The Canoe Boys
Page 14
She stepped back from his grasp, measured him momentarily with her left hand, and struck him in the face with her right. It was a dread blow, and it felled him. It did not merely fell him to the ground. The sailor had rashly chosen, as the site of his advances, the top of the open stairway which led from the dance floor to the entrance hall below. He went down this flight in a half-conscious bundle, and on the top of him fell, by intent, a handful of Tobermory lads who had seen the incident and were on their way for him anyway. By a quirk of civilised restraint, they grasped him with firmness, but did him little harm. Instead, he was taken somewhere and revived. It is one of his shore adventures he will never be heard to boast of.
During all the separate days of our Calve stay, when the north trip was still to do, we were alert to our chances for pushing on. We also did a great deal of canoe handling, enough to smooth off some of the unskilled edges, and were much afloat in the heavy conditions which pinned us there, keeping us back from the open waters. There was one day when, during the whole morning, an easterly gale which had come up with the sun turned the whole bay white, and filled the Sound past the farmhouse windows with an endless rending curtain of spray. Something urgent was wanted in the way of mails from the post office, but the morning went on and still there was no chance of putting off one of the boats. We were claiming all the time that the canoes could travel on this over to Tobermory; the gale would be well aft of our beam, and would take us fast. It was the kind of short stiff test we were eager for. Eventually we pushed the canoes off and, paddling hard, went away down the Sound like shavings down a river.
We never experienced so much motion before nor since. Most of the water was surf, and the canoes twisted all the way through a mad ellipse, with never more than half the keel-length in the water. We were too busy to watch the town, but we must have been a sight for those who came down to the end of the old pier to see us come through the spray, with our bows skying and digging. It was a bracing few minutes, set into another perspective by the banker’s wife, who pressed forward to say as we landed: ‘Are you two married? … Because if you are I’m sorry for your wives!’
On many other occasions, this was a familiar type of greeting for us. At all points, sympathy was lavished on our wives, whom we had not yet encountered. Seumas quotes, as the most notable case of transferred sympathy on record, one which occurred farther north. It had been a brutal end to the day, with a twilight bump ashore on a bad beach and a sodden painful scramble over rocks. He trotted over to a distant cottage and knocked on the door. A woman opened. She stared at him; his dripping and inadequate clothes, his battered shin-bones, his salty face; and exclaimed (they were her first words): ‘Oh, your poor mother!’
Tobermory, however, was by no means entirely negative, for even a certain proprietary concern had made the town interested in us. One of the merchants strolled to his door that wild day to tell us as we passed on the pavement: ‘I was just saying to a lady in the shop “It’s a fierce day indeed. You won’t see the Canoe Boys out today” – and then, by Jove, there you were!’
Hallowe’en came on us when we were again at Calve at the end of October. This was a full-scale festival, with clear-cut divisions for the children and for the grown-ups. Tobermory went gaily en fête, although, as we remember, the night of the 31st of October was wet and bitter cold. First came the sallies of the children, scampering in fancy dress from house to house; singing their songs from behind false-faces for rewards of nuts and apples; or steaming the windows of family homes with the uproar of parties, and dooking for apples. Later they were bundled off to bed, and the younger grown-ups took up the play.
The Calve contribution to the festival had been in preparation for some days. Some welcome time had been taken off from the potato-gathering to row across to the Aros shore and gather the nuts as they dropped thickly from the hazel trees above the tide-mark. There had also been gleeful discussions about costumes, with the girls planning surprises for friends into whose homes they would thrust Seumas and me, without ceremony. For it is part of the ancient Hallowe’en rite and jest that you may enter any house, disguised as you will, and sit with the folk talking or silent, while they try to guess who you are. We were rehearsed in the domestic trivia of some of the homes which were likely to be victims of these incursions. A set of ghastly cardboard false faces was laid in stock. But on the night of Hallowe’en, as we were preparing, Janet refused to wear one of these impassive disguises. She stretched instead a fine hand up the kitchen chimney, took off a handful of soot, and rubbed this becomingly into her face.
