The Loud Halo

by Lillian Beckwith

  Maggie filled an old black kettle from one of the enamel pails which stood in the stainless steel sink and poised it delicately half on, half, off the fire with the remark that she didn’t see the use of these sort of fireplaces anyway, what was the use of a fire that didn’t boil the bloody kettle?

  ‘Don’t you use the electric kettle?’ Katy asked.

  ‘I can never find a match to light it with,’ retorted Maggie, and when we had finished laughing, she went on: ‘The bugger won’t let me use it. He says I’ll likely burn the bottom out of it.’ The outrage in her voice was only for our benefit.

  ‘The bugger’, her son Seoras, appeared in the doorway at that moment. He was a dark, wiry young man with a permanently satirical expression on his face and a tongue even less inhibited than his mother’s. However, he greeted us with perfunctory politeness as he threw off his jacket and sat down at the table. Maggie scooped a steaming bowl of unpeeled potatoes from one of the pots on the hearth and ladled a mound of boiled fish onto a plate from the other one and placed them in front of Seoras. He bent to his repast with great concentration.

  ‘Will you come and see over the house?’ invited Maggie, and led us first to the blue and white tiled bathroom which contained, besides an aridly futile-looking W.C., a bath so narrow that anything but the slimmest of figures would have needed the aid of tyre levers to get in or out.

  ‘That’s a useful cupboard you have there, under the washbasin,’ I observed. ‘Much better than being able to see all the pipes.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ agreed Maggie, and opened the door to reveal a broody hen sitting tight on a clutch of eggs. ‘It’s a grand little cupboard,’ she enthused.

  We followed her into a downstairs bedroom and then into another room, not yet furnished.

  ‘Which room is this to be?’ I asked.

  Maggie hesitated a moment or two before replying.

  ‘Indeed, I don’t know just what he called it,’ she admitted. ‘Seoras!’ she screamed back into the kitchen. ‘What did they call this room on the plan?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ responded Seoras thickly.

  ‘Wait now till I get the plan and then you’ll tell me,’ said Maggie, rushing off. She returned and handed me a rolled-up plan which we studied for a moment together.

  ‘This will be the sitting-room, then,’ I hazarded.

  ‘The sitting-room?’ she repeated guilelessly. ‘Is that what they call it? Indeed, God knows what we’ll put to sit in here unless it’s more clockin’ hens.

  ‘D’you hear that, Seoras—it’s the sitting-room,’ she called.

  ‘No, it is not, then—the shitting-room is the one with the bath in it,’ retorted Seoras.

  Upstairs there were three bedrooms, more than Maggie had known in her life although she had brought up seven children. ‘It’s kind of lonely, though,’ she said regretfully when we exclaimed over their proportions. All the windows were curtained with net, shutting out the glorious view and to me it seemed a pity that the crofter wife should emulate the townswoman in that the bigger windows she aspires to the more curtaining she buys to screen them. I drew aside one of the bedroom curtains to look out across the shaggy moors, smouldering with autumn colour, to where the mist-wreathed hills looked down sulkily at the restless water. My three companions came up behind me.

  ‘I see old Flora and Jamesie didn’t take to livin’ in their new house yet,’ observed Katy, pointing to a brash new dwelling beside an old croft house on which a sagging roof seemed to have settled with much the same brooding determination as the hen I had just seen on the clutch of eggs in the bathroom.

  ‘No, and I don’t believe they ever will,’ Maggie asserted.

  ‘I wonder why?’ I mused.

  ‘Ach, I think they’re afraid of dirtying it,’ was Maggie’s pert rejoinder.

  It was time for us to go, and we returned to the kitchen to collect Ishbel’s bag and my gloves.

  ‘I must pee before I go,’ announced Ishbel with perfect naturalness.

  ‘Of course,’ said Maggie hospitably, and led us out to the back of the house where a new concrete cattle byre of approved hygienic design had replaced the former dry-stone byre. Straddling the dung trench behind the incurious cows we relieved ourselves.

  ‘It’s handy, this,’ Katy approved.

  ‘Ach, aye, it’s better by far than the old place,’ replied Maggie seriously.

