ISLAND
Looking
down to the harbour I could see the great fat white Aylesbury duck curtsey
neatly under the bottom of the gate in the bottom corner of the house
field in order to come waddling up the track in front of the house.
She was followed, as always, by her dapper little consort, the wild
mallard she had seduced with her majestic bosom and even more glorious
white bottom. Whilst she always contrived to give the impression of
matronly dignity, if not of maidenly reserve, he was pursuing her now,
as usual, with the beady-eyed piratical intent of a male driven by uncontrollable
lust.
They had found my new slipway a much easier route
to the sea and to their breakfast than the tumbled boulders of the bay
below the chapel, and had soon begun to pass me whilst I was still working
on it, quacking softly and encouragingly to each other, hopping and
skipping down the rough sandstone bordering walls even whilst I was
pouring the last batch of concrete.
Their appearance now must mean the tide was coming
in. As it ebbed they would go down to the shoreline, and paddle around
in the shallows, dabbling for little crabs and shrimps. I always wondered
that they always went and then returned by walking up and down the long
slope past the house, both with that curiously awkward twisting waddle,
much more pronounced for her than for him because of her luxurious embonpoint.
It always looked so painful for both, yet they preferred it to flying.
I know they could both fly perfectly well. I had discovered
it one day by accident when I dropped a large lump hammer behind them
onto a thin sheet of metal. This was intended to cover the bottom of
the chickens' front door, where it had rotted away completely, and I
had made it by cutting an oil drum open and then opening it out. The
two ducks had been poking about peacefully in the nettlebed behind the
midden looking for snails, but at the clang of metal they both exploded
upwards in a quacking flurry of alarm. Leaving a trail of small feathers
drifting behind them, they flew with strong strokes high above the walled
garden, over the chicken house, passed through the line of straggling
sycamores beside the cottage, and disappeared in the direction of the
same long wide field they were now toiling and moiling to climb
Now I could see Sandra was also coming up from the
big house. It was her red kerchief that had caught my eye. Now she was
crossing the front of the cottage. Her head was down and she was looking
worried. I soon learnt why. Niall MacFadyen, our furthest neighbour
towards Iona, had phoned the house to ask if I just happened to be free,
and if I could then try to help him that afternoon. What he really needed
was a visit from an agricultural engineer, but the man from Black's
- the only firm of engineers on the mainland - would not be available
for days. Meanwhile, he had a problem.
Like most of his neighbours, Niall always had one
or two fields let to grass. Cut towards the end of the summer, dried
by the sun and wind, it was now ready to be bailed. Given the uncertainties
of the Hebridean weather, the dry and sunny days of the past week had
made today an opportunity he could not afford to miss. But instead of
making bales his old Massey Ferguson baler, towed behind his tractor
and driven by its drive shaft, was just pushing out an endless mass
of hay tangled with twine which fell apart on hitting the ground. Apparently
the mechanism that should separate the bales, and also tie the twine
around each bale as it reached the proper size, had failed. Despite
his insistence that he would not want to be a trouble - he knew I had
plenty to do for the Doctor, and so on, Sandra reported that he sounded
a bit desperate,. Every other baler that he might borrow from other
farmers was being used.
This was probably perfectly true. They were all taking
advantage of the same weather. One of the greatest of surprises on coming
to this edge of the world was that we had expected everyone to live
together - most, after all, had been neighbours since childhood - in
a state of gentle interest in each others' lives and welfare. It was
a considerable shock to find that whilst this was how almost everyone
treated us, generally speaking almost everyone seemed to take great
satisfaction in disliking each other intensely. Slights and insults
were remembered for generations. It was not uncommon for people living
a mile or more apart on this lonely coast, their houses often the only
habitations visible from one another's windows, not to have spoken for
years. The only exception to this rule was in helping each other with
farm work. That duty was sacred. It was a duty no man or woman could
decline. If Niall asked for my help, it was because he had exhausted
all other possibilities already. I had to go.