Seumas was our prize exhibit. He went forth with us to the shore as an elderly and leering dowager, in a costume of black silk skirt and a leg-of-mutton-sleeved black silk blouse with sequins. This was produced from a kist by Mrs MacDonald, and it fitted Seumas very well here and there, even about the waist, which, in view of later developments in that area, is a feat worth remembering. He also wore it with style, and his pallid and eyeless mask was leprously repulsive. As an after-thought he carried with him a matronly bundle of knitting.
This was the figure which, plying an erratic pair of needles, was lurched into the door of the MacKinnons’ house at Aros. The rest of us, having hidden behind the trees, clustered forward to the parlour window to watch him sit in the chimney-corner and embark on a searching series of enquiries in falsetto about their recent family history. They gathered round him, guessing in vain, the girls baffled not only by the lithe figure, but by his knitting technique, as he stabbed two-handed among the unpurling rows of stitches. At last we laughed our way through the door and gave him away.
We got ‘fuarag’ in this house. It is the equivalent of the Lowland ‘champit tatties’, the Hallowe’en dish in which the participants dip among the mashed potatoes with spoons, eating the mash and searching for favours. The Gaelic ‘fuarag’ is a much superior dish. It consists of a large bowl of slightly soured whipped cream, into which is stirred a quantity of oatmeal grains which have been toasted in the oven. The favours are tossed among this, and dipped for in the darkness, the party supping tensely, and biting from time to time on the bachelors’ buttons, old maids’ thimbles, dolls, bells, rings, and sixpences. The dish was lavishly riddled with these items. We all got one or more, and many a spoonful of delight as well.
The farmhouse at Calve, with Tobermory a mile beyond.
Later we went into Tobermory and practised our deceits upon the citizens there. Seumas and I now had good enough Gaelic to answer the more simple inquisitions, but were always discovered at last, amid shouts of: ‘The Canoe Boys!’. Our costumes were all less distinctive than Seumas’s, but more concealing. Janet’s handsome negress deceived no one, and readily identified our party, but the individual labels were hard to fix. The innkeeper of the Mishnish Hotel tumbled on a ruse to force us to remove the false faces. He brought us great glasses of sherry on a salver. But we poured the stuff crudely between the wilting lips of our masks, and got only some of it internally. There was a piper or two, and we and the other guerrilla bands of guisers danced on the piers and about the whole main street, the elders at the upper windows helping the illuminations by shedding torchlight on us. So we wore much of the night away before rowing back over the familiar water.
Since this time, Calve has been sold, and as I write these lines it is for sale again. For Seumas and me, we must always feel about the island as we shall about any land where people have been happy, and we with them. It had been for us a symbol of what we had come to find: a proof that we had a goal at all. In token of which it gave us a share of itself for ever, and took as much in return. Whoever buys Calve can never wholly own it. Whoever sells it off may not displenish our memories.
CHAPTER 11
ARDMORE
They challenged him: ‘Leave folly’s toil behind
Your fortune’s furth and further!’ Comes the day
He scrapes upon the nettled land to find
The treasure that this wisdom threw away.
Our next stage would be the most dangerous open-water passage of the trip – round Ardnamurchan, the farthest west point of the British mainland; a buttress of rock hammered endlessly by the Atlantic, and without a shore for miles. The account of this hazard makes disturbing reading in all the navigational journals, and even the most optimistic of our Tobermory friends could not desist from a repeated warning: ‘It’s too late in the year for Ardnamurchan!’
From the high ground of Calve we could look over to the ready-made weather-gauge which betrays the sea conditions at the Point itself. This was the group of the Stirk Rocks. They lie two miles off at Auliston Point at the end of Loch Sunart in Morven. ‘If the sea is breaking on the Stirks, it’s bad outside’, is the Mull wisdom. There was one whole day when, on all our high dashes to view them at their sea-pastures, we saw no sign of them shaking the swell off their flanks. On the next morning they seemed to be still docile. The seas from outside, sent by a wind which was still hearty from the southward, rolled at them, but there was no broken spouting.
