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asked.
    â€˜Indeed, but it’s only a few years just since the scholars had each to take a peat with them to school every day for the fire and it’s no the hags back here they’d be taking the peats from. No, it was always the easy ones nearest the road they took instead of their own. There was plenty of miscallings and skelpings about it in those days, but they never stopped them. My own bairns was as bad as the rest.’
    My peats had already been ‘stripped’ for me by Erchy, which means that he had taken off the thick matted top layer of headier roots and turf, exposing the soft black peat. Stripping is traditionally a man’s job and I was heartily glad it was so, for the widow Mary, who had given me the use of the hag, had confided that she believed its toughness had helped her husband into his grave. (‘Ach, if you’d seen the man she had,’ said Morag, who would have liked to cull the substandard of any species, when I told her; ‘nothing but a long drink of gruel and his trousers near fallin’ off the backside of him for want of somethin’ to hold them up.’) In Bruach, the fact that a job is heavy or strenuous did not necessarily mean that it was classed as a ‘man’s job’. It was, as I soon found out, mostly the women who did the heavy work of carrying and lifting, no matter what their age, shape or condition, and they seemed to pride themselves on their ability. The first time I saw an able-bodied crofter watching indifferently while his wife laboured under the burden of a boll of meal (140 lb.) I was provoked to the point of remonstrance. When, a few days later, I saw the same crofter meeting his dressed-up wife off the bus after a day’s shopping on the mainland and chivalrously carrying her shopping basket, I was speechless. But gradually I grew to accept such things, so much so that I was only amused when I heard that Alistair Beag, a lazy man even by Bruach standards, had been taken to hospital after rupturing himself when trying to lift a load on to his wife’s back. And then came a day when an old gallant, seeing me carrying home a sack of peat, said admiringly, ‘My, my, but you have a good back for carrying,’ and I was startled to find I had accepted it as a compliment.
    Morag and I took turns at the cutting and throwing out of the peat, as we had done when I had shared her cottage and she was teaching me the essentials of a crofting life. I could of course have cut peats by myself, but it would have been a slow business. One cannot hurry peat cutting, but two people can establish a rhythm that more than halves the time and the work. I unashamedly enjoy working at the peats and not only because of a certain squirrel-like tendency which even in town was sometimes difficult to repress. It is satisfying to be mining for oneself; to be one’s own coal merchant; to know that the harder one worked in the spring—always provided the weather played its part—the bigger fires one could indulge in when winter came. I see the glow of the fire in each peat as it is cut and tell myself: so many to keep my feet warm; so many to keep my back warm; now we have cut enough to burn for an hour; now for a day.
    Peat cutting is one of the most companionable and one of the messiest jobs in the world. The cutter cuts; the soggy, chocolate-brown slices tilt into the waiting hands of the thrower out; there is a dull thud as the peat hits the heathery ground, releasing the scent of crushed bog-myrtle, or, if the aim is not particularly good, there is a resounding smack, succulent as a Louis Armstrong kiss, as it lands on its predecessor. The mud spreads up your arms—over your ankles; the sun beats on your back or your face depending on whether you cut or throw; the wind blows comfortable coolth. As you work, you and your companion discuss tranquilly the problems of your neighbours, of the country, of the world and, as the heather