A Croft in the Hills Read Online Free Page B

every morning, till the spring grass came, they would be there to greet us at the door.
    In the evenings we made plans and discussed endlessly the absorbing topics of sheep and cattle, hens and pigs, fertilisers and farm-machinery and crops. This ‘shop’ never grows
stale. It has an inexhaustible fascination, perhaps because one has the assurance that one is dealing with fundamentals, perhaps because one knows that there’s always the unpredictable
lurking in the background ready to upset the best-laid schemes, perhaps just because it relates to things one instinctively loves. We began to long for the days to lengthen and the air to soften so
that we could start putting our plans into operation.
    On Christmas morning the plumber arrived to try once more to connect the pump. He had walked the two miles from the bus and was quite tired out when he reached us and amazed at the wintry
conditions in our hills. In Inverness, he said, there had been promise of a reasonably mild day and he had had hopes of getting the job done. We have now come to accept this sort of thing. We leave
home on a bitter winter’s morning and find spring, with a flush of green in the trees, at Loch Ness-side. It’s not the distance of two miles that does it but the rise of close on a
thousand feet. There was little he could do, the plumber decided, so he shared our Christmas dinner and set off again to walk to the bus. At dusk we lit the candles on our little Christmas tree and
played games with Helen till bed-time.
    There was a party for all the children of the district in the village hall, to which we took Helen. We met her future teacher and a dozen or so lively youngsters. There were games and songs and
a piper and there was tea and cakes and oranges and sweets. It was a simple little festivity but a very happy one. Everyone asked kindly how we were faring. ‘It can be fearful wild here in
the winter’, they said, almost apologising for the climate in their hills. ‘We like it’, we said, and they looked at us out of their clear, shrewd eyes and I think they almost
believed us. We began to feel that we nearly belonged.
    On New Year’s Eve we sat by the fire talking, as usual, and when midnight came we filled our glasses and slipped upstairs and pledged each other over Helen’s sleeping head. We went
down again and got out the black bun and some extra glasses and put fresh logs on the fire. We thought it more than likely we should have a neighbour for a first-foot. Distance would not daunt the
people of Abriachan, we were sure, and the night was fine.
    We sat till two o’clock, getting drowsier and drowsier. No one came and we went to bed. At about three-thirty we were dragged from the depths of sleep by what sounded like an aeroplane
crashed outside the front door. We fumbled our way into heavy coats and staggered out, to find three neighbours clambering off a tractor. There was much handshaking and back-slapping. We poked the
fire into a blaze and drank a toast. Later we helped them to remount and stood at the door, watching the tractor lurch off on its way to the next port of call. How the two passengers managed to
keep their precarious balance, draped over the rear mudguards, will remain for ever a mystery. But we were immensely cheered by their visit and went back to bed and slept till the middle of the
morning.
    During the first days of the new year we made many pleasant visits to neighbours. Some we had called on before, but there was one whose house we had never been in. He lived, with his brother and
his cousin, in a high fold of the hills to the south-west. Several other families had lived up there at one time, but now only the ruins of their little dwellings are left. Finlay’s place,
however, had been completely modernised under the Hill Farming Scheme, and there, in the little house nestled in the shelter of the rock, we found a most heartening welcome. We were given tea
before a fine red fire and were