A Croft in the Hills (22 page)

On the fifth of January came the day Helen had to start school again. We had decided that she would have to leave Glen Convinth and go to Abriachan school. Now that I was on my own, I was
finding it impossible to walk with her the two miles every morning. It was usually eleven o’clock before I got back and then every job about the place had to be started almost from scratch
and finished before darkness came down at half-past three.

Helen accepted this arrangement calmly enough. Her new teacher, Miss Fraser, received her with kindness and understanding and after a day or two she settled into her fresh surroundings. Miss
Fraser, who was born and brought up in the district, had herself been a pupil at the school where she was now in charge. She had seen its roll diminish from over a hundred to a mere handful, but
she and her sister, Miss Kate, who cooked delicious dinners for the scholars, kept smiling faces and went briskly about their work. They always made us most welcome in the schoolhouse and they
understood our interest in the district. If only So-and-so were living, they would say, he would have been able to tell you so much about the place.

No local history or guide-book contains more than a passing reference to Abriachan, but the older people with the lively minds, such as our neighbour Mrs. Maclean, could make the place come to
life for us. The chance visitor here, looking up towards Rhivoulich, will see only a little stone house falling into decay in its hollow on the hillside, and the bright green growth on land that
had once been tended. To our eyes, thanks to Mrs. Maclean, it is the place where a cherished neighbour had her first child, when the doctor rode over on horseback, in the falling snow, from the
next glen.

Likewise, the tumble of stones on the near slope to the west is the place where the good wife baked a whole boll of meal in preparation for a wedding in the family, and the festivities went on
for a full week.

On the hillside, beyond our march, we can visualise the small drama that took place one day in the colourful time of the last occupant of the croft there. He was a man of many skills and one of
them was the making of a dram. One day word reached him that the excisemen were on their rounds. It was winter, snow had been falling, and only that morning he’d been up the hill for a drop
from the hidden ‘still’ to keep the cold out. The imprint of his boots had left a clear trail on the shining white ground. So he calmly borrowed a score of sheep from a neighbour and
drove them up and down the hill, and round and round his dwelling, till every tell-tale footprint was obliterated. And the secret of the whereabouts of his still went with him to the grave.

Bottles and jars of the stuff were easily enough hidden in the house itself, favourite places being in the mattress of a relative put hastily to bed and said to be at the point of death, or
behind the voluminous skirts of an invalid granny who couldn’t be persuaded to rise from her chair.

When we watch the two burns foaming along the edges of Mrs. Maclean’s east field, after a night of heavy rain, we remember how this piece of ground got its strange name ‘The Island
of the Cheeses’. After a downpour the field, with a burn on either side of it, does indeed become an island and, one day of exceptionally heavy spate, the cheeses that the women had made up
in the shieling by Rhivoulich were carried down the burn and landed on this green patch.

On our own ground we often come on small, neat piles of broken stones and we can picture the man who worked away at them and had them ready to sell to the roadmakers, when death overtook him.
This is an old land. Stone Age implements are found in the bogs and traces of very ancient habitation can be seen on the hill slopes. In spite of hydro-electricity, the telephone and the weekly
bus, the links with the past are strong, and they make the present so much less shadowy and unreal.

At the foot of the hill, on the shore of Loch Ness, lies the font-like stone, its hollow always brimming with water, said to have been used by Columba for baptising the faithful. And what of the
monster, that link with a very remote past? Had they ever seen it? we asked several neighbours during our early days here. Well, no, they hadn’t, but they knew others who had, and seeing, we
gathered, is not the only way of believing. There were so many unaccountable things in the world, anyway, that a loch monster was not such a great source of wonder after all.

The nearest we ourselves have come to seeing the monster is to have caught the reflection of its appearance in the wide, bright eyes of Sadie and Bertha. One summer evening we came on them
pushing their bicycles up the hill. They had been riding along the loch shore when they came unexpectedly on a sight of the beast, cruising quietly along, quite near the bank. One or two cars
stopped, they said, and a small group of people watched until the creature disappeared below the surface. It had a face like a Cheviot sheep’s, Sadie said, and a sinuous, black body. Since
that evening we feel we are practically one of the band of ‘seers’.

