She was the pig which they fattened annually. It had been many years since the name had been invented for the first of a series of these yearly residents, and the jest had quietened to a normal household mention, until our enquiring had revived it. No rancour was in the baptism, but a sufficient historical awareness. There was no need for either of us to comment or demur. This was a MacDonald farm!
And the folk? The gracious matriarch of this home was Mrs MacDonald, already widowed some years since, but a happy woman, as well she might be with her gay household about her. Of her large family, four still remained at home. Donald, the eldest, and Malcolm; and the two youngest girls, Janet and Margaret. All his life Donald had been delicate; quiet among his robust clan, a gentle spectator on the edge of their ploys. The main work of the farm fell on the mighty shoulders of Malcolm, ‘Calum’ to us all, with the power and patience to be a good farmer. We were with him late in the autumn, after our trip, when the corn was cutting, and for two days he coaxed and gentled a young new horse to take his share in the reaper harness. This task of infinite kindness and understanding is called, foolishly, ‘breaking’ a horse.
We did not see, but we heard about, the occasion when he put the ring in the bull’s nose. It is a gruesome short operation without anaesthetic, requiring a preliminary driving of a sharpened skewer through the tender gristle of the bone below the nostrils. Compared with this, ordinary bull-fighting by a toreador may well appear like a soft afternoon of dawdling. Although the others of the family all worked, and heavily, at every outside farm task, Calum did not summon any of them to assist in this one. Indeed, he did not tell them that it was afoot. He simply rounded up the bull, a vicious Ayrshire, hitched him to the stoutest beam on the island, and ringed him single-handed. The bull’s demeanour whenever Calum was in view showed that he had never forgotten this mastery. Calum was also strong in an athletic way. We used to pitch a stone in the evenings. By now Seumas and I were not frail, but Calum could putt yards beyond our best. At the Tobermory Games he could always get into the prize list, even among the circus of professional athletes who tour these events.
To Janet and Margaret went all the domestic work of the house, and the feeding of the smaller animals like hens, ducks, the pig, calves, sick lambs, dogs, cats; the shopping by rowing-boat across the bay; the dairy work and butter-making; as well as heavier outside work when the weather was good and the pressure was on. They were up baking before six in the morning, Janet producing a cairn of scones and Margaret one of pancakes. During the day, at the kitchen meals or the hayfield picnics, the scones and pancakes melted away, to be renewed in the endless dawn ritual which found the girls busy over the cooking range, with a great iron girdle apiece at the fire of mingled coals and peat.
A day or two after we started work at the Calve hay, Margaret had a birthday, and Seumas and I decided to mark the milestone by a baking of pancakes. That night, returned to the tent, I toiled late over the stove, dropping the batter with rapt zeal. I had always been proud of my pancakes. Baked in a tent by dim candlelight, and wolfed hot and hungrily direct from the pan, they had always been well received, and I had come to consider myself a cook of rich natural talents.
At the end of the rites for this special occasion we gathered up my output into newspapers, and the next day, the birthday morn, we produced it at the breakfast-table. But how different appeared the offering in the clear light of the day! How poor by comparison with the flawless mound of Margaret’s own! Mine appeared to have suffered a congealing blight; they glistened with greasy rainbows, and fingerprints fouled them here and there; there were occasional soot plumes, or scorch marks from the pan; or sometimes their undersides were a shameless yellow dough, with only the faintest brush-work of brown to hint at the firing. Few of them were circular.
Our all too necessary words of deprecation were drowned in polite cries of ‘Oh, but they’re lovely!’ – and the family stretched arms for them with eager courtesy, leaving Seumas and me to concentrate on Margaret’s pancakes of that morning. As always, they were of velvet; light, symmetrical, homogeneous; utterly and rapturously perfect. A similar perfection baited Janet’s scones, and we knew fearful indecision at mealtimes, pausing in a momentary pleasant agony to make our minds up whether to start on the scones or the pancakes – because one usually remained loyal to the first choice during an entire mealtime, so difficult was it to abandon one known perfection for another. It generally happened that Seumas and I would choose differently, and ‘try the scones!’ or ‘try the pancakes!’ we would counsel, full-mouthed, posting busily through our own selection.
