Читать книгу The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community - Tom Steel - Страница 12

To all outward appearances, life on Hirta changed little over the years. ‘If other countries are furnished with a variety of luxuries,’ concluded the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay in 1756, ‘St Kilda possesses in a remarkable degree the necessaries of life.’ Sixty years later, MacCulloch wrote in a similar vein: ‘The men are well-looking and better dressed than many of their neighbours of the Long Island; bearing indeed the obvious marks of ease of circumstance both in apparel and diet.’ Even by the end of the nineteenth century, when times became harder for the St Kildans, John Ross wrote, ‘On the whole the people live well, all that is wanted is a greater variety and more vegetable food. A Skyeman who had been often on the island for various lengths of time gave me his opinion in these terms. “They are the best fed people in Creation. I speak the truth, master”.’

The St Kildans were cragsmen first, crofters second. The remarkably high standard of living they enjoyed was based primarily upon the sea birds which provided so many of the islanders’ wants and supplied the proprietor with a profit that enabled him to be generous to his remote tenants. The scant land available to them on Hirta was never a source of wealth. The St Kildans worked hard to grow essential crops and probably put more hours into their crofts than they spent fowling, but the yield was slight.

Despite native prosperity the village on Hirta in the seventeenth century must have appeared very mean and small to the outsider. One hundred and eighty islanders, according to Martin Martin, lived in twenty-five black houses. The homes were of dry-stone construction, roofed with turf and hay and lay above the line of the later nineteenth-century village, to the west of Village Bay. The chief attraction of the site was that the homes received the most hours of sunlight and that the land was relatively dry and well drained. It was the most sheltered area available: the hills that surrounded the scattered houses broke the main force of northerly and westerly gales, and the southern shoulder of Oiseval deflected winds from the east.

Inside the houses, all was black with soot and the air hung heavy with the perfume of rough peat. There were no windows and no chimney: the fire smouldered in the middle of the floor and the smoke escaped by way of the door. The furniture of every home was sparse – the islanders lived most of their lives eating and sleeping on the floor. Each family owned a set of quernstones to grind meal, a hollow stone called a clach shoule which acted as a lamp, and a cragan which was a vessel of rudely baked clay that served as a cooking pot. The only form of lighting available was the clach shoule; the hollow in the stone was filled with fulmar oil and a cinder of peat acted as a wick. Each house also had a pitcher for water that was readily available from the numerous wells on Hirta, and a dish or two to drink from.

Life in the black house, however, had much to commend it. The sound of the ever-present wind on Hirta was greatly reduced by the thickness of the walls. The structure was warm and draught-proof and there was little chance of condensation forming. The black house, in fact, was a healthy home for people who were primarily outdoor folk.

In winter, living conditions were apparently less beneficial. The St Kildans, like their neighbours on the Hebrides, shared their humble dwellings with their cattle, so that the beasts would not perish from cold. Although unhygienic, the custom had its advantages. The presence of the cattle added warmth and the dung that was allowed to amass and dry on the floor was of inestimable value.

The Reverend Neil Mackenzie, who went to St Kilda in 1829, was distressed by the unhygienic conditions. He was influenced by the trend elsewhere in the Highlands and islands to improve the conditions in which people were living in the name of sanitation. A new village was planned. With financial incentive provided by a philanthropic Englishman, Sir Thomas Acland, who paid a short visit to the island, the St Kildans began to construct their new homes. Wood and glass – two alien materials – were incorporated in their design and were duly supplied by the proprietor. Between the years 1836 and 1838, twenty-five houses, barns, and outbuildings were constructed in a crescent one hundred yards above the shore at the head of Village Bay.

The new black houses, a great improvement upon those they replaced, were described in 1853 by Lady Mackenzie of Gairloch when, together with her young son Osgood, she paid a visit to Hirta. She was ‘surprised at the cleanly appearance of the walls and roofs of the houses, and the nice dry walk which went all along the sides of the houses. The walls of the houses are built just as they are in Harris – that is double, being very thick and the middle filled with earth. The roof extends only to the inner wall, and you can walk round the top of the wall quite easily. The form of the roof is oval, like a big bee-hive. They are made of wood covered with turf and then thatched with straw above, and on the outside are straw ropes like a network put across to keep the wind from blowing away the thatch. The houses have generally a sort of window with a tiny bit of glass, and they have a plan of their own for locking their doors with a wooden key made by themselves. It appears to keep matters quite secure. Osgood observed that the beaks of the solan geese were used as pegs to keep down the straw on the buildings.’

