Free A Croft in the Hills by Katharine Stewart Page A

their arrival their little pink snouts were black with burrowing in the peaty soil. Whatever it was in
the way of vitamins and minerals they got out of the heather roots and the ground, I don’t know, but they certainly did thrive. There was no lolling about in a clean, concrete sty for them,
they worked for their living and they liked it. The exercise in the confined space certainly didn’t prevent them putting on good, healthy flesh.
    Neighbours came from far and wide to cast an eye over them, prod them with sticks, scratch their backs and murmur ‘porky, porky!’ into their appreciative ears. A pig does love to be
flattered, and the neighbours would say, as they lit their pipes and shook their heads slowly from side to side, ‘grand pigs, grand pigs...’ in a ruminative, almost wistful way. In the
old days, when weaners were to be had for half a crown, every croft had its pig, tenderly reared in a small, dark sty: in November it would be stuck and salted. Mrs. Maclean had given me the recipe
for the brine mixture and told me tales of the great feastings they had always had with their Christmas ham. However, these particular little pigs were to go to market, and go they did a couple of
months later, when they fetched more than double their purchase price and we bought six more with the proceeds.
    That month we had a real heat wave. Warm, dry weather is so much the exception to the rule here that we tend to welcome it with open arms, and to revel in it unthinkingly. The heat shimmers over
the moor, the hills are shrouded in blue haze, the scent of the small flowers is honey-sweet and lulling. Helen scampers around, in the briefest of sun-suits, and in no time at all is burned gipsy
brown. But a heat wave brings its problems.
    We hadn’t had much snow that winter, the springs were running low and to our dismay we found that there was not enough of a flow to drive the pump at the well. The storage tank in the
house was empty and we began a frantic search for an additional supply. We wished the golden well were not so far away, it would have solved all our problems. Neighbours, sympathetic as always to
our troubles, told us of several spots where they remembered water rising long ago. We followed their directions and eventually came on the old ‘horse well’, where our predecessors had
always watered the horses. It looked promising. Jim and Billy cleared the rushes, dug down to the source of it and laid a pipe, to connect the flow with that from our existing source. It was not
strong enough to make much difference immediately, but we were confident that it would help after a good spell of rain. In the meantime, we had to carry water for drinking and cooking in pails,
every morning and evening, while for washing we still had some in the big butt at the back door. When that was done I carried the clothes down to the near burn and laundered them there. It was very
pleasant on a burning hot day. I would lay the linen on a flat stone and rub it clean, then rinse it in the clear flow. Now and again, an astonished trout would flash through the washing pool: a
frog would give me an incredulous stare before bounding to the safety of a cool, green hollow in the bank. When my back began to ache I would stretch out on the grass and watch Helen splashing in
her own pool upstream.
    Dinner would be a picnic eaten on the doorstep that day, and I would make up for it by producing ham omelette and a cool salad at supper-time. I am thankful that eggs agree with us all and that
they can be made into an almost endless variety of dishes. An egg and a lettuce, bread, butter and milk—I think we could all live on those for ever!
    One evening, after a blazing day, which had left us really limp, we noticed the sky clouding at sunset. Helen was asleep upstairs, the chickens and ducklings had all gone to roost. Everything
was very still and quiet and we were sitting in the cool of the living-room, looking through the papers,