But it also seemed that my repair of the generator
had become a legend along the coast. I had really only taken to bits
the ancient Perkins the one cylinder diesel, that turned it - probably
its first proper overhaul in 30 years - drained off the black sticky
oil that was possibly the same age, cleaned our its ports, reground
the valves, put in a few shims to adjust the compression ratio - and
finally put it together again. I had been just as surprised as delighted
when it had promptly burst again into throbbing, thumping life. But
even such elementary skill was unusual out here, however. Farmers have
rarely the time to learn how to mend their machinery, which is the reason
why virtually every farmyard has somewhere a corner of a field containing
a sad collection of broken-down junk that could have been saved for
many useful years if only there was someone who knew how to inject some
grease, clean the points, or replace a bearing. So many farms are littered
with rusting machinery because so many farmers believe that once a machine
is bought it never needs to be serviced again. It does not help, of
course, that they can claim the cost of these machines against their
tax. They are virtually encouraged to replace a proportion of their
machines every few years.
But keen eyes had seen exhaust smoke puffing again
from the diesel. They had also seen me working on the barge. That, too,
had seemed ready to be scrapped. In fact it had been a much easier task:
more like blacksmith's than mechanic's work. The hinges of its ramp
had simply been destroyed by saltwater and rust. I ripped out the remains,
deep sunk in the wood, and replaced them with a pair of massive galvanized
farm-gate hinges that I had found hanging up and forgotten in one of
the hay-barns. I bedded them in molten pitch in the proper naval fashion,
then filled all the old bolt-holes with more pitch as well. A huge grey
lump like an upturned pudding, which I found by the gate towards the
chapel and on which even grass was growing - it might have been a hundred
years old - had turned out to be a hillock of this valuable stuff, and
then I had painted everything with tar which I also found in a bucket
in the boat-shed. The whole was not especially pretty, but in motion
the ramp would no longer scoop up the sea like a snowplough, so that
the deck was always awash and nothing could be kept from the water unless
it was in some other waterproof container - there were lots of these
available of course: the wooden fishboxes of my Plymouth childhood were
rare finds these days, they had been replaced by strong polythene trays
of much the same dimensions. So many of these were washed up on our
shores alone every month that one had the impression that the Spanish
and Breton and Scottish and Irish trawlermen - one could trace them
all by the names printed on their sides - threw them away by the score
on every voyage. Anyway, if the deck stayed dry, these could now find
a better use. The ramp would now last another five or ten years - and
so, in fact, the barge too.
In one way or other, I had gained a reputation as
a wonder-worker. This was fine with me. There was otherwise a severe
imbalance in my scholarship. I knew virtually nothing of cows, sheep,
hens, ducks, fishing or lobster-pots. I also had not the slightest idea
how baler works. There was one on the island of exactly the same kind.
It was parked behind the workshop, together with the old iron hay-rake
and a couple of even older iron horse-ploughs. Some of the smarter hens
liked to lay their eggs inside our baler, for there they were out of
the wind and their eggs were safe from all but the cleverest of rats.
We had lots of rats. The two cats could hardly keep up with them.
But it would take far too long to get our baler onto
the barge as a replacement for Niall's; nor did I know whether it would
work either after being idle for at least a year, whilst quick search
through all the maintenance manuals that I could find in what had been
the big house gun-room and was now a store of the more expensive tools
drew a blank. I would just have to try to solve the problem with whatever
wit and common-sense I could muster. It did seem that I was his best
hope. I could only try.
I went over to the workshop. This attracted the immediate
attention of Mrs Thatcher, who tended to treat the workshop field as
her private domain, so that I had to push her and her twins out of the
way, even to bash her on the nose at the door to get into the workshop
alone - otherwise she and her two bleating urchins would certainly have
followed me inside - and filled the biggest toolbox I could find with
every tool I thought I might possibly use. As an afterthought I added
a pressure grease-gun, and a can of grease. It could possibly only need
this. Although to be polite I might need to conceal it, I would not
be at all surprised if what was wrong turned out to a lack of a few
squirts of lubricant.
Since I would be crossing alone, I had then to decide
which boat to take. It would have to be the smaller rubber dinghy, with
a Seagull. I had by now cleaned and repainted the lighter of the two
heavier boats. The heavier one, whose broken strake I had replaced the
previous week, was the best in rough water, but I did not know how long
my mission would last, and if I took one of the wooden boats it would
be high water before I reached the other side, and then I would need
to tow the rubber boat as well in order to be able to moor the wooden
dinghy in deep water and then transfer myself and my tools to the shore.