So there started at last the old frenzy of packing, with the tent coming down and the rounding up of our gear, so much more dispersed than if we had arrived the night before. The grass of our campsite was pale and flattened. A few days longer, and we might have wintered in that hollow, like tinkers. It was past midday before the last bundle was tamed to its travelling shape and stuffed out of sight, and the canoes were riding the Sound water, anchored only by their points resting on the shingle.
We had a quick stand-up kitchen meal, and got off at last, hailed away by all the household and the dogs. The girls went up to an attic window to wave us out of sight, while the rest went back to the long fight with the hay.
There was no hurry. We meant to get within striking distance of Ardnamurchan Point by the middle afternoon, at slack water, and take the making tide northwards. We could do this without pressing, and were glad enough at the prospect. Although the recent small trips in the bay, and the deliberate practice, had refined our paddling style and brought a noticeable new flair, these were laden canoes, and had a drag on them.
We skirted the little coast of Calve outwards to the open water, feeling again splendidly self-contained, by way of compensation for the loss of the homestead warmth. The town of Tobermory fell away on our left, its last outpost, beyond the gables of the most seaward houses, being the great white-painted phrase on the cliff above the swimming-boxes: ‘God is Love’. This announcement has been there for 50 years, a strange reminder that even the most austere Calvinism needs its wayside shrines.
Soon the heavier wind of the Sound of Mull was in our hair and there was the lighthouse of Rudha nan Gall! We brushed its very skirts, getting a wave from the balcony. Here with the Sound widening away towards the sea we recognised again the familiar sensation we had forgotten for a little time – the receding of land, and the readjustment of the mind to the different moving solidity of the sea. But we were still shore fowl, for it was possible to use Mull as a screen for some miles yet, and this we did as we held in to the little cliffs of the Mishnish shore on our left.
There was a good deal of history about us. Soon we were crossing the mouth of Bloody Bay, scene of a scrambling 15th century sea-fight by claimants for the Lordship of the Isles, whose sea skill was of course prodigious, but was rarely exercised in set-piece naval battles. Away over on the Ardnamurchan shore opposite, like a hollow tooth, was the shell of Mingary Castle. It saw more than its share of the same war, changing hands many times, and in the end a Scottish monarch sat in court there to receive the submission of all the Isles pretenders.
From Ardnamurchan Point we would go north with the tide, round the headland and out to the little island of Muck, or some other of the Small Isles group. There came a rising wind from the south again, and although this was the right direction, its strength was something more than comfortable. So, reaching the scattered rocks of Ardmore Point, at the far side of Bloody Bay, we lay there afloat for half an hour, at the most northerly point of Mull, anchored by long strands of exposed seaweed which we squeezed under the cockpit flaps to hold us. Here we had shelter from the wind, and as it was off-shore, there was only a little sea where we sat.
At the back of four o’clock, the bottom of the tide, we tore out our rubbery anchor cables and paddled off round Ardmore Point, heading for Ardnamurchan. At once a blast of wind skidded us sideways and outwards towards the cliffs north of the Sound, where we could see, even from our low viewpoint, the white fringe of spray rising. Ardmore shore, hardly half a mile away on our left, was lost in the wicked whipped sea-gale which poured like a waterfall over the shore hills, and, cold and solid, drove us out to sea. It carried us, more skidding than pointing; and this was no way to face Ardnamurchan, and these were not the conditions.
So we turned shorewards, seeking the shelter of the fresh and green weathered slopes, where the wind, pounding downwards like water falling, was combing the bracken and the grass. We were better canoeists than we had been the last time the canoes were laden, but this was no paddle across Tobermory Bay, and we set to the bitterest struggle of all our journey. We do not know now how long it took us to cover these few hundred yards, but the evening seemed to grow dark while we laboured. For long spells at a time we made no headway at all, the poles of our paddles bending as the blades tore the water apart, and we leaned far forward to dodge the wind. Then we would be making headway a little, in inches only, and grunting down the gale. The windows of a house which stood on a snug shelf, backing to the sea, stared at us impassively, but no one came out to watch.
