Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 14

And we all grew a little bit older and maybe wiser and the eighteenth century was mostly wonderful with early Bob Dylan albums, weak black and white TV with only one station and no phone, until two years later they finally put up the ten telegraph poles we needed, and no road to the house, until we finished spreading the two hundred metres of rock with shovels and a bit of dynamite and more backache, and a very old Renault 4 with the doors fallen off, which forever refused to die, even when we tried to burn it and buried it beneath a five tonne rock and covered it with earth.

And then, several light years away from real life, with a baby and a dog, we finally remembered something we should not have forgotten. We had almost no money and absolutely no way of making any.

We did have a piece of paper and a pen though, so we wrote down all the ways we could think of to make a living on a very little remote Scottish island.

It was not a long list and as we got to know the Hebridean weather the list got a lot shorter. We crossed out all the jobs that involved going out of doors.

So we chose the most obvious one.

We became weavers, not from any arty-crafty love of weaving, but because the Outer Hebrides is where Harris Tweed is made. We bought a second-hand loom for £80 and an old weaver taught us what to do and every second week or so the mills in Stornoway brought us work. Every other week we had to get the dole.

The Harris Tweed loom has no motor. It’s the regulations and is like riding a very heavy bicycle underwater and the week we made the tweed we had one pound more than the week we got the dole. This was not a career with any prospects, beyond exceptional thigh muscles.