Complications like these, and often many more, had to be considered
before any crossing. It was not very far, only about a mile in a straight
line, rather more to avoid the reefs, but if you made a mistake it could
cost a lot of time. Not to be too dramatic, it could also cost a life.
Before all else Mrs T had first to be milked. This
was a bad-tempered business at the best of times, this time it was made
more fretful - for us - both by my haste to finish, which seemed to
rouse her to diabolical stratagems to frustrate both Sandra and me.
It has to be admitted that the method we used was possibly not best
suited to soothe the temperament of a shrewish old lady, even whilst
she was being simultaneously soothed and rewarded with a two scoops
of crushed maize.
The first step was to persuade to enter the portable
stall we had put up in front of the cottage. This was done by luring
her into it by shaking the maize enticingly in a bucket. The second
was to get her to put her neck into slot in the end of the stall, at
which point Sandra would lower a plywood flap to hold her there whilst
she alternately munched and bawled annoyance. Whilst this monstrous
device (protected world-wide by patent) kept her imprisoned, the third
step was for me to crawl under her belly and catch hold of her teats.
From now on, you must use imagination.
T hey were not very large teats, nor were they
long. She was full of milk, of course, but she would still not let the
twins suckle naturally. Whether this made her udders tender or not -
possibly it did - this was apparently not enough reason for her to be
grateful for my attention and the final indignity of my grasping her
so intimately was always the moment of greatest outrage and commotion.
Twice she managed to kick the cup into which I was trying to direct
the thin squirts of milk; once she put her foot squarely in it and spilt
most of ten minutes sweating labour; finally she caught me a shrewd
blow on the jaw with her left hind leg. This seemed to please her a
lot. After this she chewed steadily, only emitting an occasional deep
intestinal rumble: which is not so reassuring when you are lying underneath
a sheep's rear end. I had no doubt that if Thatcher feel the slightest
need to evacuate her bladder or her bowels, she would do so on me with
complete satisfaction.
Despite this daily intimacy, we did not really like
each other: Thatcher and I; and I wondered now, as I had wondered before,
who really benefited from this fretful exercise. To milk a thoroughly
bad-tempered old ewe twice a day would test the patience of a saint;
perhaps that was what this was, spiritual exercise. Finally I was able
to crawl out and deliver a cup of muddy milk to Sandra for her to give
to the lambs in their bottles. The idea was that this would increase
the enforced bond of maternity between them and Thatcher. Personally
I doubted that this was having any effect on her at all. Fortunately
the lambs were thriving on the much greater volume of milk that we made
up as a mixture together with the few molecules of her oestrogen that
went with it. In any case, to her continued irritation, they followed
her about wherever she went. They were invariably as content in her
company as she was grumpy. At least she could not bite them. By the
time they were ready to be eaten - it is not what lambs expect, but
what they very often get - she was treating them as almost human.
The trip across was just as bumpy as I expected, as
it nearly always is in a smallish rubber boat, but otherwise it was
uneventful. I got moderately damp as I left the shelter of the island,
but was soon dried again by the wind. Despite the weight of the tools
and me the wind kept lifting the front of the dinghy and bouncing the
whole lot sideways, so that much of the time I only made progress crab-wise,
but as soon as I turned with the wind the bouncing eased and I could
run into the shore.
The tide was reaching its height, the wind was pushing
it into the Lough as well, and the edge of the water was lifting the
line of tide-wrack above the sand onto the short-cropped grass. I could
see our little white car beside the garage rocking with the force of
the wind. Always anxious for the propeller, I cut the motor too soon
to lift the prop shaft of the scatter of plump black rocks on the sandy
bottom, and then I had to shove hard over the side and the stern with
one of the stumpy little oars to reach the grass at all against the
wind. I clambered out, holding the painter, lifted out the toolbox,
then pulled the dinghy sideways so that I could take off the Seagull,
carried both box and motor up to the car, locked the latter in the garage,
went back to drag the dinghy far up onto the grass and tied its painter
to a sturdy iron fence post that must have been set in its concrete
base thirty or forty years before, possibly before the war; possibly
just after it began, when the Redesdales brought their damaged daughter
up here to die.
