Driftwood and Tangle E-Book

Margaret Leigh

• Herausgeber: Origin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Driftwood and Tangle is a moving and poignant memoir of life in the north-west of Scotland just after the outbreak of the Second World War. Margaret Leigh recounts the years she spent in Wester Ross, Moidart, Coigeach and Barra as a crofter, an activity which enabled her to experience the land in all its moods and capture the essence of this remote and beautiful part of Scotland in finely crafted prose. In addition to her evocative description of the land itself, she also has much to say about the people who live there – their traditions and way of life which, at the time of writing, were under threat not only because of the inevitable march of 'progress' but also because of a war likely to engulf even this remote corner of Europe.

Leseprobe

Driftwood and Tangle

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © the Estate of Margaret Leigh Introduction copyright © Ronald Black 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84158-898-8 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-592-5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Contents

Introduction by Ronald Black

1 A Word to the Reader

2 Winter Silence

3 Herdsmen

4 The Liar’s Apology

5 Days that are Gone

6 The Isle of Books

7 Graves on the Machair

8 The Day is Far Spent

9 Canach and Spume

10 At the Peats, June 1940

11 The Old Barn at Fernaig

12 Why Haste Ye to Rise Up So Early?

13 The Solitary Reaper

14 ‘Hand to Mouth, the Best Portion’

15 Equinoctial Tide

16 The Little Black Cow

17 Driftwood

18 The People Shall Be My People

19 After Samhain

20 Falling by the Way

21 My Sorrow on the Sea

22 Walking the World

23 The Wind We All Hate

24 Snow at the Sea’s Edge

Introduction

Margaret Mary Leigh (1894–1973) was her own man. The daughter of an Oxford don, reared by her mother with the help of a governess, she thought nothing of shifting dung, binding sodden sheaves or cursing at cattle. Perhaps the most truthfully footloose of a generation of writers on the Great Highland Outdoors, her specialities were manual labour and minute observation of nature. She had no desk or study but some kitchen table which was seldom her own. Her writing was done on winters’ nights to the whisper of a Tilley lamp. And here in Driftwood and Tangle it is at its most experimental. The title may be couthy, but, as usual with her, it hides a great deal. Writing like an unsentimental angel, she imparts thoughts, memories, opinions, experiences, sounds, sights and smells to a piece of paper. It is not topographical or historical writing, nor is it natural history or an account of the agricultural year, though there are elements of all these things in it, along with the odd touch of folklore and literary criticism. In each of these two dozen essays she is trying something a little bit different. Writing about herding cattle, say. Or snow. Or truth, lies and half-truths. Or just writing hot from the general stores of a richly stocked mind to see where it takes her.

We, too, wonder where she will take us, and that is Leigh at her best. But always she comes back to the Highlands, for that is where she is, and that is the place she loves above all others. So, to put the thing briefly, this is a delightful and individualistic book about certain places as they were in the 1930s and early 1940s: Fernaig in South West Ross, the isle of Tanera further north, Morvern, Moidart and Barra, with a visit to Eriska in Argyll.

Margaret Leigh was, I believe, a first cousin of the novelist Dorothy Leigh Sayers. She was born at 149 Harley Street, London, on 17 December 1894. Her father was Henry Devenish Leigh, a fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College. In 1891 he had married another classical scholar, Alice Maud Bayliss, daughter of a Birmingham ironmaster, a student of the women’s college, Somerville. Margaret’s elder brother had died at birth, so she was an only child. Her father fell sick, and, in the way of the time, was advised to go in search of a more salubrious climate. So it was that the family, little Margaret included, found itself wandering from hotel to hotel in Egypt and the Tyrol. Perhaps this is what turned her into a restless wanderer of our rainy western shores who liked to put down deep roots in the soil before pulling them up again. Her father died at Lucerne in 1903 when she was eight, and one of her abiding memories became the ‘pang I felt in childhood when, with nose pressed against the nursery pane, I heard the fading clip-clop of the hansom that bore my mother away to a party’.