The cattle, however, still occupied one end of the house. ‘The byre is on the left hand side as you enter,’ wrote Lady Mackenzie, ‘and above it is the only aperture for letting out smoke, which in fact they wish to keep in as much as possible for the sake of the soot, which they use to enrich the land for barley and the potatoes in the spring. I was told that they never clean out their byres at all till they take away the manure in April, and previous to that time it is almost impossible to get in and out of the door.’ The fireplace still remained in the middle of the room and once a year the interior floor was dug up and the roof was stripped and the straw, impregnated with soot, spread on the ground. Every October, in preparation for winter, fresh thatch was laid on the roof.

In the 1850s, the Reverend Dr MacLachlan decided the time had come to present the St Kildans with a quantity of crockery. He was particularly concerned with the lack of sanitation on the island. There were no lavatories at all on Hirta and human functions were performed upon the ground. The kindly reverend saw fit to donate a chamber pot to each household. The islanders, however, had no idea what they were for and used them to eat porridge.

In each house was a box bed, a standard feature of rural life in Scotland and, like so many things, the product of common sense. In Hirta it was called a crub. A boot-shaped sleeping cell, the crub was sensible in a place where wood was scarce, as the alcove could be built into the house when originally constructed.

In the early 1860s, new cottages were constructed by the then proprietor, John Macpherson MacLeod. A row of sixteen modern cottages, measuring thirty-three feet by fifteen feet, was built under the supervision of John Ross, master mason of the MacLeod estate. ‘The walls’, wrote McDiarmid, ‘are well built, with hewn stones in the corners and about seven or eight feet high.’ There were chimneys built into each gable and every home could boast two hearths. Every house had two windows, one for each room, facing out into the bay. Each window was fitted with nine panes of glass and the door, fitted with good latches, was placed between the windows. The stone and mortar cottages were built fifteen to twenty yards apart, gable end to gable end, and formed a long street.

The street was the only one to be found in the Western Isles. It was even given a name, ‘Main Street, St Kilda’, and each house was given a number, no 1 being the dwelling nearest to the manse. A stone-slab causeway was laid along the entire length of the street so that when it rained there was no risk of mud being carried inside the house.

The interior of each home was divided into two or three rooms by wooden partitions. Two rooms were fair-sized and the third consisted of a closet opposite the front door in which were built wooden box beds. When first built, all the houses had mud floors: it was not until the end of the century that cement was laid in each living room and a wooden floor put in the main bedroom. The walls were lined with matchboarding to serve as protection against damp, and the roofs were made of zinc sheeting. Heavy gales, however, soon swept the zinc away and the proprietor had to reroof the houses with felt, securely fastened to the masonry with wires and iron staples and then painted with pitch.

The home of each family was the same inside as outside, and furniture was functional if scant. Although there were places cut in the walls for fireplaces, no home had a grate. Each house had a large, rough wooden bed, a few boxes in which to keep valuables, and a barrel or two for sea birds. Each family owned a couple of small chairs which were sent from Edinburgh, and a dresser containing a few bits of crockery. The only article of native manufacture was the occasional chair made from straw. A table of sorts could be found in every home, although in most cases, as the schoolmaster wrote in 1890, ‘painted with mother earth’.

The hours spent sleeping in a St Kildan house were not the most comfortable. Strangely enough in a land of feathers, mattresses were stuffed with straw, and the St Kildans used the few articles of clothing that they discarded at bedtime as a pillow. ‘They lie down year after year’, wrote Ross, ‘on a hard bed of straw, placing part of their clothing under their heads for pillows. The other part they keep on, having for most part nothing between them and the straw and their only covering being a rough blanket. In this they appear to be quite comfortable notwithstanding that in many instances a number of all ages and sexes are huddled together in one place.’ In a community in which families frequently numbered eight persons or more, the two-roomed cottage provided little space. During the winter months, particularly, when the family was confined to indoors for much of the day, the St Kildans must have become adept at cramped living.

The old homes of the St Kildans were not demolished. Instead they became byres and storehouses. In the Gaelic spoken on Hirta, in fact, no word existed for ‘byre’, which was always referred to as ‘the outside house’.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the St Kildans were housed in the most advanced dwellings to be found anywhere in the Hebrides. The generosity of the proprietor in building them was surely an example of the economic value he placed upon the most remote part of his estate.

But the new homes had their disadvantages. There was, of course, no lavatory or running water installed, and the relative thinness of the walls made for a constant high-pitched whine whenever the wind blew. The situation of the homes, with the hills behind, meant that frequently the smoke did not manage to escape from the chimneys. By 1875, John Sands remarked that the interior of the houses was blackened with peat smoke. The walls, he claimed, had never been whitewashed since the houses were built. A few islanders rejected their new homes. Rachel McCrimmon, for instance, preferred to spend the rest of her days in her old black house. Few of the St Kildans changed their accustomed way of living when they moved into their new houses.

