‘Wasn’t the singing good?’ asked our hostess as she handed out the steaming cups of tea.
‘Indeed but my hands is sore with the clappin’,’ answered Morag fulsomely.
‘Mine too,’ replied the woman. ‘What did you think of the concert, Miss Peckwitt?’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t think much of it at all,’ I replied bluntly.
‘Well now, neither did I,’ rejoined Morag easily.
‘No to be sure.’ Our hostess accomplished the volte face without so much as the flicker of an eyelid. ‘I’ve heard better singing than that in my own house.’
‘Yet you’ve just been saying your hands were sore with clapping.’ I taxed them.
‘Of course we clapped,’ agreed Morag plausibly, ‘but d’you see they’ve come a long way to sing for us, and they think they’re awful good, anyway. It wouldn’t be right to disappoint them.
‘No indeed,’ responded our hostess feelingly, ‘one couldn’t do that. But myself, I’m not so keen on these Mod medallists, they sing too much like the wireless.’ (A Gaelic ‘Mod’ is the equivalent of the Welsh Eisteddfod and is held for the competitive singing of Gaelic.)
‘No more am I,’ affirmed Morag, her mouth crammed full of buttered oatcake. ‘They sound more like seagulls with larningitis.’
‘What a pity people didn’t give the comedian any encouragement,’ I said, when the two women had ceased to laugh. ‘I felt rather sorry for him and some of his jokes were quite good.’
‘He was a good laugh, right enough,’ they agreed.
‘But nobody laughed aloud at his jokes,’ I said.
‘Ach, but you canna’ be laughin’ at a man to his face just as though he was a sort of animal,’ replied Morag.
I pointed out that comedians thrive on laughter, but our hostess cut me short.
‘No, but that’s just the English way of it,’ she corrected. ‘It’s not our way.’
‘We leave the laughter to the English.’ tittered Morag, ‘the same way as we leave them the love. Why, the way English folks goes on about fallin’ in love you’d think love was a thing you could put into a parcel and take home with you.’
‘Haven’t you ever loved anyone?’ I asked.
‘There’s not such a thing as love,’ she said.
‘You’ve been married,’ I told her. ‘Weren’t you in love with your husband?’
‘In love! In love! Listen to it I tell you. Indeed it’s true I’ve been marrit. I marrit a good enough man and he had a good enough wife in myself and between us we had five children. What for would we be wantin’ love for as well? Surely I know as much about love as I know about ’ lectricity and I want nothin’ to do with either of them if I can help it.’
So spake the practical Morag, and it was difficult to believe that hardly less than an hour ago I had seen her dabbing furtively at her eyes during the singing of a particularly sentimental song.
Some time later, having taken leave of the Oxford accent, who was not coming to the dance until she had seen her old father safely to bed, we returned to the hall. It was soon evident that the majority of the revellers were still drinking strupaks with their friends or, in the case of the menfolk, drinking illegal whisky at the nearby hotel, for except for a listless group of females who had draped themselves round the doorway like wilted flags, the place was strangely deserted. The girls aroused themselves briefly from their torpor to greet Morag and me and then sank back into attitudes that seemed to add to the general lifelessness of the place rather than detract from it. Inside the ball lights were burning, but there was no sound from within. I looked at my watch. The dance had been advertised to begin at eleven o’ clock and it was now half past that hour.
‘What’s happenin’?’ Morag addressed the bevy of girls who stared dully in reply.
‘It’s the band,’ one of them at last managed to answer.
‘The band? What’s wrong with the band?’ asked Morag.
‘They’re out at the back there fightin’ like bulls,’ the girl said morosely.
They’re fightin’? Why is that?’
The girl who had volunteered the information shrugged her shoulders apathetically. The rest remained comatose. The band was having a fight, and the fact was accepted philosophically as though to be ‘fightin’ like bulls’ was a characteristic habit of all dance bands.
‘It’s swearin’ to strangle one another they was a few minutes ago.’ Another girl jerked herself to life momentarily and threw out this piece of intelligence with gloating satisfaction.