The rest of Margaret’s youth consisted of helping her mother in the struggle to preserve respectability while making ends meet, education at Oxford High School, holidays at Wells, in the Fens, or (on one occasion) Switzerland, and coping with a curvature of the spine which afflicted her at the age of twelve: ‘as a child I spent a winter in Cornwall, perched on a high ridge above Fowey harbour’. She became enthusiastic about poetry, music, wild nature and Plato, in that order. It is clear from her books which of these won out, and the reason was simple enough, for a holiday trip to Shetland in her teens imprinted dramatic images on her brain which were never forgotten.

In 1913 Margaret won a classical scholarship to Somerville, but while at college her interests drifted towards philosophy, ancient history, spirituality, the nature of existence and the role of women. Her holidays with her mother continued: Rome, Florence. Reared an Anglican, she discovered the gospel of St John, thought for the first time of becoming a Catholic, left the Church of England in 1916, and became a Quaker. While developing an admiration for asceticism and virginity, and forming a personal theology of salvation through single-minded devotion to work, she fell in love with a woman – Platonic, of course. ‘Marriage for its own sake,’ she once wrote, ‘meant nothing to me. The physical side repelled me, for my own enlightenment had come from the secret study of forbidden passages in the classics.’

In 1917 she took a government job in London, followed rapidly by one in Oxford. It was a time of change for women. The war gave them opportunities, the peace added powers and freedoms. All of these she embraced wholeheartedly. She rediscovered Cornwall, was courted by John, became engaged to him in 1918, broke it off, took a job in Scotland as classics mistress at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews, and left the Quakers. Her personal problem was that she was the wrong age at the wrong time. Having had no interest in boys before the war when they were ‘as plentiful as blackberries’, she found that ‘when I did begin to quest vaguely for a mate, the men of my generation were dead’. But the shortage of males (and her own work ethic) stood her in good stead professionally, and in 1919 she was appointed to a lectureship in Classics at Reading University.

Though close to her mother once again, she did not enjoy her new situation for long. The college was riddled with factionalism, and women were tolerated rather than encouraged. She immersed herself in Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters, who, as she is at pains to point out to us in a footnote to Driftwood and Tangle, were not English at all, but Irish on one side and Cornish on the other. The astonishingly long academic vacations of those days allowed her to spend twenty-two weeks of the year in a cottage at Zennor in 1921–22, and ‘the creature that came out of Chyreen was very different from the one that went in’. She experienced a profound sense of eternity, turned with enthusiasm to Celtic Studies and to creative writing, found an outlet in the Hibbert Journal, and produced first a little book of poems (Songs from Tani’s Garden, 1923), then, in 1924, her first novel. Called The Passing of the Pengwerns, it won a long review in The Times Literary Supplement, sold less than 300 copies, and earned what she ruefully described as ‘the price of a good litter of farrows’.

Margaret was determined to become a successful writer, however, and these were mere rites of passage. As if in a Brontë novel, what really counted at this point was a legacy. It allowed her to throw in her lecturing job, buy a cottage in a place where she really wanted to be – Plockton in Wester Ross, which combined West Highland scenery with the advantages of a railway station. In 1925, when she was thirty, she and her mother went to live there.

Complete freedom had at last arrived. For the first time in her life Margaret began to experience sexual desire, and was in a mood to accept marriage were it offered, but she had brought herself to a place where no suitable mate was likely to manifest himself; she became ‘hard, restless, cynical’, and when her second novel, Love the Destroyer, met with modest success, she went out and bought a rowing boat.

