Читать книгу England have my Bones - T. H. White - Страница 8

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There were two things wrong with to-day. I could not help thinking about the cost of motor-cars. The wind was in the east. We started at the Bath Pool with high hopes, but things proved more and more unfriendly, until noon found us both flogging the Mill Pool like maniacs, for anything. The Ardgalleys and the Crooked Pot and the Duke’s Pool were fruitless. By 7.15 I had three trout, all of 9 ounces, and Macdonald (tactfully) one of six or seven ounces. I kept one of them for my breakfast. The rest went back. Sad as the day appears on paper, it was a very nice one indeed. By one o’clock there had been two goosanders, four oyster catchers, two teal and one sandpiper, beside the usual plover and partridge. The goosanders looked rather like the oyster catchers, in their marking, at any rate. And the oyster catchers made the same sort of noise as the sandpiper. Macdonald puzzled me by saying that the “Guckoo” was late. The primaries of the plover buckled to the wind on a turn, like the tawse of a brogue. The pine clumps on the moors had dead trees in them, like the badger bristles on a tramp’s old chin. Then it began to rain. It was a Homeric east-winderly rain, as repeatedly described by the Southcotes. Just as my fingers were turning into slippery, cold-storage fish, Macdonald shouted that he had had a pull from a salmon. I hurriedly buckled on a minnow and followed him down. Then he put on a larger minnow and came down after me. In vain. We lay under a bank and talked. The Brown Hill had white whisps crawling over it. The snow on the higher moors vanished in the storms. There was a rainbow right across the arc, a perfect semicircle. Earlier on there had been a minor rainbow which started at my feet. I never saw this before. It went up beside my rod, and vanished to the left. So it has been a lovely day, if not a good fishing one. Also Macdonald taught me to throw a salmon fly, with his 14-ft. rod. I had three spells of five or ten minutes and stopped with a good cast.

Back to the beer-house, in a hired car, for a splendid high tea at 8.30. The food is excellent. The bread has a mouldy taste, due to its not being mouldy—like the chemical muck we have in England. Peat fires. The witch and her brood are lovely. There are two texts in my bedroom. Why do these people live, particularly the small crofters? I ask Macdonald about them incessantly. They have no amusements, only relaxation. When they are not working they seem to sit in front of the fire, doing nothing, reading nothing, and not speaking. No wonder they hang up texts and believe in the devil. Bare moors, few neighbours, a but and ben. Are they wildly religious or fiercely immoral? How do they get rid of themselves? No doubt they are warlocks in secret, but that I am not let into. My witch treats me like a strange animal.

The gravel is beginning to show in the burn: red. Granite, heather, peat ash. Why is rose to purple the national shade? Is Scotland rich in iron? Even the wrens.