The Sea for Breakfast (5 page)

‘My, but you're busy,' Morag called as we passed a couple of them absorbed in scratching noughts and crosses on a face of rock.

‘Aye.' They spared us a glance of tepid interest and then returned to their game.

‘Indeed, I don't know why the County bothers to give them picks and shovels,' said Morag. ‘I think it must be more for company than use.'

‘They don't seem to do much work,' I agreed.

‘Their main work is dodgin' the Gaffer. They wake him up in a mornin' to report for work and once they've done that then every time his back's turned they're out with their cards or else away up the hill with Donald's ferret. I canna' count the number of rabbits he's puttin' on the bus every mornin' since he's been working on the road.'

I glanced up towards the top of the hill and sure enough saw a straggling bunch of figures who looked as though they might be roadmen.

‘You'd think,' I said, ‘that they'd want to do some work occasionally, if only as a change from doing nothing.'

‘That's just what Erchy told them now,' replied Morag warmly. ‘Says he, “I'm sick of cards, cards, cards, I'm off to do some work,” he says, and nobody stopped him!'

Bruach's peat glen was a sad, desolate-looking place, scarred by peat hags, some long neglected, and pocked with dark pools. The crofters, though they may not have cut peats for years, jealously guarded their rights to hags used by their forbears, their claims frequently encompassing quite large areas. Those who did rely on peat for fuel were continually forced to take out new hags farther afield as the old ones became exhausted, and as a consequence it was usually the poorest and least accessible hags that were regularly worked while the best hags, close to the track for easy transport, were reserved for people who would never cut peat again, either because they were in the money or in their graves.

The only hag available for me was naturally one of the inaccessible ones. We turned off the track in its direction, the sodden moor squeaking protest at our every step. The previous day rain had fallen heavily and the hills, marble black against a paling blue sky, were still veined with white rushing burns whose muted thunder pressed at our ears. Now, the fresh-laundered sun was kindling the torches of asphodel into golden flame and coaxing the limp bog cotton to dry its plumage in the frisky breeze that sent contingents of ripples scurrying across the moorland pools.

‘Its a right day for the peats,' said Morag, ‘but if this wind drops the clegs will eat us.'

‘I wish there was a better path to my peats,' I said as we jumped dark drains and wallowed in spongy moss.

‘Right enough,' replied Morag, ‘but a few years ago you might have been glad of it.'

‘How?' I asked.

‘Indeed, but it's only a few years just since the scholars had each to take a peat with them to school every day for the fire and it's no the hags back here they'd be taking the peats from. No, it was always the easy ones nearest the road they took instead of their own. There was plenty of miscallings and skelpings about it in those days, but they never stopped them. My own bairns was as bad as the rest.'

My peats had already been ‘stripped' for me by Erchy, which means that he had taken off the thick matted top layer of headier roots and turf, exposing the soft black peat. Stripping is traditionally a man's job and I was heartily glad it was so, for the widow Mary, who had given me the use of the hag, had confided that she believed its toughness had helped her husband into his grave. (‘Ach, if you'd seen the man she had,' said Morag, who would have liked to cull the substandard of any species, when I told her; ‘nothing but a long drink of gruel and his trousers near fallin' off the backside of him for want of somethin' to hold them up.') In Bruach, the fact that a job is heavy or strenuous did not necessarily mean that it was classed as a ‘man's job'. It was, as I soon found out, mostly the women who did the heavy work of carrying and lifting, no matter what their age, shape or condition, and they seemed to pride themselves on their ability. The first time I saw an able-bodied crofter watching indifferently while his wife laboured under the burden of a boll of meal (140 lb.) I was provoked to the point of remonstrance. When, a few days later, I saw the same crofter meeting his dressed-up wife off the bus after a day's shopping on the mainland and chivalrously carrying her shopping basket, I was speechless. But gradually I grew to accept such things, so much so that I was only amused when I heard that Alistair Beag, a lazy man even by Bruach standards, had been taken to hospital after rupturing himself when trying to lift a load on to his wife's back. And then came a day when an old gallant, seeing me carrying home a sack of peat, said admiringly, ‘My, my, but you have a good back for carrying,' and I was startled to find I had accepted it as a compliment.