It had become clear that writing on its own was going to bring neither spiritual satisfaction nor regular income. The only industry in Plockton capable of providing employment for a woman was agriculture, and she began in 1928 by studying the subject to diploma level for three terms at Oxford. She must have met John Lorne Campbell, eleven years her junior, who was doing the full Oxford University course in agriculture at the time, and went on to become a celebrated Gaelic scholar, folklorist and laird of Canna. Her study of the history of land use in the Highlands from 1790 to 1883 was published across fifty-six pages of The Scottish Journal of Agriculture for 1928 and 1929, but in the Christmas vacation she worked on a dairy farm near Oxford, and in the Easter vacation on the 6,000-acre sheep-farm at Fernaig, a few miles up the Loch Carron shore from Plockton. Fernaig is better known to university students of Gaelic as a manuscript than as a farm, for it was the name given to a collection of poems made by Duncan MacRae of Inverinate, an enthusiastic Episcopalian and Jacobite, during the years 1688–93, which fell into the possession of the Mathesons of Fernaig, and lies today in Glasgow University Library. But Margaret was busy losing her appetite for such things. She was employed as a farm-hand at Fernaig for the next four years, except in 1930 when she seized the opportunity of a lifetime to bring a party of boys to Fairbridge Farm School in Western Australia. In 1932, at the age of thirty-seven, she became engaged for the second time, but the man broke it off. It was for the best, she later reflected: ‘I was much too impatient and selfish to carry a double burden.’

In 1933 Margaret obtained the tenancy of a small farm called Achnadarroch, between Fernaig and Plockton (in Highland Homespun Achnadarroch is ‘Achnabo’ and Fernaig is ‘Strathascaig’). Her first idea was to use it as a temporary home for Poor Law children who would go on to Fairbridge. Although the scheme was encouraged by the Child Emigration Society, it had to be abandoned because the authorities would not send children to a district beyond the normal reach of their inspectors. She thus avoided innocent involvement in a massive programme of child exploitation and abuse which has been documented in David Hill’s book The Forgotten Children:Fairbridge Farm School and its Betrayal of Britain’s Child Migrants to Australia, and for which the prime minister of Australia made a public apology in 2009.

Margaret became consumed, as she said herself, by a ‘stoic devotion to manual work as a cure for the maladies of the soul and for the disquietudes of the heart’. She worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, liberated and fed by natural beauty, but the inevitable happened. She fell in love with her assistant, whom she called ‘David’ in The Fruit in the Seed, and ‘Peter’ in Highland Homespun and Spade among the Rushes. ‘Peter’ was eighteen years old.

After only two years at Achnadarroch the proprietor refused to renew the lease. The couple considered farming the Crowlin Isles, or taking a croft near Dunvegan, but in the summer of 1935, by which time Margaret had begun to write again, they took a small dairy farm called Newton (in Cornish ‘Trenoweth’) on the edge of Bodmin Moor. The three years in Cornwall proved to be the most difficult of her life – not surprisingly, given that Highland Homespun, her most successful book, was published in 1936, and David left her in 1937, the year of Harvest of the Moor, the first few chapters of which are actually about the Highlands.

Margaret had discovered the hard way that the key to good writing is personal experience. Giving up Newton, she accepted a commission to travel on horseback from Bodmin to the Scottish border. This she did in September–October 1938. The result was My Kingdom for a Horse, which in an evil moment she was tempted to call England No More. Typically, one of the reasons she gives for making the journey is this: ‘I wanted to learn the technique of long-distance horseback travelling under easy conditions in a civilised country, and then see whether I had sufficient strength and resource to do the same thing in wilder places.’ As she tells us in Spade among the Rushes, she fulfilled the latter ambition a few years afterwards when she rode in continuous rain from Smirisary to Fernaig through the entire Rough Bounds of the Highlands.

After returning to Scotland in October 1938 Margaret visited her friends in Fernaig and Morvern, travelled to Ireland with her mother, then went on to Barra and South Uist. She put the finishing touches to My Kingdom for a Horse in North Uist in March. Back home in Plockton, she wrote a novel, The Further Shore, which was never published. There were to be no more novels: reality suited her best. In August 1939 she went to spend some time on Tanera in the Summer Isles with the pioneering English ecologist Frank Fraser Darling and his wife Marian (‘Bobbie’), who were farming there. It is perhaps a little curious that in her two essays on Tanera in Driftwood and Tangle she fails to mention the outbreak of the Second World War, but that is Margaret Leigh – never predictable.

