A Little More on the Hebrides
A few people have asked for more about our move to the Outer Hebrides from London Fifty years ago., so here are some rather random fragments of memory.
The first shock – no milk on the doorstep. At that time those open sided milk vans were still wheezing around the streets of London. Put out nice clean bottles and they would be replaced by full ones. You could even have a little dial to show the milkman how many pints were wanted. No, my milk supplier, it turned out, was a rather attractive brown dappled cow called Daisy belonging to my next door neighbour. Daisy wandered wherever she pleased, and just turned up to be milked every day. My neighbour assured me that they always knew where she had been because the milk tasted different depending on what she had grazed on. A bit herby one day, clover grass if you were lucky , boggy, sedgy grass if you were not. I thought this was a little bit far fetched but I too could soon tell where Daisy had been all day.
When I say neighbour, of course, everyone lived on their croft, this nearest neighbour was about two hundred yards away, the neighbour on the other side further. The land attached to our house was leased out, we just had the house itself, plus the old original ‘black house’, and a stone building which had once been the village shop.
There were sheep on ‘our’ croft, a nice woolly flock plus a huge ferocious looking ram with big curly horns. One morning I noticed that this ram, goodness knows how, had got one horn stuck with the retaining cable of a telegraph pole running through it. He was frantically struggling to free himself with no success. What to do? I was born and bred in the country but my knowledge of rams came mainly from old comedy films where they would be chasing and butting somebody unfortunate like George Formby or Norman Wisdom.
His owner doubled up as the Postman and would be out on his rounds. So I went to see what I could do. Sheep are not best known for their intelligence, but this one seemed to know that I meant him no harm. He stopped struggling and let me put my arms round his shoulders and gently move him backwards and forwards to untangle his horn from the cable. As he came free I prepared to run for it as per the movies, but he just glared at me, shook himself, and trotted back to his lady friends in the field. I was able to stroll nonchalantly back to the gate. (Shaking a bit)
….. … And no coalman, at least not a nice coal-dusty man in a leather jerkin and a cap on backwards who ferried in sacks and put them where you wanted them. Our winter coal supply came by boat, was picked up by the ‘coalman’ who dumped it from his tipper lorry outside our door, for us to shovel into the coal house ourselves – a whole ton of it.
Everybody else had peat. A strip of peat bog could be rented from the estate, I think for one pound fifty a year then. The peat was dug out, stacked in little piles to dry and then brought home for the winter. It was impossible to buy peat. Everyone had their own supply. However, a pile soon materialised outside the house, donated by kind neighbours. The peat was given, the milk was given, no money was to be exchanged. We soon slotted into the favour system, though it was difficult. Whatever favour we did was returned with interest. We did have the only telephone in the township, so that was one way we could repay, by making it freely available.
One evening we were entertaining an engineering consultant up from London to dinner. As I was serving up the main course a neighbour arrived to use the phone. His wife had gone into labour, and he needed to phone the hospital in South Uist, two islands away, to let them know they were coming. Then, would I go over and mind the other children while he was gone? Of course, and I left with him. As my husband was dishing out the pudding another neighbour arrived to use the phone. When she had finished she decided that the pud looked rather nice, sat down and joined them. Our poor guest just shook his head, and said ‘it’s all true, Whisky Galore, it’s all true’
And actually it was true, The SS ‘Politician’ sank off Eriskay in February 1941 It had on board 30,000 cases of whiskey for export, but it had been impounded in prohibition America, and sent back. They were waiting to hook up with a convoy to get safely in to Glasgow when they ran aground. A great deal of the cargo was ‘liberated’ by the men of Eriskay, and the other islands, and in the book and the film they get away with it and everybody has a jolly time. The truth was much more grim, The Customs authorities hunted relentlessly, and though a great deal was never found people were arrested, fined, some imprisoned and boats were impounded and had to be bought back. The hardship caused and the suspicion and hatred between those involved, and those suspected of informing on them remained on the island for a long time. (So much for the old movie -though I still love it)
…. …. So little fresh food to be had. A butchers van called once a week, but he bought his meat in mostly from the mainland. (We had been warned by the vet, not to buy any local meat without consulting him first). I had imagined that we would get lots of lovely fresh fish being on an island in the Atlantic, but the fishing boats made for the bigger ports on Skye or the mainland. We did get crabs from the lobster fishermen, who didn’t want them in their pots, and sometimes, after a particularly dark night I would find a salmon hanging from the latch of my back door, no questions asked! Luckily every week the Army Wives Club of which I was an honorary member was allowed the use of a launch (and some soldiers to drive it!) to go fishing. We just used hand lines, and caught mainly Mackerell, sometimes what they called Saith, which I think was Pollock. The fresh Mackerell was beautiful, and something to trade with my neighbours, but the Saith was a bit cotton – woolly and only suitable for fish cakes. So here was me, the townie who previously wouldn’t even deal with prawns because I couldn’t bear their little eyes looking at me happily gutting fish and throwing the entrails to the waiting seagulls. Amazing what you will do when you have to.
