Free Bruach Blend by Lillian Beckwith Page B

I stood up to go there was a sudden frenzy of hailstones which rattled like shot against the window and hammered on the roof. I sat down again.
    â€˜Indeed they near deafen the ears off me,’ complained Morag when the onslaught had subsided and we could once more make ourselves heard.
    â€˜Aye, isn’t that just what I’m after sayin’,’ Murdoch spoke as if he was replying to the storm rather than commenting on Morag’s remark. ‘I doubt there’ll be little enough fishin’ supposin’ it’s for mackerel or monsters if this weather doesn’t quieten.’
    â€˜It’s nothin’,’ said Willy easily.
    â€˜Nothin’?’ expostulated Murdoch. ‘Man, I tell you I canna put in my teeths when I go out for fear the wind will blow them down my throat every time I open my mouth.’
    â€˜You’d best be puttin’ a string on them an’ tyin’ them round your neck then,’ suggested Erchy waggishly.
    â€˜Ach, it’s nothin’ I tell you,’ reiterated Willy. ‘Not to a good boat.’
    â€˜She must be a good strong boat you have,’ said Erchy.
    â€˜Aye,’ Willy’s voice verged on the reverential, ‘She’s a good boat right enough.’
    The knowledge and love of boats is instinctive in most islanders and the talk soon drifted to the merits and de-merits of boats the Bruachites knew or had known. Boats which had been wrecked; boats which had been bought or sold or laid up because they could neither be crewed or sold. And it was not only the men who indulged in the discussion and recollection. The women too participated, though, as might be expected, their observations were more concerned with the genealogies of the owners and crew rather than with the boats themselves. As when, for instance, the widow Hamish interpolated: ‘I mind that man when he was a bairn and if ever there was a wee monster it was that one.’ Or again Morag’s interruption of an argument as to the qualities of a certain skipper with the question: ‘Was he not yon man who had the wife that was condensed from Church of Scotland into a Roman Catholic?’
    As I listened I found myself mentally attaching faces and shapes to the names of people as I heard them mentioned; people I had never known and would be unlikely ever to meet; people who in truth most of the Bruachites had never known except by allusion and who they were equally unlikely to meet, though, as was their custom, they had elevated such proxy acquaintance into a much more personal relationship. The ceilidh voices rippled on; old and young intermingling; some softened by memories, some sharpened by argument. I glanced covertly about me. In too many Hebridean villages the tourist invasion combined with increasing mobility had virtually put an end to ceilidhing as we in Bruach knew it, and not for the first time I wished I had the artistic skill to preserve the scene as I saw it now. The small room with its low wood ceiling and walls stained harness-brown with years of peat smoke, lamp smoke and tobacco smoke; the small curtainless window set square and black against the night; the gay linoleum, or wax cloth as it was known to the crofters, recently laid with pride but already moulded to the rugged contours of the driftwood floor it concealed; the sturdy wooden table, normally in the centre of the room but now pushed back against the wall to accommodate the company; the squat, so solidly constructed water bench on which reposed two full pails of water with the dipper handy beside them; the capacious oatmeal and flour barrels, each holding at least a hundred and forty pounds of meal, standing side by side in a corner of the room and disguised by fancy wallpaper; the salt barrel holding a minimum of two hundredweights of coarse salt which stood in the opposite corner; the peat bucket beside the fireplace piled to toppling height with neatly shaped peats which