  Seoras was standing beside the rainwater tank, scrubbing at his face with a tatter of towel.

  ‘If you’re goin’ back to Bruach now, I was just thinkin’ I might get a lift with you,’ he said. ‘It’s time I got myself a haircut.’

  ‘Seoras!’ expostulated his mother, ‘you can’t go yet, you didn’t milk the cow.’

  ‘Milk her yourself, you lazy old cailleach,’ replied Seoras with complete bonhomie. He picked up a bottle of beer from the kitchen table and followed us outside.

  ‘Seoras!’ his mother screamed after him. ‘You didn’t get the peats.’

  Seoras responded with a spate of Gaelic too fluent for me to understand.

  ‘Seoras, you’re a b … ,’ Maggie clapped her hand over her mouth and looked contrite. ‘Oh, Seoras boy, I nearly called you a bad name.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ Seoras returned with a bleak smile. ‘You nearly called me a bugger.’

  ‘Oh, no, Seoras,’ she rectified, ‘I nearly called you a bastard.’

  They were still hurling insults at each other with perfect good humour when we drove away with Seoras in the back seat beside Ishbel.

  ‘Isn’t it a good thing there’s a right barber now in Bruach after all these years,’ offered Ishbel timidly, for the presence of a male always overawed her. ‘Is he a good barber would you say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ interposed Katy, ‘but,’ she added as if in commendation, ‘they all say he’s a good sheep shearer, anyway.’

  It was only during the last year that Bruach had acquired a barber when a crofter exile who claimed to have had barbering experience in Glasgow came home to spend his retirement on his sister’s croft. Some said he had never been more than temporary lather boy and that fifty years ago, but whatever qualifications he may or may not have possessed he had announced his willingness to give any man a haircut or a shave. So as to run no risk of his earnings interfering with his pension he would accept only a pint of beer in recompense for his services. To the gratification of his lonely widowed sister and the corresponding envy of neighbours the barber’s house had soon become a popular ceilidh house where there was always a good gathering of men not only from Bruach but from other barberless villages desiring to have their hair cut. His shaving was not nearly as much in demand, and those who had undergone the experience did not choose to repeat it, complaining that the barber ‘kept a bloody cuckoo in a clock that burst out every quarter of an hour and made you jump so much you were feart where the razor would land next.’

  As we were depositing Ishbel outside her home a sauntering figure approached us. It was Erchy, just returning from his whelking. Seoras poked his head out of the car to talk to him.

  ‘Are you here just to ceilidh then, or are you goin’ some place?’ Erchy asked him.

  ‘I’m here to see will the barber cut my hair for me,’ replied Seoras.

  Erchy lifted his cap and felt his own mop of hair experimentally. ‘I could do with a haircut myself,’ he admitted, ‘an Johnny’s supposed to be bringin’ me out some of that stuff on the bus tonight.’ He nodded towards the bottle of beer in Seoras’s lap.

  ‘A bottle of beer is very cheap for a haircut, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘I got a haircut and three dirty stories for my pint last time,’ said Seoras. ‘That’s good value if you like.’

  ‘Aye,’ admitted Erchy cautiously, ‘it’s good value right enough but all the same, sometimes if there’s been a few there before you so you’re at the end of the queue, it’s a damty queer haircut you get out of it.’

  Love and Coal

  �
��There,’ said Yawn, with a satisfied grunt. ‘You’ll not take those out with your teeths.’

  I concealed a smile. ‘No,’ I agreed, though I doubted if his handiwork was really any more robust than my own. Yawn had found me trying to repair the drooping boards of my peat shed when he had come to deliver a piece of his sister Sarah’s home-made haggis. With uncharacteristic gallantry he had seized the hammer when I laid it down for an instant and, without comment, had continued to hammer in the nails himself.

  ‘That should stand for a while,’ I acknowledged by way of gratitude, having learned that to offer Yawn direct thanks only embarrassed and confused him.