With mobilisation in autumn 1939 it was easy for her to return to her old job as a farm labourer at Fernaig. She began to learn Gaelic, and her thoughts on that subject are to be found in Chapter 20 below. She is slightly economical with the truth, however. There were plenty of monoglot Gaelic speakers in those days, not least in Barra, where she went in the winter of 1940–41 to finish Driftwood and Tangle and continue her studies, living in a furnished cottage with a dog for company. Perhaps her real problem was that in wartime mysterious strangers, even (or especially?) female ones, were assumed to be spies.

From the Barra perspective the title Driftwood and Tangle was obvious enough for a miscellaneous collection of essays, four of which (Chapters 6, 14, 15, 24) had appeared in the Glasgow Herald, and two (Chapters 7, 10) in the Guardian. Margaret was beachcombing her life, never quite sure what she would stumble over, or even slip on, in the tiùrr of her own thoughts (she uses the word in Chapter 17). The book was duly published in 1941, and in Chapter 5 we discover her trajectory: she was back on the road to Rome. She herself felt on re-reading Highland Homespun, Harvest of the Moor and Driftwood and Tangle that her ‘nature-mysticism was not static: it had its joyful spring, its deeper and more sombre maturity, and its troubled, uncertain decline’. She claimed to find ‘a note of sadness, almost of disillusion’ in Driftwood and Tangle, and by way of example she cites her remarks on sorrow in Chapter 1, and also Chapter 21, which she describes as a commentary on Conrad’s saying that ‘the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty’. But this woman was not running away. ‘My ancient passion for solitude and wild nature grew and deepened,’ she recalled, ‘until, at the beginning of the last war, it became the dominant influence in my life.’

That is why Margaret Mary Leigh’s road to Rome lay through a croft at the back of beyond: to be precise, in the decaying township of Smirisary behind Glenuig in Catholic Moidart. Her farming friends in Morvern, Graham Croll and his mother, helped her obtain it. Her personal cross was ‘a spade in the rushes’, and although there is probably more humour in the book of that name than in anything else she wrote, it was laughter in the face of the devil, for by now the land was irredeemable. Her mother died (at Auchterawe House near Fort Augustus) in 1944, and she wrote Spade among the Rushes in 1946–47; it was published in 1949, and reprinted in 1974 and 1996.

Margaret was admitted into the Catholic Church in 1948; her revised edition of Highland Homespun appeared in the same year, and was reprinted in 1974. She went back to Oxford, took her vows as a Carmelite nun, entered a convent in 1950, and wrote her autobiography, The Fruit in the Seed, which was published in 1952. Her extraordinary choice of an enclosed order was as misguided as her choice in men. When she died at 1a Leachkin Road in Inverness on 7 April 1973, her address was 2 Aultgrishan, Gairloch, in Wester Ross.

In Chapter 6 Leigh risks a caricature which will help us define her place in literature. ‘There seems to be a ceaseless demand,’ she says, ‘for books and articles written to a familiar recipe – a few sea birds, a handful of wild flowers, the sun setting in the western ocean, a legend or two, an anecdote of the ’45, and a few tags of Gaelic.’ This does not describe her work, but it helps us understand why a book in which the author is careful to point out that clothes were obtained by mail order came to be called Highland Homespun. She was operating on the edge of a crowded field. T. Ratcliffe Barnett (1868–1946) was a distinguished Presbyterian minister with an Edinburgh congregation, an open but mystical mind and a taste for walking who rattled off books with titles like The Road to Rannoch and the Summer Isles. M. E. M. Donaldson (1876–1958) was an Englishwoman with a talent for photography and an interest in Jacobitism who preferred ‘wanderings’ to ‘roads’, perhaps to emphasise that she was off Barnett’s well-beaten track: Further Wanderings, Mainly in Argyll, for example. Leigh’s caricature does scant justice to Seton Gordon (1886–1977), an Oxford-educated member of an old Aberdeenshire family who was an excellent writer, an ornithologist, and almost as good an observer of wild nature as herself. ‘Roads’ and ‘wanderings’ being used up, his best-loved books bear titles like Highways and Byways in the West Highlands. (To be fair, ‘Highways and Byways’ was a long-established Macmillan series.)