The standard of hygiene improved little. Even as late as 1875, the minister was the only person on the island who used a fork for eating. The ash and refuse heaps were kept almost at the front door. ‘It would not take long’, wrote Ross, ‘to scrub up everything they possess, but they never think of such a thing.’ Plates, if used at all at meal times, were cleaned by the women wiping them over with a corner of their blue skirts. Knives and forks when used were cleaned by putting them in the mouth. Most visitors during the nineteenth century remarked upon the dirty appearance both of the St Kildans and their homes.

Emily MacLeod, a sister of the proprietor, did much at the turn of the century to improve the standards of cleanliness. The attempts to stamp out disease also did much to instil into the women the need to keep a tidier home. The last nurse to serve on St Kilda, Nurse Barclay, recalls that their homes were spotless, and that the people washed themselves and their clothes regularly once a week. ‘The floors of their houses were well scrubbed,’ she says. ‘You could go in and sit on their chairs, in some of the houses on the mainland I couldn’t. I had to put my Glasgow Herald down first. I always carried a Herald in the front of my bag when I was on the mainland and I had to put it down on the chair before I could sit on it.’

Clothing on Hirta was warm and practical. The St Kildans by design as much as by tradition never wore kilts. Instead they preferred to follow the example of fisherfolk on the west coast of Scotland. The trousers, shirts and woollen garments were worn loose to enable greater freedom of action and were hard-wearing. ‘It is remarkable’, wrote Sands, ‘that in all their work there is no attempt at ornament in which they differ strikingly from the Highlander, who when he was at liberty to please his own fancy, decorated his person from top to toe and who…abhors everything that is plain and unadorned.’

The St Kildans made most of the clothes they needed. The men not only made their own trousers and shirts, but tailored the dresses of their wives and daughters. Accessories, such as bonnets, caps, scarves, and cravats, were imported from the mainland. There is a story told that on one occasion a certain type of shoelace found its way to the lonely isle of St Kilda barely a year after it had made its first appearance in London.

The men all wore homespun woollen shirts, sewn together with worsted yarn, and blue tartan checked trousers which were dyed with imported indigo. In winter, they were muffled to the ears with big coarse cravats, twisted round their necks roll upon roll.

The women made a much more picturesque group. They wore short petticoats and long dresses, which they hitched up to knee level when work had to be done. For head-dresses they were fond of bright, turkey-red napkins. The wives kept their gowns together with two strings around their bodies, one under the arms and the other nine inches below. Every woman owned a plaid shawl, which was fastened with a brooch or a pin of native manufacture. The brooch was beaten out of an old copper coin and the pin was made from copper nails taken from wrecks that chanced to come ashore. ‘The women’, wrote Macaulay in 1756, ‘are most handsome; their complexions fresh and lively as their features are regular and fine. Some of them, if properly dressed and genteely educated, would be reckoned extraordinary beauties in the gay world.’ The strain of hard work, however, was soon etched in their faces.

Wedding rings were never worn on Hirta. Married women, therefore, distinguished themselves from unmarried ones by a white frill which was worn in front of the headshawl or kerchief.

During most of the year, the islanders wore neither stockings nor shoes. When Martin Martin visited St Kilda in 1697, the ‘turned shoe’ was still being worn, made out of the neck of a gannet and employing the natural bend in the neck for the heel. Such footwear had to be kept in water when not worn, and even then lasted only a few days. By the nineteenth century, however, every woman had a pair of brogues, rudely fashioned from raw sheepskin thongs by the men.

During the summer men, women, and children worked in the minimum of clothing. The weather could become unbearably warm and the island offered little shelter from the sun. ‘The women are often to be seen’, wrote Sands, ‘on the cliffs and in the glen without any clothing but a woollen shirt, whilst the men also strip to their underclothing when engaged on the cliffs.’

In later years, the standard of dress on the island improved immensely. ‘When I first went out in 1903,’ wrote Thomas Nicol, ‘the men were dressed on weekdays in rough homespun trousers, very baggy and just a shade neater than those adopted by a famous English University, a sleeved waistcoat, and a thick red muffler twisted as a rule twice round the throat.’ In a little less than twenty years, with the help of a mail order catalogue, the St Kildans looked little different from the people who came to visit them. ‘In many respects the people have become wonderfully modern,’ continued Nicol, ‘and this is particularly noticeable in their Sunday dress. The young men now appear in well-cut dark tweed suits with collar and tie. Some of the women even wear hats.’ But the St Kildans were never to concern themselves overmuch with appearances, and little distinction as to dress existed on the island.