‘How many players are there in the band?’ I asked, visualising something in the nature of a musical rugger scrummage.
‘Three,’ answered the first girl; ‘the pipes, the fiddle and the melodeon.’
‘And who’s swearin’ to strangle who?’ asked Morag.
‘Ach, the fiddle says he’s for stranglin’ the melodeon and the melodeon says he’s for stranglin’ the fiddler.’
‘And the piper?’
‘He’s too drunk to strangle anybody but himself.’ The girls sniggered smugly.
My landlady and I had, while extracting this information, become aware of varying sounds of battle which emanated from somewhere at the back of the hall.
‘I’m goin’ to take a look,’ said Morag bravely, and hurried towards the scene of conflict.
‘I wonder what has happened to the M. C.?’ I asked the girls after ten minutes had ticked by, and there was still no sign of the dance beginning.
‘He’s out at the back too,’ the girls told me. ‘He was tryin’ to stop them from quarrellin’, but they take no heed of him at all.’
Being confident of Morag’s ability to quell the musical strife and noticing that the girls still hugged their packets of soap flakes, I suggested that we should do whatever we were expected to do with them. ‘Just empty them on the floor as you go in,’ they told me. I led the way in and they proceeded to tear open the packets and strew the contents on the floor. Conscientiously I followed suit.
The grocer’s statement that the floor needed whole bars of soap to fill up the rat-holes was certainly not far wrong. There were some treacherous holes and even those parts of the floor which the rats had left alone were splintered and rough. Boards creaked and groaned and in places black mud oozed up between the joints as they gave under our weight. It could not by any stretch of imagination be called a dance floor, but I daresay it was good enough for tackety boots.
More people began to arrive and just as we had finished our nose-tickling task Morag appeared on the threshold solicitously shepherding two tragic and muddy figures; one with a black eye and bleeding nose; the other with a swollen chin and a gory ear. They were closely followed by the M.C. supporting or being supported by a rotund and beaming piper, who was assuring everyone happily that he had succeeded in persuading the two musicians to postpone strangling each other until after the feshtertivities, for it was a shame if folks wash to be dishappointed. (His last words, I assumed, referred to the dance and not to the strangling duet.)
Thus inauspiciously the dancing started and there were some of us who wished before the evening was very far advanced that the piper’s powers of persuasion had not been so successful, for the erstwhile combatants seemed to have imbued their instruments with their own disharmony and our ears were assaulted by an incessant riot of discordancy which Morag aptly described as being ‘worse than a bullin’ cow’. Regardless of strife the dancers leaped and stamped their way through innumerable schottisches and reels, their shrill ‘yeeps’ and screams outrivalling the frantic efforts of the belligerent instrumentalists who, with carefully averted eyes, played with the single-mindedness of two greyhounds chasing a hare and with much the same result; the fiddle invariably reaching the winning post two or three bars ahead of his antagonist.
The piper who ‘spelled’ the fiddle and melodeon was determinedly hilarious and did not degenerate until shortly after the refreshment interval, when his piping developed an alarming bubbling u
ndertone, an intrusion which the M.C. dismissed as due to there being ‘so much beer got into the pipes they won’t play right’, and while first aid was rendered to the instrument the piper himself was permitted to sleep off his excesses at the rear of the stage, from whence his nasal organs continued to accompany the dancing with only slightly less sonorousness and decidedly more rhythm than had been discernible in his previous efforts.
A bashful young blood was quick in offering to make up for the piper’s lapse and produced for this purpose an ordinary mouth-organ. A dance was duly announced and entered upon by the dancers but except for a chord at the beginning and another at the end the only indications that there might be a musical accompaniment were the bulging eyes and the distended cheeks of the musician and the position of his eyebrows which were a good two inches above normal.