Recalling how she had considered taking a croft in Skye, Leigh wrote that ‘we might have come to live in the Celtic twilight and write like Fiona Macleod or Mr Alasdair Alpin Macgregor’. The career of Mr Macgregor (1899–1970) was in a sense the reverse of her own: the son of a doctor, travel-writer and Gaelic poet from Stornoway, he lived in London but made annual photographic forays through the Highlands, and produced a stream of folklore-based books with titles like The Peat-Fire Flame, culminating in some insensitive remarks in The Western Isles (1949) which earned him the loathing of almost everyone he had ever written about. It is no coincidence that Leigh’s best friend among the many writers on the Highlands was Frank Fraser Darling (1903–79), whose natural successor as a student of nature conservation was John Morton Boyd (1925–98). By the 1960s, however, the most popular books on the Highlands were being written by an upper-class homosexual, Gavin Maxwell (1914–69), about economic disasters and exotic animals, while readers with quieter tastes were generally content with The Scots Magazine. The Highlands themselves were no longer exotic; with the foundation of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, people ceased to speak of ‘the Highland Problem’, and as there was no longer felt to be a problem, books like Leigh’s were no longer consulted for solutions. Ironically, it is books like Leigh’s which, being entirely contemporary in their own day, have now gained historical value as firsthand portraits of her time. Unlike Darling, Leigh has her eye firmly fixed upon the general reader; unlike Donaldson, she never misrepresents folklore or clothes the past in inappropriate sentiments.

For a work of recent history to survive it must be appealingly written as well as authentic. In this respect Leigh’s essays in Driftwood and Tangle are second to none. As I have said, we never know which way she will go. ‘The Day is Far Spent’ is a ‘road’ (or ‘wanderings’?) essay about a walk to Kyle, but she is ambushed by her own thoughts and only seems to get as far as Duirinish. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ is an account of a single day to rival Ulysses, but one would never know it from its Wordsworthian title. ‘Thy People Shall Be My People’ turns out to be on Irish nationalism. ‘At the Peats, June 1940’ sounds so like a poem that it is almost a surprise to discover that peats and the awful events of 1940 are very much her subject. ‘Why Haste Ye to Rise Up So Early?’ is about the Highland reputation for sloth. ‘Hand to Mouth, the Best Portion’ is an essay on class which begins with blackbirds/people and moves on through tinkers/crofters and captains/kings to the wonderful levellings in Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Says Leigh: ‘There is something intriguing in the thought of the High King’s daughter tramping the glens with her load of bowls for sale. The storyteller saw nothing unseemly in it, and neither need we.’

Ronald Black

January 2010

Many things are cast up on the shore, but only those that have been first given to the sea; and this book has more unity than its title might suggest. Every chapter but one deals with things seen and done and thought about in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland. All were written since the outbreak of war, while I was working on a neighbour’s farm in Wester Ross, or helping other friends in Morvern and in Coigeach, or spending the dark slack weeks of midwinter in the isle of Barra. This I have tried to make clear in the course of the book, but it is not really important.

For the chapters that follow are informal, like fireside conversations, and are chiefly meant for people like myself, with an empty chair at the other side of the hearth. Wild Nature will never betray its lovers; and for those who have no lively religious faith, it alone can mend the broken heart. But the price may be heavy. The love of Nature, once it becomes a passion, can be as estranging as the sea itself. He who follows it far becomes apart, as if, like the seal-people, he lived a hidden life elsewhere. And that other life has as much in it of sorrow as of joy.

Literature, not merely for information or distraction, but as a thing of beauty in itself, must be carried on at all costs. The writer’s gear is cheap enough, God knows, and if we cannot get into print, we must imitate the ragged Irish poets of the eighteenth century, and spread ourselves by recitation and the copying of manuscripts. Monks, working among the smoking ruins of sacked libraries, kept literature and learning alive through Europe’s first dark night. We in the second can hardly do less. It may not after all be so wicked to fiddle while Rome burns: it all depends on the tune and the ears that hear it. And at long last, when all the pens are broken and fiddles dumb, there will still be waves breaking on the long sands of the Western Isles.