It was she, you may remember, who shot herself in
the head in a Berlin garden when war with Britain was declared, using
the pistol Hitler had given her. She had then been given a special train
to bring her from Berlin, safe passage was arranged to London, and then
the family had brought her up here. Old Mrs Scott remembered her being
'just like a chile'. That was the wound, of course. She had been one
of the beautiful of the Mitford sisters and her second name was Valkyrie.
Years later I used to explain to a fascinated class why suicide by gunshot
is not as easy as many like to think, and that the worst possible route
for the bullet is across the brain from side to side. There is, as always,
I insisted, a right and a wrong way to do anything. In this case, more
than in any other, you do not want to have to try it twice. Unity Valkyrie
was reduced by her own attempt to the age of a six-year old.
It took me another twenty minutes to drive over to
the farm. Marie met me in the yard, and after a cheerful, somewhat distracted,
greeting pointed out the track from their yard to the field. And there
in the field sat Niall's tractor, and there behind it its impotent baler,
and behind both should have been a more or less evenly spaced line of
tumbled but neatly tied bales. Instead there was a trail of wreckage
as if thrown from a foundering ship. Here and there were a few whole
bales. Most were only half-made rickety things. A sad scattered wake
of others were already being blown apart by the wind. They had not been
made in anything resembling bales at all and all through it all wound
a horrible orange tangle of wasted baler twine.
And there on the seat, staring glumly out to sea as
if his salvation might come from there, sat Niall, the usual half-smoked
cigarette cupped in one hand, a big broad man, in his forties, greasy
tweed cap on his black hair, with huge square hands strong enough, as
I had seen, to lift a swimming ewe with her sodden fleece that alone
would weigh another thirty pounds together with her body weight clean
out of the sea and into the boat, and to do that again and again. At
the sound of the car he swung stiffly from his seat, and came across
to me, pinching out his cigarette with his fingers as he came and holding
out his hand. His tanned and red face from the perpetual wind was now
wearing a rueful smile and a frown.
"I should never 'a thought to call you, Cap'n,"
he began, but his embarrassment was already embarrassing to me. I shook
the hand he offered, but to spare him any more explanations walked past
him to the crippled machine. Its once red paint had lost all of its
shine and was faded pink. Below the sun there was already a long line
of dark cloud on the horizon coming in from the west. That seemed to
promise rain. If he had not got his hay in by dark it might be lost
to him.
"Perhaps you could make a start by trying to
tell me how it ought to work," I proposed, "Because I don't
think I know."
It would be best, I also thought, in this atmosphere
of tense but high expectation, not to suggest in even in the most light-hearted
fashion that even the mechanical genius he thought me to be might fail.
So we stood for a while, our backs to the wind, with that wonderful
clear bright sunlight shining over our shoulders deep into the machine's
mysterious insides - and this soon helped me to understand that Niall's
explanation would be no help at all. If anything was to be known, the
baler would have to tell me itself.
I could not say this to him, of course, for despite
his strength he was a tremendously shy man, and so I let him continue
to tie himself into jerky verbal knots explaining: "so this goes
in here, you see; then that thing there goes around and around - and
then oop!" - whilst I tried to puzzle out from first principles
how the machine collected loose hay from the ground, pressed it into
bales - and then, far more importantly, how these bales were then separated,
bound with twine and the knots in it were tied. It was this last part
that was not happening. It must happen very fast. How the hell was it
managed?
Niall's dog, Shep, had been ordered to lie by the
gate whilst the tractor was moving. She now decided that her exile had
ended, circled round to take up a new position from which she could
better watch her master, watch out for any danged sheep that might otherwise
be getting themselves into trouble, and of course keep a watchful eye
on me and lay down again placing her chin neatly on her crossed paws.
Okay. This whole contraption was towed and powered
by the tractor. If, as now, the tractor's engine is not running, it
is dead: completely inert. Its power was supplied by a shaft coming
out of the back of the gearbox underneath the driver's metal seat. I
had already used exactly the same drive on the island to mix concrete
for the harbour. The concrete mixer hooked on to the back here and here.