I did have an encounter with something a little more ferocious than a Mackerell while staying with friends who had renovated a deserted croft house, miles across the moors, and accessible only by a two mile walk or a boat ride. Pat’s teenage son returned from a fishing trip a bit pale and shaky, and bearing the catch of the day, a four foot long Conger Eel. It had the look of something you wouldn’t want to mess with, and even after death it’s jaws were still opening and shutting revealing a very businesslike mouthful of teeth.
Reluctantly, we felt obliged to ‘do’ something with it. But every time we put the knife in the spine behaved like the teeth, and the huge creature leapt into the air.
Luckily we each had a large glass of sherry beside us, so we soon settled into a rhythm –
cut, jump, scream, swig of sherry
cut, jump, scream, swig of sherry ………
The resulting cutlets, were huge and delicious; the finest, whitest, tastiest fish I have ever eaten. Of course, the amount of sherry consumed did not affect my judgement the least bit!
…….. Birds, were everywhere skimming and calling most of the night in the long days of almost arctic summer daylight. Seabirds, Gulls and Terns, Kittiwakes and Gannets, hundreds of them, There were Snowy Owls who nested near us, Peregrines and Golden Eagles. Lots of Larks and Lapwings taht nested on the ground, but none of our common songbirds, no Robins or Blackbirds, (no trees or hedges to nest in.) Our garden had a wide stone wall with a toppping of flat slates, and ‘my’ local Peregrine used it as his tea table. After he had caught some poor creature in my neighbour’s rickyard whe would bring it to eat on my wall. Seeing Golden Eagles close to was an almost emotional experience. A friend and I were sitting out on a moorland rock and we must have been unwittingly close to a nest, because two eagles circled low above our heads, They are enormous and were close enough for us to see all the beautiful markings on their feathers and their bright ‘eagle’ eyes. The local people were not as enthusiastic about them as we were as they were thought to take lambs from the fields, though I never met anybody who had actually witnessed this . The Ravens who inhabited the high ground in the centre of the island were not often to be seen, but on the only occasion when we had snow, many of them came down around the houses looking for food. It was very weird to walk out of the house among these huge blue black birds. Bit like Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ Scary.
Our efforts to fit in met with a good deal of mirth from our neighbours, especially my husband trying to dig our own peat. As he had a full time job it was all done in the evenings, and took weeks rather than the few days absence from the croft everyone else took to dig theirs. But he stuck at it, and finally we had our stack of peat ready for the next winter. Unfortunately the timescale meant that it had been brought in before truly dried; a bit on the damp side.
By this second winter our house had became quite a centre for the younger people. They could relax without any fear of what was said eaten or drunk getting back on the gossip grapevine. One evening the discussion had gone round to the subject of religion. My husband got up to put some more peat onto the stove, and it went in with a dull soggy hiss. “Ah well”, one of our neighbours remarked, “We none of us need to worry about going to hell if the devil uses peat like yours!”
A link to a recent BBC News item on St Kilda. St Kilda wa almost another hundred miles out into the Atlantic. We could just see the highest peaks on a clear day – after that – America! It had been uninhabited for many years. My husband was lucky enough to be allowed by the army to visit, but I never got there. I was reminded of the Island’s unique story by a recent item on the BBC news site. Here is the link
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53782411