The announcement that voting in the Beauty Contest was due to begin released all the musicians temporarily and the fiddle and melodeon were escorted from the stage in opposite directions by anxious friends. The girls meanwhile were requested to form a circle in the centre of the room and the men were handed pencils and paper and asked to record their votes. I had been asked to present the prizes, so I now made my way to a small table at the front of the stage, upon which a box of lace-edged handkerchiefs and a pair of silk stockings—the first and second prizes—were displayed, together with several half-bottles of whisky and one or two boxes of cigarettes which were to be spot prizes. The efforts of the M.C. to persuade the circle of girls to perambulate and display their charms were unavailing; they either huddled together in exaggerated modesty, as false as it was infuriating, or stood with heads bowed in attitudes of knock-kneed shyness, yet resolutely ogling the men from beneath lowered eyelids. Various ribald remarks percolated through the buzz of talk, and then the M.C. gave instructions for the papers to be collected. ‘And the pencils,’ he added meaningly, as some of the men endeavoured to secrete the latter in breast pockets. Capfuls of paper were soon being emptied on the table and between us the M.C. and I went through them.
‘Number sixteen!’ announced the M.C. and, amidst a roar of applause, number sixteen, a hefty buck-toothed young woman, sturdy as an oak and just about as supple, came lurching ferociously towards the stage. Clumsily she negotiated the steps, or rather failed to negotiate them, and tripping over the top one clutched my proffered hand desperately as a support rather than as the salute I had intended it to be. I congratulated her solemnly and handed over the prize but, overcome by an excess of shyness, she was unable to articulate even the most perfunctory acknowledgment. The M. C. also shook her hand and the dancers, seizing the opportunity for fun, clamoured that he should kiss the winner. The two looked at each other and then away again. The M.C smiled fatuously. The girl shook her abundant hair over her naming cheeks.
‘Kiss!’ The clamour became insistent, and dutifully the M.C. obeyed, but as he too was preceded by very pronounced buck teeth it was a difficult feat to accomplish. The noise of the impact put my own teeth on edge.
‘Number twenty-eight,’ called the M.C. next, and with another burst of applause the second prize-winner came lumbering forward like a frenzied calf into a sale ring. Buxom, scarlet-faced and perspiring, she was afflicted with a wall-eye, thick ankles and a depraved taste in scent. Her thick red hair was adorned with a posy of white flowers which, as I reached hastily for a handkerchief, I identified as the ramsons, or wild garlic. She shook my hand limply, grinned gummily and, evading the proffered hand of the M.C, plunged down the steps to her friends.
It may be suspected that the men were perpetrating a colossal joke, or that the girls had won their votes more as objects of compassion than of admiration. But this was not so. The Islanders viewed beauty purely from the utilitarian standpoint. For a woman to possess allure she had first to possess bulk, for in windy climates a thin or normally developed woman has distinct disadvantages. Anna Vic’s husband was a much envied man, particularly during hay harvest, because not only could his wife carry immense loads on her broad back but on breezy days he could build quite substantial hay-cocks in the shelter provided by her girth; less fortunate men with skinny wives had either to leave their hay at the mercy of the weather or build it in low cocks through which any rain would soak in no time. There could be no doubting that the men had chosen according to their desires.
The next prize was a bottle of whisky for which tickets had already been sold. The winner was a tall, pasty-faced, Bruach youth who I had hitherto glimpsed retiring clandestinely around the backs of houses, or disappearing into convenient cattle byres. Tonight he was in no mood for self-effacement and swaggering up to the stage he took his prize, pulled out the cork, and then walking to the centre of the floor he held up the bottle, threw back his head dramatically and drained the contents at one single draught. I fully expected him to drop down senseless but instead he stalked majestically to the open door and in a reedy but penetrating voice demanded naively: ‘Where’s that bloody policeman? Isn’t it his job to be lookin’ after drunks like me?’ As though in answer the uniformed policeman appeared in the doorway, his face split from ear to ear by a grin. The prize-winner lurched forward and took him most companionably by the buttons of his tunic. ‘I’m Duncan MacAllister,’ he asserted in accents that were rapidly becoming more blurred. ‘And I’m that drunk I’m not fit to be at large. I ought to be locked up where I’m safe.’