This drive itself could be engaged and disengaged by leaning down backwards
from the tractor seat, de-clutching, and pushing this lever: this one,
here.
Right now, however, looking up the bale chute from
the rear - I was having to invent these terms as I went - there was
nothing to be seen but a sorry mess of hay and tangled twine. Pointless
to ask Niall to power it up again: this would only make things worse.
The hay he had cut a few days before now lay all over the field. It
had been cut in long swathes and had lain just as the mower had left
it, but it was now being blown at every angle. But now I could also
see that the baler was designed to sweep it up from the ground, despite
the several inches of stubble that remained and in which it was naturally
entangled, by dozens of wire prongs rotating across the front of the
baler inside a slotted cylindrical housing. These prongs would pick
up the hay and drag inside this housing; and this ensured that it was
delivered into the guts of the machine at the end of this chute - here.
Then it must be compressed against that kind of gate - back there -
packed in by successive thrusts of this piston thing, sliding from here
to there; until, presumably, enough had been collected to make a bale.
And then something must be triggered by the bale to - .
Suddenly I realized that I could not do any of this
with Niall, but hovering silent but reverently behind me and breathing
over my shoulder. He had in fact a wonderful smell: about equal parts
of dog, sheep, woodsmoke, or possibly peat, hay, of course, tobacco,
of course, diesel, and sweat: a heady mixture that normally I could
have inhaled with pleasure; but his anxiety - no, even more alarming
rather: his obvious certainty - that all I needed to do was reach in
with a spanner, twiddle it a bit, and he could be cracking on again
- toot-sweet - was very distracting. As gently as I could, I banished
him with his Woodbines and Shep to the headland on the other side of
the field, and returned to my studies.
If only it had been moving when I arrived - even if
it had done nothing but toss out these horrible wrecked bales - I would
at least have some insight into the way it was all connected. As it
was it just sat there - much bigger, but not more complicated, essentially,
than a sewing machine, but absolutely static: no help at all. Imagine
trying to discover how sewing machine works that does not move.
I cleared away all the hay that I could reach out
of the tunnel, or the chute, and in the metal floor of this square tunnel,
or chute, or tube, into which the newly gathered hay would normally
be rammed by the thrust of that piston there: that would be this part
coming in from over here, there was suddenly revealed a rectangular
recess, or niche, or notch in the floor; and in this niche or notch
in the floor of the chute or tube was what looked like the eye of an
enormous needle, its blunt tip was gleaming bright, and through its
eye I could see was threaded the frayed end of the baler twine.
Ah-hah! Suddenly I knew that this was it: this was
the mysterium magisterium, the hoke of the poke, the pocus of the hocus,
the whosit of whatever - as usual I was muttering to myself. This must
be the part that did the business, and the fact that it was not doing
the business was why I was here. This was what I was here to cure.
Ho-kay. Now the reserves of twine were two great spools
on brackets on the outside of the machine, one was already feeding into
the machine, and the other, I realized, was attached to it too but only
as a spare. There must be absolute miles of the stuff. I was the brightness
of that tip that held the eye. It looked exactly like a monstrous sting,
and in it dwelt a kind of potency: as indeed there must be, for this
is the very purpose of the beast, the reason that it exists at all.
Even as the solid mass of hay is pressed again by
the piston into an even tighter embrace in the tunnel, this long needle
- it suddenly occurred to me to look underneath the chute at the baler's
underside, and now I could see that the whole curved length of it was
held back ready for the moment when it would spear upwards, tremendous
irresistible force, pierce through the body of the bale, reach over,
right right over its back, as it were, there seize in a flash the end
of the twine that - I now saw as well - the preceding bale had left
behind, and tie it - snip! - in a pitiless tight knot.
It was all actually intensely - hmm. It was really
all very sexy. What a strange beast: the bales were like its eggs, formed,
prepared, impregnated, ejected - Inside the red metal tunnel, as warm
as a womb though still thick with dust, the scent of the hay was nearly
intoxicating. I climbed out again, sat with my back against the tyre
of the baler to consider all of this. I was getting dizzy trying to
visualize this mindless thudding motion of the piston arm combined with
this darting thrust of the needle, which must move in this arc, up,
down, almost so quick that one could not follow its work, and yet this
work is the crucial part. Either it does what it is supposed to do,
does what it is expected to do, and the result is a succession of fine
fat babies - well-made bales - thudding down behind its waddling red
rear, or there is this horrible trail of scattered hay and wasted twine.