Morag and I took turns at the cutting and throwing out of the peat, as we had done when I had shared her cottage and she was teaching me the essentials of a crofting life. I could of course have cut peats by myself, but it would have been a slow business. One cannot hurry peat cutting, but two people can establish a rhythm that more than halves the time and the work. I unashamedly enjoy working at the peats and not only because of a certain squirrel-like tendency which even in town was sometimes difficult to repress. It is satisfying to be mining for oneself; to be one's own coal merchant; to know that the harder one worked in the spring—always provided the weather played its part—the bigger fires one could indulge in when winter came. I see the glow of the fire in each peat as it is cut and tell myself: so many to keep my feet warm; so many to keep my back warm; now we have cut enough to burn for an hour; now for a day.

Peat cutting is one of the most companionable and one of the messiest jobs in the world. The cutter cuts; the soggy, chocolate-brown slices tilt into the waiting hands of the thrower out; there is a dull thud as the peat hits the heathery ground, releasing the scent of crushed bog-myrtle, or, if the aim is not particularly good, there is a resounding smack, succulent as a Louis Armstrong kiss, as it lands on its predecessor. The mud spreads up your arms—over your ankles; the sun beats on your back or your face depending on whether you cut or throw; the wind blows comfortable coolth. As you work, you and your companion discuss tranquilly the problems of your neighbours, of the country, of the world and, as the heather becomes progressively patterned with peat, you drift deeper into philosophy. So engrossed do you become that you do not notice that the wind has subsided briefly until the vicious clegs fasten on your bare limbs and you forget philosophy and filth and slap at the beastly things until you are a pattern of chocolate-brown yourself.

We stopped for lunch. In books on crofting life I have seen delightful photographs and descriptions of tablecloths being spread on the moor for the crofter families' alfresco meal while at the peats. I look upon them with the utmost scepticism. Perhaps it was the custom years ago; perhaps it was by arrangement with the photographer. Certainly, I have never seen it happen in Bruach, nor have I ever met anyone who recollected it happening. Why a crofter wife who normally sees no necessity to set a table for a meal in the house, let alone use a tablecloth, should make work for herself by taking a tablecloth to spread on the moor when such a dirty job as peat cutting is involved I cannot understand. Morag and I pulled bundles of moss and wiped our hands to a uniform brown and ate oatcakes and crowdie and peat. We cupped our hands and drank water from the well where a family of robbers were said to have disposed of the bodies of their victims. It was very good water. And then we started cutting again. A normal supply of peats for a household not using coal is nine good stacks, which means some thousands of peats. We reckoned we cut at the rate of about ten a minute—six hundred an hour—and we carried on until the breeze dropped away completely, the sun was threatening to dehydrate us and we could no longer stand the onslaught of the clegs.

‘I'm badly needin' a cup of tea,' said Morag. We straightened our backs, shouldered our tools and retraced our path to the road.

Work on the road had made no noticeable progress during the day. Some of the men, under the eye of the now alert Gaffer, were chipping languidly at the rock while others were loading the chippings into a lorry with a deliberation which suggested that they were rationing the number of pieces on their shovels before attempting to raise them from the ground.

‘Hear the Gaffer gettin' right mad with them,' said Morag with evident relish, ‘and isn't my fine fellows enjoyin' themselves. Tormentin' him till they have him hoppin' about like a hen on a hot girdle.'

The Gaffer was an ex-seaman and his vocabulary when provoked was reputed to make the hills blush. We coughed and talked louder than was necessary as we approached and the abruptness with which his stream of abuse ceased was equalled by the alacrity with which the men ceased their work. He was a short, leathery old man who walked about with his hands tucked into his waistcoat and with the air of someone looking for a place to spit. It was rumoured in Bruach that he was a secret admirer of Morag's and as he turned to greet us his thick lips were stretched in a fatuous smile.

‘Wass you at the peats?' he asked superfluously.

‘We was till this minute,' replied Morag. ‘But the clegs was murderin' us once the wind dropped and we could stand it no longer.'