The picture is not one of rough but wholesome fare, spiced by hunger born of open-air toil. It was a rich varied dietary, drawn largely from the land itself. Biscuits and fruit were almost the only food items bought in. Calum, like any good farmer, was a skilled butcher. He killed a lamb one day, and there followed a sequence of delights, spread over the meals of many days. First there was the blood. One of the girls came with a basin to collect, and we ate puddings at the next meal. The first breakfast after that was fried liver and kidneys; the first dinner, sheep’s-head broth and boiled mutton. Roast leg of lamb came after, hot first and then cold, sliced for the hayfield sandwiches. Grilled chops made another breakfast or two. And so it went in a skilled succession, with the lamb’s skin curing on a board to be a rug for the girls’ bedroom.
These days, all of them, had a succulence in the air, drawn from the deep quality in the food which comes out of the Scottish soil. It is a real thing, not a memory glamoured to us personally now that a few years have passed. Not enough of our people here and elsewhere know about it, or how could we be persuaded that these pale and tasteless chunks of frozen meat, which are nowadays the main offerings of our diet, have even the same name, far less the same quality. This lamb had a mobile taste. It ran round the back of the teeth like an active spirit. When a fragment pressed the palate, there was an immediate and pervasive shock of taste, a gustatory delight, which spread and bloomed through all the senses.
These raptures made each mealtime an oasis in the long day. During the first period of our stay we were on Calve for about two weeks, working all that time on the hay crop, which had to be snatched at as the weather allowed. In some of the sunny days of high winds the hay was made in the course of hours, and could be stacked before nightfall. There were other whole days when rain and spray flogged the island and laid the crop flat, so that it stood up painfully only after some warmth had taken off the burden of water. This hay, holding in its dry strips the refreshment of herds, went all winter to the cattle and the horses after the growing herbage was dead; and in its turn their mountainous dung was wheeled from the byre and stable to midden, thence to be scattered about the land and complete the clean and mysterious cycle of the harvest from which we all live.
Seumas and AMD by the rocks, Calve.
A small strip of oats – called corn in Scotland – grew for late autumn harvesting, much of it to be milled for the meal, and the rest to sweeten, in whole sheaves, the feed of the animals. We helped to cut it in the back end, when we came back to Calve after our canoe trip was done. In the last week of October Calum was still fighting to take home his corn, and yet dealing softly with the raw young horse. He had a mechanical reaping machine to cut the stalks. All the rest – the gathering up, the binding and stooking – was the work of our hands.
There were also acres of potatoes and turnips. The turnips were the main root crop of the cattle feed, and Calum was able to grow them well on a peat-field which he had ploughed up for the first time in the previous year. He had planted the turnips experimentally in the peat, not expecting much, but hoping to get results sufficient to warrant a long move to bring this abandoned piece of land back among his arable fields. It was a successful essay. The year had been a dry and parched one, bad for turnips, which need great moisture. His own lay and swelled in the moist peat, and grew to be the best crop in the district. It was a triumphant tiny demonstrat
ion, for peaty land is looked on as land poisoned.
By a fitting coincidence, it was on the fields of Mull, not far from Calve, where some of the first Highland experiments in turnip growing were ever made.
The planting and delving of potatoes are probably the hardest of all farm tasks. We dug potatoes for whole days in early November, working for most of the daylight. Our red frozen hands clawed among the heavy earth, hooking up the potatoes into baskets which we dragged along the drills until they were caked with clay like great pots. To straighten up from this, and look over the bay towards Tobermory, was to rend the knotted sinews in the small of the back with a positive squeak. It was curious that this crouching pain grew less as the days passed, and in any case it could be stretched out of the system entirely five minutes after the last tattie had been lifted for the day.
There was, one evening, a strange flashing moment of contrast. We were carting in the bags of potatoes to the barn at the end of a day of brilliant autumn frost, when Calum lifted his head with a sudden comic gesture, hand on cheek, to a row of imaginary tenement windows, and moaned after the manner of coal hawkers. In that setting, that brilliance, it was a caricature to stun.
