A Croft in the Hills (23 page)

In former times the crofts and farms always stocked up for the winter, so that they were independent of outside provisioning from October to April. A barrel or two of salt herring would
supplement the home-produced oatmeal and potatoes; milk and eggs, of course, were in daily supply. Dry groceries were bought in bulk, when the lambs or stirks were sold. But today life is lived on
a weekly basis and the vans go everywhere, now that there are roads that they can negotiate. Eggs are produced in greater quantities, we sell them weekly and buy our groceries weekly. When a
breakdown in communications occurs, following the natural calamity of storm, we have to face a certain amount of hardship, but it is a lively experience trying to make the most one can of
one’s own resources.

We certainly never came anywhere near suffering real hunger. Life is sweeter near the bone. We would come in, glowing from our exertions in the snow, to eat vegetable soup and huge, floury
potatoes, with a relish. Afterwards we would stretch out in our chairs by the fire, to listen to the evening news bulletin on the wireless. It was strange to hear the smooth, remote voice breaking
into the stillness of the kitchen, telling of the things we had been battling with all day: we are not used to hitting the headlines. We heard of crofts isolated for days, supplies running low,
telephone lines down. Well, we can do without the telephone for a while! Should there be a real emergency, sickness or accident, we know that neighbours would hack a way through any drift to get
help. There are still sledges handy, there is even an old horse-drawn snow-plough on a nearby croft and there is real satisfaction in putting one’s independence to the test.

What worried us, during that second blizzard, was the fact that our supply of oat-straw for the cows was running short. We had had to feed them liberally, from the turn of the year, in order to
keep up their body heat, and had known that we might be faced with a shortage, for our last harvest had not been good. We had meant to buy in a load of fodder about the middle of February, but we
knew that it would be some time before even a tractor could reach us. With every road in the north impassable, it might be weeks before the hard-pressed snow-plough team would come our way.

Once again Mrs. Maclean came to our rescue. She had an ample supply of fodder, she said, for her one cow. We were welcome to take as many bundles of straw as would tide us over till the road was
opened. So every day we went back and forth to her barn, crossing the burn quite easily on the packed ice, each carrying two or three bundles of straw roped to our backs. It was exhausting work but
it saved the cows’ lives. As soon as the road was opened we got a trailer-load of straw from a farm a mile away. The tractor couldn’t get into the steading, so the load had to be left
at the roadside, whence we carried the whole half-ton of it down to the barn, on our backs. When spring eventually came it felt strange, indeed, to walk anywhere without an enormous burden strapped
on our shoulders.

All the rest of that month we had storms, big and small. Sheep on the hill-grazing had to be dug out of drifts. We lived a hand-to-mouth life, but we kept fit and forgot what a normally planned
existence was like. By the beginning of March the larks were singing again, and the black ground began to show in great, gaping patches about the fields. We looked at them curiously, for it was so
many weeks since we’d seen anything but whiteness surrounding us.

An elderly neighbour died that month. The road was still closed to wheeled traffic, as it was impossible to shift the hard-packed snow by ordinary means. Jim went with the others, to help carry
the coffin to the point the snow-plough had reached. In days gone by the coffins were always shouldered by neighbours, over the hill-track, to the burial ground in the next glen. The old funeral
paths are still clearly visible and the cairns, where the bearers stopped for a rest, still stand. How comforting it must have been to know that one would be carried on friendly shoulders, through
the sweet air, not trundled in a stuffy hearse!

By that time the grocer’s van was managing to reach a point about a mile from our gate and from there we carried our goods, or pulled them on a sledge. Just before we ran out of paraffin
the road was finally cleared. We swarmed eagerly into the van and laid hands on all the things we needed.

The evenings were lengthening and the moor came alive again, with peewits, snipe and curlew in possession. Slowly we discarded our heavy garments and let the soft air play about our bare heads
and arms bare to the elbow. We gathered a handful of earth and let it trickle through our fingers, marvelling that it was actually warm to the touch, and dry and friable. We had witnessed one more
silent miracle.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WAY AHEAD

T
HAT
was not to be a fully realised spring, for us. The snow was still lying on the high tops when the ploughs were set to work on neighbouring places.
Horses and tractors were moving steadily up and down the small, steep fields everywhere all day and far into the darkening. But for us there was not to be a full seed-time. Reluctantly, we had had
to devise a new scheme for living. We would graze sheep throughout the year and cattle during the summer months. We would buy in feeding stuff for the hens, and keep only as many as would show a
profit on this basis. Our aim was to supply our essential needs—milk, eggs, potatoes, vegetables and fuel—from our own resources and to obtain cash for our further requirements from
Jim’s spells away at work, from the rent for the wintering and from what I could earn by writing. We had sold the van and had cut our wants down to a minimum. This shedding of the load of
possessions and needs gave us a renewed sense of freedom. The van had been useful, certainly, but it had brought its own set of problems. Many a time it had refused to start, or had broken down at
some crucial point on the journey home. We now found that it was the easiest thing in the world to walk to the bus when we had business abroad. There would be a layer of worry less, on the surface
of our minds, and we’d have more time to watch the slow, high circling of the buzzards over the moor, and to chat with a neighbour at his field-side as we passed down the road on foot. With
life being lived at its simplest level, we discovered a fresh savour in the smallest things. A fried egg, mashed turnip and a floury potato, on one’s plate, was a meal to look forward to. To
stretch one’s fingers to a blaze of logs, during the hour before bed, was a happy occasion. Shelter, basic food and warmth, our small place would always give us. Then the mere fact of being
together, the three of us, was a constant source of celebration. Further separations were inevitable, but we learnt to keep the thought of them out of sight and to live delightedly in the present.
We had achieved perspective and who can fail to do that who has the sun to make him sing, the rock under his feet, the stars waiting, each night, to be wondered at?