In spite of the policeman’s obvious reluctance, Duncan grasped his arm compellingly and amid jeers and encouragements the two disappeared. Dancing was resumed, and when, about half an hour later, the policeman returned alone, he was heard confiding to enquirers that he’d got so fed up with Duncan hangin’ round his neck and insistin’ on bein’ jailed that he’d pushed him in through a little narrow window at the back of the hall, told him it was a prison cell and cleared off as quickly as he could. It transpired that the ‘little narrow window’ belonged to the ladies’ lavatory!
At three o’ clock in the morning the dancers were still in fine fettle and old men and young men, dowagers and damsels, were capering about the soapy room with the exuberance of two-year-olds, the fervour of their dancing banishing the missionary and his prophecies of Hell-fire to the regions of their inspiration. The men had discarded their jackets, collars and ties and were dancing in shirt sleeves, their expressions a mixture of ecstasy and bliss. At the commencement of each dance they approached the girls with condescending masculinity, using the same phrase, the same peremptory voice and intonation when requesting them to dance as they used when they wished to move an obstinate cow. It sounded suspiciously like the English farmer’s ‘Get up there, Daisy!’ The roadmen were much in evidence, inches of their sunburnt bull-necks emerging above constricting neck-bands, their shirts soaked with perspiration. Boisterously they skipped and vaulted about the uneven floor, wielding their partners as they had wielded their picks and shovels, though I should say that the latter had received the more consideration. Their dancing was an ungainly combination of capers, lunges and caprioles and was attended by an incessant chorus of male and female shrieks; the former rapturous, the latter agonised. It struck me that none of the roadmen had changed his boots. Lachy, hot and dishevelled, pranced vengefully across the floor brandishing his two partners as though he was practising for ‘tossing the caber’ rather than leading them through the intricacies of a ‘Dashing White Sergeant’. Johnny was being propelled hither and thither by Elspeth the schoolteacher; his legs looked as though they were moving mechanically; his eyes were tight shut. It was quite possible that he was fast asleep! Watching the dancers I recalled a phrase of the ‘warning’ notice —‘lassies now’s your chance to shine’. The lassies were certainly shining and if they had not mopped their pretty faces profusely (borrowing one another’s handkerchiefs for the purpose) they would have shone a good deal more; the perspiration showed as dark patches which reached from the armpits almost to the waistlines of their flimsy blouses. The wooden walls of the room were running with con
densation; the air was blue with tobacco smoke, and cigarette butts and empty packets were being trodden and kicked around the floor by the feet of the dancers. At the end of each dance the men dropped their partners as though they were hot—perhaps the simile is not inappropriate—and hurried outside.
At one time during the evening I ventured outside myself for a breath of fresh air and was surprised to hear the sound of a spade being plunged into earth.
‘There’s Miss Peckwitt.’ The remark came out of the darkness and a moment later Lachy’s voice was asking me if he’d ‘get a shine of a torch’. Obediently I went towards the voice and found a group of men gazing with puzzled intensity at a newly turned patch of earth. Lachy bent down, unearthed a bottle, and held it in the beam of the torch.
‘That’s no ours, Lachy,’ said Johnny who was also one of the group.
‘What brand was ours then?’ asked Lachy.
‘It was no that one anyway,’ insisted someone; ‘haste and put that back.’
‘Then were the hell is ours?’ asked Lachy irritably as he replaced the bottle and covered it over. ‘I’m damty sure it was somewhere here we put it.’
He set to work again in a slightly different spot and this time his digging brought to light a bottle which they were all satisfied was their own.
‘I have another one I buried earlier over by the dyke there,’ said Johnny. He turned to me: ‘Miss Peckwitt will be thinkin’ it’s awful strange to be buryin’ the drinks,’ he said ruefully, ‘but you canna’ dance with bottles in your pockets and you canna’ trust folks here when it comes to whisky.’ He addressed Lachy again. ‘Come and we’ll get my bottle while we have the light,’ he said eagerly.
The Hills is Lonely Page 18