  He walked around the shed, aiming experimental kicks at the walls. ‘You’ll be needin’ a new shed anyway before long,’ he warned me. ‘You cannot expect this one to stand up to much in the way of weather.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’ll have to stay until it blows away or falls down,’ I told him. ‘I can’t afford to build a new one.’

  ‘If you could put some stones round it just, to strengthen it,’ he suggested. ‘It might do you a wee bitty longer.’

  ‘And where do I get the stones?’ I asked him resignedly.

  Yawn plunged his hands into his pockets with an air of finality. ‘Aye,’ he conceded, ‘that’s the way of it just.’

  Despite the rocky ground, the craggy cliffs and the boulder-strewn shores, suitable stones for building were scarce enough in Bruach. There was an abundance of round stones, or oval stones, or sausage-shaped stones, all moulded to smooth symmetry by the sea or by the rushing burns, but flat stones as could be built into a wall were precious and if you had any on your croft you hoarded them jealously for the day when you would surely need them. They might be required in times of storm for weighting down haystacks or perhaps the roof of your house (it is difficult for an amateur to tie a rope successfully to a round stone). One of pleasing shape and size might even be used as a headstone for a grave for few Bruachites wasted money on expensive tombstones. And of course the local lobster-fishermen were constantly on the look-out for good stones for their creels. Indeed so rapacious were they that it had been reported from some villages that the fishermen were suspected of helping themselves to headstones from the burial grounds. Erchy maintained the report was more than suspicion and claimed to have seen a creel newly hauled from the sea in which a couple of good-sized lobsters were crawling over a stone roughly carved with the words ‘Isobel C … aged 89 yrs’. Erchy said he couldn’t have eaten those lobsters ‘supposin’ you’d given him a bottle of the “hard stuff” [whisky overproof] to wash the taste out of his mouth afterwards’. And yet though stone in Bruach was so scarce there was on nearly every croft at least one tumbled ruin of a dry-stone house or shed which, curiously enough, no one ever tampered with. There was just such a ruin in a corner of my own croft, now smugly canopied with many decades of moss and fern growth, but when I had one day embarked on the task of levering up some of the stones from their settled positions with the avowed intention of strengthening my peat shed in just the way Yawn was now suggesting, he himself had soon appeared on the scene to exhort me not, on any account, to disturb the stones.

  ‘But they’re not doing any good there, are they, Yawn?’ I had argued, suspecting that it was either sheer sentiment or the possible disturbance of the ‘wee folk’ that prompted his concern.

  ‘Aye, but you’d best not lift them,’ he had insisted. ‘You’ll lift those stones and you’ll lift a fever.’

  ‘A fever?’ I echoed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Ach, well, that was one of the houses that was left at the time of the big fever when it was in these parts,’ he had explained. ‘They set fire to all those that had it but the fever still stays in the stones so they say.’ His voice was exceedingly grave. ‘Nobody about here believes in touchin’ them, anyway.’

  ‘Do you remember this big fever, Yawn?’ I had asked him.

  ‘No, but I mind my father tellin’ me of it. He remembered it from when he was a lad just.’

  As soon as Yawn had gone I had dismissed his warning as absurd and had carried the few stones I had already prised out over to the peat shed. They were extremely heavy and the muscles of my back began to object so strongly that I had given up work for the rest of the day. That night I had been unable to sleep because of the agonising pain in my back and next morning I had felt as though I was developing all the symptoms of a severe cold. However, within a day or so I was perfectly all right again and I returned to the task of further depleting the ruin. I had succeeded in dislodging several more stones before my back had began to trouble me and a sneaky chillness had insinuated itself between my shoulder, blades. I had left off work and gone back to the cottage to get warm but though there were no other recognisable symptoms of cold the dullness refused to be thawed by hot drinks sipped before a roasting fire with my back as the main target for the heat, and it remained icily indifferent to a ‘poultice’ of a hot-water bottle tucked under my bedjacket; for three days I was subject to sudden fits of shivering. As soon as I had recovered I resolved that when a reasonable day came I would continue work on the ruin, and told myself with great firmness that my aches and pains were either the direct result of perspiring freely while working in heavy clothes and then standing about in a bleak wind, or else they were of psychological origin. For how, I asked myself, could fever linger in stones to remain a source of infection a century or so later? There had come a day of relative mildness with a ragged sky that looked like old sheep’s fleece and a spectral breeze that breathed moistly on the rusty sedge. I approached the ruin with waning confidence, for it seemed to my doubtless prejudiced eye to have taken on a slightly sinister aspect, the dark cavities from which I had already removed the stones looking like resentful scars on the ageing skin of moss. It is easy enough to shrug off apprehension or superstition in the warm comfort of one’s own kitchen when one has just switched off ‘Woman’s Hour’; not so easy when one is completely alone with the wildness of the moors where even the straightening of the trodden grass dogs one’s footsteps with stealthy whispers. Strangely loath to start work I prospected for a place where the dislodging of one stone might release several more and thus quicken my labours but they seemed to be embedded more firmly than I remembered and when I thought I had found such a place I had not the strength to move a single stone. My back began to ache in anticipation and I could have sworn I felt the first vestige of a shiver. I had looked sourly at the ruin and then sorrowfully towards my flimsy peat shed. Then I had gone back to the cottage and started to bake bread.