The tattie-howking is, however, at the time, a dour task, although it is the last of the island farm year. With the bagging and bringing in of the potatoes the major harvesting and stock labours are over. The winter gathers in around the steadings and the house. There is spare time to read and talk; time for the ceilidhs and the dances, and for winter holiday trips to Glasgow and Edinburgh. So it is with all Highland farms, and especially at Calve, set rarely apart in the sea, and peopled, as we knew it then, by the salt of the earth.
They were all perfectly bilingual, and we insisted on dispensing largely with English. Soon we struggled to a fair Gaelic fluency, hilariously tutored by any or all of the family. It was common for all work to be suspended as a linguistic point was made and developed, and a few more words added to our meagre vocabulary.
Songs were sung by the dozen. There were classic stories to be heard by such experts as Locheil. This elderly character who was known by his chief’s name was, of course, a Cameron who had settled at Tobermory for most of his lifetime, and as Mull is out of the Cameron territory, there was no reason why he should not have won and retained with dignity the nickname of Locheil. It was not a joke which would have been made in Lochaber. John Cameron was a man his clan might well be proud of. A great Gaelic story-teller, he had been a strong man and athlete in his youth, and until late in life he would accept any kind of hearsay challenge, but with good humour, to a feat of strength. We spoke to those who had seen him carrying a load of eight hundredweights of fencing wire. Somebody had told him (and it was probably untrue) that the strong man of a neighbouring parish had been seen carrying four two-hundredweight bales of wire at once, and youths were at hand to load a similar burden on Locheil. They let him seize one bale in each hand, and slung another two around his neck. Thus hung, he set off walking tremulously across a field, until, reaching a softer patch of soil, he was driven into the ground like a paling stob, with the grass level above his knees.
On another occasion the tale was brought to him of a rival muscle man who had proved himself so strong that he could sit himself in an oak wash-tub and lift the whole affair – self and tub – off the ground by the handles. I believe that Locheil got into a tub and wrenched upwards at the handles for an hour or two, endeavouring to lift the tubful of himself into the air. I believe also that he did this, not out of a muscular simplicity, but because he had the countryman’s social sense which demands that a ploy of amusement or instruction is worth carrying out for the communal benefit, whether one is the butt or not.
Locheil had no enemies, and his friends were all who knew him. An old man and stiff in the joints, he spent the wet days before Hallowe’en dragging through the sodden leaves in the hazel woods gathering nuts, so that he might have them to give away in handfuls to the hosts of children who would come guising without shyness to his door.
A frequent visitor to the farm, he no sooner saw the canoes than he had to try one. We stuffed him in, his mighty spread of shoulders squared above the hull like a galley’s mainsail, and pushed him off into the Sound. There he heaved himself up and down the sea-way, scooping gouts of water to the sky with the paddle blades, and making a great adventure of the affair. At last he came in to ground, bellowing a nautical judgment: ‘Hach, I could cross the Minch in her myself, and nothing in my hand but a spade!’
Tea in the hayfield.
Locheil’s talk and story kept the hayfield lively. In midmorning, and again in mid-afternoon, the girls would come out from the farmhouse with a great can of tea, a basket of cups and another of sandwiches. We would stick our forks and rakes in the ground and gather round the picnic. Anyone who has lost an appetite might well try a day at the hay. And later, he will not remember the work too well, but he will remember the teatimes. There was always a can of dram-mach standing by under the shade of a haycock. This drink is created by throwing two handfuls of oatmeal into a can of spring water. The cold cloudy liquid is an ancient thirst-quencher, and the oatmeal enthusiast can persuade himself to detect in it also a sustaining quality which is doubtless absent in a synthetic fruit drink.
It was a farm whose lines of communication were kept open by boats. The family were all rowers. The girls used to win the ladies’ pairs at Tobermory Regatta with embarrassing ease, and it was a sight to see one of them, unflurried, and smartly dressed for town, skelping a heavy rowing-boat a mile or so across the bay to do the shopping and leave some milk. Every night there was the ritual of ‘drawing the boats’, when Calum and the sisters heaved the two or three rowing-boats, which were kept in commission at the tiny shore and jetty, up on to the shore turf above the highest spring tide-mark. This was a more dramatic performance during our second stay, when it was always done in a stormy pitch-darkness, with a hurricane-lamp standing on the rocks and throwing our immense Fingalian shadows on the barn gable. Hawsers ringed to iron bolts were lashed under the thwarts, and we would deploy indoors, with no link bridging the dark between us and the town.