Near our own march fence runs the road which the women of Glen Urquhart took to meet their men coming home from Culloden. A neighbour once found a shoe, of the type worn by the soldiers at the
time of the ’45, preserved in the peat, near this road. We like to think it was lost by a Redcoat in too hot pursuit of a fleet Highlander and to imagine him having to give up the chase and
limp back to camp.

Among the scattered birches on the hill slope, where Helen likes to play at Jacobites and Redcoats with some of her friends, is a stone memorial to a forgotten clan chief, who died in a
forgotten skirmish. On a neighbouring estate are several modest memorials, consisting of a Gaelic inscription let into a piece of natural stone. The laird responsible, a historian by inclination,
wisely considered it important to record, not necessarily that a battle occurred at a certain spot but such things as the simple fact that this was the place where the shoemaker lived and worked,
that even this small green field had a name.

Then there are the intangible legacies from the past. A neighbour of ours, young and active and full of fun, will still look anxiously at a heron, bird of ill-omen, flapping his way from the
hill, lest he should pass too near her place. And a man is remembered who, in his youth, had to walk thirty miles in a day without speaking to anyone he might meet, to visit the only person who
could cure him of the evil spell which had been cast upon him for spite.

Fear, along with its fantasies, lingers in the corners of the Highland mind, but it is a fear of the unknowable and an altogether healthier thing than fear of the calculable horrors of
concentration camp, or nuclear warfare. You can live with a fear of the unknowable. It does get at the root of the thing for, at bottom, it’s an honest enough acknowledgment of the existence
of the mystery of evil. Once acknowledge the existence of the mystery and its manifestations, however horrible, can be seen in some sort of perspective. And it works the other way, too. Time and
again, when we’ve been near defeat, wondering at the narrowness of the girdle which keeps happiness intact, we’ve been aware of a sort of hovering of friendly wings about our roof.

One snowy morning I was trudging about the steading, with armfuls of straw, when I saw a figure coming slowly down from the stile, a suitcase clutched in either hand. It was Jim! I dropped the
straw and hurried to meet him. He had got several weeks’ leave, before taking on a new job in spring. It had come about suddenly and he hadn’t been able to warn us, even by a telephone
message to the Post Office. It was better that way, the surprise was a delight in itself.

He had had to walk the two miles up the hill, from the bus, carrying his cases and was nearly exhausted. I cooked him a dish of ham and eggs and we sat talking away the rest of the morning. Then
he changed into his old corduroys and dungarees and was soon tramping about the place as though he had never been away.

Jim was back just in time. The following morning we awoke to the now familiar sound of a northerly gale tearing under the roof slates. A storm of blizzard proportion battered at us all day. We
struggled out three times to see to the animals. The rest of the day we spent huddled at the living-room fire, swathed in woollen garments, heating panfuls of broth and making tea and cocoa. Helen
loved those days of storm, when we were marooned together cosily, in the firelight, with the world whirling madly outside the window-panes. Jim taught us to play cribbage and we went early to bed,
with nearly all our clothes on and hot-water bottles stuffed down our jerseys.

We were wakened in the dead of night by the sound of water dripping on the stairs and got up to investigate. The water was pouring steadily through the ceiling at various points. Evidently the
oil-lamp which we kept burning by the cistern had not provided enough heat to prevent the pipes from freezing. The overflow pipe was blocked and the water was escaping where it could.

We tried to turn on the taps in the scullery to relieve the pressure, but they were frozen, too. Next moment the water began coming through on to our beds. We lit lamps and candles, we moved the
beds on to dry spots, we put every available pail and basin at strategic points to catch the drips. Every now and again a drip would stop, only to start up again somewhere else.

By this time every step on the staircase was coated with ice and going up and down in the dark was a tricky and dangerous business. We got a kettle boiling. Jim at last managed to thaw out one
of the scullery taps and the drippings slowly ceased. Since that night we have always left one tap slightly on in frosty weather.

