The Loud Halo by Lillian Beckwith Page B

stumbling upon a really worthwhile find. Our progress was slow for Fiona demanded my attention for even her most trivial finds and her chatter was incessant. However at last we found for her a brightly coloured ball and then almost simultaneously a coir doormat and a perfectly good plastic pail. She was momentarily overawed by her good fortune until she recollected our picnic.
    â€˜When will we take our tea?’ she asked with only partially concealed impatience.
    I waited only to pick up my own finds—a brass porthole with glass intact that I thought would improve my front door and two aluminium net floats which Erchy would halve for me to provide four typically Bruach feeding bowls.
    â€˜We’ll have it now if you like,’ I told her. We sat down cautiously on the sunbaked rocks with our bare feet in a warm, tide-washed pool that was floored with pounded shells and studded with sea-anemones, and when we had eaten we played at sailing Fiona’s ball until the sun had moved off the cliff-screened shore and the midges began to work up to their evening appetites. We climbed up to the open moors again, our feet disturbing hundreds of heather moths which fluttered up in front of us like petals chased by a gamin breeze. The sun was still shining with evening-tempered brilliance; the sheep were just beginning to rouse themselves from their siesta; a lamb bleated for its mother and was answered by the frustrated mew of a buzzard planing overhead. Fiona’s fat little legs plodded sturdily beside my own but she had gone very quiet and I suspected that she was tired. I hoped she had forgotten Dugald’s message and planned to deposit her back with her mother and aunt before I went to collect the promised rhubard. But of course she had remembered and of course she insisted on accompanying me, although it would add another mile to our walk. I gave in without argument.
    Dugald’s croft ran alongside the road and was recognisable by a large notice stating that it was a ‘Car Park, price 1/-’, a notice which had been erected originally more as a piece of bluff than anything else but which was now appreciably augmenting Dugald’s pension. It had been at a ceilidh one evening that Dugald had been complaining bitterly that the tourists’ cars were ruining his hay and someone had then suggested that the best way to stop the cars from parking on his croft was to make them pay for the privilege. Dugald had thought it an excellent idea and had immediately erected the notice, but to his bewilderment instead of continuing along the road where there was ample free parking space the foolish drivers still came and parked on his croft. For some days Dugald had tried to look as though neither the house nor the croft belonged to him when he saw honest drivers looking for someone to pay their shillings to, but when, from the concealment of his byre, he had watched them go to the cottage and hand the parking fee to his wife, Dugald had been so shaken that, as he put it, ‘didn’t know what to say to myself.’ When he saw how the shillings mounted up he realised that he was on to a good thing and now Dugald was soon out of the house and waiting for his fee whenever a car so much as put a wheel on his croft. Except of course on Sunday.
    Dugald was changing the calves’ tethers when we saw him and made our presence known. He shouted that his wife was away on the bus but that there was rhubarb for me at the house if I would get it. Fiona and I opened the door of the porch and took the large bundle of rhubarb that would not only provide me with puddings for several days but would also be enough for a couple of jars of jam. I went over to thank Dugald and as he had finished the tethering he was ready and willing to spare a few minutes for conversation.
    â€˜She was sayin’ you’d get more if you’re wantin’ it,’ he told me. (Crofters when speaking English never seem to know how