Margaret MacDonald, Calve Sound.
The rattle of winter gave a special savour to our snug seclusion. This was the time for the kitchen dances, and we had one every second or third night. The MacKinnons would come from their house in the Aros woods, and other visitors would row out of the darkness, or would send piercing shepherd’s whistles from the landing-stage across the Sound, until we rowed over and collected them. A horn gramophone was the music, and most of the guests could turn their hands to the ‘box’, or melodeon. Once we had a great celebration, almost a ball, in the stone-flagged kitchen, with a full orchestra of two melodeons and a fiddle. Reed and gut lift the heart-strings and the legs, and make the most persuasive of dancing accompaniments.
Ceilidh band at Calve: Malcolm MacDonald, the farmer, is on the right. The dark halo behind his head is the horn of the gramophone, the alternative source of music for our dances.
I took pictures of the scenes by crude flashlight. The apparatus was the old-fashioned magnesium powder and touch-paper, which I had bought at a job price a day or two before leaving Glasgow. Both had grown damp in our travels, and required nursing to flash-point. The kitchen was lit by an oil-lamp, adequate for dancing, but dim for poring over smouldering explosive. The flashes, when they came, were of a devilish intensity, and left the kitchen in gross darkness, with the folk groping until their narrowed pupils picked up the lamp rays again. All this proved a merry interlude, and I was once even able to flee from the rusty tin lid on which the bomb was heaped, and get into the picture myself, before the apocalyptic chaos of the flare.
The dances were all quadrilles and other square or set figures. They were performed with accurate violence. A well-marked sense of rhythm is native to the Highlands, and the dancing is done with triumphant zest. There is none of the slipshod langour of the ballroom. In these parts the people
who dance, dance well.
We also went in a house party to the frequent dances in the Aros Hall in Tobermory, where the verve was as marked as in our kitchen reels. One finds the atmosphere of these village-hall affairs difficult to convey to the town dweller, without appearing to suggest a quaint scene of rustic clod-hopping. Actually, the proceedings were characterised by a gay and natural punctilio and correctness which is never seen in such town gatherings at all. There were none of the horseplay and antics which mark the ballroom’s occasional ventures in Scottish dancing. In Mull the dances were known and enjoyed. It was a friendly affair; a native art, and living. And the music! In addition to the well known dance airs, the musicians (led by the town butcher) had a limitless repertoire improvised from Gaelic songs, and one saw the unusual spectacle of a hall full of young people waltzing and singing at the same time, and doing both well.
Seumas with the accordion, AMD on the right at rear.
City folk may well cut inept figures among such devotees. Ballroom dances are included to accommodate the hotel residents and other strangers who may make an appearance, but these items are flat-footed and lifeless by comparison with the rest of the programme. Other awkwardness may arise through a lack of wit. It has been mentioned that a certain decorousness underlies the merriment, and the point may well be missed by the urban stranger. The master of ceremonies at these dances has a wide authority for discipline which rarely requires to be exercised, but which can intervene at short notice, fortified, if necessary, by the support of all the other males in the hall. To the fellow of merry goodwill no harm will come. The mere rowdy will be asked to leave, and quickly.
Earlier in our summer a Royal Navy vessel had visited Tobermory, and the town arranged the courtesy of a dance for her crew. An unwise sailor, dancing with one of the girls, changed his protecting arm to a more amorous position. Shyly, the girl extricated herself, and then continued dancing normally with him. She was a slim and beautiful girl, and the fellow’s crudity may have been the only tribute he knew how to pay. In a moment he was swash-buckling again, with increased pressure. Overwhelmed by embarrassment, his partner begged him to release her, and got for a reply a knowing towny laugh and a further advance. It was a situation undreamt of among her own kind; but an adolescence devoted to work on the land and in rowing boats had fitted her for what was probably the only method of dealing with the situation.
The Canoe Boys Page 13