There was one moment when we knew we would get in, although much heaving was still ahead. When we touched the steep shore at last, and got out, we lay on the cold stones with our legs shaking. But this was soon over; the twangling sinews of our arms felt fine, and restored again. Seumas went scrambling over the hill towards the house, to report ourselves and save the inhabitants the hour or two of scouting to which they would otherwise have to resort on the appearance of tented strangers from the sea. I heaved the canoes up above the high-water mark. In such a casual description it sounds a little feat. The shore was steeply sloping and composed of stones as loosely packed as a rough-riding paddock, so that my bare legs sank to mid-calf. Each canoe, packed with gear and aswill with water, weighed no less than a 150 lbs; and I rushed them successively up to the grass without a pause. I shall remember this breenge with zest in later and stiffer times. Then I unpacked the stuff, assembled it for portaging, and de-watered and snugged down the canoes in the browning bracken.
Seumas came loping down the hill slope, shouting first, and when nearer telling that the house was empty and in the first stages of ruin. No one was living in the glen of Ardmore. We shouldered our bundles and climbed inland to the house. It backed on to the last knoll before the edge of the hill, so that only its roof could be seen from the Sound of Mull. In front, it faced a sweet level of the greenest turf, which was being strangled by bracken not many yards from the door. Around, and disappearing in the undergrowth and thickets, were other and more ancient ruins.
We took possession of the house. It was a room-kitchen-and-scullery place on the ground floor, with wooden stairs leading from the small lobby to the loft attics overhead. The door hung ajar on one hinge. There was no glass in the windows. While the kitchen half was intact, the slates had started to slide from the roof of the ben end. In the kitchen, the space from which the grate had been torn had left a hole gaping like the mouth of a cave. We gathered armfuls of dry heather and old wood from the outhouses, and got a monstrous fire going, so that steam arose from the damp furred floorboards. Our cheerful smoke, with a plume of sparks, flew bravely from the chimney.
The smoke, as it bloomed, already helped to people the valley. Standing on the knoll behind, we lingered to
admire our housekeeping. The solid back of the little building, unlike the weathered front, gave no sign of decay. It might have been a live homestead, warm with folk. And very comfortable they could have been there.
Turning round to face the sea, a more formidable sight lay over from us. In the darkening grey the point of Ardnamurchan was immense, with its miles-long base in the heaving sea fringed with the darting points of white where surf was climbing the rocks. We could almost, over the wide stretch of the Sound, hear the roar of it, and the hiss as it spread back some cables’ length from the ramparts. There was, however, enough noise where we were, for the gale was in spate down Ardmore valley like a burn of wind, and we went back to the warm kitchen, barricaded the door, hung the sails, loaded with stones, as panes of canvas instead of glass in the windows, and perched lit candle-ends here and there to wag and lowe in the draughts. Something better than this kind of weather would be necessary before we could take the northern course round Ardnamurchan.
But, in journeys like these, each stage can be planned for only adequately, and taken then as the time seems best. Once the course is studied and decided, there is no gain in wrestling to carry the mind beyond the body. So once more we sloughed away our little worries and lay on our backs upon ground-sheet-covered bracken beds, basking in the heartening fire. The dark fell down the valley, and we had to go outside several times in delight to see the hot chimney breathing redly upon the under-side of our smoke. We cooked a lengthy supper in the fire-hole, scraping a bowl or two of milkless brose; and then washing down pavements of bread and cheese with black gallons of milkless tea. We had a musical session, on a timid tin whistle and a mouth-organ. And, sitting late at the ingle, we talked back and forward about ourselves. Before bedtime, I rigged up the camera and the dampening heap of flash powder, opened the lens shutter, lit a reluctant flare, and scrambled back to my place in the chimney-corner before the flare wuffed off, heaving up the roof slates with a tiny rattle. Then we dowsed the candles; and, lying in our quilt bags, we watched the fire embers die as sleep came on us.