Summer in the Hebrides
NAT BEN we we left the mainland at Mallaig for the voyage across the Minch, the sea was like a sheet of mother-of-pearl, whose shining surface was broken only by the puffins, the gannets, and our little ship herself, and the islands lay blue and dim, enfolded in a silent enchantment : -but the Hebridean weather is as fickle as any, and the rain was coming down in a steady sheet when, at 2 a.m., we arrived at our destination, Loughmaddy in North "[fist, and stumbled ashore to the waiting motor among the boxes of groceries and bicycles. The night was dark, the wind was whistling wildly. And it was not until next morning, when I pulled up my blind, that I fully realized I was in the Hebrides—those magic islands to which I had always longed to go.
As I looked out, the deer were cropping quietly within a stone's throw of the house, in a country of heather and "quiet sunniness" which reminded me forcibly of James Stephens's poem :— "The crooked paths go every way Upon the hill—they wind about Through the heather in and out Of the quiet sunniness.
And there the deer, day after day, Stray in sunny quietness, Cropping here and cropping there, As they pause and turn and pass, Now a bit of heather spray, Now a mouthful of the grass."
As a matter of fact Stephens was writing of goats; but I have substituted deer, for there are only two white goats in North Uist, whereas the deer are plentiful.
Those who know Ireland will be reminded constantly of Connemara, and yet there is the whole world of differ- ence between these islands and the West of Ireland. The mental climate is poles apart, for in the Hebrides we have a reliant, self-respecting, independent people, who toil early and late at the crops so hardly won from their rocky soil, who catch fish in their thousand lochs and bays, who herd their shaggy Highland cattle communally, who gather turf in the long summer evenings against the longer winter that is coming, and who spin and weave and knit with the wool from the backs of their little, black. faced, sturdy mountain sheep.
- The islanders have courteous manners and speak English in soft Gaelic voices, with a strange accent, for among themselves they speak their own tongue, that is said to resemble Sanskrit. At the Games an old woman of over seventy had come, as she said, perhaps for the last time. She wore a striped drugget skirt that she had had for forty years, and she told the story of how she came by it. She had the wool, but no money to pay for the spinning, so gathering a sack of whelks she sold them, and could then pay the spinner. But she had no loom and could not weave, and the weaver was busy and disinclined to oblige, so she sat down and sang a song in Gaelic, and the weaver's heart was melted and the drugget woven into beautiful red and white and black stripes. She and I sat together on a bench at the Games, and though she had no English and I had no Gaelic, she sang me her little song, as a child might.
Over six hundred people gathered together in a grassy 'hollow, close to the Big Sea, as the Atlantic is called thereabouts, to watch the throwing and the dancing and to listen to the piping, and the three local Women's Rural Institutes had joined together to have their little Exhibi- tion of homespnns and homespun wool and stockings and knitted frocks and shawls.
The islanders talk little ; with the great silence round them, that can be heard always through and behind the song of the wind and the thunder of the breakers and the cry of the sea-birds, chatter as we know it in the cities on the mainland dies away as a stream disappears in the sand. But in the evenings they gather together in one another's houses and tell stories of the past, sagas about the islands and the blood-feuds of other days and of the Secret People and what happens when warnings are not obeyed. And their eyes have the look of sailors that are for ever looking out over great spaces, for they, too, look to the far-away mountains of Harris and the Coolins of Skye, or across the Big Sea to St. Kilda, those faint blue blots beyond the rocks where the seals breed, or across the bogs and bays or up to the stars at night.
Some of them still live in sod huts with heather-thatched roofs, but many have now built grim, trim little stone dwellings with slate roofs, though they still have earthen floors. Everything is kept shining and clean : a hen or two may stray in at the door, but there are no pigs, only the little Highland calves that look like Teddy-bears, and the sheep-dog, and sometimes a white cat.
• In North Uist the islanders are sternly Protestant ; in South Uist they are Roman Catholics, and there they have preserved their dances and songs. In the North Island twice a year they have Communion and prepare for Sunday from the preceding Thursday. Work is stopped and every day the people go to the Kirk, and on Sunday gather together on the hill-side and out in the open they receive the Bread and Wine round the Lord's Table. Later they chant their Gaelic hymns and the echoes mingle with the call of the gulls and the murmur of the sea. On Monday they attend yet another service, and by the afternoon may be seen in sober black going home across the fields to their crofts.
I have written so far and have said no word of the flowers that make a coloured mosaic of the grass, nor of the water-lilies that float exquisitely on the fresh-water lochs in among the bogs, nor of the tanseys and yellow daisies, the vetches and stone-crops and a host of other flowers that grow freely but grow to no height because a the wind that is never still. Many are used for the dyes for the homespuns, heather making a wonderful yellow and a lichen from the rocks a rich brown, known as crottle.
It is a strange thing but true that every hour of every day the islands change their colour, they shift and merge from grey to blue and mauve and purple and • green ; and you may look to the right and the sun will be shining, and to the left and a cloud may be spilling rain, or the day will break fair and in an hour the hills will shroud themselves in mist, or the clouds will hang low with the dawn and later the whole world will be shining light. And the lochs will be colourless as lead between their banks of heather as you pass along the road, and as you pass back again they will be lying like living sapphires in a green and purple world.
But the islands must be seen and lived in and above all loved before they will yield their secrets to the stranger; but, once he is within, peace descends upon his soul and he is healed, WINIFEIDE WRENCIL
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