ALLASDALE, ISLE OF BARRA

February 1941

In these high latitudes winter is measureless, all-powerful in its extremes of storm or of calm. Gales come, savage and shattering, day after day without respite. Then suddenly the wind falls, the sea goes down, and the whole world sleeps for a while. Of the sundering noise of wind I need say little here. Anyone who has lain sleepless through the long night, listening to the blast shrieking through bare branches, crashing impotently against the rocky walls of the glens, will know without telling. In that vast uproar, the individual with his burden of private thoughts and hopes is alone, submerged, like a drifting waterlogged hulk. Here as I sit by myself in December, at Allasdale on the west coast of Barra, with the gale’s uproar drowning the thunder of waves, I seem as far from my neighbours as if the strip of machair between us were the whole desert of Arabia. I am already bound by a deepening sense of apartness, of detachment, always so strong in small islands. It is as if your little world were attached to the big one over there by a thread that might at any moment break, and set it adrift in space, alone with wandering hosts of stars. And it wouldn’t matter. At first we think about mails, and curse if the steamer misses a call. And then we settle down, and would not care if she never came at all.

Thus are we englobed in our private world of storm. Then one morning the sun comes out of a quiet sea, and we open our tightly barred windows and doors to the unlooked-for brightness of day. And this is the other extreme of winter – its unbelievable silence and peace.

This silence of winter is most deeply felt in the glens, where every small noise, especially those made by man, are echoed and magnified till they acquire the sudden, almost frightening quality of a stone dropped into a black lochan of the hills. For the lesser sounds of the wild – leaves rustling, or song of birds or drone of bees – are all hushed: and if there is no wind, even the branches are still, and there is nothing to hear but the burns, which in dry and frosty weather are themselves muted or silent.

In the strange winter of 1939–1940 we had many such days. People began to say that the Highland climate was changing, as it must have changed even in historical times, when (it is supposed) increasing wind and rain put an end to the forests. But now the old order has been restored and we can only think that last winter was a ‘pet day’ on a large scale. Day after day we would watch the sun, with rays level and glowing, slant across a shoulder into the glen, leaving the southern side in cold blue shadow, for from the end of November till the middle of January no sun falls on our own land. We could see the northern side basking in that bright and transient warmth, like the sight of others’ happiness when one’s own is gone. Often a drift of sheep would come down a cleft in the hill, with a slanting beam from behind to put a bright edge round them. Everything, however small, that stood in the sun’s path acquired an incredible depth and richness of colouring, especially where objects were dark in themselves, like the crimson-purple of birch stems and twigs, the violet of alder catkins, the rich glow at the heart of a black cow’s winter coat, the tawny redness of a bundle of oat-sheaves thrown down for cattle. White, also, whose essential whiteness is intensified in twilight or under the cold sheen of moon and stars, receives an alien glow from a sun low in the heavens. Often we saw the dazzling brightness of blown spray, or of gulls following a boat, and a rosy light on the snow of the highest hills. On days of broken cloud there would be travelling gleams on the slopes, moving pools of light, like those cast by the head-lamps of a car. And one bright day in February, when I was rowing close under a little cliff, I saw the quivering play of ripples reflected on the smooth face of the rock.

All that winter we were busy with wood. Birches on the braes were cut in scores and thrown down to the road to be carted home at leisure. A great stillness lay over everything, in which the shriek of the saw, the ringing blows of the axe, and the splintering crash of falling trees, reverberated among the rocks, drowning the lap of water on stone, and the croon of eider-duck far out among the skerries. Then we would get the cart, and at nightfall come home with our load. There is something hypnotic about walking beside a cart. The noise of the wheels, continuous and almost as impersonal as the roaring of surf, travels with you, intimate as your shadow, englobing you in the world of your own thoughts. It is almost like walking in a high wind on the endless sands of South Uist. This noise of cart-wheels, when heard afar at the darkening, is one of the most poignant, the most evocative of human sounds, carrying our thoughts across ages and continents to the very heart of work and its end at the door of home. For all men’s labour involves the moving of things in space, of which wheels are symbolic; and night, which brings all things home, gives a special blessing to the cart and its harsh and homely music.

