him and swear at him and start laying the trail again, but he couldn't stop the dog. At last he shut the animal in the house, but it wasn't many minutes before it was out again and eating it. It was a good thing it wasn't harmful to domestic animals or Sandy would have lost the dog right enough, and he was fond of it.' She sniggered again. ‘Indeed, I think he just decided he must put up with the rats after all.'

‘He should try Erchy and Johnny's remedy,' I said, with a reminiscent smile. The story of how Erchy and Johnny had once been given the job of ridding an hotel outbuilding of rats had often been related in the village. The two rat catchers had stipulated that they be given a bottle of whisky apiece, their professed plan being to soak pieces of bread in the whisky and to wait until the rats got drunk on it. They would then pounce on the rats before they could dodge back to their holes and hit them on their heads. They swore that rats were attracted by whisky and that their method had proved effective several times previously. Armed with stout clubs the two of them reported for work one night and the hotel proprietor, sceptical but desperate, provided the whisky. But early the next morning, so the story goes, when he went to find out how the men had got on, he found Erchy and Johnny and several rats lying drunk on the floor—some of the rats being cradled in the crook of Erchy's arm. At his shout of rage the rats had sprung up and bolted unerringly for their holes, but the two apostates had managed to struggle to their feet only to collapse again under the full blast of his wrathful sarcasm. The most curious outcome of the night's affair was that, inexplicably, the rats thereafter deserted the outbuilding.

‘Seein' the state those two were in was enough to drive any self respectin' rat away,' the hotel proprietor explained sardonically.

‘It was your damty bad whisky that got rid of them,' retorted Erchy. ‘And your damty bad language,' added Johnny morosely.

That evening I discussed with Mary the possibility of swimming lessons for the children. She fell in with the idea at once, and I sent a message to the mothers saying that any of the children who could bring a bathing suit and towel could stay after school if they wished to be given lessons—provided the weather remained calm and sunny. After break two or three of the scholars came to assure me that it was surely going to ‘make a fine day'. They shook their cupped hands and opened them to show me horrid woodlice struggling on their backs. If the woodlice had rolled up into a ball it would have been a sure sign of rain.

The sun continued to shine, the wind stayed muzzled by the heat, and when school was over for the day every child was waiting on the shore.

‘All right, go and get into your bathing suits,' I told them as Mary appeared. The girls flocked into the porch and the boys dove behind the playground walls and all emerged wearing their bathing suits—their ordinary wool vests with a large safety-pin between the legs. With Mary and me in attendance, they splashed through the strokes in the shallow water, the more promising ones being taken out individually and tutored in deeper water. When it was decided that they had had enough for the time being, they asked for a demonstration of swimming and Mary, who is as adept as a seal in the water, performed for her entranced audience willingly. Then she and I went into the schoolhouse for a ‘strupak'. We were standing on the step taking our leave of the teacher when Seumas Beag, the father of the twins, came shuffling diffidently up to us.