Bruach Blend by Lillian Beckwith

your potach.’
    Always, ever since she had first calved, I had made it a habit to give her half a potach before she was milked and the other half when milking was finished and now she looked shocked and puzzled by my seeming neglect and desertion. I felt no compunction. During the brief interlude when I thought I had shed my fear I had experienced the same lilting joy as when I first realized I could swim and that I could ride a bicycle. I had so much wanted not to be afraid of the bull but now the fear was back where it always had been and I guessed it would be with me always.
    Feeling the need to recover from the experience, I sat for a while on a cushion of heather and glared sourly at the two animals, who stood regarding me hopefully for a time until Bonny became disillusioned and turning away began to graze sulkily. Crumley lifted his head and bellowed argumentatively before he too began to graze. I continued to sit while the moors spread themselves with the fine gauze of darkness which in a Hebridean spring passes for night, and then, relenting, I threw the remains of the potach towards them before climbing back to the path along which I had come. At the gate I paused to look back to where the dark shapes of Bonny and Crumley were clearly silhouetted against the light of the sea. It seemed that Bonny had forgiven Crumley for she appeared to be licking his neck. I left them to their love-making.
    The following day when I saw Morag I asked her about the strange man I had encountered on the moors.
    â€˜Ach, it would be yon man from London that’s stayin’ with Kirsty an’ calls himself a playwright,’ she explained.
    â€˜How interesting,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t seen him around at all. Has he been here long?’
    â€˜Around two weeks since,’ she told me. ‘An’ indeed. Miss Peckwitt, but you’re lucky you haven’t seen the likes of him for Kirsty is after wishin’ she’d never set eyes on the man at all.’
    â€˜Why ever not?’
    â€˜He’s a wicked man, so Kirsty tells me.’ Her voice sounded quite vehement. ‘A really bad man.’
    â€˜Wicked?’ I echoed. Bruachites were so tolerant it sounded strange to hear of anyone being described as ‘wicked’. ‘He looked harmless enough.’
    â€˜Wasn’t it Kirsty herself told me or I wouldn’t be believin’ it by seein’ him just,’ said Morag. ‘But Kirsty is sayin’ he stays inside the house all day, ‘peckin’ at a writetyper machine like a cock at the corn, an’ it’s in the evenin’s just that he takes a walk to himself.’
    â€˜That doesn’t sound very wicked,’ I pointed out with a smile. ‘Inconvenient for Kirsty, no doubt, but hardly wicked.’
    â€˜Indeed no, mo ghaoil. But didn’t Kirsty take a look at some of his writin’ one day while she was cleanin’ his bedroom an’ the Dear knows but she says she was like to faint with the shock it gave her.’ Morag gave me a significant look and tried hard to feign reluctance to continue.
    â€˜Why was she so shocked?’ I pressed.
    Morag did not look at me. ‘It was about dirty men an’ dirty women, Miss Peckwitt,’ she confided in a scathing whisper. ‘Dirty such as you an’ me an’ decent folk the world over wouldn’t think of thinkin’ never mind writin’.’
    â€˜Really!’
    â€˜Indeed it was so.’ Morag’s voice grew more confiding. ‘Poor Kirsty there that’s never known a man’s hand up her skirts in all her life an’ she didn’t know what to say to herself when she read it. She couldn’t tell the meanin’ of some of what was written at first till young Annac that’s workin’ for her explained about them. Then she couldn’t believe her own eyes or ears.’ Morag’s lips were so tightly pursed that I knew I would have