I shall not easily forget a still November evening in West Kerry, when I stood on a high point of Valentia Island, watching the lonesome twilight look come over the hills of the mainland. To the north, across Dingle Bay, was Brandon, the second highest mountain in Ireland, with a wisp of cloud streaming from its summit. Westward, the heaving, wrinkled circle of the sea stretched luminous and unbroken from the Great Blasket to the Skelligs. The little stony fields were cleared of all crops, and men to whom time is nothing were shifting stones from gaps to let cows out or asses in. The boreens were full of wandering geese and turkeys, soon to be shipped from Cork to make an English Christmas. Small sounds fell like pebbles or raindrops into the pools of silence; but dominating all was the distant grinding of the ungreased axles of ass-carts bringing home load upon load of turf. Owing to the low price of asses, which is within the reach of all but the poorest, carts are far commoner in Ireland than in the Highlands, and their noise almost as friendly as the smell of the turf they carry.

The Atlantic may sleep, but it is never still. From every shore and skerry rose a vast continuous sighing, as if all strife and passion had died into acquiescence, into that acceptance of what is ‘appointed’ that seems to be the ultimate wisdom of the wild. The rocky field, the windswept hill has little profit to offer; but the harder its conquest, the greater its demand on patience and labour, the more passionately is it loved. As a man in Valentia, speaking of his croft, said to me: ‘There isn’t much money in it, but we have our health and enough to eat, and isn’t that a great thing?’

But that was before the war. In the winter of 1940 we were too busy with our own wood-cutting to watch other people at work. I was returning for the last load, standing up in the cart, and singing at the top of my voice, for the wheels provided a pleasant accompaniment. There was a touch of frost in the air, just enough to stiffen the clothes I had laid out on the bleach, and to put a film of ice on the puddles, through which the wheels cut with a high-pitched crackle. The sky was faintly dappled with soft cloud, and in the misty air the hills of Applecross looked twice their real height. Snow lay along the horizontal ridges, marking the lines of stratification. By the time I had lifted the logs and roped the load, night was well on its way. The pines below the road rose straight into the air, without a movement, without a sigh. The tide was far out, and at the mouth of the river a wide delta of sand and mud spread fanwise, with gulls sitting in long ordered rows. After an unusually dry autumn there was not much water coming down the glen. The river murmured softly round the big stepping stones that led across to our cornfield with its well-thatched stack. Until Christmas is over, it is not easy to look on a cleared field without a keen memory of past labours – the heat and the midges, and those breathless thundery days when we waited for war.

In one way the war may prove a blessing in disguise. Like a long hard winter, it has barred the gates of the Highland fortress, and checked the infiltration of alien, standardising influences. But it has taken away our lights. When night falls the crofts are blind, the world of men lies dead till morning. People creep round the byres with shaded lamps and furtive torches. And it is a great missing, for the friendly reddish glow of a paraffin lamp, even the sheen of a lone candle in a naked window, is nowhere more welcome than in the empty spaces of the wild. Townsmen, robbed of the glare of their countless illuminations, can, if they choose, look up and see the stars, as souls who have lost all see God. But to us, who are always under the shadow of Nature’s anger, the leaping wildfire, the brandished spears of the aurora may be too near for peace of mind, and the passionless gleam of stars above the snow may strip us of courage as well as of pride. We long for the unveiled lamp in a crofter’s window, the fiery trail of the evening train, the serried lights of steamers bringing mails and food to the isles. And there are darker possibilities. One night in Barra a boy came in to see me, and we were talking about the crew of a ship’s lifeboat. After nine days at sea, they had at last succeeded in getting ashore. But because of the black-out, these men, half dead and bewildered with their sufferings, were long unable to find a house, though there were plenty at hand. Thank God they have still left us the clear impartial gleam of our lighthouses.

Noctes orate serenas