‘Aye, right enough,' agreed the Gaffer, ‘they'd be bad at the peats. And yet can you believe it they can come all round me and I've never been bitten yet. It's funny that now, isn't it?'

‘It's no funny at all,' interpolated the driver of the lorry. ‘Clegs is teetotal. One sup of your blood and they'd die of alcoholic poisoning.'

The Gaffer's capacity for drink was phenomenol and always a source of awed comment and speculation in Bruach. It was said that when he had been ill the previous year the hospital had found it necessary to allocate to him a special blood group—White Horse. It was said that the doctors had found it necessary to wear gas masks when taking a blood sample for fear they would get drank on the fumes. But, despite his addiction, it was rare for the Gaffer to make an exhibition of himself. He imbibed in the seclusion of his hut and only the men who, with true Gaelic warm-heartedness, hovered around to see he did himself no harm, witnessed and reported the state he drank himself into. The only time I was aware of his being even moderately inebriated was when I had been a passenger on the bus one evening and we had got stuck in a snowdrift. Spades were invariably carried in the back of the bus for just such a contingency and the male passengers each took one and set to work to dig us out. All day a blizzard had been blowing but now, though the wind had dropped, the snow was still falling with steady menace. It was bitterly cold and the men were too wrapped up mentally and physically to notice the Gaffer, whose reaction to having a spade thrust into his hands was to shovel and lift, shovel and lift. This he did, loading snow enthusiastically into the mails compartment of the bus through the open rear door and inappropriately accompanying his exertions with a quaintly original version of ‘Fire Down Below' which he rendered with trumpet-tongued disharmony.

The Gaffer's smile broadened reluctantly as the men chuckled over the driver's badinage.

‘Gaffer, go and brew up a cup of tea for the ladies, they'll be needin' one,' Erchy suggested gallantly. ‘And I believe I'll take a cup myself while you're at it.'

‘Tea!' The word burst from the Gaffer's throat like a gas jet extinguishing itself with its own ferocity.

‘Aye, tea,' the voice repeated. ‘Aren't you always teilin' us what a great one you used to be for entertainin' the ladies? Well then, see and go and brew up a cup of tea for them now while you've the chance. An' don't forget us lot. We're damty dry with all the work we're after doin', aren't we, boys?'

The Gaffer looked as though he was about to spit but catching Morag's eye he swallowed and admitted cautiously: ‘The kettle's boilin' for my own tea. Will you take a cup if I made it?'

‘In my hand,' consented Morag, whom I had never known refuse a cup of tea no matter what the situation or circumstance.

He disappeared inside his hut as with startled winks and delighted chortles the men opened up their haversacks and produced a variety of sturdy mugs which they set out on an upturned wheelbarrow. We all made ourselves comfortable on boulders and on other upturned wheelbarrows. Cigarettes were handed round; pipes were lit. After a few minutes the truckling Gaffer reappeared carrying a steaming kettle and a tin of condensed milk; at the sight of his audacious henchmen placidly enjoying the interlude a certain lugubriousness was restored to his features but again he swallowed and forbore to comment.

‘Careful with that stuff, Gaffer,' quipped one of the men as he proceeded to pour out black tea from the kettle. ‘It's that strong I'm thinkin' it will be crackin' the cups.' As I accepted a cup my stomach quailed at the thought of drinking it. Under the pretext of waiting for it to cool I lazily transposed the mosaic of gravel caught in a cleft of rock beside me and watched everyone else alternately gulping tea and extracting suicidal clegs from sticky cups. The pleasantries between Gaffer and men continued unceasingly, and I was able to take advantage of a particularly amusing volley to tilt my cup surreptitiously into a convenient hillock of moss.

‘It's queer to me,' said Morag, as she finished her tea and stood up, ‘why you folks don't use gelatine for blowin' up all this rock, save havin' to chip at it day after day like you're after doin'.'

‘My God,' breathed the Gaffer piously, ‘I'd have no head left to think with and no legs left to run away with if you put gelignite in reach of these buggers. Why, that man, there,' the Gaffer went on, pointing an accusing finger at Neilac, ‘he came near to killin' me with his pick yesterday, never mind gelignite.'