Next morning the wind had shifted to the south-west and was blowing the snow into great drifts along the road. The food van was already a couple of days overdue and we were running short of
bread. I was reluctant to ask for the loan of a loaf from a neighbour, for I knew that everyone would be as short as we were ourselves. Bread is a thing one is apt to take very much for granted,
total lack of it seems a calamity. That evening I baked what I hoped would turn out to be a loaf in a cake-tin. It was edible, that was all! It certainly hadn’t the authentic texture or
flavour of bread, but we enjoyed thick slices of it spread with butter and home-made jam.

Next day the sky was a radiant blue and the icicles along the steading roof dazzled our eyes. We went to look over the sheep and found them in surprisingly good shape. They were patiently
scraping away at the snow to get a bite of heather or a mouthful of rush-tops. We filled our lungs with the cold, still air and forgot our small needs and worries. We had a sound roof to shelter
us, peat and wood for warmth, milk, eggs and potatoes in plenty to keep us fed. Health and strength we knew to be the enormous benefits they really are. We were free to open our minds and let the
stark beauty of hill and moor and sky strike into us.

It was like a morning before time began to tick, before life started its endless nagging. We were isolated, apart, and face-to-face with a brand-new, yet age-old, world. There was a whole,
strange, unknown patterning in the crystals on a frozen blade of grass. Under the ice the water lay black and deep and remote, keeping its own counsel. This was primeval water, heedless of its
function to minister to human needs. A dog barked from a croft a mile away and the silence was cracked from end to end. We made our way happily back to the job of keeping life astir, tingling with
the rare refreshment that seeps from the springs of things.

As soon as the snow-plough had opened the road, John Maclean, to whom our wintering sheep belonged, came to take his flock away. They were grazing in a rushy hollow, some distance from the road.
We tried to drive them slowly the half-mile to the gate, but they could scarcely move. The frozen snow had formed into heavy balls on their fleeces so there was nothing for it but to leave them
where they were till they thawed out. We carried bundles of hay to them and gave them as many turnips as we could spare. Two or three days later the thaw came and they quickly recovered their
normal agility.

The drains couldn’t carry all the sudden rush of water and a flood rose in the byre. The water swirled alarmingly round the cows’ hooves and we had to lodge some of them temporarily
in the stable. Then by degrees everything settled down. The food van came and we had a meal of steak and onions and fresh bread.

By the end of the month the first larks were singing. It had seemed scarcely possible that a bird would ever sing over our fields again, yet here they were, as determined as ever to enchant us!
But it was only a brief overture, for in mid-February a second blizzard struck us. It was of far greater intensity than the January one. We woke in an unusual darkness. The windows were plastered
with frozen snow. We opened the door and peered out at the fantastic shapes that had risen about us during the night. Between the house and the steading there was a drift five feet deep, and the
snow was already packed hard as cement.

We ate a hot breakfast, then we muffled ourselves in the heaviest clothing we could find and cut a way through to the byre. As I sat down to milk the cow the young blackbird, which had taken up
its abode in the steading since the previous storm, flew down from a beam below the roof and perched on a bundle of straw near me. His bright eyes darted swift glances in my direction. As soon as
the milk began to spurt into the pail he set up a tiny, inward warbling. It was one of the sweetest sounds I have ever heard. From that day on, he would greet me every morning. He was shy and
shadowy yet infinitely companionable and I missed him when spring came.

Later in the morning we hacked a way to the turnip pit. The turnips were sound, under their thick cover of turf and snow, and the cows ate them greedily. The post didn’t come that day. We
were not surprised, for the drifts on the road were chest-high, and we knew that had there been any urgent communication for us he would have got through, though it took him till well into the
night. The vanman, too, we knew would have made every effort to reach us, but it was obviously impossible. The storms always came on, or near, van-day, when supplies were at their lowest and though
we had laid in an emergency ration since the last blizzard it wouldn’t last a week.