Even now I had really no good idea how this mad device
- this slim curved devilish quick - prick: yes, prick would be the proper
word - achieved its proper end, but the brightness of exposed thread
just where it would penetrate the bale told of a bolt that had clearly
shifted from its intended position. Probably it had been loose at the
end of the previous year, when Niall, working from dawn to dusk, perpetually
short-handed like most Highland farmers, had put this machine away last
year and had not thought to test it again. Within half an hour of being
put to work again, it had untwisted even further. It was certainly now
no longer where Massahs Massey and Ferguson wanted it to be.
I reached in with a spanner and, sure enough, it was
loose. I screwed it back until no bright thread was visible, walked
over to his tractor, climbed up and waggled the gear stick in neutral,
twisted the ignition, and as the diesel burst into life. Niall, with
his coat over his arm, was already turning towards me across the field.
I leant back and engaged the baler drive, and began to move the tractor
forward in its lowest gear. All that I needed to see had happened before
Niall, advancing down the field with a light of wonder on his face,
and with Shep trotting eagerly beside him looking upwards for instructions,
had got his first arm into his sleeve.
Turning the wheels of the tractor until the prongs
of the gathering wossname were astraddle a deep winnow of hay, I saw
the tunnel begin to fill, and fill, and fill - and then, thwang!, that
wicked curved lance speared upwards to its duty, through the first warm
and scented packed mass, whilst more and more is packed in behind, and
in due time and with precise decorum a fine fat bale - as tightly tied
as any one possibly could wish - dropped out of the chute behind.
It was indeed a little triumph, despite being mostly
a fluke. The problem had really declared itself. Despite my entirely
truthful explanations of all that I had done, however, I could only
have improved on my success as a thaumaturge by walking home on water.
If I had been given only a little more whisky, before Niall hastened
away to finish baling before the rain came in as expected, I might have
tried this too. As it was I packed my tools, patted Shep - exiled again
to the gate, but a distinctly better opinion of me - said cheerio to
Marie; she had probably less than a visitor a week in that lonely farmhouse
looking out at one of the most beautiful sights in the world - and let
the car and the toolbox find their way home down the hill and along
the road to the garage and the boat.
I suppose a lot of life's problems are like that ole
baler, I mused, as the Citroen jounced down the track. You have this
big problem; you don't understand how everything's connected. But sometimes
you see just one thing that doesn't look right. You fix this and everything
improves. I wondered how this important insight would help solve the
other problem of my life. When would I have the time to give more thought
to what I really needed to think about. Were both King and Longford
right that there was no-one who could help. Where would I start? And
where was the boat? Where the hell is the boat. There is no boat!
Jeepers! Where the boat had been - firmly tied to
this solid old iron fence-post, none other than this solid old iron
fence-post; pathetically, I looked around to be sure that it was not
still tied to another solid old iron fence-post twenty feet away or
more. Blowing away the whisky fumes vigorously I even walked around
to the other side of the garage. It wasn't there too. For thirty or
forty - or even, for Christ's sake, since the perishin' Pyramids - this
solid old iron post had been rusting away in this corner of this field,
and nothing - nothing - could have moved it, certainly not this boisterous
bullying buffeting wind.
But something it had. As soon as I had turned my back,
the wind must have lifted it from the grass like a great fat grey balloon,
had waggled, tugged, butted and wrestled it - until finally the painter
broke: there was the short end, by my knot; the rest was still pointing
stiffly upwards at about thirty degrees to show just how hard it had
tried.
And the boat had gone - or, to be exact, the bloody
boat had bloody flown. Carried by this steady strong westerly wind it
must twenty miles away by now - even more. I imagined it appearing above
Fort William, sailing down the whole length of the Great Glen, over
Inverness, flying out across the North Sea. Apparition over Scotland!
Kirk leaders convene! Papal legate to be questioned.
The Kirk would have to take care of that. The more
important fact is: I am now marooned.
Colin
Hannaford,
"Soldier."
18/03/05
