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the bite of good grass he was now getting he
had improved tremendously and was looking almost sleek. No one knew exactly how old he was, but one neighbour reported having seen him working on a croft some miles away nearly thirty years before.
But he was by now a firm family friend and we preferred to ignore all rumours about his probable age. He toiled up and down the turnip drills and, quite literally, never put a foot wrong. He was as
patient with us novices as an indulgent father, and we found an affection for him which was to grow steadily over the years.
    On the first fine, windless day, we sowed the grass seed. It is so light and feathery that even a gentle breeze will scatter it in the wrong direction. We gave the fields a good rolling and felt
that at last we could relax a little. There was still much to do, but the pressure had eased.
    On the last Saturday in June, when the sun was blazing from a deep blue sky, we packed a picnic and made for Loch Laide. It’s less than a mile from our home and it’s the perfect
place for relaxation; summer or winter, we never tire of walking by its shore. This June day we lay on our backs in the heather, watching a curlew glide round the shoulder of the hill, uttering its
long, drowsy call. Then we plunged into the smooth, dark water and Helen splashed in the shallows of the little beach. We made a fire of roots and twigs to boil our kettle; and we walked home
deeply refreshed and ready to tackle whatever might come next.

CHAPTER V
    FIRST HARVEST
    W ITH the crops safely in the ground and the cattle and sheep finding a succulent bite in the clean, natural grazing, we had time to take stock of our
position and to analyse rather more closely our aims, both long-term and immediate. Our farming, even bolstered as it was by Government subsidies, could never be more than subsistence farming: we
were fully aware of that. As a business proposition its appeal was absolutely nil, but, of course, we had never looked at it—in fact, we had never looked at anything— strictly in that
light. As a way of life it had endless fascination and reward—the smallest thing could give us a glow of satisfaction. To see the green flush of corn shoots, or of turnip seedlings in ground
that had yielded nothing for years, was an obvious thrill. But there were also the small delights of watching a drain flow freely after it had been cleared of silt, of driving the horse and cart
along a road made passable with new patchings of stone, of seeing the sheeps’ foraging among the new-sown grass thwarted by a stout fence, hung on the posts we had made in the dark, winter
days. Every way we looked there was a reward and a new challenge springing up behind it, something to give us a small, encouraging pat on the back and to spur us on before we had time to smirk.
    Perhaps one of the greatest satisfactions of our life was the knowledge that we were in this thing together, as a family, as a unit. There was no seeing father off every morning, to struggle
with his own remote set of problems, while mother and child coped with theirs at home. There were no watertight compartments. When it was time to hoe the turnips we all set off to the field
together and worked side by side all day, Helen, too, wielding a diminutive hoe among the seedlings. At supper-time Jim stoked the fire and, when we’d eaten, we tackled the day’s
accumulation of dirty dishes together and it took only a few minutes to smooth the well-aired beds before we slipped between the sheets!
    Good food we had in abundance: not for us was the policy of selling every available egg to the van and buying doubtful commodities in their place. It was surely better, we felt, to have a huge,
golden-shelled egg on your breakfast plate and health in your eye, than cash accumulating in the tin box. Likewise with milk—though there, of course, there was no question of any being
sold—the best was for ourselves. The rich, yellow cream we would