  ‘Aye,’ repeated Yawn, pushing vigorously at the peat shed again. ‘There’s not many stones hereabouts that you can use.’ We had carefully turned our backs on the ruin, which I never interfered with again. ‘You could get a few from the shore maybe if you looked long enough,’ he added.

  ‘It isn’t often one sees a flat stone on the shore,’ I objected.

  ‘Ach, you’d find flat ones if you looked for them. Other folks does. Look at Alasdair there,’ he went on. ‘Every day he goes to the shore and finds himself a good stone or two to carry up in his creel for this wall he’s after buildin’.’ There was a glint of amusement in Yawn’s eye.

  ‘That’s so,’ I admitted. Every day, whatever the weather, one could see the indomitable Alasdair straggling up the cliff path from the shore with one or two stones each weighing nearly half a hundredweight in a creel on his back. These he would painstakingly build into the very substantial wall that had been destined originally to protect the tiny flower garden his Glasgow-born wife had once dreamed of planting. Perhaps, when he had dedicated himself to it over fifty years ago as a young man of twenty-four, the task had not seemed to him so stupendous but even now though he rarely missed a day during all that time the wall still needed many stones to complete it. But, though his wife had been dead for some years, he still plodded doggedly on. Perhaps he was impelled by the desire to fulfil a promise made to his deceased wife; perhaps it was t
oo difficult to break the self-imposed routine of a lifetime, but whatever the reason Alasdair’s wall still continued to grow by that daily quota of hard-won stones.

  ‘It passes the time for him,’ Yawn said with true Gaelic understanding of his need. I suspected that if the wall were ever completed Alasdair might find there was no purpose left in living.

  Being blessed with neither Alasdair’s rugged physique nor the Bruachites’ subjugation of time I knew that any flat stones I might find on the shore would stay there long enough to be washed into round ones before I would exert myself to carry them. My peat shed would have to take its chance in the gales.

  ‘Well, are you thinkin’ of buildin’ Miss Peckwitt a new shed?’ Morag came upon us in the midst of our ponderings and Yawn, fearing I might take her remark seriously, left us.

  ‘I’ve brought you a wee bitty meat will do for your dinner.’ Morag handed me a basin with half a dozen fresh chops in it.

  ‘It’s wonderful to have fresh meat,’ I said gratefully, thinking how lucky I was to have a respite from the limp and unidentifiable chunks of flesh with gory paper clinging tenaciously that came to us through the post each week from the mainland butcher.

  ‘Aye, mo ghaoil,’ she rejoined devoutly, ‘an’ once you’ve eaten heather-fed lamb you’re spoiled for any other meat for the rest of your life.’

  Together we walked back to the cottage. ‘I’ll take the bowl back with me just,’ said Morag. ‘I’m thinkin’ I’ll take a wee taste over to Willy’s wife, the poor soul.’

  ‘How is Willy?’ I asked as I rinsed out the basin. ‘The poor man seems to be lingering on a long time, doesn’t he?’