We lost Charlie that spring. He had come through the winter in surprisingly good shape. Then one warm day, when the grass was beginning to come to a flush, he wandered into a bog and got himself
caught. We tried to pull him out with ropes, but it was impossible and he had to be destroyed. It was a sore blow, but it was better for him that he should go that way rather than linger into
sickness or disability. He died enjoying the freedom that he throve on and we buried him where he fell.

Summer came, a summer of real heat and brilliance. Jim was at work and I spent a lot of time writing. When Helen’s holidays began, she and I practically lived out of doors. Housework came
almost to a standstill. After several weeks of drought, the water system broke down, for the flow was not strong enough to work the pump. We had to fetch our drinking water in pails from the
spring, and we relied on the store in the rain-water butts for other purposes. We wore the simplest clothing, which could be washed out in a minimum of water, in a pool in the burn. We ate lettuces
and eggs and hardly ever lit a fire.

In the mornings we worked in the garden, and nearly every afternoon we went to the loch for a dip, as Helen loved the water and was fast learning to swim. We were both burnt gipsy-brown by the
sun. We spent several days helping to pick fruit for the ‘strawberry-man’ and I made enormous quantities of jam. I did my writing in the cool of the evening, after Helen was in bed, and
I sold several articles and sketches of Highland life to Scottish papers.

In the autumn the Hydro-Electric Scheme began to push its nose our way; jeeps and lorries careered through bog and heather, performing fantastic feats of transportation. In an incredibly short
space of time a long line of poles sprang up, its straight, geometric design striking a strange note in a landscape of curves and hollows. But we quickly got used to the spectacle. The men on the
job were an odd collection of types and nationalities. We boiled their dinner-kettles for them and took them into shelter on the worst days of storm. Later we stood open-mouthed to watch them
swarming up the poles with climbing-irons. At last, in mid-December, we were ‘lit up’. Most of the crofts in the strath were participating in the Scheme. It was cheering to see the
lights flash on and off in the evening. Occasionally someone would forget to switch off a light at bed-time, and next day Sandy or Duncan would be hugely chaffed about the late hours he kept! Those
who had electric fires or cookers were able to keep secret the hour at which they started the daily round, for it was no longer possible to tell, by the rising of the thin plume of smoke from the
chimney-head, when the mistress had set her porridge-pot to boil!

It is, perhaps, in the winter mornings rather than the evenings that we most relish the comfort of the ‘electricity’. To be able to slip from bed and flood the room with light and
warmth at the flick of a couple of switches is little short of a miracle to those who have had all their lives to grope for matches in the early dark and to struggle with damp kindling sticks and
paraffin oil. And to have a kettle that boils before you even have time to set out the cups and fill the teapot is certainly better than a trip to the moon. This is the sort of progress the
down-to-earth Highlander really appreciates. He is still sceptical about most of the contraptions which the townsman considers essential, but something which will help him with his own
fundamentals, that he is quick to prize.

That winter I began taking Helen to the village hall, on Saturday afternoons, for a lesson in the rudiments of music on the piano. We would make an expedition of it, walking over the hill on the
fine days, and finishing up with a fireside chat with a neighbour before the return home. One afternoon we met the post as we reached the road. He handed me several letters, among them was one of
my own familiar, self-addressed, large envelopes. ‘A reject’, I thought, ‘I’ll take a look and get it over’. I slit the seal hurriedly, meaning to forget the
disappointment in the joy of the frosty, sparkling afternoon. To my astonishment, I drew out a brief, polite letter from a B.B.C. producer, which stated simply that he liked the story I had sent
him, that he would use it as a Morning Story on a date in January, and that it would be read by the actor, James McKechnie.

He read the story with exactly the right emphasis and understanding, and that was the beginning of a happy collaboration. ‘Why don’t you write a play?’ some of our friends
suggested. But that I don’t think I could do. I’m content for the moment that a glimpse of the Highland way of life should be borne from time to time on the back of this voice from
nowhere. The truth about the Highland people is not in drama, but in the small, daily acts of living, in the long, slow rhythms which shape their lives. The spotlight is not for them. It is
fitting, to my mind, that they should be ‘on the air’ in the morning, in the calm daylight of reality.

That Christmas I received several letters from people in far-off places—in Australia, America and the other side of Canada—who had read the little articles I had done for Scottish
papers about life on the croft. I found these more heartening than the cheques the work brought me. They were mostly from Highland Scots who had emigrated and who still called themselves
‘exiles’. They were proof that economic prosperity can still leave a gap in the mind and in the heart. I read lately in the paper that in the United States, among that section of the
community which is satiated with the good things of life, it is quite common practice for people to take a ‘happiness’ pill, when they want to revive themselves, before a party. It is
not surprising that thoughtful people everywhere are beginning to wonder where progress is leading us all. We can rush round half the globe, now, in a matter of weeks, provided we have a pocketful
of pills to keep us in trim. Or we can sit at home and peer at the antics of the other half reflected on a tiny screen. Yet how much wiser are we at the end of the day?

There is the moon, you’ll say, there is outer space. Now that we know so much about the world we live in, is it not up to us to concentrate all our energy on probing into these farther
regions? But—do we really know so much about this world we’ve glimpsed, maybe, at second-hand? It still takes a man with a seeing eye a whole lifetime really to know the few acres he
lives on.