Ruby
As the weeks pass, I feel I’m slowly winning Hanna’s trust. I’ve learned that, as far as she’s concerned, my role is to work hard on the croft and not to interfere in her house. In the kitchen, her collection of beachcombings, which she adds to regularly, remains undusted.
I begin to get used to the round of daily jobs, collecting the eggs, caring for the sheep, carrying peat down from the hill, tending the garden, and filling in endless forms for the Crofting Commission.
Oh, those forms! I discover a drawer full of them in the kitchen dresser, which is what amounts to Hanna’s filing system, bundled together haphazardly with a muddle of bills and receipts.
Little by little, I’m attempting to put them into some sort of order and bring her rough attempts at bookkeeping up to date, another requirement of the Commission.
A croft is far more than a small farm. It’s a way of life, particular to Scotland.
The land is occupied and managed in traditional ways by the tenant, whose right to it is regulated by the Crofting Commission.
But the rules are strict and need to be carefully adhered to.
I’d heard the saying before that a croft is a piece of land surrounded by regulations, but the administrative burden only really hits home as we sit at the table with little piles of paper before us and I try to encourage Hanna to focus on letting me help her untangle the mess.
She’d clearly rather be outdoors and is easily distracted.
Sometimes I feel it’s as if she’s slipped back in time, and the past has become more real to her than the present.
Her wrist is healing well, although she’s still not up to the heavier work.
She supervises me as I tend the kailyard—which is what she calls the vegetable garden—thinning out the carrots and beetroot in the furrowed beds and hoeing weeds from between the potatoes and onions.
It amazes me how rich the soil is, and she tells me that’s because it’s been fed with seaweed from the shore.
Her garden is a little like her kitchen, furnished with items she’s picked up while beachcombing.
Nothing is wasted. Fishermen’s floats in pink, white, and orange adorn the beds, and she’s used old fish boxes, marked with the names of far-off ports, as planters for the fennel, caraway, and dill she grows to flavor her cooking.
Peppermint spills from a battered red fire bucket, and a dented tin kettle holds a cushion of fragrant thyme.
She’s even rescued a garden gnome from the waves, who now stands guard beside the net covering the ridge of carrots.
His bright paint may have been a little weathered by the sea, and his hat is still adorned with a crust of seaweed, but he adds a jaunty air to the scene as he wards off predatory birds with the fork he carries on one shoulder.
When time allows, I take my sketching things and walk down to the beach, finding a sheltered spot in the lee of the constant, blustering wind.
I try to capture the way the light plays on the water, the way the seabirds swoop and whirl overhead, and the timeless, enduring spirit of the land.
One afternoon as I’m sitting there, Jamie emerges, whistling, from his bod, wearing a pair of fisherman’s waders and carrying a rod and a bucket of bait.
He gives me a cheery wave and comes over to see what I’ve been working on.
“That’s good,” he says. “You’ve caught the feel of the place.” He seems more relaxed today, less preoccupied than usual, and his tone is a lot friendlier.
I feel a surge of gratitude for his words of approval, then catch myself wondering why they should mean so much. I can’t help noticing, too, how the breeze ruffles his hair and how his face changes, like the landscape around us, when he smiles.
“Do you need a hand?” I nod toward the boat pulled well up on the pebbles, out of reach of the waves, attached to a winching mechanism by a thick rope.
“That’s okay,” he replies. “I can manage. But thank you. Tell Hanna I’ll bring up some mackerel for your lunch tomorrow. So long as they’re biting, that is.”
I watch as he stows his gear and releases the winch, letting the boat slide down the shingle.
Once it’s at the water’s edge, he unclips the rope.
His movements are calm and assured as he launches it, jumping aboard at the last moment, then starting the outboard and heading out into the bay.
He glances back and raises a hand in salute, then turns to face the bow again as he carves a way through the waves, leaving a chop of his wake.
I pick up my sketch pad again. Looking at the scene I’ve drawn, I add a boat out on the water.
