SPRING was in the air and a young man’s fancy turned to . . . peat cutting. At least it did when my brother and I were dragged along with the sandwiches, two vacuum flasks and a tablecloth to a distant spot on the road to Uig where we had our ancient allotment of turf to slice and burn. The older snotty brat, at the tender age of eight, I was crammed into badly-fitting wellies and ordered to do my duty.
The plan was for me to be something like a quarter hand. If they could get up to 25% of the work of an adult out of me, they reckoned it was worth filling me up with honey roast on rough-hewn sliced pan and, for afters, a selection of gooey chocolate delectables from the mobile shop. Unfairly, my brother, being a few years younger, had to do nothing at all for his tooth-rotting delights.
As soon as I was thrust out on to the rain-lashed moor, a plan was vital to get out of what seemed to me to be the worst backbreaking torture. As child abuse had not yet been invented, or the term at any rate, I even planned to tell a passing tourist heading for Reef beach that I was a child slave. When none stopped to investigate my plight, it was necessary for severely disabling but actually painless injuries to come my way soon after reaching the blasted hillock near Scaliscro.
Nature lent a helping hand. The most horrible bloodsucking bugs will always seek out peat-workers. Excellent props for my junior deviousness, earwigs, beetles, dun-fly, wasps and bees were just some of the poison-jawed pests that make up what we now glorify as rural biodiversity. Then, though, they were just parasitical, stinging mini-monsters, all of which had the power to potentially paralyse a work-shy school kid and render him unable to lift a peat for, oh, at least 20 minutes.
Sometimes it was even necessary to catch a large beetle and pulverise it into my white flesh and then hold up my arm with crimson entrails adorning it. Stoically refusing first aid or closer examination by anyone, that was worth a good 30 minutes of whimpering sit-out. Most-effective boy chompers were the midges. A cloud of culicoides impunctatus, to give them their Sunday name, can halt a team of cutters, lifters or barrow-wielders in seconds, whatever their age.
Perforating lily-white skin to resemble scarlet orange peel, the itching will drive the hardiest crofter into spasms of skin-ripping distraction. Midges, I was once told, are very religious and don’t bite on the Sabbath. My grannie, I think it was, circulated the fable to get us off to Sunday school, thinking that we would never gallivant on the seventh day to disprove her parable of the holy midge. It felt such a betrayal to be eaten alive by a passing swarm one particular Sabbath.
Despite their sabbatarianism, all kinds of horrific deaths were planned for midges. Helpful relatives would swear that the aroma of a certain type of rolling tobacco choked them on contact. So we kids were passively kippered to prove uncle’s latest death-by-Golden Virginia theory. I even remember one year being told to eat green peas for breakfast before setting off. Only later did I discover that was because the inevitable, awful flatulence was also sworn by someone’s friend of a friend to be the ultimate midge repellent. The testing took less than a season and only brought larger swarms to feast on boys and boiled ham.
Now, an EU-funded double-track highway careers through the middle of the peat bogs where my family worked and I skived. Our spring and summer rituals for winter fuel have been dying out. The moor has only an occasional dot here and there where the remains of a peat pile from last year still remain. Yet peat-cutting could be set for a revival. A fuel crisis may be round the corner. The cost is going skywards. Islanders now have to fork out anything up to £590 for a tank of heating oil. Gas is up. Electricity is up.
While negotiators try to resolve the dispute at the refinery in Grangemouth, islanders are already planning ahead – when they are not panic buying, that is. They are again calling the blacksmith to make them a peat iron. A free winter fuel stock is an attractive prospect – and the work is good, cholesterol-dissolving exercise.
Happily, the latest midge repellents are now far more effective than the previous old wives’ nonsense. So good, in fact, that you will not even need a breakfast of processed peas to have a cheaper, warmer and more sustainable winter.
Published in the Press and Journal on April 23, 2008