Heating and lighting were obvious necessities of life. In the old black houses, lighting was traditionally supplied by a cruse, an oil-bearing container, first made of stone and later of metal, in which a wick floated. A turf impaled on a stick was used as a torch by the islanders when they were outside at night. The St Kildans used paraffin, in later years, given to them by the factor in exchange for tweed and feathers, or else charitably donated by passing trawlermen. Hurricane lamps were regularly in use by the twentieth century both inside and outside the home.

The St Kildans burnt turf to heat their homes and cook their food. The fuel was generally cut from Mullach Mor to Mullach Sgar and from the slopes of Conachair and Oiseval. The turf was stripped often wastefully from good pasture land and occasionally good arable land, but the islanders had little choice in the matter. There was peat available on the island and many visitors argued that it should be cut instead. ‘It is not good moss and would never make fire’, was the islanders’ usual answer when questioned. Besides, it was more difficult to dig, harder to dry out than turf, and above all heavier to carry. The deposits were primarily confined to the top of hills, over three-quarters of a mile from the village.

As with the storing of sea birds, so with the turf: the cleits were of inestimable importance to the St Kildans. Those built beyond the village wall were used to dry and store turf. Normally they were constructed as near to the cutting grounds as possible; hence over the centuries hundreds of cleits appeared on the slopes. Although the men would help, the cutting and fetching of turf was a task for the women.

Hirta could boast a society that from time immemorial treated women as equal, certainly in terms of the work that had to be done. The peats were carried by the women and children on their backs in old plaids or pieces of canvas. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote Ross, ‘to see the burden even the children from six to nine years of age can take.’ There was little room in the house to store the dry peat, so trips to the hills had to be made regularly. ‘We helped too, young as we were,’ remembers Flora Gillies, only ten years old at the time of the evacuation. ‘I always carried for my grandfather. I don’t know why, but I always seemed to carry it. My Aunt Mary, it was nothing for her to carry a bag on her back. She was very strong.’

The women also looked after the cattle, and cut all the grass required for their feeding during the winter months. Twice a day in the summer months they would make the long walk over to Glean Mor to milk the cows and ewes. The first visit was made at daybreak and they would return to the Glean again at five o’clock in the evening. If necessary they would take a bundle of grass with them on their backs to keep the beasts happy while they were being milked.

All the fetching and carrying on the island was delegated by the men to the women. ‘Goods from Glasgow’, wrote Ross, ‘are carried by the women from the shore to their houses and woe be unto them unless they are ready waiting when the men get the cargo to the shore.’ In the landing of stores, the men were responsible for manning the island boats out to the ship and the transferring of goods from the factor’s smack or the steamer to the rowing boat. On reaching shore, the men would tumble the supplies out of the boat. ‘There being but little room,’ wrote Ross, ‘everything must be removed quickly or the place is blocked up. Such a block happened that day bringing forth a hurricane of yelling from the men but no assistance with it. This is always the case when a thing comes too hard on the men, they poke their hands down to the elbows in their trousers pockets and yell away whereas the poor women almost worry their lives out to avoid this. That day I noticed some of them literally groan under their loads without being offered the slightest sympathy or assistance.’

Occasionally the women had some time to devote to knitting. ‘The stocking’, wrote the schoolmaster Ross, ‘is always carried about her person, ready to be taken whatever situation if she is idle.’ Except for the winter months, however, the women found little time to knit. They were far more busy than the men, for there were always things to be done about the house, and in the summer months they had their part to play in the harvesting of birds. The only work specifically reserved for the men was the grand, heroic task of manning the boats and climbing the cliffs in search of birds.

By the nineteenth century, the St Kildans had little faith in the value of their crofts. From a barrel of potatoes, weighing about two hundredweight, McDiarmid reckoned in 1877 that the islanders would scarcely lift three barrels. Owing to a constant subjection to seaspray, the potatoes that were salvaged were soft and tasted more like yams. Although barley and oats were equally prominent features of the St Kildan diet, the yield was likewise small. Oats were generally sown very thickly, from ten to twelve bushels to every acre of ground, and the return was rarely above three times the quantity sown. The islanders attempted to grow a few cabbages and a few turnips, but on Hirta weeds grew more easily than crops. In season, the whole of the arable land looked more like a bed of marigolds than a provider of grain and vegetables.