Sitting at the helm is a small figure, one hand on the tiller and the other shading his eyes from the dazzle of the sunshine across the sea, a gaggle of gulls following him as he heads toward the horizon.
Then I glance at my watch and gather up my things.
I need to bring in the washing before evening falls.
My legs are stiff from sitting, and my knees complain a bit as I get to my feet.
The boat has disappeared round the far side of the island now.
I sigh, thinking again how nice it would be to get to know Jamie a little better, but he still seems mostly to keep himself to himself. Perhaps he’s just a bit of a loner.
We’re not completely starved for company, though.
Isobel, who lives on the next croft over, is a regular visitor.
She’s Shetland born and bred, and I love listening to the lilt of her voice as she tells us the latest local news over cups of tea and the delicious home baking she brings.
I discover new words as well as new delicacies, although I have to ask her to translate the dialect at times.
At first, I’m completely befuddled when she asks, “Will du hae a peerie piece mair a’ dis huffsie?
” She laughs at my bewilderment and says, more slowly, “Will you have a little more of this fruitcake, Ruby?”
Her husband, Geordie, is almost as elusive as the corncrake.
He has another job, as so many crofters do to supplement their income, working as a joiner, and is in hot demand across the islands.
When at home, come rain or shine, he spends every spare minute of the long summer days out on the hill or tending the small herd of cows they keep.
He drives a tractor, too, and occasionally I’ll catch a glimpse of him helping other neighbors with cutting grass or making silage.
Our paths crossed a few days ago when I was trudging up the hill in the speet—which is what I’ve learned to call the showers of heavy rain that seem to appear out of nowhere, without warning—and he was coming down on his quadbike.
He paused long enough to say hello, and I’d made a comment about the terrible weather.
“Ach, weel,” he replied, “if you’ve come to Shetland for the sunbathing, you’d better ask Thomas Cook for your money back.” Evidently, the driest thing on these islands is the Shetlanders’ sense of humor.
I’ve also taken to joining Hanna on her daily dips in the sea.
It began out of a sense of duty, simply keeping an eye on her—because I really didn’t want to have to explain to her son and daughter that I’d lost her in the north Atlantic when I was supposed to be looking after her—but has quickly grown into a part of the routine I positively enjoy.
The briny waves are exhilarating, and although my teeth chatter as we make our way back to the farmhouse for breakfast, our pockets filled with the day’s gleanings from the beach, the swim leaves my head feeling lighter.
We carry driftwood up from the shore, too, which Hanna piles in the empty sheep shed, to use for the fire when winter comes, I presume.
Once, in the early days, as we shivered on the shingle, drying ourselves after one of those swimming sessions, I asked her why she does it.
She stopped, looking surprised. “Does there have to be a reason for everything? Why not do it?”
I could think of a hundred reasons not to—hypothermia, rip tides, pods of killer whales, swarms of jellyfish, rogue waves, damp towels, sand and mud tracked through the house from the trudge back up the hill, to name but a few—but before I could begin to enumerate them, she went on.
“I suppose I do it to feel something,” she said.
“Something other than the pain in my head and my heart. I do it to forget the darkness for a short while and just concentrate on the blood flowing through my veins, breathing in and out, the fact of being alive.” She’d gestured to a tangled heap of seaweed on the shore.
“On land, my thoughts are like that. The water disentangles them, makes them flow. Swimming in the sea brings me back to life, for just a little while. It lets me be like I was before, back when I was young.”
I’d nodded then, seeing her in a different light.
Her swims exhilarate her. And perhaps they help wash away some of the memories for a while.
She even looks younger when she’s in the water, her stiff limbs moving more freely.
The years fall from her as she smiles and turns her face to the sky, and it’s easy to imagine her as she used to be, a beautiful young woman, living in a fisherman’s hut beside a Norwegian fjord, her image captured by her sweetheart in a sketch so he could carry her with him wherever he went.